“Don’t! Don’t!” wailed Jacqueline and clasped Aunt Martha tight. “Don’t you cry.... There’s nothing to cry about.”
CHAPTER XXXVII
ONE WAY OUT
Shakespeare speaks in one of his plays of the disastrous position of the man who is blown up with the bomb he has himself touched off. Jacqueline was not nearly so well acquainted with Shakespeare as Caroline was. But one half-second after she made her startling announcement, she needed no poet to tell her how that poor man felt.
Aunt Martha stared for that one half-second, and then a look of actual triumph came flooding into her tear-stained face.
“There, Judge!” she cried, with her arms tight about Jacqueline. “Doesn’t that prove what I kept telling you? It’s the awful heat—and she’s worked so hard and faithful, poor young one—and that long walk yesterday in the sun—it’s gone to her head. You can see for yourself she doesn’t know what she does—or what she says.”
Jacqueline stood speechless, (“flabbergasted,” Grandma would have called it!) while she looked from Aunt Martha’s excited, anxious, yet beaming face, to the Judge who sat coldly, shrewdly watching. Crowding into her brain came memories she had laid aside, passages and chapters in the latter portion of that fateful volume, “The Prince and the Pauper.”
“Oh, pluffy catamounts!” she almost shrieked in terror. “Don’t you go acting like those silly boobs in that beastly old book—don’t you go thinking I’m off my head, because I’m not—I’m not! I’m Jacqueline—and I never was anybody else! I’m Jacqueline Gildersleeve!”
She began to cry, tears of temper and terror combined. For this was drama, more than enough to satisfy her. If they didn’t believe her—why, then they must think her either crazy or an awful liar and a thief! What did they do with crazy people—and with thieves? The Judge had a court and a jail—Neil had said so. And she had laughed, only a little while ago, at the mere idea of her being sent to jail, as Neil had said, to tease her. It was no laughing matter now.
“Oh, dear! Oh, dear!” choked Jacqueline. “I want my Aunt Edie—she’ll know I’m me. And my Uncle Jimmie! Oh, oh!”
Aunt Martha was herself again. Nothing apparently could down her, except the dreadful fear that one of her children could be a thief and a liar. She drew Jacqueline down on her lap, and held her safe against her breast, and Jacqueline, for all she was eleven next month and so big she nearly overwhelmed Aunt Martha, clung tight to her and wept into the hollow of her sunburnt neck.