Part 9

But though aloof she was not alien. As befitted her name and station, she could in time of need descend from her remote Olympus above the insecticidal Mr. Boggs and lend a hand. The first occasion was when a sudden and disastrous spring epidemic of that Herod of diseases, diphtheria, swept down upon Our Square, bringing panic in its train, an insane and bestial panic which barred doors against the authorities, against help, against medicine, against even our fiery and beloved Little Red Doctor, who stands like a bulwark between us and death and the fear of death. Then the Duchess appeared. She consulted briefly with the Little Red Doctor. She put on the black silk of splendor, the Pinckney laces and the Pemberton diamonds, and thus girded for the fray went forth, a spare, thin-lipped, female St. George, against our local dragon. Wherever that sane and confident presence appeared, panic gave way to reason and mutiny to obedience. There were no heroics. She nursed no dying children, saved no sudden emergency. She simply restored and enforced courage through the authority of a valiant and assured personality. Just before the Little Red Doctor collapsed, at the close of the crisis, he delivered his estimate of her.

“Cold nerve and tradition. Our Square ought to put up a statue to her--in steel.”

Against which may be set off the Duchess's complacent and bland summing up of the Little Red Doctor:--

“He seems a worthy young man.”

In retort, Mr. Boggs, for once forgetting his reverential attitude, indignantly piped: “God give you understanding!” The Duchess merely lifted her eyebrows fractionally. Being a Pemberton by birth and a Tallafferr by name, she perceived no necessity of understanding lesser forms of life.

Yet she possessed understanding, too, and of a subtle, fine, and profound kind. Otherwise she could never have done for Schepstein what she did when Schep-stein's twenty-year-old Metta killed herself through taking poison tablets (by mistake of course, as the Little Red Doctor perjuriously certified). In his hour of lonely grief and shame, Our Square turned its back upon the little cross-eyed, cross-grained, agnostic trafficker in old debts, old furniture, old books, old stamps, old silver, and anything else old which he could buy from the uninformed and sell to the covetous; not because he had at one time or another got the better of most of us in some deal and was the best-hated habitant within the four inclosing streets, but because we did not know what to do for him and feared his savage and cynical rebuffs. But when the furtive hearse and the one carriage for Schepstein, which was to have been the whole of little Metta's funeral, drew up at night before the Schepstein flat, Madam Rachel Pinckney Pemberton Tal-lafferr descended her steps, and crossed Our Square, rustling and in the high estate of black silk and lace. She must have been watching. Behind her waddled Old Sally with an armful of white roses. They met Schepstein at the foot of his steps, following his dead. As the casket passed her, Madame Tallafferr took the wealth of bloom from the servant and scattered its snowy purity above the girl. At that the face of Schepstein, which had been cold lead-gray, changed and flushed and softened, and he staggered suddenly where he stood and might have fallen had not that strong old woman thrust an arm under his to help him on his way. So two mourners went in the lone carriage to little Metta's funeral.

Only long afterward was this known to Our Square. What established the Duchess as a local heroine and an Olympian controller of destinies was her handling of MacLachan the Tailor. MacLachan, on his black, alcoholic days, was wont to sing “The Cork Leg” under circumstances which I have set forth elsewhere. On this occasion he sang it, sitting on the coping of the fountain with his legs in the water, and beating time with a revolver which might or might not have been loaded. Nobody knew at the time. Regarding MacLachan there was no such room for doubt. Between stanzas he would announce his purpose of presently ending all his troubles with a bullet, previous to which, candidates for coffins would be considered in the order of their applications. In the natural logic of events this was a case for Terry the Cop, but Polyglot Elsa of the Elite Restaurant had early observed MacLachan's ready weapon, and with more cunning than conscience had dispatched the intrepid Terry to the farther end of the beat upon a purely fictitious Italian riot. For reasons of her own she did not wish Terry punctured. Hence Our Square, deprived of the official protection to which we were entitled, lurked about in the night shadows, watching the balladist from a respectful distance and wondering what would come next.

The Duchess came next. She rustled stiffly up to the fountain and bade MacLachan hold his peace. Old Sally followed with a market basket. MacLachan elevated his voice a pitch.

“Horror and fright were in his face. The neighbors thought he was running a race; He clung to a lamp-post to stay his pace, But the leg broke away and kept up the chase,”

bellowed MacLachan. “I am not aweer,” he added, still rhythmic, though with a change of meter, “that now and here, you possess any legal authority in this Squeer!”

