CHAPTER XXXIV

The Inside Facts

Pell Barneyfield was now one of the fascinated auditors of the facts about to be disclosed. Though not known to the rest thereof. For he was now quietly seated on the end of the step of the trailer, off from the slightly open space of the door. Immobile. Ears directed toward that open space. Could hear all. And wanted to! Wanted to, almost, more even than he wanted to carry through his triumphant, final, and long, long-awaited act: the presentation of one present of such nature as to upset half a dozen applecarts around here: the discomfiture of one word-artist who right at this second no doubt was sitting in bathrobe shrouded and b-v-d’d self. For all the time Pell had been with the circus, he’d been baffled by that weird diorama which, from time to time, got exhibited. But on the way here this evening had fatuously believed that it was the ingenious cannon that had been sold—and, of course, Hugo’s contract. And hadn’t dared even to broach it to Hugo, lest the German, knowing nothing about being “sold down the river” go up in the air. And, as in the past, be unable to do his performance for several evenings. Nor had Pell felt able, during the recent quarter-hour, to ask MacWhorter what had been sold. Lest he hurt MacWhorter where already perhaps he was deeply wounded.

But now—now—’twas the diorama! A flimsy little diorama. A—

Pell was perhaps the most fascinated auditor of all right now. Must have been—to hold off for a brief few moments his own great moment!

“The bizarre little diorama, Steve,” the girl inside was beginning, “though actually made only about fourteen years ago, is connected in strange manner with a rich man who, retired, lived in New Orleans, around 1875 or so, and died there. And who, after taking care of the financial needs of his closest descendants—and he had quite a number!—you see, he’d married, in his day, a British-born girl, a French girl—even a German-Jewess!—had sons and daughters from all!—well, he left about a third of a million dollars with a trust company down there—the Crescent City Trust—to be paid over to his youngest living descendant as of the day on which the fund became one million dollars.”

“Ever’body,” complained Golden-Tongue, dourly, “gits to do the things I’ve always wanted to do. Yep, make an eccentric will—so that years after I’m forgotten, I—I won’t be at all forgotten—” His words sounded very much as though he was making a futile gesture with his two hands, showing too plainly the likelihood of his ever making any eccentric wills. At least any—involving a third of a million dollars!

The girl inside, if she were smiling at the man’s gesture, nevertheless proceeded to show the unfeasibility of such ambitions.

For her words continued.

“Such long-time affairs are foolish things, Steve. For when this very estate was about to become a million dollars—and which was only a few weeks ago—it seemed plainly destined to go to a wastrel and spendthrift living today in Paris, a regular no-good chap named Brewster Bonnefond—”

“Ah!” ejaculated the man. “Down from the French wife, of course! Since kids tend to marry back into their mother’s race. Well how come,” he now asked, half-facetiously, half-seriously. “a ‘youngest’ descendant could be so old as to—to be blowing 1650 francs a day on benedictine, and dining nightly on crêpes suzettes and pâté de foi gras on the Mont Martre?”

“Now, Steve!” the girl protested, “you got that touch of wastrel French life out of a book. And you know it!” But she did answer the man’s question. “Oh, a terrific lot of babies in the descendancy line all sort of—of died off, in a short range of years. Tossing the mantle of ‘youngest’ straight back on to older members. And—”

“About a year before this, however,” she changed the subject suddenly, “a certain poor little girl of New Orleans named Eliabelle Virmond—that wasn’t her legal name; went by her mother’s maiden name, you see—well, she had come tremulously to a firm of lawyers down there, named Samson, Melow, Grimes and Weacock, with papers—ever’thing, Steve, from marriage licences to birth-certificates, family corres pondence, even registered fingerprints of herself—that showed her in-dis-put-ably to be the daughter—ah—uh—ah— ‘legal daughter’, if you get me!—of a man who was himself one of the many descendants from that New Orleans nabob. Her youth—for she was then but thirteen years old—would have made her, in fact, the youngest in the descendancy. Except that unfortunately—”

“—her pah-pah had died?” helped out Golden-Tongue. “Well what diff—”

