CHAPTER II

SHOAL WATER

Punch’s sense of duty condemned him to a rather dull day. He ate a solitary lunch, for his mother hadn’t returned from town, and Judy was apparently making a day of it with his bicycle. He spent several uneventful hours wandering over the house, watching workmen and servants going about their duty, but without detecting anything that looked suspicious. Of course he couldn’t be everywhere at once.

The Oaks is an enormous house; old, as such matters are reckoned out in this part of the world. It was built about fifty years ago, of dark red brick with Gothic trimmings in wood, three stories high, and a nervous-looking, high peaked roof on top of that.

Structurally it hasn’t been altered very much, save for additional bathrooms, the installation of electric lights and an elaborate system of burglar alarms. The place is a regular fort. One incongruous innovation, namely an elevator, was necessitated by old Mrs. Corbin’s illness. She might, of course, have moved down to rooms on the ground floor, but she wasn’t willing to do that. She said she’d lived in those rooms ever since she came to the house as a bride and she was going to die in them. She’d have found it unendurable, too, no doubt, to give up the possibility of visiting any room in her house; seeing to it that the house-maids did their duty.

It abounded, of course, in odd, unused and half-forgotten nooks and crannies. On a rainy day Punch found endless enjoyment in exploring these, and he probably knew more about the house, little of his life as he had spent in it, than anybody else, his grandmother included.

The old lady appeared for the first time that day about four o’clock. She impressed Punch as unusually bright, and in the main, good-humored, although her dismissal of poor Miss Digby at sight of him was brusk, and her comments on his mother’s continued absence decidedly caustic. She put him in charge of her wheel chair, and elected to make a tour of the house to see how things were going. There were still workmen on every floor, but it began to look as if they were going to finish in time.

From the wheel chair she allotted the rooms for her expected guests, from memory. Although she forgot some of them, and her plans had to be heavily revised, it struck the boy as a remarkable evidence, not only of her disposition to run things, but of her ability to do so. His mother wouldn’t have been capable of it, he felt pretty sure. But of course she’d never have tried to do it without a list.

The outline of the scheme was simple enough. The unmarried men, groom, best man, ushers and odd relations, such as Punch’s mysterious Uncle Alec, were to have the top floor. Punch’s own quarters were up there. The middle of this story was a billiard room. It was surrounded by a regular rabbit warren of bedrooms and the only daylight it got came from a big window on the landing of the stairs.

Married couples, maiden aunts, bridesmaids and so on had their rooms on floors below.

Punch found all these decisions and indecisions rather stupid--his thoughts remained on the necklace--and when the tour of inspection was finally finished and his grandmother returned to her own sitting-room, he tactfully brought up the subject by asking her how old she supposed the safe was and whether his grandfather had bought it. It was a rather big old-fashioned affair of cast iron, lacquered, and with a picture of a startled stag painted on the door--one of the first works of art that Punch had ever admired.

“Yes, your grandfather bought it,” the old lady admitted. “And it’s a good safe, too. They don’t make things as well as that now-a-days.”

“Perhaps not,” Punch agreed. “But I think they make them harder to break into. I read in a magazine a while ago that any safe more than ten years old might just as well be left unlocked, as far as burglars were concerned.”

“Well, I don’t leave this one unlocked,” his grandmother said grimly, “burglars or no. What are you getting at, you young rascal? Still thinking about that necklace?”

Punch admitted that he was.

“Like a look at it?” she asked.

Would he!

He darted over to the safe. “Let me unlock it, Gran,” he pleaded. “Tell me the combination. See if I can do it.”

“You let it alone,” she ordered. “I’ll do it myself.”

She began wheeling her chair across the room, but the next moment Punch had turned the handle and pulled the great door open.

“Why, Gran,” he cried, horrified, “it wasn’t locked!”

The pearls, like all the other contents of the irregularly shelved, cubby-holed place, were safe all right, and as soon as this had been discovered to be a fact, the old lady tried hard to convince her grandson that she had known that it was unlocked all the time. But he knew that for a minute she had been absolutely incapacitated by terror, and the look in her withered old face was one that he didn’t like to remember. She had simply forgotten to lock the safe the last time she’d gone to it. She was too badly shaken to do anything for herself. Even after he’d found the long morocco covered box in the place she’d indicated, she was too weak to press the spring that released the lid.

