CHAPTER X

TRANSFORMATION SCENE

What Judy thought she wanted of me at dinner that night I don’t know. Probably she didn’t know herself. She regarded me as an ally and may have reasoned that some unforeseen change in the pattern of things might make me useful. Or, more likely, she didn’t reason at all; just felt that she wanted me there, and sent for me.

As things turned out, the part I played at the dinner was merely that of a wholly unimportant spectator. The cue that called me upon the stage wasn’t given me until several hours later. Neither during the dinner nor after it did I have a moment alone with her.

I had a little talk with Punch, though, and got one curious piece of information from him. That this happened was due to our somewhat too prompt arrival at The Oaks. Belden had taken old Mr. Smith up-stairs to show him his room, and the boy, who was the first one of The Oaks party to appear in the drawing-room, seated himself on the arm of the easy chair where the butler had deposited me, and brought his report down to date.

“Have you still got it?” I asked.

He patted his trousers pocket confidentially.

“I didn’t forget to change it when I changed my clothes,” he told me, “and I bolted my door and hung my coat on the door-knob. So nobody knows where it is. Mother thinks it’s still in the safe. I don’t know what I’ll do about it to-night, though, after I’ve gone to bed. Sleep with my trousers on, I expect. Unless grandmother has me give it back to her before then.”

“Have you any idea that she means to?” I asked.

“Well,” he said, “of course you never can tell about Gran. She called me into her room again just now and asked me if it was safe, and if I had it hidden where I could get it when it was wanted. I said I could. She’s coming down to dinner to-night, you know, and she may spring something. I’ll be all ready if she does.”

He grinned and added, “It certainly will be a surprise for mother.”

“How do you know she thinks it’s in the safe?” I asked.

He hesitated, and I didn’t know for a minute whether he meant to answer. His pride over what he felt to be a sound piece of reasoning, and his wish to see whether or not I would follow it prevailed over any other feelings he may have had.

“It’s kind of funny,” he said. “I figured it out from Digs. You see, early this morning when I showed her that the necklace was back, she was awfully excited and said she thought I’d taken it for a joke--because I hated her, she said. She didn’t mean that really--it was just because she was upset--and she came around later and said she was sorry. So that was all right.

“But this afternoon just before they had the wedding rehearsal Digs was all stirred up again. I saw she was acting sort of reproachful toward me, so I asked her what the matter was, and she said she didn’t think it was fair of me to have told mother about her knowing the combination to the safe. She said she wasn’t supposed to know it, only she had to in order to tell grandmother what it was when she forgot.

“Well, of course, I hadn’t told mother that Digs knew the combination. I hadn’t told anybody but you and Mr. Smith. And I told Digs I hadn’t told mother. And then, because it seemed kind of funny, I asked Digs what made her think I had.

“She pressed her lips together--you know the sort of face she makes--and wasn’t going to tell me.

“I said, ‘Mother hasn’t been accusing you of taking the necklace, has she?’

“She was very indignant then, and said, ‘No, she has not,’ and then she began to cry, and asked me if I’d miss her if she went away; because, she said, she thought she might have to.

“I asked her why, and she wouldn’t tell me. So I said she mustn’t mind grandmother even if she did get sort of rough sometimes, and Digs said she didn’t mind grandmother. It wasn’t that at all. She wouldn’t say anything more; wanted to kiss me instead. So I went away to think about it.”

I remembered old Mr. Smith’s comment on Miss Digby’s manner just after she’d parted from Victoria in the hall that afternoon. “Frightened--or shocked,” he had said, and he had hazarded a guess that she might have been given some order that she didn’t want to carry out. I didn’t mention this to the boy, however. I waited to see what conclusion he’d come to by himself.

“I think,” he went on, “that mother must have asked Digs to open the safe for her; just guessed that she might know the combination. And the only thing she’d want the safe open for would be to get the necklace out. I don’t know why she wants to get it out, though, unless to put it in some safer place. Or unless”--he hung fire a moment but he couldn’t turn aside from the pursuit of truth wherever it took him--“or unless mother doesn’t think Gran ought to give Judy the necklace and wants to put it for a while somewhere so that she can’t. Anyhow, it makes it sort of exciting about to-night, doesn’t it?”

