He looked at Choate so seriously that Choate had to take it with an equal gravity. He knew how ridiculous the situation could be made by a word or two. But Jeff was making it entirely sane and even epic.
"We know perfectly well," said Jeff, "that the law wouldn"t have much to do if all offenders and all witnesses told the truth. They don"t, because they"re prisoners--prisoners to fear and prisoners to selfishness and hunger. But if we three told each other the truth--and ourselves, too--we could be free this instant. You, Esther, if you would tell Choate here how you"ve loved that necklace and what you"ve done for it, why, you"d free him."
Esther cried out here, a little sharp cry of rage against him.
"I see," said she, "it"s only an attack on me. That"s where all your talk is leading."
"No, no," said Jeff earnestly. "I a.s.sure you it isn"t. But if you owned that, Esther, you"d be ashamed to want glittering things. And Choate would get over wanting you. And that"s what he"d better do."
The impudence of it, Choate knew, was only equalled by its coolness.
Jeff was at this moment believing so intently in himself that he could have made anybody--but an angry woman--believe also. Jeff was telling him that he mustn"t love Esther, and virtually also that this was because Esther was not worthy to be loved. But if Choate"s only armor was silence, Esther had gathered herself to s.n.a.t.c.h at something more effectual.
"You say we"re all prisoners to something," she said to Jeffrey. Her face was livid now with anger and her eyes glowed upon him. "How about you? You came into this house and took the necklace. Was that being a prisoner to it? How about your being free?"
Choate turned his eyes away from her face as if it hurt him. The taunt hurt him, too, like unclean words from lips beloved. But he looked involuntarily at Jeff to see how he had taken them. Jeff stood in silence looking gravely at Esther, but yet as if he did not see her. He appeared to be thinking deeply. But presently he spoke, and as if still from deep reflection.
"It"s true, Esther. I"m a prisoner, too. I"m trying to see how I can get out."
Choate spoke here, adopting the terms of Jeff"s own fancy.
"If you want us all to understand each other, you could tell Esther why you took the necklace. You could tell us both. We seem to be thrown together over this."
"Yes," said Jeff. "I could. I must. And yet I can"t." He looked up at Alston with a smile so whimsical that involuntarily Alston met it with a glimmer of a smile. "Choate, it looks as if I should have to be a prisoner a little longer--perhaps for life."
He went toward the door like a man bound on an urgent errand, and involuntarily Alston turned to follow him. The sight hurt Esther like an indignity. They had forgotten her. Their man"s country called them to settle man"s deeds, and the accordance of their going lashed her brain to quick revolt. It had been working, that shrewd, small brain, through all their talk, ever since Madame Beattie had denied Jeff"s having taken the necklace, and now it offered its result.
"You didn"t take it at all," she called after them. "It was that girl that"s had the entry to this house. It"s Lydia French."
x.x.x
At the words Alston turned to Jeff in an involuntary questioning. Jeff was inscrutable. His face, as Alston saw it, the lines of the mouth, the down-dropped gaze, was sad, tender even, as if he were merely sorry.
They walked along the street together and it was Choate who began awkwardly.
"Miss Lydia came to me, some weeks ago, about these jewels."
Here Jeff stopped him, breaking in upon him indeed when he had got thus far.
"Alston, let"s go down under the old willow and smoke a pipe."
Alston was rather dashed at having the tentative introduction of Lydia at once cut off, and yet the proposition seemed to him natural. Indeed, as they turned into Mill Street it occurred to him that Jeff might be providing solitude and a fitting place to talk. As they went down the old street, unchanged even to the hollows worn under foot in the course of the years, something stole over them and softened imperceptibly the harsh moment. There was Ma"am Fowler"s where they used to come to buy doughnuts. There was the house where the crippled boy lived, and sat at the window waving signals to the other boys as they went past. At the same window a man sat now. Jeff was pretty sure it was the boy grown up, and yet was too absorbed in his thought of Lydia to ask. He didn"t really care. But it was soothing to find the atmosphere of the place enveloped him like a charm. It wasn"t possible they were so old, or that they had been mightily excited a minute before over a foolish thing. Presently after leaving the houses they turned off the road and crossed the shelving sward to the old willow, and there on a bench hacked by their own jackknives they sat down to smoke. Jeff remembered it was he who had thought to give the bench a back. He had nailed the board from tree to tree. It was here now or its fellow--he liked to think it was his own board--and he leaned against it and lighted up. The day"s perturbation had taken Choate in another way. He didn"t want to smoke. But he rolled a cigarette with care and pretended to take much interest in it. He felt it was for Jeff to begin. Jeff sat silent a while, his eyes upon the field across the flats where the boys were playing ball. Yet in the end he did begin.
