The Corbin necklace
the rest. The real story will get around, of course, but that won’t
matter so much. Even the people here in the house will have to pretend
to believe what we tell them.”
“Have you outlined that plan to Mrs. Corbin?” I asked.
“That’s all it would need to make her turn it down,” she said hotly.
“Even if it had been her own idea, she’d jump to something else--heaven
only knows what. I want you to put it up to her.”
“Does Judy agree to it?”
I perceived that she evaded this question. “It was Judy’s own idea when
she wrote me that note, last night,” she pointed out. “I don’t see how
she could object to it now.”
I reflected that a good deal of water had gone under the bridge since
Judy had written that note. I told Victoria that the plan sounded
reasonable to me and that if nothing better turned up at the council
the old lady had called, for ten o’clock--it was nearly that now--I’d
advocate it.
She was bitterly disappointed at my answer, chose to regard it as a
refusal, but it was the best I could do.
“She ought to be given something that would put her to sleep for the
day. She’s drunk, that’s what she is--oh, with excitement, I mean.
There’s simply no telling what she’ll do.”
I agreed with the latter part of this statement. I wouldn’t put
anything beyond the old woman in her present mood, and I didn’t blame
Victoria for feeling jumpy.
“She’s shown herself pretty competent, so far this morning,” I pointed
out, for whatever consolation there might be in that. “If she can keep
it up she may leave our practical wisdom looking foolish.”
Victoria showed her opinion of this prophecy by getting up and leaving
me.
“Do you know where Judy is now?” I asked.
She paused to say, “No, I don’t.”
“How about Bill Grant?” I persisted. “Has anything been heard from
him?”
“He came back about an hour ago,” she said. “Perhaps Belden could find
him for you.”
I gave up further inquiry at that, mounted my crutches and joined Mr.
Smith. It still lacked a minute or two of our appointed hour with Mrs.
Corbin.
A car came coasting down the drive and I stared at it with a curiosity
that was admissible, I think, since it happened to be my own. I hadn’t
ordered it, certainly. My interest shot up to excitement when I saw who
was getting out of it.
“It’s young Mills, the parson from the village,” I told Mr. Smith in
answer to his inquiring glance. “I gave Bill Grant a card to him this
morning. Do you suppose _that’s_ what our old friend is up to?”
“I never entertained a doubt of it,” he said.
The three of us, Mr. Smith, the parson, and I, went up-stairs together
to the old lady’s sitting-room. Young Mills, though perfectly equal to
the situation, was obviously rather tense and his manner was highly
professional. We found, already gathered in the room, Bill Grant and
Judy, Alec, Victoria and Punch. Mrs. Corbin sat just as I had seen her
at our earlier meeting that morning. Miss Digby stood behind her chair.
No one was speaking when we came in, but I guessed from Victoria’s
flushed cheeks that, despairing of my aid, she’d tried to get a hearing
for her own plan and failed.
“These two young people,” Mrs. Corbin said, indicating Judy and Bill,
“tell me they’re fond of each other and want to be married. They’ve had
the grace to ask for my consent, and I’ve given it. So they’re going to
be married now. After they’re married, if there’s anything left to talk
about, we can talk.”
Victoria’s silence at this was as eloquent as the best of Cicero’s
orations against Catiline, but the old woman remained unmoved by it.
“Is there any one else, any one in the house,” she asked Judy, “whom
you’d like to invite to your wedding?”
“I’d like Belden,” the girl answered. And Punch was despatched to fetch
him.
We waited in silence until Punch came back with him. The old butler’s
face was by no means inexpressive, but the emotion most conspicuously
absent from it was surprise.
“Now, Mr. Mills,” said old Mrs. Corbin.
And so Judy was married to her lover, without the aid of a string
orchestra on the lawn or a light opera chorus of bridesmaids--not in
any respect as the event had been rehearsed the afternoon before. But
Judy seemed completely satisfied with it.
She turned, I was glad to see, from her husband’s embrace to her
mother, and Victoria, after a moment during which my heart had stood
still, gathered the girl up with a sob of surrender into her arms.
I don’t think there was a word said between them, but words weren’t
needed. The deplorably long strain was relaxed--temporarily, anyhow.
Judy turned away with her eyes full of tears.
“Where’s the guardian angel?” she asked, with a shaky laugh. “I can’t
see very well.”
Bill knew whom she wanted and pushed Punch into her arms.
“You don’t mind very much, do you, now?” she demanded. “It makes a
difference, doesn’t it?”
“Oh, yes,” said Punch, wriggling a little under the ordeal of being
publicly kissed. “I don’t mind as long as it’s Bill.”
“I don’t either,” she told him. “It’s surprising what a difference it
makes.”
And then she went the rounds and kissed the rest of us. When she
had finished us off she went back to her place. “There!” she said,
contentedly.
At that Victoria emerged; got her head, so to speak, above water again.
“It’s twenty minutes past ten,” she proclaimed, “and we haven’t decided
anything yet.”
Old Mrs. Corbin grinned at that. Apparently she regarded the event
of the last few minutes as highly decisive. But she was feeling too
good-humored to be captious just then.
“There’s the item of the necklace,” she remarked. “I suppose that may
as well be disposed of now as later. Let’s have it, Punch.”
