Uncle Abner, Master of Mysteries Read online

  She paused and tittered.

  “Bless my life, how young folks does carry on! Every day heah comes Mars Cedward a-ridin’ up, an’ he says, ‘Howdy, Mammy, I reckon if I can’t see Miss Betty, I’ll have to run upstairs an’ look at her Ma.’ An’ he lights offen his horse, ‘Get your key, Mammy,’ he says, ’an’ open the sacred po’tals. ‘And I gets the key outen my pocket an’ unlocks the do’ an’ he whippits in there to that little picture of Miss Betty’s Ma, that hangs over her bureau.”

  The old woman paused and wiped a mist from her spectacles with an immaculate and carefully folded handkerchief.

  “Yes, yes, sah, ’co’se Miss Betty does look like her Ma—she’s the very spit-an’-image of her … Well, I goes along back an’ sets down on the stair-steps, an’ waits till Mars Cedward gets done with his worshiping, an’ he comes along an’ says, Thankee, Mammy, I reckon that’ll have to last me until tomorrow, ’an then I goes back an’ locks the do’. I’s mighty keerful to lock do’s. I ain’t minded to have no ’quisitive nigger ramshakin’ ’roun’.”

  But my uncle stopped her and sent her to Betty as evidence in the flesh that she had come acquit of Randolph’s inquisition. And the two men fell into a talk upon other matters.

  But I no longer listened. I sat within my bush and studied the impassive face of my Uncle Abner, and tried to join these contradictory incidents into something that I could understand. Slowly the thing came to me! But I did not push on into the inevitable conclusion. Its consequences were too appalling. I saw it and let it lie.

  Somebody had pried the emeralds out of that cross,—somebody having access to the room. And that person was not Mammy Liza! Abner knew that… And he deliberately falsified the evidence. To acquit Mammy Liza? Something more than that, I thought. She was in no danger; even Randolph behind his judicial attitudes, had never entertained the idea for a moment. Then, this thing meant that my uncle had deliberately screened the real criminal. But why? Abner was no respecter of men. He stood for justice—clean and ruthless justice, tempered by no distinctions. Why, then, indeed?

  And then I had an inspiration. Abner was thinking of some one beyond the criminal, and of the consequences to that one if the truth were known; and this thing he had done, he had done for her! And now I thought about her, too.

  Her faith, her trust, the dearest illusion of her life had been imperiled, had been destroyed, but for my uncle’s firm, deliberate act.

  And then, another thing rose up desperately before me. How could he let this girl go on in ignorance of the truth? Must he not, after all, tell her what he knew? And my tongue grew dry in contemplation of that ordeal. And yet again, why? Love of her had been ultimately the motive. She need never know, and the secret might live out everybody’s life. Moreover, for all his iron ways, Abner was a man who saw justice in its large and human aspect, and he stood for the spirit, above the letter, of the truth.

  And yet, even there under the limited horizon of a child, I seemed to feel that he must tell her. And so when he finally got away from Randolph, and turned into the garden, I stalked him with desperate cunning. I was on fire to know what he would do. Would he speak? Or would he keep the thing forever silent? I had sat before two acts of this drama, and I would see what the curtains went down on. And I did see it from the shelter of the tall timothy-grass.

  He found Betty at the foot of the garden. She ran to him in joy at Mammy Liza’s vindication, and with pretty evidences of her affection. But he took her by the hand without a word and led her to a bench.

  And when she was seated he sat down beside her. I could not see her face, but I could hear his voice and it was wonderfully kind.

  “My child,” he said, “there is always one reason, if no other, why good people must not undertake to work with a tool of the devil, and that reason is because they handle it so badly.”

  He paused and took the gold cross out of his pocket.

  “Now here,” he continued, “I have had to help somebody out who was the very poorest bungler with a devil’s tool. I am not very skilled myself with that sort of an implement, but, dear me, I am not so bad a workman as this person! … Let me show you … The one who got the emeralds out of this cross left the twisted and broken tines to indicate a deliberate criminal act, so I had to grind them off in order that the thing might look like an accident … That cleared everybody—Mammy Liza, who had no motive for this act, and Edward Duncan, who had.”

