Uncle Abner, Master of Mysteries Read online

  “I did know it,” replied my uncle.

  The old man looked at the Justice with a queer ironical smile; then he went into the house.

  “Await me, Randolph,” he said. “I would produce the evidence and make out your case.”

  And prodded by the words, Randolph cursed bitterly.

  “By the Eternal,” he cried, “I am as little afraid as any of God’s creatures, but the man confounds me!”

  And he spoke the truth. He was a justice of the peace in Virginia when only gentlemen could hold that office. He lacked the balance and the ability of his pioneer ancestors, and he was given over to the vanity and the extravagance of words, but fear and all the manifestations of fear were alien to him.

  He turned when the old man came out with a rosewood box in his hand, and faced him calmly.

  “Mansfield,” he said, “I warn you. I represent the law, and if you have done a murder, I will get you hanged.”

  The old man paused, and looked at Randolph with his maddening ironical smile.

  “Fear again, eh, Randolph!” he said. “Is it by fear that you would always restrain me? Shall I be plucked back from the gibbet and Abner’s hell only by this fear? It is a menace I have too long disregarded. You must give me a better reason.”

  Mansfield opened the rosewood box and took out a pistol like the one on the arm of Randolph’s chair. He held the weapon lightly in his hand.

  “The creature came here to harangue me,” he said, “and like the genie in the copper pot, I gave him his choice of deaths.”

  He laughed, for the fancy pleased him.

  “In the swirl of his heroics, Abner, I carried him the pistol yonder, to the steps of my portico where he stood, and with this other and my father’s watch, I sat down here. ‘After three minutes, sir,’ I said, ‘I shall shoot you down. It is my price for hearing your oration. Fire before that time is up. I shall call out the minutes for your convenience.’

  “And so, I sat here, Abner, with my father’s watch, while the creature ranted with my pistol in his hand.

  “I called out the time, and he harangued me: The black of the Negro shall be washed white with blood!’ And I answered him: ‘One minute, sir!’

  “‘The Lord will make Virginia a possession for the bittern!’ was his second climax, and I replied, ‘Two minutes of your time are up!’

  “‘The South is one great brothel,’ he shouted, and I answered, ‘Three minutes, my fine fellow,’ and shot him as I had promised! He leaped off into the darkness with my unfired pistol and fled to the cabin where you found him.”

  There was a moment’s silence, and my uncle put out his arm and pointed down across the long meadow to a grim outline traveling far off on the road.

  “Mansfield,” he said, “you have lighted the powder train that God, at His leisure, would have dampened. You have broken the faith of the world in our sincerity. Virginia will be credited with this man’s death, and we cannot hang you for it!”

  “And why not?” cried Randolph, standing up. He had been prodded into unmanageable anger. “The Commonwealth has granted no letters of marque; it has proclaimed no outlawry. Neither Mansfield nor any other has a patent to do murder. I shall get him hanged!”

  My uncle shook his head.

  “No, Randolph,” he said, “you cannot hang him.”

  “And why not?” cried the Justice of the Peace, aroused now, and defiant. “Is Mansfield above the law? If he kills this madman, shall he have a writ of exemption for it?” “But he did not kill him!” replied my uncle. Randolph was amazed. And Mansfield shook his head slowly, his face retaining its ironical smile.

  “No, Abner,” he said, “let Randolph have his case. I shot him.”

  Then he put out his hand, as though in courtesy, to my uncle. “Be at peace,” he said. “If I were moved by fear, there is a greater near me than Randolph’s gibbet. I shall be dead and buried before his grand jury can hold its inquisition.”

  “Mansfield,” replied my uncle, “be yourself at peace, for you did not kill him.”

  “Not kill him!” cried the man. “I shot him thus!” He sat down in his chair and taking the pistol out of the rosewood box, leveled it at an imaginary figure across the portico. The man’s hand was steady and the sun glinted on the steel barrel.

  “And because you shot thus,” said Abner, “you did not kill him. Listen, Mansfield: the pistol that killed the Abolitionist was held upside down and close. The brand on the dead man’s face is under the bullet hole. If the pistol had been held as usual, the brand would have been above it. It is a law of pistol wounds: as you turn the weapon, so will the brand follow. Held upside down, the brand was below the wound.”

