CHAPTER V

THE LEGS OF A SUIT OF PAJAMAS

Punch didn’t want to be sent to bed, so he was adroitly evading his mother’s notice, flitting about the edges of the evening’s gaiety and lingering in the shadows. It was a warm windless evening. It would be stuffy in his little room on the top floor and he was feeling wide awake and rather restless. But out-of-doors, in the verandas and on the lawn, it was nice. The moon was dead full, hanging, an undisputed dignitary, in the cloudless sky. Not so exciting as when it went sailing through a scud of flying clouds, but he didn’t crave excitement just now. He’d had enough.

They were dancing in the big west drawing-room--some of them were. Some of them seemed to share--though it couldn’t be from the fear of being sent to bed--his own preference for the shadows. In a sort of glade down at the bottom of the lawn, so far away that the music must almost have been inaudible, one pair were dancing, barefoot, Punch believed. There’d been some talk of what fun it would be, and Judy had applauded the idea, though she herself wasn’t dancing, of course, because of her ankle.

She was permanently established in a long chair in the corner of the veranda, holding a sort of court between dances, and always with one man or another beside her when the music played. She adored dancing, Punch knew, and he wondered a little that she didn’t permit her ankle to get better.

Bruce Applebury danced indefatigably. He always came back with his partner and sat beside Judy during the intermissions. But Punch had heard Judy tell him it was his duty to make the rounds of at least all the bridesmaids, so he didn’t sit out many dances with her.

Punch was beginning to feel a little like a ghost. The mixture of cold moonlight with the music and the odor of a great thicket of lilac bushes in bloom at the corner of the house, was distilling a sort of melancholy in him, when the voice of the one he had privately ticketed as the nice bridesmaid roused him from the trance into which he was drifting.

“Oh, but I’ve promised this dance to Punch,” he heard her say to the man who, with his hand on her arm, was trying to lead her down from the veranda to the lawn.

He’d approached them unconsciously in his irregular orbit--Judy was the center of it--but on hearing this, he stopped before her and made her his best bow. The man, with a laugh, relinquished her arm, said he’d come back for the next, and strolled away, lighting a cigarette.

Punch didn’t know the girl’s name; their acquaintance had begun in a spontaneous exchange of smiles at the tennis court, and they’d had a lot of fun together in the pool.

“I _can_ dance,” he said, a little doubtfully, when they were left alone, “but I’m not sure that mother doesn’t think I’ve gone to bed.”

The girl laughed and laid her hand on his arm. “We’ll go for a little walk instead then,” she decided.

She was a nice girl, and Punch didn’t think she’d make the opening remark which some of the others, earlier in the day, had devastated him with, “Won’t you miss Judy horribly when she’s married?”

His confidence was justified. She didn’t. She talked about sensible things: swimming strokes, and how it felt the first time you tried a high dive; the probable delights of owning a motorcycle, and so on. Eventually they got around to talking about the pleasures of not traveling in Europe and the advantages of being an American.

When they heard the music stop, he said, with real regret, “I suppose if you’re promised for the next dance I’d better take you back.” After a ripple of applause they heard the dance go on again, but now they were strolling back toward the house.

“I envy Judy,” she said suddenly. “I wish I had a nice young brother of my own.”

“If you did,” Punch blurted out, “you’d probably just go and get married.”

She withdrew her hand from his arm, where it had rested quite comfortably all the while. He needed both his hands just then, for his eyes were threatening him with disaster. She put her arm across his shoulders and for a moment held him tight. Then she let him go, and walked on.

“It’s funny how black the shadows are in the moonlight,” she said. “You can’t see a thing. Do you know yet where you’re going to college?”

She _was_ a nice girl.

They came up into the veranda just as the dance was coming to an end--really this time. The man she had left was waiting there to claim her, and Punch turned for a look at Judy. He had an idea that he might sit out the next dance with her.

She happened, just then, to be alone. A moment earlier, Punch was sure, a man had been standing before her, bending over. Now he was gone, and Judy was holding something in her hand. A letter, or what looked like it. Not just a scrap of a note, for when she tried to fold it small it offered some resistance.

