The Prisoner Part 68

Madame Beattie was still not moved except by mild amus.e.m.e.nt. Anne left the chair and took a step nearer.

"Madame Beattie," she said, "you don't believe a word I say. But I mean it. You've got to go out of this house, or I shall put you out of it with my hands. With my hands, Madame Beattie--and I'm very strong."

Madame Beattie was no coward, but she was not young and she had a sense of physical inadequacy. About Anne there was playing the very spirit of tragic anger, none of it for effect, not in the least gauged by any idea of its efficiency. Those slender hands, gripping each other until the knuckles blanched, were ready for their act. The girl's white face was lighted with eyes of fire. Madame Beattie rose and slowly a.s.sumed her cloak.

"You're a silly child," she said. "When you're as old as I am you'll have more common-sense. You'd rather risk a scandal than tell Jeff he has a debt to pay. By to-morrow you'll see it as I do. Come to me in the morning, and we'll talk it over. I won't act before then."

She walked composedly to the door and Anne scrupulously held it for her.

They went through the hall, Anne following and ready to open the last door also. But she closed it without saying good-bye, in answer to Madame Beattie's oblique nod over her shoulder and the farewell wave of her hand. For an instant Anne felt like slipping the bolt lest her adversary should return, but she reflected, with a grimness new to her gentle nature, that if Madame Beattie did return her own two hands were ready. She stood a moment, listening, and when the carriage wheels rolled away down the drive, she went to the big closet under the stairs and caught at her own coat and hat. She was going, as fast as her feet would carry her, to see Alston Choate.

x.x.xVII

Alston Choate was working, and he was alone. Anne, bright-eyed and anxious, came in upon him and brought him to his feet. Anne had learned this year that you should not knock at the door of business offices, but she still half believed you ought, and it gave her entrance something of deprecation and a pretty grace.

"I am so troubled," she said, without preliminary. "Madame Beattie has just been to see me."

Alston, smiling away her agitation, if he might, by a kind a.s.sumption that there was no conceivable matter that could not be at once put right, gave her a chair and himself went back to his judicial seat.

Anne, not loosening her jacket, looked at him, her face pure and appealing above the fur about her throat, as if to beg him to be as kind as he possibly could, since it all involved Lydia.

"I've no doubt it's Madame Beattie," said Alston carelessly, even it might have been a little amused at the possibilities. "If there's a ferment anywhere north of Central America she's pretty certain to have set it brewing."

Anne told him her tale succinctly, and his unconcern crumbled. He frowned over the foolishness of it, and considered, while she talked, whether he had better be quite open with her, or whether it was sufficient to take the responsibility of the thing and settle it like a swaggering G.o.d warranted to rule. That was better, he concluded.

"I'll go to see Madame Beattie," he said. "Then I'll report to you. But you'd better not speak to Lydia about it. Or Jeff. Promise me."

"Oh, I'll promise," said Anne, a lovely rose flush on her face. "Only, if Lydia is in danger you must tell me in time to do something. I don't know what, but you know for Lydia I'd do anything."

"I will, too," said Alston. "Only it won't be for Lydia wholly. It'll be for you."

Then for an instant, though so alive to her, he seemed to withdraw into remote cogitation, and she wondered whether he was really thinking of the case at all. Because she was in a lawyer's office she called it a case, timorously; that made it much more serious. But Alston, in that instant, was thinking how strange it was that the shabby old office, witness of his unwilling drudgery and his life-saving excursions into the gardens of fiction, should be looking now on her, seated there in her earnestness and purity, and that he should at last be recognising her. She was a part of him, Alston thought, beloved, not because she was so different but so like. There was no a.s.sault of the alien nature upon his own, irresistible because so piquing. There were no unexplored tracts he couldn't at least fancy, green swards and clear waters where a man might be refreshed. Everything he found there would be, he knew, of the nature of the approaches to that gentle paradise. What a thing, remote, extraordinary to think of in his office while she brought him the details of a tawdry scandal. Yet the office bore, to his eyes, invisible traces of past occupancy: men and women out of books were there, absolutely vivid to his eyes, more alive than half the Addingtonians. The walls were hung with garlands of fancy, the windows his dreaming eyes had looked from were windows into s.p.a.ce beyond Addington. No, these were no common walls, yet unfitting to gaze on while you told a client you loved her. After all, on rapid second thought, it might not seem so inapt seen through his mother's eyes, as she was betraying herself now in more than middle age. "Ask her wherever you find yourselves," he fancied his mother saying. "That is part of the adventure."

Alston looked at Anne and smiled upon her and involuntarily she smiled back, though she saw no cause for cheerfulness in the dismal errand she had come on. She started a little, too, for Alston, in the most matter of fact way, began with her first name.

"Anne," said he, "I have for a long time been--" he paused for a word.

The ones he found were all too dignified, too likely to be wanted in a higher cause--"bewitched," he continued, "over Esther Blake."

The colour ran deeper into Anne's face.

"You don't want," she said, "to do anything that might hurt her? I shouldn't want to, either. But it isn't Esther we're talking about. It's Madame Beattie."

"I know," said Alston, "but I want you to know I have been very much--I've made a good deal of a fool of myself over Mrs. Blake."

