By the Watchman's Clock Read online

  I waited for her to speak, watching the sun play on her bent dispirited head, bringing out auburn and gold lights in her wavy chestnut hair. I was a little surprised when I saw a tear fall and make a bright wet spot on her brown arm.

  Thorn Carter is about twenty-four, and ordinarily irresistibly alive and gay. In the eight years I’d known her I’d never seen her more than momentarily low. She’s not pretty, except that she has beautiful hair, lovely dark brown eyes, and skin rather like the luminous texture of a very fresh egg—not a white one but a delicate ivory-colored one. Thorn Carter isn’t pretty, but sometimes she’s beautiful. And sometimes she looks pretty much like something that’s been out in the rain all night. Her face is intelligent and so are her eyes. She’s quite different from Susan Atwood, who’s her Aunt’s ward and lives at Seaton Hall too.

  “It’s about Franklin,” she said, brushing the tears out of her eyes with the back of her hand, very much as a child would do. She looked nearer seventeen then than twenty-four.

  “What’s he done?” I asked patiently.

  Franklin is Dr. Knox’s son and a rising young Baltimore lawyer. The Suttons and the Knoxes are very close friends, and have been ever since they came in the same year to Landover.

  “He hasn’t done anything except ask me to marry him, and Uncle seems to think it’s a crime. But that’s not what’s the matter with him—that’s what’s the matter with me.”

  She looked up with a sudden smile, her old spirit breaking through for a moment.

  I’m afraid I’m not patriarchial enough to be terribly impressed by parents, uncles and guardians.

  “I don’t see what objections your uncle has in the first place,” I said a little shortly. “And second, both you and Franklin are old enough to know your own minds.”

  “Precisely what Uncle Dan says.”

  She lighted a cigarette and tossed the matches to me.

  “Well?” It was my turn to shrug.

  “Exactly.”

  Thorn stared wretchedly at the cascade of pink and white magnolia blossoms just outside the window. “Don’t let me stand in your way, my dear,” she recited, “if you want to be a fool like your mother. Go right ahead, marry a penniless lawyer when young Fairweather has money enough to provide for you. Go right ahead. But don’t count on me for anything. I think I’d better make that clear to Franklin. It wouldn’t be fair to let him in for anything.”

  She gave a perfect imitation of Daniel Sutton’s unpleasant sharp precise clipped speech.

  “Well, why not?” I asked. “You haven’t any doubt about what Franklin would say. I’m not sure it mightn’t do your uncle a lot of good to hear it.”

  Her head was lying back against the cushions in the corner of the sofa. She moved it dejectedly from side to side in weary dissent.

  “It’s not that,” she said. “But I won’t have him humiliated. It was hard enough for him to ask me, just for that reason—and I won’t have it, Martha, I won’t have it.”

  “That’s up to you.”

  “Oh but you don’t know what he’s like. Uncle Dan I mean. It’s all very well to talk, but you don’t have to live here with him. You’ve no notion how horrible he can be without ever raising his voice. He’s always decent to you. He says you’re the only woman in Landover who’s got a lick of sense. But you ought to see what he’s like to everybody else. You don’t know him, Martha.”

  I didn’t tell her that I’d heard enough about Daniel Sutton from people who did know him. I don’t think Thorn herself knew how everybody in town and everybody at the college, for that matter, loathed him. He’d always been charming to me, and I must say I liked him immensely, with reservations, probably for just that reason. However, there was no use talking with Thorn about it.

  “If that’s the matter with you, what’s the matter with Mr. Sutton?” I inquired peaceably.

  She groaned wearily and punched a cushion violently into shape and out again.

  “Oh Lord!” she said. “It’s Aunt Charlotte again.”

  “Again?”

  She nodded.

  “Same old thing. He couldn’t get her out ten years ago for two hundred dollars, and he can’t get her out for ten thousand dollars now. But that’s not it—not quite.”

