The Corbin necklace
already--she had not, during the past three or four years, got on very
well with Judy. Within the last few months we who were her friends had
vaguely understood that the difficulty had got a good deal worse, and
Judy was, for a while, a declared rebel. Victoria had been half frantic
between the necessity of winning Judy back and keeping all echoes
of the trouble from reaching Mrs. Corbin’s ears. This acute phase
had passed somehow, and Judy had come back, curiously sobered and,
superficially at least, tractable.
Now, of course, everything was lovely. Judy was going to be married
within a week to a man of whom not only her mother, but, marvelous to
relate, old Mrs. Corbin as well, heartily approved.
The old lady had never seen the man himself, for she never went east,
and no member of the Applebury clan had ever crossed the Alleghenies.
But they were the Appleburys of East Weston, Massachusetts; cautious,
solid, not too vulgarly rich. The family fortune had suffered somewhat,
we understood, from their Toryism during the Revolutionary War. It was
a good bet that they’d endure as long as Plymouth Rock. Anyhow, they
might be supposed to be capable of managing Judy. The girl was safe
now, old Mrs. Corbin thought, for life.
Victoria may have thought so too, but I take the liberty to doubt it.
Safe, anyhow, probably for the next four or five years. And if there
were an explosion then (I wouldn’t put it by Victoria to reflect)
it wouldn’t so frightfully matter, since the old lady would almost
certainly have been gathered to her fathers before that time.
_Nunc dimittis_, anyhow. For Punch would certainly never make any
trouble. He could get on with anybody. Even with his grandmother.
I looked across at him now. He was lost in a brown study, probably
about Monsieur Dupin or Sherlock Holmes, or some of their more recent
successors.
“When are your mother and Judy coming down?” I asked.
“Oh, Judy’s here,” he told me. “She came yesterday afternoon. Mother
was to have come with her, but she didn’t. She’ll come to-day, I
expect. She’d better, because the whole gang is coming to-morrow and
the house is still something awful. Decorators and curtain hangers
working around all over the place. Grandmother’s room is about the only
one that isn’t in a mess, and we’re not allowed in there.”
I could easily understand the need for all this renovating. The
hospitality of the old house hadn’t been taxed to capacity, as it was
going to be for this wedding, in years.
“How is Judy?” I asked.
“All right,” he said, a little doubtfully.
“Well, I assume?”
“Sure,” he said.
Then he grinned. “I’d found a new way of climbing up the outside of
the house--all the way to the roof. I went up yesterday, and she saw me
going by her window and came out and climbed up too. Then she came all
the way down. Not so bad for a girl, because there’s one place where
it’s kind of tricky. And then we took my new rifle and shot a tin can
off a fence post. She can shoot as well as I can. I don’t see what
_she_ wants to get married for. I don’t believe she does, either.”
Marriage was so evidently incomprehensible to Punch, except as a last
resort after the more enjoyable resources of living had come to an end,
that I didn’t take this last observation so very seriously.
We were saved from discussing it by the arrival just then of Judy
herself. Punch saw her before I did.
“Hello!” he exclaimed. “How did you get here?”
She came over and kissed me before she answered, and would have ignored
his question altogether if he hadn’t repeated it.
“Oh, in Trumble’s Ford,” she said. “At least I hope it was Trumble’s.
It was standing there in the yard where he always leaves it.”
“Well,” Punch said, getting up decisively, “as long as you’re here, I
think I’ll go back.”
“Brotherly love!” she commented, with a grin.
Punch explained--to me, rather than to her, “There ought to be somebody
in the house.”
“There were at least twenty when I left,” Judy remarked. “Florists’
people, upholsterers.... Heaven knows what!”
“That’s why,” said Punch. “Look here, I’m going to drive the Ford back.
You can come along on my bike.”
“I like your nerve!--Oh, it’s all right. Go along.”
She didn’t turn back to me until she’d seen him out of the cottage and
had heard the Ford go rattling away.
It didn’t seem credible that she was going to be married three days
from now. She looked, standing there hatless, disheveled, in her
tumbled slip of a dress, not a day over fifteen. She’d been bickering
with her brother like a little girl. What did she know--what could she
possibly understand--about marriage?
“I had a lot of nice things all ready to say to you”--she turned back
to me now with a funny little grimace of perplexity--“and Punch has put
them all out of my head.”
“Never mind them. And don’t blame Punch. He’s worrying about the famous
necklace.”
“Oh, damn the necklace!” she cried.
She might well enough have used an exclamation like that off-hand,
humorously, or by way of experiment to see if I’d be shocked. But
she didn’t use it in any of these ways. The thing had struck a nerve
somehow.
“That’s a reasonable enough wish,” I said, “on general principles. But
why particularly?”
“Did you see that silly story in the paper?” she asked. “About how Gran
was going to give it to me for a wedding present? It gave mother a
jolt, all right, when she read it yesterday at breakfast.”
“She hadn’t wanted it published, then?”
Judy stared. “Wanted it published? It was the first she’d heard of
it. And--well, she didn’t seem quite to know whether to believe me or
not when I said I hadn’t heard about it either. I told her it must
be just a newspaper guess. She’s always thought grandmother ought to
give it to her. And of course she ought. I told mother I didn’t want
it myself. If it was mine, the first thing I’d do with it would be to
sell it. Heavens! Think of having a thing around your neck or on your
dressing-table that was worth--how much? Fifty thousand dollars?”