  A deepening wonder came into the old man’s ironical face. “How did the creature die, then, if I missed him?” Abner took up the weapon on the arm of Randolph’s chair. “The dead man did not shoot in Mansfield’s fantastic duel,” he said. “Nevertheless this pistol has been fired. And observe there is a smeared bloodstain on the sharp edges of the barrel. I think I know what happened..

  “The madman with his pistol, overwrought, struggled in the cabin yonder to make himself a ‘sacrifice of blood’ and so bring on this war. Someone resisted his mad act—someone who seized the barrel of the pistol and in the struggle also got a wounded hand. Who in that cabin had a wounded hand, Randolph?”

  “By the living God!” cried the Justice of the Peace. “The woman who plaited thorns! It was a blind to cover her injured band!”

  Abner looked out across the great meadows at a tiny figure far off, fading into the twilight of the distant road that led toward the Ohio.

  “To cover her injured hand,” he echoed, “and also, perhaps, who knows, to symbolize the dead man’s mission, as she knew the saw it! The heart of a woman is the deepest of all God’s riddles!”

  Chapter 17

  The Adopted Daughter

  “Isn’t she a beauty-eh, Randolph?”

  Vespatian Flornoy had a tumbler of French brandy. He sucked in a mouthful. Then he put it on the table.

  The house was the strangest in Virginia. It was of some foreign model. The whole second floor on the side lying toward the east was in two spacious chambers lighted with great casement windows to the ceiling. Outside, on this brilliant morning, the world was yellow and dried-up, sere and baked. But the sun was thin and the autumn air hard and vital.

  My uncle, Squire Randolph, the old country doctor, Storm, and the host, Vespatian Flornoy, were in one of these enormous rooms. They sat about a table, a long mahogany piece made in England and brought over in a sailing ship. There were a squat bottle of French brandy and some tumblers. Flornoy drank and recovered his spirit of abandon.

  Now he leered at Randolph, and at the girl that he had just called in.

  He was a man one would have traveled far to see—yesterday or the day ahead of that. He had a figure out of Athens, a face cast in some forgotten foundry by the Arno, thick-curled mahogany-colored hair, and eyes like the velvet hull of an Italian chestnut. These excellencies the heavenly workman had turned out, and now by some sorcery of the pit they were changed into abominations.

  Hell-charms, one thought of, when one looked the creature in the face. Drops of some potent liquor, and devil-words had done it, on yesterday or the day ahead of yesterday. Surely not the things that really had done it—time and the iniquities of Gomorrah. His stock and his fine ruffled shirt were soiled. His satin waistcoat was stained with liquor.

  “A daughter of a French marquis, eh!” he went on. “Sold into slavery by a jest of the gods—stolen out of the garden of a convent! It’s the fabled history of every octoroon in New Orleans!”

  Fabled or not, the girl might have been the thing he said. The contour of the face came to a point at the chin, and the skin was a soft Oriental olive. She was the perfect expression of a type. One never could wish to change a line of her figure or a feature of her face. She stood now in the room before the door in the morning sun, in the quaint, all
uring costume of a young girl of the time—a young girl of degree, stolen out of the garden of a convent! She had entered at Flornoy’s drunken call, and there was the aspect of terror on her.

  The man went on in his thick, abominable voice:

  “My brother Sheppard, coming north to an inspection of our joint estate, presents her as his adopted daughter. But when he dropped dead in this room last night and I went about the preparation of his body for your inquisition—eh, what, my gentlemen! I find a bill of sale running back ten years, for the dainty baggage!

  “French, and noble, stolen from the garden of a convent, perhaps! Perhaps! but not by my brother Sheppard. His adopted daughter—sentimentally, perhaps! Perhaps! But legally a piece of property, I think, descending to his heirs. Eh, Randolph!”

  And he thrust a folded yellow paper across the table. The Justice put down his glass with the almost untasted liquor in it, and examined the bill of sale.

