by Zenith Brown
“It’s all bluff, if you ask me,” Bill said, filling his pipe. “Somebody’s got hold of it, and he’s going to make Dad pay through the nose. Everybody knows he’s crazy about it.”
We were interrupted by the precipitate entrance of Susan Atwood, Miss Mildred Carter’s nineteen-year-old ward. Susan always entered precipitately.
“Hello everybody.” She pitched a floppy tan straw hat to the other side of the room and collapsed in a deep chair.
“My dears! There’s the most ravaging creature down stairs you’ve ever seen! Thorn, he’s marvellous! He uses too much lipstick though, they’re sort of sticky red.”
“Susan, how awfull”
“Not at all! Au contraire! He’s marvellous, he’s wonderful! And what’s he doing here? No one asks? I’ll tell you anyway. He was asking Matthew if he could see Uncle Dan. I was coming out of the library.”
“Susan!” said Dan with concern. “You weren’t reading a book?”
“No; I’d left my racket there. And Miss Atwood said to the charming stranger, ‘If you’re not in a hurry you’d better come back Friday, Uncle is not in a receptive mood.’ ”
Thorn stared at her.
“Wait till Matthew tells Uncle Dan that.”
“Not necessary, my pet. At precisely that moment Uncle Dan appears at the front door. I sha’n’t lie to you, I wasn’t very happy. But I said, pleasantly and with great calm, ‘Uncle Dan, I’ve just told this gentleman who’s just arrived from Spain that you will be delighted to buy whatever he’s got.’ With that I left.”
“What did Uncle Dan say?”
“My dear, I said I left. I closed my eyes and my ears and I went. And as I came up the stairs I could feel the fiery breath on the back of my neck.”
Bill smiled patiently.
“What is the distinguished foreign gentleman doing, by the way?”
“He’s staying to lunch, for one thing. I listened from the landing.”
“You’d better stay too, then, Martha,” Thorn said dryly. “If you don’t there’ll be a murder. Millionaire slays impulsive nineteen-year-old.”
“Surely, Martha. If only to see what the beautiful man sold Uncle Dan.”
I shook my head.
“I’ve got to get home.”
“That’s silly,” Susan answered calmly. “Anyway, you can’t. I just met Mrs. Hopper and Mrs. Joyce coming out of your place seven minutes ago, and I told them you were going to be here for lunch and play golf with me in the afternoon. So that’s settled. Oh, and I met Miss Eliza Baker too, this morning, and she stopped me and said she was so sorry to hear that Aunt Charlotte had sold her land to some oil company for a service station.”
Here Susan made a long and doleful face so exactly like Miss Eliza’s that even Bill had to smile.
“What did you say?”
“I didn’t say a thing.”
“I’ll bet,” said Dan.
“Or not much. I just said Yes, it was such a lousy place the way it is, and Uncle Dan thought a nice scarlet station would be a convenient landmark for Bill when he gets home in his usual condition at three in the morning.”
“Oh shut Up,” Bill said.
I wish I had been clairvoyant that morning. Maybe I could have recognized then that there were already well in motion the three currents of event, one of which—so everyone thought later—was leading us swiftly and inevitably to the murder of Daniel Sutton. There was the situation of Thorn Carter and Franklin Knox; there was the rising complication of Aunt Charlotte’s thirty feet of land; and there were the strange happenings connected with the brilliant-eyed, faultlessly dressed stranger.
CHAPTER IV
I stayed to lunch. Looking back on the events of these few days beginning with the arrival of the stranger, they seem to me almost like a play in which I was a spectator who’d got mixed up, in some way, with the actors on the stage. My talk with Thorn was a prologue. This lunch was an opening scene that moved slowly, putting everything in its place so that the rest of the incredible business must inevitably follow. And I think I must have got in everybody’s way very much, as a spectator would who left his seat and started wandering about on the stage, talking to Hamlet, say, so that he hadn’t time to see his father’s ghost, or pick up poor Yorick’s skull as the grave-digger tossed it up.