This movement seemed half frightened, although this didn’t exactly describe the look that was in her face. She started to tuck the thing down inside her dress, suddenly desisted and, with an exasperated laugh, snatched it out again. She glanced around, helplessly at a loss. Then her hand darted out to a narrow-necked Chinese vase which stood on the table beside her, and she pushed her letter down inside. It wouldn’t be very easy to get out again, Punch reflected, for the hastily folded paper would spring apart.

The next moment Bruce Applebury came out through the open French window from the drawing-room and sat down beside her.

“Just on the minute,” she remarked to him. “Like a man in a play.”

Punch stood rooted where he was. He wouldn’t have gone to her even if Bruce Applebury hadn’t come out. The fog of trouble which the nice bridesmaid had for the while dissipated stole again over his spirit.

He didn’t know who the man was who had given Judy the letter--except, of course, that it wasn’t Bruce. He’d barely glimpsed him out of the corner of his eye. There was something secret and hasty about the whole episode that didn’t go with his idea of Judy. What he hated worst about it was the look in her face that disputed with the fright in it.

He was sunk so deep in a brown study that his mother caught him without difficulty and sent him to bed.

But it wasn’t so easy to send him to sleep. The music went on and on, floating in through his open window, nagging his jangled nerves. It was punctuated, too, by disconcerting little fragments of talk coming up astonishingly clear now and then from the strollers on the lawn. Nothing that meant anything; just broken phrases, exclamations, giggles. It annoyed him that people could be so horribly silly.

He must have drifted off, though, at last, for he sat up suddenly in bed, bolt awake from an unreasonably unpleasant dream. The party must be over and everybody gone to bed, for the house was silent, except, he noted with disgust, for the grumble of conversation that was going on in the adjoining bedroom. Bill Grant’s it was, and he imagined he identified the other voice, that was doing most of the talking, as Bruce Applebury’s. He couldn’t hear what they were saying. He was afraid though that if they talked any louder he might hear.

He lay down again and turned and tossed. No hope of getting asleep till they stopped. Finally, in desperation he got up, padded softly out through the billiard room to a near-by bathroom, got himself a drink and splashed his hot face with cold water. This refreshed him somewhat, but he didn’t want to go back to his room. The big davenport in the hall, one flight down, occurred to him as a quieter, and perhaps cooler, place to sleep. He wouldn’t need any covers. It was too hot a night. So with infinite precautions against noise he stole down there. He’d meant to sleep there anyway if the necklace had not already been stolen.

It wasn’t very dark down there in the second-floor hall. It had two big windows at one end and an enormous one above the stair-landing at the other. And the big moon still had everything her own way in the cloudless sky.

In spite of his precautions against making any noise, he did make one. In the process of disposing the pillows on the davenport, he dropped one on the floor with a plop.

A moment or two later Judy’s door opened, and she asked, in a clear, penetrating whisper, “Who’s that?”

“I dropped a pillow,” he said. “I didn’t mean to disturb you.”

“You!” she said.

She came over to the davenport and stood looking down at him. She had on the same orange-colored kimono that she’d worn when she went to her grandmother’s room before dinner.

“What are you doing down here?” she asked. “Still keeping watch?”

“It was stuffy up in my room,” he explained, “and I couldn’t sleep.”

She gave a little shiver, not with cold, and sat down beside where he lay.

“I can’t sleep either,” she told him. “It’s beastly. Punch, I tell you what let’s do. Let’s go out for a ride on bicycles. There’s another one besides yours up in the old stable. You go ahead and get them, and I’ll meet you here by the corner of the veranda.”

If he’d been feeling just right about Judy he’d have taken the thing as a lark and gone, but he didn’t feel right. Her mention of the corner of the veranda reminded him of something.

“I don’t want to go up-stairs and get dressed,” he objected. “There were some people talking up there when I came down.”

She seemed concerned by that and asked him quickly, “Who?”

“I don’t know,” he told her. “They were in Bill Grant’s room.”

She glanced sharply in the direction of the stairs as if she thought she’d heard something, but decided she hadn’t.

“You don’t have to dress,” she pleaded. “Pajamas are all right, and I’ll lend you a pair of my sneakers.”

