The ancient woman rose as if she would go out before them. Then suddenly, at the door, she stepped aside for the girl to pass, making the long, stooping, backward curtsy of the passed Victorian era.
“After you, my dear,” she said, “always!”
V. The Man in the Green Hat
“Alas, monsieur, in spite of our fine courtesies, the conception of justice by one race must always seem outlandish to another!”
It was on the terrace of Sir Henry Marquis' villa at Cannes. The members of the little party were in conversation over their tobacco—the Englishman, with his brier-root pipe; the American Justice, with a Havana cigar; and the aged Italian, with his cigarette. The last was speaking.
He was a very old man, but he gave one the impression of incredible, preposterous age. He was bald; he had neither eyebrows nor eyelashes. A wiry mustache, yellow with nicotine, alone remained. Great wrinkles lay below the eyes and along the jaw, under a skin stretched like parchment over the bony protuberances of the face.
These things established the aspect of old age; but it was the man's expression and manner that gave one the sense of incalculable antiquity. The eyes seemed to look out from a window, where the man behind them had sat watching the human race from the beginning. And his manners had the completion of one whose experience of life is comprehensive and finished.
“It seems strange to you, monsieur”—he was addressing, in French, the American Justice—“that we should put our prisoners into an iron cage, as beasts are exhibited in a circus. You are shocked at that. It strikes you as the crudity of a race not quite civilized.
“You inquire about it with perfect courtesy; but, monsieur, you inquire as one inquires about a custom that his sense of justice rejects.”
He paused.
“Your pardon, monsieur; but there are some conceptions of justice in the law of your admirable country that seem equally strange to me.”
The men about the Count on the exquisite terrace, looking down over Cannes into the arc of the sea, felt that the great age of this man gave him a right of frankness, a privilege of direct expression, they could not resent. Somehow, at the extremity of life, he seemed beyond pretenses; and he had the right to omit the digressions by which younger men are accustomed to approach the truth.
“What is this strange thing in our law, Count?” said the American.
The old man made a vague gesture, as one who puts away an inquiry until the answer appears.
“Many years ago,” he continued, “I read a story about the red Indians by your author, Cooper. It was named 'The Oak Openings,' and was included, I think, in a volume entitled Stories of the Prairie. I believe I have the names quite right, since the author impressed me as an inferior comer with an abundance of gold about him. In the story Corporal Flint was captured by the Indians under the leadership of Bough of Oak, a cruel and bloodthirsty savage.
“This hideous beast determined to put his prisoner to the torture of the saplings, a barbarity rivaling the crucifixion of the Romans. Two small trees standing near each other were selected, the tops lopped off and the branches removed; they were bent and the tops were lashed together. One of the victim's wrists was bound to the top of each of the young trees; then the saplings were released and the victim, his arms wrenched and dislocated, hung suspended in excruciating agony, like a man nailed to a cross.
“It was fearful torture. The strain on the limbs was hideous, yet the victim might live for days. Nothing short of crucifixion—that beauty of the Roman law—ever equaled it.”
He paused and flicked the ashes from his cigarette.
“Corporal Flint, who seemed to have a knowledge of the Indian character, had endeavored so to anger the Indians by taunt and invective that some brave would put an arrow into his heart, or dash his brains out with a stone ax.
“In this he failed. Bough of Oak controlled his braves and Corporal Flint was lashed to the saplings. But, as the trees sprang apart, wrenching the man's arms out of their sockets, a friendly Indian, Pigeonwing, concealed in a neighboring thicket, unable to rescue his friend and wishing to save him from the long hours of awful torture, shot Corporal Flint through the forehead.
“Now,” continued the Count, “if there was no question about these facts, and Bough of Oak stood for trial before any civilized tribunal on this earth, do you think the laws of any country would acquit him of the murder of Corporal Flint?”
The whole company laughed.
“I am entirely serious,” continued the Count. “What do you think? There are three great nations represented here.”
“The exigencies of war,” said Sir Henry Marquis, “might differentiate a barbarity from a crime.”
“But let us assume,” replied the Count, “that no state of war existed; that it was a time of peace; that Corporal Flint was innocent of wrong; and that Bough of Oak was acting entirely from a depraved instinct bent on murder. In other words, suppose this thing had occurred yesterday in one of the Middle States of the American Republic?”
The American felt that this question was directed primarily to himself. He put down his cigar and indicated the Englishman by a gesture.
“Your great jurist, Sir James Stephen,” he began, “constantly reminds us that the criminal law is a machine so rough and dangerous that we can use it only with every safety device attached.
“And so, Count,” he continued, to the Italian, “the administration of the criminal law in our country may seem to you subject to delays and indirections that are not justified. These abuses could be generally corrected by an intelligent presiding judge; but, in part, they are incidental to a fair and full investigation of the charge against the prisoner. I think, however, that our conception of justice does not differ from that of other nations.”
The old Count shrugged his shoulders at the digression.
“I beg your pardon,” he said. “I do not refer to the mere administration of the criminal law in your country; though, monsieur, we have been interested in observing its peculiarities in such notable examples as the Thaw trials in New York, and the Anarchist cases in Chicago some years ago. I believe the judge in the latter trial gave about one hundred instructions on the subject of reasonable doubt—quite intelligible, I dare say, to an American jury; but, I must confess, somewhat beyond me in their metaphysical refinements.