For some reason Daniel Sutton came to the table in—for him—a fairly genial mood. He was one of those men whose family and servants wait for his arrival with a vague anticipatory dread, never knowing quite what to expect by way of atmosphere. Sometimes Mr. Sutton was, as Thorn always put it, on a rampage. Sometimes he was sunk in an ominous sullen silence; at others, such as to-day, he was moderately genial.
Mr. Sutton was never, except to a very few people, of whom I was one and Dr. Knox another, what you might call gracious or even pleasant. He was indomitably stubborn and selfish. His high voice had an unpleasant sneering quality; so did his thin smooth-shaven upper lip. Pale grey eyes glinted at you myopically through thick rimless lenses under a pair of beetling black brows. He had a habit of running his fat hands through his dry sparse grey hair so that it crackled brittlely. He smoked cigars, continuously and savagely, but he seldom drank, and then only a little light wine from his pre-Volstead cellar in New York. His two sons, Thorn Carter his niece, and Wally Fenton, a nephew, were without a doubt afraid of him. At least they avoided being around him when they could, or ever taking issue with him. There’s no doubt they had considerable respect for his achievements in the industrial world, and even a sort of timid affection for him. Susan Atwood, I think—except of course Miss Mildred Carter, his dead wife’s sister—was the only person in the house, servants included, who didn’t leave when he appeared if possible. Susan was herself on all occasions. Neither Mr. Sutton nor anyone else had been known to dampen her in the least.
When we came down Mr. Sutton presented Sebastien Baca.
Mr. Baca was, it turned out, a Mexican, apparently of considerable wealth, whose ancestors, we were told, had stood on the cliffs with Balboa when he first sighted the waters of the Pacific.
Susan was entranced. Bill asserted in a whisper his belief that she had only a vague idea what the waters of the Pacific were, and was undoubtedly confusing Balboa and Columbus. I thought Susan could certainly hear these comments, but if so they had no effect on the quality of her admiring attention.
“I’ve got to hand it to him,” Bill said in an undertone. “He’s the only person she’s ever listened to ten seconds without breaking in to ask what time it is, or if it rained last night.”
Sebastien Baca was interesting. He told us about the life on the great ranchos of Mexico and New Mexico. He spoke careful, beautiful English, and was considerably more cultivated than the two Suttons or their cousin Wally Fenton, who was there.
“It’s a beautiful country,” he said, smiling first at Miss Carter, Daniel Sutton’s sister-in-law, and then at Susan. “My people once owned the great ranch that you now own, Mr. Sutton. El Rancho del Ojo del Espiritu Santo. The Ranch of the Spring of the Holy Ghost.”
“What a gorgeous name! Uncle Dan, do you really own a ranch named that?”
“The Spaniards were a poetic people, and a religious people,” remarked the Mexican, smiling again at her enthusiasm. “And the country is so beautiful one is never surprised. The sun rising behind the Sierras, the rosy dawn in the mountains, and in the evening the amethyst shadows deepening in the valleys to the bluest ultramarine—it is so lovely! At night the stars are like golden bees on a velvet ground. The mountains, the desert.” He shrugged his shoulders as if deprecating his own enthusiasm. “They are sublime!”
He went on to tell us about his own people, and the library in the mission monastery built by their padres. He told us about the Spanish treasure supposed to be buried in the hills, in caves whose mouths had long ago been concealed by quick-growing mesquite. One story that I liked particularly he told us about an ancestor of his with Balboa who had wearied of carrying his share of the
treasure taken from a native settlement. He offered it to a friend, who refused it. Then he threw it—thousands of dollars in pearls and beaten gold—over his shoulder. There it still lies, somewhere in the sand. His grandfather had told him the story.
“I met your grandfather once,” said Daniel Sutton.
“My grandfather was bitterly opposed to selling the ranch,” returned Sebastien Baca simply. “So was my father, who was a young man then. But younger brothers have no importance in my family.”
He shrugged his elegant shoulders with good-humored resignation, and smiled engagingly at Miss Carter.
By this time he had completely captivated her. His undeniable charm, his quick changes of mood, from a deprecatory regret at the passing of the old patriarchal order to a warm enthusiasm about his country, and from cultivated suaveness to an almost child-like naïveté, were delightful. At first Bill and Dan exchanged mildly derisive glances, especially over Susan’s wide-eyed and very flattering eagerness. They gave it up in a few minutes, and listened to Mr. Baca with quite evident interest.
