The Corbin necklace
morning. I wish to God I’d gone all the way back, but I never did. I
hung on, somehow, to my fool idea.
“Well, of course I began watching for a letter from her within a week.
I didn’t know her handwriting nor what the postmark would be, and every
time I found a letter addressed in a woman’s handwriting, my heart
stopped beating--literally stopped, I mean, for one beat anyhow, and
there isn’t a thing the matter with it.
“After three months of that I was pretty nearly crazy. I couldn’t go
looking for her, you see. I’d sawed myself off that limb by promising
her that I wouldn’t. I couldn’t be sure she hadn’t taken me at my word;
decided she’d done a perfectly crazy thing--which it was, of course,
by all her home standards--and was only hoping that I’d never turn
up to remind her of it. My mother saw I was half out of my head about
something, and persuaded me finally to go to Italy with her for the
rest of the winter. I made extra careful arrangements for my mail to be
forwarded, and went.
“I came back just in time for Bruce to ask me to be best man at his
wedding. I was a little surprised at his doing that, because we’ve
never been friends really, but he’s great on family, and going out,
as it seemed to him, into the wilds like this, he wanted to rally us
around and present a united front. I agreed to it, of course. I’d
nothing else to do.
“He didn’t talk about her much; never showed me her picture. Well,
he wouldn’t. I hadn’t had the slightest warning, not a hint, when I
got out of that car under the porte-cochère at The Oaks and saw her
standing there in the veranda.”
I had paid his tale the tribute of almost breathless attention, and
even now when he paused as if he’d come to the end of it, it was a good
while before I could find anything to say.
At last I asked a question. “Why didn’t Judy write to you?”
“She’d torn up my letter in a rage before she’d ever got as far as my
name and address at the bottom of it. Oh, naturally enough. Think of
the perfectly hellish jolt she must have got just from the sight of
those two damned twenty-dollar bills, and the knowledge that I’d gone!
“And the thing I’d really done wasn’t very much better. Do you remember
what she said just now, about thinking she was too young to be allowed
to decide anything for herself? That was the theory I’d gone on. I’d
taken the decision out of her hands.”
“It was the chivalrous thing to do,” I argued dubiously, but wasn’t
very much surprised when he flung the word back at my head.
“Oh, chivalry be damned! She deserved to have been taken in on it, all
right, and I ought to have known it. Lord, I’d had seven solid days of
her. She hadn’t acted like a silly kid out for a lark. I was a coward,
that’s what it came to. I was afraid if I told her what my plan was
that she’d talk me out of it and I’d cave in and be left looking like a
crook. Hell, there are times when a man ought to have courage enough to
_be_ a crook!
“But I wasn’t at the end of my chivalry yet, even when I saw her there
at The Oaks Thursday afternoon, saw her turn white and bolt into the
house, and found out she was the girl that Bruce was going to marry.
“I saw through the sprained ankle dodge, of course, and decided I
wouldn’t play tennis. I was hanging around the hall waiting for a sight
of her, when Punch caught me and showed me to my room. I did have a few
minutes with her afterward, when the others were out on the courts.
“But I was still trying not to look like a crook. I started out by
trying to tell her she needn’t be afraid, that I hadn’t known I’d find
her here and that I wouldn’t give her away.--Oh, I don’t blame myself
so much for that. I was rattled, naturally. But I’d lost my chance for
a talk that would get anywhere with her, and it began to look as if I’d
never have another.
“By the time that first infernal evening was half over (lord, it was
only night before last) I was desperate. I went off up-stairs and sat
down and wrote her another letter. She’d told me why she hadn’t written
me, so I had that much to go on. And of course I knew without any
question at all, that, regardless of what happened to me, she ought
never to marry Bruce.
“It would be a perfect crime, a marriage like that, for Judy. Bruce
isn’t a monster, nor a villain, nor anything like that. But he’s stiff
and self-satisfied, and bull-headed, and he hasn’t the imagination of a
good Ford car. He’d try to break Judy on the wheel without knowing he
was doing it.
“I don’t think he _could_ break her, but he might drive her to almost
anything.--Well, I put all of that and a whole lot besides, into that
letter, and then went out on the veranda where she was sitting and
handed it to her.”
“I’ll tell the world he did,” came a sleepy voice from the couch. “I
could have killed him. He explained afterward he thought I could tuck
it in my dress.”
“Well,” I asked, “why didn’t you?”
She opened her eyes and looked at me with a hopeless expression.
“What do you think we wear?” she asked me. “Corsets? All I had on, that
night, besides my shoes and stockings was a shirt and a step-in--and
my dress, of course. Where do you think the letter would have stopped
if I’d stuck it down inside?”
It came as a shock to me to realize that this time-honored repository,
consecrated by tradition to the implements of intrigue, love-notes,
keep-sakes, and so on, had become as obsolete as a sedan chair, but
there was no getting away from the logic of the facts.
Judy, still curled up on the couch, was broad awake now, and went on
telling me about it.
