The Sleuth of St. James's Square by Melville Davisson Post (black authors fiction txt) 📕

“Doubtless,” he said, “it was not known that Maxwell had only a life estate in the lands, and the remainder to the heirs was likely purchased for some slight amount. The language of the deeds that Henderson exhibits in his suit shows a transfer of all claim or title, as though he bought a thing which the grantees thought lay with the uncertainties of a decree in chancery.”

“I have seen the deeds,” said my father.

“Then,” said the hunchback, “you know they are valid, and transfer the title.” He paused. “I have no doubt that Mr. Henderson assembled these outstanding interests at no great cost, but his conveyances are in form and legal.”

“Everything connected with this affair,” said my father, “is strangely legal!”

The hunchback considered my father through his narrow eyelids.

“It is a strange world,” he said.

“It is,” replied my father. “It is profoundly, inconceivably strange.”

There was a moment of silence. The two men regarded each other across the half-length of the room. The girl sat in the chair. She had got back her courage. The big, forceful presence of my father, like the shadow of a great rock, was there behind her. She had the fine courage of her blood, and, after the first cruel shock of this affair, she faced the tragedies that might lie within it calmly.

Shadows lay along the walls of the great room, along the gilt frames of the portraits, the empty fireplace, the rosewood furniture of ancient make and the oak floor. Only the hunchback was in the light, behind the four candles on the table.

“It was strange,” continued my father over the long pause, “that your father's will discovered at his death left his lands to you, and no acre to your brother David.”

“Not strange,” replied the hunchback, “when you consider what my brother David proved to be. My father knew him. What was hidden from us, what the world got no hint of, what the man was in the deep and secret places of his heart, my father knew. Was it strange, then, that he should leave the lands to me?”

“It was a will drawn by an old man in his senility, and under your control.”

“Under my care,” cried the hunchback. “I will plead guilty, if you like, to that. I honored my father. I was beside his bed with loving-kindness, while my brother went about the pleasures of his life.”

“But the testament,” said my father, “was in strange terms. It bequeathed the lands to you, with no mention of the personal property, as though these lands were all the estate your father had.”

“And so they were,” replied the hunchback calmly. “The lands had been stripped of horse and steer, and every personal item, and every dollar in hand or debt owing to my father before his death.” The man paused and put the tips of his fingers together. “My father had given to my brother so much money from these sources, from time to time, that he justly left me the lands to make us even.”

“Your father was senile and for five years in his bed. It was you, Dillworth, who cleaned the estate of everything but land.”

“I conducted my father's business,” said the hunchback, “for him, since he was ill. But I put the moneys from these sales into his hand and he gave them to my brother.”

“I have never heard that your brother David got a dollar of this money.”

The hunchback was undisturbed.

“It was a family matter and not likely to be known.”

“I see it,” said my father. “It was managed in your legal manner and with cunning foresight. You took the lands only in the will, leaving the impression to go out that your brother had already received his share in the personal estate by advancement. It was shrewdly done. But there remained one peril in it: If any personal property should appear under the law you would be required to share it equally with your brother David.”

“Or rather,” replied the hunchback calmly, “to state the thing correctly, my brother David would be required to share any discovered personal property with me.” Then he added: “I gave my brother David a hundred dollars for his share in the folderol about the premises, and took possession of the house and lands.”

“And after that,” said my father, “what happened?”

The hunchback uttered a queerly inflected expletive, like a bitter laugh.

“After that,” he answered, “we saw the real man in my brother David, as my father, old and dying, had so clearly seen it. After that he turned thief and fugitive.”

At the words the girl in the chair before my father rose. She stood beside him, her lithe figure firm, her chin up, her hair spun darkness. The courage, the fine, open, defiant courage of the first women of the world, coming with the patriarchs out of Asia, was in her lifted face. My father moved as though he would stop the hunchback's cruel speech. But she put her fingers firmly on his arm.

“He has gone so far,” she said, “let him go on to the end. Let him omit no word, let us hear every ugly thing the creature has to say.”

Dillworth sat back in his chair at ease, with a supercilious smile. He passed the girl and addressed my father.

“You will recall the details of that robbery,” he said in his complacent, piping voice. “My brother David had married a wife, like the guest invited in the Scriptures. A child was born. My brother lived with his wife's people in their house. One night he came to me to borrow money.”

He paused and pointed his long index finger through the doorway and across the hall.

“It was in my father's room that I received him. It did not please me to put money into his hands. But I admonished him with wise counsel. He did not receive my words with a proper brotherly regard. He flared up in unmanageable anger. He damned me with reproaches, said I had stolen his inheritance, poisoned his father's mind against him and slipped into the house and lands. 'Pretentious and perfidious' is what he called me. I was firm and gentle. But he grew violent and a thing happened.”

The man put up his hand and moved it along in the air above the table.

“There was a secretary beside the hearth in my father's room. It was an old piece with drawers below and glass doors above. These doors had not been opened for many years, for there was nothing on the shelves behind them—one could see that—except some rows of the little wooden boxes that indigo used to be sold in at the country stores.”

The hunchback paused as though to get the details of his story precisely in relation.

“I sat at my father's table in the middle of the room. My brother David was a