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Updated: June 22, 2025
When they stopped at the house Esther, watching from the window, contemptuously noted how familiar they were. Madame Beattie, she thought, was as intimate with a foreign fruit-seller as with one of her own class. Madame Beattie seemed impressing upon him some command or at least instructions.
Suddenly Madame Beattie raised her voice and called twice: "Esther! Esther!" The sound echoed in the silent street, appallingly to one who knew what Addington streets were and what proprieties lined them. Then the door did open. Jeffrey fancied the smooth-faced maid had slipped the bolt. Esther, from what he knew of her, was not by to face the music.
"Esther," continued Madame Beattie, "has been a silly child. She took my necklace, years ago, and Jeff very chivalrously engaged to pay me for it and " "That will do," said Jeff harshly. "We all know what happened years ago. Anyhow Esther does. And I do. We'll leave Lydia out of this. I don't know what you've come here to say, Madame Beattie, but whatever it is, I prefer it should be said to me.
"If you've any law business, Madame Beattie, you'd far better go to Alston Choate. Moore's no kind of a man." "He's the right kind for me," said Madame Beattie. "No manners, no traditions, no scruples. It's a dirty job I've got for him, and it takes a dirty man to do it." She had risen now, and was smiling placidly up at the colonel. He frowned at her, involuntarily.
"No," said Aunt Patricia easily, "it isn't altogether mine. Jeff made me a payment on it a good many years ago." Esther turned upon her. "He paid you for it? When?" "He paid me something," said Madame Beattie. "Not the value of the necklace. That was when you stole it, Esther. He meant to pay me the full value. He will, in time. But he paid me what he could to keep you from being found out.
Why, Jeff!" suddenly her voice rose in a shrill note and startled them. Her face convulsed and a deeper hue ran into it. "I'm a personage, Jeff. The world is my friend. You seem to think because I've lost my voice I'm not Patricia Beattie. But I am. I am Patricia Beattie. And I have power." Lydia made a movement toward her and laid her hands together, impetuously, in applause.
But when she came to Esther, she saw his glance quicken and fasten on hers the more keenly, and when she told him Madame Beattie believed the necklace had not been lost at all, he was looking at her with astonishment even. "You say " he began, and made her rehearse it all again in snatches.
"Deeply, because she's my first client in a cause celebre." "Have you forgotten her book again?" "Her book? 'The Kasidah'? I've got it here." He tapped the capacious side pocket of his coat. "You saw it then?" he added. "Beattie had it when I went upstairs." "I wonder what she made of it," Daventry said, with softness in his voice. "Don't ever let Rosamund see it, by the way.
James Beattie had been brought up with such a love for the Kirk of Scotland, and for her ministers and her people; he had of late grown into such a love for his books also, and for the work of the ministry, that in examining himself in prospect of his approaching licence he had felt afraid that he loved the thought of a study, and a pulpit, and a manse, and its inhabitants, and, indeed, the whole prospective life of a minister, with more keenness of affection than he loved the souls of men, or even his Master Himself.
Or was it because some inner watchman on the tower told her Jeff himself had better hear again what one person thought of Esther? Madame Beattie threw back her plumed head and laughed, the same laugh she had used to annotate the stories. Lydia immediately hated herself for having challenged it.
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