Part 7

“Monsieur, I have said his mind was Hellenic, like his big, wonderful body. Mark you how of heroic antiquity it was! It was his boast, among the perils that constantly beset him, that no criminal should ever take his life; that, if ever he should receive a mortal wound from the hand of the assassins about him, he would not wait to die in agony by it. He himself would sever the damaged thread of life and go out like a man!

“Observe, monsieur, how like the great heroes of legend--like the wounded Saul when he ordered his armor-bearer to kill him; like Brutus when he fell on his sword!”

He looked intently at the American.

“Doubtless, monsieur,” he went on, “those near this man along the Monongahela did not appreciate his attitude of grandeur; but to us, in the distance, it seemed great and noble.”

He looked out over the Mediterranean, where the great adventurers who cherished these lofty pagan ideals once beat along in the morning of the world.

“On an afternoon of summer,” he continued like one who begins a saga, “this man, alone and fearless, followed a violator of the law and arrested him in a house of the village. As he led the man away he noticed that an Italian followed. He was a little degenerate, wearing a green hat, and bearing now one name and now another. They traversed the village toward the municipal prison; and this creature, featured like a Parisian Apache, skulked behind.

“As they went along, two Austrians seated on the porch of a house heard the little man speak to the prisoner. He used the word sparate. They did not know what he meant, for he spoke in Italian; but they recognized the word, for it was the word used in the mines before the coal was shot down. The prisoner made his reply in Italian, which the Austrians did not understand.

“It seemed that this man who had made the arrest did not know Italian, for he stopped and asked the one behind him whether the prisoner was his brother. The man replied in the negative.”

The Count paused, as though for an explanation. “What the Apache said was: 'Shall I shoot him here or wait until we reach the ravine?' And the prisoner replied: 'Wait until we come to the ravine.'

“They went on. Presently they reached a sort of hollow, where the reeds grew along the road densely and to the height of a man's head. Here the Italian Apache, the degenerate with the green hat, following some three steps behind, suddenly drew a revolver from his pocket and shot the man twice in the back. It was a weapon carrying a lead bullet as large as the tip of one's little finger. The officer fell. The Apache and the prisoner fled.

“The wounded man got up. He spread out his arms; and he shouted, with a great voice, like the heroes of the Iliad. The two wounds were mortal; they were hideous, ghastly wounds, ripping up the vital organs in the man's body and severing the great arteries. The splendid pagan knew he had received his death wounds; and, true to his atavistic ideal, the ideal of the Greek, the Hebrew and the Roman, the ideal of the great pagan world to which he in spirit belonged, and of which the poets sing, he put his own weapon to his head and blew his brains out.”

The old Count, his chin up, his withered, yellow face vitalized, lifted his hands like one before something elevated and noble. After some moments had passed he continued:

“On the following day the assassin was captured in a neighboring village. Feeling ran so high that it was with difficulty that the officers of the law saved him from being lynched. He was taken about from one prison to another. Finally he was put on trial for murder.

“There was never a clearer case before any tribunal in this world.

“Many witnesses identified the assassin--not merely English-speaking men, who might have been mistaken or prejudiced, but Austrians, Poles, Italians--the men of the mines who knew him; who had heard him cry out the fatal Italian word; who saw him following in the road behind his victim on that Sunday afternoon of summer; who knew his many names and every feature of his cruel, degenerate face. There was no doubt anywhere in the trial. Learned surgeons showed that the two wounds in the dead man's back from the big-calibered weapon were deadly, fatal wounds that no man could have survived.

“There was nothing incomplete in that trial.

“Everything was so certain that the assassin did not even undertake to contradict; not one statement, not one word of the evidence against him did he deny. It was a plain case of willful, deliberate and premeditated murder. The judge presiding at the trial instructed the jury that a man is presumed to intend that which he does; that whoever kills a human being with malice aforethought is guilty of murder; that murder which is perpetrated by any kind of willful, deliberate and premeditated killing is murder in the first degree. The jury found the assassin guilty and the judge sentenced him to be hanged.”

The Count paused and looked at his companions about him on the terrace.

“Messieurs,” he said, “do you think that conviction was just?”

There was a common assent. Some one said: “It was a cruel murder if ever there was one.” And another: “It was wholly just; the creature deserved to hang.”

The old Count bowed, putting out his hands.

“And so I hoped he would.”

“What happened?” said the American.

The Count regarded him with a queer, ironical smile.

“Unlike the great British people, monsieur,” he replied, “your courts have never given the pig, or the pasture on which he gathers his acorns, a consideration above the human family. The case was taken to your Court of Appeals of that province.”

