MAD ANTHONY
Beyond the selvage of the sleepy leaf-sheltered village a cherry
bordered lane met the Red Road. On its one side was a clovered pasture
and beyond this an orchard, bounded by a tall hedge of close-clipped box
which separated it from a broad yard where the gray-weathered roof of
Rosewood showed above a group of tulip and catalpa trees. Viewed nearer,
the low stone house, with its huge overhanging eaves, would have looked
like a small boy with his father's hat on but for the trellises of
climbing roses that covered two sides and overflowed here and there on
long arbors, flecking the dull brown stone with a glorious crimson,
like a warrior's blood. On the sunny steps a lop-eared hound puppy
was playing with a mottled cat.
The front door was open, showing a hall where stood a grandfather's
clock and a spindle-legged table holding a bowl of potpourri. The
timepiece had landed from a sailing vessel at Jamestown wharf with the
household goods of that English Garland who had adopted the old Middle
Plantation when Dunmore was royal governor under George III. Framed
portraits and engravings lent tints of tarnished silver, old-rose and
sunset-golds--colors time-toned and reminiscent, carrying a charming
sense of peaceful content, of gentleness and long tradition. The dark
polished stairway had at its turn a square dormer-window which looked
out upon one of the rose-arbors.
Down this stair, somewhat later that afternoon, came Shirley Dandridge,
booted and spurred, the rebellious whorls of her russet hair now as
closely filleted as a Greek boy's, in a short divided skirt of yew-green
and a cool white blouse and swinging by its ribbon a green hat whose
rolling brim was caught up at one side by a crisp blue-black hawk's
feather. She stopped to peer out of the dormer-window to where, under
the latticed weave of bloom, beside a round iron table holding a hoop
of embroidery and a book or two, a lady sat reading.
The lady's hair was silver, but not with age. It had been so for many
years, refuted by the transparent skin and a color as soft as the cheek
of an apricot. It was solely in her dark eyes, deep and strangely
luminous, that one might see lurking the somber spirit of passion and of
pain. But they were eager and brilliant withal, giving the lie to the
cane whose crook one pale delicate hand held with a clasp that somehow
conveyed a sense of exasperate if semi-humorous rebellion. She wore
nun's gray; soft old lace was at her wrists and throat, and she was
knitting a scarlet silk stocking.
She looked up at Shirley's voice, and smiled brightly. "Off for your
ride, dear?"
"Yes. I'm going with the Chalmers."
"Oh, of course. Betty Page is visiting them, isn't she?"
Shirley nodded. "She came yesterday. I'll have to hurry, for I saw them
from my window turning into the Red Road." She waved her hand and ran
lightly down the stair and across the lawn to the orchard.
She pulled a green apple from a bough that hung over a stone wall and
with this in her hand she came close to the pasture fence and whistled a
peculiar call. It was answered by a low whinny and a soft thud of hoofs,
and a golden-chestnut hunter thrust a long nose over the bars, flaring
flame-lined nostrils to the touch of her hand. She laid her cheek
against the white thoroughbred forehead and held the apple to the eager
reaching lip, with several teasing withdrawings before she gave it to
its juicy crunching.
"No, Selim," she said as the wide nostrils snuffled over her shoulder,
the begging breath blowing warm against her neck. "No more--and no sugar
to-day. Sugar has gone up two cents a pound."
She let down the top bar of the fence and vaulting over, ran to a stable
and presently emerging with a saddle on her arm, whistled the horse to
her and saddled him. Then opening the gate, she mounted and cantered
down the lane to meet the oncoming riders--a kindly-faced, middle-aged
man, a younger one with dark features and coal-black hair, and two
girls.
Chisholm Lusk spurred in advance and lifted his hat. "I held up the
judge, Shirley," he said, "and made him bring me along. He tells me
there's a fox-hunt on to-morrow; may I come?"
"Pshaw! Chilly," said the judge. "I don't believe you ever got up at
five o'clock in your born days. You've learned bad habits abroad."
"You'll see," he answered. "If my man Friday doesn't rout me out
to-morrow, I'll be up for murder."
They rode an hour, along stretches of sunny highways or on shaded
bridle-paths where the horses' hoofs fell muffled in brown pine-needles
and drooping branches flicked their faces. Then, by a murky way gouged
with brusk gullies, across shelving fields and "turn-rows" in a long
detour around Powhattan Mountain, a rough spur in the shape of an
Indian's head that wedged itself forbiddingly between the fields of
springing corn and tobacco. They approached the Red Road again by a
crazy bridge whose adze-hewn flooring was held in place by wild
grape-vines and weighted down against cloudburst and freshet by heavy
boulders till it dipped its middle like an overloaded buckboard in the
yellow waters of the sluggish stream beneath. On the farther side they
pulled down to breathe their horses. Here the road was like a narrow
ruler dividing a desert from a promised land. On one hand a guttered
slope of marl and pebbles covered with a tatterdemalion forest--on the
other acre upon acre of burnished grain.
