CHAPTER VIII

EXPERT CONSIDERATION

I was afraid after they’d gone that old Mr. Smith would begin asking embarrassing questions, but his curiosity, if he had any, was under perfect control.

He launched as a topic of conversation the modern young person, and at just that moment I was grateful to him, although it is a subject which, as far as I am concerned, has been thoroughly talked out. Ordinarily I find myself desperately bored with the solemn and terrified generalities one hears. I like the young people of to-day, but as for the modern young person, considered as something essentially new, a product of post-war conditions or a judgment upon our sins, I simply don’t believe the little monster exists.

I didn’t, however, express myself in this destructive manner to Mr. Smith. I coddled the topic along. Anything was welcome that would keep us away from the tangled skein of fact that Judy seemed involved in.

“Manners change, I admit,” I said, “but manners are by definition conventional conduct, conduct which has no significance one way or the other. Think of this wedding. Judy’s going to be married in the garden, and her bridesmaids, from what I hear of the costumes, are going to look more or less like a chorus in a light opera. It will be an amazingly pretty picture, no doubt. But Victoria in her day would as soon have thought of being married in a bathing suit. Victoria would have been horrified at the idea of sleeping the night before her wedding under the same roof with the man she was going to marry. Victoria was supposed to be shy, so she acted as if she were. But that doesn’t mean that she was any finer or cleaner-minded than Judy is. No, the younger generation....”

My argument was interrupted.

“Here comes a sample of it now,” said Mr. Smith, who was gazing down the path. “Heavens, that’s not Punch, is it?”

It was though, and he was a good sight; hatless as always, and clad in khaki shirt and trousers which went well with his brown skin. He was carrying his little target rifle.

There was no doubt that he was coming to make me a visit, for he waved gaily toward the summer-house as he came along. He and I both got a surprise, though, out of his meeting with Mr. Smith; Punch because he hadn’t had the least idea he’d find him with me, and I over the discovery that they were old friends. They greeted each other with enthusiasm.

“I hadn’t realized you were so well acquainted,” said I.

“Oh, yes,” Punch told me; “we’re very old friends. Mr. Smith was the nicest man in Paris that winter we lived there. He used to take me around and show me things.

“My, but I’m glad you’re here,” he went on, turning back to the old gentleman. “It comes out just right. But why aren’t you over at our house?”

“Your mother asked me to take him in,” I explained. “She thought you’d be too wild for him over there; too much row, late hours and so on.”

“Ho!” said Punch derisively to his very old friend, “there couldn’t be too much row for you, could there?”

I thought I saw a troubled look coming into the boy’s eyes, so I changed the subject.

“You out shooting rabbits?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “I haven’t shot anything yet.”

“After bigger game perhaps,” Mr. Smith suggested. “Lions, or hippopotamuses.”

“No,” said Punch, “I’m not hunting _anything_, really.”

“You aren’t _being_ hunted, are you?” Mr. Smith wanted to know.

I thought the boy flushed a little.

“No, I guess not,” he said.

“I suppose,” the old man suggested, “if they’re keeping such late hours over at The Oaks, the mornings must be pretty slow.”

“Yes,” Punch admitted, “they are, rather. Oh, everybody’s up but nobody’s doing anything. Nobody but Bruce Applebury. He went off to town on the morning train, with Judy.”

I don’t know what happened to my face at that, but I can answer for Mr. Smith’s. There wasn’t a flicker of an eyelid to betray anything.

Punch was looking at him just as I was, and he went on, “He’s the man who’s going to marry Judy, you know. He was afraid he wouldn’t get the sort of wedding ring she liked, so he took her in to-day to pick it out.” He sighed and added, “I’ll be glad when this business is all over.”

“How’s your grandmother?” Mr. Smith asked.

“Oh, she’s better this morning, now that she knows the necklace has come back,” the boy said. “Of course it was an awful shock to her last night when she found it had been stolen.”

I’d been holding my breath waiting for this to happen, from the moment I had seen how friendly was the relation between the old gentleman and the boy, but I hadn’t expected it to come out with a plop like that. I felt rather embarrassed over my own reticence, but Mr. Smith didn’t even indirectly reproach me with it.

“I didn’t know the necklace had been stolen,” he said. “I’ve only just got here, you see. Tell me about it.”

“There’s Donovan,” I pointed out. “He’s coming up to tell us lunch is ready, I expect. You’ll stay, won’t you, Punch? And then you can tell Mr. Smith the whole story of how the necklace was stolen.--And perhaps,” I added, “you’ll tell me, too, the details of how it came back.”