“I should understand reasonable doubt if I were uninstructed, but I do not think I could explain it. I should be, concerning it, somewhat as Saint Augustine was with a certain doctrine of the Church when he said: 'I do not know if you ask me; but if you do not ask me I know very well.'”
He paused and blew a tiny ring or smoke out over the terrace toward the sea.
“There was a certain poetic justice finally in that case,” he added.
“The prisoners were properly convicted of the Haymarket murders,” said the American Justice.
“Ah, no doubt,” returned the Count; “but I was not thinking of that. Following a custom of your courts, I believe, the judge at the end of the trial put the formal inquiry as to whether the prisoners had anything to say. Whereupon they rose and addressed him for six days!”
He bowed.
“After that, monsieur, I am glad to add, they were all very properly hanged.
“But, monsieur, permit me to return to my question: Do you think any intelligent tribunal on this earth would acquit Bough of Oak of the murder of Corporal Flint under the conditions I have indicated?”
“No,” said the American. “It would be a cold-blooded murder; and in the end the creature would be executed.”
The old Count turned suddenly in his chair.
“Yes,” he said, “in a Continental court, it is certain; but in America, monsieur, under your admirable law, founded on the common law of England?”
“I am sure we should hang him,” replied the American.
“Monsieur,” cried the old Count, “you have me profoundly puzzled.”
It seemed to the little group on the terrace that they, and not the Count, were indicated by that remark. He had stated a case about which there could be no two opinions under any civilized conception of justice. Sir Henry Marquis had pointed out the only element—a state of war—which could distinguish the case from plain premeditated murder in its highest degree. They looked to him for an explanation; but it did not immediately arrive.
The Count noticed it and offered a word of apology.
“Presently—presently,” he said. “We have these two words in Italian—sparate! and aspetate! Monsieur.”
He turned to the American:
“You do not know our language, I believe. Suppose I should suddenly call out one of these words and afterward it should prove that a life hung on your being able to say which word it was I uttered. Do you think, monsieur, you could be certain?
“No, monsieur; and so courts are wise to require a full explanation of every extraordinary fact. George Goykovich, an Austrian, having no knowledge of the Italian language, swore in the court of an American state that he heard a prisoner use the Italian word sparate! and that he could not be mistaken.
“I would not believe him, monsieur, on that statement; but he explained that he was a coal miner, that the mines were worked by Italians, and that this word was called out when the coal was about to be shot down with powder.
“Ah, monsieur, the explanation is complete. George Goykovich must know this word; it was a danger signal. I would believe now his extraordinary statement.”
The Count stopped a moment and lighted another cigarette.
“Pardon me if I seem to proceed obliquely. The incident is related to the case I approach; and it makes clear, monsieur, why the courts of France, for example, permit every variety of explanation in a criminal trial, while your country and the great English nation limit explanations.
“You do not permit hearsay evidence to save a man's life; with a fine distinction you permit it to save only his character!”
“The rule,” replied the American justice, “everywhere among English-speaking people is that the best evidence of which the subject is capable shall be produced. We permit a witness to testify only to what he actually knows. That is the rule. It is true there are exceptions to it. In some instances he may testify as to what he has heard.”
“Ah, yes,” replied the Count; “you will not permit such evidence to take away a man's horse, but you will permit it to take away a woman's reputation! I shall never be able to understand these delicate refinements of the English law!”
“But, Count,” suggested Sir Henry Marquis, “reputation is precisely that what the neighborhood says about one.”
“Pardon, monsieur,” returned the Count. “I do not criticize your customs. They are doubtless excellent in every variety of way. I deplore only my inability to comprehend them. For example, monsieur, why should you hold a citizen responsible in all other cases only for what he does, but in the case of his own character turn about and try him for what people say he does?
“Thus, monsieur, as I understand it, the men of an English village could not take away my pig by merely proving that everybody said it was stolen; but they could brand me as a liar by merely proving what the villagers said! It seems incredible that men should put such value on a pig.”
Sir Henry Marquis laughed.
“It is not entirely a question of values, Count.”
“I beg you to pardon me, monsieur,” the Italian went on. “Doubtless, on this subject I do nothing more than reveal an intelligence lamentably inefficient; but I had the idea that English people were accustomed to regard property of greater importance than life.”
“I have never heard,” replied the Englishman, smiling, “that our courts gave more attention to pigs than to murder.”
“Why, yes, monsieur,” said the Count—“that is precisely what they have been accustomed to do. It is only, I believe, within recent years that one convicted of murder in England could take an appeal to a higher court; though a controversy over pigs—or, at any rate, the pasture on which they gathered acorns—could always be carried up.”
The great age of the Count—he seemed to be the representative in the world of some vanished empire—gave his irony a certain indirection. Everybody laughed. And he added: “Even your word 'murder,' I believe, was originally the name of a fine imposed by the Danes on a village unless it could be proved that the person found dead was an Englishman!
“I wonder when, precisely, the world began to regard it as a crime to kill an Englishman?”
The parchment on the bones of his face wrinkled into a sort of smile. His greatest friend on the Riviera was this pipe-smoking Briton.
Then suddenly, with a nimble gesture that one would not believe possible in the aged, he stripped back his sleeve and exhibited a long, curiously twisted scar, as though a bullet had plowed along the arm.
