by Zenith Brown
“What is it, J. K.?” I asked in alarm, his manner was so grave.
“Have you seen Thorn Carter this morning?”
I nodded.
“What did she say?”
“She said she intended to marry Franklin if he’d have her. She was frightfully upset. I hope Franklin will call her up or something.”
Dr. Knox shook his grand white head.
“I’m afraid he won’t, Martha.”
“Where is he?”
“He went to Baltimore this morning. He’s very deeply hurt, I’m afraid.”
“Oh, it’s absurd I” I scoffed. “If he can’t overlook Thorn’s outbursts—heaven knows they’re rare enough—then he can’t be very much in love with her.”
“You’re overlooking his own pride, my dear.”
“Oh, my dear sir!” I said. I was getting a little fed up with the business of Thorn and Franklin Knox. “They make me . . . Well, you send Franklin to me and I’ll give him a piece of my mind.”
Just then my impractical professor of Anthropology appeared in the door.
“Always giving away something she hasn’t got—aren’t you? How are you, sir?”
Dr. Knox smiled.
“All right, Martha, I’ll send him around. See what you can do. I’d like to see it patched up. I think they’re a good match.”
“Oh, Mr. Sutton told me to tell you he’d like to see you, J. K.,” I said. “And look—there comes Reverdy Hawkins. He’s on his way to see Mr. Sutton now. I wouldn’t like to be in his shoes.”
I pointed up the road to the absurd figure of the colored lawyer with his brown derby and frock coat above a pair of grey flannels that we’d bought for Ben in Regent Street the last time we were in London. He wore enormous horn-rimmed spectacles and carried a brief case and looked very important indeed.
He came opposite the porch and seeing us swept off his hat in an elaborate salutation that was an irresistibly funny caricature of Dr. Knox’s fine Southern manner. I caught Dr. Knox’s eye and we both laughed, and Reverdy Hawkins laughed too, though one could see from his face that he didn’t think anything was very funny.
He opened the gate and came to the bottom step.
“Good evenin’, Doctor. Evenin’, Miss. Mighty warm day, sir.”
It wasn’t particularly warm, as a matter of fact, but I could quite understand Reverdy’s thinking it was.
“How’s John Thomas getting on?” I asked.
“Tolable, tolable. Right smart of business comin’ in, but things pretty slow jest now.”
John Thomas was Reverdy’s son who’d just opened a catering establishment. The general feeling was that he was bootlegging; it was an assumption based solely on his new Chrysler. In Landover people don’t get new cars by serving mint-flavored ice tea and cakes with pink frosting at garden parties.
I felt rather sorry for Reverdy, mopping his glistening mahogany dome with a green silk handkerchief. He didn’t want to stay and talk to us, but he wanted to put off facing Daniel Sutton in his den as long as he could. Obviously a victim of his own guile.
Wally drove by just then in his blue sports Packard and waved at us.
“Hawkins!” he called out. “Mr. Sutton’s expecting you. Better move along!”
“Yassuh!” he said, although Wally was already half-way down the road.
Reverdy stretched his long black neck, pulled at his limp wing collar and adjusted the great red glass pin in his orange and black striped knit tie.
“Ah reckons Ah’d better be goin’ on. Ah wouldn’ want to keep Mistah Sutton waitin’.”
“Good day, Reverdy,” said Dr. Knox.
The amused smile on his face faded with Reveredy’s reluctant figure. He turned to me.
“What’s this all about, Martha?”
“Aunt Charlotte. I don’t know exactly what it is, but Mr. Sutton’s furious. She’s finally sold the place, or decided to. Whoever it is is threatening to put up a service station.”
Dr. Knox said nothing for a moment.
“What’s behind it?” he asked at last.
“I don’t know—except twenty-five thousand dollars. At least that’s the sum the townspeople have got hold of. Do you think Mr. Sutton would pay that much to keep a service station off the spot?”
Dr. Knox was silent again.
“Yes,” he said slowly. “I think he would. In his present mood he would pay anything. He said last week he’d get that ground, and get Charlotte off it, if it took the rest of his life and every cent he had to do it.”
I looked at him incredulously. His face was grave.
