# Peewee/Chapter 14

The peculiar understanding of one another which existed between the hard old operator and the boy made Peewee appreciate that Beman was anxious. The old man sat silent, watching the clock. When the long hand had traveled nearly all its way round, his great head with its shock of snow-white hair sunk toward his chest as if in disappointment. He straightened suddenly and listened as the doorbell rang. A servant appeared in the door and Beman nodded to him with relief. The servant retired, and Peewee stiffened as the big form of his grandfather appeared in the doorway. The man who followed Lampert was small, dapper, completely bald, with a crafty, hawk-like face. He was, Peewee understood, the lawyer.
Did Beman intend Peewee to remain? He ​had not sent him away. As Lampert, perceiving him, fixed his gaze upon him, the boy hitched away from him nervously and stared at him angrily.
His grandfather, since Peewee had seen him, had taken on still more the look of a man who would not work. He appeared, Peewee saw uneasily, triumphant.
"This is an unfortunate business, gentlemen," Beman remarked.
"Unpleasant, Mr. Beman—unpleasant on all sides," the lawyer put in unctuously.
"Beman—" Lampert began. The lawyer checked him.
Peewee shrank unhappily. Beman was not threatening; he was not fighting. Whatever it was that he had learned it had, apparently, conquered the old man.
"You are Mr. Rubenwall?" he said to the lawyer.
"Yes, Mr. Beman."
Peewee saw anxiously that Beman waited in a subdued way for them to commence; when they did not, he was obliged to speak.
​"There is some evidence, I understand, which you have discovered," he conceded.
The lawyer rubbed his hands; he had apparently been waiting for this. "Will you allow me, Mr. Beman to state the facts?"
"I'd be glad if you would," Beman agreed.
"Before the death of Mr. Lampert's daughter," the lawyer stated, "her family had not seen her for some years. There had been previously a still longer period when they had not known her whereabouts. You know, I have been told, the particulars of the discovery at the time of her death that she had a son."
"Just so," said Beman. "This is the boy."
Peewee moved uneasily upon his chair as all three turned to look at him. He avoided Lampert's gaze and stared resentfully at Beman. Beman's placating manner was causing him bitter bewilderment.
"Mr. Lampert had had so little recent communication with his daughter," the lawyer went on, "that he was as much surprised as others by the existence of this child."
Lampert seemed about to interrupt, but the ​lawyer stopped him by a gesture. "I speak of this, Mr. Beman, because Mr. Lampert's ignorance regarding the boy is one of the reasons why the discovery Mr. Lampert has now made was not made earlier. Two days before she died, Mr. Lampert's daughter sent for him and his wife and told them about the boy. Following her death, Mr. Lampert, as supposedly her nearest relative, assumed charge of his daughter effects."
Peewee remembered that; his grandfather had assumed charge particularly of his mother's rings.
"Among other things which came into Mr. Lampert's hands was, naturally, her trunk. The trunk contained, besides wearing apparel, such articles as a woman would be likely to accumulate in a number of years of—er—nomadic life."
"You mean letters?" Beman inquired.
"There were, among other things, a large number of letters."
"From Markyn?"
"None, so far as Mr. Lampert has yet found, ​from him. Mr. Lampert set himself to the careful examination of these letters."
"Naturally." Beman broke in. The dryness of the old man's tone gave Peewee for the first time a ray of hope. Beman, it showed him, was not being fooled. Beman comprehended, as clearly as Peewee did in his precocious wisdom, that Lampert had examined the letters to see if they gave him a chance to blackmail.
"This examination took—if Mr. Lampert will pardon my saying so—a considerable time when conducted by a gentleman of Mr. Lampert's limited education. Because of that, these many weeks elapsed before Mr. Lampert discovered, enclosed in one of the letters—with which, however, it had nothing to do—the evidence to which, Mr. Beman, you just now referred."
"It shows," Lampert broke out truculently, "that she'd ought to been living with him in his big house all the time; she'd ought to have had her servants—"
The lawyer stopped him. Peewee trembled at the assurance of his grandfather's voice.
​"Just what is this?" Beman asked.
"What Mr. Lampert found was the written statement of a minister, legally correct, that on the eighteenth day of October, 1908, he performed the ceremony of marriage between Walter Wendell Markyn and Helen Lampert—"
"We've had the thing looked up," Lampert exclaimed. "We've found the town and the place where the ceremony was done. She'd ought to have been riding in her automobile all the time; she'd ought to have had money to send to her folks and have us to live with her."
Beeman listened silently.
"As Mr. Lampert says, our evidence shows that Helen Lampert, for more than ten years, was deprived of her marital rights," broke in the lawyer.
What, Peewee wondered, were marital rights?
"Helen Lampert is dead," said Beman. "It don't matter to her now what she was deprived of. What we're discussing here is the effect of this upon my granddaughter."
"That is why we came to you, Mr. Beman."
"Got this thing with you that you speak of?"
​The lawyer took an envelope from his pocket. Lampert moved to interfere.
"You can trust me," Beman assured him.
Peewee thrilled excitedly. He thought that Beman, if they let him take the paper, would tear it up. He sank back in disappointment as the old man, having looked through the writing, merely gave it back.
"I ain't going to ask you yet how much you want from me for this," Beman remarked. "All I'm going to ask is, supposing I buy this now, what's to prevent you and Ben Lampert from sitting down and writing out another one and coming around and expecting to sell me that one too?"
Peewee shook. Beman got up with difficulty from his chair and moved on his stiff old legs to the hearth-rug and stood facing the two men.
