THE CORBIN NECKLACE
The Corbin Necklace
By HENRY KITCHELL WEBSTER
AUTHOR OF
“The Innocents,” “Joseph Greer and His Daughter,”
“Mary Wollaston,” “The Thoroughbred,” etc.
[Illustration]
A. L. BURT COMPANY
Publishers New York
Published by arrangement with The Bobbs-Merrill Company
Printed in U. S. A.
COPYRIGHT, 1926
BY THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
_Printed in the United States of America_
COPYRIGHT, 1926
BY LIBERTY WEEKLY, INCORPORATED
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I PUNCH--AND JUDY 1
II SHOAL WATER 20
III FRUSTRATION OF PUNCH 35
IV SOMETHING BEHIND 51
V THE LEGS OF A SUIT OF PAJAMAS 77
VI REWARD OF MERIT 91
VII IN THE SUMMER-HOUSE 102
VIII EXPERT CONSIDERATION 115
IX MYSTIFICATION OF EAGLE-EYE 139
X TRANSFORMATION SCENE 155
XI WHEN I CAME IN 168
XII AN EXCURSION INTO ARCADY 180
XIII STUNG! 196
XIV A POINT OF HONOR 212
XV BLACK LOOKS 220
XVI THE GENTLE ART 234
XVII SOME MUST WATCH 253
XVIII PEACOCK FEATHERS 268
XIX THE AUTOCRAT 288
THE CORBIN NECKLACE
THE CORBIN NECKLACE
CHAPTER I
PUNCH--AND JUDY
“How much do you suppose it’s really worth?” Punch wanted to know.
“Your grandmother’s necklace?” I inquired. It had been ten minutes or
so since we’d mentioned it. Evidently, though, it was still on his
mind. “Oh, something fabulous,” I told him.
But I saw at once that the reply hadn’t passed muster. It had
struck him, apparently, as a typically adult remark, frivolous, or
ignorant--or both. I don’t like being a typical adult to Punch so I
tried to do better.
“I don’t know much about pearls,” I said. “They’re a special subject.
And I haven’t even seen the necklace since your mother wore it at some
ball or other--oh, pre-war. Perhaps a dozen years ago. But you can put
it at this, safely enough. If it were sold and the money it brought
invested, even conservatively, it would produce an income one could
live on.”
“If you had to sell it to a fence, though,” Punch observed, “you
wouldn’t get near so much for it. And a regular jeweler would know
where it came from, if you’d stolen it, and call up the police. I
suppose the way to do would be to break the string and sell the pearls
one or two at a time. Even that would be pretty hard to do.”
“You aren’t planning to steal the necklace yourself, are you?” I
inquired.
He smiled politely, by way of acknowledging the joke, but without
losing his thoughtful air.
“It was horribly silly putting it in the paper, anyhow.”
“Putting what in the paper?”
“About how Gran was going to give it to Judy for a wedding present.
I’ve got it here. I tore it out of Tuesday’s paper. I thought perhaps
it was just as well not to have it lying around the house.”
He removed it in a wad from a pocket in his knickerbockers and brought
it around for me to see.
There were columns about Judith Corbin’s approaching wedding in
all the papers, these days. Justifiably, too, perhaps. If news is
whatever people are curious about, the Corbins have been news for
three generations. But the particular article which Punch had put into
my hand was written in the vein I most detest, knowing, insinuating,
pandering to the most abject form of snobbery.
“Confound American newspapers!” I said.
Punch caught me up sharply. “It isn’t their fault,” he declared.
“They’re better than the newspapers in any other country.”
His Americanism, I may remark, is almost rabid. As a result of his
having been dragged all over Europe for most of his boyhood, the
temperature of his patriotism is far above normal; say about one
hundred and four. It goes rather oddly with the rest of him for in the
other respects he’s an incorruptible realist.
“My remark about American newspapers is stricken out,” I said hastily.
“I didn’t mean to insult our country. But I agree with you that the
reference to the necklace is unfortunate. Of course your mother....”
I was going to say, “knows best,” or something like that, just to avoid
any implied criticism of Victoria. But Punch broke in.
“I don’t think it was mother who told them. She’s been kind of funny
about that necklace.”
Well, there were old reasons why the necklace should be a sore
point with Victoria. I didn’t feel like going into them with her
thirteen-year-old son.
“Where is it?” I asked. “In the bank, I suppose?”
“No, it isn’t. It’s down here. Grandmother’s got it in that silly old
safe of hers. Isn’t that the worst possible place to keep anything that
people might want to steal? It isn’t supposed to be hard at all to open
an ordinary safe. If Gran would just give it to me and let me hide it
for her, somewhere, it would be a whole lot safer.”
