“Where is Mr. Smith?” asked Mrs. Carter, as she helped the company to
soup.
“Yes, where is he?” repeated Mr. Whacker, looking up in surprise.
“Perhaps he does not know that we are at dinner.”
“After conducting me to the parlor,” explained Mrs. Poythress, “he
excused himself and went to his room. I fancied he was not very well.”
“Indeed!” said Mr. Whacker. “Zip, you go—”
Charley made a motion to Moses,—Zip for short,—and rising from the
table and bowing his excuses, he left the room.
“I am a little afraid,” continued Mrs. Poythress, turning to me, who
chanced to be her nearest neighbor at table, “that your friend
over-strained himself in that tremendous leap he made to save me from
falling. I am sure I felt his arm tremble as we walked towards the
house. Then he was so very silent. Is he always so?”
“Generally; though I do not think it is altogether natural to him. He
seems to constrain himself to silence from some motive or other; but
every now and then he loses control of himself, it would seem, and
breaks forth into a real torrent of brilliant talk,—no, brilliant is
not the word—though torrent is. When he bursts forth in this
impassioned way, he carries everything before him. By the way, his
leaping is of the same character. Do you know I had to change my shoes?
For when he sprang to catch you, he actually knocked me into the water.”
“What eyes he has! Such a concentrated look! And no one,” she added
after a pause, “has any idea who he is?”
“Not the slightest.”
“Is it possible? What a number of strange people your dear old
grandfather has contrived to bring to Elmington from time to time! Where
he has found them all, or how they have found him, has always been a
mystery to me.”
“Yes, but the Don is not one of grandfather’s captures. Charley must
have the credit of bringing him in.”
“Then he is a good man,” replied she, with decision. “Charley never
makes any mistakes. But here comes Master Charles.”
Every one looked up on Charley’s entrance. As for that young man, he
looked neither to the right nor to the left. “Mr. Smith will be down
presently,” said he to Mrs. Carter. As he strode around the room to take
his chair, his firm-set lips wore a rather dogged expression, as though
he would warn us all that, so far as he was concerned, the conversation
was ended; and, hastily taking his seat, he began a vigorous attack on
his soup, as if to overtake the rest of the company. Somehow every one
was silent, and the isolated and rather rapid click of Charley’s spoon
was distinctly audible. Alice smiled, and conversation beginning to
spring up around the table, “I fear your soup is cold,” she began.
“The soup was cold?” asked he, looking up. “I am very sorry.”
“I didn’t say that,” replied she, quickly. “I remarked that I was afraid
yours was cold.”
“Mine?” asked he, looking puzzled. “Why?”
“You were detained so long up-stairs.”
“Oh!” said he, renewing the assault upon the soup. “You are right,” he
added; “it is ratherish cool.”
Alice was foiled. “I believe Mrs. Poythress called you.”
Charley leaned forward.
“Nothing serious, I hope?” asked Mrs. Poythress.
All eyes were fixed on Charley, every ear intent to hear his answer to
this question, which Mrs. Poythress alone had ventured to ask. For a
moment this master of fence and parry stood confounded; but only for a
moment. “Nothing to speak of,” replied he, with careless simplicity,
and, leaning back in his chair, he glanced at Uncle Dick. Richard,
briskly, though with averted face, came to remove the soup-plate, and
then hurried out of the room to have a quiet chuckle.
“Tain’t no use, Polly; dey jess as well let Marse Charles alone. He is a
keener, he is, umgh—umgh! Dey ain’t gwine to git nothin’ out o’ him, ef
you b’lieve Dick, dey ain’t, mun.” And the old worthy’s sides shook with
laughter. “Dey has been tetchin’ her up pretty lively dis mornin’, dat’s
a fac’, and dey wet Dick’s whistle for him, dey did, ef you b’lieve me,
and more’n once, too. Well,
‘Christmas comes but once a year,
Den every nigger git his shear.’
“Hurry up, gal! hurry up!”
“Don’t come round me, boy, wid your ‘hurry up, hurry up.’ Don’t you see
I’se hurryin’ up all I kin hurry up already? I b’lieve you is drunk,
anyhow!”
“Pretty close to it, thank de Lord.
‘Christmas comes but once a year,
Every nigger—’”
“I tell you git out o’ dis kitchen, and mind you don’t fall and break
dat dish, wid your ‘Christmas comes but once a year.’ Go ’long, boy. Dat
ham’s seven years old, and you jess let it fall!”
“Hi!” thought Uncle Dick, as he entered the dining-room. “What’s he
doin’ at de table?”
