Priceless Pearl — Chapter III Part 2

Suddenly she felt two hard, masculine arms go round her, a kiss on the back of her neck, another on her reluctantly turned cheek.

It happened in a second.

As she struggled ungracefully, angrily, she saw over Williams' shoulder the figure of Durland rising from the hammock on the piazza.

If Wood had received that batch of Sunday letters at the mine he would have torn open Pearl's first--as likely to promise the most amusement.

But he got them at his hotel in Mexico City, and conscious of great leisure--for he was staying there a week or so on his way home while he dickered over taxes with a governmental department--he adopted a different method.

He ranged them before him inversely in the order of interest.

They came--first Durland's. He wondered what Durland wanted, for his nephew was never moved to the momentous effort of writing except under the stress of great financial necessity; second, Edna's;

third, that of Miss Wellington, who did not write often; and last Pearl's thick typewritten budget.

_Dear Uncle Anthony_: I know mother is writing her point of view about this, and I want you to know the truth.

I was there and mother was not.

Miss Exeter could not have helped what happened.

If it was any of our faults it was Dolly's--not only for having that kind of a thug to stay but for being as usual an hour late in getting off, so that Miss Exeter thought they had gone.

You can imagine how I felt in seeing a great beast like Williams coming up behind her and grabbing her like that.

I let him know what I thought, but I would like to have pasted him one on the jaw.

I

wish you had been here.

Mother is all wrong--a dreadful injustice is being done a very wonderful woman.

She is patient, but I don't suppose she will stand much more.

I wouldn't if I were her.

Your affectionate nephew, DURLAND CONWAY

Wood tore open his sister's letter.

His thought was, "Impossible!"

_Dear Anthony_: I am sorry, after the trouble you took ["A lot you are," he thought] that your priceless pearl will really have to go.

It has been an impossible situation from the first, but I have loyally tried to carry it through for your sake--you seemed to care so much about it.

I have never liked the girl.

She has a sort of breezy aggressiveness that I can't stand, and Cora Wellington felt just the same.

I did not write you, but that first evening Cora said to me, "Where is Anthony's judgment--sending you a girl like that?"

I do not like the effect she has had on the children--taking all the spirit out of poor Durland, and Antonia appeared dressed for church this morning like a little French doll.

However, when Durland discovered her this afternoon clasped in the arms of a detestable young man by the name of Williams--Allen Williams, whom Dolly, poor child, has had spending Sunday, much against my inclination--I did feel that things had reached a point when even you would hardly blame me for getting rid of her.

I sent for the girl and told her she must go.

I was surprised and, I own, hurt, Anthony, when she answered that you had extracted a secret promise from her not to go until you released her.

I hope you see what a disagreeable and humiliating position you have put me in.

I think I should have ignored both her promise and my own, except that the girl has acquired such a hold over Durland and Antonia that they go on like little maniacs about the injustice I am doing her.

Dolly and Cora entirely agree with me.

However, I have consented to keep her until I get a telegram from you releasing us both.

I do hope you will immediately send it on the receipt of this letter.

Wood laid the letter down with a feeling of the most intense surprise.

Allen Williams--a young man unfavorably known to him as an admirer of the most conspicuous of the year's Broadway beauties--that man spontaneously interested in a girl like Miss Exeter--a ruthless, stupid young animal like Williams attracted by that pale, honest, intellectual, badly dressed girl--without an effort on her part.

No, that was too much to ask him to believe.

He opened Cora's letter.

Cora wrote a large, sprawling hand, and her only rule was never to write upon the next consecutive page, so that her correspondent went hopelessly turning her letters round and about to find the end of a sentence.

Wood caught "----getting herself kissed in poor Edna's blameless sitting room in broad daylight, and thus getting rid of her and an undesirable suitor of Dolly's at one fell----" He twisted the letter about, trying to find the end of this, but coming only upon a description of moonlight on the ocean, he tossed it aside and opened that of the culprit herself.

