By the Watchman's Clock Read online

  “Didn’t you notice?” Arbuthnot-Howe said in some surprise. “Of course I may be quite wrong, you know,” he added hastily.

  Wally had recovered himself in the merciful shadows of the lindens.

  “I thought I noticed something too,” he said. “I wasn’t sure of it though. Dan says they found him on the shoal. Tide out, fortunately. He must have run on a pile out there.”

  Susan was silent, odd as that was. Colonel Arbuthnot-Howe said “No doubt.” We went on to the house.

  Miss Carter luckily had gone to bed. Luckily, because we should have had to listen to a lecture on the dangers of night bathing, for which I think we all preferred to wait until morning. And no one else was particularly disturbed. After all, it was just one of those things, and the man wasn’t drowned. Mr. Sutton and Dr. Knox were in the library, talking, as they always talked, about the college, its endowment fund, its lacrosse team, its ancient past and its hopes and fears for tomorrow. That’s one nice thing about a college. Its future is always so important, an eternally intriguing problem. My husband and Mr. Sutton’s secretary, a serious young man from Princeton whose life was made a constant torment by Susan, were playing chess on the bridge table in the back drawing room.

  “I suppose some one has called Mac?” Mr. Sutton remarked casually.

  “I suppose so,” I said. “Mac” is Dr. McPherson, our cloud by day and pillar of fire by night.

  I went out into the hall, and just then Thorn came down stairs. Her eyes were like black caverns against the deathly pallor of her face. The uneven remnants of lipstick gave her mouth a curiously twisted look—or perhaps it was twisted.

  “Where’s Uncle?” she said, in a tense effort to control herself.

  “In the library. How’s Mr. Baca?”

  She shrugged her shoulders.

  “He’ll be all right. Dan called Dr. Mac, but he’s out in the country having a baby. Dan got him on the phone, though, and found out what to do. Is Uncle Dan alone?”

  “Dr. Knox is in there. They’re talking about the college.”

  Thorn made a sound that was somewhere between a sob and a laugh.

  “Whether to have a training table or a chemistry laboratory, I suppose.”

  “You’d better go to bed,” I said. “Ben and Matthew are in the middle of something, but as Susan’s in there I imagine they’ll be glad to call it off. Really, Thorn, you must go to bed.”

  She shook her head.

  “Not until I’ve seen Uncle.”

  I knew there wasn’t any use trying to reason with her. I got my wrap and finally my husband and we started home.

  “I hope Mr. Baca doesn’t get pneumonia,” I remarked as we went down the steps. But Ben wasn’t listening. He muttered something about knights, queens, checkmating and Susan. I gathered that if Susan got pneumonia it would be a boon to chess-players and we let it go at that.

  Tim Healy came out of his lodge when we got to the gate. The Suttons keep it closed at night. “Good night to you both,” he said. “It’s a rare foine night but there’s showers ahead. Night to you, sir; good night, Ma’am.”

  Ben was still thinking about his interrupted chess, or maybe about something else. Anyway, he wasn’t talking. He added a perfunctory “Good night” to my cordial one, and we went out into York Road.

  Across the street most of Landover College was asleep. An occasional light in Taney Hall, and the far-off strumming of a banjo were the only evidence that four hundred young men were tucked away behind the leafy screen of tulip poplars, and elms and ivy. Dr. Knox’s house was dark except for the dim fan light over the door. There’s something very moving about a college campus late at night. I felt it now; and I half turned to glance back at the other thing on York Road that always moves me too—Aunt Charlotte’s white-washed cabin, with its ancient fence and the hollyhocks moving rigidly, like thin sentinels, in the luminous blue moonlight.

  Everything was so calm out there. The campus, the trees along York Road, the high brick wall with its overhanging clusters of purple and white lilacs. Tim back in his lodge, lighting his pipe and reading a chapter in the Bible, waiting to close the gate; Aunt Charlotte down the road asleep. Aunt Charlotte remembered the old soldiers who had been quartered down the river when she was a girl. Those old soldiers had fought in the Revolution. Lord! I thought, and Susan doesn’t remember the World War, and thinks Colonel Arbuthnot-Howe is old.

