by Leslie Ford
He pushed his chair back and got up.
“Will you tell her that, Mrs. Latham?—I can’t trust myself to speak to her now.”
He moved across the room and stood a moment, his tall slender figure bent a little, by the empty hearth. “I’m afraid I’ve been blind, Mrs. Latham. Blind and . . . selfish. And now that I can see again, it’s . . . too late.”
“Good Lord,” I thought, “—he thinks they killed her too.”
I started to speak, and stopped. What could I say? A sear leaf from the old ivy on the chimney fell and scratched across the window. The Judge moved slowly out of the room like a man blinded not with selfishness but with sheer pain. I folded my napkin and just sat there.
Old William came in and set about moving the dessert plates, untouched except for mine, over to the serving table. I watched him not seeing anything very sharply, until he came back and stood by the judge’s chair, his black face streaked with tears.
“It warn’t none of them done it, Mis’ Grace,” he mumbled. “They was asleep in they beds. It warn’t them took th’ key off’n the board. It was somebody else done it. Judge he think it was them. It was me foun’ th’ key on th’ groun’ when th’ fire engine was shootin’ light ev’where. But don’ you tell nobody. Mist’ Pepperday, he call an’ says they key done gone an’ ain’ Ah seen it no place. Ah tell him you got it, Ah ain’ seen it since.”
“Who do you think took it, William?” I asked.
The old man shifted his gaze.
“Tell th’ truth, Mis’ Grace, Mist’ Pepperday done lef’ that key here his self, when he was plumbin’ for Mis’ Karen. But Ah ain’ tellin’ him Ah know—he pride his self he don’ nevuh make mistakes in de-tails. He know his self he lef that key in Mis’ Karen’s seegar box she got painted an’ fixed up pre-tendin’ birds make a nes’ in it. Ain’ no use makin’ nestes in seegar boxes. Ain’ no use tellin’ Mis’ Karen that—ain’ no use tellin’ Mist’ Pepperday he overlook a de-tail. They both knowed it already.”
I said, “Oh.”
“Then this mo’nin’, Mist’ Philander he come lookin’ an say, ‘Weeyum, didn’ they use to be a key in that there box?’ He don’ miss nothin.’ Ah figger he knowed that ’cause he messin’ roun’ when Mist’ Pepperday do Mis’ Karen’s plumbin’. He say, ‘You mis-took you’ profession, Mist’ Pepperday.’ Mist’ Pepperday he say, That’s more’n anybody can say ‘bout you, Mist’ Doyle,’—snappin’ lak a she turtle.”
“You didn’t tell him you gave it to me, did you?” I asked.
“Ah ain’ give it to you then. Ah got it in mah own han’s.”
“When was Mr. Doyle looking for it?”
“When he come ovuh fust thing this mo’nin’.”
“When the fire engines were there?”
“Not right fust, Mis’ Grace. He nevuh come till they was workin’ on pore Mis’ Karen.”
“After six?” I asked.
“Yes, ma’am. It was hittin’ six when Capt’n Fox brung Mis’ Karen out. ’Twas after that he come ovuh, him an’ Mist’ Roger.”
“You don’t say,” I said.
“Ah do say. Ah seen ’em come, cross th’ street.”
“But the Judge, and Miss Jerry, and Mr. Sandy—they were down there, weren’t they?”
“Mis’ Jer’my, she was. Ain’ nothin’ woke up Mist’ Sandy, ain’ nevah since he bawn. Jedge he tryin’t’ find his pants. Ah done had ’em all down in mah kitchen, goin’ press ’em fust thing in th’ mo’nin’. He shoutin’, ‘Weeyum, you fool niggah, wheah mah pants?’ jus’ lak he use’ to when he was comin’ up. Done mah soul good jus’ hearin’ him.”
Somehow the picture of the dignified and distinguished figure of the Virginian jurist standing in the hall bellowing for his pants seemed to me very funny, and William beamed at me like an ancient black seraph.
“Then he shout, Tell Mis’ Jer’my put some clothes on ’fore she go out theah!’ But Ah couldn’ fin’ Mis’ Jer’my, she gone.”
