MATCHED PEARLS (30 page)

The meeting was over at last, the throngs who surged up to shake hands and thank Seagrave for his message were all greeted and dismissed with that grave, sweet smile, and he came down the aisle to Constance with eagerness.

“I’ve been thinking,” he said with a smile. “We’ve missed the early train by about half a minute. Do you mind? Of course we could take a taxi all the way home, but how would you like instead to walk in the park a little while? It’s wonderful down there by the river. I went down a number of times after you were gone to college before I sailed and thought how pleasant it would be to come there together sometimes. It’s moonlit tonight. It will be great! It’s only a five-minute taxi ride from here and we’d have a little over an hour before we’d have to drive to the station for the later train. It would be a good quiet place to talk, and cool, too. Would you enjoy it?”

Constance was trembling with the joy and the sadness of it, for she knew she must carry out her purpose of confession now. But her eyes were bright as she lifted them to his face, and there was a ring of gladness in her voice.

Just a few minutes now before she must confess. This beautiful way he was treating her was the way it might have been between them if she had been his sort. Oh, the sweetness of it! Oh, the sadness!

She tried to tell him on the way how much she had enjoyed the meeting! How much his message had meant to her soul, but she could not find the right words and stumbled along with halting speech, feeling more and more how impossible it was because she did not speak his language.

She was trembling visibly as he dismissed the taxi. Now in just a minute or two she must begin her story. There could be no more reprieve.

He drew her arm within his own and they walked slowly along the wide, paved walk amid the cool, earthy smell of ferns and other growing things, the moonlight dripping through the feathery branches of the trees and mingling with the garish blare of the many arc lights along the way.

They passed several benches where people were sitting, some talking, some drowsing, a pair of lovers, the man’s arm about the girl, oblivious of the world. He led her along till they found a seat near the riverbank deeper in the shadow than the rest, a trifle off the beaten path. Their only neighbor was a man stretched at full length on a bench over by the walk, his hat drawn down over his eyes. He was asleep. He would not trouble them. It seemed as if they had withdrawn into a little world of their own.

“I have thought a great deal about the time when perhaps you and I might come here,” said Seagrave as they sat down. “It seems wonderful that my dream has really come true. This is a wonderful place to talk. I have been longing to tell you a lot of things. But you said you had something to tell me. Shall we begin with that first?”

Constance looked up with a frightened little shiver of a smile and knew that her time had come.

I
have to tell you that I am not what you think I am,” she began sorrowfully. “I’ve been miserable ever since I found out how despicable I am, since you came and talked with Doris and since I’ve been reading your little book. I have been so utterly wretched over it that I’ve got to be honest and tell you the whole thing.”

“Yes?” he said and there was something tense and strained in his voice, as if what she had to say would mean a great deal to him.

“Don’t tell me unless it will help you,” he added. “I can trust you.”

“No,” said Constance, “you can’t trust me. You think you can, but that’s just it. You’ve got to know the whole truth. I’ve done something that you will think is terrible! You know just a little part of it, but you’ve got to know the whole. I can’t stand it any longer.”

“Then I shall be glad to listen,” said he gravely.

She put her hand to her throat.

“I wore these pearls tonight to help me to tell you,” she said. “They are real and very valuable. They are matched pearls, and my great-grandfather paid a good many thousands of dollars for them. He gave them to my grandmother the day she united with the church when she was a young girl.”

“Yes?” He looked down upon her with a tender light in his eyes, but she, hurrying on with her story, did not see.

“My grandmother had said for a good many years that she was going to give them to me when I united with the church. However, that church part of it seemed to have dropped out of sight, and later it came to be understood that I was to have them when I graduated from college. I was most eager to have them for an especial occasion, a weekend house party to which I was invited just after Easter, and I got Mother to feel around judiciously and try to get Grandmother to be willing to give me the pearls at Easter instead of waiting for my graduation. Then what was my disappointment to find out when I got home that Grandmother still had her heart set on the pearls being given when I joined the church. Mother found out that she had been deeply disappointed that I had not done so long ago, and when she discovered that my former Sunday school classmates were all joining at Easter, she made it a point that I join also. She seemed to feel it meant almost disgrace that I was not a member of the old church that my great-grandfather had helped to organize. She had even gone to the length of considering whether she would not give the pearls to a little country cousin of mine who could have no possible use for them but who was quite a devoted church worker. Now, can you begin to see what I did?”