  We were turning in our own gate when I thought I heard something down King Charles Street. Normally, I suppose, one expects to hear sounds on streets; but never in Landover after midnight. At any rate, noises after that time are unusual enough so that I was justifiably curious. I stepped back and glanced down King Charles Street. To my astonishment I recognized, scurrying along close to the Suttons’ wall, the absurd figure of Reverdy Hawkins, the colored lawyer. He stopped under the old-fashioned street lamp—which we still affect in Landover—and glanced back cautiously. I saw him reach in his pocket, bring out something and examine it closely. He put his thumb to his mouth, and began, as nearly as I could see, counting something that he held in his hand. There was no doubt what it was that he was counting. That in itself was surprising, and the hour made it more so. But it was still more surprising because no one ever uses the great barred gate on King Charles Street.

  CHAPTER X

  The grotesque top-hatted figure of Reverdy Hawkins greedily counting his money under the dim lamp in King Charles Street, at one o’clock in the morning, would, ordinarily, have been rather comical. As it was, against the background of the last fifteen hours, it was decidedly sinister. There was something furtive about it. Furthermore, I knew only too well how dangerous the most harmless person can get when he is in the clutches of cupidity. I went to sleep thinking that somebody might as well have given a child a stick of dynamite. And I’m afraid there wasn’t much doubt in my mind who, in this instance, that somebody was.

  I didn’t, of course, mention any of this to my husband. His curiosity is peculiarly limited. He will dig in the sand or crawl through caves on hands and knees for three months on end in the most torrid weather, to find out what kind of hair ornaments middle-class ladies wore during the Third Crô-Magnon Dynasty. In the domestic affairs of his contemporaries, however, he has the most profound absence of interest. Until I learned better I used to burst in on him with some astounding piece of gossip, such as that the wife of the French professor had refused to return the call of the wife of the Mathematics professor—and be received with that polite but so uninterested “Oh?” that Americans learn at Oxford. Gradually I’ve learned to ponder on the ways and affairs of faculty wives in silence, or at least to more sympathetic ears.

  I suppose I was asleep as soon as I put my head on my pillow, and I have a vague memory of dreaming that some one was calling me; and that became so insistent that at last I woke up and lay there listening. I glanced at my clock. The radium hands showed 2:15. I turned over and closed my eyes. Then I sat up. I heard the far-off buzz of the front door bell—it sounds in the kitchen—and heard my name: “Martha!” I think I knew what Thorn Carter wanted before I got into my dressing gown and went down to open the door.

  She was standing there much as she had stood in the hall at home a few hours before. But she seemed paler. Her body swayed a little, as if the effort to stay erect was almost more than she could bear.

  She came in slowly. I had the feeling when she did that she realized how futile it was for one human being ever to come to another with a burden. She probably felt that just getting away from one place to another would change something that ached inside of her. But it’s something I imagine we all have to learn sometime, that we take our heartaches with us. I know I felt horribly helpless just then. I wanted to tell her there was nothing she could do but wait. I suppose heartaches do fade and lose their sharp edges in time—at least people say that.

  We sat down on the living room sofa. I at one end, she at the other.

  “What’s the matter, Thorn?”
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  “Uncle,” she said dully. “I did talk to him. He’s going to change his will, tomorrow.”

  “Did he tell you that?”

  She shook her head.

  “No. He didn’t.”

  She was staring straight ahead, hopeless tears welling up in her eyes, her voice tight and clipped.

  “I heard him tell Dr. Knox that he was getting Mr. Rand down to-morrow. He telephoned for him. He’s coming at noon.”

  “That doesn’t necessarily mean he’s changing his will,” I said. I knew however that it probably did mean just that.

  She took a long deep breath and closed her eyes.

