CHAPTER IX

MYSTIFICATION OF EAGLE-EYE

It was the thought of Judy that made me change my mind about going to The Oaks with old Mr. Smith. I thought that perhaps if I were alone at the cottage all the afternoon, and if the fact that I was here alone were advertised by the presence of my ancient guest at The Oaks, she might come back and tell me the story which he had prevented my hearing at the summer-house.

My concern for the child was fast deepening into an acute distress. I was spared, to be sure, the misery of doubting her essential rectitude. I’d known her from the time she was a baby, and the long intervals when I’d seen nothing of her had neither interrupted the growth of our friendship, nor changed the quality of it.

She’d never been expansively confidential; reticence was, indeed, one of her outstanding qualities. Victoria complained of her as a close-mouthed little thing who kept everything to herself. But candor--perhaps I shouldn’t put it that way, for I believe the two things naturally go together--candor was not a virtue with her, but simply an irresistible compulsion. She couldn’t even acquiesce at all graciously in a pretense. I consider myself a decently straightforward person, but I’ve been self-convicted a dozen times by a straight look from Judy’s eyes of cowardly flinchings from the plain truth. I don’t think she regards them as cowardly. She isn’t a bit of a prig. She simply doesn’t understand how it can be done.

The pungent quality of cynicism which sometimes flavors her speech has always one source--sham. She is cynical of shams.

I recalled a remark she had made to me only a day or two before, to the effect that the horridest thing in the world was whitewash. Then, with a start, I remembered the prediction she’d made in the next breath that she was going to be coated with it this week. How much had she known about the necklace then? Anything more than was involved in the newspaper announcement that her grandmother was going to give it to her as a wedding present?

In the light of Mr. Smith’s revelations this afternoon, I thought it likely that she had known more; known that the necklace then reposing in the morocco covered box in her grandmother’s safe was an imitation, and that the fact somehow involved her mother’s credit. Didn’t an invincible determination on Judy’s part to save her mother’s credit account for everything the girl was doing--including, even, her agreement to marry a man whom she didn’t love?

It was all very well for old Mr. Smith, whose emotions were running cool and thin, to warn me against jumping at conclusions. But I had to jump. I had nowhere else to go. So I nailed my conviction like a flag to this mast.

It wasn’t necessary to try to work out all the details. Victoria had done something--probably, in some desperate money crisis, stolen the necklace; she’d always believed it was going to be hers some day--and Judy had agreed to see her through.

How had that involved a marriage with Bruce Applebury? Possibly Victoria had sold the necklace to him. Or possibly she’d done something besides steal the necklace. (I found it comparatively easy, that afternoon, to impute anything to Victoria.) At all events the necklace, the real one, had to be recovered, somehow.

Was this the errand Judy and Bruce had started upon, this morning under the innocent pretense of buying the wedding ring? Had she really started with him and been compelled, by some unforeseen occurrence, to turn back? Or had she only pretended to go with him in order to be free for some other meeting, under the protection of his cousin?

What sort of rendezvous had my unexpected visit to the summer-house prevented? Had old Mr. Smith, through my field-glasses, caught a glimpse of the other party to it?

I had an exciting feeling, about then, that I was within one idea of the solution. But this idea, widely as I cast my net for it, refused to be caught. And presently my little pattern, fragmentary as it was, fell to pieces again.

How was I going to account for the theft of the imitation necklace and for the return of it? Well, I didn’t care about that. That didn’t necessarily concern Judy at all.

But how about the thing that had happened to her on the veranda yesterday afternoon when the guests were arriving? The thing that had set her world rocking like a boat, that had led her to cry out to Punch, “Are you on my side, whatever happens--whatever I do?” No, I couldn’t solve that. I wanted her to come and tell me about it. She didn’t come, though, and I put in the longest, dreariest afternoon I can remember, waiting for her.

When Mr. Ethelbert Smith returned about six o’clock I was in so detestably unamiable a state of mind that a resolute summoning of all the manners I had ever learned hardly availed to produce a decent show of politeness. I didn’t want, I told myself, any more of his cold-hearted observations. However, common civility required me to ask for them, and before he had gone very far I was listening with unfeigned interest.

He began with an apology. He had permitted himself this morning to be saddled upon me as a guest, and now, after I’d hospitably made him welcome, and most comfortable, he added, he was about to climb out of the saddle again. In short, he was about to pack his bags and go to The Oaks to stay.

It appeared that old Mrs. Corbin, who’d been, of course, the first person he’d asked for on arriving at the house, had seen him at once and made him welcome in the friendliest manner. Furthermore she’d been furiously annoyed to learn that he was not stopping under her roof, and had insisted that he change his plans at once in order to do so.

