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The Prisoner, a novel by Alice Brown |
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Chapter 18 |
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_ CHAPTER XVIII What Alston Choate did, after ten minutes' frowning thought, was to sit down and write a note to Madame Beattie. But as he dipped his pen he said aloud, half admiring and inconceivably irritated: "The little devil!" He sent the note to Madame Beattie by a boy charged to give it, if possible, into her hand, and in an hour she was there in his office, ostrich plumes and all. She was in high feather, not adequately to be expressed by the plumes, and at once she told him why. "I believe that little wild-fire's been here to see you already. Has she? and talking about necklaces?" Madame Beattie was sitting upright in the office chair, fanning herself and regarding him with a smile as sympathetic as if she had been the cause of no disturbing issue. "You'll pardon me for asking you to come here," said Alston. "But I didn't know how to get at you without Mrs. Blake's knowledge." "Of course," said Madame Beattie composedly. "She was there when the note came, and curious as a cat." "I see," said Alston, tapping noiselessly with his helpful paper knife, "that you guess I've heard some rumours that--pardon me, Madame Beattie--started from you." "Yes," said she, "that pretty imp has been here. Quite right. She's a clever child. Let her stir up something, and they may quiet it if they can." "Do you mind telling me," said Alston, "what this story is--about a necklace?" "I've no doubt she's told you just as well as I could," said Madame Beattie. "She sat and drank it all in. I bet ten pounds she remembered word for word." "As I understand, you say--" "Don't tell me I 'say.' I had a necklace worth more money than I dared tell that imp. She wouldn't have believed me. And my niece Esther is as fond of baubles as I am. She stole the thing. And she said she lost it. And it's my opinion--and it's the imp's opinion--she's got it somewhere now." Alston tapped noiselessly, and regarded her from under brows judicially stern. He wished he knew recipes for frightening Madame Beattie. But, he suspected, there weren't any. She would tell the truth or she would not, as she preferred. He hadn't any delusions about Madame Beattie's cherishing truth as an abstract duty. She was after results. He made a thrust at random. "I can't see your object in stirring up this matter. If you had any ground of evidence you'd have made your claim and had it settled long ago." "Not fully," said Madame Beattie, fanning. "Then you were paid something?" "Something? How far do you think 'something' would go toward paying for the loss of a diamond necklace? Evidently you don't know the history of that necklace. If you were an older man you would. The papers were full of it for years. It nearly caused a royal separation--they were reconciled after--and I was nearly garroted once when the thieves thought I had it in a hand-bag. There are historic necklaces and this is one. Did you ever hear of Marie Antoinette's?" "Yes," said Alston absently. He was thinking how to get at her in the house where she lived. How would some of his novelists have written out Madame Beattie and made her talk? "And Maupassant's." This he said ruminatingly, but the lawyer in him here put down a mark. "Note," said the mark, "Maupassant's necklace. She rose to that." There was no doubt of it. A quick cross-light, like a shiver, had run across her eyes. "You know Maupassant's story," he pursued. "I know every word of Maupassant. Neat, very neat." "You remember the wife lost the borrowed necklace, and she and her husband ruined themselves to pay for it, and then they found it wasn't diamonds at all, but paste." "I remember," said Madame Beattie composedly. "But if it had been a necklace such as mine an imitation would have cost a pretty penny." "So it wasn't the necklace itself," he hazarded. "You wouldn't have brought a priceless thing over here. It was the imitation." Madame Beattie broke out, a shrill staccato, into something like anger. But it might not have been anger, he knew, only a means of hostile communication. "You are a rude young man to put words into my mouth, a rude young man." "I beg your pardon," said Alston. "But this is rather a serious matter. And I do want to know, as a friend of Mrs. Jeffrey Blake." "And counsel confided in by that imp," she supplied shrewdly. "Yes, counsel retained by Miss Lydia French. I want to know whether you had with you here in America the necklace given you by--" Here he hesitated. He wondered whether, according to her standards, he was unbearably insulting, or whether the names of royal givers could really be mentioned. "A certain Royal Personage," said Madame Beattie calmly. "Or," said Alston, beginning after a safe hiatus, "whether you had had an imitation