  Anyone who’s lived in Landover knows the story of Daniel Sutton, multimillionaire, and Charlotte Hawkins, Landover’s only living slave. It’s a fine example of the gnat and the elephant, although physically Aunt Charlotte is much nearer being the elephant. Long before the Seatons began to go down in the world Aunt Charlotte was Miss Abigail Seaton’s colored mammy. Miss Abigail’s mother died of galloping consumption after returning from a ball at the Mayhews at London Town one Christmas Eve. Miss Abigail was two years old and Aunt Charlotte was fifteen or so. That was in 1845, when the Seatons still owned most of the county and were people of importance in the state. After the Civil War the Seaton fortunes declined, but when Anthony Seaton died in 1870 he was able to leave the house and grounds to his daughter Abigail and the tobacco plantation to his son. Abigail also died of quick consumption four years later, and left house and grounds to her brother’s eldest son, with the exception of a small plot thirty feet long and seventy feet deep on the corner of York Road and Duke of Gloucester Street, where Aunt Charlotte’s cabin stood. That she left to Aunt Charlotte and her heirs forever, and there Aunt Charlotte still lived, earning her living by running a small cook shop. Her devilled crabs were famous; many a white person in Maryland wouldn’t think of coming to Landover without stopping for them, or oysters and ham, at Aunt Charlotte’s whitewashed cottage on York Road. Consequently Aunt Charlotte had done better, comparatively, than the Seatons. She paid her taxes while theirs were in arrears, and when they sold their house and land, and everyone else between King Charles Street and the river sold his to Daniel Sutton, Aunt Charlotte refused flatly to sell hers. It was the only inch of all that land that wasn’t mortaged up to the hilt. Aunt Charlotte kept her land and her cabin in which Miss Abigail’s picture, a lock of her, and a copy of her will in the wiry handwriting of fifty years ago were framed together and hung over the dresser in the parlor. Aunt Charlotte also had money in the bank and was a respected charter member of a flourishing Burying Society. In all she was as prosperous as anyone in Landover—more so than most, because her needs and her wants coincided and her income was ample for both.

  Mr. Sutton had offered her two hundred dollars for her cabin in 1921. In 1922 he offered three hundred. He was not particularly perturbed in those years, because Aunt Charlotte was sick most of the winter of 1922. She was then ninety-one years old and it was obvious to Mr. Sutton that she could hardly last out the winter. He closed up Duke of Gloucester Street, built his wall to each boundary of Aunt Charlotte’s thirty feet and left the intervening space confidently to time. Aunt Charlotte’s heir was a worthless old Negro of sixty-some years who would sell the land for anything. “Anything that’s strong enough,” Bill Sutton said one day when we were talking about it.

  Or so the Suttons, being Northerners, thought.

  But Aunt Charlotte didn’t die. She flourished. As she flourished something seemed to dry up in Daniel Sutton. It became a question if Aunt Charlotte wasn’t the better man, and if she wouldn’t in fact outlast the whole Sutton tribe.

  “Do you know, Martha,” said Thorn abruptly, “I don’t know just what’s happened to Uncle Dan. About Aunt Charlotte, I mean.”

  “How?”

  “Well, all things being equal there’s no reason why she shouldn’t stay in the cabin. Heaven knows she doesn’t hurt anybody. She’s picturesque and when we’ve got people to entertain she’s a godsend with her rabbit’s foot and love-potions and sticks for chasing devils. And Uncle likes her too. But she won’t sell. She owns that spot of ground and Uncle can’t get it. I swear, Martha, it’s killing him.”

  “Perfect rot, Thorn,” I said. “You’re as bad as Lillie. Last Friday when it was thundering and raining and we had all that lightning, she insis
ted Aunt Charlotte had conjured Mr. Sutton and he was goin’ to die hisself right in his tracks.”

  Thorn brushed her hair violently away from her forehead.

  “I almost believe it, Martha.”

  Her distress was so genuine that I was a little alarmed.

  “Don’t be an idiot,” I protested. “Ask Professor Sykes what’s wrong. He’ll tell you your uncle’s got a complex, or a fixation or something. He’s set his heart on having the whole piece of land and he won’t be happy until he gets it No one’s ever stood out against him in all his life, at least for long, and here’s the old colored woman who was a slave almost forty years, who can neither read nor write, but who simply won’t sell her land. It’s very simple. It’s sort of a frustration business. I don’t know exactly what it is but it seems it’s what people get when they can’t have what they want and there’s nobody to spank them soundly and send them to bed.”