Punch found the pearls rather disappointing. They were beautiful, of course. Big and round and handsome, and rather nice to touch. But as anything to commit a crime for, or to pay a fortune for, he couldn’t see it. He was too polite to express these opinions to his grandmother, who he perceived was deeply moved by the sight of the thing.

She told him a long history of the necklace, the occasion of his grandfather’s buying it, and the admiration it had excited on various memorable occasions.

“Are you really going to give it to Judy?” he asked.

“What’s that about Judy?” she demanded.

She wasn’t deaf a bit, he was sure, but she often asked to have things repeated. His theory of this was that it gave her more time to decide what she wanted to say.

“It was in the paper yesterday,” he explained, “that you were going to give the necklace to Judy for a wedding present.”

He extricated from his pocket the same damp wad of paper he had offered for my inspection that morning. She didn’t pretend to read it, though. Her vision wasn’t nearly so good as her hearing, and without her spectacles, which she hated to wear, she couldn’t read at all.

“So they had it in the paper, did they?” she remarked. “Well, it’s an amazing thing how much these newspaper reporters know. What has Judy got to say about it?”

“She hasn’t said anything to me,” Punch told her.

“How about your mother? I dare say she had some ideas on the subject.”

“I haven’t seen mother,” Punch pointed out to her, “since she went to town with Judy last week. But what I thought was that as long as it _did_ come out in the paper, it would be better to hide these where no one would think of looking for them, instead of leaving them in the safe, which is the first place where any one would look. Especially while there are so many people we don’t know around the house. I _know_ I could hide them, Gran, where they’d be safe.”

He had an idea that she was considering the proposal favorably. At any rate she didn’t at once decline it. But in the middle of the silence there came a light tap on the door.

Punch admits that he jumped a little himself, for they hadn’t heard any footsteps. His grandmother started violently, then called, “Who’s there?”

“It’s Victoria,” Punch heard his mother say. “May I come in?”

He thought his grandmother made a move to put the pearls back in the safe, but she changed her mind, and answered rather sharply, “Yes, of course. Come in.”

He thought the sight of the pearls surprised his mother.

“Letting Punch have a gloat over them, are you?” she said. “I’ve had a frightful ride out from town. That’s a beastly train.--I suppose,” she went on, reverting to the necklace, “that you’ve heard what was in the paper. They say you’re going to give them to Judy for a wedding present.”

“So Punch has just been telling me,” his grandmother remarked dryly.

She didn’t add anything to that, and Punch looked over at his mother. He got the queer impression that she was holding her breath. She seemed awfully tired and worried, anyway.

“Well,” she said at last, “I suppose that sort of irresponsibility is what we have to expect from the papers.--Unless,” she went on jerkily, after another pause, “this happens to be the truth.”

“I can make it the truth if I like,” the old woman said.

“Yes, of course,” his mother remarked. “No one questions that.”

Punch was getting uncomfortable. It’s horribly embarrassing to children to be present when their elders quarrel, and of course he was sensitive enough to feel electricity in the air. He brought the lightning down upon himself.

“Well, they can’t be given to Judy if they’re stolen by a burglar first,” he pointed out. “Won’t you let me have them, Gran, to hide for you?”

She turned upon him furiously. “No, I will not! And I won’t be nagged to death about them either, by you or by any one else.”

She whipped around on her daughter-in-law. “Why shouldn’t I give them to Judy?” she demanded. “She’s my own granddaughter, isn’t she?”

“Judy says she doesn’t want them ...” his mother began.

But his grandmother pounced upon her again.

“You’ve been trying to talk her out of it, have you? So that you could get them for yourself? Well, that settles it. She shall have them whether she wants them or not. And once she’s married you’ll find her husband will have something to say about what she does with them. I won’t hear another word about them. Ring for Miss Digby, Punch.”

She wheeled her chair forward, restored the pearls to the safe, tugged shut, with a good deal of trouble, the big iron door herself, waving off their proffered assistance, and spun the combination knob.

“Don’t try to tell me I don’t keep this locked,” she said.