  “Yes. They’d been talking about it. I know they had, because they want him down for a college Board meeting next week and they were trying to save him a trip. Uncle let Dr. Knox out and said ‘You’ll be over to lunch.’ ”

  “That doesn’t seem to concern you.”

  “It does though. I met Uncle Dan coming back. Susan had gone upstairs. He was out quite a little while, talking to Tim, I guess, and he came in smiling. I’d rather die than see him smile. It was awful, awful.”

  Her voice was intense with tears. She pulled painfully at the sodden little handkerchief in her hands.

  “Thorn!” I said. “For God’s sake pull yourself together!”

  “Oh, it was terrible! He didn’t see me at first, and when he did he just sort of laughed. I said ‘Uncle Dan, listen to me, I’ve got to marry Franklin—I don’t care whether you change your will or not.’ ”

  I stared at the girl. She was almost beside herself. I thought it was best to let her talk it out.

  “He laughed. He said ‘I’ll change my will a plenty and don’t you forget it. Marry him if you please. Do any damn fool thing you want to: only don’t cry to me about it.’ Then he walked into the library and slammed the door. I couldn’t bear it, Martha! I sat down on the steps and cried. He didn’t come out. After a while I went up stairs.”

  She was talking by now in jerky little gasps, now and then punctuating by pounding the cushions with a tightly closed fist.

  “I lay down on my bed and tried to tell myself how stupid I was—that it didn’t matter, that Franklin doesn’t care or he’d call me up or something, that I’d got to snap out of it. I went to sleep. Then I woke up, I’d thought I heard something.”

  “Where?”

  “Down stairs. I got up and went out and looked over the bannister.”

  “Did you see anything?”

  “No, it was pitch dark. But I did hear something more. First I thought it was in the library. Maybe it was Uncle Dan, but there wasn’t any light anywhere.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I just listened. I wasn’t frightened, then. I guess I was too tired to be frightened.”

  She sounded like a little girl wistfully apologizing for something quite sweet that she’d done.

  “I stayed there a long time. Then I thought I’d wake one of the boys. Wally’s room was nearest, so I tipped over to the door and opened it as quietly as I could. It was very dark and I didn’t want to turn on the light, so I went over to his bed and touched his shoulder—but he wasn’t there. I felt the bed—it was turned down of course, but it was all smooth, nor body had slept in it.”

  “What did you do then?”

  “Then I got frightened. You know what Wally’s like. I went back and put on these tennis slippers and this coat and tip-toed down stairs. I couldn’t see anybody but I knew somebody was there—and it didn’t feel like anybody I knew.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean . . . you know . . . how you sense people you know even in the dark. I suppose it’s a sort of instinct—isn’t it?—or smell, or characteristic sound. You know what I mean. Anyway, I felt somebody was there and I didn’t know him. I mean it wasn’t Wally or . . . Uncle Dan.”

  “Didn’t you turn on the lights?”

  She shook her head slowly and caught her under lip between her teeth with a sharp intake of breath.

  “I was afraid,” she said quietly. “I knew that whoever it was was by the light switch. And . . . well, I didn’t want him to touch me . . . that’s all.”

  I looked at her intently. I was wide awake by this time, and I kept listening to Thorn’s story—although of course at that time I had no idea of the importance it took on in view of what was happening—in fact had already happened—with peculiar intensity. And somehow, without my being able either then or now to say why it was, I felt absolutely certain that Thorn Carter was deliberately lying to me. I looked away quickly. Then it occurred to me that perhaps she was lying to herself too.

  “What did you do then, Thorn?” I asked in as matter-of-fact a voice as I could.

  “When I got to the bottom of the stairs I thought I’d go to the back drawing room and go out through a window and get Tim. I got as far as the door and I saw that the garden door was open. I ran outside. Then I heard someone coming. I guess I lost my head then; I ran around the kitchen and down the road to the King Charles Street gate and over here.”