  “Call it what you please,” Thorn replied wearily. “I agree with Lillie. Aunt Charlotte’s conjured him and he’s goin’ to die. What’s it matter how she’s done it? All conjuring demands a psychological victim. Uncle Dan’s a perfect one.”

  She was deadly serious, lying there with eyes closed, traces of tears for Franklin Knox still on her smooth pale ivory cheeks. I got up uncomfortably and moved to the window. I was thinking of Lillie’s old black face and her skinny bony hands pointing through our kitchen window to the lightning over Seaton Hall: “Aunt Charlotte’s conjured him. He’ll die hisself in his tracks some night.”

  I hardly noticed the banks of white and pink magnolia blossoms until one large petal fell from a bloom and fluttered down against the black-green ground of the box hedge. Involuntarily my eye followed it until it came to rest in a yellow-gloved hand stretched out to catch it. I looked at the hand and then at the man standing in the drive, looking up at the magnolia tree. It was my friend in grey flannels whom I’d left sitting on my garden wall. He saw me, and raised his hat and bowed. I heard Lafayette open the great mahogany door to admit him.

  As I turned back to Thorn I had a distinct feeling of impending diaster.

  CHAPTER III

  Ordinarily when I have alarming forebodings about anything I go out to the club and play nine holes of golf. Surely nothing can ever be as bad as the average woman who hasn’t any hard physical work to do can make it by spending a couple of solitary hours thinking about it.

  As a matter of fact if Thorn, who’s normally so irresistibly level-headed and gaily matter-of-fact, hadn’t been so upset about her uncle, I think the presence of a handsome dark-skinned young man in the court below would never have occurred to me as the least bit strange. What was more natural, when you got down to it, than that the man, having asked if this was the Sutton place, should turn up at it a little later? And that he should choose to pause a moment and catch a drifting magnolia petal in his yellow-gloved hand was hardly sinister.

  Nevertheless when I went back across the room and sat down at the end of the sofa, I was distinctly uneasy. Thorn was occupied in repairing the damage her tears had done and in pushing her curly hair into more formal waves with slim dexterous fingers. For myself I felt exactly as I do when I’ve been driving on a glaring sunny day wearing dark glasses. I gradually forget that it’s really brilliantly clear with the sky blue, and find myself driving faster and faster to escape the terrifying brazen sulphur sky and ominously darkened fields.

  I don’t know whether it’s odd or not that my foreboding was so completely justified.

  Of course I’d known the rumor in the town that Mr. Sutton had become unreasonably concerned with the business of Aunt Charlotte’s land. Only the night before Dr. Knox had said it was preying on the old gentleman’s mind. Miss Alice Marks, a decayed gentlewoman of the old school, had remarked when we met that morning in the local Piggly Wiggly over the basket of fresh lima beans that it seemed curious to her that having so much as Mr. Daniel Sutton had he should be so determined to get Aunt Charlotte’s plot She knew nothing about it, of course, except what she’d heard from one of her guests (Miss Marks ran a genteel boardinghouse), but it seemed most strange that a man of so much prominence should be so small. Her butler had told her that Mr. Sutton had offered twenty-five thousand for the land. It seemed a great deal for thirty feet of land, didn’t I think so?

  I quite truthfully said I did think so—knowing the care with which Mr. Sutton usually spent money. I still underestimated Daniel Sutton’s passion not to be thwarted.

  Archie McNab, the superintendent of the college buildings and grounds, said it sure made him laugh the way the old boy was hipped on getting the old lady’s dump and he didn’t mean maybe. It was his opinion that the old bird was as crazy as a bed-bug.

  I think that is a fair cross-section of local white opinion. Colored opinion was fairly expressed by my Lillie: “That ol’ devil goin’ get Aunt Charlotte’s place if he busts hisself.”

  That was apparently the conclusion his family had come to. The manner of his busting hisself seemed the only thing left to decide.

  As I’ve known the Suttons intimately since they’ve been in Landover, I’ve never felt the necessity of telling them the continuous gossip about them that goes the rounds. They hear enough of it without the help of their friends.