The Duchess pointed a stiletto-like finger at MacLachan. “You are a rum-wastrel,” she pronounced severely.

MacLachan pointed his revolver at the Duchess, though rather waveringly. “I am,” said he, “and proud of it.”

“You will do some harm with that firearm.”

“I will,” said MacLachan, “and glad to do it.”

“Go home to your bed and pray,” ordered the stiff old lady contemptuously.

MacLachan regarded her gravely. “Fly, witch,” he said. “Awa' wi' ye on yer broomstick. I have a silver bullet for yer life.”

“Give me that pistol,” she directed and stretched out a hand for it.

Quietly but firmly MacLachan shot her. At the same moment Old Sally hit him expertly on the head with a bottle which she took from her market basket. MacLachan slumped forward and took his whirling thoughts carefully between his two hands. “I ha' done wrong,” he presently concluded. “I ha' murdered my aged an' respectable aunt in cold blood. Tak' my weepon an' hale me to the gallus.”

He passed his revolver over to a firm grasp. It was that of the Duchess. She was bleeding very slightly, the merest trickle, from the ear which MacLachan's bullet had grazed.

“Do not strike him again,” she bade Old Sally, composedly, and that faithful amazon dropped her bottle and lost fifty cents' worth of catchup.

“Come home before you get into trouble,” was the lady's command to the now cowed and repentant tailor.

Whimpering and rubbing his head, he suffered himself to be marched back to his Home of Fashion. So promptly was the retirement executed that Terry the Cop never knew (officially) what had taken place. Unofficially all of Our Square knew. And the following day a deputation of us marched MacLachan around to No. 17 to apologize. As we stood on the stairway awaiting her pleasure, we could hear Madam Rachel Pinckney Pemberton Tallafferr directing Old Sally to inform the deputation that she had not, to the best of her recollection, evinced any intention of receiving on that particular day, and that she sent her compliments to us, and was not at home.

“That's the high-toned way of saying she don't want to see us,” chirped the admiring Mr. Boggs between gratification and apology. “Aristocrat to the finger tips! Haven't I always told you so?”

He had, to the uttermost wearying of the flesh. But there came a time when he boasted less assuredly of his top-floor grandeur. To the little circle at the Elite Restaurant it became evident that something was preying upon the blithe spirit of the Angel of Death, something having to do with his Duchess. One evening, in a burst of confidence, he unburdened himself to the Little Red Doctor and me. Madam was, he feared, losing interest in the lofty social sphere to which she had been called. Seldom, nowadays, did she go in her full regalia uptown. Automobiles came no more to his flattered door. Worst of all, her fascinating mail had dwindled. Where formerly there would be as many as eight or ten envelopes per week, decorated with splendid and significant insignia and inclosing proud and stiff cardboard, now there was but one regular communication of the sort, the letter bearing the mystic double circle of the Spirit of Guidance Group and, as that was postmarked Brooklyn, Mr. Boggs had a small notion of its social import. Most of her days the aristocratic lodger now spent at solitaire, with Sempronius, the black cat, for critic. Mr. Boggs surmised sadly that the goddess of his top-floor Olympus was growing old.

Very likely the phenomenon would have gone unexplained to this day had not both the Rosser twins fallen into the fountain simultaneously, contrary to their usual custom, which is for one of them to take the careless plunge while the other dances frantically on terra firma and yells till help comes. Madam Tallafferr once termed them “Death's playmates,” because of this ineradicable passion for gambling on the brink of the pool which is just deep enough to cover their two-year-old heads. On this occasion Old Sally was the nearest aid. So she waddled fatly over and hauled them out easily enough. Then, quite inexplicably, she fell in herself and lay gently oscillating at the bottom of three feet of water. Still more inexplicably, she refused to come to properly when Mr. Boggs and I fished her out after not more than thirty seconds' immersion. Also she looked queerly flattened and misshapen and unnatural. So we ran her into the Little Red Doctor's office and awaited the verdict.

It was a long wait. When at length the Little Red Doctor emerged there was a wild kind of glint in his eye.

“D' you know what's the matter with that old black idiot?” he demanded.

“Martyr to her own hee-roism,” suggested Mr. Boggs, the romantic. “Is she drowned?”

