The Corbin necklace
“and I bolted my door and hung my coat on the door-knob. So nobody
knows where it is. Mother thinks it’s still in the safe. I don’t know
what I’ll do about it to-night, though, after I’ve gone to bed. Sleep
with my trousers on, I expect. Unless grandmother has me give it back
to her before then.”
“Have you any idea that she means to?” I asked.
“Well,” he said, “of course you never can tell about Gran. She called
me into her room again just now and asked me if it was safe, and if I
had it hidden where I could get it when it was wanted. I said I could.
She’s coming down to dinner to-night, you know, and she may spring
something. I’ll be all ready if she does.”
He grinned and added, “It certainly will be a surprise for mother.”
“How do you know she thinks it’s in the safe?” I asked.
He hesitated, and I didn’t know for a minute whether he meant to
answer. His pride over what he felt to be a sound piece of reasoning,
and his wish to see whether or not I would follow it prevailed over any
other feelings he may have had.
“It’s kind of funny,” he said. “I figured it out from Digs. You see,
early this morning when I showed her that the necklace was back,
she was awfully excited and said she thought I’d taken it for a
joke--because I hated her, she said. She didn’t mean that really--it
was just because she was upset--and she came around later and said she
was sorry. So that was all right.
“But this afternoon just before they had the wedding rehearsal Digs was
all stirred up again. I saw she was acting sort of reproachful toward
me, so I asked her what the matter was, and she said she didn’t think
it was fair of me to have told mother about her knowing the combination
to the safe. She said she wasn’t supposed to know it, only she had to
in order to tell grandmother what it was when she forgot.
“Well, of course, I hadn’t told mother that Digs knew the combination.
I hadn’t told anybody but you and Mr. Smith. And I told Digs I hadn’t
told mother. And then, because it seemed kind of funny, I asked Digs
what made her think I had.
“She pressed her lips together--you know the sort of face she
makes--and wasn’t going to tell me.
“I said, ‘Mother hasn’t been accusing you of taking the necklace, has
she?’
“She was very indignant then, and said, ‘No, she has not,’ and then she
began to cry, and asked me if I’d miss her if she went away; because,
she said, she thought she might have to.
“I asked her why, and she wouldn’t tell me. So I said she mustn’t mind
grandmother even if she did get sort of rough sometimes, and Digs said
she didn’t mind grandmother. It wasn’t that at all. She wouldn’t say
anything more; wanted to kiss me instead. So I went away to think about
it.”
I remembered old Mr. Smith’s comment on Miss Digby’s manner just after
she’d parted from Victoria in the hall that afternoon. “Frightened--or
shocked,” he had said, and he had hazarded a guess that she might have
been given some order that she didn’t want to carry out. I didn’t
mention this to the boy, however. I waited to see what conclusion he’d
come to by himself.
“I think,” he went on, “that mother must have asked Digs to open the
safe for her; just guessed that she might know the combination. And the
only thing she’d want the safe open for would be to get the necklace
out. I don’t know why she wants to get it out, though, unless to put it
in some safer place. Or unless”--he hung fire a moment but he couldn’t
turn aside from the pursuit of truth wherever it took him--“or unless
mother doesn’t think Gran ought to give Judy the necklace and wants to
put it for a while somewhere so that she can’t. Anyhow, it makes it
sort of exciting about to-night, doesn’t it?”
I cordially agreed that it did.
I don’t think Victoria really expected me to come to the dinner, but
with a crowd like that--there were more than thirty of us--one more or
less couldn’t have mattered much. They solved the problem of my stiff
leg by putting me at a card table and giving me a spare chair opposite
for my foot. I had Punch on one side of me and his special bridesmaid
on the other. Either she was an uncommonly nice girl, or else the
cradle and the grave, so to speak, were her specialties, for apparently
she didn’t mind in the least having us for her partners. She was very
jolly anyhow and deserved a less divided attention than I was able to
give her.
The rest of the elderly group sat at a table by themselves; old Mr.
Ethelbert Smith at Mrs. Corbin’s right at the head of it, Alec at the
foot, and Victoria half-way down the side that faced me. The bridal
party, lacking the two who had been told off to me, sat, eighteen in
all, at an enormous table transversely to the room, Judy at the end of
it nearest me, with Bill Grant at her right and Bruce away down at the
other end.
The arrangement had its importance for me--by that same token it was
probably an unlucky one for the nice bridesmaid--since it put all of
the principal actors in the drama, or at least all whom I took to be
the principal actors, where I could watch their faces. Judy and old
Mrs. Corbin I saw in profile; Bill Grant, Bruce Applebury and Victoria
faced me squarely.
I didn’t neglect the others. One by one I studied them intently. One
of them, it seemed impossible to resist the conclusion, must have been
Punch’s man in pajamas, who, for some motive less explicable even than
the one that had incited the taking of it, had returned the stolen
necklace to old Mrs. Corbin’s room last night. Would the same man walk
again to-night, I wondered?
I think I know something of faces. They’ve been a serious part of my
study, at all events, for many years. But there wasn’t one within range
of my vision which I could associate at all with an act like that.
