The Corbin necklace
fallen silent. Once or twice she darted a quick look at Bill Grant,
and at last she may have spoken to him under her breath.
Anyhow I found myself presently watching him, so that I was on the
spot, as it were, when his face changed too. It was like the lifting
of a fog. I saw him look down the table toward Bruce, and then back
at Judy. No, not at Judy; at Judy’s necklace. He was staring at it
now like one fascinated, and to my amazement his face broke into a
broad--but really a ferocious--grin. _His_ eyes were blazing now.
I gave up trying to entertain the nice bridesmaid after that. It really
didn’t matter. She was too excited about the necklace to care.
But for myself, I was in exactly the plight in which old Eagle-Eye
had found himself this afternoon. I had seen a drama played out under
my eyes, and what it was all about I hadn’t the remotest idea. And
I went home, once they’d got fairly to dancing, without any further
illumination. Judy, as I said, never came near me. Whatever situation
she’d foreseen which I might be useful in hadn’t come off. She had
something else on her mind now.
But this much I knew. Whatever Judy’s story might be, the necklace was
somehow the nub of it.
CHAPTER XI
WHEN I CAME IN
I got my cue at five minutes past four the next morning. I know what
time it was since I had, a moment earlier, switched on my light and
looked at my watch to see how much longer the night was going to last.
The sky would begin turning gray before very long, I remember thanking
heaven, and then perhaps I should drop off to sleep.
It wasn’t ten seconds after I’d switched out my light and dropped back
upon my pillow, when I heard my name spoken, almost beside my head, it
seemed, in a whisper.
I don’t mind admitting that if I’d had two practicable legs, I’d have
come clean out of bed in one jump. As it was I sat up and took out
my suppressed activity in thinking. The name that had been whispered
was not the one by which I had been baptized, nor even the familiar
nickname which almost every one calls me by, but a private diminutive
which Judy and Punch sometimes used as a mark of affection.
I’ve been sleeping, since I’ve been too clumsy to get up and
down-stairs on crutches, in a little room on the ground floor which my
gardener and his wife used to use for a dining-room. The floor of it is
hardly above the ground level, and the open window is low enough for
any one bigger than a child to look through, or for that matter, climb
in at. So there was nothing unnatural about the whisper, weird as the
effect of it had been.
When it was repeated an instant later, I answered in a low voice, “Come
around to the front door and I’ll let you in.”
I thought it was Punch come down to report some new and exciting
development that he couldn’t wait till morning to tell me.
Donovan slept up-stairs in a little room over the kitchen, the remotest
room in the cottage. I’d had a bell put in to summon him by. My
gardener and his wife, who was my cook, had moved out after the fire
to the second story of my garage. So if I could move quietly enough
not to disturb my nurse, my nocturnal visitor’s errand could remain as
confidential as he seemed to wish it to be.
I switched on the reading lamp in my living-room as I passed through;
then cautiously unlocked and opened the door. Two people were standing
on the door-step, but neither of them was the caller I had expected.
One of them was Judy, and the other was Bill Grant.
I don’t think, though, that I was especially surprised. Down in the
bottom of my mind I must have guessed a good deal more, during the
past two days, than I had allowed myself to admit. All the same I
felt pretty blank for a minute. I just stood there in the doorway and
balanced myself upon my crutches. My paralysis seemed to have infected
them too, for neither of them moved nor spoke.
At last I said, “You’d better come in.”
“Do you want us to?” Judy asked very quietly.
“Yes, of course,” I told her, and on the words I swung myself back out
of the doorway. “Come into the living-room,” I added, “and we’ll shut
the door, and then perhaps it won’t be necessary to let Donovan in on
it.”
Bill made me follow Judy inside, and it was he who closed both
doors--more quietly than I could have done.
I didn’t ask what they were doing or were planning to do. There is no
mistaking the sort of adventure upon which this pair were about to
embark.
“Sit down,” I said, “and tell me all about it.”
My voice was coming to life a little, but it was hardly satisfactory,
even to me, and I wasn’t surprised at Judy’s question.
“Are you on our side? Because there’s no use sitting down and talking
unless you are.”
I did sit down myself, though, in my easy chair and filled and lighted
a pipe before I answered. It was time, not tobacco, that I wanted.
“Of course I’m on your side, Judy,” I said at last. “I’ll be on any
side that I’m satisfied is really yours.”
Neither of them had followed my example about sitting down. Young
Grant was standing in front of my empty fireplace, his hands behind
him--locked together, if I could judge by the tension of his shoulders.
Judy, who had been wandering restlessly about the room while I got my
pipe going, now gave me a rueful sort of smile and came to rest on the
arm of my chair.
“You haven’t my best interests at heart, have you?” she asked with
slightly burlesqued apprehension. “You don’t want to save me from doing
something that I’ll always regret?”
The words and the manner may have been flippant, but the voice wasn’t.
Judy trusted me to understand seriousness without the label of a long
face, and I blessed her for her confidence in me.
I essayed a small joke of my own. “It’s no good your sitting in my
lap,” I told her. “I’m not old enough to be seduced that way. I want to
be satisfied which your side really is, before I fall in, that’s all.”
