The Prisoner Part 56

"Your husband entered this house and took the necklace. I want to know where he took it from."

"She told you," said Esther scornfully.

He gained a little courage now and ventured to look at her. If she could repel Madame Beattie's insinuation, it must mean she had something on her side. And when he looked he wondered, in a rush of pity, how he could have felt anything for that crushed figure but ruth and love. So when he spoke again his voice was gentler, and Esther's courage leaped to meet it.

"I am told the necklace was in your bag. How did it get there?"

"I don't know," said Esther, in a perfect clarity.

His new formed hope crumbled. He could hear inexorably, like a counter cry, Lydia's voice, saying, "She stole it." Had Esther stolen it? But Esther did not know Lydia had said it, or that it had ever been said to him at all, and she was daring more than she would have dared if she had known of that antagonist.

"It is a plot between them," she said boldly.

"Between whom?"

"Aunt Patricia and him."

"What is the plot?"

"I don't know."

"If you think there was a plot, you must have made up your mind what the plot was and what they were to gain by it. What do you believe the plot to have been?"

This was all very stupid, Esther felt, when he might be a.s.suring her of his unchanged and practical devotion.

"Oh, I don't know," she said irritably. "How should I know?"

"You wouldn't think there was a plot without having some idea of what it was," he was insisting, in what she thought his stupid way. "What is your idea it was?"

This was really, she saw, the same question over again, which was another instance of his heavy literalness. She had to answer, she knew now, unless she was to dismiss him, disaffected.

"She put the necklace in my bag," she ventured, with uncertainty as to the value of the statement and yet no diminution of boldness in making it.

"What for?"

"To have him steal it, I suppose."

"To have him steal her own necklace? Couldn't she have given it to him?"

"Oh, I don't know," said Esther. "She is half crazy. Don't you see she is? She might have had a hundred reasons. She might have thought if he tried to steal it he'd get caught, and she could blackmail him."

"But how was he to know she had put it in the bag?"

"I don't know." Esther was settling into the stolidity of the obstinate when they are crowded too far; yet she still remembered she must not cease to be engaging.

"Why was it better to have him find it in your bag than anywhere else in the house?" he was hammering on.

"I don't know," said Esther again, and now she gave a little sigh.

That, she thought, should have recalled him to his male responsibility not to trap and torture. But she had begun to wonder how she could escape when the door opened and Jeff came in. Alston turned to meet him, and, with Esther, was amazed at his altered look. Jeff was like a man who had had a rage and got over it, who had even heard good news, or had in some way been recalled. And he had. On the way home, when he had nearly reached there, in haste to find Lydia and tell her the necklace was back in Madame Beattie's hands, he had suddenly remembered that he was a prisoner and that all men were prisoners until they knew they were, and it became at once imperative to get back to Esther and see if he could let her out. And the effect of this was to make his face to s.h.i.+ne as that of one who was already released from bondage. To Esther he looked young, like the Jeff she used to know.

"Don't go, Choate," he said, when Alston picked himself up from the mantel and straightened, as if his next move might be to walk away. "I wanted to see Esther, but I'd rather see you both. I've been thinking about this infernal necklace, and I realise it's of no value at all."

Choate's mind leaped at once to the jewels in Maupa.s.sant's story, and Madame Beattie's quick disclaimer when he ventured to hint the necklace might be paste. Did Jeff know it was actually of no value?

Jeff began to walk about the room, expressing himself eagerly as if it were difficult to do it at all and it certainly could not be done if he sat.

"I mean," said he, "the only value of anything tangible is to help you get at something that isn't tangible. The necklace, in itself, isn't worth anything. It glitters. But if we were blind we shouldn't see it glitter."

"We could sell it," said Choate drily, "or its owner could, to help us live and support being blind."

Esther looked from one to the other. Jeffrey seemed to her quite mad.

She had known him to talk in erratic ways before he went into business and had no time to talk, but that had been a wildness incident to youth.

But Choate was meeting him in some sort of understanding, and she decided she could only listen attentively and see what Choate might find in him.

"It's almost impossible to say what I want to," said Jeff. The sweat broke out on his forehead and he plunged his hands in his pockets and stood in an obstinate wrestling with his thought. "I mean, this necklace, as an object, is of no more importance, really, than that doorstone out there. But the infernal thing has captured us. It's made us prisoner. And we've got to free ourselves."

Now Esther was entirely certain he was mad. Being mad, she did not see that he could say anything she need combat. But her own name arrested her and sent the blood up into her face.

"Esther," said he, "you're a prisoner to it because you've fallen in love with its glitter, and you think if you wore it you'd be lovelier.

So it's made you a prisoner to the female instinct for adornment."

Alston was watching him sharply now. He was wondering whether Jeff was going to accuse her of appropriating it in the beginning.

"Choate is a prisoner," said Jeff earnestly and with such simplicity that even Choate, with his fastidious hatred of familiarity, could not resent it. "He's a prisoner to your charm. But here's where the necklace comes in again. If he could find out you'd done unworthy things to get it your charm would be broken and he'd be free."

This was so true that Choate could only stare at him and wish he would either give over or brutally tell him whether he was to be free.

"Madame Beattie uses the necklace as a means of livelihood," said Jeff.

He was growing quite happy in the way his mind was leading him, because it did seem to be getting him somewhere, where all the links would hold.

"Because she can get more out of it, in some mysterious way I haven't fathomed, than by selling it. And so she's prisoner to it, too."

"I shall be able to tell what the reason is," said Choate, "before long, I fancy. I've sent for the history of the Beattie necklace. I know a man in Paris who is getting it for me."

"Good!" said Jeff. "Now I propose we all escape from the necklace. We're prisoners, and let's be free."

"How are you a prisoner?" Alston asked him.

Jeff smiled at him.

"Why," said he, "if, as I told you, I took the necklace from this house, I'm a criminal, and the necklace has laid me by the heels. Who's got it now?"

This he asked of Esther and she returned bitterly:

"Aunt Patricia's got it. She walked out of the room with it, shaking it in the sun."

"Good!" said Jeff again. "Let her have it. Let her shake it in the sun.

But we three can escape. Have we escaped? Choate, have you?"