CHAPTER VII

IN THE SUMMER-HOUSE

It was from Victoria that I learned of the return of the necklace. She telephoned me about nine o’clock Friday morning, and I was disposed at first to be rather touched by her consideration for my own anxiety on the subject. She cut short my congratulations, though, as soon as she decently could, and made it plain that she had no time just then to satisfy my thirst for details. She spoke suavely enough, but even over the telephone I could guess that her troubles weren’t over yet.

“I wonder if you’ll do something for me?” she asked. “You’ve a spare room down there at the cottage, haven’t you?”

“Yes,” I said. “Surely. Whom do you want me to put up?”

I was rather hoping she’d say Punch, but she didn’t.

“You’ve heard of old Mr. Ethelbert Smith, haven’t you? I don’t believe you’ve met him, because he’s lived in Paris for years and years and years. He’s an old friend of Mrs. Corbin. I think he’s older than she is. She invited him especially to come down for the wedding, and he writes this morning to say he’ll come. I can make room for him, but I thought with all the crowd and confusion here, he’d perhaps be more comfortable with you.”

“I’ll be delighted,” I assured her. “When’s he coming?”

“I’m afraid it’s awfully short notice,” she said. “He’s coming down to-day on the morning train. I’ll meet him myself and bring him around to you about eleven o’clock. Of course I want both of you to come over for dinner to-night--if you’ll keep him for me until then?”

“I can see that he gets over safely for dinner,” I told her. “I don’t think I can come myself. A leg in a cast is a pretty awkward thing to dispose of under a dining table.”

“Well,” she said, “I’ll argue that out with you later. It’s awfully nice of you to take him off my hands. He seemed just a little more than I could manage to-day.”

Glad as I was to be serviceable, I wasn’t very much thrilled by the particular job Victoria had wished on me. She made it so plain that she regarded him as an incumbrance--she’d as good as said I wasn’t to permit him to escape to The Oaks until dinner time to-night--that I didn’t look forward much to six or eight hours of the ancient man’s undiluted society.

I passed a restless unpleasant sort of morning, and by eleven o’clock I was feeling sorry for myself. Punch hadn’t turned up for his morning call. I was mindful, too, of Judy’s promise to come and give me a look at Bruce Applebury. Unless they came early, before old Mr. Ethelbert Smith arrived, I shouldn’t have much chance for a real visit with them.

They hadn’t come, though, nor had I received any word of any sort from The Oaks, when, at a little after eleven, Victoria delivered her guest at my door. On hearing the car drive up I’d sent out Donovan, my nurse, to help fetch the old gentleman inside, and I’m afraid I betrayed my surprise with an unmannerly stare when there came in at her heels a very tall old man, slender and straight as a lance, as he stood erect after the rather ceremonious bow he had made when he ushered Victoria into my doorway.

Anything more unlike the image of senile decay which she had prepared me for, it would be hard to imagine. He was old, to be sure, very old, perhaps, for his lean clean-shaven face was deeply lined and his short white hair was, no doubt, thinner than it once had been. He looked a little like the picture of Oliver Wendell Holmes. Not Mr. Justice Holmes--his father. His dark eyes had a twinkle of ironic amusement in them, which may have been due merely to the astonishment I had momentarily exhibited at sight of him, or may have been due to something else.

Victoria introduced us rather breathlessly and then, cutting across our politely reciprocal murmurs, said, “I really can’t stop a minute. If you knew what things were like at the house.... You’ll both excuse me, won’t you? And we’ll all see you at dinner; it’s at eight, you know.”

With that she was gone, so hastily that she almost collided in the entry with the chauffeur who was bringing in Mr. Smith’s bags.

“There’s a certain economy about Victoria’s method,” he remarked in a tone of dry amusement. He added instantly, with the friendliest concern, “Oh, don’t let me keep you on your crutches.” He waved me back to my couch, and to make it easier for me to obey the gracious gesture, he promptly seated himself in a near-by chair.