Anyhow, that didn’t comprise the whole story. That is to say, the
theft and return of the necklace did not. Otherwise it would not have
involved Judy. And there was no getting away from the fact that she was
involved inextricably.
She was not now perhaps, as I looked at her, quite the lifeless
mechanical thing, the talking doll, which old Eagle-Eye had described
her to have been at the rehearsal of her wedding, but she was still
a long way from any Judy I had ever known. She was laughing too much
and talking too hard. They didn’t converse decorously in pairs down
at that table, but called to one another back and forth down the
length of it, and oftenest of all I heard her voice, all aglitter, the
lovely sensitive shades quite gone out of it. Yes, she was entangled in
something.
But was it the necklace? The question asked itself so clearly and
suddenly in my mind that I started at it. Had Judy a story of her own,
which by pure coincidence had fallen thwartwise of the mystery of the
necklace? Was the wordless drama old Eagle-Eye had seen enacted this
afternoon between the girl and those two young men nothing but a plain
tale of common human jealousy? Could the riddle be solved on that
hypothesis?
“What _is_ Judy doing back there?” the nice bridesmaid asked me.
“You’ve been looking steadily past my shoulder without saying a word
for about five minutes, and I’m too curious to be polite any longer.”
“I’m afraid it’s I who’ve been too curious to be polite,” I apologized
contritely. “And she isn’t doing anything, really.”
I was going on expatiating, rather feebly I’m afraid, on the feelings
of an avowedly sentimental honorary uncle, when Mrs. Corbin cut me
short by calling aloud in her vibrant, imperious old voice to Punch.
“Come here!” she commanded the boy. “I want to speak to you.”
Everybody in the room seemed to realize that something was coming, for
Punch walked to her side in complete silence and we all heard what she
said to him.
“Go and get that thing I told you to keep for me. Get it and take it to
Judy.”
Her voice was harsh as she issued the order, and I saw her turn a
sardonic look down the table at Victoria. But nobody paid any attention
to that. They were all watching Punch, expecting, of course, that he’d
turn and leave the room. Instead, he walked straight toward Judy. His
grandmother’s voice halted him.
“Go and get it first,” she called.
“Oh, I have it here in my pocket,” said Punch. And he pulled out, on
the words, the same rather disgraceful handkerchief in which he’d
exhibited the necklace to us at the lunch table.
I stopped watching him then, and turned my eyes, once more, on Judy.
And, pearls or no pearls, she was the one to watch. The first look
that flashed into her face when she saw what her brother was bringing
her was one of an irrepressible disgust. She had damned the necklace,
before, and this look of hers damned it now. That was gone, of course,
in an instant, and by the time the others had turned to look at her,
she had ironed out her face into a perfectly correct expression of
pleasure over the receipt of a rather overwhelming gift--surprise and
delight beautifully mingled.
She lifted the thing daintily from Punch’s outrageous handkerchief,
felt for the ends, and fastened it around her neck. I saw her fingers
pause suddenly over the clasp, not so much as if they were baffled by
it, but as if all the activities of her body had been, for an instant,
frozen. Another instant and she had fastened the clasp, turned away
from the table, and was coming down the length of the room toward her
grandmother. She passed my chair on the way, but she had no eyes for me
in that moment.
The girl’s face was transfigured, her eyes were shining like stars. I
can’t help it if I am banal, it’s what they were shining like. I heard
her catch her breath in something like a sob as she walked by.
“Gran, you darling!” she cried. And rather to Mrs. Corbin’s
astonishment I think, she bent and kissed her squarely on her old mouth
before the old woman had time to turn her cheek. “Are they _really_
mine?” Judy demanded. “Do you mean you’ve _given_ them to me?”
“They belong to you, and to no one else,” Mrs. Corbin said. “Here! Give
Ethelbert Smith a look at them. He knew them long before you were born,
or your father, either.”
The girl turned to him dutifully, leaning forward so that they swung
away from her breast. I saw old Mr. Smith touch them with the tips of
his fastidious fingers, and then I looked at Victoria.
She wasn’t a beautiful sight. The change in color of her face had made
the make-up blotchy, and her eyes were as hard as stones. I’m sure
she wasn’t breathing. But old Mr. Smith’s voice came out suave and
untroubled.
“The Corbin necklace is one of the most beautiful strings of pearls
I know, my dear. And your young neck is worthy of it. I wish you
happiness.”
The other table broke up as Judy approached it. They all grouped around
her to look and go into raptures. That was my first impression at
least, but it was not quite correct.
Bruce Applebury expressed no raptures, and he fell back a little
from the group, seeming content to survey this marvelous gift to his
bride at long range. This might have been nothing, of course, but the
celebrated Applebury reserve.
But there was none of that reserve about his cousin, Bill Grant. That
young man didn’t even pretend to look. And he was scowling just as
he had scowled that morning when he and Judy had come upon me in the
summer-house. But nobody, of course, was paying any attention to him.
Eventually the tumult subsided and people went back to their places.
Bruce was watching Judy now. At all events it looked more like watching
to me than like the lover’s gaze one might have expected. She seemed
aware of his watchfulness and troubled by it, though not profoundly.
Exasperated perhaps says a little more accurately what I mean. The
brilliant glow of excitement was still in her face, and yet she had