16
I don’t know what made me happen to glance up at the door at that moment. Perhaps my subconscious had heard something I wasn’t conscious of. Yet why not, unless he’d crept in with the most extraordinary care, I can’t imagine. It was the smaller-than-life-size figure of Mr. Pepperday. How long he’d been standing there I had no idea, except that it must have been some little time. He looked very severe, anyway, as if the sight of an old darkey and a white lady laughing about the Judge’s trousers was undignified if not downright disreputable.
He screwed his spectacles into their niche on his beaked nose.
“I’ve come to inquire about a certain article,” he said in his high prim treble—deciding, I suppose, that ignoring the whole scene he’d run in on was the better course for a man of any delicacy.
“Unfortunately, Mr. Pepperday,” I said, “it’s lost.”
“The lostah the bettah,” William said darkly.
He and Mr. Pepperday seemed to have a subtle rapport that interested me, chiefly, I think, because I felt it without being able to define it in any way. They were curiously like the old Greek god whose name I’ve forgotten whose head had two faces. Though that was ridiculous, too, because anything with Mr. Pepperday’s face on one side and old William’s on the other would definitely not remotely resemble a Greek god.
“That depends, in my opinion, on how thoroughly it has been lost,” Mr. Pepperday observed shrilly.
“Very thoroughly indeed, Mr. Pepperday,” I said. “And since Colonel Primrose has already noticed it’s gone from the board, I think it would be a mistake for it to be found and returned.”
“He sure am smart, ain’ he?” William said, with quite genuine enthusiasm. “He come out in mah kitchen this mo’nin’ an’ says, ‘What’s goin’ on ’round heah, son? Gabriel goin’ blow fo’ you fus’ thing you know. Bettah sta’t prayin’, and don’ tell me no lies, or Ah’ll bus’ you irrega’dless.”
“Oh, that’s Serge’nt Buck, not Colonel Primrose, William,” I said. If there had been any doubt, that last word would have clinched it.
“Mighty nice man, anyhow,” William said. “Want to know, did Ah cook th’ suppah ovah to Mis’ Karen’s. Said no girl nevah cook that there ham ovah in that there frigidary.”
“You be careful of him all the same, William,” I said. “Sergeant Buck is just as much of a siren in his way as Mr. Doyle is in his.”
William shook his head. “No, ma’am—came jus’ as quiet. Ask me who was th’ young man Mis’ Karen was sweet on.”
“Did you tell him?”
“No, ma’am. Tell him Ah don’ know. He’s a foreign gennaman Ah ain’ nevah seen ’fore; he come messin’ ’roun’ in th’ kitchen lak he ain’ nevah seen th’ inside one ’fore, askin’ what that clock runs th’ oilburner was, callin’ that hot watah tank a . . . a geezah.”
I wondered.
“ ’Course Ah tol’ him. Seem interested. Ask don’ we heat ouah watah. Ah took him down in th’ cellah, showed him we ain’ got no new-fangled apparatux to kill nobody in they sleep.”
Mr. Pepperday, listening from the door, looked anxiously at his watch.
“Good night,” he shrilled.
William picked up the Judge’s napkin and folded it.
“Mr. Pepperday, he re-tahr at eight o’clock,” he said, I suppose by way of explanation of the little man’s abrupt departure.
“I know,” I said. “By the way, did he show up at all this morning?”
“No, ma’am—Mr. Pepperday, he don’ get up till half-past seb’n.”
Mr. Pepperday then, no matter what might happen, was placed from eight, when he invariably retired, till seven-thirty, when he invariably arose. It was unfortunate, I thought, that all the rest of us weren’t as methodical.
I watched the old darkey move around, snuffing the candles with a pair of silver snuffers. He polished off the satin-smooth old table and took up his tray.
“Good night, Miss,” he said.
He waited f
or me to precede him into the empty hall, and switched out the single electric light overhead. I heard him padding slowly back to his kitchen. Poor Mr. Geoffrey McClure, I thought. I’ve always suspected that what Sergeant Buck gleaned backstairs was what made his Colonel so omniscient in the drawing room, and I was sure of it now. Heaven knew what else William had told him, in the secure conviction that he was not telling him anything. Then I paused with my hand on the stair rail. Or had he, I wondered? He was certainly nobody’s fool, even if he did have the old Negro’s suspicion of “apparatux.” Nevertheless . . .
I went slowly up to my room. The clock on the landing pulled its old joints together to boom out Mr. Pepperday’s bedtime. Somewhere in the dark recesses of the quiet house Mrs. Harris raised a plaintive meow. Sandy’s voice raised suddenly: “Why doesn’t somebody strangle that damned cat?” I listened. Mrs. Harris didn’t make another peep. Jerry’s level voice said, “You’d better pull yourself together, darling.”