“The whole house is locked up tight,” he objected. “We’d probably set off the burglar alarm if we tried to open a door or a window down-stairs.”

“We can go out my window, can’t we?”

That made the thing seem more fun, and he all but yielded; indeed he had moved to get up from the davenport, when he noticed something.

“You’ve started to dress already, Judy,” he said.

“Shirt and bloomers,” she admitted. “Yes, I was going out anyway. I was getting ready to when I heard you drop that pillow. I’ve left something I want, down on the veranda.”

“That letter?” he asked.

There was a breathless sort of silence between them.

At last she said, “Don’t you care, Punch. You’ll understand some day, maybe.”

He’d have gone with her then if he’d felt sure she wanted him, sure that the proposal of a ride with him hadn’t been a mere pretext of hers for an opportunity to recover her letter while he was up at the stable getting out the bicycles. It was with a very sore spirit that he lay down on the davenport again and let her go back to her own room and close the door after her without a word.

He lay there straining his ears for a sound from her, but she must have been moving about as quietly as a ghost for he heard nothing. Perhaps he’d be able to hear her when she came in though, and she’d turn on the light, wouldn’t she, to read her letter by?

But still there was nothing. The silence in the big house remained unbroken.

He stood it as long as he could; then went to Judy’s door, opened it and after a glance about the deserted room, left it open. He’d know, now, when she came back, anyhow.

After that once more he fell asleep, only to be wakened as before by a dream, or so he supposed at the moment, though he realized afterward that the soft closing of a door might have done it. He sat up, and now he heard footsteps shuffling along in felt slippers, and turning he saw a man in pajamas crossing the hall.

There was more light than ever now. The moon shone slantwise through the great window on the landing and threw a brightly lighted patch upon the floor. As the legs of these pajamas crossed this patch he saw them very plainly. They were gray, or lavender, or perhaps a washed-out blue, and there was a triangular tear, such as might happen from getting caught on a nail, in one of them. The rest of the man he couldn’t see so well, and in a moment he was nothing but a shadowed silhouette.

Punch almost spoke to him automatically, but checked himself with the reflection that by doing so he’d give some slightly embarrassed guest on his way to the bathroom a horrible start.

The next moment he sat up straighter and held his breath. The man didn’t turn into the bathroom. He went straight on up-stairs. That was strange. Why should a guest who slept on this floor go up-stairs in the middle of the night? Or if his room were up there, why had he come down?

The boy was rather frightened now, and the realization that he was made it a point of honor with him to investigate the mystery if he could. So softly and swiftly he stole up-stairs too, alert for the sound of a closing door or glimpse of a streak of light under one of them. There wasn’t a sound, and the blackness up here in the billiard room was all but complete. Was somebody lurking there, waiting? Some one who had heard his following footsteps?

He stood still, overcoming a panicky impulse of flight. He at last mustered his courage--really considerable, it seems to me--to the point of moving over to the switch and turning on the light in the tin-shaded chandelier over the table. The room was empty. The mystery remained unsolved.

Well, he had done all he could anyhow, and he turned off the light again and stole down-stairs.

He now went into Judy’s room and glanced around. No, she hadn’t come back yet. She must have gone on that bicycle ride after all. It must be horribly late. He carried her watch from the night-table to the window. After three. He stole back to his uneasy bed on the davenport.

He wasn’t yet quite at the end of his night’s adventures. He sprang up again almost before he’d had time to lie down. His grandmother’s door was opening. Somebody with an electric torch was coming out.

“Who’s that?” he asked sharply.

The figure gave a violent start. It was Miss Digby in her old plum-colored bathrobe.

“Punch!” she cried, “what are you doing here?”

“Trying to get a night’s sleep,” he said. “What’s happened? Is anything wrong with grandmother?”

“No,” Miss Digby said. “I was waked up a few minutes ago by hearing this door shut. I’ve been frightened pretty near out of my wits. I wish you wouldn’t go poking around the house in the middle of the night.”

He didn’t tell her he hadn’t shut a door. The only thing on his mind was Judy’s door standing open. Old Digs mustn’t go in there and find that she was gone. So he told her he wouldn’t poke around any more, and, glad to be rid of her so easily, went back to the davenport.