“Alas, monsieur,” he said, “I myself live in the most primitive condition of society! I pay a tribute for life.... Ah! no, monsieur; it is not to the Camorra that I pay. It is quite unromantic. I think my secretary carries it in his books as a pension to an indigent relative.”
He turned to the American
“Believe me, monsieur, my estates in Salerno are not what they were; the olive trees are old and all drains on my income are a burden—even this gratuity. I thought I should be rid of it; but, alas, the extraordinary conception of justice in your country!”
He broke the cigarette in his fingers, and flung the pieces over the terrace.
“In the great range of mountains,” he began, “slashing across the American states and beautifully named the Alleghanies, there is a vast measure of coal beds. It is thither that the emigrants from Southern Europe journey. They mine out the coal, sometimes descending into the earth through pits, or what in your language are called shafts, and sometimes following the stratum of the coal bed into the hill.
“This underworld, monsieur—this, sunless world, built underneath the mountains, is a section of Europe slipped under the American Republic. The language spoken there is not English. The men laboring in those buried communities cry out sparate when they are about to shoot down the coal with powder. It is Italy under there. There is a river called the Monongahela in those mountains. It is an Indian name.”
He paused.
“And so, monsieur, what happened along it doubtless reminded me of Cooper's story—Bough of Oak and the case of Corporal Flint.”
He took another cigarette out of a box on the table, but he did not light it.
“In one of the little mining villages along this river with the enchanting name there was a man physically like the people of the Iliad; and with that, monsieur, he had a certain cast of mind not unHellenic. He was tall, weighed two hundred and forty pounds, lean as a gladiator, and in the vigor of golden youth.
“There were no wars to journey after and no adventures; but there was danger and adventure here. This land was full of cockle, winnowed out of Italy, Austria and the whole south of Europe. It took courage and the iron hand of the state to keep the peace. Here was a life of danger; and this Ionian—big, powerful, muscled like the heroes of the Circus Maximus—entered this perilous service.
“Monsieur, I have said his mind was Hellenic, like his big, wonderful body. Mark you how of heroic antiquity it was! It was his boast, among the perils that constantly beset him, that no criminal should ever take his life; that, if ever he should receive a mortal wound from the hand of the assassins about him, he would not wait to die in agony by it. He himself would sever the damaged thread of life and go out like a man!
“Observe, monsieur, how like the great heroes of legend—like the wounded Saul when he ordered his armor-bearer to kill him; like Brutus when he fell on his sword!”
He looked intently at the American.
“Doubtless, monsieur,” he went on, “those near this man along the Monongahela did not appreciate his attitude of grandeur; but to us, in the distance, it seemed great and noble.”
He looked out over the Mediterranean, where the great adventurers who cherished these lofty pagan ideals once beat along in the morning of the world.
“On an afternoon of summer,” he continued like one who begins a saga, “this man, alone and fearless, followed a violator of the law and arrested him in a house of the village. As he led the man away he noticed that an Italian followed. He was a little degenerate, wearing a green hat, and bearing now one name and now another. They traversed the village toward the municipal prison; and this creature, featured like a Parisian Apache, skulked behind.
“As they went along, two Austrians seated on the porch of a house heard the little man speak to the prisoner. He used the word sparate. They did not know what he meant, for he spoke in Italian; but they recognized the word, for it was the word used in the mines before the coal was shot down. The prisoner made his reply in Italian, which the Austrians did not understand.
“It seemed that this man who had made the arrest did not know Italian, for he stopped and asked the one behind him whether the prisoner was his brother. The man replied in the negative.”
The Count paused, as though for an explanation. “What the Apache said was: 'Shall I shoot him here or wait until we reach the ravine?' And the prisoner replied: 'Wait until we come to the ravine.'
“They went on. Presently they reached a sort of hollow, where the reeds grew along the road densely and to the height of a man's head. Here the Italian Apache, the degenerate with the green hat, following some three steps behind, suddenly drew a revolver from his pocket and shot the man twice in the back. It was a weapon carrying a lead bullet as large as the tip of one's little finger. The officer fell. The Apache and the prisoner fled.
“The wounded man got up. He spread out his arms; and he shouted, with a great voice, like the heroes of the Iliad. The two wounds were mortal; they were hideous, ghastly wounds, ripping up the vital organs in the man's body and severing the great arteries. The splendid pagan knew he had received his death wounds; and, true to his atavistic ideal, the ideal of the Greek, the Hebrew and the Roman, the ideal of the great pagan world to which he in spirit belonged, and of which the poets sing, he put his own weapon to his head and blew his brains out.”
The old Count, his chin up, his withered, yellow face vitalized, lifted his hands like one before something elevated and noble. After some moments had passed he continued:
“On the following day the assassin was captured in a neighboring village. Feeling ran so high that it was with difficulty that the officers of the law saved him from being lynched. He was taken about from one prison to another. Finally he was put on trial for murder.
“There was never a clearer case before any tribunal in this world.
“Many witnesses identified the assassin—not merely English-speaking men, who might have been mistaken or prejudiced, but Austrians, Poles, Italians—the men of the mines who knew him; who had heard him cry out the fatal Italian word; who saw him following in the road behind his victim on that Sunday afternoon of summer; who knew his many names and every feature of his cruel, degenerate face. There was no doubt anywhere in the trial. Learned surgeons showed that the two wounds in the dead man's back from the big-calibered weapon were deadly, fatal wounds that no man could have survived.
