I stopped for a moment on the doorstep. P Street in Georgetown looked like an old-fashioned Christmas card, and when I closed the door behind me I could hear the chains of passing cars like hollow sleighbells.
I shook the snow off my hat, listened to its sharp sizzle in the crackling fire in the living room, and drew the curtains aside to look out on the snow-covered back garden. The room, the fire, the snow-peaked frames over the dark boxwood, the patches of warm light from the window, the inside, the tea-tray on the low table in front of the chintz-covered sofa . . . all of it made the fact that a blue revenue stamp on a pack of cigarettes is worth six cents, and that racketeers steam them off and cheat the government out of a million dollars a year, seem very unreal and far-fetched, some way. I dropped the curtain in place again, thinking how remote crime is from ordinary people’s lives. It seems peculiarly silly, now, that I should have stood there just then, boggling about Sergeant Buck and crime. As Roger Doyle’s aunt Miss Isabel said a day or so later, “You know, my dear, I think it’s just as well we don’t know what Providence has in store for us, I really do.” And I dare say she’s right, except for the Providence part of it. I shall personally always doubt that Providence had any hand in what happened in Chatham Street in Alexandria, Virginia, on the night of February 3rd.
Certainly I had no remotest inkling that the dark foreshadow of that night was already lengthening across the path—even less that it was creeping up my own doorstep at that moment, behind the light young feet scuffing off the snow against the old iron mud scraper. Karen Lunt and the scene in K Street were as far away as summer at April Harbor, my colored cook Lilac waddling up out of the basement kitchen, muttering darkly to herself as she answered the tinkling doorbell, was no more ominous than usual when she’s interrupted starting dinner. Then I heard her voice, high-pitched whenever she’s pleased, say, “ ’Deed, Miss Jerry, come right in. Law, chile, you bin wallowin’ in th’ snow? Let me brush you off. There you is!—Mis’ Grace, here Miss Jerry!”
And there was Miss Jerry the very next instant, glowing from the crisp cold night, her copper-colored hair red-gold in the firelight, framing her flushed pointed little face, her tortoise-shell eyes shining like stars, so radiant and alive that I positively gasped.
“Darling! What’s happened? Have some tea!”
“Oh, everything’s happened, Grace!” she cried. “And I’d love some. Milk and no sugar.”
Jeremy Candler pushed the fraction of brown velvet hat off her bright curly head, deposited it with her bag and newspaper and woolly gloves on the chair by the door, and flopped down in the sofa beside me.
“Have you seen the evening papers?”
I shook my head.
“I just got in. Anyway, I avoid them as long as I can. My young are getting too near war age. What is it?”
She loosened her short beaver jacket and took the tea cup I held out to her and ate three hot marmalade rolls one after the other. Then she said, “Nothing, really—unless you read between the lines. Oh, Grace, it’s marvelous!—Dad was at the White House today.”
I looked blank. Everybody goes to the White House these days. Then I remembered, with a sudden catching of my breath, what some columnist had written about Judge Candler.
“Do you mean——”
She put her fingers across her red lips.
“You mustn’t breathe it, Grace! It’s all an awful secret, and it’s not settled, nearly. Won’t be for a month, perhaps. But I had to come by, Grace! I’d have burst, or driven too fast and gone in the Potomac before I got home, or something shattering. I’m so happy I could die!”
She laughed again. “The boss thought I’d lost my mind, or had a bottle of champagne in the wash room!”
Then suddenly she became more serious than I’d ever seen her, even Thanksgiving Day when her young brother who goes to school with my younger boy—which is how I happen to know her—had such a pain that it didn’t seem possible it was just an old-fashioned stomach ache and we had three doctors in to take out his appendix on the kitchen table.
“You know, Grace,” she said, and stopped, her wide-set yellow-brown eyes fixed on the fire. “—But I don’t suppose you do know at all, there’s no reason you should.”
She stopped again and smiled. Then she said quickly, “Dad’s had pretty tough going.”
I didn’t say anything. Judge Candler had always seemed to me one of those extraordinarily untouchable people who dwell outside the common world. I’d never known him, however, except by reputation and the most occasional meeting at rather staid receptions, until the school holidays of the past winter. A fifteen-year-old boy always under foot can be an astonishing catalyst. Whatever tough going there’d been I’d more or less assumed had been on Jeremy’s side of the road. It was she who took over when her mother died and raised her freckle-faced younger brother, and put up with her harum-scarum older one, Sandy, so her father could keep his head and heart in the clouds. Still, an airplane can hit bumpy patches ten thousand feet up, and I suppose men can too, even in the rarefied heights where Judge Peyton Candler lives.
“I don’t mean he’s ambitious,” Jeremy said quickly. “I mean, not like . . . some men are.”
I was a little surprised. I’d never thought of him as striving to get where he’d got.
“Not for money, I mean. I don’t think he’s ever thought about it. It would have made it easier, sometimes, if he had.”
She smiled suddenly.
“I’m being a pig, and I don’t mean to. And anyway, that’s all over. But I mean after mother died, and he was appointed to the Court of Appeals, it seemed as if everything was—was marvelous. It was what they’d wanted, he and Mother, and all of us. Then he got sick and had to give it up.”
I nodded. I remembered that from the newspapers.
“He was so frightfully conscientious, and he wouldn’t stay on the Court and let the others do his work. Anyway, the doctors all said he’d die, he couldn’t live six months.—That was just when the Doyles came back from New York and bought our old home across the street.”
She gave a strange little laugh.
“He used to hate it so when Mr. Doyle would come and boom out about it being the drawback of Cavalier ancestry, that he was glad his ancestors were Irish navvies brought up on potatoes and peat smoke. Of course he was just trying to cheer him up, but, . . . well, you know.”
“I know,” I said. “I hate cheerful people when I’m sick. I’m sure I couldn’t bear it if I knew I was dying.”
“That’s what I used to think,” Jeremy said. “Then he got well. I guess the Cavalier blood was pretty good after all.—And now!”
She got up. The firelight glowed in the burnished glory of her hair. “It’s too wonderful! It’s just as if being poor and so tragically alone, and then being so ill, and coming back, had all made him a so much bigger person, really bigger! Oh, he’s marvellous, Grace—I adore him!”
She stood there by the fire, slim and young. I thought, “It’s you that’s done the heaviest part of it, my lamb—you with your own Cavalier blood.”
It was the Cavalier spirit burning there now in her