  By this time Thorn as well as myself was curiously calm about all this business. Our eyes met; I think we understood each other. I hesitated a moment before asking my next question. Then I decided it would be just as well to get it over with.

  “Thorn,” I said, “how did you get out of the King Charles gate? Wasn’t it locked?”

  She looked at me blankly for a second, perfectly silent and apparently bewildered. I saw her bite her lower lip again. It was a mannerism that both she and Dan had when puzzled or annoyed.

  “I hadn’t thought of that, Martha.”

  “Did you know it was open? It’s always locked, isn’t it?”

  She nodded slowly.

  “Yes. It’s always locked. I wonder what I was thinking of.”

  She stared straight ahead of her. Then she said abruptly, “I’m going back, Martha. You’ve got to come with me.”

  I looked at her, trying to fathom what lay behind her sudden determination to go back, and what lay behind her change from hysterical child to self-controlled woman. I got a coat out of the hall closet and slipped it on. One of the children’s flashlights was on the floor by his small rubbers, and I put it in my pocket. I switched out the lights and we went out.

  “Let’s go back through the King Charles gate,” I whispered when we came to the corner. I bought she hesitated an instant. Perhaps I imagined it. Anyway, we went swiftly down the street, passing under the dim lamp where I’d seen Reverdy Hawkins counting his bills an hour or so before. We stopped at the great iron grill. I pushed it. It didn’t open. I looked at Thorn. She gave it a harder push. Still it didn’t budge. I took the flashlight from my pocket and turned it on the huge lock.

  Thorn and I stared at each other in the darkness. The King Charles gate was bolted and locked, just as it always is.

  CHAPTER XI

  “But it was open a minute ago,” Thorn whispered, gripping my arm convulsively.

  “It isn’t now.”

  “But Martha, who could have done it?”

  I shrugged my shoulders. I was skeptical of the whole business. Convinced as I was that Thorn hadn’t been telling the truth—at least not the whole truth—a few moments before, it didn’t take much to make me doubt anything she said. Especially anything as preposterous as this. Still there was genuine alarm in her voice and in those tight fingers on my arm.

  “We’ll go around the other way,” I said, “and wake up Tim—if he’s not already awake.”

  She nodded. We turned back along King Charles Street in the shadow of the long brick wall. As we passed again under the lamp post where Reverdy had stood I noticed suddenly a piece of paper lying on the brick walk. I reached down in the dim yellow light and picked it up.

  “What’s that?” Thorn asked quickly.

  “It looks like a piece of paper.”

  I stuffed it in my coat pocket, wondering if by chance Reverdy had dropped it when he brought his roll of bills ou
t to count them under the light.

  It occurred to me then that someone in Seaton Hall might have left the gate unlocked so that Reverdy could leave the grounds. Supposing that whoever it was wanted to avoid any possible chance of being seen with the Negro lawyer, he—or she—might conceivably have left the gate unlocked, then when everybody was in bed, come down and locked it. That would explain the time from one o’clock when I heard the click of the gate and saw Reverdy under the lamp, until Thorn came that way at 2:15.

  “Thorn,” I said as we turned down York Road towards the main gate, “did you hear anyone near the gate when you came through?”

  “No,” she said slowly, “and yes.”

  She hesitated a second before she explained. “I was running along the road. I thought I heard someone after me. But I thought it was just my imagination. The faster I ran the more frightened I was. It may have been someone. I wasn’t sure.”

  I thought that was reasonable enough. Isn’t there—wasn’t there when I was in college—a theory in psychology that you are afraid because you run, and not that you run because you are afraid? That would explain Thorn’s fogginess about it. There was only one thing it didn’t explain. I wondered vaguely about it for a second as we went along; then suddenly it came quite clearly to me.

  “Are you sure you came through that gate?” I asked abruptly.

  It was quite dark now. When I looked at her I couldn’t make out anything clearly, except the white blur of her face and neck. She didn’t answer at once. Then she said in a calm unruffled voice, “Yes, Martha. I’m sure. Why? Don’t you believe me?”