“There was nothing incomplete in that trial.
“Everything was so certain that the assassin did not even undertake to contradict; not one statement, not one word of the evidence against him did he deny. It was a plain case of willful, deliberate and premeditated murder. The judge presiding at the trial instructed the jury that a man is presumed to intend that which he does; that whoever kills a human being with malice aforethought is guilty of murder; that murder which is perpetrated by any kind of willful, deliberate and premeditated killing is murder in the first degree. The jury found the assassin guilty and the judge sentenced him to be hanged.”
The Count paused and looked at his companions about him on the terrace.
“Messieurs,” he said, “do you think that conviction was just?”
There was a common assent. Some one said: “It was a cruel murder if ever there was one.” And another: “It was wholly just; the creature deserved to hang.”
The old Count bowed, putting out his hands.
“And so I hoped he would.”
“What happened?” said the American.
The Count regarded him with a queer, ironical smile.
“Unlike the great British people, monsieur,” he replied, “your courts have never given the pig, or the pasture on which he gathers his acorns, a consideration above the human family. The case was taken to your Court of Appeals of that province.”
He stopped and lighted his cigarette deliberately, with a match scratched slowly on the table.
“Monsieur,” he said, “I do not criticize your elevated court. It is composed of learned men—wise and patriotic, I have no doubt. They cannot make the laws, monsieur; they cannot coin a conception of justice for your people. They must enforce the precise rules of law that the conception of justice in your country has established.
“Nevertheless, monsieur”—and his thin yellow lips curled—“for the sake of my depleted revenues I could have wished that the decision of this court had been other than it was.”
“And what did it decide?” asked the American.
“It decided, monsieur,” replied the Count, “that my estates in Salerno must continue to be charged with the gratuity to the indigent relative.
“That is to say, monsieur, it decided, because the great pagan did not wait to die in agony, did not wait for the mortal wounds inflicted by the would-be assassin to kill him, that interesting person—the man in the green hat—was not guilty of murder in the first degree and could not be hanged!”
Note—See State versus Angelina; 80 Southeastern Reporter, 141: “The intervening responsible agent who wrongfully accelerates death is guilty of the murder, and not the one who inflicted the first injury, though in itself mortal.”
VI. The Wrong Sign
It was an ancient diary in a faded leather cover. The writing was fine and delicate, and the ink yellow with age. Sir Henry Marquis turned the pages slowly and with care for the paper was fragile.
We had dined early at the Ritz and come in later to his great home in St. James's Square.
He wished to show me this old diary that had come to him from a branch of his mother's family in Virginia—a branch that had gone out with a King's grant when Virginia was a crown colony. The collateral ancestor, Pendleton, had been a justice of the peace in Virginia, and a spinster daughter had written down some of the strange cases with which her father had been concerned.
Sir Henry Marquis believed that these cases in their tragic details, and their inspirational, deductive handling, equaled any of our modern time. The great library overlooking St. James's Square, was curtained off from London. Sir Henry read by the fire; and I listened, returned, as by some recession of time to the Virginia of a vanished decade. The narrative of the diary follows:
My father used to say that the Justice of God was sometimes swift and terrible. He said we thought of it usually as remote and deliberate, a sort of calm adjustment in some supernatural Court of Equity. But this idea was far from the truth. He had seen the justice of God move on the heels of a man with appalling swiftness; with a crushing force and directness that simply staggered the human mind. I know the case he thought about.
Two men sat over a table when my father entered. One of them got up. He was a strange human creature, when you stood and looked calmly at him. You thought the Artificer had designed him for a priest of the church. He had the massive features and the fringe of hair around his bald head like a tonsure. At first, to your eye, it was the vestments of the church, he lacked; then you saw that the lack was something fundamental; something organic in the nature of the man. And as he held and stimulated your attention you got a fearful idea, that the purpose for which this human creature was shaped had been somehow artfully reversed!
He was big boned and tall when he stood up.
“Pendleton,” he said, “I would have come to you, but for my guest.”
And he indicated the elegant young man at the table.
“But I did not send you word to ride a dozen miles through the hills on any trivial business, or out of courtesy to me. It is a matter of some import, so I will pay ten eagles.”
My father looked steadily at the man.
“I am not for hire,” he said.
My father was a justice of the peace in Virginia, under the English system, by the theory of which the most substantial men in a county undertook to keep the peace for the welfare of the State. Like Washington in the service of the Colonial army, he took no pay.
The big man laughed.
“We are most of us for purchase, and all of us for hire,” he said. “I will make it twenty!”
The young man at the table now interrupted. He was elegant in the costume of the time, in imported linen and cloth from an English loom. His hair was thick and black; his eyebrows straight, his body and his face rich in the blood and the vitalities of youth. But sensuality was on him like a shadow. The man was given over to a life of pleasure.
“Mr. Pendleton,” he said, with a patronizing pedantic air, “the commonwealth is interested to see that litigation does not arise; and to that end, I hope you will not refuse us the benefit of your experience. We are about to draw up a deed of sale running into a considerable sum, and we would have it court proof.”
He made a graceful gesture with his jeweled hand.