He stopped and lighted his cigarette deliberately, with a match scratched slowly on the table.

“Monsieur,” he said, “I do not criticize your elevated court. It is composed of learned men--wise and patriotic, I have no doubt. They cannot make the laws, monsieur; they cannot coin a conception of justice for your people. They must enforce the precise rules of law that the conception of justice in your country has established.

“Nevertheless, monsieur”--and his thin yellow lips curled--“for the sake of my depleted revenues I could have wished that the decision of this court had been other than it was.”

“And what did it decide?” asked the American.

“It decided, monsieur,” replied the Count, “that my estates in Salerno must continue to be charged with the gratuity to the indigent relative.

“That is to say, monsieur, it decided, because the great pagan did not wait to die in agony, did not wait for the mortal wounds inflicted by the would-be assassin to kill him, that interesting person--the man in the green hat--was not guilty of murder in the first degree and could not be hanged!”

Note--See State versus Angelina; 80 Southeastern Reporter, 141: “The intervening responsible agent who wrongfully accelerates death is guilty of the murder, and not the one who inflicted the first injury, though in itself mortal.”

VI. The Wrong Sign

It was an ancient diary in a faded leather cover. The writing was fine and delicate, and the ink yellow with age. Sir Henry Marquis turned the pages slowly and with care for the paper was fragile.

We had dined early at the Ritz and come in later to his great home in St. James's Square.

He wished to show me this old diary that had come to him from a branch of his mother's family in Virginia--a branch that had gone out with a King's grant when Virginia was a crown colony. The collateral ancestor, Pendleton, had been a justice of the peace in Virginia, and a spinster daughter had written down some of the strange cases with which her father had been concerned.

Sir Henry Marquis believed that these cases in their tragic details, and their inspirational, deductive handling, equaled any of our modern time. The great library overlooking St. James's Square, was curtained off from London. Sir Henry read by the fire; and I listened, returned, as by some recession of time to the Virginia of a vanished decade. The narrative of the diary follows:

My father used to say that the Justice of God was sometimes swift and terrible. He said we thought of it usually as remote and deliberate, a sort of calm adjustment in some supernatural Court of Equity. But this idea was far from the truth. He had seen the justice of God move on the heels of a man with appalling swiftness; with a crushing force and directness that simply staggered the human mind. I know the case he thought about.

Two men sat over a table when my father entered. One of them got up. He was a strange human creature, when you stood and looked calmly at him. You thought the Artificer had designed him for a priest of the church. He had the massive features and the fringe of hair around his bald head like a tonsure. At first, to your eye, it was the vestments of the church, he lacked; then you saw that the lack was something fundamental; something organic in the nature of the man. And as he held and stimulated your attention you got a fearful idea, that the purpose for which this human creature was shaped had been somehow artfully reversed!

He was big boned and tall when he stood up.

“Pendleton,” he said, “I would have come to you, but for my guest.”

And he indicated the elegant young man at the table.

“But I did not send you word to ride a dozen miles through the hills on any trivial business, or out of courtesy to me. It is a matter of some import, so I will pay ten eagles.”

My father looked steadily at the man.

“I am not for hire,” he said.

My father was a justice of the peace in Virginia, under the English system, by the theory of which the most substantial men in a county undertook to keep the peace for the welfare of the State. Like Washington in the service of the Colonial army, he took no pay.

The big man laughed.

“We are most of us for purchase, and all of us for hire,” he said. “I will make it twenty!”

The young man at the table now interrupted. He was elegant in the costume of the time, in imported linen and cloth from an English loom. His hair was thick and black; his eyebrows straight, his body and his face rich in the blood and the vitalities of youth. But sensuality was on him like a shadow. The man was given over to a life of pleasure.

“Mr. Pendleton,” he said, with a patronizing pedantic air, “the commonwealth is interested to see that litigation does not arise; and to that end, I hope you will not refuse us the benefit of your experience. We are about to draw up a deed of sale running into a considerable sum, and we would have it court proof.”

He made a graceful gesture with his jeweled hand.

“I would be secure in my purchase, and Zindorf in his eagles, and you, Sir, in the knowledge that the State will not be vexed by any suit between us. Every contract, I believe, upon some theory of the law, is a triangular affair with the State a party. Let us say then, that you represent Virginia!”

“In the service of the commonwealth,” replied my father coldly, “I am always to be commanded.”

The man flicked a bit of dust from his immaculate coat sleeve.