I cordially agreed that it did.

I don’t think Victoria really expected me to come to the dinner, but with a crowd like that--there were more than thirty of us--one more or less couldn’t have mattered much. They solved the problem of my stiff leg by putting me at a card table and giving me a spare chair opposite for my foot. I had Punch on one side of me and his special bridesmaid on the other. Either she was an uncommonly nice girl, or else the cradle and the grave, so to speak, were her specialties, for apparently she didn’t mind in the least having us for her partners. She was very jolly anyhow and deserved a less divided attention than I was able to give her.

The rest of the elderly group sat at a table by themselves; old Mr. Ethelbert Smith at Mrs. Corbin’s right at the head of it, Alec at the foot, and Victoria half-way down the side that faced me. The bridal party, lacking the two who had been told off to me, sat, eighteen in all, at an enormous table transversely to the room, Judy at the end of it nearest me, with Bill Grant at her right and Bruce away down at the other end.

The arrangement had its importance for me--by that same token it was probably an unlucky one for the nice bridesmaid--since it put all of the principal actors in the drama, or at least all whom I took to be the principal actors, where I could watch their faces. Judy and old Mrs. Corbin I saw in profile; Bill Grant, Bruce Applebury and Victoria faced me squarely.

I didn’t neglect the others. One by one I studied them intently. One of them, it seemed impossible to resist the conclusion, must have been Punch’s man in pajamas, who, for some motive less explicable even than the one that had incited the taking of it, had returned the stolen necklace to old Mrs. Corbin’s room last night. Would the same man walk again to-night, I wondered?

I think I know something of faces. They’ve been a serious part of my study, at all events, for many years. But there wasn’t one within range of my vision which I could associate at all with an act like that.

Anyhow, that didn’t comprise the whole story. That is to say, the theft and return of the necklace did not. Otherwise it would not have involved Judy. And there was no getting away from the fact that she was involved inextricably.

She was not now perhaps, as I looked at her, quite the lifeless mechanical thing, the talking doll, which old Eagle-Eye had described her to have been at the rehearsal of her wedding, but she was still a long way from any Judy I had ever known. She was laughing too much and talking too hard. They didn’t converse decorously in pairs down at that table, but called to one another back and forth down the length of it, and oftenest of all I heard her voice, all aglitter, the lovely sensitive shades quite gone out of it. Yes, she was entangled in something.

But was it the necklace? The question asked itself so clearly and suddenly in my mind that I started at it. Had Judy a story of her own, which by pure coincidence had fallen thwartwise of the mystery of the necklace? Was the wordless drama old Eagle-Eye had seen enacted this afternoon between the girl and those two young men nothing but a plain tale of common human jealousy? Could the riddle be solved on that hypothesis?

“What _is_ Judy doing back there?” the nice bridesmaid asked me. “You’ve been looking steadily past my shoulder without saying a word for about five minutes, and I’m too curious to be polite any longer.”

“I’m afraid it’s I who’ve been too curious to be polite,” I apologized contritely. “And she isn’t doing anything, really.”

I was going on expatiating, rather feebly I’m afraid, on the feelings of an avowedly sentimental honorary uncle, when Mrs. Corbin cut me short by calling aloud in her vibrant, imperious old voice to Punch.

“Come here!” she commanded the boy. “I want to speak to you.”

Everybody in the room seemed to realize that something was coming, for Punch walked to her side in complete silence and we all heard what she said to him.

“Go and get that thing I told you to keep for me. Get it and take it to Judy.”

Her voice was harsh as she issued the order, and I saw her turn a sardonic look down the table at Victoria. But nobody paid any attention to that. They were all watching Punch, expecting, of course, that he’d turn and leave the room. Instead, he walked straight toward Judy. His grandmother’s voice halted him.

“Go and get it first,” she called.