“I know,” I agreed, “that in every detective story and in most plays
there’s a character who can sandpaper the tips of his fingers and open
a safe quicker than I can break into a can of sardines. Whether experts
of that sort are really so numerous, or safes so little entitled to
their name, I don’t know.”
He didn’t a bit mind my laughing at him. “Well,” he said, “there’s
going to be big trouble, I bet, before this business is over.”
Certainly there’s no denying that in this instance Punch was a good
prophet.
It is probably unnecessary to remark that he derives his nickname from
the fact that his sister had been named Judith. He was christened John
Benedict Corbin, as were his father and grandfather, both now long
dead, before him. And perhaps, since I have been in a way commissioned
to set down an account of the business of the next few days and the
trouble it involved, I may as well begin being a little more explicit.
The consensus seems to be that I know as much about it as anybody,
though--or perhaps because--I have really been very little involved.
I might have been involved a good deal deeper, since I’m the Corbins’
only near neighbor. The original plan had been that on the occasion
of Judith’s wedding--an old-style country wedding it was to be--I
should keep bachelor’s hall for the groom, his best man and some of
the ushers. Also, as a traditional friend of the family, I’d have
been over at The Oaks most of the time from the beginning of the
festivities to the end. But my house, a few days earlier, had been
pretty well wrecked and gutted by a bad fire, and in the course of my
efforts to get things out of the burning building, I’d had the serious
misfortune--that, anyhow, was the way I felt about it at the time--to
break my leg.
In the light of ensuing events, I’m not altogether sorry that I had
to spend those wretched days in my gardener’s cottage with my leg
in a cast. It had, at least, its compensations. Nobody, as far as I
know, from first to last suspected me of complicity in, or even guilty
knowledge of, any crime. A pair of crutches, which I was frightfully
clumsy with, a twenty-pound cast on my leg and an iron-clad alibi
served to protect me. And with Punch for a daily visitor, I don’t think
I missed much of the excitement.
It is possible that since he takes his obligations seriously, he felt
he owed me something in return for the thrill he’d been afforded by my
fire and my broken leg. He’d helped the surgeon put on the cast--this
was before my nurse arrived--and he took a professional, almost a
proprietary, interest in the damaged limb from that point on. But I’m
proud to believe that Punch likes me. I’m not often, he’s good enough
to imply, betrayed into that levity in dealing with serious matters, to
which most of my generation are incorrigibly addicted. I’m coeval more
or less with his mother.
I’ve always known Victoria and got on with her well enough, though
I never was one of her numerous adorers. Perhaps it was their
numerousness that put me off. I haven’t, either, in the years since
her husband’s death, always applauded her judgment, especially in the
matter of bringing up her children. But I’d be the first to admit that
she’s had difficulties.
Oh well, perhaps, since I’ve already kept Punch waiting so long, I may
as well go ahead and tell my history right end to.
The first John Corbin’s father, Peter, I think his name was, came out
to these parts somewhere about the time of the Black Hawk War. His
ancestors had been seafaring folk--Newburyport, I think they came
from--and had prospered at it. Peter had money behind him, anyhow,
and he got possession of some thousands of acres of the best land in
Illinois--chased the Indians off it, I suppose--and built his first
house out of bricks that he made on the place.
His son, Punch’s grandfather, inherited the whole thing. He may have
been able enough, though I suspect the line was thinning out. Anyhow,
the most important thing about him is the woman he married.
I haven’t an idea who, in the social sense, she was. But certainly
for the past fifty years or so she has been a tremendous person. She
had two sons--she’d probably have had a dozen but for her husband’s
untimely death. She completely dominated the elder, Punch’s father, and
quarreled violently with the younger one, Alexander--she quarreled with
everybody she couldn’t dominate--so that he ran away, fought in the
Spanish War, went out to the Philippines and stayed there.
John married Victoria Ashcroft; he died two or three months before
Punch was born. Judy remembers him, of course, and adores his memory.
It’s one of the reasons, perhaps, why she doesn’t get on better with
her mother.
The proceeding years never softened up the old lady a bit. Her
husband’s will left the whole fortune in her hands, and she has used
it remorselessly as a club to enforce submission to her ideas. In the
main I think her ideas have been pretty sound--certainly her business
judgment has always been above reproach--but they aren’t Victoria’s
ideas in the least. It’s hard to imagine a more difficult position than
that of being old Mrs. Corbin’s daughter-in-law.
The famous necklace affords an illustration. As an adornment it has
long been useless to the old lady. She’s been crippled with arthritis
for years, living, from somewhere about dawn till nine o’clock at
night, in a wheel chair. Victoria used to wear the necklace frequently.
Pearls, I believe, and especially old pearls, need wear. And the thing
was popularly supposed to be hers.
