CHAPTER XIV

A POINT OF HONOR

I heard a sudden move from Judy on the couch and looked around at her. She was sitting bolt upright, gazing at me wide-eyed.

“Has something happened to Bill?” she asked.

“No, it’s Bruce,” I said. “He was robbed of the necklace last night.”

“But why did you say anything about Bill?” she persisted.

“Your mother wanted to know whether I could tell them where he was. It was Alec who talked to me.”

She was still looking rather wild-eyed, like one under some nightmare apprehension. Indeed I thought the shadows of the sleep she’d just awakened from must still be clouding her mind a little. The fact was, of course, that she was thinking straighter and faster than I.

“Which necklace do you suppose it was,” I asked, “that Bruce was robbed of; the real one or the imitation?”

“The real one, of course,” she said. “It’s the only one he had. He brought it home from the bank, you see, and when mother couldn’t get the imitation away from Gran, in order to put the real one in place of it, Bruce said he thought it would be safer if he kept it and if nobody knew he had it. Nobody did know he had it but mother and me.” She made a full stop there. Then, “And Bill,” she added. “Of course I told him.”

She swung her legs off the couch as if about to spring to her feet, but arrested the action half-completed. She was thinking, I could see, with an agonized intensity, and I found myself now upon the trail of her thoughts.

“Your mother must have read your note,” I observed. “That’s why she had Alec ask me if I knew where Bill was. You wrote a note to Bruce, too, didn’t you? How did you deliver that one?”

“I had Bill take it into his room,” she said, “after he’d gone to sleep. That’s what we waited for. That’s why we were so late getting away.”

It’s Judy’s order that this story isn’t to be a whitewash, so I must in common honesty forbear to apply the brush to myself.

I didn’t, even for one grisly moment, believe that Bill was the thief; that his elopement with Judy had been a mere pretext and that he was speeding away now to parts unknown with the necklace in his pocket. But I perceived the plausibility of the pattern his actions made.

It wasn’t merely that he had known Bruce had the necklace, that he’d gone to Bruce’s room when Bruce was asleep, and that he and the necklace were now gone. There were some queerly confirmatory details. He hadn’t been willing to consider eloping with Judy until he knew Bruce had the necklace. He had been at some pains to leave Judy in my hands as soon as possible after they’d got out of the house. It had struck me that he’d been rather unreasonably in a hurry to set out on his quest of the license clerk. He’d shown a dislike of hearing the necklace discussed; had run away--this was Judy’s own explanation--from hearing her story of its adventures.

I didn’t believe that any of this nightmare nonsense really explained anything, but I did find myself wishing, with a kind of prayerful intensity, that he would come back now with his parson and his license. How long had he been gone? What time was it anyhow? By the clock on the mantelpiece it was quarter to seven.

“Look here, Judy,” I said. “I told Alec I’d come right up to The Oaks, and I’ll go as soon as I can dress and get up there in my car. But there’s no reason why this should interfere with your plans.”

She looked at me in pitiful bewilderment.

“What are my plans?” she said. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Your plans for getting married to Bill,” I explained. “You wait here till he comes back with the license and the minister. Get Donovan and the gardener and his wife for your witnesses. Go ahead and marry Bill. And then--well, do just as you like. Start off on your wedding journey, or else stay here. After I’ve seen how the situation looks at The Oaks, I can telephone to you, if you’d like me to, and you can come back just as you had planned, and pretend that nothing has happened. I didn’t tell Alec you were here. All I said was that I could give some news of Bill.”

“I can’t be married to Bill now,” she said. “Not till Bruce has got the necklace back.”

I started to say that I didn’t see the connection, but she broke in upon me with a savage intensity.

“Don’t you see, it’s the necklace that bought me off. Mother bargained me for it, and I gave it to him and got clear. Now he hasn’t got it. It’s been taken away from him. And I can’t marry Bill till he’s got it back. I’m--I’m caught in a trap.”

And indeed, her eyes had the panic in them that I’ve seen once or twice, in those of a trapped animal. It was unbearable to see little Judy looking like that.

“Let’s try to keep our feet on the ground,” I said, “and see where we really stand.

“You gave those pearls to Bruce in good faith. You told him in the note that they were his. That lets you out. Suppose he hadn’t been robbed of them last night but were to have his pocket picked of them to-morrow in town. You wouldn’t feel that bound you to turn yourself over to him. Well, what’s the difference?

“Neither you nor Bill had anything to do with the robbery. You _know_ Bill didn’t. You know that from no conceivable motive, sordid or other, would Bill touch that necklace. He’d have done anything to defend Bruce’s possession of it, for it was his release as much as it was yours.”

I saw tears spring into her eyes and she came over to me, kissed me briefly, and went back to the couch. “There are two of us, then,” she said, “--and I guess there’s Punch; that makes three.”

She was counting up, I knew, the people who were on her side.

“And old Mr. Smith,” I added. “I think you can count him in.”

She looked a little surprised at that and I went on:

“Not for any emotional reason. Simply because he’s so damned intelligent. The advantage of knowing as an axiom that Bill was not the thief is that we can count intelligence on our side.”

I couldn’t feel that this had impressed her very much, but she was quieter anyhow, and she was giving me a hearing.

“And it seems to me,” I went on, “that another advantage of our certainty of Bill is that it makes it possible for you to marry him first and tackle the problem of the necklace afterward.”

She smiled at that. “Bill wouldn’t marry me even if I asked him. And I won’t ask him. I should, of course, if I were a little bit in doubt about him, or if I were afraid he’d think I was. But we aren’t like that. We’re---- Oh, you can’t talk about it. Look: you know what it’s been like at home, don’t you, ever since--well, ever since father died? Even Punch has hated it, and it hasn’t been so bad for him because he can’t remember father. And they treat a girl worse anyhow.

“I’ve never been educated. I don’t know anything. I’ve been _trained_. When father owned a racing stable he used to breed race horses. Well, I’ve been brought up like that. I hated it so that at last I ran away.

“But I didn’t know _why_ I hated it until I met Bill. Of course I’ve known honorable people before, but never anyone that I’d had a chance to see all the way through. It’s different, and it’s going to be different. When I go with him I’m not going to take any of mother’s--bargains along with me.”

I’ve never been very enthusiastic about Victoria, but I felt that I had to come to her defense here.

“I’m not in your mother’s confidence,” I said to Judy, “but there’s something I don’t think we can lose sight of. Victoria’s had a pretty rotten time herself since your father died. She’s got a small income of her own and she could have been comfortable and independent on it if she’d been willing to give in to your grandmother’s ideas about bringing up you two children. They may have been better ideas than her own, but she didn’t think they were. She took on what’s turned out to be a long battle, as she saw it in your behalf. If she got herself into money difficulties so desperate that she was driven to hypothecate the necklace, she did it so that she could give you what she regarded as a fair chance.”

“I’m glad you told me that,” Judy said, after a moment of blank silence. “At least I think I am. But you see it ties me down all the tighter. I’ve got to keep her bargain--one way or the other.”

“You don’t mean,” I cried, “that you’d marry Bruce _now_!”

She nodded.

“But I’m not going to do it,” she said. “We’re going back to The Oaks and find that necklace. You ring for Donovan to come down and help you dress. I’ll leave a note for Bill, and then I’ll go up to the garage and get out your car.”