“I would be secure in my purchase, and Zindorf in his eagles, and you, Sir, in the knowledge that the State will not be vexed by any suit between us. Every contract, I believe, upon some theory of the law, is a triangular affair with the State a party. Let us say then, that you represent Virginia!”
“In the service of the commonwealth,” replied my father coldly, “I am always to be commanded.”
The man flicked a bit of dust from his immaculate coat sleeve.
“It will be a conference of high powers. I shall represent Eros; Mr. Pendleton, Virginia; and Zindorf” and he laughed—“his Imperial Master!”
And to the eye the three men fitted to their legend. The Hellenic God of pleasure in his sacred groves might have chosen for his disciple one from Athens with a face and figure like this youth. My father bore the severities of the law upon him. And I have written how strange a creature the third party to this conference was.
He now answered with an oath.
“You have a very pretty wit, Mr. Lucian Morrow,” he said. “I add to my price a dozen eagles for it.”
The young man shrugged his shoulders in his English coat.
“Smart money, eh, Zindorf... Well, it does not make me smart. It only makes me remember that Count Augsburg educated you in Bavaria for the Church and you fled away from it to be a slave trader in Virginia.”
He got on his feet, and my father saw that the man was in liquor. He was not drunken, but the effect was on him with its daring and its indiscretions.
It was an April morning, bright with sun. The world was white with apple blossoms, the soft air entered through the great open windows. And my father thought that the liquor in the man had come with him out of a night of bargaining or revel.
Morrow put his hands on the table and looked at Zindorf; then, suddenly, the laughter in his face gave way to the comprehension of a swift, striking idea.
“Why, man,” he cried, “it's the devil's truth! Everything about you is a negation! You ought to be a priest by all the lines and features of you; but you're not... Scorch me, but you're not!”
His voice went up on the final word as though to convey some impressive, sinister discovery.
It was true in every aspect of the man. The very clothes he wore, somber, wool-threaded homespun, crudely patched, reminded one of the coarse fabrics that monks affect for their abasement. But one saw, when one remembered the characteristic of the man, that they represented here only an extremity of avarice.
Zindorf looked coldly at his guest.
“Mr. Lucian Morrow,” he said, “you will go on, and my price will go on!”
But the young blood, on his feet, was not brought up by the monetary threat. He looked about the room, at the ceiling, the thick walls. And, like a man who by a sudden recollection confounds his adversary with an overlooked illustrative fact, he suddenly cried out:
“By the soul of Satan, you're housed to suit! Send me to the pit! It's the very place for you! Eh! Zindorf, do you know who built the house you live in?”
“I do not, Mr. Lucian Morrow,” said the man. “Who built it?”
One could see that he wished to divert the discourses of his guest. He failed.
“God built it!” cried Morrow.
He put out his hands as though to include the hose.
“Pendleton,” he said, “you will remember. The people built these walls for a church. It burned, but the stone walls could not burn; they remained overgrown with creeper. Then, finally, old Wellington Monroe built a house into the walls for the young wife he was about to marry, but he went to the coffin instead of the bride-bed, and the house stood empty. It fell into the courts with the whole of Monroe's tangled business and finally Zindorf gets it at a sheriff's sale.”
The big man now confronted the young blood with decision.
“Mr. Lucian Morrow,” he said, “if you are finished with your fool talk, I will bid you good morning. I have decided not to sell the girl.”
The face of Morrow changed. His voice wheedled in an anxious note.
“Not sell her, Zindorf!” he echoed. “Why man, you have promised her to me all along. You always said I should have her in spite of your cursed partner Ordez. You said you'd get her some day and sell her to me. Now, curse it, Zindorf, I want her... I've got the money: ten thousand dollars. It's a big lot of money. But I've got it. I've got it in gold.”
He went on:
“Besides, Zindorf, you can have the money, it'll mean more to you. But it's the girl I want.”
He stood up and in his anxiety the effect of the liquor faded out.
“I've waited on your promise, Zindorf. You said that some day, when Ordez was hard-pressed he would sell her for money, even if she was his natural daughter. You were right; you knew Ordez. You have got an assignment of all the slaves in possession, in the partnership, and Ordez has cleared out of the country. I know what you paid for his half-interest in this business, it's set out in the assignment. It was three thousand dollars.
“Think of it, man, three thousand dollars to Ordez for a wholesale, omnibus assignment of everything. An elastic legal note of an assignment that you can stretch to include this girl along with the half-dozen other slaves that you have on hand here; and I offer you ten thousand dollars for the girl alone!”
One could see how the repetition of the sum in gold affected Zindorf.
He had the love of money in that dominating control that the Apostle spoke of. But the elegant young man was moved by a lure no less potent. And his anxiety, for the time, suppressed the evidences of liquor.
“I'll take the risk on the title, Zindorf. You and Ordez were partners in this traffic. Ordez gives you a general assignment of all slaves on hand for three thousand dollars and lights out of the country. He leaves his daughter here among the others. And this general assignment can be construed to include her. Her mother was a slave and that brings her within the law. We know precisely who her mother was, and all about it. You looked it up and my lawyer, Mr. Cable, looked it up. Her mother was the octoroon woman, Suzanne, owned by old Judge Marquette in New Orleans.
“There may have been some sort of church marriage, but there's no legal record, Cable says.