The Little Red Doctor snorted: “She's starved. That's what she is!”

“She's as fat as butter,” I protested.

“Fat like a sliver!” retorted the physician scornfully. “Padded!”

“What on earth should she pad for?” I cried.

“To fool her mistress. She's been going without food so as to buy more for madam.”

At this information the eyes of the Destroying Angel bade fair to pop from their sockets and injure the Little Red Doctor toward whom they were violently protruding. “D' ye meantersay they're poor?” he gasped.

The Little Red Doctor outlined the history of the aristocratic pair, as he had extracted it from Old Sally. In the extraction he had grossly violated his professional ethics, as he shamelessly admitted, by giving her a half glass of port, which, on her pinched stomach operated as a tongue-loosener and betrayed her secret into his hands.

“I'm not going to have two aged females dying of want in Our Square just for the sake of a paper ethic or two,” he declared rebelliously.

According to what he had learned, the Duchess had left Virginia to save money and appearances, dragging along like a fetter a debt of honor contracted by a worthless scamp of a brother. Of course it was not in any sense a legal debt, but she, with her old-world ideas, had considered it to be a blot upon the family 'scutcheon, and had been paying interest, and bit by bit the principal, from her rigidly conserved little income. Presently an investment which had been indicated through the Spirit of Guidance Group's interpretation of one of madam's dreams reduced its dividends and madam cut off a few of her filial memberships. Another recommended by the dream magazine went wholly wrong. More memberships were reluctantly resigned. Old Sally, as head of the commissary, with full powers and responsibilities, was compelled to operate on a radically reduced apportionment. Two items took precedence of all else--the rent and the debt.

“You meantertellme,” chirped Mr. Boggs, “that Madam Tallafferr hasn't had enough to eat?”

“I do not,” said the Little Red Doctor emphatically. “She has. Old Sally hasn't. But her mistress doesn't know that.”

Mr. Boggs raised pious eyes to the ceiling. “Wotche going to do about it?” he inquired. He was, I take it, reminding Providence of its responsibility in the matter.

The Little Red Doctor wasn't for leaving it to Providence. “We've got to find a way to help.”

“Charity? To madam?” twittered Mr. Boggs. “I'd hate to try it on.”

The Little Red Doctor scratched his large red head in perplexity. Then he called Old Sally in.

“Now, Sally,” said he, “we're all friends of yours here.”

“Yessuh,” said Old Sally gratefully. “And friends of your mistress's.”

Old Sally bristled. “My young mist'ess ain' needin' no _frien's_ 'roun' yeah. She hol's her haid _high!_”

“Well, admirers, then,” the Little Red Doctor tactfully amended. “The point is, we want to help. Now, haven't you got some things there you could sell without missing them? Some of that old furniture must be valuable.”

“Sell the Tallaffeh homestead fuhni-ture!” cried Old Sally, scandalized.

“Well, perhaps madam has more of that old lace than she needs.”

“The Pinckney lace!” said Old Sally in a tone of flat finality, which settled that point.

“Possibly, then, the diamonds,” I suggested diffidently.

At this Old Sally's lips, which had been pressed firmly inward, inverted themselves. She began to blubber. The blubbering became a sobbing. The sobs waxed to subdued howls. From the midst of the howls one coherent and astounding statement emerged:--

“I stole'em.”

“Stole the Pemberton diamonds!” cried Mr. Boggs in consternation. His structure of social splendor was fast disintegrating. “What did you do with em?”

“Hocked,” wept that sorry and shrunken old negress. “Gossome cheap trash in deir place to fool my young mist'ess. Her sight ain' good no mo'.”

“And the money went for food,” I suggested.

“Some. Rest I put on a dream figgah.”

“Policy,” explained the Little Red Doctor, who is wise in the ways of the world. “She dreamed a number and put her money on it in a policy shop. And it didn't come out. They never do.”

“Ef it had,” said Old Sally eagerly, “I'd'a' had money to pay dat eighteen hund'ed an' fo'ty-five dollahs an' fifty cents debt, an' plenty mo' besides.” Obviously she had been wearing that hair-shirt debt next to her soul's skin. “But I must'a' disremembered my dream figgah.”

“Very likely,” agreed the Little Red Doctor gravely. “Come now, Sally; think. Isn't there anything you could sell out of the house?”

