The Corbin necklace
said. She turned to her lover. “It’s all right now, Bill.”
Bill Grant came over and shook hands with me.
“I can’t tell you what a relief it is, sir,” he said. “I didn’t want to
take Judy on a wild goose chase through the middle of the night looking
for a license clerk and a justice of the peace. I wanted it known where
she was. If I may leave her here with you, I’ll drive over now to the
county-seat and get a license as soon as I can wake up the clerk.”
“I’ll keep Judy for you,” I said. “But there’s no use in your starting
yet. It’s only a twenty-mile drive, and you can’t rout that man out in
the middle of the night. Sit down and be comfortable.”
“Do you keep anything to eat in your house?” Judy asked. “I’m hungry,
now that I can think about something besides eloping with Bill.”
I told her where to find the ice-box, and cautioned her to go quietly
in order not to waken Donovan. Bill went with her, and they came back
in a few minutes with three-quarters of a pie, and a bottle of milk. We
set out the feast on the little table beside my couch, and I watched
them eat, mercifully refraining from asking any questions. These babes
in the wood were as hungry as the wolves that would have devoured them.
But when we’d finished, and when Bill Grant and I had lighted our
pipes, I asked, “Now, haven’t I earned the story for my collection?
When did you two youngsters meet for the first time? Yesterday
afternoon?”
Judy curled up on my couch, happy as a well-fed kitten.
“Tell him about it, Bill,” she said. “I think I’m going to sleep. The
whole works, you know,” she continued. And by way of launching him she
spoke once more to me.
“Has mother told you about my horrible past? Well, Bill’s it!”
CHAPTER XII
AN EXCURSION INTO ARCADY
Of course I knew what Judy meant by her horrible past. The escapade
Victoria had told me about while she was trying to persuade me to help
her put the soft pedal on Alexander Corbin’s activities in the matter
of the theft of the necklace. She hadn’t, to be sure, so much told me
about it, as bounded it for me. It began, I knew, in Judy’s flight from
school and ended in the Martha Washington Hotel where Victoria had
found her, “looking as if she hadn’t found liberty as jolly as she’d
expected.”
The natural inference from this last remark of Judy’s was that it was
Bill Grant who had disillusioned her, who had reduced her to that
cynical acquiescence in defeat which I’d found it so hard to understand
in her. The appropriate thing for me to have done then, under the
traditional code, would have been to tell the young man he was a yellow
dog and order him out of my house. But the notion of doing anything
like that was so absurd that I smiled at him.
Bill misunderstood the smile.
“It’s quite true, sir,” he said soberly.
“He knows it’s true,” Judy remarked.
“You go to sleep,” he told her gently, “and don’t listen in. I want to
tell this my own way.”
But it seemed he couldn’t begin. He sat there taking his pipe in short,
sharp little puffs, his eyes unfocused, his thoughts astray all over
the area of the past. He seemed to be exploring for a path that would
take him through.
“To begin with,” I said at last, to help him out, “tell me who you are.”
“Well, I _am_ Bruce Applebury’s cousin,” he answered doubtfully.
“I don’t mean that,” I said.
“Tell him what you do,” put in Judy.
“Shut up,” he ordered, “and go to sleep.”
“I’m not an Applebury,” he then said to me, possessed of the thread
at last. “His mother and mine are sisters. Osborne, their name was.
We don’t see them much. Father, mother and I have traveled around
a good deal--a little like Henry James’ family, though I don’t mean
the results have been the same. Anyhow, until I went to college, my
education had been a catch-as-catch-can affair, never in one school
very long. Bruce, of course, did everything perfectly regularly, so I
didn’t see so very much of him. And after we graduated and he went into
the family bank, I saw him still less. I really know him pretty well,
though, and that’s important.”
I could see that it might be, but I wasn’t ready to go back to Bruce. I
remembered Judy’s comment, “Tell him what you do,” so now I asked him.
“Oh,” he said, embarrassed, “I try to write.”
“What do you write?” I asked.
“Why, I’ve tried my hand at pretty nearly everything but poetry,”
he told me. “When I met Judy, down in Easton, Pennsylvania, I was
traveling around on a try-out circuit, one-night stands mostly, with a
play of mine, trying to lick it into shape, as they say, and hoping it
would get into New York. It never did. It died out on the road. But I
wasn’t there when it happened. I left it in Easton.”
“Where you met Judy?” I suggested.
“Yes,” he admitted. “But not because I’d met her. I’d already made up
my mind to quit when that happened. I’d come to hate the thing so that
it made me sick. Every change they made in it made it worse, until I
hoped it would die on the road. If it had ever got in New York, I’d
have run like a rabbit.”
“Anyhow you _did_ meet Judy,” I persisted. “How did it happen?”
Once more his face was shiny with sweat, and he mopped it with his
handkerchief.
“Oh, it sounds rotten,” he said miserably. “You’ll think I ought to be
kicked, and I wouldn’t deny it. But then, you know Judy. You _do_ know
her, don’t you?” he shot at me fiercely.
“Yes, I know her,” I said. “Go on.”
“She was a waitress in the hotel,” he resumed. “One of these
coffee-shop places, you know, where half the town comes for lunch. I
talked to her over a meal or two. She’d been to see my play. One night
I overtook her on the street, and instead of going to that damned
theater, I went for a long walk with her.