For I didn’t see any point, now that the cat had got out, in trying to make a mystery of the empty bag.

I was relieved, though, that Punch’s story, which he told with admirable lucidity at lunch time, was considerably abridged where it touched Judy. Of course at that time I knew nothing of the letter that had been pushed through the narrow neck of the Chinese vase, nor of her nocturnal excursion for its recovery. Punch’s account of his adventures that night left this episode out.

He told us how, when he couldn’t sleep in his room on the top floor, he’d come down to the davenport in the hall below; how he’d seen a man in pajamas going up-stairs; how the mystery had completely baffled him at the time; how Miss Digby had told him of the fright she’d had, and how, between sleep and waking he’d figured out what had happened.

“Good work, Punch,” Mr. Smith said, when the tale was told. “I’m proud of you.” His tone, though, wasn’t as enthusiastic as his words. He’d spoken with only half his mind, as if out of some deep preoccupation.

“Well, that’s more than anybody else is,” the boy answered. “You see they all think--mother and Miss Digby and Uncle Alec--that I took the necklace myself, for a joke or something, and then brought it back in the middle of the night. It’s what anybody would think if they didn’t believe the story of the man in the pajamas. And it _is_ sort of a funny story. Only, you see, I _saw_ him.”

“Yes,” Mr. Smith said thoughtfully, “it is a funny story, sure enough.”

The boy looked from one of us to the other, possibly to satisfy himself that we ourselves believed it. He must have done so, for presently he went on.

“It gets even funnier than that. Because, you see, as long as they thought I’d done it, I wanted to know whose pajamas I’d seen, and who it probably was who wore them. So after they’d all gone down to breakfast, I went around and saw all the pajamas there were--all that had been slept in, I mean--and I couldn’t find the pair I’d seen last night. They weren’t on the top floor, so I went down to the second floor, and they weren’t there either.”

“Are you sure you saw them all?” Mr. Smith asked.

“I counted,” said Punch. “I found a pair for everybody.”

“Servants too?” Mr. Smith asked.

“No,” said Punch. “But you see there isn’t any third floor to the servants’ wing. The door to it opens into the second-floor hall where the davenport is. If it had been one of the servants he wouldn’t have gone up-stairs.”

“How well did you see the pajamas when the man was wearing them?” I asked.

“Pretty well,” Punch said. “I saw the legs of them awfully well, because they walked right through the moonlight and it was about as bright as day. They were plain pajamas, gray, or some color like that, and one of the legs was torn, a little square tear as if it had been caught on a nail. Well, the only person in the house whose pajamas are plain gray is Uncle Alec, and they weren’t torn. Besides he’s about twice as big as the man I saw. Everybody else’s pajamas are fancy; because of the wedding, I suppose. Anyhow, it’s a puzzle.”

“Well, the pearls are brought back, that’s one thing,” Mr. Smith observed. “To your grandmother’s room, you say? Where are they now?”

Punch’s eye gleamed with a sudden pleasure. “That’s supposed to be a great secret,” he said.

“Don’t tell any secrets,” Mr. Smith warned him quickly.

“Well, it isn’t a secret from you--from either of you,” Punch explained. “And Donovan isn’t around, is he, nor any one else who’d hear?”

“No,” I said, “you won’t be overheard. But how do you know we’re not to be kept out of the secret?”

“I’ll tell you,” he said, “and then you’ll see. It’s a secret from mother, all right, and Judy and Uncle Alec, but not from you.

“It was when I was going around on the second floor, looking at the pajamas, that grandmother heard me and called me into her room. She said I’d been right about the safe not being a safe place for the necklace, so she was going to give it to me to hide. Only I was to promise not to tell any one in the house that she’d done it, nor where the necklace was, of course. But you see, you aren’t in the house, so the secret doesn’t include you.”

I won’t pretend to have been satisfied that this bit of casuistry was strong enough to bear, but my curiosity was much wider awake, just then, than my conscience. I made no protest, and neither did Mr. Smith. The boy went on:

“Mother came in just after Gran had given it to me and asked her where it was, and Gran told her it was in the safe. She’d had me put the box back in the safe and lock the safe up, but of course the box was empty. Mother asked her when she was going to give the necklace to Judy, and Gran said she would when she got ready. She always gets kind of cross when you ask her a lot of questions. So mother saw it was no good asking more and went away. And there I had it all the time.”

“Where did you hide it?” Mr. Smith asked.