  “It is in form!” he said. “And you interpret it correctly, Flornoy, by the law’s letter. But you will not wish to enforce it, I imagine!”

  “And why not, Randolph?” cried the man. The Justice looked him firmly in the face. “You take enough by chance, sir. You and your brother Sheppard held the estate jointly at your father’s death, and now at your brother’s death you hold it as sole heir. You will not wish, also, to hold his adopted daughter.”

  Then he added: “This bill of sale would hold in the courts against any unindentured purpose, not accompanied by an intention expressed in some overt act. It would also fix the status of the girl against any pretended or legendary exemption of birth. The judges might believe that your brother Sheppard was convinced of this pretension when he rescued the child by purchase, and made his informal adoption at a tender age. But they would hold the paper, like a deed, irrevocable, and not to be disturbed by this conjecture.”

  “It will hold,” cried the man, “and I will hold! You make an easy disclaimer of the rights of other men.” Then his face took on the aspect of a satyr’s. “Give her up, eh! to be a lady! Why Randolph, I would have given Sheppard five hundred golden eagles for this little beauty—five hundred golden eagles in his hand! Look at her, Randolph. You are not too old to forget the points—the trim ankle, the slender body, the snap of a thoroughbred. There’s the blood of the French marquis, on my honor! A drop of black won’t curdle it.”

  And he laughed, snapping his fingers at his wit. “It only makes the noble lady merchandise! And perhaps, as you say, perhaps it isn’t there, in fact. Egad! old man, I would have bid a thousand eagles if Sheppard had put her up. A thousand eagles! and I get her for nothing! He falls dead in my house, and I take her by inheritance.”

  It was the living truth. The two men, Vespatian Flornoy and his brother Sheppard, took their father’s estate jointly at his death. They were unmarried, and now at the death of Sheppard, the surviving brother Vespatian was sole heir, under the law, to the dead man’s properties: houses and lands and slaves. The bill of sale put the girl an item in the inventory of the dead man’s estate, to descend with the manor-house and lands.

  The thing had happened, as fortune is predisposed to change, in a moment, as by the turning of dice.

  At daybreak on this morning Vespatian Flornoy had sent a Negro at a gallop, to summon the old country doctor, Storm, Squire Randolph and my Uncle Abner. At midnight, in this chamber where they now sat, Sheppard as he got on his feet, with his candle, fell and died, Vespatian said, before he could reach his body. He lay now shaven and clothed for burial in the great chamber that adjoined.

  Old Storm had stripped the body and found no mark. The man was dead with no scratch or bruise.

  He could not say what vital organ had suddenly played out—perhaps a string of the heart had snapped. At any rate, the dead man had not gone out by any sort of violence, nor by any poison. Every drug or herb that killed left its stamp and superscription, old Storm said, and one could see it, if one had the eye, as one could see the slash of a knife or the bruise of an assassin’s fingers.

  It was plain death “by the Providence of God,” was Randolph’s verdict. So the Justice and old Storm summed up the thing and they represented the inquiry and the requirements of the law.

  My uncle Abner made no comment on this conclusion. He came and looked and was silent. He demurred to the “Providence of God” in Randolph’s verdict, with a great gesture of rejection. He disliked this term in any human horror. “By the abandonment of God,” he said, these verdicts ought rather to be written. But he gave no sign that his objection was of any special tenor. He seemed profoundly puzzled.

  When the girl came in, at Vespatian’s command, to this appraisal, he continued silent. At the man’s speech, and evident intent, his features and his great jaw hardened, as though under the sunburned skin the bony structure of the face were metal.

  He sat in his chair, a little way out beyond the table, as he sat on a Sunday before the pulpit, on a bench, motionless, in some deep concern.

  Randolph and Vespatian Flornoy were in this dialogue. Old Storm sat with his arms folded across his chest, his head down. His interest in the matter had departed with his inspection of the dead man, or remained in the adjoining chamber where the body lay, the eyelids closed forever on the land of living men, shut up tight like the shutters of a window in a house. He only glanced at the girl with no interest, as at a bauble.

