CHAPTER XIII

STUNG!

I saw, though, by the way he pulled himself up, that he wasn’t going to tell me about it; not then, anyhow. He walked to the window, and then looked at his watch.

“I’m off,” he said decisively. “It’s almost broad daylight now, and I don’t want to waste any time getting things started.”

“You can’t get a public official out of bed in any such ungodly hour as this,” I protested.

But he was oddly determined about it.

“I can keep on trying till I do,” he assured me.

So I gave over the ungrateful rôle of obstructionist and started in to help.

“You’ll want a parson as well as a license,” I pointed out, and named a man who I thought might be willing to serve. “He’s quite a nice young chap, new here in the village. He’s been out to see me three or four times since I’ve been laid up--out of pure amiability, nothing professional about it--and we’ve become pretty good friends. I’ll give you a card to him. You can tell him your story, and if he wants any confirmation that I can give him, he can call me up. He won’t mind getting up early, so on your way back with the license you can stop and bring him along. You’ve a car, haven’t you?”

“Quite a good one,” said Judy. “I don’t know whose it is.”

Bill looked a little startled at that. Then he grinned. “Oh well,” he said, “what’s one small sport roadster among friends? I’ll bring it back all right.”

Judy went, but no farther than the door, to see him off.

“You know, I like Bill,” she said, in the thoughtful manner of one announcing a discovery, when she came back into my sitting-room. And she wouldn’t agree, when I laughed, that there was anything funny about it.

“It’s an entirely different thing from being in love with him,” she insisted. “He’s got what they used to call--in old-fashioned novels, you know--delicacy. I’m sure I know why he was in such a hurry to get off. It was because we’d got around to the necklace, and he doesn’t like to talk about it. He didn’t want to hear me tell you about it, and he knew I was going to. It is a dirty sort of story, of course, but--well, there it is. You want me to tell you about it, don’t you?”

“Lord, _yes_!” I cried. Really, I don’t like whitewash much better than she does. I added, “I could hardly bear it yesterday when old Mr. Smith came back to the summer-house and kept you from telling it then.”

“I didn’t know it, then,” she said. “Not the worst of it. The real worst of it hadn’t happened.

“You know I told you--when was it, Wednesday morning when I came over here?--what a jolt mother had got over the newspaper story that Gran was going to give me the necklace? Well, that night, just before dinner, after Gran had told her that she really was going to give it to me, mother told me that she was in trouble about it.

“You see, about a year ago, Gran had given her the necklace to take to town to the jeweler to be cleaned and restrung, and mother had had an imitation necklace made then. She told me she’d done it because the real one was likely to be stolen any time out of that silly old safe Gran kept it in, especially now that she was taking so much dope and forgot to lock it half the time. She put the real one in the bank, she said, where it would be safe, and brought the imitation back to grandmother. It got by with Gran, all right. She never suspected a thing.

“But she told me if Gran did give it to me for a wedding present it was likely to be found out that it was an imitation. What she wanted to do was to go back to town next day and get the real one out of the bank and put it back in the safe, instead of the imitation, so that Gran shouldn’t know that an imitation had been made. If Gran ever found that out, she said, there was no telling what she’d do. She’d probably disinherit Punch and me by way of getting even with mother, especially after Uncle Alec had come back and made up their quarrel.

“Even if she didn’t do that, mother said, Gran would be sure to make a perfectly frightful row and accuse her of having tried to steal the necklace, which would be pretty rotten right in the middle of the wedding, with the Appleburys there and all.

“Mother said it was harder to get the necklace out of the bank than it had been to put it in. There were more formalities about it, especially since it had come out in the paper that Gran was going to give it to me. Mother wanted me to write a note, to show to the bank, saying that Gran had given me the necklace and that they were to let mother take it out.

“I didn’t want to do that because she hadn’t given it to me, and I didn’t more than half believe she really would. I didn’t believe that until last night when she did. She’d promised to give it to mother a dozen times.

“Mother and I rather quarreled about that. But at last we made it up. She said she’d go and try to get the bank to give her the necklace anyhow without any note from me, but that if she didn’t get it and Gran did give the imitation to me, I was to take it and hand it right over to her; refuse to wear it, you know, and not give anybody a chance to look at it, not even Bruce, and especially not old Mr. Smith whom grandmother said she’d invited to the wedding. Because, of course, he’d spot it for an imitation in a minute.

“I was glad enough to agree to that. I didn’t want to wear the beastly thing. Mother went back to town Thursday morning to try to get the bank to give her the necklace, but didn’t succeed.

“Well, and then Bill came the same afternoon and I forgot all about the necklace. He’d driven me pretty nearly wild in that first little talk with him. The only question I wanted to decide was whether it would be better to run away then and there with Bill, or to stay and go through with the program, only marry Bill instead of Bruce when the time came. Bill didn’t see it that way at all. He was still being--chivalrous, you know, like he said.