“I saw Bruce bearing down on me, so I shoved the letter down into that
silly Chinese vase that people are always dropping cigarettes into,
although I knew I’d have a fearful time getting it out. If I could have
been sure what line Bill had taken in his letter I’d have hung on to it
and seen the thing through with Bruce then and there. But I had to read
it first. So I climbed out of my window in the middle of the night and
got it and read it, and then spent the rest of the time until daylight
riding around on Punch’s bicycle, deciding what I’d do.
“Poor little Punch! I wouldn’t have cared except that he saw the whole
thing. He saw me hide the letter in the first place, and he knew when I
went out to get it. I don’t know what he thought.”
“I can guess what he thought,” I said. “He thought it had something to
do with the loss and the return of the necklace. That’s what I’d have
thought too, if he’d told me about it. Now it seems that the necklace
had nothing to do, from start to finish, with the whole affair.”
They looked at me and looked at each other. Bill drew a long,
heart-felt sigh of dissent.
“Hadn’t it just!” he said. “It was that infernal necklace that made all
the trouble, really.”
CHAPTER XIII
STUNG!
I saw, though, by the way he pulled himself up, that he wasn’t going to
tell me about it; not then, anyhow. He walked to the window, and then
looked at his watch.
“I’m off,” he said decisively. “It’s almost broad daylight now, and I
don’t want to waste any time getting things started.”
“You can’t get a public official out of bed in any such ungodly hour as
this,” I protested.
But he was oddly determined about it.
“I can keep on trying till I do,” he assured me.
So I gave over the ungrateful rôle of obstructionist and started in to
help.
“You’ll want a parson as well as a license,” I pointed out, and named
a man who I thought might be willing to serve. “He’s quite a nice
young chap, new here in the village. He’s been out to see me three or
four times since I’ve been laid up--out of pure amiability, nothing
professional about it--and we’ve become pretty good friends. I’ll give
you a card to him. You can tell him your story, and if he wants any
confirmation that I can give him, he can call me up. He won’t mind
getting up early, so on your way back with the license you can stop and
bring him along. You’ve a car, haven’t you?”
“Quite a good one,” said Judy. “I don’t know whose it is.”
Bill looked a little startled at that. Then he grinned. “Oh well,” he
said, “what’s one small sport roadster among friends? I’ll bring it
back all right.”
Judy went, but no farther than the door, to see him off.
“You know, I like Bill,” she said, in the thoughtful manner of one
announcing a discovery, when she came back into my sitting-room. And
she wouldn’t agree, when I laughed, that there was anything funny about
it.
“It’s an entirely different thing from being in love with him,” she
insisted. “He’s got what they used to call--in old-fashioned novels,
you know--delicacy. I’m sure I know why he was in such a hurry to get
off. It was because we’d got around to the necklace, and he doesn’t
like to talk about it. He didn’t want to hear me tell you about it,
and he knew I was going to. It is a dirty sort of story, of course,
but--well, there it is. You want me to tell you about it, don’t you?”
“Lord, _yes_!” I cried. Really, I don’t like whitewash much better than
she does. I added, “I could hardly bear it yesterday when old Mr. Smith
came back to the summer-house and kept you from telling it then.”
“I didn’t know it, then,” she said. “Not the worst of it. The real
worst of it hadn’t happened.
“You know I told you--when was it, Wednesday morning when I came over
here?--what a jolt mother had got over the newspaper story that Gran
was going to give me the necklace? Well, that night, just before
dinner, after Gran had told her that she really was going to give it to
me, mother told me that she was in trouble about it.
“You see, about a year ago, Gran had given her the necklace to take to
town to the jeweler to be cleaned and restrung, and mother had had an
imitation necklace made then. She told me she’d done it because the
real one was likely to be stolen any time out of that silly old safe
Gran kept it in, especially now that she was taking so much dope and
forgot to lock it half the time. She put the real one in the bank,
she said, where it would be safe, and brought the imitation back to
grandmother. It got by with Gran, all right. She never suspected a
thing.
“But she told me if Gran did give it to me for a wedding present it
was likely to be found out that it was an imitation. What she wanted
to do was to go back to town next day and get the real one out of the
bank and put it back in the safe, instead of the imitation, so that
Gran shouldn’t know that an imitation had been made. If Gran ever found
that out, she said, there was no telling what she’d do. She’d probably
disinherit Punch and me by way of getting even with mother, especially
after Uncle Alec had come back and made up their quarrel.
“Even if she didn’t do that, mother said, Gran would be sure to make
a perfectly frightful row and accuse her of having tried to steal the
necklace, which would be pretty rotten right in the middle of the
wedding, with the Appleburys there and all.
“Mother said it was harder to get the necklace out of the bank than it
had been to put it in. There were more formalities about it, especially
since it had come out in the paper that Gran was going to give it to
me. Mother wanted me to write a note, to show to the bank, saying that
Gran had given me the necklace and that they were to let mother take it
out.
“I didn’t want to do that because she hadn’t given it to me, and I
didn’t more than half believe she really would. I didn’t believe that
until last night when she did. She’d promised to give it to mother a
dozen times.
“Mother and I rather quarreled about that. But at last we made it up.
She said she’d go and try to get the bank to give her the necklace
anyhow without any note from me, but that if she didn’t get it and Gran