“Perhaps.”

“It was Saturday night, and I was going to a dance at the country club. I felt it was archaic to join the church. I didn’t believe in anything. I was just a little pagan. But I went Sunday morning and appeared before the session, consented to everything they asked me, stood up beside you that Easter Sunday morning to confess before the world a Christ in whom I did not even believe! You thought I did it to please my grandmother, and even that was bad enough, and you let me see how false it was, but you did not know that I sold my honesty and mocked God for a string of matched pearls!”

Suddenly Constance felt a rough, coarse hand brush across her shoulder and touch her neck, and looking up, startled, she saw an ugly gun pointing straight into her face, held by a slouchy-looking man with a handkerchief tied over the lower part of his face and an old hat pulled down over his eyes.

“Now you two set right still and don’t you make no noise,” he said in a tone that struck terror to Constance’s heart. “You won’t neither of you get hurt ef you do as I tell ya! Now you, lady, you just hand me over them pretty white babies round your neck and keep still about three minutes and you won’t be interrupted in yer talk anymore.”

Her pearls! Constance’s heart sank! Oh, why had she been such a fool! Sitting here in the open telling how valuable they were! Retribution had come swiftly. But oh, to lose them in this way! How humiliating! It would have been one thing to have to give them back to Grandmother and let her give them to Norma. That she recognized as just. But for her to have wantonly lost them outside of the family, a family heirloom! The thought, added to her fright, was sickening and it came in a flash as one can comprehend a whole chapter of truth in an instant under great stress. She felt paralyzed. She couldn’t open her lips. She couldn’t move her hand.

The man was growing impatient.

“Unfasten them pearls, sister, and give ’em to me! Be quick about it ur I’ll shoot yer young man and snatch ’em, see? I gotcha both covered. Ya can’t do a thing! Hand ’em over! Ya don’t want yer man shot, do ya?”

Constance lifted an unsteady hand toward the clasp of her pearls, but suddenly, just behind her it seemed, there came the sharp, shrill scream of a policeman’s whistle, almost in her ear! It was so loud and close it made both Constance and the bandit start. As if he had been but a bad dream, the intruder slithered into the shadows and disappeared. It all happened so quickly that Constance thought she must be losing her mind.

But Seagrave had caught her hand and spoken one word: “Quick!”

On limbs that seemed powerless to bear her she fled with him across the grass, blindly, not seeing her way ahead, her breath coming in quick, frightened gasps, having much ado to keep her footing as Seagrave fairly dragged her along.

It was only a moment and they were back on the safe, bright pavement again where people were coming and going and a traffic cop could be seen half a block away holding up cars while a great green bus swung into its waiting place at the curb.

Straight toward the bus they ran, still hand in hand, Constance breathless and frightened, still holding her other hand tight over the pearls about her neck, and only aware that she was being guided and cared for.

No one noticed them. It was not an infrequent sight just at that spot to see people running for a bus. The world went right on about them.

Then all at once a great comforting policeman loomed ahead of them, and Seagrave drew him aside for a moment and told him what had happened.

The officer put a bright little whistle to his lips and let out that same shrill, terrifying whistle that she had heard behind her ear down on the bench by the river when the bandit was ordering her to hand over her pearls, and the chills went down Constance’s back.

She couldn’t hear all that Seagrave and the officer were saying, but she saw the policeman look toward her pearls comprehendingly. She glanced around fearsomely, half expecting to see the bandit lurking off in the shadows.