Punch was thoroughly enjoying himself now, there could be no doubt of that. The unjust accusations of his mother and Uncle Alec and old Digs he could afford to ignore in the face of this magnificent compensation.

“Why, I thought of lots of places,” he said, “that would probably have been all right, but I didn’t like them somehow, and then I thought about _The Purloined Letter_--you know, that story of Poe’s. How the safest hiding-place for anything is the last place where any one would think of looking for it. So I just wrapped the necklace up in a handkerchief and stuck it in my pocket.”

“Good lord!” I cried. “Is that where it is now?”

“Surely it is,” old Mr. Smith remarked calmly. “Hence the rifle.”

Punch flushed a little. “Of course it’s only a twenty-two,” he said, “but it’s got a long cartridge in it.”

At first blush the idea of entrusting a famous jewel like the Corbin necklace to the trousers pocket of a thirteen-year-old boy armed with a little target rifle seemed wild enough, and when one added that an inexplicable attempt had just been made to steal it, an attempt that might be repeated at any hour, day or night, it became perfectly frantic. I didn’t care much about the necklace, but I cared immensely about the boy.

He was looking eagerly into my face, and must have read the consternation that was printed plain upon it. “Can you think of a safer place?” he asked. “Of course I suppose I could give it to you to keep for me.”

“Heaven forbid!” I cried. “But there must be some other....”

I let the sentence fade out unfinished, and lapsed into a thoughtful silence. I couldn’t think of anything better, and that was the truth.

“It’s years since I’ve seen that string of pearls,” Mr. Smith said presently. “Let’s have a look at them, Punch.”

The boy plunged a hand deep into his pocket and pulled out a wadded and rather grimy handkerchief which he spread open on the table. There the thing was, all right. I stared at it fascinated.

It was beautiful, of course, that perfectly graded series of shining globes, but I was moved by the sight of it to reflect how ridiculously artificial our values are. That thing would buy leisure for a man’s lifetime. Comparatively few men from the cradle to the grave are able by their labors to earn as much as would be needed to buy it. Numberless men alive in the world to-day would commit any crime up to murder to possess it. It seemed absurd when one thought of it like that.

Possibly to carry out the illusion the thing wanted a better background. Perhaps it suffered from the indignity of contact with a small boy’s pocket handkerchief.

Old Mr. Smith took the thing in his fingers--unusually intelligent-looking old fingers they were, as if habituated to handling pearls. Then I glanced up at his face, and was struck by a conviction which for the moment put the necklace clean out of my mind.

He had stuck a monocle into one eye. The gleam may have come merely from the lens, but from wherever it came, there was so piercing a brilliancy in his gaze that I almost shouted, “Old Eagle-Eye!” aloud.

I didn’t, of course. He went on studying the necklace, and Punch sat gazing from his face to mine. Of course--of course! Why hadn’t I identified him at once? He was the man Judy was to prevent, at all costs, from getting a chance at something--the necklace, beyond a doubt. That was why Victoria hadn’t wanted to keep him in the house.

Well, the best laid plans go wrong sometimes. Victoria had overdone it. There sat old Eagle-Eye with the necklace in his hands.

What was he going to do with it? I’ll admit that in my confounded state of mind I’d hardly have been surprised at anything. I didn’t really expect him to perpetrate a robbery with violence then and there, but I was vividly conscious, for a fleeting instant, that Punch’s little rifle was leaning up in the corner of the room, far out of reach. It only shows what an atmosphere of persistent mystery will do to the ordinarily well-behaved mind.

Mr. Smith, however, remained calm, and when he had done examining the necklace, folded it up again in Punch’s handkerchief, rather negligently I thought, and handed it over to the boy.

“Put it back in your pocket, Punch,” he said. “I can’t think of a safer place for it.--But now that you’ve gratified our curiosity,” he went on, “I think you’d better stretch the promise you gave your grandmother to include everybody, out of the house as well as in it. Who are in the house, anyway? Do you know them all?”

“Oh, hardly any of them, if you mean do I _really_ know, not just who they’re supposed to be. I don’t think mother does, even; not the Applebury crowd.”

“And the Appleburys,” commented Mr. Smith, “don’t know Judy’s crowd any better. It’s a perfect situation, in a way.”

We weren’t very talkative during the rest of the lunch. The thoughts of old Eagle-Eye seemed to be running mostly on the man in pajamas.

“You said he wasn’t near as big as your Uncle Alec. Was he noticeably small; smaller, say, than any of the men in the party?”

