The Beloved Stranger

Chapter 7




For a moment Sherrill and Aunt Pat stood facing one another, taking in the full significance of the loss from every side. Sherrill knew just how much that necklace was prized in the family. Aunt Pat had told her the story of its purchase at a fabulous price by an ancestor who had bought it from royalty for his young bride. It had come down to Aunt Pat and been treasured by her and kept most preciously. Rare emeralds, of master workmanship in their cutting and exquisite setting! Sherrill stood appalled, aghast, facing the possibility that it was hopelessly gone.

“Oh, Aunt Pat!” she moaned. “You oughtn’t to have given it to me! I—I’m—not fit—to have anything rare! Either man or treasure!” she added with a great sob, her lips trembling. “It—seems—I—can’t—keep—anything!”

Aunt Pat broke into a roguish grin.

“I hope you didn’t call that man rare, Sherrill Cameron!” she chuckled. “And for sweet pity’s sake, if you ever do find a real man, don’t put him on a level with mere jewels! Now, take that look off your face and use your head a little. Where did you have that necklace last? You wore it this evening, I know, for I noticed with great satisfaction that you were not wearing that ornate trinket your would-be bridegroom gave you.”

“Oh, I thought I had it on when I came in here!” groaned Sherrill. “I just can’t remember! I’m sure I didn’t take it off anywhere! At least I can’t remember doing it.”

She rushed suddenly to the big chair where she had been sitting for the last hour and pulled out the cushions frantically, running her hands down in the folds of the upholstery, but discovering nothing but a lost pair of scissors.

She turned on the overhead lights and got down on her knees, searching earnestly, but there was no green translucent gleam of emeralds.

Meanwhile Aunt Pat stood thinking, a canny look in her old eyes.

“Now look here, Sherrill,” she said suddenly, whirling round upon the frantic girl, “you haven’t lost your soul, you know, and we are still alive and well. Emeralds are just emeralds after all. Get some poise! Get up off that floor and go quietly downstairs! Look just casually wherever you remember to have been. Just walk over the same places. Don’t do any wild pawing around; just merely look in the obvious places. Don’t make a noise, and don’t say anything to the servants if any of them are up. I don’t think they are. Gemmie thought they were gone to bed. I just sent Gemmie away. Then, if you don’t find it, come up to me.”

Sherrill made a little dismal moan.

“Oh, for mercy’s sake!” said Aunt Pat impatiently. “It isn’t as if you hadn’t had a chance to wear them once anyway, and one doesn’t wear emeralds, such emeralds, around every day. You won’t miss them much in the long run even if you never find them. Now stop your hysterics and run downstairs, but don’t make any noise!”

Sherrill cast a tearful look at her aunt and hurried away, stopping at her own room to get a little flashlight she kept in her desk.

Step by step she retraced the evening in an agony of memory. It wasn’t just her losing the emeralds forever; it was Aunt Pat losing the pleasure of her having them. It was—well, something else, a horrible haunting fear that appeared and disappeared on the horizon of her mind and gripped her heart like a clutching hand.

When she came in her search to the long french window out which she and Copeland had passed to the garden such a little while before, she paused and hesitated, catching her breath at a new memory. If it came to that, there would be something she couldn’t tell Aunt Pat! She couldn’t hope to make her understand about that kiss!

Oh! A long shudder went through her weary body, and every taut nerve hurt like a toothache. How was she to explain it to herself? And yet—!

She unfastened the window with a shaking hand and, touching the switch of her flashlight, went carefully over the porch, and inch by inch down the walk where they had passed, not forgetting the grassy edges on either side. On her way back she stopped, and her cheeks grew hot in the dark as she held back the branches of privet and stepped within that cool green quiet hiding place. Oh, if she could but find it here! If only it had fallen under the shrubs. It would have been very easy for it to come unfastened while he held her in his arms. If only she might find it and be set free from that haunting fear. Just to know that he was all right. Just to be sure—! She felt again the pressure of his arms about her, so gentle, the touch of his lips upon her eyelids. It had rested and comforted her so. It hadn’t seemed wrong. Yet of course he was an utter stranger!

But she searched the quiet hiding place in vain. There was no answering gleam to the little light that went searching so infallibly, and at last she had to come in and give it up. There was utter dejection in her attitude when she came back to Aunt Pat, her lip trembling, her eyes filled with large unshed tears, that haunting fear in their depths. For of course she could not help but realize that that moment when he held her in his arms would have been a most opportune time for a crook to get the emeralds.

“There isn’t a sign of them anywhere!” she said.

“Well,” said Aunt Pat, “you can’t do anything more tonight. Get to bed. You look worn to a thread. I declare, for anybody who went through the evening like a soldier, you certainly have collapsed in a hurry. Lose a bridegroom, and take it calmly. Lose a bauble and go all to pieces! Well, go to bed and forget it, child! Perhaps we’ll find it in the morning.”

