The Prisoner Part 46

"She'd rather give you the diamonds," said Lydia.

"My dear, she sets her life by them. Do you know what she's doing when she goes to her room early and locks the door? She's sitting before the gla.s.s with that necklace on, cursing G.o.d because there's no man to see her."

"You can't know that," said Lydia.

She was trembling all over.

"My dear, I know women. When you're as old as I am, you will, too: even the kind of woman Esther is. That type hasn't changed since the creation, as they call it."

"But I don't like it," said Lydia. "I don't think it's fair. She hates Jeff--"

"Nonsense. She doesn't hate any man. Jeff's poor, that's all."

"She does hate him, and yet you're going to make him pay money so she can keep diamond necklaces she never ought to have had."

"Make him pay money for anything," said the old witch astutely, "money he's got or money he hasn't got. Set his blood to moving, I tell you, and before he knows it he'll be tussling for dear life and stamping on the next man and getting to the top."

Lydia didn't want him to tussle, but she did want him at the top. She had not told Madame Beattie about the ma.n.u.script growing and growing on Jeff's table every night. It was his secret, his and hers, she reasoned; she hugged the knowledge to her heart.

"That's all," said Madame Beattie, in that royal way of terminating interviews when she wanted to get back to literature. "Only when he begins to address his workingmen you tell me."

Lydia, on her way downstairs, pa.s.sed Esther's room and even stood a second breathlessly taking in its exquisite order. Here was the bower where the enchantress slept, and where she touched up her beauty by the secret processes Lydia, being very young and of a pollen-like freshness, despised. This was not just of Lydia. Esther took no more than a normal care of her complexion, and her personal habits were beyond praise.

Lydia stood there staring, her breath coming quick. Was the necklace really there? If she saw it what could she do? If the little bag with the necklace inside it sat there waiting to be taken to New York, what could she do then? She fled softly down the stairs.

Addington was a good deal touched when Jeffrey Blake took the old town hall and put a notice in the paper saying he would give a talk there on American History in the administration of George Washington. He would speak in English and parts of the lecture would be translated, if necessary, by an able interpreter. Ladies considered seriously whether they ought not to go, to encourage him, and his father was sure it was his own right and privilege. But Jeff choked that off. He settled the matter at the supper table.

"Look here," said he, "I'm going down there to make an a.s.s of myself.

Don't you come. I won't have it."

So the three stayed at home, and sat up for him and he told them, when he came in, at a little after ten, that there had been five Italians present and one of them had slept. Two ladies, deputed by the Woman's Club, had also come, and he wished to thunder women would mind their business and stay at home. But there was the fighting glint in his eye.

His father remembered it, and Lydia was learning to know it now. He would give his next lecture, he said, unless n.o.body was there but the Woman's Club. He drew the line. And next day Lydia slipped away to Madame Beattie and told her the second lecture would be on the following Wednesday night.

That night Jeff stood up before his audience of three, no ladies this time. But Andrea was not there. Jeff thought a minute and decided there was no need of him.

"Will you tell me," said he, looking down from the shallow platform at his three men, "why I'm not talking in English anyway? You vote, don't you? You read English. Well, then, listen to it."

But he was not permitted to begin at once. There was a stir without and the sound of feet. The door opened and men tramped in, men and men, more than the little hall would hold, and packed themselves in the aisles and at the back. And with the foremost, one who carried himself proudly as if he were extremely honored, came Madame Beattie in a long-tailed velvet gown with a shining gold circlet across her forehead, and a plethora of jewels on her ungloved hands. She kept straight on, and mounted the platform beside Jeff, and there she bowed to her audience and was cheered. When she spoke to Jeff, it was with a perfect self-possession, an implied mastery of him and the event.

"I'll interpret."

After all, why not fall in with her, old mistress of guile? He began quite robustly and thought he was doing very well. In twenty minutes he was, he thought, speaking excellently. The men were warmly pleased. They sat up and smiled and glistened at him. Once he stopped short and threw Madame Beattie a quick aside.

"What are they laughing at?"

"I have to put it picturesquely," said Madame Beattie, in a stately calm. "That's the only way they'll understand. Go on."

It is said in Addington that those lectures lasted even until eleven o'clock at night, and there were pet.i.tions that The Prisoner should go to the old hall and talk every evening, instead of twice a week. The Woman's Club said Madame Beattie was a dear to interpret for him, and some of the members who had not studied any language since the seventies, when they learned the rudiments of German, to read Faust, judged it would be a good idea to hear her for practice. But somebody told her that, and she discouraged it. She was obliged, she said, to skip hastily from one dialect to another and they would only be confused; therefore they thought it better, after all, to remain undisturbed in their respective calm. Jeff sailed securely on through Lincoln's administration to the present day, and took up the tariff even, in an elementary fashion. There he was obliged to be drily technical at points, and he wondered how Madame Beattie could accurately reproduce him, much less to a response of eager faces. But then Jeff knew she was an old witch. He knew she had hypnotised wives that hated her and husbands sworn to cast her off. He knew she had sung after she had no voice, and bamboozled even the critics, all but one who wrote for an evening paper and so didn't do his notice until next day. And he saw no reason why she should not make even the tariff a primrose path.

