The Prisoner Part 53

"You mean you found it."

"No. I didn't find it. I took it."

"You must have found it first."

"I looked for it," said Lydia.

"Where?"

"In Esther's bag."

Jeffrey stood staring at her, and Lydia unwinkingly stared at him. She was conscious of but one desire: that he would not scowl so. And yet she knew it was the effort of attention and no hostile sign. He spoke now, and gently because he saw how great a strain she was under.

"You'll have to tell me about it, Lydia. Where was the bag?"

"It was on her bed," said Lydia. "I went into the room and saw it there.

Madame Beattie told me she was going to New York--"

"That Madame Beattie was?"

"No. Esther. To hide the necklace. So Madame Beattie shouldn't get it.

And I saw the bag. And I knew the necklace must be in it. So I took it."

By this time her hands were shaking and her lips chattered piteously.

Jeffrey was wholly perplexed, but bitterly sorry for her.

"What made you bring it here, dear?" said he.

Lydia caught at the endearing word, and something like a spasm moved her face.

"I had to," said she. "It has made all the trouble."

"But I don't want it," said Jeffrey. "Whatever trouble it made is over and done with. However this came into Esther's hands--"

"Oh, I know how that was," said Lydia. "She stole it. Madame Beattie says so."

"And whatever she is going to do with it now--that isn't a matter for me to meddle with."

"Don't you care?" said Lydia, in a pa.s.sionate outcry. "Now you've got it in your hand, don't you care?"

"Why," said Jeff, "what could I do with it?"

"If you know it's Madame Beattie's, you can take it to her and tell her she can go back to Europe and stop hounding you for money."

"How do you know she's hounded me?"

"She says so. She wants you to get into politics and into business and pay her back."

"But that's what you've wanted me to do yourself."

"Oh," said Lydia, in a great breath of despairing love, "I want you to do what you want to. I want you to sit here at this table and write.

Because then you look happy. And you don't look so any other time."

Jeff stood gazing at her in a compa.s.sion that brought a smart to his eyes. This, a sad certainty told him, was love, the love that is unthinking. She was suffocated by the pure desire to give the earth to him and herself with it. What disaster might come from it to her or to the earth, her lulled brain did not consider. The self-immolation of pa.s.sion had benumbed her. And now she looked at him beseechingly, as if to beg him only not to scorn her gift. Her emotion transferred itself to him. He must be the one to act; but disappointingly, he knew, with the mind coming in to school disastrous feeling and warn it not again to scale such heights or drop into such depths.

"Lydia," said he, "you must leave this thing here with me."

His hand indicated by a motion the hateful bauble that lay there glittering at them.

"Why, yes," said she. "I've left it with you."

"I mean you must leave it altogether, the decision what to do with it, even the fact of your having had anything whatever to do with it yourself."

Lydia nodded, watching him. It had not occurred to her that there need be any concealment. She had meant to indicate that to herself when she walked so boldly down the front stairs and clanged the door and went along the street with the parcel plainly in her hand. If there was a slight drop in her expectation now, she did not show it. What she had indeed believed was that Jeff would greet the necklace with an incredulous joy and flaunt it in the face of Esther who had stolen it, while he gave it back to Madame Beattie, who had preyed on him.

"Do you understand?" said he. "You mustn't speak of it."

"I shall have to tell," said Lydia, "if anybody asks me. If I didn't it would be--queer."

"It's a great deal more than queer," said Jeff.

He smiled now, and she drew a happy breath. And he was amused, in a grim way. He had been, for a long time, calling himself plain thief, and taking no credit because his theft was what might have seemed a crime of pa.s.sion of a sort. He had put himself "outside ", and now this child had committed a crime of pa.s.sion and she was outside, too. Her ignorant daring frightened him. At any instant she might declare her guilt. She needed to be brought face to face, for her own safety, with the names of things.

"Lydia," said he, "you know what it would be called--this taking something out of another woman's bag?"

"No," said Lydia.

"Theft," said he. He meant to have no mercy on her until he had roused her dormant caution. "If you take what is not yours you are a thief."

"But," said Lydia, "I took it from Esther and it wasn't hers, either."

She was unshaken in her candour, but he noted the trembling of her lip and he could go no further.

"Leave it with me," he said. "And promise me one thing. Don't speak to anybody about it."

"Unless they ask me," said Lydia.

"Not even if they ask you. Go to your room and shut yourself in. And don't talk to anybody till I see you again."

She turned obediently, and her slender back moved him with a compa.s.sion it would have been madness to recognise. The plain man in him was in physical rebellion against the rules of life that made it criminal to take a sweet creature like this into your arms to comfort her when she most needed it and pour out upon her your grat.i.tude and adoration.

Jeff took the necklace and its bed of crumpled paper with it, wrapped it up and, holding it in his hand as Lydia had done, walked downstairs, got his hat and went off to Esther's. What he could do there he did not fully know, save to fulfil the immediate need of putting the jewels into some hand more ready for them than his own. He had no slightest wish to settle the rights of the case in any way whatever. "Then," his mind was saying in spite of him, "Esther did have the necklace." But even that he was horribly unwilling to face. There was no Esther now; but he hated, from a species of decency, to drag out the bright dream that had been Esther and smear it over with these blackening certainties. "Let be,"

his young self cried to him. "She was at least a part of youth, and youth was dear." Why should she be pilloried since youth must stand fettered with her for the old wrongs that were a part of the old imagined sweetness? The sweetnesses and the wrongs had grown together like roots inextricably mingled. To tear out the weeds you would rend also the roots they twined among.

In a stern musing he was at Esther's door before he had decided what to say, had knocked and Sophy, large-eyed and shaken out of her specious calm, had admitted him. She did not question him nor did Jeffrey even ask for Esther. With the opening of the door he heard voices, and now the sound of an angry crying, and Sophy herself had the air of an unwilling servitor at a strange occasion. Jeffrey, standing in the doorway of the library, faced the group there. Esther was seated on a low chair, her face crumpled and red, as if she had just wiped it free of tears. The handkerchief, clutched into a ball in her angry fist, gave further evidence. Madame Beattie, enormously amused, sat in the handsome straight-backed chair that became her most, and unaffectedly and broadly smiled. And Alston Choate, rather pale in a sternness of judicial consideration, stood, hands in his pockets, and regarded them. At Jeffrey's entrance they looked up at him and Esther instantly sprang to her feet and retreated to a position at the right of Choate, where he might be conceived of as standing in the position of tacitly protecting her. Jeff, the little parcel in his hand, advanced upon them.

"Here is the necklace," said he, in a perfectly commonplace tone. "I suppose that's what you are talking about."

Esther's eyes, by the burning force he felt in them, seemed to draw his, and he looked at her, as if to inquire what was to be done with it now it was here. Esther did not wait for any one to put that question. She spoke sharply, as if the words leaped to utterance.