“No,” Punch said, “I don’t think he was. He just looked about ordinary. Of course, I didn’t see him very well, except his legs, and I didn’t look at him very hard. I just thought he was somebody going to the bathroom, until he started up-stairs. I think he looked sort of stout and clumsy, as if he filled his pajamas rather full.”

“Are you sure it _was_ a man. I know you didn’t think of it at the time, but mayn’t it have been a woman? I believe they wear pajamas sometimes. And in any sort of men’s clothes they’re likely to look heavy.”

I could see that the idea attracted Punch. It seemed to offer a loophole of escape from his mystery. But he was too honest a witness to avail himself of it.

“No,” he said, “I don’t think it was. I don’t think a woman would have walked along like that.”

“You’re probably right,” the old man agreed. “Most women would look like women even if they had on a man’s pajamas. We’ll stick to the men for the present. Stout and stocky, medium height; does that describe anybody in the party?”

Punch laughed. “The only one it describes is Bruce Applebury himself,” he said.

Mr. Smith didn’t laugh. “What are _his_ pajamas like?” he asked.

“Sort of tan color,” said Punch, “with red stripes.”

I spoke up in the interests of common sense. “Surely you couldn’t suspect....”

“I’d suspect anybody,” the old man asserted, “when we’re concerned with a thing like that necklace. Oh, not suspect if you dislike the word--but consider as possibly involved. I admit my point of view is rather specialized.”

“He played tennis and swam practically from the time he came to the house until he dressed for dinner,” I pointed out, “and the loss of the necklace was discovered before he’d finished dressing.”

“Probably, then, he didn’t take it,” Mr. Smith conceded. “But he may have brought it back, and that’s just as important a part of the mystery.”

Without waiting to allow time for that to sink in, he turned to Punch. “When is he--when are he and Judy expected back from town?” he asked.

“There’s a train about three. I think they’ll surely come on that, because they’re going to rehearse the wedding this afternoon. You’ll come over for that, won’t you?”

Eagle-Eye took this invitation with a twinkle. “Old men are supposed to take naps after lunch,” he said. “Still, I may turn up. If I do, suppose, since we’re already in mystery up to the neck, that you greet me as if we were meeting for the first time since Paris. Can we get away with it? Did anybody know you were coming here to lunch?”

“No,” said Punch. “I just sort of disappeared. I suppose I’d better be going back now, though, or they may begin wondering where I am. I _could_ eat another lunch, of course.”

We both laughed over that as we bade him farewell. But we turned pretty serious as we watched him walk away with his little rifle.

“Do you think he’s safe going around with a hundred-thousand-dollar necklace in his pocket?” I asked.

“Yes, I think so,” Mr. Smith answered reflectively. “For one thing, he hasn’t got it in his pocket.”

I must have gaped at him like a goggle-eyed fish. My mind once more had gone to pieces. Had the old gentleman done a sleight of hand trick when he returned that handkerchief?

“Oh, he’s got just what he brought over here with him,” he added. “Undoubtedly the same thing his grandmother gave him this morning to hide for her. It’s not the necklace. It’s a very fair imitation of it, however.”

“You’re perfectly sure of that, I suppose?” I asked weakly.

He nodded.

“You’d better go back to your couch where you’ll be comfortable,” he suggested. “We’ve got some thinking to do.”

I agreed, and rang for Donovan. When he’d made me comfortable and gone away, Mr. Smith pulled up an easy chair for himself and lighted a cigar.

“I know that necklace intimately,” he began. “I sold it to Punch’s grandfather in Paris, ’way back in the days of the Second Empire. Lord, what a while ago! A man shouldn’t be allowed to live as long as that. Eighteen hundred seventy it must have been, or thereabouts.

“I’m a jeweler by profession, and I was managing director over there for Paulding and Revere. I’ve seen the necklace a number of times since. Mrs. Corbin always gave me a look at it whenever she came to Paris. So I can say with certainty that the thing Punch has in his pocket is not merely a necklace of imitation pearls; it’s an imitation, pearl for pearl, of that necklace. In fact, we can go a little further than that, if you don’t mind my prosing a bit.”

“I don’t,” I assured him.

“Both the French and the Japanese make imitation pearls,” he went on. “Serious imitations, I mean. Merely for purposes of wear, the French pearls are better. Their luster’s more like the real thing. On a pretty woman’s neck in a ballroom they wouldn’t be detected as not the real thing. But the moment you pick them up, they give themselves away. They’re much too light and much too translucent. Japanese pearls, on the other hand, are the right weight, or very near it, and they don’t betray themselves when you hold them against the light. But they haven’t the luster, not even the best of them.