Wallace Fenton was the only person at the table who had an air of completely uninterested boredom. To look at him sitting across the table next to Susan one got the impression that if that person didn’t stop talking he for one would find it utterly impossible to take food. None of us like Wally very much, I’m afraid. He’s Mr. Sutton’s nephew and spends as much time at Seaton Hall as he can manage. I don’t suppose his cousins are actually rude to him, but there’s certainly none of that fine camaraderie that exists between the four of them.
“What’s the matter with the golden-haired boy?” whispered Bill sotto voce to me as his cousin stifled a yawn and lighted a cigarette.
“Doesn’t like Mexico,” I replied.
Wally’s hair is as black, and almost as shinily lacquered in appearance, as that of the Mexican now at the end of the table. His eyes are dark, although he is usually referred to as the blue-eyed boy. If such designations bother him at all no one has ever noticed it. In fact when at Seaton Hall he practically ignores everybody except his uncle and Susan.
Bill grinned.
“He’s probably returning thanks that he didn’t take the Holy Ghost ranch when Dad offered it to him last year. Picture him going in for the purple sunsets and the lone coyote?”
His cousin heard him and twisted his lips into a bored and not unfriendly half-smile that managed to tilt his tiny, perfect black mustache to a very devilish angle. He raised his brows and slowly blew a thin wand of smoke towards the ceiling.
Daniel Sutton, who pretends to a certain convenient deafness but always manages to hear anything said in a whisper, glanced sharply at Bill and then at his nephew. I think he was going to make some remark when Lafayette entered the dining room with a telegram on his little silver tray.
“It’s fo’ Mistah Wally, ma’am,” the old darkey said.
“May I, Aunt Mildred?”
He tore open the yellow envelope. Although I’d hesitate to say that any of us were staring at him, I don’t think any of us missed the slight contraction of his dark features, or the tiny smile of satisfaction that followed. At any rate I didn’t.
“It’s from Arbuthnot-Howe, Aunt. You remember, Uncle Dan, he was in New York last winter and I brought him around?”
“Is he the Englishman? Hasn’t he got a title or something?” Susan asked hopefully.
“He will have when his uncle, brother and two nephews die,” Wally replied. “He’s too old for you anyway, Sue. Furthermore, he got shot up in the war and has a game leg.”
“Oh,” said Susan.
I can’t ever remember that these youngsters of Susan’s age were almost infants in arms in 1914 to 1918. The thought always comes as a new shock to me.
“He’s in Washington, Aunt Mildred. Could we have him over for the week-end?”
“Surely,” Miss Carter smiled. “And Mr. Baca is staying too—aren’t you?”
I think everybody had forgotten Mr. Baca. That is, everybody but me. Of course I wasn’t as much interested in Arbuthnot-Howe as they were, and I was interested in Mr. Baca. When Wally mentioned the name of his British friend I had been looking at the portrait of Thorn Carter’s grandfather over the mantel just above his head. My glance in getting back to the table quite accidentally dropped to Mr. Baca on its way, and there it rested for a second just as Wally said “Arbuthnot-Howe.” I don’t know exactly what the emotion in Baca’s face was, it was so instantaneously gone; but I do know this: Sebastien Baca was perfectly familiar with that name. What’s more, it meant a lot to him. I didn’t of course know in what way, but I knew that Sebastien Baca would have preferred not to see Mr. Arbuthnot-Howe.
And just at that moment he said, “I shall be delighted, madam. It’s so kind of you.” He bowed and offered his arm to Miss Carter as we left the dining room.
“I’ll drive over, I guess, and pick him up,” Wally said. “Want to go, Sue?”
“Not if he’s got a game leg, I don’t,” Susan returned callously.
“Okay,” said Wally.
CHAPTER V
After lunch we all went out on the wide verandah that Mr. Sutton built across the back of the house, looking down the long green vista of formal tree-lined garden into the grey-blue haze of Seaton River. Mr. Sutton sat down by me and cocked an angry pale grey eye at me.
“Heard the latest?” he demanded with a sardonic chuckle.
“No. What?” I replied.