“Who heard him say that, J. K.?” I asked. It seemed to me that I was beginning to see into this business.
He looked at me quickly.
“It was after dinner one night last week,” he replied. “I was there, Bill and Dan, and Franklin. That’s all.”
“Wasn’t Thorn there?”
“Oh yes. Yes, she came in while we were talking.”
CHAPTER VI
I didn’t go out with Thorn and the others to play golf that afternoon. An important point had come up as to whether the Faculty Wives’ Club should give a tea-dance during Commencement or confine their efforts to entertaining parents and friends of the graduating class at a garden party. Personally I was for the garden party. Nothing makes me feel my thirty-odd years more than undergraduates and their girls at tea-dances. I suppose it’s chiefly because quite unconsciously they regard you as tottering most definitely on the brink. When I go back to my college homecoming all my professors seem years younger to me than they did while I was a student. How much greater the gulf is between twenty and thirty than between thirty and forty!
Anyway, I went to the meeting to vote against a tea-dance. On my way home I remembered I hadn’t got Aunt Charlotte the unbleached muslin I promised her the week before and stopped in at The Ladies’ Store to get it. I was coming out with my parcel under my arm when I met Mr. Sullivan, Landover’s prosecuting attorney, just coming up from Court House Square.
“How are you, Mrs. Niles?”
“I’m well, how are you?”
“Tolerable, thanks.”
“Mr. Sullivan, you sound just like Reverdy Hawkins.”
He grinned.
“Glad I don’t feel like him. He was just in to see me. He’s a scared boy.”
“What’s he trying to do?” I asked guilelessly.
“I don’t exactly know. Seems to have something up his sleeve. He wanted to know what the legal definition of conspiracy was. I guess he wanted to know how far he could go without Sutton’s getting him on a criminal charge.”
“Did you tell him?”
“I told him if he was wise he’d let Sutton alone. I told him he had as much chance as a jack-rabbit if Sutton gets Nathan Rand down here on him.”
Mr. Rand is Mr. Sutton’s New York lawyer, who happens also to be an alumnus of Landover College, and furthermore one of its Visitors and Governors. I mention all this because, as it happens, he played a small but very important part in the terrible event that was coming so rapidly on us.
“But there’s one thing Sutton and Rand and the whole blessed kit and caboodle of ’em can’t do,” Mr. Sullivan added, with another grin. “They can’t make old Charlotte sell to ’em, and they can’t stop her selling to her nephew Reverdy if she wants to. And they can’t stop him selling to anybody he pleases.”
I caught the shrewd twinkle of his blue Irish eyes.
“So that’s it,” I said. “She’s selling to Reverdy.”
“I don’t know it officially. But that’s what my wife tells me. And she gets more hot tips than any state police you’ve ever seen. I’ve often thought of putting her on the pay-roll. Wouldn’t quite do, would it?”
We parted at Mr. Sullivan’s gate on York Road a few doors above me, and I went on down the street to give Aunt Charlotte my parcel—and, I suspect, to hear whatever I could.
I opened the rickety gate and crossed the little patch of gar
den that divided her whitewashed cabin from York Road. The door was open. When I looked in I think I got one of the worst shocks of my life. There was a dingy little parlor hung with heavy gilt-framed crayon enlargements of the biggest lot of forebears you ever saw; and Daniel Sutton was sitting on the horsehair sofa at the end of the room.
Aunt Charlotte was in her chair near the door. When she saw me she got up painfully. She’s pretty much crippled with rheumatism.
“Law, Miss Marty, is that you honey? You ain’ been see me for days.”
She hobbled along on her heavy stick to meet me.
“Sit down, Aunt Charlotte. How’s your rheumatism?”
“Mighty poorly, honey. Mah laig ain’ much ’count. If Ah could Ah’d sell it for a yaller dawg an’ shoot him.”
She wagged her old head that was like an ancient withered gourd except for two shrewd bright eyes and four small patches of neatly braided white wool on top of it.
“I’se poorly, honey. The doctor’s here yes’day, an’ he tells me Ah got move away from this’yere water. It’s done got lime in it. Lime ain’ good for some folks, they jus’ nach’lly cain’ stand it.”
