CHAPTER III

FRUSTRATION OF PUNCH

None of the Corbins went down to the village, which is the better part of two miles from The Oaks, to meet the train. Both Gran and Uncle Alec seemed to think it rather queer that Judy didn’t plan to go, but she explained her position with perfect lucidity.

“We’ve hardly been able to scrape up cars enough to bring them all out in one trip. And mother will be there, of course, to do the arranging.”

“Won’t your young man feel a bit defrauded at not finding you there?” Uncle Alec asked her.

“It’s hard to know about that,” Judy answered him thoughtfully. “That’s another reason. You see, I don’t know whether he’d expect me to kiss him on the station platform or not. I think it’s safer, on the whole, to wait and do it here.”

The train happened to be late, and they waited quite a while--Gran, Uncle Alec, Judy and Punch in the corner of one of the deep verandas that commanded the drive. At last the first car appeared.

“There’s Bruce,” Judy said. “He’s the one in the front seat.”

She turned to her brother with a funny sort of smile, and added, “So it looks as if it were really going to happen, Punch.”

He found, to his consternation, that he had a lump in his throat and he turned away from her quickly to watch the approaching car. She’d upset him horribly, somehow, looking at him like that. It seemed contrary to the laws of nature that that rather good-looking, plump-faced, slightly pompous grown-up could seriously be planning to carry Judy away to live with him. Judy!

The boy’s impulse was to grab her by the arm, drag her around the corner of the house, and bolt with her. Hide somewhere until the excitement had blown over. There were plenty of girls whom no one would miss who might be allowed to marry Mr. Applebury if they liked.

But Judy wouldn’t go with him, he realized, even if he did grab her arm. She’d said good-by to him, somehow, in that one look.

He watched her as she moved off, composedly enough, to meet the car under the porte-cochère. He saw Bruce spring spryly out; he heard Judy’s short little laugh just before she kissed him. Then she turned quickly and began greeting the others. Now they were all coming up into the veranda together, toward the group of three that remained in the corner.

A saving idea occurred to Punch. His grandmother’s room up-stairs had been left unguarded now for a long while. Most of the servants were having lunch; everybody else had been occupied expecting the arriving guests. Sentry duty was his job now. He slipped around the corner of the veranda, entered the house and stole swiftly up the stairs.

The upper hall was deserted. He tried the door to his grandmother’s room. It wasn’t locked, and he went in, crossed over to the safe and tried the door to that. It was locked all right, so he withdrew to the hall again. Down at the end of it stood a big high-sided davenport. It afforded an excellent post of observation, since by crouching down in the lee of one of the great arms one could make one’s self highly unnoticeable, almost invisible.

Through the open windows he could hear cars arriving, one after another, and a steadily rising surge of voices. Sometimes he could isolate Judy’s. Once or twice he heard her laugh. Still the cars kept arriving. Lord, there were a lot of people! And there would be still more to-morrow.

He stayed there for what seemed quite a long while, but it couldn’t have been, really, because, of course, as soon as the baggage had come up from the station, the servants would begin carrying up suit-cases and things to the different rooms.

Presently he heard a step on the stair, coming up in a hurry but quietly. Instantly he was at gaze, breathless to see who would appear around the turn of the landing. It was Judy.

He’d have spoken to her if astonishment had not silenced him. Her face was so white that the color she had put on it stood out unnaturally, and her eyes were wild, like those of a frightened animal.

She looked right at him as she passed, and he thought at first she hadn’t seen him at all. But when she went into her room she left the door open behind her and called his name, not loud, but urgently.

“Come in,” she said, as he halted on the threshold, “and shut the door after you.”

She had flung herself down on the bed. He stood awkwardly beside her, not knowing what he ought to do. She wasn’t crying. He thought she must be suddenly ill.

“Hadn’t I better call mother?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “Don’t call anybody. Don’t do anything. Just stay here a few minutes until I have had time to think. Sit down and give me something to hold on to. It’s rocking like a boat.”

She clutched the hand he gave her with a strength that hurt, and the coldness of hers frightened him. But he obeyed her literally and didn’t try to talk, let alone ask questions.

Presently her grip relaxed and her eyes steadied themselves. Evidently the rocking wasn’t quite so bad. She had a queer look in her face, though there was nothing you could call it but a smile. And then suddenly her eyes filled up with tears and she began to cry. She buried her face in a pillow in order to make no noise, and sobbed and shook. But this somehow didn’t distress him as much as the smile had done.

The crying didn’t last very long, and when it was finished and she looked up at him again and said shakily, “I’m all right now,” he perceived that this was true.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” she said. “I’ve got to think and I can’t, yet. Punch, are you for me? Are you on my side whatever happens--whatever I do?”

“Sure I am!” he told her.