“It will be a conference of high powers. I shall represent Eros; Mr. Pendleton, Virginia; and Zindorf” and he laughed--“his Imperial Master!”

And to the eye the three men fitted to their legend. The Hellenic God of pleasure in his sacred groves might have chosen for his disciple one from Athens with a face and figure like this youth. My father bore the severities of the law upon him. And I have written how strange a creature the third party to this conference was.

He now answered with an oath.

“You have a very pretty wit, Mr. Lucian Morrow,” he said. “I add to my price a dozen eagles for it.”

The young man shrugged his shoulders in his English coat.

“Smart money, eh, Zindorf... Well, it does not make me smart. It only makes me remember that Count Augsburg educated you in Bavaria for the Church and you fled away from it to be a slave trader in Virginia.”

He got on his feet, and my father saw that the man was in liquor. He was not drunken, but the effect was on him with its daring and its indiscretions.

It was an April morning, bright with sun. The world was white with apple blossoms, the soft air entered through the great open windows. And my father thought that the liquor in the man had come with him out of a night of bargaining or revel.

Morrow put his hands on the table and looked at Zindorf; then, suddenly, the laughter in his face gave way to the comprehension of a swift, striking idea.

“Why, man,” he cried, “it's the devil's truth! Everything about you is a negation! You ought to be a priest by all the lines and features of you; but you're not... Scorch me, but you're not!”

His voice went up on the final word as though to convey some impressive, sinister discovery.

It was true in every aspect of the man. The very clothes he wore, somber, wool-threaded homespun, crudely patched, reminded one of the coarse fabrics that monks affect for their abasement. But one saw, when one remembered the characteristic of the man, that they represented here only an extremity of avarice.

Zindorf looked coldly at his guest.

“Mr. Lucian Morrow,” he said, “you will go on, and my price will go on!”

But the young blood, on his feet, was not brought up by the monetary threat. He looked about the room, at the ceiling, the thick walls. And, like a man who by a sudden recollection confounds his adversary with an overlooked illustrative fact, he suddenly cried out:

“By the soul of Satan, you're housed to suit! Send me to the pit! It's the very place for you! Eh! Zindorf, do you know who built the house you live in?”

“I do not, Mr. Lucian Morrow,” said the man. “Who built it?”

One could see that he wished to divert the discourses of his guest. He failed.

“God built it!” cried Morrow.

He put out his hands as though to include the hose.

“Pendleton,” he said, “you will remember. The people built these walls for a church. It burned, but the stone walls could not burn; they remained overgrown with creeper. Then, finally, old Wellington Monroe built a house into the walls for the young wife he was about to marry, but he went to the coffin instead of the bride-bed, and the house stood empty. It fell into the courts with the whole of Monroe's tangled business and finally Zindorf gets it at a sheriff's sale.”

The big man now confronted the young blood with decision.

“Mr. Lucian Morrow,” he said, “if you are finished with your fool talk, I will bid you good morning. I have decided not to sell the girl.”

The face of Morrow changed. His voice wheedled in an anxious note.

“Not sell her, Zindorf!” he echoed. “Why man, you have promised her to me all along. You always said I should have her in spite of your cursed partner Ordez. You said you'd get her some day and sell her to me. Now, curse it, Zindorf, I want her... I've got the money: ten thousand dollars. It's a big lot of money. But I've got it. I've got it in gold.”

He went on:

“Besides, Zindorf, you can have the money, it'll mean more to you. But it's the girl I want.”

He stood up and in his anxiety the effect of the liquor faded out.

“I've waited on your promise, Zindorf. You said that some day, when Ordez was hard-pressed he would sell her for money, even if she was his natural daughter. You were right; you knew Ordez. You have got an assignment of all the slaves in possession, in the partnership, and Ordez has cleared out of the country. I know what you paid for his half-interest in this business, it's set out in the assignment. It was three thousand dollars.

“Think of it, man, three thousand dollars to Ordez for a wholesale, omnibus assignment of everything. An elastic legal note of an assignment that you can stretch to include this girl along with the half-dozen other slaves that you have on hand here; and I offer you ten thousand dollars for the girl alone!”

One could see how the repetition of the sum in gold affected Zindorf.

He had the love of money in that dominating control that the Apostle spoke of. But the elegant young man was moved by a lure no less potent. And his anxiety, for the time, suppressed the evidences of liquor.

