The Prisoner Part 52

"Then why won't you," said Jeff, in wrath, "let me knock something else into their heads. You can't do it by facts. There aren't many facts just now that aren't shameful. Why can't you let me do it by poetry?"

Madame Beattie stopped in the street and gazed up at the bright heaven.

She was remembering how the stars looked in Italy when she was young and sure her voice would sound quite over the world. She seldom challenged the stars now, they moved her so, in an almost terrible way. What had she made of life, they austerely asked her, she who had been driven by them to love and all the excellencies of youth? But then, in answer, she would ask them what they had done for her.

"Jeff," said she, "you couldn't do it in a million years. They'll do anything for me, because I bring their own homes to them, but they couldn't make themselves over, even for me."

"They like me," said Jeff, "for some mysterious reason."

"They like you because I've told them to."

"I don't believe it." But in his heart he did.

"Jeff," said she, "life isn't a matter of fact, it's a matter of feeling. You can't persuade men and women born in Italy and Greece and Syria and Russia that they're happy in this little bare town. It doesn't smell right to them. Their hearts are somewhere else. And they want nothing so much in the world as to get a breath from there or hear a story or see somebody that's lived there. Lived--not stayed in a _pension_."

"Do they feel so when they've seen their sisters and cousins and aunts carved up into little pieces there?" Jeff asked scoffingly. But she was hypnotising him, too. He could believe they did.

"What have you to offer 'em, Jeff, besides wages and a prospect of not being a.s.sa.s.sinated? That's something, but by G.o.d! it isn't everything."

She swore quite simply because out in the night even in the straight street of a New England town she felt like it and was carelessly willing to abide by the chance of G.o.d's objecting.

"But I don't see," said Jeff, "why you won't let me have my try at it."

He was waiting for her to signify her readiness to go on, and now she did.

"Because now, Jeff, they do think you're a G.o.d. If they saw you trying to produce the Merchant of Venice they'd be bored and they wouldn't think so any more."

"Have you any objection," said Jeff, "to my trying to produce the Merchant of Venice with English-speaking children of foreigners?"

"Not a grain," said Madame Beattie cordially. "There's your chance. Or you can get up a pageant, if you like-, another summer. But you'll have to let these people act their own historic events in their own way. And, Jeff, don't be a fool." They were standing before her door and Esther at the darkened window above was looking down on them. Esther had not gone to the dances because she knew who would be there. She told herself she was afraid of seeing Jeff and because she had said it often enough she believed it. "Tell Lydia to come to see me to-morrow," said Madame Beattie. Sophy had opened the door. It came open quite easily now since the night Madame Beattie had called Esther's name aloud in the street.

Jeff took off his hat and turned away. He did not mean to tell Lydia.

She saw enough of Madame Beattie, without instigation.

XXVIII

Lydia needed no reminder to go to Madame Beattie. The next day, in the early afternoon, she was taking her unabashed course by the back stairs to Madame Beattie's bedchamber. She would not allow herself to be embarra.s.sed or ashamed. If Esther treated Madame Beattie with a proper hospitality, she reasoned when her mind misgave her, it would not be necessary to enter by a furtive way. Madame Beattie was dressed and in a high state of exhilaration. She beckoned Lydia to her where she sat by a window commanding the street, and laid a hand upon her wrist.

"I've actually done it," said she. "I've got on her nerves. She's going away."

The clouds over Lydia seemed to lift. Yet it was incredible that Esther, this charming sinister figure always in the background or else blocking everybody's natural movements, should really take herself elsewhere.

"It's only to New York," said Madame Beattie. "She tells me that much.

But she's going because I've ransacked her room till she sees I'm bound to find the necklace."

Lydia was tired from the night before; her vitality was low enough to waken in her the involuntary reb.u.t.tal, "I don't believe there is any necklace." But she only pa.s.sed a hand over her forehead and pushed up her hair and then drew a little chair to Madame Beattie's side.

"So you think she'll come back?" she asked drearily.

"Of course. She's only going for a couple of days. You don't suppose she'd leave me here to conspire with Susan? She'll put the necklace into a safe. That's all."

"But you mustn't let her, must you?"

"Oh, I sha'n't let her. Of course I sha'n't."

"What shall you do?"

"She's not going till night. She takes Sophy, of course."

"But what can you do?"

"I shall consult that dirty little man. He's a lawyer and he's not in love with her."

"Mr. Moore? You haven't much time, Madame Beattie. She'll be going."

"That's why I'm dressed," said Madame Beattie. "I shall go in a minute.