Still he obstinately would not say he had been in love. Anne, looking at him with the colour rising higher and higher, hardly seemed to understand. But suddenly she did.

"You don't mean--" she stammered. "Mr. Choate, she's married, you know, even if she and Jeff aren't together any more. Esther is married."

"I know it," said Alston drily. "I've wished they weren't married. I've wished I could ask her to marry me. But I don't any longer. You won't understand at all why I say it now. Sometime I'll tell you when you've noticed how I have to stand up against my cut and dried ways. Anne, I'm talking to you."

She had got on her feet and was fumbling with the upper b.u.t.ton of her coat which had not been unloosed. But that she didn't remember now. She was in a mechanical haste of making ready to go. Alston rose, too, and was glad to find he was the taller. It gave him a mute advantage and he needed all he could get.

"I'm telling you something quite important," he said, in a tone that set her momentarily and fallaciously at ease. "It's going to be very important to both of us. Dear Anne! darling Anne!" He broke down and laughed, her eyes were so big with the surprise of it, almost, it might be, with fright. "That's because I'm in love with you," said Alston.

"I've forgotten every other thing that ever happened to me, all except this miserable thing I've just told you. I had to tell you, so you'd know the worst of me. Darling Anne!" He liked the sound of it.

"I must go," said Anne.

"You'd better," said Alston. "It'll be much nicer to ask you the rest of it in a proper place. Anne, I've had so much to do with proper places I'm sick of 'em. That's why I've begun to say it here. Nothing could be more improper in all Addington. Think about it. Be ready to tell me when I come, though that won't be for a long time. I'm going to write you things, for fear, if I said them, you'd say no. And don't really think.

Just remember you're darling Anne."

She gave him a grave look--Alston wondered afterward if it could possibly be a reproving one--and, with a fine dignity, walked to the door. Since he had begun to belie his nature, mischief possessed him. He wanted to go as far as he audaciously could and taste the sweet and bitter of her possible kindness, her almost certain blame.

"Good-bye," he said, "darling Anne."

This was as the handle of the door was in his grasp ready to be turned for her. Anne, still inexplicably grave, was looking at him.

"Good-bye," she said, "Mr. Choate."

He watched her to the head of the stairs, and then shut the door on her with a click. Alston was conscious of having, for the joy of the moment, really made a fool of himself. But he didn't let it depress him. He needed his present cleverness too much to spend a grain of it on self-reproach. He went to his safe and took out a paper that had been lying there ready to be used, slipped it into his pocket and went, before his spirit had time to cool, to see Madame Beattie.

Sophy admitted him and left him in the library, while she went to summon her. And Madame Beattie came, finding him at the window, his back turned on the warm breathing presences of Esther's home. If he had penetrated, for good cause, to Circe's bower, he didn't mean to drink in its subtle intimacies. At the sound of a step he turned, and Madame Beattie met him peaceably, with outstretched hand. Alston dropped the hand as soon as possible. Lydia might swear she was clean and that her peculiarily second-hand look was the effect of overworn black, but Alston she had always impressed as much-damaged goods that had lost every conceivable inviting freshness. She indicated a chair conveniently opposite her own and he sat down and at once began.

"Madame Beattie, I have come to talk over this unfortunate matter of the necklace."

"Oh," said Madame Beattie, with a perfect affability and no apparent emotion, "Anne French has been chattering to you."

"Naturally," said Choate. "I am their counsel, hers and her sister's."

"These aren't matters of law," said Madame Beattie. "They are very interesting personal questions, and I advise you to let them alone. You won't find any precedent for them in your books."

"I have been unpardonably slow in coming to you," said Alston. "And my coming now hasn't so very much to do with Lydia and Anne. I might have come just the same if you hadn't begun to annoy them."

"Well," said Madame Beattie impatiently. She wanted her nap, for she was due that evening at street corners in Mill End. "Get to the point, if you please."

"The point is," said Alston, "that some months ago when you began to make things unpleasant for a number of persons--"

"Nonsense!" said Madame Beattie briskly. "I haven't made things unpleasant. I've only waked this town out of its hundred years' sleep.

You'd better be thankful to me, all of you. Trade is better, politics are most exciting, everything's different since I came."

"I sent at once to Paris," said Alston, with an impartial air of conveying information they were equally interested in, "for the history of the Beattie necklace. And I've got it. I've had it a week or more, waiting to be used." He looked her full in the face to see how she took it. He would have said she turned a shade more unhealthy, in a yellow way, but not a nerve in her seemed to blench.

"Well," said she, "have you come to tell me the history of the Beattie necklace?"

"Briefly," said Alston, "it was given the famous singer, as she states, by a certain Royal Personage. We are not concerned with his ident.i.ty, his nationality even. But it was a historic necklace, and he'd no business to give it to her at all. There were some rather shady transactions before he could get his hands on it. And the Royal Family never ceased trying to get it back. The Royal Personage was a young man when he gave it to her, but by the time the family'd begun to exert pressure he wasn't so impetuous, and he, too, wanted it back. His marriage gave the right romantic reason, which he used. He actually asked the famous singer to return it to him, and at the same time she was approached by some sort of agent from the family who offered her a fat compensation."

"It was a matter of sentiment," said Madame Beattie loftily. "You've no right to say it was a question of money. It is extremely bad taste."