“So when grandmother sent for me to try on the necklace and there was nothing there but that silly empty box, it struck me as rather funny. I shouldn’t have laughed, of course.

“It seemed such an ideal way of settling mother’s troubles that I wanted to let it ride, just as she did. We didn’t care whether Gran had hidden it somewhere and forgotten, or whether it had really been stolen. If it had, it was a joke on the thief, that’s all. All we wanted was to keep Uncle Alec from sending for the police, which would have made a lot of trouble, especially if they got it back and found it was only an imitation after all. Well, you got him quieted down, and that seemed to be all right.

“I read Bill’s letter by the light of Punch’s bicycle lantern that night and saw that he felt the same way that I did about everything. He didn’t want me to marry Bruce, anyhow. All we needed was a good long talk, which might be rather hard to manage, of course, and we’d work everything out.

“Then, awfully early yesterday morning, mother came in in her nightgown, half wild, to tell me that the imitation necklace had turned up again in grandmother’s room, and that Mr. Smith was coming that morning. She accused Punch of having taken it, and called him a little fiend for bringing it back.

“She came back about an hour later, though, a whole lot calmer and said she’d got everything fixed up. Bruce was going into town, she said, to get the necklace. He’d told her how to work it and she’d given him the sort of note the bank wanted. He’d be back with it on the three o’clock train in time for the rehearsal.

“She wanted me to get up and dress right away and drive Bruce to the station, but not go in town with him because he’d be awfully busy and I’d be in his way. She told me not to say anything to him about the necklace. She wanted the crowd to think I’d gone in with him, though, so that his going off like that wouldn’t look queer. I was to keep out of sight wherever I pleased till it was time for his train to come back. And she said she’d fixed Mr. Smith so that he wouldn’t come to the house till dinner to-night.

“Well, of course it would have looked fishy to me if I’d thought about it at all. But the only thing I thought of was that here was a perfectly heaven-sent chance for my talk with Bill. So I sent a note up to him and told him where to meet me.

“We went up to the summer-house, thinking it would be the safest place there was, and found you there with old Mr. Smith. He’d seen us through his field-glasses, of course, and we must have given him something to think about. But it didn’t seem to matter much then. We got away as soon as we could and had our talk.

“Bill was stubborn about it. He wouldn’t hear of my marrying him, then. The only thing to do, he said, was to call off the marriage with Bruce. He wanted that and my marriage to him, he said, to be two separate things. I told him he wanted to be sure he wasn’t getting me on the rebound. But of course that wasn’t fair. I can really see how it looked to him. He’s--well, he’s like that.

“So what we agreed on was that I was to meet Bruce at the three o’clock train and drive him around a while before we came back to The Oaks and tell him that I wasn’t going to marry him; I’d do anything else he wanted, except that. He could throw me over any way he liked, tell any story he wanted to tell. If he wanted the thing done quietly, I’d pretend to be awfully ill, or grandmother could, and the wedding could be postponed.

“It was a perfectly rotten position to put him in, and it wasn’t his fault that he was in it--at least it wasn’t his fault any more than it was mine. I’d never told him I was in love with him. I had told him when he first asked me to marry him that I’d been in love with some one else, but I said I didn’t know where he was and that he was out of my life altogether. Of course I thought that was true. He said he’d take a chance. Well, I was going to have to tell him that the chance turned out to be that the man had come back, neither by his fault nor mine, and that we were in love with each other. It never struck me as possible that Bruce would want to marry me when he knew that. You wouldn’t think it was possible, would you?”

“Yes, my dear,” I told her regretfully, “I’m afraid I would.”

“Well,” she conceded, “you know more about life than I do.

“I met him and we drove off down the Yorkville Road, and I told him the whole thing. He didn’t say a word; just sat there looking blacker and blacker every minute till I’d finished. And then the horrible thing happened.

“He told me he’d been stung. He told me what had really happened about the necklace. And the minute he began talking I knew it was true. He told me mother had really taken it--he used perfectly horrible words: ‘fraudulently hypothecated it.’ That means she’d pretended it was hers and got the bank to let her have some money on it; a lot of money--twenty-five thousand dollars. She’d tried to raise the money to get it back and she couldn’t. And when they found out that the necklace wasn’t hers they’d threatened her, Bruce said, with a criminal prosecution. Of course she was almost crazy with worry about it. So she’d gone to _him_, to _Bruce_, and asked him to put up the money to get the necklace back.”

That was more than I could listen to in silence.

“She went to Bruce!” I cried. “Good God!”

“I suppose she couldn’t think of any one else to go to,” Judy said thoughtfully. “It had to be some one she could absolutely count on to keep it quiet. He’d hate a scandal in his family worse than anything else in the world, and of course mother thought, and so did he, that I was as good as married to him.