“Well, these are Japanese pearls. Whoever had the string made of them, it’s fair to assume, wanted them for some other purpose than wearing to parties. The French pearls would have been better for that, and cheaper too. But they wouldn’t serve if they had to deceive some one who had opportunities to handle them.”

“In other words they were made to deceive old Mrs. Corbin,” I broke in. “Her eyesight has been failing for years.”

“That’s very likely a good guess,” he said mildly. “But let’s not begin guessing just yet.

“She may have ordered the imitation made herself. She’s as likely to have wanted to deceive Victoria, let us say, as Victoria is to have wanted to deceive her. And with her poor vision she may have deceived herself. The real string may have been knocking about, unregarded for months, in some drawer of her dressing-table, while the imitation was lying in the safe.

“All we know is that there are two strings, and that a person who couldn’t see very well, either because his eyes were bad, or because he was working in the dark, might easily mistake one for the other. We know that the imitation string is now in Punch’s pocket. But where the real string is we don’t know.”

“It’s reasonably probable, isn’t it,” I asked, “that the necklace in Punch’s pocket is the same one that his grandmother showed him Wednesday afternoon, when she told him she meant to give it to Judy for a wedding present? It was taken from the safe, it was brought back, and it was handed by his grandmother straight to Punch.”

“That’s as good a possibility as any,” said the old man. “The thief takes it in a hurry and more or less in the dark, discovers at his first good look at it that it’s an imitation, and brings it back. But there are other hypotheses just as good.

“He may have seen a chance to take the real one at a time when he hadn’t the imitation at hand to replace it with, and then brought the imitation back in the hope that the loss hadn’t yet been discovered. It wasn’t made public, I understand. Or some one may have borrowed the real one and returned the imitation by mistake. Or one person may have stolen the real one, and some one else, who later discovered the theft and wished to shield the thief, may have brought back the imitation, thinking he was making restitution. You see, it’s endless. The most serious mistake we can make will be to begin thinking we know too much.”

“Of course,” I agreed. “One could easily do a cruel injustice to an innocent person by jumping at conclusions.”

“That’s not just what I mean,” he said gently. “Perhaps I should have said dangerous instead of serious. I’m more concerned over what may happen in the next twenty-four hours than I am over what may have happened--oh, any time within the last five years.”

He gave me half a moment of silence to digest that in.

“I’ll run the risk of speaking with the utmost plainness,” he then went on. “I think I can guess how this thing looks to you. You believe Victoria had that imitation string made for the purpose of imposing upon her mother-in-law and getting possession of the real one. You think she took alarm over Mrs. Corbin’s decision to give it to Judy, because she thought that such a gift would lead to the discovery of the substitution and that she’d be charged with it. You think that’s why she didn’t want me stopping in the house.

“That’s all plausible enough. It may all be true. It would account, after a fashion, for the disappearance of the imitation necklace from the safe. She might have taken it herself; she might have persuaded Judy to take it.

“But into that picture you can not fit the return of the necklace. You can’t fit the man in pajamas, whom Punch saw. I have no intelligible picture, yet, into which that man will fit. But the return, I tell you frankly, seems to me to be sinister. It suggests strongly the presence somewhere, as an active possibility, of the real necklace--not stolen yet, but waiting to be. And accompanying that theft we may have anything, up to murder. That’s why I say it’s dangerous to feel too sure.”

With great deliberation, he extinguished his cigar in the ash tray and rose to his full height.

“Invited or not,” he said, “I’m going to that house this afternoon. I want to see the people in it. There aren’t a great many first-class jewel thieves in the world, and I know the faces of a pretty fair proportion of them. Of course people who aren’t jewel thieves sometimes attempt to steal jewels--a covetous girl, a boy desperately in debt, might make a frantic clutch, with no forethought, no preparation, and of course, no possibility of ultimate success.

“If that’s the case here, I’m as helpless as any of you, for I can’t read thoughts or intentions from people’s faces.

“But somehow to me the thing hasn’t quite that look. So I’m going over to see whether I know any of Victoria’s guests better than she does.--How about you? Will you come along? Can you manage in a comfortable motor, if you’ve lots of room?”

I could manage it, all right, and my first impulse was to say I’d go. Then I thought of something and changed my mind.

“I think I’ll stay at home this afternoon,” I told him, “and rest up for that dinner.”