I regret to say, [it began in vein that struck Wood as none too serious] that I have caused a scandal.

A young man called Williams tried to kiss me--in fact he did--when I was reading the paper and didn't even know he was in the house.

I should have dealt with him; but Durland, who saw it all, was so cunning and manly, and ordered him out of the house.

Your sister is naturally annoyed with both of us and won't believe I was not to blame.

She keeps quoting something you once said to Dolly under circumstances described as similar--that no man kisses a girl if he knows it's really against her will.

If you did say that, Mr. Wood, you're wrong.

If a man wants to kiss a girl something in his psychology makes him feel sure she wants him to.

But the loathsome creepiness a girl feels at having a man whom she doesn't like touching her is something no man can possibly understand.

Williams has behaved technically correctly and actually horridly--saying sourly enough that it was entirely his fault, that he alone was to blame, but letting everyone see that he feels I led him on--only that, of course, a gentleman's lips are sealed.

However, he was instantly shipped back to New York on a slow train that stops at every station.

As soon as he was gone Mrs. Conway and I had rather a scene.

She wanted me to go at once.

I said I could not go without your permission.

She finally agreed to let me wait until you had been heard from.

I need not say I shall do exactly as you wish.

It will not be particularly easy to stay after this, but I will do it if you wish--or go--just as you telegraph.

Whatever Anthony Wood's faults might be, lack of decision was not usually one of them.

He folded the letters neatly on his table, took his panama hat from the peg, went to the telegraph office and sent his sister the following message: Letters received.

Please keep Miss Exeter until my return.

Should be back within two weeks.

And then, rapid decisions being at times dangerously like impulses, he sent a second one to Miss Exeter herself, which read: Wish to express my complete confidence in you.

The days before those two messages came were trying ones in the Conway household, which was now divided into two hostile parties--Pearl, Durland and Antonia on one hand; Mrs. Conway and Dolly, occasionally reenforced by Miss Wellington, on the other.

Miss Wellington did not make matters any easier by suggesting to Edna that something similar must have taken place in the case of Anthony himself--just what you'd expect from that sort of girl--that hair, that great curved red mouth.

She understood from dear little Dolly that Williams had told her--as much as a man could tell such a thing--that he could hardly have done anything else.

What Williams had really said, for few men are as bad as their adoring women represent them, was that her mother was taking the incident too seriously.

Pearl could not have borne life if it had not been for her daily letter, which she continued to write.

Mrs. Conway hardly spoke to her;

and if she did, she spoke slowly, enunciating every word carefully as if Pearl's moral obliquity had somehow made her idiotic.

Durland, loyal to the death, was not much help, because he merely hated his family and scowled through every meal.

Antonia, on the other hand, was one of those rare natures who could be an ally without being a partisan.

"Of course," she would say calmly to anyone who would listen to her, "Allen only came here at all in the hope of seeing Miss Exeter, but you can't expect Dolly to understand that."

Anthony's two telegrams arrived one evening at dinnertime and were handed by the butler, one to Mrs. Conway and one to the governess.

Pearl's heart sank on seeing there were two.

She thought it must mean he was deciding against her; and though she found her present position unpleasant, she did not want Mr. Wood to decide against her.

She opened hers and read its few words at one glance.

It was not her habit to blush, but she blushed now with a deep emotion--of gratitude and admiration.

Not many men would have stood by her, she thought, in a situation like this.

She knew where Antonia got her sense of justice.

Or, she thought with something very like jealousy, was it really Augusta in whom he was expressing his confidence, not in her at all?

Yes, of course, anyone who had once seen Augusta would feel confidence in her.

The next day she settled back to the routine--lessons with Antonia and then with Durland--the public beach--a silent luncheon--then sometimes a little feeble tennis with Antonia; but more often now her mother took the child out with her, as if Pearl were not a proper person to be given charge of a pure young child.

Left alone, Pearl would take her book and parasol and retire to the Conway's beach.