  Thorn went back abruptly after a long silence. “I won’t marry Franklin, Martha, if Uncle Dan cuts me out of his will. I told Franklin so last night.”

  I looked at her, rather surprised at the finality in her voice. She was sitting with chin cupped in her hands, her elbows on her knees, her jaw set tightly. I had less doubt than ever that she was a Sutton.

  “If money’s that important, my dear,” I began, a little sententiously, I’m afraid, “I think you’re very wise.”

  “It isn’t that. Although you know how beastly important it is as well as I do,” she went on warmly. “Two people can’t possibly be happy or get anything out of life, or give anything to each other, without it. And you know it.”

  I saw myself forced into the very unwelcome role of defending small incomes.

  “That’s true up to a point,” I said. “But it doesn’t mean that you have to have a million dollars for you and Franklin to get on. After all, he makes a fairly decent income, doesn’t he? It’s certainly above the average; and eventually he’ll do very well. What did he say when you told him what you’d decided?”

  She flushed painfully.

  “He said maybe I was right, and that it wasn’t fair for him to ask me to marry him because he’d never have the money Uncle has. Said he never wanted it. That if I thought it was important, and couldn’t get used to living on a simpler scale he’d release me.”

  She stared straight ahead of her. The corners of her mouth quivered dangerously.

  “Oh,” I said callously. “What did you say?”

  “I said that if that was all he cared about me, it was just as well I knew it too. Then I came inside. I haven’t seen him since.”

  “Are you surprised?” I asked. “After all, Thorn, it isn’t quite as if he were a grocery clerk at seven dollars a week. It’s no particular virtue of yours that you’re Daniel Sutton’s niece. You couldn’t help it. On the other hand Franklin is what he is and what he’s going to be entirely by his own intelligence and jolly hard work.”

  “I know that.”

  “But don’t you see the position you put him in? He can’t say money doesn’t matter. All he can do is one of two things. He can go back to Baltimore and work like poison to make enough money to marry you. That takes time and he can’t be sure you’ll not up and marry young Fairweather, since it’s money you’ve got to have. Or he can tell you to go to blazes, you’re not worth what he’s got to offer you.”

  She didn’t move a muscle. She sat with her chin still in her cupped hands, staring sullenly in front of her. Her face was a mixture of shadowy moving passions that I’d never thought of her as having. The grim tight mouth, the set jaw and flat smoldering eyes were new phases of Thorn
Carter to me.

  She got up suddenly and began to pace the room.

  “There’s no use saying I don’t care, Martha,” she said huskily after a little. “I do care. I’ll marry Franklin, if he’ll have me after last night. He’ll probably think I’m just a mercenary pig. But it’s not fair of Uncle Dan and I’ll get even with him. You’ll see.”

  Her voice rose passionately. Just then there was a tap at the door. Thorn stopped quickly.

  “Come in,” she said. “Oh hello, Dan.”

  Thorn’s two cousins, Mr. Sutton’s sons, came in. Dan sank down on the sofa beside me.

  “Hello, Martha,” he said. “Cigarettes somewhere, Thorn? Anything’ll do. Thanks.”

  Bill Sutton stopped wandering around the room. He’s two years younger than Dan and rather quicker.

  “What’s the matter with you, Thorn?” he said.

  “Nothing.”

  “That’s the trouble with most of us,” Bill said philosophically. “What’s the matter with you, Martha? How’s the good old endowment fund?”

  “Rotten, thanks,” I said.

  “Heard the latest, Thorn, about the station?”

  “No. Something new?”

  “Somebody’s trying to stick the old man for twenty-five thousand.”

  “I heard that. Who is it, do you know?”

  “Nope. A lawyer called up this morning. I guess we’ll know by night.”

  “Why the devil he doesn’t let them have the place and be blowed I can’t see,” Dan remarked. “Is this an ashtray?”

  Thorn rescued a bit of old Venetian glass.

  “No. Here, use this.”

  Dan looked sorrowfully at the half-pint pewter mug handed to him.

  “Women,” he said, “have no feeling for these things. This is for beer. Not ashes.”

  “I don’t see,” said Thorn, “why anybody would want a service station there.”