CHAPTER XI

WHEN I CAME IN

I got my cue at five minutes past four the next morning. I know what time it was since I had, a moment earlier, switched on my light and looked at my watch to see how much longer the night was going to last. The sky would begin turning gray before very long, I remember thanking heaven, and then perhaps I should drop off to sleep.

It wasn’t ten seconds after I’d switched out my light and dropped back upon my pillow, when I heard my name spoken, almost beside my head, it seemed, in a whisper.

I don’t mind admitting that if I’d had two practicable legs, I’d have come clean out of bed in one jump. As it was I sat up and took out my suppressed activity in thinking. The name that had been whispered was not the one by which I had been baptized, nor even the familiar nickname which almost every one calls me by, but a private diminutive which Judy and Punch sometimes used as a mark of affection.

I’ve been sleeping, since I’ve been too clumsy to get up and down-stairs on crutches, in a little room on the ground floor which my gardener and his wife used to use for a dining-room. The floor of it is hardly above the ground level, and the open window is low enough for any one bigger than a child to look through, or for that matter, climb in at. So there was nothing unnatural about the whisper, weird as the effect of it had been.

When it was repeated an instant later, I answered in a low voice, “Come around to the front door and I’ll let you in.”

I thought it was Punch come down to report some new and exciting development that he couldn’t wait till morning to tell me.

Donovan slept up-stairs in a little room over the kitchen, the remotest room in the cottage. I’d had a bell put in to summon him by. My gardener and his wife, who was my cook, had moved out after the fire to the second story of my garage. So if I could move quietly enough not to disturb my nurse, my nocturnal visitor’s errand could remain as confidential as he seemed to wish it to be.

I switched on the reading lamp in my living-room as I passed through; then cautiously unlocked and opened the door. Two people were standing on the door-step, but neither of them was the caller I had expected. One of them was Judy, and the other was Bill Grant.

I don’t think, though, that I was especially surprised. Down in the bottom of my mind I must have guessed a good deal more, during the past two days, than I had allowed myself to admit. All the same I felt pretty blank for a minute. I just stood there in the doorway and balanced myself upon my crutches. My paralysis seemed to have infected them too, for neither of them moved nor spoke.

At last I said, “You’d better come in.”

“Do you want us to?” Judy asked very quietly.

“Yes, of course,” I told her, and on the words I swung myself back out of the doorway. “Come into the living-room,” I added, “and we’ll shut the door, and then perhaps it won’t be necessary to let Donovan in on it.”

Bill made me follow Judy inside, and it was he who closed both doors--more quietly than I could have done.

I didn’t ask what they were doing or were planning to do. There is no mistaking the sort of adventure upon which this pair were about to embark.

“Sit down,” I said, “and tell me all about it.”

My voice was coming to life a little, but it was hardly satisfactory, even to me, and I wasn’t surprised at Judy’s question.

“Are you on our side? Because there’s no use sitting down and talking unless you are.”

I did sit down myself, though, in my easy chair and filled and lighted a pipe before I answered. It was time, not tobacco, that I wanted.

“Of course I’m on your side, Judy,” I said at last. “I’ll be on any side that I’m satisfied is really yours.”

Neither of them had followed my example about sitting down. Young Grant was standing in front of my empty fireplace, his hands behind him--locked together, if I could judge by the tension of his shoulders. Judy, who had been wandering restlessly about the room while I got my pipe going, now gave me a rueful sort of smile and came to rest on the arm of my chair.

“You haven’t my best interests at heart, have you?” she asked with slightly burlesqued apprehension. “You don’t want to save me from doing something that I’ll always regret?”

The words and the manner may have been flippant, but the voice wasn’t. Judy trusted me to understand seriousness without the label of a long face, and I blessed her for her confidence in me.

I essayed a small joke of my own. “It’s no good your sitting in my lap,” I told her. “I’m not old enough to be seduced that way. I want to be satisfied which your side really is, before I fall in, that’s all.”

“You’re absolutely right, sir,” said Bill seriously. They were the first words he’d spoken. “You ought to be told the whole story before you’re asked to do anything, or even agree to anything.”

“No, he’s wrong, Bill,” Judy contradicted him over my head. (She hadn’t stirred, by the way, at my jibe about sitting in my lap.) “He’s got to decide first and hear the story afterward. Really the story hasn’t a thing to do with it, except that he’ll be awfully interested in it--put it in his collection, probably. He knows already, you see, that I mean to marry you and that I’m not going to marry Bruce. Of course if he thinks that because I’m still rather young I shouldn’t be allowed to decide _anything_ for myself--which is a mistake that has been made before....”

I saw Bill Grant smile ruefully at that and perceived that he himself had made this mistake.

“... if he does think that,” Judy went on, “then, of course, he’ll think I’m wrong anyhow, story or no story. But if he thinks I’m grown up, then he’ll see that I’m the only person who can possibly know whether you’re the man I ought to marry, or Bruce.”

“I’ll admit that you’re grown up, my dear.”

She kissed me briefly, and sprang to her feet.