“I’m sorry!” Sandy said. “But every time she squeaks I can see——”
“Sandy! Stop it—stop it!”
If I’d had my coat I think I’d have slipped out of the front door and gone home. But I didn’t, and I didn’t care about freezing to death on my way back to Georgetown. Then as I went on up the stairs the telephone rang. I heard Sandy say, “Just a minute,” and then he opened the door and shouted for me.
I went on in. It was Colonel Primrose.
“Look, my dear. What about your bringing Miss Jerry around for a confidential chat? Not here——”
“The police station?” I asked acridly.
He chuckled. “No, to Fox’s house. He’s not there. I don’t expect you to take my word for it. Bring the Melton pack and nose him out if you like.”
“I’ll see,” I said. I turned to Jerry. “Colonel Primrose wants to talk to you.—I know, Sandy.” He was glowering angrily. “But you can’t keep her incommunicado and you might as well face it. You might as well have Colonel Primrose see her with me as have Captain Fox have to get at her officially.”
“I’ll be glad to see him,” Jerry said quietly.
I turned back to the phone and said, “All right.” He gave me a number in St. Asaph’s Street, and I put the phone down.
Sandy and Jerry were standing looking at each other. She turned abruptly and went out into the hall.
“Make him pull the old punches, Grace,” Sandy said. “She’s not as elastic as she looks.”
No one would have thought her the least elastic as she joined me downstairs a minute later. She was pale gold and brittle as spun sugar in her short brown beaver jacket and little brown velvet hat perched on the back of her copper head. But she smiled back at Sandy standing in the dim light of the open door. We got in my car. I would have given a great deal to know what was going on in her mind as we drove slowly through the dark silent street to the gleaming white little clapboard house with its three rows of tiny windows looking out like bright eyes through the dead winter branches of the big maple tree in the sidewalk.
Colonel Primrose opened the door. “Mrs. Fox has taken the children to the movies,” he said. I listened. There was no sound in the house except the scratching of the big good-natured dog in front of the fireplace.
Jerry took off her jacket, sat down on a stool by him and scratched his head, his long tail knocking noisily on the hearth. She looked at Colonel Primrose, her golden eyes as open as the sky, and smiled a little. He sat down beside me on the davenport and put down his cigar. I looked around the room. It was a pleasant chintzy sort of place, with school books on the big table, a businesslike radio and miniature broadcasting set beside it. Captain Fox’s leather slippers poked their worn noses out from under an armchair, his pipe was on the smoking stand close by. Mrs. Fox’s knitting bag and a basket with socks in it and a darning egg were on a low table beside the couch. Somehow my heart rose a little.
“I want to know all about this business of the aircraft stock you hold, Miss Jerry,” Colonel Primrose said. He wasn’t trying to be casual, or kind, and I saw Jerry relax a little.
“It’s quite simple, Colonel Primrose,” she said. “When Karen’s father died, he was supposed to be a rich man. He’d appointed my father her guardian without bond. They’d had a long correspondence about her future. When Father took everything over he found Mr. Lunt had left very little, actually. There was some real estate in what they call a ‘blighted area’ in Baltimore, some gold mining stock in Nevada, where it cost more to get the gold than it was worth, even with new chemical methods, and one hundred shares of aircraft stock, at one hundred dollars a share.”
I was proud of her cool straightforward voice and her steady unwavering eyes meeting his.
“There wasn’t much insurance, and what there was was invalidated by a suicide clause. We weren’t wealthy. My father got what money he could out of everything he could sell—-to keep Karen on at Briar Hill, which he’d promised Mr. and Mrs. Lunt he’d do. He tried to sell the aircraft stock, but it wasn’t worth a thousand dollars, much less ten thousand. Still he kept her at Briar Hill. When he found he’d have to take her out because he just couldn’t pay the bills, he went to Mr. Doyle, who’d been a friend of her parents too, and got him to take the aircraft stock, which still wasn’t worth anything, at its face value as an act of friendship.”
There was no trace of bitterness in her voice as she spoke Philander Doyle’s name.