“We-ell, no—he’d been declared dead fifteen years before, after having not then been seen nor heard of, of from, by anyone, for seven long years. The child had, in fact, been born just about two round years subsequent to even his declaration of death. For the mother herself had, not long after marrying him, left him, drifted about, become sentimentally associated with other men—had a child finally by one of the later ones. And died in childbirth.” The girl paused. “But,” she swept suddenly on, “according to a recent United States Supreme Court decision, Steve, the mere birth of a child to the ‘widow’ of a non-existent man—’specially when born after his legally-declared demise—does not, per se, constitute legal proof, nor even evidence, that he was even alive during his unheard-of and unheard-from period. For the reason—uh—ah—”

“Natch!” was Golden-Tongue’s pointed comment. “Too many stags in the world for any doe to have to crop green grass alone.”

“Sometimes, Steve,” the girl in the trailer conceded generously, “I think you have the soul of a poet. In the way you can express—uh—all—again,” she half-laughed, “I—I think you like to shock people by the very way you avoid terms that—” She dropped this unprofitable line of comment.

“Anyway,” she resumed the thread of her previous words, “such was—and is—the certified law on the matter I set forth. And therefore such a child, especially when ‘posthumous’ by more than the period of its own conception, cannot, through the mere fact of its own birth, set aside the declaration of its own father’s death. And—is this too deep for you, Steve?”

“Er—lys!” Golden-Tongue’s voice held facetious hurt. “The great, deep mind of Steve Octigan—befuddled by a simple, though unique, legal situation? You’re ragging me, of course. Drive on!”

“Yes,” the girl evidently nodded acquiesence. “Well, this poor little girl, a sort of homely duckling, but talented in so many ways, was being ‘kept’ by some ‘kind’ people in New Orleans, who owned a cheap, shabby boarding-house on—on Rampart Street, since you say you’ve been there—and who made her scrub floors all day, be scullery maid, work from sun to—”

“Oh dear!” said Golden-Tongue. “My hank’chief, slave. The big one! Po-o-or li’l Eli’belle! A scrubbin’ and a rubbin’ all day long. Bring me a pail, also, slave, to wring my hank’chief out in. For—”

“No, Steve,” the girl inside the trailer was protesting. “All this really was the little girl’s state.” She paused undecidedly. “Well,” she went on, “this legal firm took up with the judge who had had to originally declare the descendant in question dead—Judge Francois Dauphinais the judge in question was—took up with the judge the matter of his perhaps setting the declaration aside. Which it seems, Steve, could be done legally, since the money involved was still in trust. And Dauphinais himself was still—on the bench. They pointed out that only thus could Eliabelle become not-posthumous; not posthumous, you understand, by that disastrous couple of years by which she was posthumous; could, in short, become the unqualified ‘legal’ offspring of her otherwise ‘legal father’——” The girl who was speaking sounded now as though she were shaking her own petite head in deprecation of what she must now set forth.

“But Judge Dauphinais,” she drove on, “much as he deplored the situation, pointed out that he could not set the declaration aside on any evidence then existing; that he would be immediately overruled by the higher courts. And standing inexorably thus and immutably pat, ended Eliabelle’s chances to qualify in an estate she had a sort of—of right to. Moral right, anyway! Since her mother had once married the descendant in question, and had never divorced him, even if she had drifted away and—

“But now,” the girl inside broke off, “we come to the really strange and dramatic feature of this whole case. The diorama! The diorama—portraying a little fish. A little fish being hanged. And which—”

“Yes,” the man inside the trailer was saying eagerly. “That’s what I wants to know about! And’s why I’ve sat here, patient as heck, darling o’ mine, and—”

“Oh gods on Olympus!” said Pell Barneyfield fiercely, out on the step of the trailer, though to himself only. “I—I can’t take it! ‘Darling—o’ mine’. Darling—of his? I—I can’t take any more of this. I—” He was off the trailer step, stepping up on it. “So help me, I’m—I’m gonna present my present ri-ight here and now. This—this very minute. And see how quick Erlys will want to marry him—when she knows I’m not her broth—gangway, ever’body. Here comes Pell—with a present!”