"I wasn't sure about all this," he said. "He might have been fool enough sometime to marry her. But now I know, if this is how you had to get at the thing, he didn't. So I ain't asking you now what more there is you've got. You've figured out about the witnesses and license, I ​suppose. Maybe you found some place where those things could be faked, or where the court-house and its records had been burned. I ain't interested in that. This thing wasn't made up to carry into court. It was made to sell to Walter Markyn. When I found that you were ready to sell to some other buyer—that's me—I thought it probably was a frameup. If you hadn't come here, I wouldn't have known quite what to think. I've seen you both here now, and I've seen part of what you've got. That is enough for me."
"We expected you to do some talking, Beman."
"I'm doing it. You listen!"
Peewee shivered at Beman's voice which, thin and cracked with age, had become suddenly that of the cold-blooded operator who had watched callously his fortunes fail or grow, who had ruined twenty men and had himself been ruined half as many times—of the gambler who had fought not only against men, but had staked his all against drought and flood and taken his toll of dollars out of famine.
​"There's been a lot of scandal said about me in my time. You might take note there's never been a word or line about my women folks. Once long ago a man came to me and wanted money not to print some lie about my oldest daughter. He didn't print it because by the next day noon I would have shot him dead. I was a young man then; I don't do things now in just that fashion."
"This is a legal matter, Mr. Beman."
"You listen to me. You're to drop this talk of Helen Lampert and her son entirely. I don't mean merely that you're to keep it out of court; there's to be no other kind of publicity." The voice was clear and cold and hard as ice. "If you splash my granddaughter's name with one drop of your mud, I'll ride you—I'll ride you both. If you don't know what that means, ask the boys on the Board of Trade about other men I've ridden. You've both got pasts that won't bear looking into; most men have. If you haven't, I'll make them for you. Do you get that? I know what kind of men I'm dealing with; I'll make pasts for you. I've got the ​money and the influence and, old as I am, I've still got the brain to bedevil you both until you'll wish that you were dead. There'll be no city big enough and no village small enough for you to hide in. The only dollar you'll ever get again will be by begging. You understand me?"
"We hear your actionable threats."
"All right. Read that!"
He moved stiffly to the table, took a paper from the drawer and threw it toward the lawyer. The lawyer hesitated, stooped and picked it up.
He read it and his hands dropped at his sides.
Peewee watched him curiously, wondering what this meant.
"All right," the lawyer said. "I'm through."
Lampert swore loudly. "You're what?" he asked.
"I'm through. I drop the case. You'll drop it too, if you are wise."
Lampert moved angrily to seize the paper, but stopped at the lawyer's gesture.
"You'll permit me, Mr. Beman," the lawyer inquired, "to read this to my client?"
Peewee strained forward in his excitement to ​hear. He could not distinguish all, as the lawyer read in a low, rapid voice; he could catch sentences.
"State of Illinois, County of Cook." What had that to do with it, Peewee wondered? "Whereas the undersigned Henry Mellen to-day appeared before me." What followed this Peewee could not hear. . . . "Deponent states he is, and was upon the twelfth day, of June, 1919, employed as a physician in the office of the coroner of above county." Peewee's experience had shown him what a coroner was. More. words followed which he could not make out. . . . "Did upon the twelfth day of June, 1919, perform upon the body of one Helen Lampert an autopsy." Peewee did not know what that meant. He caught other, but not directly succeeding words. . . . "Due to suspicion of death by drugs administered with murderous or suicidal intent." This was not plain to Peewee. . . . "Resulting in determination that death had ensued from natural causes, complicated and induced by exessive use of alcohol and drugs." There. ​was no understanding this stuff, Peewee decided. . . . "All as now upon file in records of the coroner's office. Deponent further states that the above Helen Lampert, upon whose body he performed this autopsy, had never borne a child."
Peewee stared at Beman in perplexity. The words of the last sentence, taken just as words, were plain; their meaning he could not at first make out. His mother, the words said, had not had a child. But here was Peewee and Lampert, he saw, was as perplexed as himself.
"Why look at him!" Lampert exclaimed. "Don't he look just like his father?"
"But not like your daughter," Beman returned.
Peewee commenced to understand. Lampert—what was it Beman had called it?—forged, Lampert had forged a marriage, and Beman had forged to beat him. He had fooled the lawyer, who stood with his hands hanging limply at his sides. He had, Peewee could perceive by Lampert's manner, fooled Lampert too. They did not know the truth so well as he ​himself did; they had not been there when his mother, dying, had told him that he was her son.
"We quit," the lawyer said to Lampert. "If she had no kid, what's to be gained?"
Peewee understood still better. Beman had not attacked the false evidence of marriage; he had instead taken away the stake for which Lampert had played—the claim on Walter Markyn through Peewee's mother. Peewee was not capable of putting this so plainly for himself, but he comprehended the significance of it from the manner of Lampert and the lawyer. Lampert, he appreciated, did not any longer believe himself to be Peewee's grandfather, and Peewee was grateful to Beman for that, even though he himself still realized the relationship. Lampert and Rubenwall, still examining the paper, were talking together in low tones. They did not know that it was Peewee who had set Beman on them, and thus indirectly had defeated them.
Did what Beman had done to them mean that he no longer intended that Mrs. Markyn should ​be told? Peewee, recalling the inexplicable change in Beman which he had noticed, commenced to think it did. The old man saw the boy gazing at him and smiled dryly back at him, and Peewee warmed pleasantly at this sign of understanding between them. He looked again at the two men and back at Beman as he stood upon the hearthrug—massive, his hands clasped behind his back, his old legs wide apart and his great head pushed forward. Then he sidled off his chair and went and stood beside him, clasping his small hands behind his back and putting his short legs wide apart like him, and the two watched as the servant showed Lampert and Rubenwall out.