“But Aunt Pat!” said Sherrill, standing tragically with clasped hands under the soft light from the old alabaster chandelier, with her gold hair like a halo crowning her. “Oh, Aunt Pat! You don’t suppose—he—took it, do you?”

“He?” said the old lady sharply, whirling on her niece. “Whom do you mean? Your precious renegade bridegroom? No, I hadn’t thought of him. I doubt if he had the nerve to do it. Still, it’s not out of the thinking.”

“Oh, Aunt Pat! Not Carter! I didn’t mean Carter.” She said, astonished, “Of course he wouldn’t do a thing like that!”

“Why ‘of course’?” snapped Aunt Pat grimly. “He knew the value of those stones, didn’t he? And according to his own confession, he needed money, didn’t he? If he would steal a girl’s love and fling it away, why not steal another girl’s necklace? Deception is deception in whatever form you find it, little girl! However, I suppose Carter McArthur had enough on his hands this evening for one occasion, and he likely wouldn’t have had the time to stage another trick. But I hope you are not trying to suspect that poor innocent bystander that you dragged into your service this evening!”

“He was a stranger!” said Sherrill with white anxious lips and frightened eyes.

“Hmm! Did he act to you like a crook, Sherrill Cameron?”

“No, Aunt Pat! He was wonderful! But—”

“Well, no more buts about it. Of course he had nothing to do with it. I know a true man when I see him, even if I am an old maid, and I won’t have a man like that suspected in my house! You don’t really mean to say you haven’t any more discernment than that, do you?”

“No,” said Sherrill, managing a shaky smile. “I’m sure he is all right, but I was afraid you would think—”

“There! I thought as much! You thought I had no sense. Well, go to bed. We’re both dead for sleep. And don’t think another thing about this tonight! Mind me!”

“But—oughtn’t I to call the police?”

“What for? And have them demand a list of our guests and insult every one of them? No emeralds are worth the losing of friends! Besides, nobody can do anything about it tonight anyway. Now get to bed. Scat!”

Sherrill broke into a little hysterical laugh and, rushing up to her aunt, threw her arms around her neck and gave her a tender kiss.

“You are just wonderful!” she whispered into her ear, and then hurried back to her room.

Before her mirror she stood again, looking sternly into her own eyes. Such sorrowful tired eyes as looked back at her, such a chastened little face, utterly humble.

Somehow as she stood facing her present situation, it seemed weeks, almost years, since she had stood there in wedding satin facing married life like an unknown country through which she had to travel. If she had known when she stood there smiling with her wedding bouquet in her arms, and her wedding veil, blossom-wreathed, on her head, that all this was to be, how would the laughter have died on her lips! How trivial would have seemed her faint fears! Had those fears been a sort of premonition of what was to happen in a few minutes? she wondered. She had read of such things, and perhaps they were in the air like radio waves waiting to be picked up!

Oh, what a night! What an ending to all that lovely preparation! The tears welled suddenly into her eyes, and a great feeling of being overwhelmed came over her anew. Dust and ashes! How had all the beauty of her life faded in a few short minutes! And how was she to face the long desert of the future?

Ah! To have lifted the goblet of Life to her lips, and suddenly to have had it snatched from her without even a single sip! How was she going to bear it all?

It was like coming up to a great stone wall and not being able to scale it, a stone wall on every side, and not even a desire left to try to get over it. All that she really wanted just now was to drop down and sleep and forget.

Well, that was just what she had promised Aunt Pat she would do, but even the effort seemed too much.

She turned from the mirror, too tired even to cry, and saw that Gemmie had laid out one of her plain simple nightgowns, nothing new and smart, just an old, soft, well-worn gown out of her pleasant thoughtless past. Gratefully she crept into it and got into her bed.

She was too tired to think, too burdened to toss and weep. All she wanted was to sink down into oblivion; and that was just what happened. Tired nature pulled a curtain about her, and she drifted away into deep sleep.

But it was not a peaceful sleep. There were troublesome times and buffetings. She was having to drive her car very fast over a rough wild road in a storm, and her wedding veil kept blowing over her eyes and getting tangled in her steering wheel. Carter seemed to be standing somewhere ahead in the darkness, waiting for her with a terrible frown on his handsome face, the frown he had worn when he first saw Arla enter that door. She was late for her wedding and out of breath. She seemed to be lost on a wild prairie, and was afraid, terribly afraid!

Over and over she dreamed this with variations. Sometimes it was snowing, and the sleet stung her cheeks and shriveled the lilies of the bouquet in her lap, but she had to go on until she finally arrived at a strange dark rendezvous in an unknown country, and plunged out of her car, letting it run away into the darkness without her. She groped about in the night to find her wedding, but there was only a closed and darkened church. She was filled with despair till a stranger, whom yet she seemed to have known all her life, came out of the shadows and helped her home. A stranger who kissed her gently when he left her at her door.