He can give me a warrant or something to search her things."

Lydia went at once, with a noiseless foot. She felt a sudden distaste for the accomplished fact of Esther face to face with justice. Yet she did not flinch in her certainty that nemesis must be obeyed and even aided. Only the secrecy of it led her to a hatred of her own silent ways in the house, and as she often did, she turned to her right instead of to her left and walked to the front stairs. There at her hand was Esther's room, the door wide open. Downstairs she could hear her voice in colloquy with Sophy. Rhoda's voice, on this floor, made some curt remark. Everybody was accounted for. Lydia's heart was choking her, but she stepped softly into Esther's room. It seemed to her, in her quickened feeling, that she could see clairvoyantly through the matter that kept her from her quest. A travelling bag, open, stood on the floor. There was a hand-bag on the bed, and Lydia, as if taking a predestined step, went to it, slipped the clasp and looked. A purse was there, a tiny mirror, a book that might have been an address book, and in the bottom a roll of tissue paper. Nothing could have stopped her now. She had to know what was in the roll. It was a lumpy parcel, thrown together in haste as if, perhaps, Esther had thought of making it look as if it were of no account. She tore it open and found, with no surprise, as if this were an old dream, the hard brightness of the jewels.

"There it is," she whispered to herself, with the scant breath her choking heart would lend her. "Oh, there it is!"

She rolled the necklace in its paper and closed the bag. With no precaution she walked out of the room and down the stairs. The voices still went on, Esther's and Sophy's from the library, and she did not know whether Madame Beattie had already left the house. But opening the front door, still with no precaution, she closed it sharply behind her and walked along the street in suns.h.i.+ne that hurt her eyes.

Lydia went straight home, not thinking at all about what she had done, but wondering what she should do now. Suddenly she felt the unfriendliness of the world. Madame Beattie, her ally up to this moment, was now a foe. For whether justly or not, Madame Beattie would claim the necklace, and how could Lydia know Jeff had not already paid her for it?

And Anne, soft, sweet Anne, what would she do if Lydia threw it in her lap and said, "Look! I took it out of Esther's bag." She was thinking very clearly, it seemed to her, and the solution that looked most like a high business sagacity made it likely that she ought to carry it to Alston Choate. He was her lawyer. And yet indeed he was not, for he did nothing for her. He was only playing with her, to please Anne. But all the while she was debating her feet carried her to the only person she had known they would inevitably seek. She went directly upstairs to Jeffrey's room where he might be writing at that hour.

He was there. His day's work had gone well. He was beginning to have the sense the writer sometimes has, in a fortunate hour, of divine intention in his task. Jeff was enjoying an egoistic interlude of feeling that the things which had happened to him had been personally intended to bring him to a certain deed. The richness of the world was crowding on him, the bigness of it, the dangers. He could scarcely choose, among such diversities, what to say. And dominating everything he had to say in the compa.s.s of this one book was the sense of life, life at its full, and the stupidity of calling such a world bare of wonders. And to him in his half creative, half exulting dream came Lydia, her face drawn to an extremity of what looked like apprehension. Or was it triumph? She might have been under the influence of a drug that had induced in her a wild excitement and at the same time strung her nerves to highest pitch.

Jeff, looking up at her, pushed his papers back.

"What is it?" he asked.

Lydia, for answer, moved up to his table and placed the parcel there before him. It was the more shapeless and disordered from the warm clutch of her despairing hand. He took it up and carelessly unrolled it.

The paper lay open in his palm; he saw and dropped the necklace to the table. There it lay, glittering up at him. Lydia might have expected some wondering or tragic exclamation; but she did not get it. He was astonished. He said quite simply:

"Aunt Patricia's necklace." Then he looked up at her, and their eyes met, hers with desperate expectation and his holding her gaze in an unmoved questioning. "Did she give it to you?" he asked, and she shook her head with a negation almost imperceptible. "No," said Jeffrey to himself. "She didn't have it. Who did have it?"

He let it lie on the table before him and gazed at the bauble in a strong distaste. Here it was again, a nothingness coming between him and his vision of the real things of the earth. It seemed singularly trivial to him, and yet powerful, too, because he knew how it had moved men's minds.

"Where did you get it?" he asked, looking up at Lydia.

Something inside her throat had swollen. She swallowed over it with difficulty before she spoke. But she did speak.

"I took it."

"Took it?"

He got up, and, with a belated courtesy, pulled forward a chair. But Lydia did not see it. Her eyes were fixed on his face, as if in its changes would lie her destiny.