“Of course I’d known from the first word she spoke to me that she
wasn’t an ordinary waitress.... Well--naturally. But I couldn’t make
her out at all. She wouldn’t tell me anything about herself. She gave
me a name to call her by, but she told me while we were on that walk
that it wasn’t hers.
“By way of playing the game I didn’t tell her anything about myself,
either. She knew my name, of course, but I let her think it was a _nom
de plume_. It was Osborne Grant on the programs, and I told her to call
me Bill. It got to be a sort of understanding that we took each other
as is, without explanations.
“You can’t imagine what it was like. Well, perhaps you can, but I’d
never imagined that anything like that could happen. It was the only
really romantic thing that ever had happened to me. And it was like
that from the very first moment.
“On that walk we took I told her I was going to quit the play. I said
I was so deadly sick of it that I couldn’t go on with it. I said I was
going to buy a Ford and go somewhere, disappear for a while--get lost.
“It’s hard to be sure you’re being honest telling about a thing like
that. I suppose I must have had it in the back of my head as an awfully
jolly possibility that she’d come with me. We talked about it at first
as a joke, and then she said to me suddenly, ‘Are you really joking?
Because if you aren’t, I’ll come.’ She said she was on a sort of tramp,
anyhow. She meant to work her way west, clear to the Pacific coast
perhaps.”
He broke off and looked at her. She was sound asleep now, and no
mistake. He went to the couch and drew a light blanket over her.
“She’s had a rotten two days,” he said, as he stood looking down at
her. Then he went back to his chair.
“You’ll find it hard to believe, sir,” he went on. “I find it hard
myself to believe it now. She looks like a little girl, asleep there.
But I really thought, then, that she was as old as I was. She seemed
harder. She seemed to have seen a lot of life. I don’t know how she
could put it on. It was a sort of defensive armor, I suppose. Anyhow,
I didn’t feel I was taking any advantage of her. And I didn’t expect
to be any Sir Galahad about it, either. I don’t know that I exactly
expected the other thing. I was just willing to let it ride. I’d only
just begun to know her then, you see.
“Well, I bought a Ford, and she quit her job and we started out. And on
that first day together I began to see what she was really like. She
kept getting younger, and, well--I don’t know any other word--sweeter;
taking off the armor, you know, as she tried me out and came to feel I
was all right.
“We went across Pennsylvania, through Lancaster and Gettysburg, and hit
the old National Trail in Maryland; followed it up into the Cumberland
Mountains. We didn’t get on very fast, because whenever we saw anything
we thought it would be jolly to stop and do--nice little brooks to wade
in; things like that--we stopped and did it.
“I did turn out to be, well--a Galahad, after all, though it wasn’t any
merit of mine. The thing just took itself for granted, the first time
we put up for the night. I won’t talk any brother and sister rot. No
brother and sister ever were like that. But we always slept in separate
rooms. We didn’t pay any attention to appearances, though. If the rooms
happened to be adjoining, it was all the better. We talked through the
door.
“That lasted a week. And then I couldn’t trust myself any further. We
were in love with each other, you see. Oh, we’d been that from the
first, but now each of us knew the other knew it. You know what _she’s_
like. She’d never welsh in her life. She’d go through with anything
that she started; perfectly reckless, if no one but herself was
concerned.
“Well, that was all right. We might have got married then and there,
and it would have saved a terrible lot of anguish if we had. But by
that time I’d come to. I knew how young she was--she’d given that
away--and I knew she was a runaway. She’d never told me her name, nor
what her people were like. I knew what they must be like, of course.
“Well, it struck me that I couldn’t look them in the face, nor Judy,
nor even myself, if I took advantage of a child’s escapade like that. I
hadn’t any idea of giving her up, but I thought I’d figured out a way
to square the thing. I wrote her a letter, and slipped it under her
door that last night, and bolted. It seemed the right thing to do, but
I knew by instinct I was being a fool all the time.
“I told her in the letter that I loved her, and always would, but that
I wanted her to go home to her own people and her own surroundings and
take a little while to think it over. I said that after she had thought
it over she was to make her choice.
“I said it was perfectly possible that when she found herself back
among her old friends, she’d think of this adventure of ours as
something perfectly insane. If it did seem like that she wasn’t to
worry. I’d never try to follow her up, and she could remember it as a
pleasant episode. Lord, what a fool I was! I might have known how Judy
would take that.
“I went on to tell her of course, that I loved her as I never would
love anything else in the world, and if she found she still loved me,
back home with her feet on the ground, she was to write me a letter and
I’d come like a shot. I signed it with my full name, of course, and
wrote out my permanent address. And then I wrote a postscript telling
her she wasn’t to have any regrets whichever way she decided it,
because she’d given me something....
“Well, you know how it is, sir. It looked all right on the page. I
thought I meant it; meant that I could be satisfied with what I’d had,
even if it stopped there. Of course I was a perfectly doddering fool.
“Oh, and I did one more fool thing. I didn’t know how her money was
holding out. I was afraid she might be completely strapped. So I put a
couple of twenty-dollar bills in the envelope to pay her fare home.
“I drove off in the night, and I turned back three times before