“Then Mr. Doyle got in a jam. It was just before he moved back down here and bought the old house. By that time the five thousand dollars had been more than spent on Karen, but Father had a salary from the bench then, so it didn’t matter—very much . . . not to him. Mr. Doyle brought the stock around, and asked Father to take it back. He had to have ready cash. Father took it, at the price Mr. Doyle had paid. Then he got very ill.”
She hesitated and went on.
“He was terribly alarmed about all of us then.—The doctors said he couldn’t live six months. He arranged with Mr. Doyle to take Karen over and keep her at Briar Hill, and then he scraped together everything he could lay his hands on—even collected a few of his old unpaid fees—and put everything in an irrevocable trust for me and my younger brother Billy, with Mr. Doyle as guardian ad litem. He left Sandy the house, with instructions to sell the furniture only when he had to keep us going. The aircraft stock was listed at five hundred dollars then, but with everything he had he got the trust up to $20,000, and he had $5000 insurance. Then . . . he didn’t die, we wouldn’t let him die. And . . . after a while everything went on the same. Karen stayed at Briar Hill, flunking a year or two. Billy went to public school, I went to Miss Ebury’s in Charlottesville, Sandy went to George Washington instead of Princeton.”
“That was . . . ?” Colonel Primrose said.
“Five years ago. And then, two years ago, with all the war scare and armament, somebody took the company our stock was in and put it on its feet. And the stock went way up.”
Colonel Primrose nodded.
“Did Karen know that?”
“Oh, yes, of course,” Jerry answered quickly. “She’d finished school, finally, and she’d gone abroad and come back and was living with us. All she had was twenty-five dollars a month from a trust her great-aunt had left her. Father was still taking care of her, as he’d promised her father and mother he’d do till she married. She knew about the stock. She said several times it showed there was a God, because Father was getting back the money he’d spent on her, and didn’t it serve Mr. Doyle right.”
Colonel Primrose touched the grey column of ash of his cigar on the side of the metal tray. “Nothing was said about it belonging to her?”
“Nothing at all, ever, except last year when she decided to do over the carriage house and live by herself, and the estimate was terrific. She said, ‘But darling—I haven’t cost a whole hundred thousand, and that’s the morning quotation on your stock.’ I guess I looked blank, because she put her arm around me and said ‘I was joking, yo
u baby—but it’ll be so much better for all of us if I have a place of my own. I’ll try to cut it down.’ But she didn’t, and Father said to me, ‘But we don’t want to be selfish, Jeremy.’—The idea that it was hers, or that she had any claim to it, except through our good will never was suggested, even.”
“When did it first come up?” Colonel Primrose asked.
Jerry looked at me. “It was the night I stopped by your house on my way home from the office, Grace.”
“What office?” Colonel Primrose asked.
“Where my job is,” Jerry said. She said it as if he ought naturally to have known she had one. “You see the stock doesn’t pay but two per cent, and my kid brother’s at St. Paul’s, and Karen’s house costs more to keep up than we’d planned.”
“I see,” Colonel Primrose said. He blew out a rather ironical trail of blue smoke. “Go on.”
“That’s all, really.”
“But you haven’t answered my question. What day was it you were at Mrs. Latham’s?”
“It seems years ago now.” She looked across at me. “I guess it was Monday night. This is Friday, isn’t it? Karen came in after dinner and stayed in the library a long time with Father. Sandy and I were jittery, because that usually meant an awful wallop of some sort. Then when she’d gone he called us down and said he was going to let her have the stock. She wanted to marry a young man who hadn’t any money, and . . . oh, a lot of things. We were appalled, of course, but he said after all we didn’t want to profit by her . . . her misfortune, was the way he put it.”
She bent down and rubbed the dog’s ears.
“I guess I lost my temper. I said a lot of things I’m sorry I said, now.”
She didn’t look up at him.
“Father said he was sorry I was being unpleasant, because I’d have to sign over my rights before the trust could be absolved, because I was twenty-one. I had a birthday three weeks ago.”
Colonel Primrose looked at her, his cigar suspended in mid-air. I’m sure he hadn’t thought she was eighteen.
“I hadn’t realized that, of course. I asked him how Billy-he’s fifteen—could agree to give up his share. He said Mr. Doyle as guardian would do that. I said Mr. Doyle could, but I wouldn’t. Nothing could ever make me do it. I guess I said a lot more I needn’t have said. But I was . . . furious. It meant . . . so much, you see.”