“You’re absolutely right, sir,” said Bill seriously. They were the
first words he’d spoken. “You ought to be told the whole story before
you’re asked to do anything, or even agree to anything.”
“No, he’s wrong, Bill,” Judy contradicted him over my head. (She hadn’t
stirred, by the way, at my jibe about sitting in my lap.) “He’s got to
decide first and hear the story afterward. Really the story hasn’t a
thing to do with it, except that he’ll be awfully interested in it--put
it in his collection, probably. He knows already, you see, that I mean
to marry you and that I’m not going to marry Bruce. Of course if he
thinks that because I’m still rather young I shouldn’t be allowed to
decide _anything_ for myself--which is a mistake that has been made
before....”
I saw Bill Grant smile ruefully at that and perceived that he himself
had made this mistake.
“... if he does think that,” Judy went on, “then, of course, he’ll
think I’m wrong anyhow, story or no story. But if he thinks I’m grown
up, then he’ll see that I’m the only person who can possibly know
whether you’re the man I ought to marry, or Bruce.”
“I’ll admit that you’re grown up, my dear.”
She kissed me briefly, and sprang to her feet.
“Well, then, it’s like this,” she said, turning and facing me very
earnestly. “Do you want to get into a whole lot of trouble that you
needn’t get into at all? Do you want mother to quarrel with you, and
grandmother to cut you out of her will, and a whole lot of people to
think you’ve been, well--seduced, you know, into doing something that
was perfectly frantically foolish? You needn’t, you know. You needn’t
let any of these things happen. That’s why I wanted you to decide
first. I wouldn’t have you persuaded. But I thought perhaps you’d--just
naturally--want to.”
I don’t know what answer I made; whether, indeed, in words I made any
at all. Judy was satisfied at all events, for she went over to her
lover, slipped her arm through his, and said, “I knew he would.”
Even at that moment I credited this young man with unusually acute
perceptions. He made no attempt to express any gratitude of his own, or
to speak for Judy in the matter of hers. He’d have annoyed me intensely
if he’d done either of these things. What he said was more to the point.
“It may not turn out to be quite so bad as Judy makes it look,” he
said. “We’ve a plan that will avoid a general explosion of scandal if
it works. It’s a near thing, of course, whether it works or not.”
“You’re an optimist,” I commented, “if you think you can run off with
Judith Corbin less than twelve hours before she was to have married
Bruce Applebury without causing a general explosion of scandal.” I was
as yet, you see, prepared to be amiable only in streaks.
Judy came back to the arm of my chair and patted me consolingly. “You
think so,” she said, “because you haven’t any idea how clever Bill
is.--Tell him the plan, Bill,” she added.
Young Grant stood very straight, and spoke rather stiffly.
“The essential thing about it is,” he said, “that we get married as
early as possible this morning, before the people at The Oaks are up
and about.”
“That’s what I told them we were going to do,” Judy put in, “in the
notes I left--one for mother and one for Bruce. I told mother that by
the time she’d read it we’d be married, but if she wanted us to, we’d
come back before anybody knew we’d gone and not let on that anything
had happened. I left the note in her room so that she’d have time to
think before she started anything.”
“But the wedding!” I gasped. “The marriage to Bruce in the afternoon!
What would you do about that?”
“Oh, they’d have to postpone the wedding,” Judy said easily. (I’m not
sure she didn’t speak through a yawn.) “Get up some excuse. You can
trust mother for that. Grandmother could be horribly ill. That would be
easiest, of course. The people would all go away, don’t you see, and
then when they’d stopped thinking about us, Bill and I could be married
again. There’s no law against that, is there?”
“But why be married now?” I asked. “Why not simply postpone the
wedding? The same excuse would serve.”
“Tell him, Bill,” commanded Judy.
“I know Bruce pretty well,” young Grant said, “and I imagine Judy
knows her mother. I don’t believe either of them would submit quietly
to anything less than the proved inevitable. And unless they made up
their minds to it instantly and put the excuse over--for all they were
worth--it wouldn’t be any good. If they know there’s nothing left to
argue about, they may plant their excuse at once and send for us.”
“Send for you where?” I asked.
Judy gave a guilty sort of wriggle.
“I had to let you in for it, a little,” she said. “I told mother that
as soon as we were married, we would let you know where we were, and
that if she wanted us to come back, she was to call up your house and
find out.”
“Where _will_ you be?” I asked.
Judy didn’t answer. She left my chair again and walked away, but not,
this time, to where her lover was standing; there was a moment before
she turned and faced me.
“Do you _want_ to get into this?” she demanded of me. She was intensely
serious now. “It will be beastly for you. Mother will hate you, whether
the plan works and they save their faces or not. We didn’t want to do
it this way, you know. At least, Bill didn’t. We wouldn’t have done it
if we could have helped it. I can’t marry any one else but Bill--not
now, and they--they haven’t left us any way but this. But you don’t
deserve to be--to be made the goat.”
I’d never seen tears in Judy’s eyes before, but they were there now,
and they brought a responsive blur into my own.
“I shall enjoy being the goat,” I said, “and I’ll double in any other
useful part that you can assign to me. How about it? Will you be
married here?”
Judy heaved a deep sigh of assent. “In this nice little house,” she