“Oh, I have it here in my pocket,” said Punch. And he pulled out, on the words, the same rather disgraceful handkerchief in which he’d exhibited the necklace to us at the lunch table.

I stopped watching him then, and turned my eyes, once more, on Judy. And, pearls or no pearls, she was the one to watch. The first look that flashed into her face when she saw what her brother was bringing her was one of an irrepressible disgust. She had damned the necklace, before, and this look of hers damned it now. That was gone, of course, in an instant, and by the time the others had turned to look at her, she had ironed out her face into a perfectly correct expression of pleasure over the receipt of a rather overwhelming gift--surprise and delight beautifully mingled.

She lifted the thing daintily from Punch’s outrageous handkerchief, felt for the ends, and fastened it around her neck. I saw her fingers pause suddenly over the clasp, not so much as if they were baffled by it, but as if all the activities of her body had been, for an instant, frozen. Another instant and she had fastened the clasp, turned away from the table, and was coming down the length of the room toward her grandmother. She passed my chair on the way, but she had no eyes for me in that moment.

The girl’s face was transfigured, her eyes were shining like stars. I can’t help it if I am banal, it’s what they were shining like. I heard her catch her breath in something like a sob as she walked by.

“Gran, you darling!” she cried. And rather to Mrs. Corbin’s astonishment I think, she bent and kissed her squarely on her old mouth before the old woman had time to turn her cheek. “Are they _really_ mine?” Judy demanded. “Do you mean you’ve _given_ them to me?”

“They belong to you, and to no one else,” Mrs. Corbin said. “Here! Give Ethelbert Smith a look at them. He knew them long before you were born, or your father, either.”

The girl turned to him dutifully, leaning forward so that they swung away from her breast. I saw old Mr. Smith touch them with the tips of his fastidious fingers, and then I looked at Victoria.

She wasn’t a beautiful sight. The change in color of her face had made the make-up blotchy, and her eyes were as hard as stones. I’m sure she wasn’t breathing. But old Mr. Smith’s voice came out suave and untroubled.

“The Corbin necklace is one of the most beautiful strings of pearls I know, my dear. And your young neck is worthy of it. I wish you happiness.”

The other table broke up as Judy approached it. They all grouped around her to look and go into raptures. That was my first impression at least, but it was not quite correct.

Bruce Applebury expressed no raptures, and he fell back a little from the group, seeming content to survey this marvelous gift to his bride at long range. This might have been nothing, of course, but the celebrated Applebury reserve.

But there was none of that reserve about his cousin, Bill Grant. That young man didn’t even pretend to look. And he was scowling just as he had scowled that morning when he and Judy had come upon me in the summer-house. But nobody, of course, was paying any attention to him.

Eventually the tumult subsided and people went back to their places. Bruce was watching Judy now. At all events it looked more like watching to me than like the lover’s gaze one might have expected. She seemed aware of his watchfulness and troubled by it, though not profoundly. Exasperated perhaps says a little more accurately what I mean. The brilliant glow of excitement was still in her face, and yet she had fallen silent. Once or twice she darted a quick look at Bill Grant, and at last she may have spoken to him under her breath.

Anyhow I found myself presently watching him, so that I was on the spot, as it were, when his face changed too. It was like the lifting of a fog. I saw him look down the table toward Bruce, and then back at Judy. No, not at Judy; at Judy’s necklace. He was staring at it now like one fascinated, and to my amazement his face broke into a broad--but really a ferocious--grin. _His_ eyes were blazing now.

I gave up trying to entertain the nice bridesmaid after that. It really didn’t matter. She was too excited about the necklace to care.

But for myself, I was in exactly the plight in which old Eagle-Eye had found himself this afternoon. I had seen a drama played out under my eyes, and what it was all about I hadn’t the remotest idea. And I went home, once they’d got fairly to dancing, without any further illumination. Judy, as I said, never came near me. Whatever situation she’d foreseen which I might be useful in hadn’t come off. She had something else on her mind now.

But this much I knew. Whatever Judy’s story might be, the necklace was somehow the nub of it.