An hour later there was a more significant landfall than the fate of
these finny trophies. Few of the river craft kept their dates of arrival
with certainty, and this was especially the case with the general
packets. Though the water was high, the operations of the Confederates
rendered the passage sometimes unsafe, sometimes impracticable. Now and
again the Federal authorities pressed a boat into government service for
a time and released it to its owners and its old traffic when the
emergency was past. Therefore on this dull night, when no sign or news
was received of the _Calypso_, overdue some ten hours, the wharf became
deserted. Hardly a light showed on the river banks or along the spread
of the stream, save indistinct gleams in the misty gloom where the
picket boats kept up a ceaseless vigilant patrol. The gunboats, with a
vaguely saurian suggestion lay with their noses in the mud. Here and
there in allotted berths were the ordinary steamboats with their
curiously flimsy aspect, as if constructed of white cardboard, silent,
disgorged, asleep. The rafts, the coal-barges, the humble skiffs, and
flatboats were all tied up for the night. The town had lapsed to
silence and slumber as the hour waxed late. The great pale stream seemed
as vacant as the great pale sky.
Suddenly far down the river two lights, close together, high in the air,
red and green, shimmering through the mist, struck the attention of a
wanderer along the high bluffs near Judge Roscoe's house, even before a
hoarse, remonstrant, outspreading sound, the clamor of the whistle three
times repeated, hailing the landing, invaded the murky air. It was a
spell to rouse all the precincts of the river bank. Lights flickered
here and there. Hack drivers, who had given up the expectation of the
boat's arrival at any hour that would admit of the transfer of the
passengers to the hotel, heard the sound from afar, harnessed their
teams in haste, and the carriages came rattling turbulently down the
stony declivity to the wharf. Baggage vans, empty and curiously noisy,
recklessly jolted along, careening ill-poised and light without their
wonted burdens. The omnibuses, with the glow of their dim little front
windows to distinguish their approach, were soon on the scene; the
driver of one was vociferating with a hackman, because of the lack of
lighted carriage lamps, which had caused a collision and the wrenching
away of the door and the cover of the step of the "bus," swaying open
for want of a cautionary pull on the cord. Loud and turbulent did this
wrangle grow, and presently it was punctuated by blows. The crowd that
the mere sound of a fight summons from invisibility was almost instantly
swaying about the scene and hindering the efforts of the police, who
found it necessary to interfere, and while both participants were
arrested and hurried off to the station in the clutches of the law, they
left their respective vehicles like white elephants in the hands of the
remainder of the force, two of whom must needs mount the boxes to
restrain the "cattle," as the hack driver mournfully called his beasts
in commending them to police protection. The horses plunged and reared,
terrified at the apparition of the _Calypso_, now manoeuvring and turning
in the river, the paddles beating upon the water with a splashing impact
as the side-wheels slowly revolved. The ripples were all aglow with the
reflection of her red furnace fires, and her cabin lights sent long
avenues of white evanescent radiance into the vague riparian glooms. The
jangle of the pilot bells and the sound of the exhaust pipes came
alternately on the air. And presently the great white structure was
motionless, towering up into the gray uncertainties of the night, the
black chimneys seeming to fairly touch the clouds, the lacelike guards
filled with flitting figures all in wild commotion pressing toward the
stairway.
Albeit the discharge of the freight would not take place till morning,
the scene was one of great confusion. In accordance with the regulation
which the military occupation of the country required, the passengers
rendered up their passes on deck to the officer who had boarded the
vessel for the purpose of receiving them, permitting the travellers to
depart one by one through a guarded gate, but it was impossible to
identify them after they were once on the wharf. Hence there was naught
to distinguish from the other passengers a gentleman carrying a
portmanteau, who entered an omnibus, save that the wharf lamps might
have shown that he was handsome, taller than common, with a fine
presence and gait, and clad in garments of unmistakably English cut and
make. The night clerk of the hotel evidently saw nothing else unusual in
the stranger as he stood under the gas-jet to register at the desk in
the office, almost deserted at this hour--not even in the momentary
hesitation when he had the pen in hand. He wrote "John Wray, Junior,
Manchester, England," had a room assigned to him, and passed on to the
late supper, for which Uncle Ephraim's negligence had prepared him to do
ample justice.