But between the old lady and Victoria there was never any ambiguity
about it. The mother-in-law kept tabs on it most jealously; decreed
when it should be worn and when it should not, and kept it most of the
time in her possession. She has never liked Victoria, has often openly
mistrusted her, and it was easy to believe that her decision to give
the necklace to Judy was inspired by a wish to do Victoria out of it
finally.
With the children Victoria more nearly had her own way. She had some
money of her own, though nowhere near enough to carry out her program
for them, and as long as she could keep them away from The Oaks, far
enough away to sift out details, their grandmother’s edicts were of
little effect.
But too far Victoria dared not go. There could be no shadow of doubt
that the old lady was in her right mind and able to make a will, and
upon this will the disposal of the whole Corbin fortune depended. She
could found a theological seminary with it if she liked.
To make it harder for Victoria--as if it weren’t hard enough
already--she had not, during the past three or four years, got on very
well with Judy. Within the last few months we who were her friends had
vaguely understood that the difficulty had got a good deal worse, and
Judy was, for a while, a declared rebel. Victoria had been half frantic
between the necessity of winning Judy back and keeping all echoes
of the trouble from reaching Mrs. Corbin’s ears. This acute phase
had passed somehow, and Judy had come back, curiously sobered and,
superficially at least, tractable.
Now, of course, everything was lovely. Judy was going to be married
within a week to a man of whom not only her mother, but, marvelous to
relate, old Mrs. Corbin as well, heartily approved.
The old lady had never seen the man himself, for she never went east,
and no member of the Applebury clan had ever crossed the Alleghenies.
But they were the Appleburys of East Weston, Massachusetts; cautious,
solid, not too vulgarly rich. The family fortune had suffered somewhat,
we understood, from their Toryism during the Revolutionary War. It was
a good bet that they’d endure as long as Plymouth Rock. Anyhow, they
might be supposed to be capable of managing Judy. The girl was safe
now, old Mrs. Corbin thought, for life.
Victoria may have thought so too, but I take the liberty to doubt it.
Safe, anyhow, probably for the next four or five years. And if there
were an explosion then (I wouldn’t put it by Victoria to reflect)
it wouldn’t so frightfully matter, since the old lady would almost
certainly have been gathered to her fathers before that time.
_Nunc dimittis_, anyhow. For Punch would certainly never make any
trouble. He could get on with anybody. Even with his grandmother.
I looked across at him now. He was lost in a brown study, probably
about Monsieur Dupin or Sherlock Holmes, or some of their more recent
successors.
“When are your mother and Judy coming down?” I asked.
“Oh, Judy’s here,” he told me. “She came yesterday afternoon. Mother
was to have come with her, but she didn’t. She’ll come to-day, I
expect. She’d better, because the whole gang is coming to-morrow and
the house is still something awful. Decorators and curtain hangers
working around all over the place. Grandmother’s room is about the only
one that isn’t in a mess, and we’re not allowed in there.”
I could easily understand the need for all this renovating. The
hospitality of the old house hadn’t been taxed to capacity, as it was
going to be for this wedding, in years.
“How is Judy?” I asked.
“All right,” he said, a little doubtfully.
“Well, I assume?”
“Sure,” he said.
Then he grinned. “I’d found a new way of climbing up the outside of
the house--all the way to the roof. I went up yesterday, and she saw me
going by her window and came out and climbed up too. Then she came all
the way down. Not so bad for a girl, because there’s one place where
it’s kind of tricky. And then we took my new rifle and shot a tin can
off a fence post. She can shoot as well as I can. I don’t see what
_she_ wants to get married for. I don’t believe she does, either.”
Marriage was so evidently incomprehensible to Punch, except as a last
resort after the more enjoyable resources of living had come to an end,
that I didn’t take this last observation so very seriously.
We were saved from discussing it by the arrival just then of Judy
herself. Punch saw her before I did.
“Hello!” he exclaimed. “How did you get here?”
She came over and kissed me before she answered, and would have ignored
his question altogether if he hadn’t repeated it.
“Oh, in Trumble’s Ford,” she said. “At least I hope it was Trumble’s.
It was standing there in the yard where he always leaves it.”
“Well,” Punch said, getting up decisively, “as long as you’re here, I
think I’ll go back.”
“Brotherly love!” she commented, with a grin.
Punch explained--to me, rather than to her, “There ought to be somebody
in the house.”
“There were at least twenty when I left,” Judy remarked. “Florists’
people, upholsterers.... Heaven knows what!”
“That’s why,” said Punch. “Look here, I’m going to drive the Ford back.
You can come along on my bike.”
“I like your nerve!--Oh, it’s all right. Go along.”
She didn’t turn back to me until she’d seen him out of the cottage and
had heard the Ford go rattling away.