Punch, for the last time it’s safe to say, took it out of his trousers
pocket and handed it to his grandmother.
“I gave this to Judy,” she said. “But she and her husband both take the
view that I bought it back when I wrote Mr. Bruce Applebury a check,
this morning, for twenty-five thousand dollars. Judy says she’d rather
have some less exciting sort of wedding present. Well, I’m willing to
fall in with her views.”
She dangled the glorious thing thoughtfully in her old fingers.
“Punch has been proved right about the old safe,” she went on. “That’s
evidently no place for it, especially as I’ve been known to forget to
lock it up. Anyhow it’s been mine for more than half a century, and
that’s long enough.”
With a sudden gesture of resolution she held it out to Victoria.
“Do you want it?” she asked. “Will you take it from me now? Call it a
peace offering, if you like.”
There was a pretty exciting moment after that. Victoria was so nearly
stupefied by the unexpectedness of her mother-in-law’s act that she
could at first neither speak nor come up to take the thing. My private
belief is that it was a knife edge whether the old woman wouldn’t
snatch it back. She hated giving it up, I’m sure. But she wouldn’t have
found much satisfaction in keeping it in the bank, and I think, too,
she was tired of the long quarrel.
The situation resolved itself at length. Victoria came out of her daze,
accepted the thing, and made all the proper acknowledgments. And at the
end of them, impulsively and a good deal more simply, she said, “I
hope we won’t quarrel any more.”
“Be reasonable,” said the old lady grimly. “Say, half as much.”
Victoria laughed and fastened the pearls around her neck. We all
crowded around her and admired them in a buzz of talk. It was silenced
presently by old Mrs. Corbin’s voice.
“If there’s nothing more to dispose of,” she said, “and I can’t see
that there is, I think I’ll excuse everybody but Miss Digby and take my
nap.”
“But--” Victoria cried aghast, “we haven’t settled _anything_ yet. It’s
half past ten and we haven’t even called up the papers, nor cancelled
the special train. We don’t even know yet what we’re going to tell
people.”
“What should we tell them? Why should we cancel the train? Let them
come and see for themselves.”
“Do you mean,” Victoria demanded aghast, “that we should let everybody
we know come down here for the wedding, and then turn them away at the
gate with the word that there isn’t going to be any?”
“No,” said the old woman. “Why turn them away? Bring them in. Feed
them, just as we’d meant to do. Introduce them to Mr. and Mrs. William
Grant here. Tell them they were married this morning. They’ll have to
know it some time and it might as well be now.”
“But,” Victoria cried, voiceless almost with horror, “what will they
think?”
“They’ll have to think what they please,” old Mrs. Corbin declared.
“After all, we’ve lived here a long while and we’ve always managed our
own concerns. We’re going to manage this.”
* * * * *
And that, as of course you know if you remember our newspaper history
three months back, is what those Corbins did. There has been, so far as
I know, only one event productive of a similar sort of excitement, out
in these parts, in living memory.
But this reception at The Oaks was an indisputable victory for the
old woman who had willed it. For two hours she sat, very splendidly
dressed, in her wheel chair on the lawn like a sovereign on her
throne, Belden at her left hand announcing her guests as they came
up--superfluously in most instances since her memory for names and
faces, especially old names and faces, was astonishingly good. Some she
greeted ceremoniously, some with her familiar abruptness, some with an
offered hand and some without, but in every case her discrimination was
perfect. And in every case, I believe, she passed them on to her son
without a word of explanation. She was enjoying it, there can be no
doubt of that. Her amazing endurance can’t be accounted for otherwise.
Victoria was as good as she was, really superb. I pause to pay tribute
to the accuracy of Bill Grant’s estimate of her. She would yield,
he had predicted, to the proved inevitable. He’ll get on with his
mother-in-law, that young man.
Well, they got away with it, that’s what it all comes to. There wasn’t
a hint of apology discernible along the line.
The funny thing about it was that it turned out to be so easy. We saw
some startled faces, to be sure, and the name Applebury went off, as it
were, now and then by mistake. But in the main you wouldn’t have known,
unless you’d listened to private conversations more closely than one
does at a lawn party, that the earth was rocking, or that the stars
were about to fall. People chatted, admired the bride, congratulated
the groom, ate enthusiastically at the tables grouped around the
marquee on the lawn, danced on the canvas that had been stretched over
the tennis court--and took their leave.
There was nothing much else, when you come to think of it, that they
could have done.
The only unnatural thing about their behavior was the way they
departed. Once people had started to go there was a rather panicky sort
of rush--like the going-out of the tides of Fundy. It must have been
felt that it would be disastrous to be the last one there. By half past
six on that lovely June afternoon the lawns were deserted. Well, I
don’t believe any one was sorry.
Judy dropped down beside me upon a settee. She’d been looking lovely
all the afternoon, I thought, the simplicity of her going-away clothes
showing in agreeable contrast to the magnificence of the older women,
but now it was over she was white and limp, for the moment an orthodox
bride.
“Do you remember when this day began?” she asked. “I’m so tired I
can’t.”
“Don’t try,” I advised her. “It isn’t necessary. It’s all--come out in
the wash just as you said it would. There’s nothing more you even need
think about, let alone do.”
Victoria, still wearing the necklace, was strolling by with Bill.