"Not to my knowledge."
Anne and Lydia exchanged looks. Madame Beattie was a familiar name to them, but they had never heard she was a harpy.
"Was she Esther's aunt?" Lydia inquired, really to give the talk a jog. She was accustomed to shake up her watch when it hesitated.
"Great-aunt," said Jeffrey. "Step-sister to Esther's grandmother. She must be sixty-five where grandmother's a good ten years older."
"She sang," said the colonel, forgetting, as he often did, they seemed so young, that everybody in America must at least have heard tradition of Madame Beattie's voice. "She lived abroad."
"She had a ripping voice," said Jeff. "When she was young, of course. That wasn't all. There was something about her that took them. But she lost her voice, and she married Beattie, and he died. Then she came back here and hunted up Esther."
His face settled into lines of sombre thought, puzzled thought, it seemed to Anne. But to Lydia it looked as if this kidnapping of Madame Beattie from the past and thrusting her into the present discussion was only a pretext for talking about Esther. Of course, she knew, he was wildly anxious to enter upon the subject, and there might be pain enough in it to keep him from approaching it suddenly. Esther might be a burning coal. Madame Beattie was the safe holder he caught up to keep his fingers from it. But he sounded now as if he were either much absorbed in Madame Beattie or very wily in his hiding behind her.
"I've often wondered if she came back. I've thought she might easily have settled on Esther and sucked her dry. No news of her?"
"No news," said the colonel. "It's years since she's been here. Not since—then."
"No," said Jeff. There was a new line of bitter amusement near his mouth. "I know the date of her going, to a dot. The day I was arrested she put for New York. Next week she sailed for Italy." But if Lydia was going to feel more of her hot reversals in the face of his calling plain names, she found him cutting them short with another question: "Seen Esther?"