It didn’t seem credible that she was going to be married three days
from now. She looked, standing there hatless, disheveled, in her
tumbled slip of a dress, not a day over fifteen. She’d been bickering
with her brother like a little girl. What did she know--what could she
possibly understand--about marriage?
“I had a lot of nice things all ready to say to you”--she turned back
to me now with a funny little grimace of perplexity--“and Punch has put
them all out of my head.”
“Never mind them. And don’t blame Punch. He’s worrying about the famous
necklace.”
“Oh, damn the necklace!” she cried.
She might well enough have used an exclamation like that off-hand,
humorously, or by way of experiment to see if I’d be shocked. But
she didn’t use it in any of these ways. The thing had struck a nerve
somehow.
“That’s a reasonable enough wish,” I said, “on general principles. But
why particularly?”
“Did you see that silly story in the paper?” she asked. “About how Gran
was going to give it to me for a wedding present? It gave mother a
jolt, all right, when she read it yesterday at breakfast.”
“She hadn’t wanted it published, then?”
Judy stared. “Wanted it published? It was the first she’d heard of
it. And--well, she didn’t seem quite to know whether to believe me or
not when I said I hadn’t heard about it either. I told her it must
be just a newspaper guess. She’s always thought grandmother ought to
give it to her. And of course she ought. I told mother I didn’t want
it myself. If it was mine, the first thing I’d do with it would be to
sell it. Heavens! Think of having a thing around your neck or on your
dressing-table that was worth--how much? Fifty thousand dollars?”
“More like twice that, I suppose,” I told her.
She shivered.
“Well, I tried to talk mother out of it, but I couldn’t. She wouldn’t
believe it was just a mare’s nest, whether it was news to me or not.
And she isn’t really sure it was.”
“What does your grandmother say about it?”
“Oh, I haven’t seen her since I came down. Miss Digby won’t let
me in. I suppose this happens to be one of the times when she
isn’t--presentable.”
I was rather aghast at that, and I dare say I showed it. Judy gave me
an intent look, and went on.
“You knew that, didn’t you? That she--takes something? Oh, I don’t know
what. Morphine, I suppose. Heaven knows I don’t blame her! I’d do it if
I were in her fix. Hope she’ll be all right for the wedding. Probably
will be. I suppose old Digs is just tuning her up.”
She didn’t look like a child as she said that.
Suddenly she came over and sat down on the edge of my couch, took one
of my hands and patted it.
“Do you want to hear all about the plans for the wedding, who the
bridesmaids are, and what they’re going to wear--the sort of man I’m
going to marry....”
“Tell me that,” I broke in. “What’s Bruce Applebury like?”
She considered silently before she answered. But there was nothing
about her unsmiling young face to suggest the sort of reverie a young
girl in love might be expected to fall into over such a question.
“I won’t try it,” she said at last. “It’s too important a subject.
You’ll see him anyhow in a day or two. I’ll bring him over and give you
a look.”
She wasn’t quite willing to let it go at that, however.
“He’s all right--abso_lute_ly.”
The mispronunciation was humorously meant, or, rather, was meant to
sound as if it were. But people with finely expressive voices like
Judy’s inevitably give themselves away. I stirred with an involuntary
protest. It was an outrage, marrying her off like that--a girl of
twenty--to a man she was not in love with.
She plunged into a detailed recital of the festivities, and never
paused until she got up to go.
“So you see all the fun you’re going to miss for having broken your
poor old leg? Oh, but your nose would have been out of joint anyway.
You were to have given me away, you know. But it seems it’s going to be
Uncle Alec.”
“Not Alexander Corbin!” I exclaimed. “Where in the world has he turned
up from?”
“From the Philippines, where he’s been all the time. Mother got a
telegram Saturday from San Francisco. That was something of a jolt too,
I expect. You’ll come over for the wedding itself, though, won’t you,
on Saturday afternoon--in a horse litter or a palanquin, or something?”
I told her I would.
In the doorway she paused for a comprehensive glance about the room.
“It’s a nice little room, isn’t it,” she said. “And a nice little
house. I’ve never been in here before.”
She paused a moment, then went on. “The horridest thing in the world,
I’m getting to think, is whitewash, and it’s going to be thick over at
The Oaks this week. I’m going to be coated with it. Come out looking
like a nice little plaster angel. Do you know what I’d like to do? I’d
like to poison your nurse, or something, and come down here and take
care of you--for the rest of this week.”
“And not get married at all?” I asked.
“They used to do that by proxy sometimes, didn’t they? I should think
that would be a good way to do it. Good-by. I suppose Punch left his
bicycle around here somewhere.”
I tried, after she’d gone, to make myself believe that there was
nothing to this but the modern young girl’s dread of seeming to be
the conventional blushing bride, but I couldn’t manage it. Punch’s
prediction that there was going to be big trouble before this business
was over stuck in my mind like a burr.