“Well, then, it’s like this,” she said, turning and facing me very earnestly. “Do you want to get into a whole lot of trouble that you needn’t get into at all? Do you want mother to quarrel with you, and grandmother to cut you out of her will, and a whole lot of people to think you’ve been, well--seduced, you know, into doing something that was perfectly frantically foolish? You needn’t, you know. You needn’t let any of these things happen. That’s why I wanted you to decide first. I wouldn’t have you persuaded. But I thought perhaps you’d--just naturally--want to.”

I don’t know what answer I made; whether, indeed, in words I made any at all. Judy was satisfied at all events, for she went over to her lover, slipped her arm through his, and said, “I knew he would.”

Even at that moment I credited this young man with unusually acute perceptions. He made no attempt to express any gratitude of his own, or to speak for Judy in the matter of hers. He’d have annoyed me intensely if he’d done either of these things. What he said was more to the point.

“It may not turn out to be quite so bad as Judy makes it look,” he said. “We’ve a plan that will avoid a general explosion of scandal if it works. It’s a near thing, of course, whether it works or not.”

“You’re an optimist,” I commented, “if you think you can run off with Judith Corbin less than twelve hours before she was to have married Bruce Applebury without causing a general explosion of scandal.” I was as yet, you see, prepared to be amiable only in streaks.

Judy came back to the arm of my chair and patted me consolingly. “You think so,” she said, “because you haven’t any idea how clever Bill is.--Tell him the plan, Bill,” she added.

Young Grant stood very straight, and spoke rather stiffly.

“The essential thing about it is,” he said, “that we get married as early as possible this morning, before the people at The Oaks are up and about.”

“That’s what I told them we were going to do,” Judy put in, “in the notes I left--one for mother and one for Bruce. I told mother that by the time she’d read it we’d be married, but if she wanted us to, we’d come back before anybody knew we’d gone and not let on that anything had happened. I left the note in her room so that she’d have time to think before she started anything.”

“But the wedding!” I gasped. “The marriage to Bruce in the afternoon! What would you do about that?”

“Oh, they’d have to postpone the wedding,” Judy said easily. (I’m not sure she didn’t speak through a yawn.) “Get up some excuse. You can trust mother for that. Grandmother could be horribly ill. That would be easiest, of course. The people would all go away, don’t you see, and then when they’d stopped thinking about us, Bill and I could be married again. There’s no law against that, is there?”

“But why be married now?” I asked. “Why not simply postpone the wedding? The same excuse would serve.”

“Tell him, Bill,” commanded Judy.

“I know Bruce pretty well,” young Grant said, “and I imagine Judy knows her mother. I don’t believe either of them would submit quietly to anything less than the proved inevitable. And unless they made up their minds to it instantly and put the excuse over--for all they were worth--it wouldn’t be any good. If they know there’s nothing left to argue about, they may plant their excuse at once and send for us.”

“Send for you where?” I asked.

Judy gave a guilty sort of wriggle.

“I had to let you in for it, a little,” she said. “I told mother that as soon as we were married, we would let you know where we were, and that if she wanted us to come back, she was to call up your house and find out.”

“Where _will_ you be?” I asked.

Judy didn’t answer. She left my chair again and walked away, but not, this time, to where her lover was standing; there was a moment before she turned and faced me.

“Do you _want_ to get into this?” she demanded of me. She was intensely serious now. “It will be beastly for you. Mother will hate you, whether the plan works and they save their faces or not. We didn’t want to do it this way, you know. At least, Bill didn’t. We wouldn’t have done it if we could have helped it. I can’t marry any one else but Bill--not now, and they--they haven’t left us any way but this. But you don’t deserve to be--to be made the goat.”

I’d never seen tears in Judy’s eyes before, but they were there now, and they brought a responsive blur into my own.

“I shall enjoy being the goat,” I said, “and I’ll double in any other useful part that you can assign to me. How about it? Will you be married here?”

Judy heaved a deep sigh of assent. “In this nice little house,” she said. She turned to her lover. “It’s all right now, Bill.”

Bill Grant came over and shook hands with me.

“I can’t tell you what a relief it is, sir,” he said. “I didn’t want to take Judy on a wild goose chase through the middle of the night looking for a license clerk and a justice of the peace. I wanted it known where she was. If I may leave her here with you, I’ll drive over now to the county-seat and get a license as soon as I can wake up the clerk.”

“I’ll keep Judy for you,” I said. “But there’s no use in your starting yet. It’s only a twenty-mile drive, and you can’t rout that man out in the middle of the night. Sit down and be comfortable.”

“Do you keep anything to eat in your house?” Judy asked. “I’m hungry, now that I can think about something besides eloping with Bill.”

I told her where to find the ice-box, and cautioned her to go quietly in order not to waken Donovan. Bill went with her, and they came back in a few minutes with three-quarters of a pie, and a bottle of milk. We set out the feast on the little table beside my couch, and I watched them eat, mercifully refraining from asking any questions. These babes in the wood were as hungry as the wolves that would have devoured them.

But when we’d finished, and when Bill Grant and I had lighted our pipes, I asked, “Now, haven’t I earned the story for my collection? When did you two youngsters meet for the first time? Yesterday afternoon?”

Judy curled up on my couch, happy as a well-fed kitten.

“Tell him about it, Bill,” she said. “I think I’m going to sleep. The whole works, you know,” she continued. And by way of launching him she spoke once more to me.

“Has mother told you about my horrible past? Well, Bill’s it!”