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Page 44
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!"
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