I glanced involuntarily at Mr. Sutton, sitting cross-legged on the old sofa, listening to all this without a word. His face was expressionless, which was an unusual thing.
“It’s been mighty good for you, Aunt Charlotte,” I said. “Not many people live to be ninety-nine and stay as young as you are.”
“Deed Ah ain’ so young, honey.”
Mr. Sutton spoke abruptly. “Where are you going to go, Charlotte?”
“Deed an’ Ah’ don’ know, sir. They say they’s a place whe’ it ain’ never col’, and whe’ they ain’ no lime in the water, whe’ they can take me to. I don’ want no other winter like las’ one.”
“You be careful, Charlotte,” Mr. Sutton said with more humanity than I’d heard him use toward the old woman, “that those fellows don’t put you down there at Shepherd’s Hill.”
For an instant stark primitive fear appeared in the old woman’s eyes. She gave a sudden start and clutched at her stick. It was the one constant fear of her life that somebody would put her in the colored old people’s home. In fact—as I that minute remembered—her dislike of Daniel Sutton rose from precisely that fear. When he first came to Landover he suggested that in all faith she’d be more comfortable there.
Now she looked dumbly first at him, then at me.
“They won’ do that, Miss Marty,” she mumbled. But I saw she wasn’t confident of it.
Mr. Sutton got up abruptly.
“Are you going back, Martha?”
I nodded, but caught the dumb appeal in poor old Charlotte’s eyes.
“I’ll be back later,” I told her. “Would you like some rice pudding for supper?”
She rocked back and forth. I didn’t really want to leave her.
When we had gone Mr. Sutton said, “That’ll give her something to think about.”
“It was rather cruel, don’t you think?”
“Nonsense. I don’t know—quite—who’s behind all this business, but it’s nobody who’s going to give a continental about what Charlotte wants or doesn’t want.”
“Mr. Sullivan says Reverdy is buying the place.”
Mr. Sutton snorted derisively.
“That damned blockhead doesn’t know what he’s doing. I grilled him for twenty minutes. I couldn’t exactly get out of him who’s hired him. But I’ve got a pretty good guess, Martha.”
He gave me a look so black with vexation, bitterness and sheer wrath that I almost shuddered.
“Who is it?” I said, as evenly as I could.
He was silent. I thought for a moment that I’d been unduly inquisitive, although I really knew that he wanted to tell it to somebody. I glanced at him. He was walking with his hands clasped behind his back, jaw set like a steel trap. Suddenly he looked coldly at me.
“It’s someone in my own family, Martha,” he said.
I looked away.
“That’s what you thought too?” he asked quickly.
“Oh no!”
“Then you’re as big a fool as I was. But I don’t believe you.”
We were nearing the gate.
“I don’t have to tell you that this is between the two of us,” he said. I nodded.
We reached the gate. I was going on when Wally Fenton drove up complete with friend, a perfectly gigantic man with a high bronzed forehead and blondish hair.
Wally drew up and introduced us.
“How d’you do?” he said.
His voice was very deep and very English, naturally. I still remember that moment, as well—or almost as well—as when I first saw Mr. Sebastien Baca. And in his way the Englishman was as perfect as the Southerner. I don’t think I’ve met many people as irresistibly charming at first sight as Colonel Arbuthnot-Howe. He had a fine strong face, rugged and kindly, and steely amused blue eyes. We shook hands and his were enormous cordial brown paws.
We talked a few moments. Mr. Sutton remembered him and was disposed to be quite friendly, rather to Wally’s relief, I thought.
After a bit they drove on into the grounds, and I continued homeward along York Road. Once I turned around. Mr. Sutton was slowly making his way, head down, hands clasped behind him, across the campus. He was walking very slowly. I guessed he was on his way to the Knox house on College Green. I had a cold sick feeling inside of me.
CHAPTER VII
When I got back to the house I found, a message from Miss Carter asking us over to the dinner. I was still considerably disturbed by the events of the last half hour. But by the time I’d arbitrated in the nursery dessert question, compromised on Peter Rabbit, found my husband’s studs, dressed myself and tied my husband’s tie the Sutton business had faded to insignificance. I did remember when we set out to take Aunt Charlotte her rice pudding.