“The woman belonged to Marquette, and under the law the girl is a slave. You got a paper title out of Marquette's executors, privily, years ago. Now you have this indefinite assignment by Ordez. He's gone to the Spanish Islands, or the devil, or both. And if Mr. Pendleton can draw a deed of sale that will stand in the courts between us, I'll take the risk on the validity of my title.”
He paused.
“The law's sound on slaves, Judge Madison has a dozen himself, not all black either; not three-eighths black!” and he laughed.
Then he turned to my father.
“Mr. Pendleton,” he said, “I persuaded Zindorf to send for you to draw up this deed of sale. I have no confidence in the little practicing tricksters at the county seat. They take a fee and, with premeditation, write a word or phrase into the contract that leaves it open for a suit at law.”
He made a courteous bow, accompanied by a dancing master's gesture.
“I do not offend you with the offer of a fee, but I present my gratitude for the conspicuous courtesy, and I indicate the service to the commonwealth of legal papers in form and court proof. May I hope, Sir, that you will not deny us the benefit of your highly distinguished service.”
My father very slowly looked about him in calm reflection.
He had ridden ten miles through the hills on this April morning, at Zindorf's message sent the night before. The clay of the roads was still damp and plastic from the recent rain. There were flecks of mud on him and the splashing of the streams.
He was a big, dominating man, in the hardened strength and experience of middle life. He had come, as he believed, upon some service of the state. And here was a thing for the little dexterities of a lawyer's clerk. Everybody in Virginia, who knew my father, can realize how he was apt to meet the vague message of Zindorf that got him in this house, and the patronizing courtesies of Mr. Lucian Morrow.
He was direct and virile, and while he feared God, like the great figures in the Pentateuch, as though he were a judge of Israel enforcing his decrees with the weapon of iron, I cannot write here, that at any period of his life, or for any concern or reason, he very greatly regarded man.
He went over to the window and looked out at the hills and the road that he had traveled.
The mid-morning sun was on the fields and groves like a benediction. The soft vitalizing air entered and took up the stench of liquor, the ash of tobacco and the imported perfumes affected by Mr. Lucian Morrow.
The windows in the room were long, gothic like a church, and turning on a pivot. They ran into the ceiling that Monroe had built across the gutted walls. The house stood on the crown of a hill, in a cluster of oak trees. Below was the abandoned graveyard, the fence about it rotted down; the stone slabs overgrown with moss. The four roads running into the hills joined and crossed below this oak grove that the early people had selected for a house of God.
My father looked out on these roads and far back on the one that he had traveled.
There was no sound in the world, except the faint tolling of a bell in a distant wood on the road. It was far off on the way to my father's house, and the vague sound was to be heard only when a breath of wind carried from that way.
My father gathered his big chin, flat like a plowshare, into the trough of his bronze hand. He stood for some moments in reflection, then he turned to Mr. Lucian Morrow.
“I think you are right,” he said. “I think this is a triangular affair with the state a party. I am in the service of the state. Will you kindly put the table by this window.”
They thought he wished the air, and would thus escape the closeness of the room. And while my father stood aside, Zindorf and his guest carried the flat writing table to the window and placed a chair.
My father sat down behind the table by the great open window, and looked at Zindorf.
The man moved and acted like a monk. He had the figure and the tonsured head. His coarse, patched clothes cut like the homely garments of the simple people of the day, were not wholly out of keeping to the part. The idea was visualized about him; the simplicity and the poverty of the great monastic orders in their vast, noble humility. All striking and real until one saw his face!
My father used to say that the great orders of God were correct in this humility; for in its vast, comprehensive action, the justice of God moved in a great plain, where every indicatory event was precisely equal; a straw was a weaver's beam.
God hailed men to ruin in his court, not with spectacular devices, but by means of some homely, common thing, as though to abase and overcome our pride.
My father moved the sheets of foolscap, and tested the point of the quill pen like one who considers with deliberation. He dipped the point into the inkpot and slowly wrote a dozen formal words.
Then he stopped and put down the pen.
“The contests of the courts,” he said, “are usually on the question of identity. I ought to see this slave for a correct description.”
The two men seemed for a moment uncertain what to do.
Then Zindorf addressed my father.
“Pendleton,” he said, “the fortunes of life change, and the ideas suited to one status are ridiculous in another. Ordez was a fool. He made believe to this girl a future that he never intended, and she is under the glamor of these fancies.”
He stood in the posture of a monk, and he spoke each word with a clear enunciation.
“It is a very delicate affair, to bring this girl out of the extravagances with which Ordez filled her idle head, and not be brutal in it. We must conduct the thing with tact, and we will ask you, Pendleton, to observe the courtesies of our pretension.”
When he had finished, he flung a door open and went down a stairway. For a time my father heard his footsteps, echoing, like those of a priest in the under chambers of a chapel. Then he ascended, and my father was astonished.
He came with a young girl on his arm, as in the ceremony of marriage sometimes the priest emerges with the bride. The girl was young and of a Spanish beauty. She was all in white with blossoms in her hair. And she was radiant, my father said, as in the glory of some happy contemplation. There was no slave like this on the block in Virginia. Young girls like this, my father had seen in Havana in the houses of Spanish Grandees.
“This is Mr. Pendleton, our neighbor,” Zindorf said. “He comes to offer you his felicitations.”
The girl made a little formal curtsy.