The old face began to work again. “My young mist'ess she'll like to skin me if I tell,” she whimpered.

“I'll cross your eyes like Schepstein's, if you don't,” threatened the Little Red Doctor savagely.

A deep breath signified the termination of her struggle between two fears.

“Tazmun,” she enunciated in a mystical voice.

We looked at each other, puzzled. “What?” queried Mr. Boggs.

“Tazmun. You know, tazmun.”

“What on earth is tazmun?”

“Tazmun,” she repeated determinedly. “Like whut you keep aroun' you to fotch luck.” Seeing us still at a loss, she sought and evolved an illustration.

“Rabbit foot's a tazmun.”

“Talisman,” I translated in a burst of inspiration.

“Dass it, tazmun.”

“But you can't sell a talisman,” objected the Little Red Doctor.

“Dis tazmun you can,” eagerly asserted Old Sally. “Wuth a heap o' money. My young mist'ess keep it locked up in her jool box. Lawzee! How I has tried to get my han's on'at ol' tazmun lettah.'Cause we sho' need de money fo' it.”

“A letter?”

“Dass it. Aut'graph tazmun letter. Fum Gen'al Stonewall Jackson, wrote to ol' Massah Pemberton, befo' de war.”

Mr. Boggs turned to me. “Dominie, you know everything.” (This is one of the perquisites of professing the classics in Our Square; it has also its drawbacks in the shape of disappointed expectations.) “Would that kind of letter be worth real money?”

“It's a fo'tellin' lettah,” put in Old Sally eagerly. “It fo'tells de wah mo' dan ten yeahs befo' de wah.”

In that case, I thought, it might be valuable historically. Anyway it would do no harm to get an offer from an expert. But could “young mist'ess” be induced to let it out of her hands? Young mist'ess's Old Sally thought it doubtful. Young mist'ess, with her passion for the things of the Lost Cause, held that document in sacred veneration. Once a week she took it from its neatly addressed envelope to read it. Her spirit guide had repeatedly advised her of its preciousness, and had declared that it would eventually bring fortune and happiness to her, if she would await the sign. What sign? Old Sally did not know. But she was certain that a marvelous “tazmun” such as General Stonewall Jackson's foretelling letter would furnish a sign beyond all misconception.

“Sign? She shall have a sign,” muttered the Little Red Doctor, who is wholly without conscience in any matter where he can pamper his insatiable appetite for help-ing others. Then to Sally: “But don't you say a word to her of what you have told us.”

“Cotch me!” said that aged crone. “I don' want to get _skint_.”

How to come to negotiations with the secluded and exclusive Madam Rachel Pinckney Pemberton Tallafferr was something of a problem. Strategy was useless against that keen old woman. The direct way was decided upon and Mr. Boggs was appointed emissary. He respectfully petitioned that the lady grant a conference to the Little Red Doctor, myself, and himself upon a matter of business. Prefacing her gracious consent with the comment that she could not conceive what it was about, she set an hour for receiving us. When we climbed to the top floor above the Angel of Death sign, we found her a faded and splendid figure amid the faded splendor of her belongings. She was clad in her stiffest black, she sat in the biggest Tallafferr chair, her throat emerged from the delicate and precious Pinckney lace, and there glittered in her innocent ears a grotesque travesty upon the small but time-honored Pemberton diamonds. I knew on sight what she would say. She said it: “To what am I indebted, sirs, for this visit?”

The Little Red Doctor explained that we were interested, historically, in a document which she possessed. The Duchess's sharp glance passed over me to rest sardonically upon Mr. Boggs, seeming to inquire with what historical interest that insecticidal nemesis might be credited; then leaped upon and fixed the spokesman: “How, may I ask, did you learn of this document?”

“Through a dream,” replied that shameless one.

Her glance livened. “Strange,” she murmured. “You dreamed--what?”

“That there was preserved at the top of this house a prophetic letter of Stonewall Jackson's.”

The old lady's eyebrows twitched. He had touched the right chord of superstition. Her voice was quite animated as she asked: “And you actually expect this dream to be confirmed?”

“Pardon me; it is already confirmed. A few days after, I saw a newspaper clipping, stating that such a letter was said to be in existence, but that its whereabouts was unknown.”