"That necklace, Choate," said he, "is a regular little devil of a necklace. Do you realise how much mischief it"s already done?"
Between Esther"s a.s.severations and Lydia"s theories Choate"s mind was in a good deal of a fog. He thought it best to give a perfunctory grunt and hope Jeff would go on.
"And after all," said Jeff, "as I said, the devilish thing isn"t of the slightest real value in itself. It can, in an indirect way, send a fellow to prison. It can excite an amount of longing in a woman"s mind colossal enough to make one of the biggest motives possible for any sort of crime. Because it glitters, simply because it glitters. It can cause another woman who has done caring for glitter, to depend on it for a living."
"You mean Madame Beattie," said Alston. "If it"s her necklace and she can sell it, why doesn"t she do it? Royal personages don"t account for that."
But Jeff went on with his ruminating.
"Alston," said he, "did it ever occur to you that, with the secrets of nature laid open before us as they are now--even though the page isn"t even half turned--does it occur to you we needn"t be at the mercy of s.e.x? Any of us, I mean, men and women both. Have we got to get drunk when it a.s.saults us? Have we got to be the cave man and carry off the woman? And lie to ourselves throughout? Have we got to say, "I covet this woman because she is all beauty"? Can"t we keep the lookout up in the c.o.c.kloft and let him judge, and if he says, "That isn"t beauty, old man"--believe him?"
"But sometimes," said Alston, "it is beauty."
He knew what road Jeff was on. Jeff was speaking out his plain thought and at the same time a.s.suring them both that they needn"t, either of them, be submerged by Esther, because real beauty wasn"t in her. If they ate the fruit of her witchery it would be to their own d.a.m.nation, and they would deserve what they got.
"Yes," said Jeff, "sometimes it is real beauty. But even then the thing that grows out of s.e.x madness is better than the madness itself.
Sometimes I think the only time some fellows feel alive is when they"re in love. That"s what"s given us such an idea of it. But when I think of a man and woman planking along together through the dust and mud--good comrades, you know--that"s the best of it."
"Of course," said Alston stiffly, "that"s the point. That"s what it leads to."
"Ah, but with some of them, you"d never get there; they"re not made for wives--or sisters--or mothers. And no man, if he saw what he was going into, would dance their dance. He wouldn"t choose it, that is, when he thinks back to it."
Alston took out his match-box, and felt his fingers quiver on it. He was enraged with himself for minding. This was the warning then. He was told, almost in exact words, not to covet his neighbour"s wife, cautioned like a boy not to s.n.a.t.c.h at forbidden fruit, and even, unthinkably, that the fruit was, besides not being his, rotten. And at his heart he knew the warning was fair and true. Esther had dealt a blow to his fastidious idealities. Her deceit had slain something. She had not so much betrayed it to him by facts, for facts he could, if pa.s.sion were strong enough, put aside. But his inner heart searching for her heart, like a hand seeking a beloved hand, had found an emptiness. He was so bruised now that he wanted to hit out and hurt Jeff, perhaps, at least force him to naked warfare.
"You want me to believe," he said, "that--Esther--" he stumbled over the word, but at such a pa.s.s he would not speak of her more decorously--"years ago took Madame Beattie"s necklace."
Jeff was watching the boys across the flats, critically and with a real interest.
"She did," he said.
Alston bolstered himself with a fict.i.tious anger.
"And you can tell me of it," he bl.u.s.tered.
"You asked me."
"You believe she did?"
"It"s true," said Jeff, with the utmost quietness. "I never have said it before. Not to my father even. But he knows. He did naturally, in the flurry of that time."
"Yet you tell me because I ask you."
Alston seemed to be bitterly defending Esther.
"Not precisely," said Jeff. "Because you"re bewitched by her. You must get over that."
The distance wavered before Choate"s eyes, He hated Jeffrey childishly because he could be so calm.
"You needn"t worry," he said. "She is as completely separated from me as if--as if you had never been away from her."
"That"s it," said Jeff. "You can"t marry her unless she"s divorced from me. She"s welcome to that--the divorce, I mean. But you can"t go drivelling on having frenzies over her. Good G.o.d, Choate, don"t you see what you"re doing? You"re wasting yourself. Shake it off. You don"t want Esther. She"s shocked you out of your boots already. And she doesn"t know there"s anything to be shocked at. You"re Addington to the bone, and Esther"s a primitive squaw. You"ve nothing whatever to do with one another, you two. It"s absurd."
Choate sat looking at the landscape which no longer wavered. The boys ran fairly straight now. Suddenly he began to laugh. He laughed gaspingly, hysterically, and Jeff regarded him from time to time tolerantly and smoked.