  The girl stood straight up.

  “Oh,” she said, and her voice was a long shuddering whisper, “no one could think he did it!”

  “And why not?” continued my uncle. “He had the opportunity and the motive. He was in the room during your absence, and he needed the money which those emeralds would bring in order to clear his lands of debt.”

  The girl clenched her bands and drew them in against her heart.

  “But you don’t think he stole them?” And again her voice was in that shuddering whisper.

  I lay trembling.

  “No,” replied Abner, “I do not think that Edward Duncan stole these emeralds, because I know that they were never stolen at all.”

  He put out his hand and drew the girl down beside him.

  “My child,” he continued, “we must always credit the poorest-thief with some glimmering of intelligence. When I first saw this cross in your hand, I knew that this was not the work of a thief, because no thief would have painfully pried the emeralds out, in order to leave the cross behind as an evidence of his guilt. Now, there is a reason why this cross was left behind, but it is not the reason of a thief—two reasons, in fact: because some one wished to keep it, and because they were not afraid to do so.

  “Now, my child,” and Abner put his arm tenderly around the girl’s shoulders, “who could that person be who treasured this cross and was not afraid to keep it?”

  She clung to my uncle then, and I heard the confession among her sobbings. Edward Duncan was making every sacrifice for her, and she had made one for him. She had sold the emeralds in Baltimore, and through an agent, bought his mountain land. But he must never know, never in this world, and my Uncle Abner must promise her that upon his honor.

  And lying in the deep timothy-grass, I heard him promise.

  Chapter 11

  The Hidden Law

  We had come out to Dudley Belts’ house and were standing in a bit of meadow. It was an afternoon of April; there had been a shower of rain, and now the sun was on the velvet grass and the white-headed clover blossoms. The sky was blue above and the earth green below, and swimming between them was an air like lotus. Facing the south upon this sunny field was a stand of bees, thatched with rye-straw and covered over with a clapboard roof, the house of each tribe a section of a hollow gum-tree, with a cap on the top for the tribute of honey to the human tyrant. The bees had come out after the shower was gone, and they hummed at their work with the sound of a spinner.

  Randolph stopped and looked down upon the humming hive. He lifted his finger with a little circling gesture.

  “‘Singing masons building roofs of gold’,” he said. “Ah, Abner, William of Avon was a great poet.”

  My uncle turned about at that and looked at Randolph and then at the hive of bees. A girl was coming up from the brook below with a pail of water. She wore a simple butternut frock, and she was cleanlimbed and straight like those first daughters of the world who wove and spun. She paused before the hive and the bees swarmed about her as about a great clover blossom, and she was at home and unafraid like a child in a company of yellow butterflies. She went on to the spring house with her dripping wooden pail, kissing the tips of her fingers to the bees. We followed, but before the hive my uncle stopped and repeated the line that Randolph had quoted:

  “‘Singing masons building roofs of gold,’ … and over a floor of gold and pillars of gold.” He added, “He was a good riddle maker, your English poet, but not so good as Samson, unless I help him out.”

  I received the fairy fancy
with all children’s joy. Those little men singing as they laid their yellow floor, and raised their yellow walls, and arched their yellow roof! Singing! The word seemed to open up some sunlit fairy world.

  It pleased Randolph to have thus touched my uncle.

  “A great poet, Abner,” he repeated, “and more than that; he drew lessons from nature valuable for doctrine. Men should hymn as they labor and fill the fields with song and so suck out the virus from the curse. He was a great philosopher, Abner—William of Avon.”

  “But not so great a philosopher as Saint Paul,” replied Abner, and he turned from the bees toward old Dudley Belts, digging in the fields before his door. He put his hands behind him and lifted his stern bronze face.