Madame Beattie loved it all. Also, there was the exquisite pleasure, when she got home late, of making Sophy let her in and mix her a refreshing drink, and of meeting Esther the next day at dinner and telling her what a good house they had. Business, Madame Beattie called it, splendid business, and Esther hated her for that, too. It sounded like shoes or hosiery. But Ether didn't dare gainsay her, for fear she would put out a palmist's sign, or a notice of seances at twenty-five cents a head. Esther knew she could get no help from grandmother. When she sought it, with tears in her eyes, begging grandmother to turn the unprincipled old witch out for good, grandmother only pulled the sheet up to her ears and breathed stertorously.

But Madame Beattie was tired, though this was the flowering of her later life.

"My G.o.d!" she said to Lydia one night, before getting up to dress for a lecture, "I'm pretty nearly--what is it they call it--all in? I may drop dead. I shouldn't wonder if I did. If I do, you take Jeff into the joke.

n.o.body'd appreciate it more than Jeff."

"You don't think the men like him the less for it?" said Lydia.

"Oh, G.o.d bless me, no. They adore him. They think he's a G.o.d because he tells their folk tales and their stories. I give you my word, Lydia, I'd no idea I knew so many things."

"What did you tell last night?" said Lydia.

"Oh, stories, stories, stories. To-night I may spice it up a little with modern middle-Europe scandal. Dear souls! they love it."

"What does Jeff think they're listening to?" asked Lydia.

"The trusts, last time," said Madame Beattie. "My Holy Father! that's what he thinks. The trusts!"

XXV

The colonel thrived, about this time, on that fallacious feeling, born of hope eternal, that he was growing young. It is one of the precautionary lies of nature, to keep us going, that, the instant we are tinkered in any part, we ignore its merely being fitted up for shortened use. Hope eternal tells us how much stronger it is than it was before.

If you rub unguent into your scanty hair you can feel it grow, as a poet hears the gra.s.s. A nostrum on your toil-hardened hands brings back, to keen antic.i.p.ation, the skin of youth. All mankind is prepared to a perfect degree of sensitiveness for response to the quack doctor's art.

We believe so fast that he need hardly do more than open his mouth to cry his wares. The colonel, doing a good day's work and getting tired enough to sleep at night, felt, on waking, as if life were to last the measure of his extremest appet.i.te. The household went on wings, so clever and silent was Anne in administration and so efficient Mary Nellen. Only Anne was troubled in her soul because Lydia would go slipping away for these secret sessions with Madame Beattie. She even proposed going with her once or twice, but Lydia said she had put it off for that night; and next time she slipped away more cleverly. Once in these calls Lydia met Esther at the head of the stairs, and they said "How do you do?" in an uncomfortable way, Esther with reproving dignity and Lydia in a bravado that looked like insolence. And then Esther sent for Alston Choate, and in the evening he came.

Esther was a pathetic pale creature, as she met him in the dusk of the candle-lighted room, little more than a child, he thought, as he noted her round arms and neck within the film of her white dress. Esther did not need to a.s.sume a pathos for the moment's needs. She was very sorry for herself. They sat there by the windows, looking out under the shade of the elms, and for a little neither spoke. Esther had some primitive feminine impulses to put down. Alston had an extreme of pity that gave him fervencies of his own. To Esther it was as natural as breathing to ask a man to fight her battles for her, and to cling to him while she told him what battles were to be fought. Alston had the chafed feeling of one who cannot follow with an unmixed ardency the lines his heart would lead him. He was always angry, chiefly because she had to suffer so, after the hideousness of her undeserved destiny, and yet he saw no way to help that might not make a greater hardship for her. At last she spoke, using his name, and his heart leaped to it.

"Alston, what am I going to do?"

"Things going badly?" he asked her, in a voice moved enough to hearten her. "What is it that's different?"

"Everything. Aunt Patricia has those horrible men come here and talk with her--"

"It's ridiculous of her," said Alston, "but there's no harm in it.

They're not a bad lot, and she's an old lady, and she won't stay here forever."

"Oh, yes, she will. She gets her food, at least, and I don't believe she could pay for even that abroad. And this sort of thing amuses her. It's like gipsies or circus people or something. It's horrible."

"What does your grandmother say?"

"Nothing."

"She must stand for it, in a way, or Madame Beattie couldn't do it."

"I don't believe grandmother understands fully. She's so old."