“She’s altered greatly--by illness, of course,” he remarked, “but she’s no less imperious than she was in her best days. She settled the matter of my entertainment then and there, and summoned Victoria as tyrannically as she would have sent for her chambermaid. Victoria came, too.”

“Was she startled at finding you there?” I asked.

“If she was, she didn’t show it. She may have been warned, of course; probably was. A question or two of the servant who brought the message would have let her know what she had to expect. No, she took my being there as the most natural thing in the world. She didn’t show more than a flicker or two of resentment over the manner in which the orders were given. She must, of course, be in a state of suppressed rebellion all the time, for I fancy that sort of thing is an every-day occurrence. I’m sorry for Victoria. I wouldn’t blame her much for anything she might resort to, short of poison, as an escape.”

“Did you find out anything about the necklace?” I asked. “From the old lady herself, I mean? Whether she knows of the existence of the imitation one?”

“I was disappointed there,” Mr. Smith said. “I thought that when Victoria had gone, Mrs. Corbin would unburden her mind. She has something weighing upon it, I should say. But the emotion she’d wasted over the matter of where I was to sleep had completely exhausted her. She had to ring for her nurse, and tell me we’d have our visit later. She wasn’t visible again all the afternoon. So I was told, at least, and of course I couldn’t question it.”

Then, “Do you know anything about that nurse?” he asked.

“She’s been with Mrs. Corbin two or three years,” I told him. “Punch regards her humorously, I think, but considers her above suspicion. Why? Did you notice anything queer about her?”

“When I left Mrs. Corbin’s room,” he said, “she was parting from Victoria in the hall. Evidently they’d been talking somewhere. It struck me that the woman was frightfully upset--frightened or shocked, I couldn’t tell which. She might have been found out in something, or she might have been given some order she didn’t want to carry out.--They aren’t drugging that old lady, are they?”

“She drugs herself, I understand--morphine. Naturally enough, after years of pain.”

He looked like a very old man when I told him that, and he sat musing over it for a long time. Finally he roused himself.

“Well, I didn’t find what I went for,” he said. “I made a point of strolling about the house. I managed to see several of the servants; not all of them, of course. But in a talk I had with Punch, I asked him whether any new house servants had been taken on during the last two weeks, and he said there had not. Somehow I don’t believe it’s the servants we have to reckon with anyhow.

“I saw all the guests in the house eventually. There was quite a wait for the principal performers. The others were all gathered for the rehearsal of the ceremony, impatient as school children for it to be over with, too, so that they could run away and play. But Judy and the bridegroom, by failing for a long time to put in an appearance, kept them waiting.”

“Was Bill Grant there?” I asked.

“He was. And his manner toward me excited my admiration. His weakness is evidently that he mustn’t be surprised. Do you remember him this morning, completely disconcerted, unable to contribute more than a disjointed word here and there to the talk, floundering in the presence of the unexpected? But evidently he’d foreseen the probability of an encounter with me this afternoon, and he sustained it with complete _sang froid_. Everybody else was discussing Judy’s trip to town with her bridegroom. Nobody questioned but that was where she was spending the day. He knew that I knew that she hadn’t gone to town, that she’d spent the day, or a good part of it, surreptitiously with him. Yet he confronted me without batting an eye, without attempting a private explanation, or even a private signal entreating me not to give them away. He was, I felt, in the circumstances almost formidably self-possessed.

“His self-possession didn’t last him through the afternoon, however. Fate had another surprise in store for him.”

“What was the surprise?” I asked.

“That’s the point of my story,” he said. “But let me tell it in order. The fact that it doesn’t make sense makes it more important to approach it methodically.

“Before Judy arrived with her bridegroom, I had seen every one of the guests in that house, including Mr. Alexander Corbin and excepting only the bridegroom himself. There was no one among them whom I recognized as a professional jewel thief. Mr. Bruce Applebury then arrived with Judy and I didn’t recognize him either. I had drawn blank as far as my particular errand to the house was concerned. But I was diverted from thoughts of my failure by something I saw happening under my eyes.

“I saw enacted a scene of perfectly tragic intensity, and I haven’t the remotest idea now what it meant. I can tell it all in a very few words, because the scene itself had no accompanying words at all.

“Judy, as I say, arrived in the car with Mr. Bruce Applebury. They were surrounded at once by a group of young people who had been waiting for them on the lawn, clamoring for the rehearsal to begin. I looked at Mr. Applebury, realized that I didn’t know him and realized, further, that I didn’t like him. He is self-important and oppressively correct. He looked not sulky, exactly--mulish, that’s better. And victorious. Like a bad-tempered parent who has just beaten one of his children and has succeeded in persuading himself of his own righteousness.