  “Those who coveted after money,” he said, “have pierced themselves through with many sorrows. And is it not the truth? Yonder is old Dudley Belts. He is doubled up with aches; he has lost his son; he is losing his life, and he will lose his soul—all for money—‘Pierced themselves through with many sorrows,’ as Saint Paul said it, and now, at the end he has lost the hoard that he slaved for.”

  The man was a by-word in the hills; mean and narrow, with an economy past belief. He used everything about him to one end and with no thought but gain. He cultivated his fields to the very door, and set his fences out into the road, and he extracted from those about him every tithe of service. He had worked his son until the boy had finally run away across the mountains. He had driven his daughter to the makeshifts of the first patriarchal people—soap from ashes, linen from hemp, and the wheel and the loom for the frock upon her limbs.

  And like every man under a single dominating passion, he grew in suspicion and in fear. He was afraid to lend out his money lest he lose it. He had given so much for this treasure that he would take no chance with it, and so kept it by him in gold.

  But caution and fear are not harpies to be halted; they wing on. Belts was dragged far in their claw-feet. There is a land of dim things that these convoys can enter. Belts arrived there. We must not press the earth too hard, old, forgotten peoples believed, lest evil things are squeezed out that strip us and avenge it. And ancient crones, feeble, wrapped up by the fire, warned him: The earth suffered us to reap, but not to glean her. We must not gather up every head of wheat. The earth or dim creatures behind the earth would be offended. It was the oldest belief. The first men poured a little wine out when they drank and brought an offering of their herds and the first fruits of the fields. It was written in the Book. He could get it down and read it.

  What did they know that they did this? Life was hard then; men saved all they could. There was some terrible experience behind this custom, some experience that appalled and stamped the race with a lesson!

  At first Belts laughed at their warnings; then he cursed at them, and his changed manner marked how far he had got. The laugh meant disbelief, but the curse meant fear.

  And now, the very strangest thing had happened: The treasure that the old man had so painfully laid up had mysteriously vanished clear away. No one knew it. Men like Belts, cautious and secretive, are dumb before disaster. They conceal the deep mortal hurt as though to hide it from themselves.

  He had gone in the night and told Randolph and Abner, and now they had come to see his house.

  He put down his hoe when we came up and led us in. It was a house like those of the first men, with everything in it home-made—hand-woven rag carpets on the floor, and hand—woven coverlets on the beds; tables and shelves and benches of rude carpentry. These things spoke of the man’s economy. But there were also things that spoke of his fear: The house was a primitive stockade. The door was barred with a beam, and there were heavy shutters at the window; an ax stood by the old man’s bed and an ancient dueling pistol hung by its trigger-guard to a nail.

  I did not go in, for youth is cunning. I sat down on the doorstep and fell into so close a study of a certain wasp at work under a sill that I was overlooked as a creature without ears; but I had ears of the finest and I lost no word.

  The old man got two splint-bottom chairs and put them by the table for his guests, and then he brought a blue earthen jar and set it before them. It was one of the old-fashioned glazed jars peddled by the hucksters, smaller but deeper than a crock, with a thick rim and two great ears. In this he kept his gold pieces until on a certain night they had vanished.

  The old man’s voice ran in and out of a whisper as he told the story. He knew the very night, because he looked into his jar before he slept and every morning when he got out of his bed. It had been a devil’s night—streaming clouds drove across an iron sky, a thin crook of a moon sailed, and a high bitter wind scythed the earth.

  Everybody remembered the night when he got out his almanac and named it. There had been noises, old Belts said, but he could not define them. Such a night is full of voices; the wind whispers in the chimney and the house frame creaks. The wind had come on in gusts at sunset, full of dust and whirling leaves, but later it had got up into a gale. The fire had gone out and the house inside was black as a pit. He did not know what went on inside or out, but he knew that the gold was gone at daylight, and he knew that no living human creature had got into his house. The bar on his door held and the shutters were bolted. Whatever entered, entered through the keyhole or through the throat of the chimney that a cat would stick in.