“I’m afraid she’s rather foisted me upon you,” he went on, “under the pretext that she can’t make me comfortable in the other house. I don’t know what she thinks I want. I’m an old campaigner, and not an exigent person at all, so you’re not to allow me to weigh upon your conscience or your spirits. Presently your man shall show me where my room is, and then you’re to trust me to make myself comfortable.”

He left me with something to think about after these suggestions had been carried out. Whatever reason Victoria might have had for not wanting Mr. Ethelbert Smith at The Oaks, it was not the reason she had given me. The man would have been a social asset at any house party. I felt sure that he would have enjoyed the jolly confusion generated by a crowd of high-spirited young people as well as anybody. And I believed Victoria knew it perfectly well. They seemed, at least, to be pretty well acquainted. His characterization of her high-handed ways as “economy of method” showed that.

He’d seemed a little surprised at my asking him if he’d just returned from Paris.

“Oh, no,” he said. “I retired from business several years ago and when I did that I came home. I do a little work now and then--for Lloyds, mostly--just to keep from getting rusty, and by way of having leisure to enjoy. A man with no occupation, you know,” he remarked, “has no leisure. He’s kept busy all the time looking for something to do.”

I laughed at that, tapped my stone leg and told him I agreed with him heartily.

It may have been this expression of my own weariness of doing nothing which led him, when he came down-stairs again a little later, coolly clad in mohair, to make a suggestion which produced some unexpected results.

“I was thinking of going out for a stroll,” he said, “but why don’t you come with me? That wheel chair of yours looks seaworthy. I saw a pleasant little summer-house up on the hill, beyond your ruins. Couldn’t Donovan wheel you up there, with a little help perhaps from me? You’d enjoy a change and a new view, and, I should think, a certain amount of exercise.”

It was a perfectly practicable idea, as well as an attractive one, so we carried it out at once. I wondered a little that I hadn’t thought of it myself days ago. He carried my field-glasses along to amuse himself with and I was munitioned with a book, so that he might feel at liberty to stroll off and leave me if the humor took him. This, after a period of pleasant chat about nothing in particular, is what he did.

The summer-house is nothing much but a conical roof supported by rustic trellised poles, open at all sides to the breeze, and though these are more or less overgrown with vines, it still commands a pretty wide prospect all around the hill. I turned my back on the melancholy ruin of my house and faced down the path by which we had come, the cottage in the middle of my view with the road to The Oaks winding down the valley.

I sat there contentedly enough for quite a while, ruminating and hardly more than half awake. The mysteries connected with old Mrs. Corbin’s necklace were still mysterious to me, to be sure, but since the thing had been returned, my interest in it was largely academic. I hadn’t, you are to remember, seen Punch that morning.

I was mildly curious about my guest. I wondered what the business had been that had kept him living in Paris so many years. He hadn’t volunteered to tell me, and of course I hadn’t asked. And what was the sort of work that he did occasionally for Lloyds? Since they write every conceivable kind of insurance, the name didn’t tell me much.

I was aroused suddenly by becoming aware that I was going to have visitors. I can’t say how, because I can’t remember having heard their footsteps or their voices. My back was to the entrance, so I wheeled my chair around to see who it was.

Judy and her young man! She’d remembered her promise after all. They were almost upon me. She was holding out her hand to lead him inside.

“Here we are,” she said to him.

One sees so quickly and so much, and it takes so long to tell! I had time to take him in from head to foot and to reflect that I liked him better, judging merely from his looks, than Punch or Alec Corbin, or even Judy herself had led me to believe I should. I had time to observe a deep sober preoccupation in both their faces; to see that he drew breath to speak, and to guess that he was going to say nothing but just her name.

And then suddenly I cried out, heartily and rather loudly, “Hello!” for I had also had time to realize that I must make my presence known at once.

They hadn’t come to see me. They couldn’t have expected to find me here unless they’d been to the cottage first, and if they’d done that they’d have been fairly in my field of vision all the way up.

They both started galvanically at my voice. Then the man scowled in my direction. No kindlier word will do for it; it was a black scowl and nothing else. I think Judy said something admonitory to him under her breath.