Richard was surprised.
For, as I am pained to have to say, the Virginians had in those days the
very irrational habit of drinking before dinner; and it was to this fact
that Uncle Dick alluded in the somewhat figurative language recorded
above. If the truth must be told, our venerable serving-man never
doubted but that the Don stayed up-stairs simply because he was too
drunk to come down. The facts were far otherwise.
“Charley,” said I that night, as we were smoking our last pipe, “what
was the matter with the Don to-day? Why was he not with us when we sat
down to dinner?”
“Because,” said Charley, lazily lolling back in his rocking-chair, and
sighting with one eye through a ring of smoke that he had just projected
from his mouth,—“because he was in his room.”
“Another word, and Solomon’s fame perishes.”
“It is a well-known physical law” (Charley used to avenge himself on me
in private for his silence in general company),—“it is a well-known
physical law,” said he, inserting his forefinger with great precision
into the centre of the whirling ring, “that a body cannot occupy two—”
“To be continued in our next. But why was he not punctual, as usual?”
“Nothing simpler,—because he was behind time.”
“Solon, Solon!”
“Yes, Sir William Hamilton has well observed that it is positively
unthinkable that the temporal limitations of two events occurring at
different times should be identical. Let’s have another pipe.”
Charley had forced me to change the subject; but I contrived to make the
change not very satisfactory to him. “By the way,” I began, “what were
you and the charming Alice saying to one another on your way from the
landing to-day?”
Charley laid his halt-filled pipe on the table and gave a frightful
yawn. “Let’s go to bed,” said he, and immediately began to doff his
clothes with surprising swiftness.
“Two bodies,” said I, striking a match, “cannot”—Charley kicked off one
boot—“occupy the same space”—off flew the other; “but, as Sir William
hath well put it,—or was it some other fellow?”—and leaning against
the end of the mantel-piece, and poising myself on my elbow, I assumed a
thoughtful attitude,—“two bodies are sometimes fond of being very close
together. Why this sudden and uncontrollable somnolency? Were we not to
have another pipe?” But not another word could I get out of Charley; and
nearly four years passed by before he gave me the account (which I will
now lay before the reader) of what he saw that day.
The Don, as we know, had escorted Mrs. Poythress from the landing at the
foot of the lawn to the house, and had gone immediately to his room. As
she leaned upon his arm, he had seemed to her to be tremulous; and a
certain disorder in his features as he left the parlor had led her to
fear that he was not well; having, as she surmised, given himself an
undue wrench in his efforts to arrest her fall. Then, when the Don had
failed to put in an appearance at dinner, Charley had gone in person to
his room. To a gentle tap there was no reply, and successively louder
knocks eliciting no response, a vague sense of dread crept over him, and
his hand shook as he turned the knob and entered the room. “Great God!”
cried Charley, stopping short, as he saw the Don stretched diagonally
across the bed, his face buried in a pillow. There he lay, still as
death. Was he dead? Charley hurried to the bedside with agitated
strides, and leaning over the prostrate figure, with lips apart,
intently watched and listened for signs of life. “Thank God!” breathed
Charley. For reply the Don, with a sudden movement, threw back his right
arm obliquely across his motionless body, and held out his open hand.
The released pillow fell. It was wetted with tears. Charley clasped the
offered hand with a sympathetic pressure that seemed quite to unnerve
the Don; for the iron grasp of his moist hand was tempered by a grateful
tenderness, and convulsive undulations again and again shook his
stalwart frame. For a while neither spoke.
“You will be down to dinner presently, I hope?”
The Don nodded, and Charley crossed the room and poured out some water
and moved some towels in an aimless sort of way.
“I’ll go down now; come as soon as you can.”
Another nod.
Charley moved, half on tiptoe, to the door, and placing his hand on the
knob, turned and looked at the Don. A sudden impulse seized him as he
saw the strong man lying there on his face, his arm still extended along
his back; and hurrying to the bedside, he bent over him, and taking the
open hand in both his, with one fervent squeeze released it and hastened
out of the room. But he had not reached the door before there broke upon
his ear a sound that made him shiver.
It was a sob.
One!—No more! It was a sound such as we do not often hear and can never
forget,—the sob of a strong man, bursting, hoarse, guttural,
discordant, from an over-wrought heart,—a stern, proud heart that would
stifle the cry of its bitterness, but may not. A look,—a word,—the
touch of a friendly hand,—has sufficed to unprison the floods.
So, once, the dimpled finger of childhood pressed the electric key; and
the primeval rocks of Hell-Gate bounded into the air.