  Abner said nothing, but Randolph sat down to an official inquiry:

  “You have been robbed, Belts,” he said. “Somebody entered your house that night.”

  “Nobody entered it,” replied the old man in his hoarse, half-whispered voice, “either on that night or any other night. The door wast fast, Squire.”

  “But the thief may have closed it behind him.”

  Belts shook his head. “He could not put up the bar behind him, and besides, I set it in a certain way. It was not moved. And the windows—I bolt them and turn the bolt at a certain angle. No human touched them.”

  It was not possible to believe that this man could be mistaken. One could see with what care he had set his little traps—the bar across the door precisely at a certain hidden line; the bolts of the window shutters turned precisely to an angle that he alone knew. It was not likely that Randolph would suggest anything that this cautious old man had not already thought of.

  “Then,” continued Randolph, “the thief concealed himself in your house the day before the robbery and got out of it on the day after.”

  But again Belts shook his head, and his eyes ran over the house and to a candle on the mantelpiece.

  “I look,” he said, “every night before I go to bed.”

  And one could see the picture of this old, fearful man, looking through his house with the smoking tallow candle, peering into every nook and corner. Could a thief hide from him in this house that he knew inch by inch? One could not believe it. The creature took no chance; he had thought of every danger, this one among them, and every night he looked! He would know, then, the very cracks in the wall. He would have found a rat.

  Then, it seemed to me, Randolph entered the only road there was out of this mystery.

  “Your son knew about this money?”

  “Yes,” replied Belts, “’Lander knew about it. He used to say that a part of it was his because he had worked for it as much as I had. But I told him,” and the old man’s voice cheeped in a sort of laugh, “that he was mine.”

  “Where was your son Philander when the money disappeared?” said Randolph.

  “Over the mountains,” said Belts; “he had been gone a month.” Then he paused and looked at Randolph. “It was not ’Lander. On that day he was in the school that Mr. Jefferson set up. I had a letter from the master asking for money… I have the letter,” and he got up to get it.

  But Randolph waved his hand and sat back in his chair with the aspect of a brooding oracle.

  It was then that my uncle spoke.

  “Belts,” he said, “how do you think the money went?”

  The old man,
’s voice got again into that big crude whisper.

  “I don’t know, Abner.”

  But my uncle pressed him.

  “What do you think?”

  Belts drew a little nearer to the table.

  “Abner,” he said, “there are a good many things going on around a man that he don’t understand. We turn out a horse to pasture, and he comes in with hand-hold in his mane …. You have seen it?”

  “Yes,” replied my uncle.

  And I had seen it, too, many a time, when the horses were brought up in the spring from pasture, their manes twisted and knotted into loops, as though to furnish a hand-hold to a rider.

  “Well, Abner,” continued the old man in his rustling whisper, “who rides the horse? You cannot untie or untwist those hand-holds—you must cut them out with shears—with iron. Is it true?”

  “It is true,” replied my uncle.

  “And why, eh, Abner? Because those hand-holds were never knotted in by any human fingers! You know what the old folk say?”

  “I know,” answered my uncle. “Do you believe it, Belts?”

  “Eh, Abner!” he croaked in the guttural whisper. “If there were no witches, why did our fathers hang up iron to keep them off? My grandmother saw one burned in the old country. She had ridden the king’s horse, and greased her hands with shoemakers’ wax so her fingers would not slip in the mane …. Shoemakers’ wax! Mark you that, Abner!”

  “Belts,” cried Randolph, “you are a fool; there are no witches!”

  “There was the Witch of Endor,” replied my uncle. “Go on, Belts.”

  “By gad, sir!” roared Randolph, “if we are to try witches, I shall have to read up James the First. That Scotch king wrote a learned work on demonology. He advised the magistrate search on the body of the witch for the seal of the devil; that would be a spot insensible to pain, and, James said, ‘Prod for it with a needle.’”