Uncle Abner, Master of Mysteries (28 page)

“I have found it out,” said my uncle, “and it has happened in so strange a way, and with so curious an intervention, that I cannot save the State from shame.”

“It happened in the simplest way imaginable,” said Randolph. “The fool killed himself.”

It was not an unthinkable conclusion. The whole land was wrought up to the highest tension. Men were beginning to hold their properties and their lives as of little account in this tremendous issue. The country was ready to flare up in a war, and to fire it the life of one man would be nothing. A thousand madmen were ready to make that sacrifice of life. That a fanatic would shoot himself in Virginia with the idea that the slave owners would be charged by the country with his murder and so the war brought on, was not a thing
improbable in that day's extremity of passion. To the madman it would be only the slight sacrifice of his life for the immortal gain of a holy war.

My uncle looked at the Justice with a curious smile.

“I think Mansfield will hardly believe that,” he said.

The old man laughed.

“It is a pretty explanation, Randolph,” he said, “and I commend it to all men, but I do not believe it.”

“Not believe it!” cried the Justice, looking first at my uncle and then at the old man. “Why, Abner, you said the woman spoke the truth!”

“She did speak it,” replied my uncle.

“Damme, man!” cried the Justice. “Why do you beat about? If you believe the woman, why do you gentlemen disbelieve my conclusion on her words?”

“I disbelieve it, Randolph,” replied my uncle, “for the convincing reason that I know who killed him.”

“And I,” cried Mansfield, “disbelieve it for an equally convincing reason—for the most convincing reason in the world, Randolph,”—and his big voice laughed in among the pillars and rafters of his porch—“because I killed him myself!”

Abner sat unmoving, and Randolph like a man past belief. The Justice fumbled with the pistol in his pocket, got it out, and laid it on the flat arm on his chair, but he did not speak. The confession overwhelmed him.

The old man stood up, and the voice in his time-shaken body was Homeric:

“Ho! Ho!” he cried. “And so you thought I would be afraid, Randolph, and dodge about like your little men, shaken and
overcome by fear.” And he huddled in his shawl with a dramatic gesture.

“Fear!” And his laugh burst out again in a high staccato. “Even the devils in Abner's Christian hell lack that! I shot the creature, Randolph! Do you hear the awful words? And do you tremble for me, lest I hang and go to Abner's hell?”

The mock terror in the old man's voice and manner was compelling drama. He indicated the pistol on the chair arm.

“Yes,” he said, “it is mine. Abner should have known it by the Mansfield arms.”

“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!”

“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, alluring 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.