She was sitting on her front stoop, wagging her head in dismal monotony.
“Evenin’ Mr. Ben,” she said dully. “Miss Marty, does you s’spose that worthless Reve’dy’d play me tricks?”
“I don’t know, Aunt Charlotte.”
“Don’ you sit, honey, you spoil that frock. It’s mighty purty an’ you powerful careless.”
I sat down anyway.
“Now look, Aunt Charlotte,” I said. “I know this. That business about lime in the water is silly rot.”
She shook her head. Like millions of her betters she was impressed by plausible quackery.
“How much is Reverdy paying you, Aunt Charlotte?”
She hesitated only a second. “Ten thousand dollars.” She said it dreamily, almost chanting it.
While I was thinking that over the college bell struck seven.
“I’ve got to go, Aunt Charlotte. But I want you to promise me this: that you won’t do anything until you let us know. You haven’t signed anything, have you?”
“No’ndeed, I ain’ sign nothin’,” she replied stoutly.
“Then don’t before I see you again. Promise!”
She mumbled an incoherent something.
“Promise, Aunt Charlotte!”
“Yas’m. Ah promises.”
——Not that I expected it would do much good.
Everyone was in the drawing room when we arrived except Mr. Sutton and the gentleman from Mexico.
We spoke to Miss Carter and Susan drew me to a sofa beside her.
“Martha, have you met Colonel Arbuthnot-Howe?”
Both of us nodded.
“He’s wonderful, he knows all about elephant hunting in Africa. ‘Tracking was difficult in the extreme. As there was a total absence of rain, it was impossible to distinguish the spoor of two days’ date . . .’ ”
“Shut up,” said Bill from across the room. “The trouble with Susan,” he explained to Colonel Arbuthnot-Howe, “is that her Fifth Reader made such an impression on her that she’s never forgot it, and never opened a book since.”
“That’s a lie. I read the She
ik. That was years ago. Say, where’s Uncle Dan?”
She got up hastily and I gathered set out to look for him.
As she went out Bill grinned broadly at her.
“It’s not so,” she said, tossing her head impudently. “Is he going to stay, Auntie?”
Miss Carter nodded. “He’s a very interesting and well-bred young man,” she said gently.
“Have you met Mr. Baca?” I asked Colonel Arbuthnot-Howe. Rather by way of conversation than anything else. Then I remembered something.
“I think not,” he said pleasantly. “Although I might have, you know. I’ve met a great many people.”
“He knows you.”
“Really? What makes you think so?”
“Nothing really. Just that this noon at lunch when your name was mentioned he looked for a second as though . . . well, as though he knew you. It may have been my imagination.”
He shrugged his shoulders.
“Is this he?”
“Yes.”
Susan came back followed by her uncle and Mr. Baca.
“Look, I found them. Playing geography—had a map pinned on the wall,” she announced. “You two haven’t met,” she went on, turning to Mr. Baca and Colonel Arbuthnot-Howe. “You’d better, you have to share the same bathroom.”
The two men bowed with splendid formality. Miss Carter looked mildly pained and infinitely resigned. Clearly she had given up hope of Susan.
Lafayette brought in cocktails and Mr. Baca drifted over to talk to Miss Carter. Susan perched on the arm of her aunt’s chair. Mr. Sutton was talking to Arbuthnot-Howe, and Thorn, Bill, Dan and I were looking at the sporting pages of a Baltimore paper trying to find out how much we’d lost on Tiger Cat in the second race.
Quite by chance I glanced up and caught Colonel Arbuthnot-Howe’s eye. He smiled and shook his head. He didn’t know Sebastien Baca, then. That seemed odd. I decided that Mr. Baca was still more interesting than I’d thought. As a matter of fact, I began to wonder a little if I hadn’t imagined it all, because Mr. Baca certainly gave not the remotest indication that he had ever seen or heard of the Englishman before. I’m afraid Colonel Arbuthnot-Howe’s smile more or less indicated that he thought so too—that I’d imagined it all, I mean.