“Sure you are!” she said, and sitting up suddenly, she kissed him in the sort of brief, business-like way that was her fashion.

Then she dropped back again on the pillow.

“Why, this is what happened,” she went on, after a thoughtful silence. “You’re to go down now and tell them all about it. I slipped on a rug, down there in the hall, and turned my ankle, quite hard. And I’m up here now in my bathroom putting it in hot water so it won’t be swollen--for the wedding, you know. And I shan’t be able to play tennis this afternoon, or swim either, I suppose. But otherwise I’m quite all right. You don’t mind being a liar, do you, Punch, in a good cause?”

He told her he didn’t.

“Where did you disappear to when the crowd came?” she asked him suddenly. “You were there just the minute before.”

“Oh, I was sort of keeping an eye on things,” he told her. “Grandmother’s room, you know. On account of the necklace.”

She gave a rather sudden laugh at that, and told him he had that necklace on the brain.

“Forget it!” she commanded him. “Go down and meet the Appleburys. But don’t forget about my ankle.”

Punch got down-stairs in time to find the crowd on the veranda in the act of dispersal to their rooms. He gave Judy’s message to his mother, and it had, of course, the effect of checking, for a few minutes, the movement indoors. People crowded around, plying him for details, and passing the news along.

He was a little uneasy at first from the impression that he had seen a flicker of incredulity in his mother’s eye, but elsewhere belief seemed instantaneous. He avoided elaborating the story, though. He knew only what Judy had told him. He added one small lie of his own. He said he hadn’t seen the ankle himself. She’d been talking to him through the bathroom door.

It was hard luck, they all felt, but there was nothing to be done about it. They might as well go in and dress for tennis or riding, or just lounging about. Punch was requisitioned as usher to show people where their rooms were.

When he had personally conducted a good many of them and the rush was over, he came down-stairs from the third floor to find a man he hadn’t previously seen, standing about indecisively in the second-floor hall.

“I seem to have got lost,” he said to the boy. “I’m William Grant, a cousin of Bruce Applebury. You’re Punch, aren’t you?”

Punch said he was, and took the hand the man held out to him.

“Why, you’re up in what we call The Club,” he said. “That’s on the next floor. I’ll show you.”

“I don’t believe that’s necessary,” the man protested. “I think I can find it if you’ll tell me.”

“Oh, no,” Punch insisted. “I’ll show you. Come along.”

He was deeply perplexed as he turned to mount the stairs. There was nothing queer of course about his having failed to see the man in the crowd on the veranda. There was no reason to doubt his being a wedding guest. He looked like a person who would be one. Punch had liked his looks instantly. He looked sort of lazy, and yet alert too, and as if he was the kind of person that could understand things.

But what he hadn’t in the least looked like, in the moment when Punch first glimpsed him in the hall, was a man who had lost his way and was looking for the door of his own room. It had looked more like waiting than looking. A rather exciting sort of waiting, too.

Had he been a little reluctant to accept Punch’s guidance? Hadn’t he hung back a little, for one last glance around that hall that Gran’s door opened into?

This must have been pure imagination on Punch’s part. There was no mystery about the man’s identity at all events. He was Bruce Applebury’s cousin, all right.

The Club was what they called an irregular suite of three or four bedrooms and a bath, opening through a tiny vestibule of its own into the billiard room. As Punch opened the door and conducted the man in, they saw the prospective bridegroom, already stripped to his underclothes, and getting out of them for his bath.

Punch had to revise one of his estimates immediately. There was nothing fat or soft about Judy’s fiancé. What gave him that stout look was clear muscle. He was a much more impressive and formidable-looking figure like this than when he was covered up with clothes.

“Where in the world have you been?” he said to Punch’s charge.

“Got lost,” the other said cheerfully. “Punch, here, rescued me.”

“Well, look alive,” Bruce commanded, “if you’re going to play tennis.”

“I’m not,” his cousin told him. “Changed my mind.”

“How’s Judy?” Bruce asked Punch. “Has she come out yet?”

Punch said he didn’t think so. He hadn’t seen her, anyhow.

“It’s a shame you won’t be able to see her play, Bill. Her form’s simply immense, and she gets around the court like a little wildcat.”

Punch knew he didn’t like Bruce Applebury when he heard him say this. He was talking already as if he owned her. And what was rather strange, he got the impression that Bill Grant didn’t like it very well either.

He was feeling rather silly as he came down-stairs from The Club over having doubted Bill Grant’s authenticity as a cousin of the bridegroom and having almost suspected him of being a burglar. He had half a mind to try to do as Judy had commanded and forget the necklace. But to his orderly young mind this would have been impossible. He simply couldn’t leave loose ends.