I realized, somehow, even in that moment of profound misunderstanding, that what I saw wasn’t the mere vexation of a pair of lovers who had found already appropriated the retreat they’d intended for their love-making.

Judy came in at once, a curiously complicated look in her face--affection for me was a part of it--and gave me a brief kiss, expressive more than anything else of apology for their bad manners the moment before. She walked without a trace of a limp. Evidently she’d allowed her ankle to get well.

“It’s perfectly great up here, isn’t it?” she said.

“It’s great now that you’ve come and brought Bruce Applebury to make that call you promised,” I said, and held out a welcoming hand to him on the words.

He didn’t come forward to take it, but remained as if rooted in the entrance to the summer-house. If ever I saw consternation written plain upon an open countenance, I saw it then.

Judy patted my shoulder encouragingly, as one might pat a horse that was going to shy.

“All wrong!” she said. “All wrong! We didn’t come up here to see you. We came because we had something to talk about and I said I knew a good, safely deserted place where we could do it.--And this isn’t Bruce, you know. Bruce has gone to town on an errand. This is his cousin, Bill Grant.”

She must have felt me give the start she’d been expecting. “Shake hands, you two,” she commanded curtly.

I felt she meant it, somehow, as a guarantee, and held out my hand again, and this time he came forward and took it, but still without a word. Then he sat down heavily on the circular seat that ran around the place. His face was shining with sweat, and he got out his handkerchief and mopped it.

“You’re out of condition, Bill,” Judy remarked. “This life of crime is too much for you.”

She sat down herself in a big hickory chair, straightened out her legs in front of her and looked thoughtfully at her feet. I take no blame for the ensuing silence. I can’t think yet of anything I could have said.

Judy finally broke it. “After all,” she said, looking up at Bill, “I don’t know why not. Since he’s here, maybe it’s providential.”

She turned to me. “You like to hear long stories, don’t you? Stories of people’s lives, their terrible pasts and all that? Do you want me to tell you one?”

She had startled her companion, I could see, but it wasn’t, I thought, as if he meant to try to dissuade her.

“Go ahead and tell it,” I said.

But before she had time to say another word, there were some more footsteps; jaunty footsteps, if that’s a fair way to describe them. Judy’s eyes widened as she listened. Bill Grant had sprung erect.

“It’s Mr. Ethelbert Smith,” I said swiftly. “He’s staying with me, you know.”

“Oh, damn!” whispered Judy. Then with a swoop she flew to meet him.

“Why, Judy!” I heard him cry. “This is delightful!”

“Isn’t it?” she agreed. “But,” she went on, reaching around for Bill Grant and hauling him out to be introduced, “this is not the blushing bridegroom; he’s the next best man. Mr. Smith, Mr. Grant. Bruce’s cousin, you know. Bruce had to go to town on an errand, so we’re”--she waved a hand toward the grassy slope--“making hay.”

“I can’t blame either of you,” he said gallantly, with a look of frank admiration from one to the other. “A much more respectable occupation than mine has been. I’ve been up there in the woods”--he patted my field-glasses--“spying upon the innocent domesticities of little birds.”

There were no more silences after that. We all talked volubly and nobody really said anything. There wasn’t a word about the necklace.

I wondered uneasily whether old Mr. Smith wasn’t noticing something unnaturally vacuous about our talk. Certainly for an old family friend he was showing very little curiosity. He wasn’t asking a question. Had he seen anything queer through those damned field-glasses of mine?

I kicked that question out of my mind with the contempt it deserved. Judy wasn’t like that, anyhow. The great wonder, what the story was which she’d seemed to be on the point of telling me, I simply didn’t dare let my mind dwell upon. That would have to wait.

It was mainly a relief, though my feelings were somewhat mixed, when Judy said, with a queer flicker of a smile at me, “Well, we must be going along. This is going to be a busy day,” and took her “next best man” away with her.

They went, not down the path toward my cottage, but back by the way they had come.