made, and whether the necklace said to be lost was the imitation." "Well, then I'll tell you plainly," said Madame Beattie, in a cheerful concession, "I didn't have an imitation made. And you're quite within the truth with your silly 'said to be's.' For it was said to be lost. Esther said it. And she no more lost it than she went to New York that time to climb the Matterhorn. Do you know Esther?" "Yes," said Alston with a calculated dignity, "I know her very well." "Oh, I mean really know her, not enough to take her in to dinner or snatch your hat off to her." "Yes, I really know her." "Then why should you assume she's not a liar?" Madame Beattie asked this with the utmost tranquillity. It almost robbed the insult of offence. But Alston's face arrested her, and she burst out laughing. "My dear boy," said she, "you deal with evidence and you don't know a liar when you see her. Esther isn't all kinds of a liar. She isn't an amusing one, for instance. She hasn't any imagination. Now if I thought it would make you jump, I should tell you there was a tiger sitting on the top of that bookcase. I should do it because it would amuse me. But Esther never'd think of such a thing." She was talking to him now with perfect good-humour because he actually had glanced up at the bookcase, and it was tribute to her dramatic art. "She tells only the lies she has to. Esther's the perfect female animal hiding under things when there's something she's afraid of in the open and then telling herself she hid because she felt like being alone. The little imp wouldn't do that," said Madame Beattie admiringly. "She wouldn't be afraid of anything, or if she was she'd fight the harder. I shouldn't want to see the blood she'd draw." Alston was looking at her in a fixed distaste. "Esther is your niece," he began. "Grandniece," interrupted Madame Beattie. "She's of your blood. And at present you are her guest--" "Oh, no, I'm not. The house is Susan's. Susan and I are step-sisters. Half the house ought to have been left to me, only Grandfather Pike knew I was worshipped, simply worshipped in Paris, and he wrote me something scriptural about Babylon." "At any rate," said Alston, "you are technically visiting your niece, and you come here and tell me she is a thief and a liar." "You sent for me," said Madame Beattie equably. "And I actually walked over. I thought it would be good for me, but it wasn't. Isn't that a hack out there? If it's that Denny, I think I'll get him to take me for a little drive. Don't come down." But Alston went in a silence he recognised as sulky, and put her into the carriage with a perfect solicitude. "I must ask you," he said stiffly before he closed the carriage door, "not to mention this to Mrs. Blake." "Bless you, no," said Madame Beattie. "I'm going to let you stir the pot, you and that imp. Tell him to drive out into the country somewhere for half an hour. I suppose I've got to get the air." But he was not to escape that particular coil so soon. Back in his office again, giving himself another ten minutes of grave amused consideration, before he called the stenographer, he looked up, at the opening of the door, and saw Anne. She came forward at once and without closing the door, as if to assure him she would not keep him long. There was no misreading the grave trouble of her face. He met her, and now they shook hands, and after he had closed the door he set a chair for her. But Anne refused it. "I came to tell you how sorry I am to have troubled you so," she began. "Of course Lydia won't go on with this. She won't be allowed to. I don't know what could stop her," Anne admitted truthfully. "But I shall do what I can. Farvie mustn't be told. He'd be horrified. Nor Jeff. I must see what I can do." "You are very much troubled," said Alston, in a tone of grave concern. It seemed to him Anne was a perfect type of the gentlewoman of another time, not even of his mother's perhaps, but of his grandmother's when ladies were a mixture of fine courage and delicate reserve. That type had, in his earliest youth, seemed inevitable. If his mother had escaped from it, it was because she was the inexplicable wonder of womankind, unlike the rest and rarer than all together. Anne looked at him, pleading in her eyes. "Terribly," she said, "terribly troubled. Lydia has always been impulsive, but not unmanageable. And I don't in the least know what to do." "Suppose you leave it with me," said Alston, his deference an exquisite balm to her hurt feeling. Then he smiled, remembering Lydia. "I don't know what to do either," he said. "Your sister's rather terrifying. But I think we're safe enough so long as she doesn't go to Weedon Moore." Anne was wordlessly grateful, but he understood her and not only went to the door with her but down the stairs as well. And she walked home treasuring the memory of his smile. _ |
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