The thing that seemed to be puzzling Punch, when he reported the scene to me, was his grandmother’s sudden change of mind about confiding the pearls to him.

“I think she really meant to let me hide them,” he said. “Anyhow she didn’t get mad when I suggested it the first time. But the second time she pretty near blew me out of the room.”

I didn’t offer the boy the upshot of my own speculations, which was that a sudden suspicion had sprung up in the old woman’s mind that her grandson was in league with his mother, and that the original suggestion, that he be given the pearls to hide, had come from her.

Punch didn’t see anything more of his mother that day, until he came down into the drawing-room dressed for dinner, where he found her talking to Judy. They went right on talking, somewhat enigmatically, after they’d seen him come in, so he had felt entitled to listen and make what he could of it.

They both looked as if the conversation had been rather exciting. But Judy was speaking now more affectionately than was her wont. It was as if they’d made up a quarrel about something.

“But of _course_ I will, mother! I understand, and I’ll do it exactly. You leave it to me. I won’t give anybody a chance at it, old Eagle-Eye or any one else. And please don’t bother about it, mother. It isn’t as if I cared.”

“You’re a queer child,” her mother said. “Is it really true that you don’t care?”

“Not the smallest conceivable--damn!” said Judy. She smiled a very small smile, and added “I don’t know about Bruce, though. You may have to square me with him.”

“You’ll have no trouble squaring yourself with him,” her mother told her.

There must have been, Punch thought, some significance in the words that Judy didn’t like, for she turned sharply away, and he saw that her face had flushed.

But Uncle Alec came into the room just then and that talk was over. He’d arrived only about an hour before.

Punch was inclined to approve of his long lost uncle. He was quite jolly, and kept them entertained through what would otherwise have been a pretty painful dinner, with Gran up at the head of the table still in the frame of mind she’d been in after her quarrel with her daughter-in-law. He told them about his tobacco plantation, and his plans for growing rubber, and spun a few delightfully bloodcurdling tales about Moros and Igorots.

Then, just as everything was going so well, he went off the deep end by saying something about Judy’s necklace. He’d been reading yesterday’s paper in the train.

Punch didn’t know how the quarrel flared up again. Everybody went on trying to be polite for a while, but it wasn’t long before the fat was in the fire. He fastened his eyes upon his plate and tried not to listen to the blistering things his grandmother was saying. Uncle Alec was horrified, of course. He did his best to pacify his mother, but without avail. And finally Punch’s mother got up and left the room. He wasn’t surprised. He only wondered that she’d stood it as long as she did.

He didn’t see her again that evening, and when he came down to breakfast next day Belden, the old butler, told him she’d gone to town on the early train and was coming back with the guests on the special car that afternoon.

She hated the journey to town, he knew, and he thought it rather funny that she should undertake it again on a hot morning like this, the very day that most of their guests, including the Applebury clan, were coming down.

I silently agreed with him--more heartily than I was willing to admit. There were several things that looked rather queer to me. I couldn’t resist asking a question or two.

“Have you seen Judy this morning?”

He shook his head. “I haven’t seen anybody but Uncle Alec. He was down to breakfast and we walked around the place for a while, afterward. He asked me about a million questions. I like him, though.”

I wanted to know what he looked like.

“Oh, kind of peaceful and jolly. But he sees things quickly enough. I told him about where Gran keeps the necklace. I sort of left him in charge so that I could come over here.”

“You don’t think,” I hazarded, “that he was the person Judy meant by ‘old Eagle-Eye’?”

He looked rather thoughtful over that, but said he didn’t. “Somehow he isn’t like that. Anyhow, I thought she was talking about the man she’s going to marry--Bruce Applebury.”

This didn’t strike me as likely. The adjective old, for instance. Applebury was under thirty. But then Judy, like Punch himself, wouldn’t hesitate to apply it to any one over twenty-five.

I grew more apprehensive and indignant as I turned the matter over in my mind after Punch had gone back--“on the job,” as he said. Victoria was in shoal water of some sort. There couldn’t be any doubt of that. Academically speaking, I was sorry for her. But I had no sympathy with what seemed like an attempt to drag Judy into the breakers with her.

Oh yes, I’m sentimental about Judy. I may as well admit that at once.