“When my father returns,” she said in a queer, liquid accent, “he will thank you, Meester Pendleton; just now he is on a journey.”
And she gave her hand to Lucian Morrow to kiss, like a lady of the time. Then Zindorf, mincing his big step, led her out.
And my father stood behind the table in the enclosure of the window, with his arms folded, and his chin lifted above his great black stock. I know how my father looked, for I have seen him stand like that before moving factors in great events, when he intended, at a certain cue, to enter.
He said that it was at this point that Mr. Lucian Morrow's early comment on Zindorf seemed, all at once, to discover the nature of this whole affair. He said that suddenly, with a range of vision like the great figures in the Pentateuch, he saw how things right and true would work out backward into abominations, if, by any chance, the virtue of God in events were displaced!
Zindorf returned, and as he stepped through the door, closing it behind him, the far-off tolling of the bell, faint, eerie, carried by a stronger breath of April air, entered through the window. My father extended his arm toward the distant wood.
“Zindorf,” he said, “do you mark the sign?” The man listened.
“What sign?” he said.
“The sign of death!” replied my father.
The man made a deprecating gesture with his hands, “I do not believe in signs,” he said.
My father replied like one corrected by a memory.
“Why, yes,” he said, “that is true. I should have remembered that. You do not believe in signs, Zindorf, since you abandoned the sign of the cross, and set these coarse patches on your knees to remind you not to bend them in the sign of submission to the King of Kings.”
The intent in the mended clothing was the economy of avarice, but my father turned it to his use.
The man's face clouded with anger.
“What I believe,” he said, “is neither the concern of you nor another.”
He paused with an oath.
“Whatever you may believe, Zindorf,” replied my father, “the sound of that bell is unquestionably a sign of death.” He pointed toward the distant wood. “In the edge of the forest yonder is the ancient church that the people built to replace the burned one here. It has been long abandoned, but in its graveyard lie a few old families. And now and then, when an old man dies, they bring him back to put him with his fathers. This morning, as I came along, they were digging the grave for old Adam Duncan, and the bell tolls for him. So you see,” and he looked Zindorf in the face, “a belief in signs is justified.”
Again the big man made his gesture as of one putting something of no importance out of the way.
“Believe what you like,” he said, “I am not concerned with signs.”
“Why, yes, Zindorf,” replied my father, “of all men you are the very one most concerned about them. You must be careful not to use the wrong ones.”
It was a moment of peculiar tension.
The room was flooded with sun. The tiny creatures of the air droned outside. Everywhere was peace and the gentle benevolence of peace. But within this room, split off from the great chamber of a church, events covert and sinister seemed preparing to assemble.
My father, big and dominant, was behind the table, his great shoulders blotting out the window.
Mr. Lucian Morrow sat doubled in a chair, and Zindorf stood with the closed door behind him.
“You see, Zindorf,” he said, “each master has his set of signs. Most of us have learned the signs of one master only. But you have learned the signs of both. And you must be careful not to bring the signs of your first master into the service of your last one.”
The big man did not move, he stood with the door closed behind him, and studied my father's face like one who feels the presence of a danger that he cannot locate.
“What do you mean?” he said.
“I mean,” replied my father, “I mean, Zindorf, that each master has a certain intent in events, and this intent is indicated by his set of signs. Now the great purpose of these two masters, we believe, in all the moving of events, is directly opposed. Thus, when we use a sign of one of these masters, we express by the symbol of it the hope that events will take the direction of his established purpose.
“Don't you see then... don't you see, that we dare not use the signs of one in the service of the other?”
“Pendleton,” said the man, “I do not understand you.”
He spoke slowly and precisely, like one moving with an excess of care.
My father went on, his voice strong and level, his eyes on Zindorf.
“The thing is a great mystery,” he said. “It is not clear to any of us in its causes or its relations. But old legends and old beliefs, running down from the very morning of the world, tell us—warn us, Zindorf—that the signs of each of these masters are abhorrent to the other. Neither will tolerate the use of his adversary's sign. Moreover, Zindorf, there is a double peril in it.”
And his voice rose.
“There is the peril that the new master will abandon the blunderer for the insult, and there is the peril that the old one will destroy him for the sacrilege!”
At this moment the door behind Zindorf opened, and the young girl entered. She was excited and her eyes danced.
“Oh!” she said, “people are coming on every road!”
She looked, my father said, like a painted picture, her dark Castilian beauty illumined by the pleasure in her interpretation of events. She thought the countryside assembled after the manner of my father to express its felicitations.
Zindorf crossed in great strides to the window: Mr. Lucian Morrow, sober and overwhelmed by the mystery of events about him, got unsteadily on his feet, holding with both hands to the oak back of a chair.
My father said that the tragedy of the thing was on him, and he acted under the pressure of it.
“My child,” he said, “you are to go to the house of your grandfather in Havana. If Mr. Lucian Morrow wishes to renew his suit for your hand in marriage, he will do it there. Go now and make your preparations for the journey.”
The girl cried out in pleasure at the words.
“My grandfather is a great person in New Spain. I have always longed to see him... father promised... and now I am to go ... when do we set out, Meester Pendleton?”
“At once,” replied my father, “to-day.” Then he crossed the room and opened the door for her to go out. He held the latch until the girl was down the stairway. Then he closed the door.