  And now while the dialogue went on and Storm looked down his nose, the girl, silent and in terror, appealed to my uncle in a furtive glance, swift, charged with horror, and like a flash of shadow. The great table had a broad board connecting the carved legs beneath, a sort of shelf raised a little from the floor. In her glance, swift and fearful, she directed my uncle’s attention to this board.

  It was a long piece of veneered mahogany, making a shelf down the whole length of the table. On it my uncle saw a big folded cloth of squares white and black, and a set of huge ivory chessmen. The cloth was made to spread across the top of the table, and the chessmen were of unusual size in proportion to the squares; the round knobs on the heads of the pawns’ were as big as marbles. Beside these things was a rosewood box for dueling-pistols, after the fashion of the time.

  My uncle stooped over, took up these articles and set them on the table.

  “And so, Flornoy,” he said, “you played at chess with your brother Sheppard.”

  The man turned swiftly; then he paused and drank his glass of liquor.

  “I entertained my brother,” he said, “as I could; there is no coffeehouse to enter, nor any dancing women to please the eye, in the mountains of Virginia.”

  “For what stake?” said my uncle.

  “I have forgotten, Abner,” replied the man, “—some trifle.”

  “And who won?” said my uncle.

  “I won,” replied the man. He spoke promptly.

  “You won,” said my uncle, “and you remember that; but what you won, you have forgotten! Reflect a little on it, Flornoy.”

  The man cursed, his face in anger.

  “Does it matter, Abner, a thing great or small? It is all mine today!”

  “But it was not all yours last night,” said my uncle.

  “What I won was mine,” replied the man.

  “Now, there,” replied my uncle, “lies a point that I would amplify. One might win, but might not receive the thing one played for. One might claim it for one’s own, and the loser might deny it. If the stake were great, the loser might undertake to repudiate the bargain. And how would one enforce it?”

  The man put down his glass, leaned over and looked steadily at my uncle.

  Abner slipped the silver hooks on the rosewood box, slowly, with his thumb and finger.

  “I think,” he said, “that if the gentleman you have in mind won, and were met with a refusal, he would undertake to enforce his claim, not in the courts or by any legal writ, but by the methods which gentlemen such as you have in mind are accustomed to invoke.”

  He opened
the box and took out two pistols of the time. Then his face clouded with perplexity. Both weapons were clean and loaded.

  The man, propping his wonderful face in the hollow of his hand, laughed. He had the face and the laughter of the angels cast out with Satan, when in a moment of some gain over the hosts of Michael they forgot the pit.

  “Abner,” he cried, “you are hag-ridden by a habit, and it leads you into the wildest fancies!”

  His laughter chuckled and gurgled in his throat.

  “Let me put your theory together. It is a very pretty theory, lacking in some trifles, but spirited and packed with dramatic tension. Let me sketch it out as it stands before your eye … Have no fear, I shall not mar it by any delicate concern for the cunning villain, or any suppression of his evil nature. I shall uncover the base creature amid his deeds of darkness!”

  He paused, and mocked the tragedy of actors.

  “It is the hour of yawning graveyards—midnight in this house. Vespatian Flornoy sits at this table with his good brother Sheppard. He has the covetousness of David the son of Jesse, in his evil heart.

  He would possess the noble daughter of the Latin marquis, by a sardonic fate sold at childhood into slavery, but by the ever watchful Providence of God, for such cases made and provided, purchased by the good brother Sheppard and adopted for his daughter!

  “Mark, Abner, how beautifully it falls into the formula of the tragic poets!

  “The wicked Vespatian Flornoy, foiled in every scheme of purchase, moved by the instigation of the Devil, and with no fear of God before his eyes, plays at chess with his good brother Sheppard, wins his interest in the manor-house and lands, and his last gold-piece—taunts and seduces him into a final game with everything staked against this Iphigenia. The evil one rises invisible but sulphurous to Vespatian’s aid. He wins. In terror, appalled, aghast at the realization of his folly, the good brother Sheppard repudiates the bargain. They duel across the table, and Vespatian, being the better shot, kills his good brother Sheppard!

  “Why, Abner, it is the plan of the ‘Poetics.’ It lacks no element of completeness. It is joined and fitted for the diction of Euripides!”