She seldom read, for, to be candid, she was not a great reader; but she would sit and stare at the empty sea--empty at least if the wind were from the south;

but when it turned and blew from the north, then the whole ocean would be dotted with fishing boats out of Gardiner's Bay; and Pearl, lying there idly, would watch the rowboats putting out and taking in the nets.

Sometimes Antonia was permitted to be her companion, and then she read aloud to the child.

Antonia was in the stage of development when she loved poetry, but poetry of a stirring, narrative quality--The Ballad of East and West, The Revenge, The Burial of Moses.

She would lie with her head in Miss Exeter's lap, gazing up into the unquenchable blue of the sky, and say "I'm going to learn that one by heart," and would get as far as the second verse when it was time to go in and dress.

After dinner Pearl and Durland would play Russian bank, which he had proudly and lovingly taught her; and Dolly and Mrs. Conway would run over to Miss Wellington's, where they could abuse the governess to their heart's content.

One night--just between night and day--Pearl woke with an overmastering sense of dread.

She had been dreaming that the sea, a perpendicular wall miles and miles high, was coming over the dunes.

After two or three days of damp heat the waves had been rising; local weather prophets were talking about the August twister.

Now, as she sat up in bed, listening and looking into the dark, she became aware that the wind had risen; the wooden house was creaking and trembling like a ship.

She was frightened, as an animal must be frightened without reason and out of all proportion.

In the medley of little sounds she thought she detected the sound of something hostile.

The pearls--she thought of the pearls.

It would have been easy to lock her door--no, not easy, for as she sat rigid in her bed she found the idea of motion terrifying; but she could have summoned courage to cross the floor and lock the door.

Only, Pearl was afflicted by a sense of responsibility.

She turned on her light--that helped her.

She was no longer terrified like an animal; she was merely frightened like a human being.

She got up, put on her dressing gown and, crossing the hall by a supreme effort of courage, entered Mrs. Conway's darkened room.

Perfectly gentle, regular breathing greeted her ear.

She knew where the switch was and turned on the light.

Mrs. Conway sat up in bed and said, "Is anything wrong--the children?"

Pearl's fears melted in the face of human companionship.

She felt calm again and rather foolish as she explained that she had felt alarmed for no special reason--had thought about the pearls.

Mrs. Conway glanced at the closed safe.

"I thought," she said, "that the argument for keeping valuables in the safe was that we could sleep calmly.

The safe can't be opened unless you give the combination."

"It was childish of me," said Pearl.

"I was frightened."

Mrs. Conway smiled at her more kindly than she had ever done.

It was one of the contradictions in her nature that she was physically brave--a fact obscured to most observers on account of her moral cowardice.

Like most brave people, she was kind to the timid.

"It's the storm," she said.

"It gets on some people's nerves.

I hope the roof isn't leaking; it nearly always does in one of these storms.

What were you afraid of?"

"I don't exactly know," said Pearl.

"Would you like me to go back to your room with you?

Would you like to sleep on my sofa?"

Edna asked.

But that was too ignominious.

A faint wild dawn was breaking, and Pearl knew that with the night her terror had gone.

She went back to bed.

The next morning the wind was still blowing like a hurricane from the south, though the rain had stopped.

Great waves were running up the beach, in some places as far as the sand hills, and forming a long, narrow pool at the base of the dunes.

As soon as lessons were over Antonia dragged Miss Exeter to the beach--it was no easy matter, for the wind blew the sand stingingly against face and hands.

There was no use in going to the public beach that morning, for the bathing apparatus of barrels and life lines had been washed away, the bathhouses were threatened, and there was a rumor that the sea was washing into Lake Agawam.

Pearl and Antonia sat on their own dunes, watching the wild scene, and suddenly Antonia said, "Look here, Miss Exeter, I want to ask you something.

Perhaps I oughtn't to."

Pearl had so completely lost any sense of having a guilty secret that she answered tranquilly, "Go ahead."

