CHAPTER XIX

THE AUTOCRAT

We made a rather silent meal, served imperturbably by Belden. I found myself wondering whether that perfect butler’s manner would survive the events which this volcanic day was likely to bring forth. Did he foresee, or even allow himself to guess, what they might be? If I’d been alone with him I would have sounded him out, since he and I are friends of long standing, but in the presence of a comparative stranger like Mr. Smith it wasn’t possible.

Just as we finished Victoria came in and the old gentleman, perceiving that she wanted to talk to me, withdrew with his cigar for a stroll in the veranda. She wasted no time after he had gone.

“You don’t owe me any favors,” she began candidly. “I haven’t been any too decent to you, lately, but I believe you’ll help all the same.”

“I’m glad you believe that,” I told her. “I wish you wouldn’t think of me as unfriendly. I’ll be glad to do all I can to help you as soon as I know what it is that wants to be done.”

“There’s only one possible thing to do,” she asserted urgently. “There can’t be two opinions about that; not two sane opinions. And if we’re going to save anything at all out of the wreck we’ve got to do it at once. But it can’t be done--nothing can be done--till my mother-in-law can be persuaded to consent to it. You know she won’t listen to me--so I’m putting it up to you.”

“I still don’t know what the thing is,” I told her. “If it aims in any way at a reconciliation between Judy and Bruce Applebury, looking toward their marriage....”

She interrupted me with a sharp laugh. “We’re long past that,” she answered me. “They’re leaving, the whole crowd, on the eleven o’clock train to town. Do you wonder?”

“Not a bit. They’ll have had enough of the Wild West, that crowd, to last them another ten generations. Think of the myth that will grow up among them, to terrify wayward little Appleburys with.”

Victoria smiled at that in spite of herself.

“Oh, if you want to joke about it....” she said petulantly.

“You don’t regret it, do you?” I asked. “You love Judy, and you know her. You wouldn’t want her to marry a man like that!”

“Oh, I suppose not,” she admitted. “He shouldn’t have told her, when he did, that he’d lent me money. And of course he shouldn’t have tried to make us think that Bill had stolen the necklace.

“But what’s the good talking about that? Do you realize what’s supposed to happen to-day? There are more than a thousand people who’ve been invited to this wedding. There’s a special train coming down from town. It’s to leave at two o’clock. And there’ll be hundreds coming from all around the county in cars.

“There’s just one thing to do, unless we mean to have Belden meet them at the gate and send them home. Judy’s grandmother’s got to be suddenly ill. She could be easily enough. Everybody knows about her. With all this excitement it’s likely to happen before night, anyhow.

“But if she’ll agree to it now, within the next half-hour or so, we can call up all the afternoon papers in town and tell them the wedding’s been postponed on account of it. We can cancel the special train and have someone at the station to tell them about it. We can telephone to a lot of people who’d be driving, and Belden can turn back 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. Punch, very casually, followed along behind.

“I know what she’s saying to him,” Judy remarked. “She was talking to me about it just now. She wants to know where we’re going--on our wedding trip. She seems to think we’ve got to go somewhere now, to-night--if only to a hotel in town. In order to be--decent, you know.”

“I’ll tell you where you can go if you don’t want to do that,” I said. “Go down to my cottage. Just walk off, the two of you, now, any time you like.”

“Oh, you darling!” she cried, and put her head down on my shoulder with something like a sob of relief. “Do you mean we can stay there?”

“As long as you like,” I told her. “I got things ready, more or less, on the chance, when I went home to lunch. I’ll get Mrs. Corbin to take me in up here. You’ll find enough to eat to last you till Monday, anyhow.”

“Your nice little house,” she murmured, “--that I thought I was going to be married in. But this is better.”

She sprang up, all trace of fatigue gone.

“Bill,” she called.

Victoria followed them into the house.

Punch dropped down beside me.

“Well,” he said, “it’s been a perfectly wonderful three days, hasn’t it? I don’t suppose I’ll ever have anything as exciting as that happen again. But I’m sort of glad it’s over.--Only, where do you suppose mother’s going to keep the necklace till she can put it in the bank on Monday?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But if she tells you I shall never forgive her. You can trust her with it, anyhow. She won’t lose it.”

“No,” said Punch contentedly, “I guess she won’t.”

THE END

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