“But when he had paid the money to the bank and got the necklace, and then found I didn’t mean to marry him, he felt that he’d been, as he said, stung. Even the necklace wasn’t his, he said. It was practically stolen goods. It had belonged to grandmother all the time. She could have made the bank give it back to her without paying back the money, just by proving to them that mother hadn’t had any right to give it to them.

“Oh, I can see now how he felt about it. I suppose for any one like him it was the natural way to feel. But I couldn’t see anything then. I’d just gone dead, like a flat tire.

“We went along for miles after he’d told me that nice little story without saying a word, either of us. Then I told him I’d marry him if he wanted me to. I said it seemed that I’d already been sold to him. I couldn’t see any other way out. I couldn’t pay him his beastly twenty-five thousand dollars, and I didn’t know any one I could ask for it--not for a thing like that.

“I didn’t begin to hate him till then. I’d hated myself, and hated mother. But when I told him I’d marry him because he’d paid me---- Oh, I told him more than that too. I said that he could do anything he liked with me, but that I loved Bill and would go right on loving him.--And after I’d told him all that, he began to get--_amiable_.

“He said he’d known he could trust me to do the right thing. He’d been sure all the time I hadn’t known what mother had asked him to do. He said it was a foolish fancy that I was in love with Bill. That I’d get over it as soon as we’d been married a little while. He said he was acting for my own good and what I needed now was a little firmness to keep me from leaving the rails and making a hash of my whole life. He said he was sure we were going to be happy together.

“I didn’t say anything at all; just hung on and kept from jumping out of the car. That’s how we got back to The Oaks.

“Of course the minute Bill saw the satisfied look in Bruce’s face he knew I’d fallen down on him somehow. It wasn’t the sort of thing he’d expected me to do, and he was pretty well upset. So after the rehearsal I took him off in front of everybody and told him what had happened. I didn’t have time for the details, of course, but I told him Bruce had paid for me in advance.

“He wanted me to postpone the wedding, anyhow, and give him time to raise the money himself. I told him I wasn’t going to be auctioned off any more, let alone to him. He says now that he saw the point all right, but he wouldn’t admit it then. The last thing he said was that he’d think of a way yet, and I told him it was all right if he could. He’s terribly clever, but I don’t believe there was any way, except the one that happened.”

“What did happen?” I asked. I’ll admit my mind wasn’t working very well. It was too boiling hot.

“Why,” she cried, “you were there! You saw it happen. Gran gave me the necklace, right before everybody. Didn’t you hear me ask her if it was _really_ mine, and hear her say it was? It was only the imitation one, of course, but she thought it was the real one. The real one was right in Bruce’s pocket where it belonged. So all I had to do was to tell him to keep the necklace. That’s what I said in my note to him. And poor old Bill didn’t see it for about five minutes after it happened.”

There wasn’t much to say after that. I could see how horribly tired she was--could any one wonder?--and I suggested presently that she go back to my couch and take another nap while we waited for Bill to come with the parson and the license. She took to the suggestion readily.

“We’re supposed to be pretty wild,” she observed, referring, I suppose, to her generation, “but I don’t believe we like it quite as wild as this. It’s over, anyhow. There isn’t anything more that can happen now.”

With that, being the perfectly healthy young animal that she was, she fell contentedly asleep.

I’m not so young and my nerves don’t bear stretching so easily. So for a good while I sat watching her, thinking over the story she’d told me, fitting it in with what I’d already known of the queer series of happenings which had so disturbed and mystified me during the past three days.

I had it all now, hadn’t I? Well no, not quite. I didn’t know yet who’d stolen the imitation necklace in the first place and then incomprehensibly brought it back. It didn’t matter much, though, did it? Old Eagle-Eye thought it did. Probably old Mrs. Corbin herself had mislaid the necklace or hidden it somewhere, perhaps under the influence of her drug, and under the same influence, restored it, the way it happened in _The Moonstone_.

Yes, but how about Punch’s man in pajamas?--Oh, well, Punch might have dreamed him.

With dreams in my mind I must have fallen asleep myself, just then, in my chair.

What wakened me was the persistent ringing of a telephone bell. It hadn’t wakened Judy, so I hobbled over to the instrument as quickly as I could and answered it.

“This is Alexander Corbin,” I heard the voice say. “I’m afraid I’ve wakened you. I want to tell you that Bruce Applebury was robbed last night of the Corbin necklace.”

“Robbed!” I repeated stupidly. “How?”

“He tells a very queer story. He came to my room with it just now. I’ll give you the details later. I’m talking on Victoria’s phone. She wants me to ask whether you happen to know anything of the whereabouts of young William Grant?”

“Not precisely,” I said. “I can give you some news of him, though. Shall I come up to The Oaks?”

“I wish to heaven you would!” Alec exclaimed. “And the quicker you get here, the better.”