“As for Judy, she was like an automaton; an amazingly life-like, well-made automaton, capable of going where she should, answering questions, even of responding in an appropriate manner to jokes. Perhaps I shouldn’t have perceived how perfectly galvanic all this was if I hadn’t happened to be standing where I intercepted the one look she turned upon her mother.

“It was a look--it’s a strong word, but I mean it--of horror, the look of one still incredulous over a betrayal. Something had happened to her that had never entered into her calculations as a possibility when we saw her in the summer-house this morning, although I thought she was facing some rather queer possibilities then.”

I couldn’t bear to have it spun out any longer. “What happened?” I demanded. “Get to the point, man, and tell me.”

“Nothing happened,” he said. “Nothing, at least, until after the scene was over. They went ahead and had their rehearsal. I watched. I watched all of them, even Alexander Corbin. Particularly I watched our young friend Bill Grant.

“He had already had his surprise. But I swear I don’t know how he got it. He hadn’t had a significant look or word, let alone an intelligible message, either from his cousin or from Judy. And yet he looked like a man in a daze. When it came time for him to produce the ring and hand it to the bridegroom, a good stiff nudge was not enough to bring him to. He had to be spoken to, and then he responded like a somnambulist.

“I simply can’t describe the intensity of the feeling that was shared, in some inexplicable way, by Judy and those two young men. And what made a nightmare of it was that no one seemed to perceive it but myself.--Oh, Victoria may have been a little unnaturally alert. She’d taken that look from Judy square in the face; though without flinching, so that I wonder now whether she knew what it meant. To the others it was simply the rehearsal of a wedding, to the usual accompaniment of jokes and giggles.”

“How about Punch? Didn’t he see anything?”

“No, I don’t think he did. He was entirely serious, of course; scrupulous about doing his part exactly as he was told. One of his hands showed a tendency to stray into his pocket, but he corrected that when his mother spoke to him about it. No, Punch had something else on his mind and I don’t think he saw a thing.

“Yet I can swear that if those three people had been Italians, there’d have been a flash of a stiletto. But who would have wielded it and who’d have got it, I don’t know.

“Something did happen at last, just when the rehearsal was over. Some one, perhaps two or three of them at once, said to Applebury, ‘Now’s when you kiss her.’

“Judy turned to him and said, without any expression in her face at all, ‘Are you going to? You can if you like, of course.’

“He went rather red and stood looking at her like a fool. Angry I should say, rather than embarrassed. I don’t think he’d embarrass easily. He has no misgivings about himself.

“She didn’t give him more than a second to make up his mind. Then she reached out a hand for the other man. Some fool laughed and said, ‘Are you going to kiss him instead?’, but nobody else made that mistake. Something about her gesture silenced the lot of them.

“She said right out so that everybody could hear, ‘I’m going to talk to Bill for five minutes, over on that bench.’ She nodded toward a stone seat at the bottom of the lawn in plain sight, but out of earshot. ‘After that we’ll decide what we’re going to do next.’ She led young Grant off to the bench and they sat down on it with their backs to us.

“There was some electricity in the air by then. I think that for a moment Applebury considered following her, but he changed his mind about it, and turned to Victoria. The others stayed together in a group, as if they didn’t know what to do nor where to look.

“I looked frankly at the pair on the bench. They sat side by side, not very close together though, and talked without looking at each other. It didn’t last very long; less, I’m sure, than the five minutes Judy stipulated. Then she got up, turned away from him, still without a look, and came back toward us, he following.

“She looked to me then a perfectly live girl. The second act of _The Tales of Hoffman_ was over. ‘It’s too late and too hot for tennis,’ she said. ‘Let’s all go for a swim in the pool.’

“I heard Grant speak to her just before they got within the hearing of the others. ‘I’ll think of something, yet,’ he said. She answered him over her shoulder for anybody to hear that might. ‘All right, if you can.’ He’d got over his surprise at all events and seemed to be coming to life again, himself.

“He went into the pool with the others. So did Judy. So did everybody except Punch and Bruce Applebury. One of the bridesmaids made quite a point of it that Punch should go in; a personal appeal. But he refused regretfully, and I knew why. His bathing suit hadn’t any pocket in it.

“I don’t know why Applebury didn’t go in. He looked hot and stuffy enough after his day in town. Unless....”

Old Eagle-Eye’s face suddenly brightened and he slapped his lean old leg. “Unless, by George, he had the same reason that Punch had, only a better one. Do you suppose he had the real necklace in his pocket?”

“Damn the necklace!” I cried.

“Damn it by all means,” he agreed seriously. “But in the meantime we’d better be dressing for dinner. You’re going, aren’t you?”

I told him dully that I didn’t think I would.

But after he’d gone up-stairs to change his clothes and pack, a servant from The Oaks brought me a note from Judy that changed my mind.

“You must come to-night,” it said. “Not that you can do anything, but I want you here.”