The officer was writing down something in his notebook. Seagrave took a card out of his pocket and gave it to him. Then three other policemen came hurrying from different directions to answer the whistle. A word and they were scattered hastily, one off in the direction of the bench by the river, the other two sliding away among the shrubbery like shadows on their rubber-soled boots.

Presently Seagrave came back to her where she stood waiting and put her in the bus. There was only one double seat vacant, and Constance was glad to sink down into the deep puffy cushion. Seagrave reached for her hand that lay in her lap and held it firmly in a strong, reassuring grasp as he sat down beside her and, leaning over, peered into her face.

“Are you all right?” he asked anxiously.

“Oh yes.” Constance tried to smile but it was a wan and feeble attempt, and her voice was still shaky.

“I shall never forgive myself that I let you in for that by my foolish suggestion.”

“Oh, it was all my fault!” said Constance with a little catch in her voice that might easily have been an incipient sob. “I ought to have known better than to wear them. I ought not to have talked—” and she looked around furtively. “Oh, I’m such an utter fool!”

“No!” said Seagrave gently, speaking very quietly and giving her hand another tender pressure. “Please don’t say that. I was entirely to blame. I ought to have realized that in this strange, uncertain age in which we are living it is not safe to idle about in lonely places with a lady even so early in the evening and so near to city traffic. We have been wonderfully cared for. That was a great escape!”

“Oh yes!” breathed Constance, shivering suddenly at the memory of that sinister gun. “But I don’t quite understand yet how it all happened. What became of our policeman, the one who whistled and drove the man away from us? You don’t suppose he is in any danger, do you? You don’t think we should have waited awhile to thank him, do you?”

“There wasn’t any policeman,” said Seagrave, turning a boyish grin toward her.

“There
wasn’t
any?” said Constance, amazed, wondering if her ears had deceived her in the general excitement. “But who whistled? It was right behind my ear!”

“I did!” said Seagrave. “It’s a trick I learned long ago. I used to have all kinds of fun as a kid holding up traffic when someone was trying to speed by me. I enjoyed seeing them stop and hunt in vain for the cop who had stopped them.”

“But you didn’t move a muscle of your face. I could see you out of the side of my eye.”

“I know,” grinned Seagrave. “It’s a part of the trick to do it so that no one can tell where it comes from. You see, it was the only weapon I had at hand. A kind of trivial thing to venture, I admit, in such a serious situation, but I couldn’t think of anything else to do just at that stage of the game. I didn’t dare try to wrest the gun out of his hand as I should likely have ventured if I had been alone, lest it would go off in your face. And I knew that the whistle was likely to startle him at least and perhaps throw him off his guard, so that I could get a better chance at him. I scarcely hoped he would fade out of the picture quite so easily, but I guess it must really have scared him.”

“Oh!” said Constance, suddenly taking the whole thing in. “Oh!” And suddenly she began to laugh uncontrollably, to check the tears that threatened to undo her.

And then suddenly they were at the station and had to get out of the bus.

There was still a half hour before the train was scheduled to leave, but the train was open and they found seats and comparative privacy. Only a few people were in the car, away up at the other end, and they could talk without interruption.

Constance sank into the seat wearily and put her head back, closing her eyes for an instant. Seagrave eyed her anxiously.

“I shall always blame myself for having let you in for all this,” he said in troubled tones.

Constance opened her eyes at that and sat up energetically.

“Oh, don’t say that,” she protested earnestly. “I’m glad it happened! Now it’s over, I’m glad for having gone through it. It was what I deserved to lose my pearls. And they would have been gone if it hadn’t been for you. You saved them for me! I don’t feel as if I had a right to them anymore. I’m glad, glad that I saw it all just as it must be in God’s eyes. I think it took that gun to complete the revelation of myself. I found a little story in the Testament you gave me, a story about a man who found a pearl of great price and went and sold all that he had and bought it. I read it a great many times, and I began to think that was like myself. I sold my finer feelings and standards when I joined the church to get those pearls.”