"Is Uncle Anthony in love with you--like Mr. Williams?"

Ah, Pearl knew what that meant: Antonia had taken a long drive with her mother and Miss Wellington the day before!

She picked her words carefully.

"I only saw your uncle once," she said.

"But Allen only saw you once or twice--and look at the darn thing!"

"Mr. Williams is not in the least in love with me."

"Miss Wellington said that some women have the power of rousing----" "Antonia, I don't want to hear what she said."

"You don't like her, do you?"

"No." "Shake," said Antonia heartily.

"I don't like her, though she's very kind to me; but it doesn't seem to me"--Antonia's voice took on the flavor of meditation--"that she quite tells the truth.

For instance, just before Uncle Anthony went away, she telephoned to him one morning and asked him to come over.

He was playing a game of parcheesi with me--I'd teased him a good deal to play--and he said he couldn't come, and she--well, I couldn't hear what she was saying, but at last he said, rather ungraciously, 'All right then, I'll come.'

And he went, and he took me with him.

And we only stayed about ten minutes, although she wanted us to stay longer.

And then later at the bathing beach I heard her telling someone that she was late--she was sorry--she couldn't help it, because Anthony Wood came in just as she was starting--of course she adored having him run in like that, but it did take a good deal of one's time--'one's time'--that's what she said.

I

call that a lie, don't you?"

"I certainly do," said Pearl.

"That's what I like about you, Miss Exeter; you say right out what you think--even to a child."

Antonia looked thoughtful.

"It's a great mistake not to tell children the truth; it makes it so hard for them to know what to do.

For instance, we have an aunt--a great aunt--Aunt Sophia.

She's awful, or as you would say, just terrible, but it seems she's going to leave us all her money.

Now if mother would tell us that, it would be simple; but she doesn't. She says to be nice to Aunt Sophia because she's such a dear.

She isn't a bit a dear.

So I had to find out all by myself why mother, who's so awful to most of her relations, is so nice to Aunt Sophia.

I did.

And it's the same thing about my father.

He tried to kidnap me once--at least he met me on my way to school and asked me to take a drive with him.

I wouldn't do it.

Mother said it was lucky I didn't. But it wasn't luck.

It was good judgment.

Grown-up people are queer about that.

When they do something wise they say it was wise.

But when a child does something wise they say it was lucky.

Children have more sense than people think; they have to have."

"You have," said Pearl, who had never thought of all this before.

"Now this morning, do you know why mother wanted to get us all out of the house?"

Antonia continued.

Pearl felt tempted to say that Mrs. Conway always wanted to get her out of the house, but she merely shook her head, and Antonia went on, "Because she is going to have an interview with my father."

"With your father?"

Pearl sprang to her feet.

"Are you sure?"

Antonia nodded.

"When mother is going to see father she looks the way I feel as if I looked when I'm going to the dentist--don't you know, you say to yourself, 'I wouldn't think twice about this if I were brave'--and then you think about it all the time.

You know, mother doesn't think she tells us everything, but she really does, except about my father.

And so, you see, if it's something about my father I always know, because mother's worried without saying why."

This reasoning seemed sound to Pearl.

She felt that in order to fulfill Anthony's instructions she must go to Mrs. Conway's assistance at once.

She did not like to burst in upon them from the open windows of the sitting-room, and so ran round the house to the front door.

A small, shabby automobile was standing in the circle, and as Pearl bounded up the steps a man came out quickly and got into it--a pale man, with long white hands and something of Durland's birdlike quality.

She saw that she was too late.

She went into the sitting-room.

Mrs. Conway was standing in the middle of the room, supporting one elbow in one hand and two fingers of the other resting against her chin.

She looked so white that every grain of rouge seemed to stand out--away from her cheeks.

She turned her eyes coldly upon Pearl.

"Well?"

she said.

Pearl had not thought at all what she was going to say, and blurted out, "Oh, Mrs. Conway, I thought you might need me!