“I'll take the risk on the title, Zindorf. You and Ordez were partners in this traffic. Ordez gives you a general assignment of all slaves on hand for three thousand dollars and lights out of the country. He leaves his daughter here among the others. And this general assignment can be construed to include her. Her mother was a slave and that brings her within the law. We know precisely who her mother was, and all about it. You looked it up and my lawyer, Mr. Cable, looked it up. Her mother was the octoroon woman, Suzanne, owned by old Judge Marquette in New Orleans.

“There may have been some sort of church marriage, but there's no legal record, Cable says.

“The woman belonged to Marquette, and under the law the girl is a slave. You got a paper title out of Marquette's executors, privily, years ago. Now you have this indefinite assignment by Ordez. He's gone to the Spanish Islands, or the devil, or both. And if Mr. Pendleton can draw a deed of sale that will stand in the courts between us, I'll take the risk on the validity of my title.”

He paused.

“The law's sound on slaves, Judge Madison has a dozen himself, not all black either; not three-eighths black!” and he laughed.

Then he turned to my father.

“Mr. Pendleton,” he said, “I persuaded Zindorf to send for you to draw up this deed of sale. I have no confidence in the little practicing tricksters at the county seat. They take a fee and, with premeditation, write a word or phrase into the contract that leaves it open for a suit at law.”

He made a courteous bow, accompanied by a dancing master's gesture.

“I do not offend you with the offer of a fee, but I present my gratitude for the conspicuous courtesy, and I indicate the service to the commonwealth of legal papers in form and court proof. May I hope, Sir, that you will not deny us the benefit of your highly distinguished service.”

My father very slowly looked about him in calm reflection.

He had ridden ten miles through the hills on this April morning, at Zindorf's message sent the night before. The clay of the roads was still damp and plastic from the recent rain. There were flecks of mud on him and the splashing of the streams.

He was a big, dominating man, in the hardened strength and experience of middle life. He had come, as he believed, upon some service of the state. And here was a thing for the little dexterities of a lawyer's clerk. Everybody in Virginia, who knew my father, can realize how he was apt to meet the vague message of Zindorf that got him in this house, and the patronizing courtesies of Mr. Lucian Morrow.

He was direct and virile, and while he feared God, like the great figures in the Pentateuch, as though he were a judge of Israel enforcing his decrees with the weapon of iron, I cannot write here, that at any period of his life, or for any concern or reason, he very greatly regarded man.

He went over to the window and looked out at the hills and the road that he had traveled.

The mid-morning sun was on the fields and groves like a benediction. The soft vitalizing air entered and took up the stench of liquor, the ash of tobacco and the imported perfumes affected by Mr. Lucian Morrow.

The windows in the room were long, gothic like a church, and turning on a pivot. They ran into the ceiling that Monroe had built across the gutted walls. The house stood on the crown of a hill, in a cluster of oak trees. Below was the abandoned graveyard, the fence about it rotted down; the stone slabs overgrown with moss. The four roads running into the hills joined and crossed below this oak grove that the early people had selected for a house of God.

My father looked out on these roads and far back on the one that he had traveled.

There was no sound in the world, except the faint tolling of a bell in a distant wood on the road. It was far off on the way to my father's house, and the vague sound was to be heard only when a breath of wind carried from that way.

My father gathered his big chin, flat like a plowshare, into the trough of his bronze hand. He stood for some moments in reflection, then he turned to Mr. Lucian Morrow.

“I think you are right,” he said. “I think this is a triangular affair with the state a party. I am in the service of the state. Will you kindly put the table by this window.”

They thought he wished the air, and would thus escape the closeness of the room. And while my father stood aside, Zindorf and his guest carried the flat writing table to the window and placed a chair.

My father sat down behind the table by the great open window, and looked at Zindorf.

The man moved and acted like a monk. He had the figure and the tonsured head. His coarse, patched clothes cut like the homely garments of the simple people of the day, were not wholly out of keeping to the part. The idea was visualized about him; the simplicity and the poverty of the great monastic orders in their vast, noble humility. All striking and real until one saw his face!

My father used to say that the great orders of God were correct in this humility; for in its vast, comprehensive action, the justice of God moved in a great plain, where every indicatory event was precisely equal; a straw was a weaver's beam.

God hailed men to ruin in his court, not with spectacular devices, but by means of some homely, common thing, as though to abase and overcome our pride.

My father moved the sheets of foolscap, and tested the point of the quill pen like one who considers with deliberation. He dipped the point into the inkpot and slowly wrote a dozen formal words.

Then he stopped and put down the pen.

“The contests of the courts,” he said, “are usually on the question of identity. I ought to see this slave for a correct description.”