The Corbin necklace
attitude for her, on the couch in the corner. Bruce was in another
corner sitting--evidently by command, and not liking it; one could see
he’d rather have been on his feet--bolt upright on a hard little chair.
Victoria, trying to look at ease and not succeeding very well at it,
had seated herself near one of the windows.
The old lady greeted me with ceremonious courtesy, thanked me for
having come, and directed Miss Digby to place a chair for me. Her
greeting to old Mr. Smith was less formal.
“I thought I might need you as an expert, Ethelbert,” she said. “But I
doubt now if I shall.”
Then she told Miss Digby she could go and waited in dead silence until
the door was closed behind her.
Sad and humiliating as old Mrs. Corbin’s bad periods must be--those
times when, as Judy said, she was not presentable--it was already
evident to me that at this particular early morning hour of this
particular day she was as good as ever. I felt my spirits rising a
little as this realization came home. Somehow I was counting another
addition to Judy’s phalanx. I don’t know why I felt that the old
matriarch would be on her side. There was nothing in Judy’s forlorn
appearance to warrant such a conclusion.
She opened with heavy artillery upon her daughter-in-law.
“It seems to me, Victoria,”--her voice crackled like sparks out of a
coil--“that I have allowed you to make a mess of this business about
long enough. I’m going to see what I can do with it myself.”
“I haven’t regarded the mess as of my making,” Victoria retorted
coolly enough--a little too coolly not to betray the fact that she was
frightened. She’s always been afraid of old Mrs. Corbin. “However, I’ll
be glad to see what you make of it.”
“Punch tells me ...” the old woman began again, and looked around as if
in search of him. “I wanted him in here,” she threw in, “but it doesn’t
matter.--Punch tells me that the necklace has been stolen again.”
Victoria nodded.
“It was taken last night, from Bruce ...” she began.
The old woman interrupted her. “I asked if it had been stolen, and you
say it was. That’s enough for the present. If it was stolen last night,
I’d like to know what this is.”
She stretched out a hand which had been lying in her lap and opened it.
I jumped, and I think most of us did, for there dangled the necklace.
Well, wait a minute;--a necklace, anyhow.
“I found it,” she went on, “in Judy’s room this morning. Judy herself
wasn’t there. She was running away, I understand, with her new young
man. But she’d left this behind her, lying among the litter on her
dressing-table like a string of glass beads. I assume it’s not the
necklace that was stolen, but Ethelbert here will tell us, no doubt,
whether it is or not, if you care to refer it to him.”
“No,” Victoria said dully. “It’s an imitation I had made a little more
than a year ago.” She added with a spurt of anger, “You knew that all
right, didn’t you? I suppose Judy’s been telling you all about it.”
“Let Judy alone!” the old woman rapped out. “She’s told me no secrets
that weren’t her own.”
She turned from Victoria and addressed herself to Bruce Applebury,
abandoning as she did so a good deal of her harshness of manner.
Indeed for her she spoke almost gently. I scented danger for him, but
apparently he did not.
“Judy tells me,” Mrs. Corbin said, “that when she ran away with your
cousin last night she meant to marry him. She says she’ll marry him now
if the necklace can be recovered, but that if it can not be recovered,
she stands ready to marry you. A wedding is a bargain, and it takes
two to make it. Are you still willing to marry her?”
“Yes,” Bruce said. “Certainly. That’s all I ask; to go on as if nothing
had happened.”
He glanced toward Judy, but she gave no sign of having heard him or of
even knowing that he was in the room.
“She understands that, I think,” he went on a little less confidently.
“We talked it out pretty thoroughly yesterday afternoon.”
“The necklace hadn’t been stolen then,” the old lady remarked. “Where
was it?”
“It happened to be in my pocket,” Bruce said. “I’d gone into town to
get it and she met me at the train.”
“Whose was it then?” Mrs. Corbin asked him.
The question obviously took him aback and he repeated it stupidly. She
flung it back at him. “Yes, to whom did the necklace belong then?”
“I understood,” he said, “that it belonged to you.”
“You’re perfectly right,” she assured him grimly. “It did. And last
night at dinner I gave it to Judy. It was my intention, at least, to
give it to her, and give it I did, although it wasn’t the thing she
put around her neck. The real necklace was hers last night. But whose
was it when it was stolen, Mr. Applebury?”
He perceived the pitfall now, but too late to keep from plunging into
it. He was neither a naturally endowed nor a practised liar.
“Why--it was hers, I suppose,” he said.
“Hadn’t she given it to you?”
He flushed deeply. “I hadn’t accepted it,” he said.
“Do you believe your cousin stole it?” she asked.
“That’s not a pleasant conclusion to come to,” he told her. “But it’s
hard to see how one can believe anything else.”
“Don’t palaver,” the old woman snapped at him. “Do you believe he stole
it?”
Bruce hesitated, looking acutely unhappy, but at last he said, “Yes, I
do.”
“Judy doesn’t,” Mrs. Corbin returned. “She says she’d marry him now
if the necklace could be recovered. She wouldn’t marry any one she
believed to be a thief. But she seems to feel that you have a right
either to her or to the necklace. If she can’t produce the necklace,
she’s bound to marry you. Is that the way you look at it yourself?”
“That’s a perfectly unfair way of putting it,” he protested.
She gave a short grim laugh.