I thought I could help you if--Mr. Wood said----" Edna, rather to her own surprise, suddenly lost her temper.

"I'm tired of being considered a perfect fool," she said.

"Anthony!

I know what Anthony thinks--that I'm always going to give Gordon all the children's money.

As a matter of fact, I know better than anyone--though it isn't always very easy to say no, no, no, to a man who has been your husband and who insists if he had five dollars he could make a fortune; but I do say it--I always have--always--almost always.

It's a little too much to be watched over and lectured by you, Miss Exeter."

After which speech Mrs. Conway left the room.

Luncheon was more than usually silent that day, although Edna attempted to take an interest in the children's morning, asking whether it had been pleasant in the water.

"My goodness, mother," Antonia answered, "have you looked at the water?

We'd certainly have been drowned if we'd gone in."

After lunch was over Edna was obliged to address Miss Exeter directly.

"I think you went off this morning without unlocking my safe," she said.

"Oh, I'm sorry," said Pearl.

Mrs. Conway smiled faintly.

"It was quite what I expected--it always happens with safes," she said.

"But now perhaps you will get me my pearls."

Pearl went eagerly, and as she went she remembered that she had remembered to unlock the safe--just before she went to the beach with Antonia.

Yes, as she thought, the safe was very slightly ajar.

She took the long, slim, blue velvet case from its compartment and brought it to Mrs. Conway in the drawing-room.

It was empty!

The surprise was like a physical blow, and yet no one at first supposed that the pearls were actually gone.

Mrs. Conway, as so often happens to anyone who has sustained a loss, was instantly severely lectured by her three children on her habitual carelessness.

Then a superficial search was made on her dressing table, on the glass shelves in the bathroom.

Then a recapitulation was made--a joint effort on the part of everybody--of just what had occurred since the pearls were last seen.

Everyone agreed that Mrs. Conway had been wearing them at dinner the night before.

She had gone to bed rather early, and distinctly remembered that she had put the pearls in their slim blue velvet case and put the case in the safe and shut the safe, which was then automatically locked.

She did not remember seeing the safe unlocked in the morning.

No, Pearl explained, the reason for this was that she, Pearl, had knocked at the door about eleven, just after finishing Durland's algebra lesson.

There had been no answer, because Mrs. Conway was in her bath--her bathroom opened out of her bedroom.

Pearl had been in a hurry, so that she had just run and unlocked the safe and had called to Mrs. Conway that it was unlocked.

There had been no one in the room at the time; but the maid--the maid had been Dolly's nurse when she was a baby, and was therefore absolutely above suspicion--had been sewing in the next room.

Mrs. Conway did not contradict this story.

She simply raised her eyebrows and said that she had not noticed that the safe was open.

Evidently it must have been open all day long--very unfortunate.

Pearl felt and probably looked horribly guilty.

Of course she ought to have looked to see whether the pearls were in their case when she opened the safe.

She usually did.

She remembered, too, her strange terror of the night before.

Was it possible that that had been based on something real?

Had she really heard a footstep under the noise of the storm?

Could there have been a burglar in the house, hidden perhaps all night, and stepping out at the right moment about noon when the upstairs rooms were deserted?

It was Pearl who insisted on telephoning to New York for a detective.

Mrs. Conway at first objected and said she would feel like a goose if the pearls were immediately discovered--caught in the lace of her tea gown, or something like that.

But Pearl was quite severe.

If there had been a robbery, she knew that every minute was of importance.

Just before dinner she called an agency.

Two detectives arrived by motor about ten o'clock that night.

They had a long secret conference with Mrs. Conway.

Then one went back to New York and the other--the head man, Mr. Albertson--took up his residence in the house.

Pearl went to bed more worried than ever.

It didn't seem to her that the detectives had really taken hold of the situation.

She herself could think of a dozen things they might have done that night.

It did not occur to her that their first action was to look up the past record of everyone in the household.