"Ah never saw such a frowsley-looking thing in mah life," said Betty
Page, in her soft South Carolinian drawl that was all vowels and
liquids, "as that wild hill beside those fields. For all the world like
a disgraceful tramp leering across the wall at a dandy."
Shirley applauded the simile, and the judge said, "This is a boundary.
That hobo-landscape is part of the deserted Valiant estate. The hill
hides the house."
She nodded. "Damory Court. It's still vacant, Ah suppose."
"Yes, and likely to be. Valiant is dead long ago, but apparently there's
never been any attempt to let it. I suppose his son is so rich that one
estate more or less doesn't figure much to him."
"I got a letter this morning from Dorothy Randolph," said Shirley. "The
Valiant Corporation is being investigated, you know, and her uncle had
taken her to one of the hearings, when John Valiant was in the chair.
From her description, they are making it sufficiently hot for that
silver-spooned young man."
"I don't reckon _he_ cares," said Lusk satirically. "Nothing matters
with his set if you have enough money."
The judge pointed with his crop. "That narrow wagon-track," he said,
"goes to Hell's-Half-Acre."
"Oh, yes," said Betty. "That's that weird settlement on the Dome where
Shirley's little protegee Rickey Snyder came from." It was all she said,
but her glance at the girl beside her was one of open admiration. For,
as all in the party knew, the lonely road had been connected with an act
of sheer impulsive daring in Shirley's girlhood that she would never
hear spoken of.
Judge Chalmers flicked his horse's ears gently with his rein and they
moved slowly on, presently coming in sight of a humble patch of ground,
enclosed in a worm-fence and holding a whitewashed cabin with a
well shaded by varicolored hollyhocks. Under the eaves clambered a
gourd-vine, beneath which dangled strings of onions and bright red
peppers. "Do let us get a drink!" said Chilly Lusk. "I'm as thirsty as
a cotton-batting camel."
"All right, we'll stop," agreed the judge, "and you'll have a chance to
see another local lion, Betty. This is where Mad Anthony lives. You must
have heard of him when you were here before. He's almost as celebrated
as the Reverend John Jasper of Richmond."
Betty tapped her temple. "Where have Ah heard of John Jasper?"
"He was the author of the famous sermon on _The Sun do Move_. He used to
prove it by a bucket of water that he set beside his pulpit Saturday
night. As it hadn't spilled in the morning he knew it was the earth that
stood still."
Betty nodded laughingly. "Ah remember now. He's the one who said there
were only four great races: the Huguenots, the Hottentots, the
Abyssinians and the Virginians. Is Mad Anthony really mad?"
"Only harmlessly," said Shirley. "He's stone blind. The negroes all
believe he conjures--that's voodoo, you know. They put a lot of stock
in his 'prophecisms.' He tells fortunes, too. S-sh!" she warned. "He's
sitting on the door-step. He's heard us."
The old negro had the torso of a black patriarch. He sat bolt upright
with long straight arms resting on his knees, and his face had that
peculiar expressionless immobility seen in Egyptian carvings. He had
slightly turned his head in their direction, his brow, under its shock
of perfectly white crinkly hair, twitching with a peculiar expression of
inquiry. His age might have been anything judging from his face which
was so seamed and creviced with innumerable tiny wrinkles that it most
resembled the tortured glaze of some ancient bitumen pottery unearthed
from a tomb of Kor. Under their heavy lids his sightless eyeballs,
whitely opaque and lusterless, turned mutely toward the sound of the
horse hoofs.
The judge dismounted, and tossing his bridle over a fence-picket, took
from his pocket a collapsible drinking cup. "Howdy do, Anthony," he
said. "We just stopped for a drink of your good water."
The old negro nodded his head. "Good watah," he said in the gentle
quavering tones of extreme age. "Yas, Mars'. He'p yo'se'f. Come f'om de
centah ob de yerf, dat watah. En dah's folks say de centah of de yerf is
all fiah. Yo' reck'n dey's right, Mars' Chalmahs?"
"Now, how the devil do you know who I am, Anthony?" The judge set down
his cup on the well-curb. "I haven't been by here for a year."
The ebony head moved slowly from side to side. "Ol' Ant'ny don' need no
eyes," he said, touching his hand to his brow. "He see ev'ything heah."