The big man, falsely in his aspect, like a monk, looking out at the far-off figures on the distant roads, now turned about.
“A clever ruse, Pendleton,” he said, “We can send her now, on this pretended journey, to Morrow's house, after the sale.”
My father went over and sat down at the table. He took a faded silk envelope out of his, coat, and laid it down before him. Then he answered Zindorf.
“There will be no sale,” he said.
Mr. Lucian Morrow interrupted.
“And why no sale, Sir?”
“Because there is no slave to sell,” replied my father. “This girl is not the daughter of the octoroon woman, Suzanne.”
Zindorf's big jaws tightened.
“How did you know that?” he said.
My father answered with deliberation.
“I would have known it,” he said, “from the wording of the paper you exhibit from Marquette's executors. It is merely a release of any claim or color of title; the sort of legal paper one executes when one gives up a right or claim that one has no faith in. Marquette's executors were the ablest lawyers in New Orleans. They were not the men to sign away valuable property in a conveyance like that; that they did sign such a paper is conclusive evidence to me that they had nothing—and knew they had nothing—to release by it.” He paused.
“I know it also,” he said, “because I have before me here the girl's certificate of birth and Ordez's certificate of marriage.”
He opened the silk envelope and took out some faded papers. He unfolded them and spread them out under his hand.
“I think Ordez feared for his child,” he said, “and stored these papers against the day of danger to her, because they are copies taken from the records in Havana.”
He looked up at the astonished Morrow.
“Ordez married the daughter of Pedro de Hernando. I find, by a note to these papers, that she is dead. I conclude that this great Spanish family objected to the adventurer, and he fled with his infant daughter to New Orleans.” he paused.
“The intrigue with the octoroon woman, Suzanne, came after that.”
Then he added:
“You must renew your negotiations, Sir, in, a somewhat different manner before a Spanish Grandee in Havana!”
Mr. Lucian Morrow did not reply. He stood in a sort of wonder. But Zindorf, his face like iron, addressed my father:
“Where did you get these papers, Pendleton?” he said.
“I got them from Ordez,” replied my father.
“When did you see Ordez?”
“I saw him to-day,” replied my father.
Zindorf did not move, but his big jaw worked and a faint spray of moisture came out on his face. Then, finally, with no change or quaver in his voice, he put his query.
“Where is Ordez?”
“Where?” echoed my father, and he rose. “Why, Zindorf, he is on his way here.” And he extended his arm toward the open window. The big man lifted his head and looked out at the men and horses now clearly visible on the distant road.
“Who are these people,” he said, “and why do they come?” He spoke as though he addressed some present but invisible authority.
My father answered him
“They are the people of Virginia,” he said, “and they come, Zindorf, in the purpose of events that you have turned terribly backward!”
The man was in some desperate perplexity, but he had steel nerves and the devil's courage.
He looked my father calmly in the face.
“What does all this mean?” he said.
“It means, Zindorf,” cried my father, “it means that the very things, the very particular things, that you ought to have used for the glory of God, God has used for your damnation!”
And again, in the clear April air, there entered through the open window the faint tolling of a bell.
“Listen, Zindorf! I will tell you. In the old abandoned church yonder, when they came to toll the bell for Duncan, the rope fell to pieces; I came along then, and Jacob Lance climbed into the steeple to toll the bell by hand. At the first crash of sound a wolf ran out of a thicket in the ravine below him, and fled away toward the mountains. Lance, from his elevated point, could see the wolf's muzzle was bloody. That would mean, that a lost horse had been killed or an estray steer. He called down and we went in to see what thing this scavenger had got hold of.”
He paused.
“In the cut of an abandoned road we found the body of Ordez riddled with buckshot, and his pockets rifled. But sewed up in his coat was the silk envelope with these papers. I took possession of them as a Justice of the Peace, ordered the body sent on here, and the people to assemble.”
He extended his arm toward the faint, quivering, distant sound.
“Listen, Zindorf,” he cried; “the bell began to toll for Duncan, but it tolls now for the murderer of Ordez. It tolls to raise the country against the assassin!”
The false monk had the courage of his master. He stood out and faced my father.
“But can you find him, Pendleton,” he said. And his harsh voice was firm. “You find Ordez dead; well, some assassin shot him and carried his body into the cut of the abandoned road. But who was that assassin? Is Virginia scant of murderers? Do you know the right one?”
My father answered in his great dominating voice
“God knows him, Zindorf, and I know him!... The man who murdered Ordez made a fatal blunder... He used a sign of God in the service of the devil and he is ruined!”
The big man stepped slowly backward into the room, while my father's voice, filling the big empty spaces of the house, followed after him.
“You are lost, Zindorf! Satan is insulted, and God is outraged! You are lost!”
There was a moment's silence; from outside came the sound of men and horses. The notes of the girl, light, happy, ascended from the lower chamber, as she sang about her preparations for the journey. Zindorf continued to step awfully backward. And Lucian Morrow, shaken and sober, cried out in the extremity of fear:
“In God's name, Pendleton, what do you mean; Zindorf, using a sign of God in the service of the devil.”
And my father answered him:
“The corpse of Ordez lay in the bare cut of the abandoned road, and beside it, bedded in the damp clay where he had knelt down to rifle the pockets of the murdered body, were the patch prints of Zindorf's knees!”