I shuddered. Couldn't the reckless idiot foresee the next question? It came, straight and sharp:--

“Have you the clipping?”

“I have.”

I gasped with relief, wonder, and admiration.

He had. That wise young Ananias had quietly provided for it all by getting Inky Mike, who loftily terms himself a journalist (being a pressman's assistant in a socialist weekly office), to set up and strike off a brief and vague article which the Little Red Doctor himself had composed for the occasion. Madam Tallaffer read it with heightened color.

“This,” she said to Old Sally calmly, “is without doubt the Sign.”

From a beautifully inlaid box she reverently took an old buff envelope, stamped and postmarked, and put it in the Little Red Doctor's hands. “This, sirs,” said she, “is my talisman. It was given to me, as his most prized possession, by my father, to whom it was written.”

“What do you value this at, Madam Tallafferr?” asked the physician.

Her reply came without hesitation. “Eighteen hundred and forty-five dollars and fifty cents.”

The Little Red Doctor's jaw fell. “Eighteen--did I understand you to say eighteen _hundred?_”

“And forty-five dollars and fifty cents. That is the minimum. It is perhaps worth more.”

“Er--yes. Certainly. Very likely,” said the Little Red Doctor jerkily.

“I bid you good day, sirs,” said the Duchess. “You will, of course, exercise every care of General Jackson's letter.”

We bowed ourselves out. On the sidewalk we looked upon each other in dismay. “And Old Sally down to the last dollar,” said the Little Red Doctor, neglecting to mention that he had given her the dollar.

“Let's try the letter on the trade, anyway,” piped Boggs hopefully. “You can't tell but maybe it might be worth the money. _Is_ there an autograph trade, dominie?”

In my capacity of omniscience, I chanced, happily for my reputation, to be informed upon this and to be able to make some definite suggestions. We went to Mr.

Barker's small and recherché curio shop, with the talisman. Mr. Barker did not bark. He purred. The substance of his purring was that while the letter was authentic beyond question and would be of interest to some Southern historical society, it could claim no special value. As for the prophetic feature, upon which so much stress had been laid, a mere opinion that, “Be it sooner or be it later, the moot question of State rights will demand a final settlement,” could hardly be regarded as an inspired forecast of the Civil War. However, should we say twenty-five dollars?

As the business brains of our delegation, Mr. Boggs, intrusted with the bargaining, would not say twenty-five dollars. Mr. Boggs would not say anything remotely suggesting twenty-five dollars. Mr. Boggs would say good day, which he forthwith did in great disgust of spirit. From Mr. Barker we went to Mr. Pompany. Mr. Pompany neither barked nor purred. He mumbled. The upshot of his submaxillary communication was a dim “Twenty dollars, take it or leave it.” We left it, and Mr. Pompany, the latter with a Parthian arrow sticking in his soul (if he had one) in the form of Mr. Boggs's firm opinion, delivered in a baleful squeak, that he might be only an ignoramus, but had rather the appearance and bearing of a swindler.

“Thieves!” piped Mr. Boggs on the sidewalk. “Thieves and fatheads, the whole trade. What now?”

“Schepstein,” said the Little Red Doctor. “He's a thief too. But he knows.” Schepstein received us in his grubby, grimy, desolated front room, which did duty as an office, with a malevolent cross-fire from his distorted eyes. “Bit of business?” he repeated after Mr. Boggs. “What business? State your business.”

“For sale,” piped Mr. Boggs, handing him the letter which he had taken from the envelope.

Hardly a glance did Schepstein give it. “Thomas Jonathan Jackson? Who'she? And who's this Major Pemberton?”

Mr. Boggs explained, in indignant piccolo tones, who Thomas Jonathan Jackson was. Not about Major Pemberton, however. No authority had been given to our deputation to disclose the ownership of the letter; So far as we were aware at that time, it would have meant nothing to Schepstein anyway. We had no reason, then, to suppose that he even knew Madam Tallafferr.

“Humph!” grunted Schepstein. “Stonewall Jackson, eh? Might be worth something. Lessee the envelope.”

He looked it over carefully, front and back, folded the letter which he had not even read, and slipped it back in. “Leave it with me overnight,” he suggested negligently. “I'll think it over and make you a price in the morning.”

“Think as much as you like,” returned Mr. Boggs, retrieving the treasure. “We'll keep this. And we'll be back at eleven to-morrow.”