“More like twice that, I suppose,” I told her.
She shivered.
“Well, I tried to talk mother out of it, but I couldn’t. She wouldn’t
believe it was just a mare’s nest, whether it was news to me or not.
And she isn’t really sure it was.”
“What does your grandmother say about it?”
“Oh, I haven’t seen her since I came down. Miss Digby won’t let
me in. I suppose this happens to be one of the times when she
isn’t--presentable.”
I was rather aghast at that, and I dare say I showed it. Judy gave me
an intent look, and went on.
“You knew that, didn’t you? That she--takes something? Oh, I don’t know
what. Morphine, I suppose. Heaven knows I don’t blame her! I’d do it if
I were in her fix. Hope she’ll be all right for the wedding. Probably
will be. I suppose old Digs is just tuning her up.”
She didn’t look like a child as she said that.
Suddenly she came over and sat down on the edge of my couch, took one
of my hands and patted it.
“Do you want to hear all about the plans for the wedding, who the
bridesmaids are, and what they’re going to wear--the sort of man I’m
going to marry....”
“Tell me that,” I broke in. “What’s Bruce Applebury like?”
She considered silently before she answered. But there was nothing
about her unsmiling young face to suggest the sort of reverie a young
girl in love might be expected to fall into over such a question.
“I won’t try it,” she said at last. “It’s too important a subject.
You’ll see him anyhow in a day or two. I’ll bring him over and give you
a look.”
She wasn’t quite willing to let it go at that, however.
“He’s all right--abso_lute_ly.”
The mispronunciation was humorously meant, or, rather, was meant to
sound as if it were. But people with finely expressive voices like
Judy’s inevitably give themselves away. I stirred with an involuntary
protest. It was an outrage, marrying her off like that--a girl of
twenty--to a man she was not in love with.
She plunged into a detailed recital of the festivities, and never
paused until she got up to go.
“So you see all the fun you’re going to miss for having broken your
poor old leg? Oh, but your nose would have been out of joint anyway.
You were to have given me away, you know. But it seems it’s going to be
Uncle Alec.”
“Not Alexander Corbin!” I exclaimed. “Where in the world has he turned
up from?”
“From the Philippines, where he’s been all the time. Mother got a
telegram Saturday from San Francisco. That was something of a jolt too,
I expect. You’ll come over for the wedding itself, though, won’t you,
on Saturday afternoon--in a horse litter or a palanquin, or something?”
I told her I would.
In the doorway she paused for a comprehensive glance about the room.
“It’s a nice little room, isn’t it,” she said. “And a nice little
house. I’ve never been in here before.”
She paused a moment, then went on. “The horridest thing in the world,
I’m getting to think, is whitewash, and it’s going to be thick over at
The Oaks this week. I’m going to be coated with it. Come out looking
like a nice little plaster angel. Do you know what I’d like to do? I’d
like to poison your nurse, or something, and come down here and take
care of you--for the rest of this week.”
“And not get married at all?” I asked.
“They used to do that by proxy sometimes, didn’t they? I should think
that would be a good way to do it. Good-by. I suppose Punch left his
bicycle around here somewhere.”
I tried, after she’d gone, to make myself believe that there was
nothing to this but the modern young girl’s dread of seeming to be
the conventional blushing bride, but I couldn’t manage it. Punch’s
prediction that there was going to be big trouble before this business
was over stuck in my mind like a burr.
CHAPTER II
SHOAL WATER
Punch’s sense of duty condemned him to a rather dull day. He ate a
solitary lunch, for his mother hadn’t returned from town, and Judy
was apparently making a day of it with his bicycle. He spent several
uneventful hours wandering over the house, watching workmen and
servants going about their duty, but without detecting anything that
looked suspicious. Of course he couldn’t be everywhere at once.
The Oaks is an enormous house; old, as such matters are reckoned out
in this part of the world. It was built about fifty years ago, of dark
red brick with Gothic trimmings in wood, three stories high, and a
nervous-looking, high peaked roof on top of that.
Structurally it hasn’t been altered very much, save for additional
bathrooms, the installation of electric lights and an elaborate
system of burglar alarms. The place is a regular fort. One incongruous
innovation, namely an elevator, was necessitated by old Mrs. Corbin’s
illness. She might, of course, have moved down to rooms on the ground
floor, but she wasn’t willing to do that. She said she’d lived in those
rooms ever since she came to the house as a bride and she was going to
die in them. She’d have found it unendurable, too, no doubt, to give up
the possibility of visiting any room in her house; seeing to it that
the house-maids did their duty.
It abounded, of course, in odd, unused and half-forgotten nooks and
crannies. On a rainy day Punch found endless enjoyment in exploring
these, and he probably knew more about the house, little of his life as
he had spent in it, than anybody else, his grandmother included.
The old lady appeared for the first time that day about four o’clock.
She impressed Punch as unusually bright, and in the main, good-humored,
although her dismissal of poor Miss Digby at sight of him was brusk,
and her comments on his mother’s continued absence decidedly caustic.
She put him in charge of her wheel chair, and elected to make a tour