The judge beckoned to the others and they trooped inside the paling.
"I've brought some other folks with me, Anthony; can you tell who they
are?"
The sightless look wavered over them and the white head shook slowly.
"Don' know young mars,'," said the gentle voice. "How many yuddahs wid
yo'? One, two? No, don' know young mistis, eidah."
"I reckon you _don't_ need any eyes," Judge Chalmers laughed, as he
passed the sweet cold water to the rest. "One of these young ladies
wants you to tell her fortune."
The old negro dropped his head, waving his gaunt hands restlessly. Then
his gaze lifted and the whitened eyeballs roved painfully about as if in
search of something elusive. The judge beckoned to Betty Page, but she
shook her head with a little grimace and drew back.
"You go, Shirley," she whispered, and with a laughing glance at the
others, Shirley came and sat down on the lowest step.
Mad Anthony put out a wavering hand and touched the young body. His
fingers strayed over the habit and went up to the curling bronze under
the hat-brim. "Dis de li'l mistis," he muttered, "ain' afeahd ob ol'
Ant'ny. Dah's fiah en she ain' afeahd, en dah's watah en she ain'
afeahd. Wondah whut Ah gwine tell huh? Whut de coloh ob yo' haih,
honey?"
"Black," put in Chilly Lusk, with a wink at the others. "Black as a
crow."
Old Anthony's hand fell back to his knee. "Young mars' laugh at de ol'
man," he said, "but _he_ don' know. Dat de coloh dat buhn mah han's--de
coloh ob gol', en eyes blue like er cat-bird's aig. Dah's er man gwine
look in dem eyes, honey, en gwine make 'em cry en cry." He raised his
head sharply, his lids shut tight, and swung his arm toward the North.
"Dah's whah he come f'om," he said, "en heah"--his arm veered and he
pointed straight toward the ragged hill behind them--"he stay."
Lusk laughed noiselessly. "He's pointing to Damory Court," he whispered
to Nancy Chalmers, "the only uninhabited place within ten miles. That's
as near as he often hits it, I fancy."
"Heah's whah he stay," repeated the old man. "Heap ob trouble wait heah
fo' him too, honey,--heap ob trouble, heah whah li'l mistis fin' him."
His voice dropped to a monotone, and he began to rock gently to and fro
as if he were crooning a lullaby. "Li'l trouble en gr'et trouble! Fo'
dah's fiah en she ain' afeahd, en dah's watah en she ain' afeahd. It's
de thing whut eat de ha'at outen de breas'--dat whut she afeahd of!"
"Come, Anthony," said Judge Chalmers, laying his hand on the old man's
shoulder. "That's much too mournful! Give her something nice to top off
with, at least!"
But Anthony paid no heed, continuing his rocking and his muttering.
"Gr'et trouble. Dah's fiah en she ain' afeahd, en dah's watah en she
ain' afeahd. En Ah sees yo' gwine ter him, honey. Ah heah's de
co'ot-house clock a-strikin' in de night--en yo' gwine. Don' wait, don'
wait, li'l mistis, er de trouble-cloud gwine kyah him erway f'om yo'....
When de clock strike thuhteen--when de clock strike thuhteen--"
The droning voice ceased. The gaunt form became rigid. Then he started
and turned his eyes slowly about him, a vague look of anxiety on his
face. For a moment no one moved. When he spoke again it was once more in
his gentle quavering voice:
"Watah? Yas, Mars', good watah. He'p yo'se'f."
The judge set a dollar bill on the step and weighted it with a stone, as
the rest remounted. "Well, good-by, Anthony," he said. "We're mightily
obliged."
He sprang into the saddle and the quartette cantered away. "My
experiment wasn't a great success, I'm afraid, Shirley," he said
ruefully.
"Oh, I think it was splendid!" cried Nancy. "Do you suppose he really
believes those spooky things? I declare, at the time I almost did
myself. What an odd idea--'when the clock strikes thirteen,' which, of
course, it never does."
"Don't mind, Shirley," bantered Lusk. "When you see all 'dem troubles'
coming, sound the alarm and we'll fly in a body to your rescue."
They let their horses out for a pounding gallop which pulled down
suddenly at a muffled shriek from Betty Page, as her horse went into the
air at sight of an automobile by the roadside.
"Now, whose under the canopy is that?" exclaimed Lusk.
"It's stalled," said Shirley. "I passed here this afternoon when the
owner was trying to start it, and I sent Unc' Jefferson as first aid to
the injured."
"I wonder who he can be," said Nancy. "I've never seen that car before."
"Why," said Betty gaily, "_Ah_ know! It's Mad Anthony's trouble-man, of
course, come for Shirley."