“They’re buying that old woman’s property for a service station.”
“Well, that’s simple,” I said. “All you have to do is get an injunction against it. I was afraid when I heard somebody was buying it—I had heard about that—they’d really be offensive.”
He snorted violently, bit his strong yellow teeth into a cigar and spat the end out with more feeling than I like to see.
“Damn scoundrels,” he muttered savagely.
“Who’s behind it?” I asked tentatively, holding a match for him.
He puffed silently a moment His face developed a curiously mottled look that was positively alarming.
“I don’t know who’s behind it, Martha,” he said. “But I’m going to find out. When I do somebody’s going to sweat . . . plenty.”
He breathed heavily and his thick nostrils quivered. I began to understand Thorn’s distress. He certainly wasn’t normal on the subject.
“Do you know Reverdy Hawkins?” he demanded suddenly. “You seem to enjoy a wide acquaintance in the town.”
People usually regard his expression when he makes jokes of that sort as a sneer, but I don’t think he meant it as such.
“Yes,” I said. “He’s a lawyer. Aunt Charlotte’s nephew. I used to have a cook with an epileptic son. Reverdy got him out of jail once a week for stealing, at three dollars a throw. I finally persuaded Anna May it would be better to put the boy in Crownsville.”
Mr. Sutton mumbled a rounder oath than was polite.
“Reverdy is honest as far as he goes,” I went on. “Also, if there’s an idea involved in what he’s doing, you can be sure it’s not his idea. Somebody’s putting him up to it. Probbly somebody white.”
Here we were characteristically interrupted by Susan.
“Martha, if we’re going to play golf we’d better be getting on with it.”
She perched on the arm of Mr. Sutton’s chair and put her hands over his mouth as he was about to speak.
“Anyway, Uncle Dan’s not allowed to talk about Aunt Charlotte after meals. Bad for his digestion, bad for everybody else’s.”
I think I almost expected to see Susan’s small brown hands bitten off at the wrists and bleeding stumps waving about. Mr. Sutton however took it with surprising grace.
“Promise, Uncle Dan!” she demanded loudly in his right ear, still keeping her hands firmly over his mouth. “Yes or no?”
He tried, not very hard, to free himself, and finally nodded. Susan let him go. I breathed much more easily.
“A
ll right. I’m ready,” I said.
“We’ll be at the house for you in half an hour,” Susan finished up. She manages everything for everybody—giving or saving no end of trouble, whichever way you look at it.
“By the way, Martha,” Mr. Sutton said as I was going inside. “If you happen to see J. K., tell him I’d like to see him.”
I nodded. J. K. is Dr. Knox, the president of Landover College and Mr. Sutton’s only intimate friend.
It wasn’t in the least odd that I did see Dr. Knox just as I crossed Duke of Gloucester Street. Landover is so small that you see almost everyone you know almost every day, unless they’re sick or out of town. Dr. Knox was on his way to our house.
“Hello, Martha,” he smiled. I smiled too, because he has an infectious twinkle in his shrewd blue eyes. Even if you don’t quite know what the joke is, or perhaps suspect it’s on you, you nevertheless have to smile too.
“Hello!” I said.
“I was just going in to see your husband about young Baker. I’m told he’s flunking Anthropology and won’t be eligible for the Williams game.”
“How awful!” I said. “I hope you’ll think of my helpless infants, and our poor cat with five kittens born this very morning, and not throw him to the alumni.”
Dr. Knox gave his charming subterranean chuckle.
“You never take these things seriously enough, Martha.”
“It’s you, sir,” I retorted. “You don’t realize that if it weren’t for athletics such harmony would prevail that American colleges would peacefully go to sleep like Oxford and Cambridge. As a matter of fact, I think the coach said he didn’t really need young Baker. That’s why Ben’s flunking him, of course. I suspect that, anyway, because the other night the coach and Ben were having a highball in Ben’s study and later Ben told me he’d at last persuaded him that Bob Lacey was the better goalkeeper of the two.”
Dr. Knox smiled quietly. Then his face sobered quickly.
“As a matter of fact it was you I wanted to see, Martha,” he said as we went up on the porch. “Let’s sit out here.”