“It’ll serve well enough I think,” she said.
In the next breath she pounced upon him again.
“Victoria had pawned the necklace, of course. Did you redeem it for
her?”
“Yes,” he admitted sulkily, “I did.”
“How much did it cost you?” she asked.
He told her, “Twenty-five thousand dollars.”
“That was very handsome of you,” she observed, not satirically, but
quite as if she meant it.
He started to tell her he’d been glad to do it, but before the words
were half uttered, she’d turned to Victoria.
“Did you tell Judy,” she asked, “that you had come down on her fiancé
for the money?”
“No,” Victoria answered, “of course not.”
The gathering cloud of the old woman’s anger was a positively appalling
thing to watch.
“Then,” she said at last, turning back to Bruce, “you must have told
her yourself.”
You couldn’t deny the possession of a certain stiff sort of courage to
that young man. He stood up to her.
“Yes,” he said, “I told her. She’d met me at the train with the
information that she’d planned to jilt me for that worthless cousin
of mine. I’d engaged myself in good faith to marry her. I’d come out
here with my friends and my family to do it. And then, here on the day
before the wedding, she wanted to cry off.
“I’d advanced a substantial sum of money to her mother on the
supposition that the wedding was to take place. I thought it was only
fair she should know it. She took the same view of it that I did, and
agreed to marry me. I didn’t suggest--it would have been unthinkable,
of course--that I take the necklace as an alternative.”
“The necklace wasn’t hers at that time to offer as an alternative,”
Mrs. Corbin pointed out. “I hadn’t given it to her then. When I did,
she gave it to you--by word of mouth, or did she put it in writing?”
“She left a note last night,” Bruce told her, “in which she said that I
might keep the pearls. But apparently my cousin didn’t agree to that
disposal of them.”
“And, that being the case, you’re willing to marry my granddaughter?”
The biting irony in her voice could not be ignored, but he answered
stiffly, “Yes, I am. But I think your insinuation is outrageously
unfair. You seem to be trying to make it appear that I’m to blame for
all this. I’ve come out here to keep my part of a bargain, and all I’m
asking, as a matter of simple justice, is that your granddaughter shall
keep hers. I haven’t deceived anybody nor lied to anybody, nor tried to
take unfair advantage of anybody. It seems to me that the shoe is on
the other foot.”
“You needn’t worry about simple justice,” said the old woman grimly.
“You’re going to get it. When you told that child that you’d redeemed
the necklace for her mother you practically told her you’d bought her.
But I’m not willing to let her go at that price. She’s worth more than
you paid, just as the necklace is. You shall have your money back as
soon as I can write you a check.”
There’s no doubt at all that Bruce felt himself abominably ill used.
He hadn’t transgressed his own code in telling Judy the obligation
her mother had saddled her with. He considered, no doubt, that he was
acting magnanimously in forgetting, so to speak, Judy’s adventure with
Bill. He must, of course, have been passionately desirous of her or he
wouldn’t have done that. But there was a hotter fuel for his anger than
all this came to, I think.
This was the knowledge that in another particular he had transgressed
his code. It was his hatred of his cousin that had betrayed him into
it. One can imagine that this hatred must have been latent for years.
He’d spoken of him to me that morning as an undisciplined anarchist
who had done what he liked, had what he wanted. The care-free
grasshopper--don’t you see?--viewed by the laborious ant and never
overtaken by the winter.
His discovery, early that morning, that Bill had taken Judy
away from him had driven him to an act that demolished his own
self-righteousness. As I said before, I really pitied him when I
understood. That wasn’t my feeling at the present moment, though.
His face had gone livid with anger under the lash of the old woman’s
last words. He sprang to his feet.
“Very well,” he said. “I can’t dispute your right to discharge the
obligation in that way. But that’s not going to be the end of it. If
your granddaughter wants to marry my cousin, she’ll have to marry a
proclaimed thief. He may never be sent to jail for what he’s done. That
decision’s in your hands too, I suppose. But the story of it shall
follow him as long as he lives.”
There was a furious retort on the old woman’s lips, but it was checked
by the quiet tones of old Mr. Smith.
“Augusta,” he said (I’d never heard her addressed by that name before,
and it made me jump), “have I your permission to take a hand?”
She nodded without a word, and sank back with a sigh into her chair.
Old Eagle-Eye turned to Bruce.
“Please sit down again,” he said persuasively. “I don’t think we need
be violent about this. The suggestion I wish to make is that you make a
beginning at once and tell us the story now. I’ve heard no account of
the robbery myself, and I don’t think Mrs. Corbin has. If there really
is a clear case against your cousin, we’d like to hear it.”
Disarming as his voice was, I don’t know that Applebury would have
yielded if the old man hadn’t added, “Of course you’d want to tell
it, at least for once, in the presence of any of us who might have
contributory testimony of our own to offer.”
“I’m not afraid of any contributory testimony,” Bruce said. “Yes, I’ll
be glad to tell it.”
I felt, as he went ahead and detailed in a painstakingly literal
manner, without comment and without betrayal of passion, the incident
which Victoria had related to me a little earlier, that it made at best
a terribly damaging story. It seemed to me just as it seemed to Judy
that it was refutable only by the discovery of the actual thief. Not
even Bill’s return--lord, how I wished he would come, though--could
clear him of the shabby crime Bruce was charging him with.