“Val, supper’s ready,” came Rupert’s voice from the hall.
Val half turned to go. “I’ve got to go now. But I’ll be back later,” he promised.
“Yo’ll tell him?” Jeems stabbed a finger at the door.
“Yes; after supper. I promise.”
With a little sigh Jeems relaxed and burrowed down into the softness of the pillow. “Ah’ll be awaitin’,” he said.
XIII
On Such a Night as This—
It had been on of those dull, weepy days when a sullen drizzle clouded sky and earth. In consequence, the walls and floors of Pirate’s Haven seemed to exude chill. Rupert built a fire in the hall fireplace, but none of the family could say that it was a successful one. It made a nice show of leaping flame accompanied by fancy lighting effects but gave forth absolutely no heat.
“Val?”
The boy started guiltily and thrust his notebook under the couch cushion as Charity came in. Tiny drops of rain were strung along the hairs which had blown free of her rain-cape hood like steel beads along a golden wire.
“Yes? Don’t come here expecting to get warm,” he warned her bitterly. “We are very willing but the fire is weak. Looks pretty, doesn’t it?” He kicked at a charred end on the hearth. “Well, that’s all it’s good for!”
“Val, what sort of a mess have you and Jeems jumped into?” she asked as she handed him her dripping cape.
“Oh, just a general sort of mess,” he answered lightly. “Jeems had callers who forgot their manners. So Ricky and I breezed in and brought the party to a sudden end—”
“As I can see by your black eye,” she commented. “But what has Jeems been up to?”
Val was suddenly very busy holding her cape before that mockery of a blaze.
“Why don’t you ask him that?”
“Because I’m asking you. Rupert came over last night and sat on my gallery making very roundabout inquiries concerning Jeems. I pried out of him the details of your swamp battle. But I want to know now just what Jeems has been doing. Your brother is so vague—”
“Rupert has the gift of being exasperatingly uncommunicative,” his brother told her. “The story, so far as I know, is short and simple. Jeems knows a secret way into this house. In addition, his grandfather told him that the fortune of the house of Jeems is concealed here—having been very hazy in his description of the nature of said fortune. Consequently, grandson has been playing haunt up and down our halls trying to find it.
“His story is as full of holes as a sieve but somehow one can’t help believing it. He has explained that he has the secret of the outside entrance only, and not the one opening from the inside. In the meantime he is in bed—guarded from intrusion by Ricky and Lucy with the same care as if he were the crown jewels. So matters rest at present.”
“Neatly put.” She dropped down on the couch. “By the way, do you realize that you have ruined your face for my uses?”
Val fingered the crisscrossing tape on his cheek. “This is only temporary.”
“I certainly hope so. That must have been some battle.”
“One of our better efforts.” He coughed in mock modesty. “Ricky saved the day with alarms and excursions without. Rupert probably told you that.”
“Yes, he can be persuaded to talk at times. Is he always so silent?”
“Nowadays, yes,” he answered slowly. “But when we were younger—You know,” Val turned toward her suddenly, his brown face serious to a degree, “it isn’t fair to separate the members of a family. To put one here and one there and the third somewhere else. I was twelve when Father died, and Ricky was eleven. They sent her off to Great-aunt Rogers because Uncle Fleming, who took me, didn’t care for a girl—”
“And Rupert?”
“Rupert—well, he was grown, he could arrange his own life; so he just went away. We got a letter now and then, or a postcard. There was money enough to send us to expensive schools and dress us well. It was two years before I really saw Ricky again. You can’t call short visits on Sunday afternoons seeing anyone.
“Then Uncle Fleming died and I was simply parked at Great-aunt Rogers’. She”—Val was remembering things, a bitter look about his mouth—“didn’t care for boys. In September I was sent to a military academy. I needed discipline, it seemed. And Ricky was sent to Miss Somebody’s-on-the-Hudson. Rupert was in China then. I got a letter from him that fall. He was about to join some expedition heading into the Gobi.
“Ricky came down to the Christmas hop at the academy, then Aunt Rogers took her abroad. She went to school in Switzerland a year. I passed from school to summer camp and then back to school. Ricky sent me some carvings for Christmas—they arrived three days late.”
He stared up at the stone mantel. “Kids feel things a lot more than they’re given credit for. Ricky sent me a letter with some tear stains between the lines when Aunt Rogers decided to stay another year. And that was the year I earned the reputation of being a ‘hard case.’
“Then Ricky cabled me that she was coming home. I walked out of school the same morning. I didn’t even tell anyone where I was going. Because I had money enough, I thought I would fly. And that, dear lady, is the end of this very sad tale.” He grinned one-sidedly down at her.
“It was then that—that—”
“I was smashed up? Yes. And Rupert came home without warning to find things very messy. I was in the hospital when I should have been in some corrective institution, as Aunt Rogers so often told me during those days. Ricky was also in disgrace for speaking her mind, as she does now and then. To make it even more interesting, our guardian had been amusing himself
