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.