So he crossed to his grandmother’s door and knocked lightly. He didn’t suppose she was there, for she seldom came down-stairs but once before dinner. He just wanted to make sure, once more, that everything was all right. He was on the point of letting himself in, since no voice answered his knock, when he heard footsteps. The door was opened, and he was confronted by Miss Digby. She had a sort of harassed, interrupted air as she opened the door, and it changed to something like exasperation when she saw who the visitor was.

“What do you want?” she demanded. She didn’t offer to let him in.

“Nothing,” he told her truthfully. “I just wanted to make sure that everything was all right.”

“Oh, Punch,” she cried, “go away! Stop bothering about that necklace. Your grandmother’s just come up to lie down. She’s going to rest until dinner time. The strain of meeting so many people was a little too much for her. So don’t be a nuisance if you can help it.”

“All right,” he said, “I won’t,” and she closed the door.

He hung about the upper hall for a little while hoping, since Judy’s door was half open, that she would come out, but she didn’t, so he went forlornly out to the court.

His spirits came up, little by little, out here in the sunshine. There was a lot of good fast tennis. Applebury played insatiably; a hard, wary, efficient sort of game. It was evident he loved it. Punch kept an eye open for Bill Grant, who he hoped would appear among the onlookers, but in this he was disappointed.

He saw him later, though, at the pool, when the tennis was over. Everybody went in then, including Punch himself. Judy, with a cane, and a good big bandage showing through her stocking, came down to watch the sport. She gave so good an imitation of a girl with a damaged ankle that Punch found himself wondering whether perhaps it hadn’t been true that she’d slipped on the rug. And certainly there seemed to be nothing now the matter with her spirits. He was heavily at a discount with himself as a detective when he went into the house to dress for dinner.

This didn’t take him long--all his movements are singularly neat and swift--and he was the first person to come down from the top floor.

His grandmother’s door was open now and when he paused there a moment she called to him to come in. She was dressed for dinner and all ready for her ride down in the elevator. She struck him, just as she had on her first appearance the day before, as being rather unusually bright-looking somehow. And again almost unnaturally amiable.

“How about it, Punch?” she asked. “Shall we give your sister something to make up to her for her bad ankle? Nobody will look at her ankles if she has the pearls around her neck. Why shouldn’t she wear them to-night? Give that bridegroom of hers a treat. Let him see what he’s going to get.”

Punch was moved to protest. “I sort of don’t think she’d want to wear them to-night,” he said. “It’s nearly two whole days before the wedding.”

“Go and call her,” his grandmother commanded, starting to wheel herself over to the safe. “No, don’t stop to help me. I don’t need it. Go tell your sister as soon as she’s dressed to come to me.”

Punch went on the errand a little reluctantly, and gave the message to Judy through the door.

He meant to dart back to his grandmother’s room in time to see her open the safe. He was curious as to whether this time it was locked or not. But Judy detained him.

“I’ll go now,” she said. “I’m dressed all but my dress, and I don’t want to put that on till it’s time to go down to dinner. Come in here a minute.”

She was putting on, as he entered the room, some sort of kimono-like garment of orange-colored silk. But she arrested the action to laugh at the sight of him.

“You look so nice and innocent, with your hair brushed,” she explained, and having her arms in her sleeves by this time, she came over and hugged him. “Oh, Punch, you’re a dear,” she cried. “You made an instantaneous hit this afternoon. Do you know that?”

It wasn’t the caress that made him uncomfortable, nor yet the compliment. It was the sort of wildness there was about her look.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen,” she went on, still holding him by the shoulders and looking at him very intently. “I don’t know that it matters--much--what does. Only--you haven’t forgotten what you said this afternoon? You’re on my side, you know.”

He told her that he was and that he hadn’t forgotten.

“All right,” she said. “Come along to grandmother. Do you know what she wants?”

He was afraid, somehow, that if he told her she’d refuse, so instead of answering her question he reminded her that she was starting off without her cane. She laughed and darted across the room to get it. Then, with her arm through his, she limped decorously down the hall to her grandmother’s room.

The old lady had opened the safe door, and had the brown morocco case in her lap.

“That isn’t your dinner dress, is it?” she complained at sight of her granddaughter. “I sent word you were to come when you were dressed. I wanted to see how you’d look in the pearls. However, now you’re here, you may as well put them on.”

Punch had been watching his sister, for the sight of the morocco case in his grandmother’s lap had convinced him that everything was all right. He saw her eyes widen a little.

At the same moment his grandmother uttered a wheezy sort of shriek. He turned and looked. The box she held in her hand was empty.

“Shut the door!” Judy commanded, and his prompt obedience came none too soon, for with the old woman’s next breath she cried out, full voice, “They’re gone. She’s taken them. Your mother’s taken them.”

“Are they _really_ gone?” Judy asked.

Then to Punch’s amazement she began to laugh.