Julius did not appear next morning at the usual breakfast hour. The
terrors of the Chinese gong, that was wont to rouse the laggards as it
howled about the hotel under the belaborings of a stalwart waiter,
failed to stimulate his activity or break his slumber. The fatigues and
dangers Julius had encountered had prostrated him. He was unconsciously
recuperating, gathering strength for the rebound. He did not wake,
indeed, till near noon. He turned once or twice luxuriously in the
comfortably sheeted bed--at his home they had not dared to purloin linen
from the household store to furnish his couch in the attic--and then,
with his hands clasped under his head, he lay with a mind almost vacant
of any conscious process, mechanically, quietly, taking in the details
of the place. The sun sifted in at a crevice of the green shutters of
the window that opened to the floor and gave upon a wide gallery
without--now and again he heard at considerable intervals the passing of
a footstep on this gallery. He noticed the wind stir and the flicker of
the shadow of foliage on the blinds. The room was in the second story,
and he knew that there were trees in a space at the rear of the
old-fashioned little hotel. The furniture was of a highly varnished,
cleanly, straw-colored aspect, of some cheap wood that refreshingly made
no pretentions to be aught but what it was, for on the bureau drawers,
the head and foot-boards of the bed, and on the rocking-chair was
painted a gay little bouquet of flowers in natural but intense tints. A
fresh Chinese matting was on the floor, and muslin curtains hung from
poles supported on pins that had a great brass rosette or boss at the
extremity. The building enclosed a quadrangle, bounded by the river at
the lower end. On each of the other three sides the wide galleries of
the three-story brick edifice overlooked the grassy space. He had
learned that the hotel had gone into the hands of a new proprietor, but
even were it otherwise he hardly feared recognition, although he had
been born and reared in the immediate vicinity. At his time of life a
few years work great changes. The boy of nineteen was hardly to be
identified in the man of twenty-two, with his mustached lips, his
broadened shoulders, his three inches of added height, and the
composure, confidence, and capability conferred by those years of
activity and emergency and responsibility working at high pressure. Some
old resident might recognize the Roscoe eye, but he knew he could trust
the kindly associations of "auld lang syne" to avoid the sifting of a
casual recollection. Besides, this was hardly likely to befall, for the
town was an ever shifting kaleidoscope of confused humanity. It was full
of strangers,--Federal officers, on service and unattached, on leave of
absence, wounded, and their families; special correspondents; hospital
nurses; emissaries of the Sanitary Commission; enterprising promoters of
all manner of jobs, and the horde of nondescript non-combatants that
hangs on the rear of every army, seeking the many methods of securing a
windfall from the vast expenditures of money and goods necessary to
maintain a great force on a war footing. He was hardly likely to meet
any one who had ever known him, or even his father, in his stay at the
hotel, which he must contrive by some method to make as short as
practicable. Then suddenly a great dismay fell upon him. He lifted his
head and gasped as he looked about him for something that was gone! His
treacherous memory!--in the prostration of his mental faculties by
excitement and fatigue, in the lull of his long slumber, he had
forgotten the alias he had registered as his own name on his entrance to
the hotel. He thought of half a dozen of the most usual nomenclature,
striving to goad his mind to a recognition of each in turn as the one he
had selected. He was in desperation. True, he might have an opportunity
to study the register and could recognize his own handwriting. But
something--anything might occur in the interval in which it might be
necessary to give the name he had assumed, and any incongruity with the
registered alias would be fatal. Every casual step along the hall on one
side, or the gallery on the other, threw him into a sudden tremor as he
prefigured a stoppage, a knock, an inquiry--"Are you Mr. Alfred
Jones?--here's a note for you. Messenger waits for an answer."
"And _I_ don't know whether to answer as Mr. Jones or not!" he said to
himself in a panic. He might turn away a note of warning from his
father, who possibly had recognized his handwriting on the register, of
greeting from Leonora in whose face he had seen an appalled
commiseration as he sped past her yesterday in his father's hall; or it
might be that some Confederate agent within the lines would hear of his
plight and contrive this way to communicate with him. No matter how
cautiously worded, his was not a correspondence at this juncture to
decline to receive, and to turn lightly over to the investigating
scrutiny of all the A. Joneses to whom it might be presented. On the
other hand he might "throw all the fat in the fire," should he meddle
with the large correspondence of the Jones family by opening sealed
missives bearing their name, obviously not intended for him, if he had
registered as Abner Smith.
Julius was about to spring up, throw on his clothes, and rush to the
register, when the name struck him with the force of conviction. _John
Wray_--That was it! _Manchester, England!_ The address had been selected
to take advantage of the typically English clothes. He meditated upon it
as he sat upright in bed. He had added the "Junior," for the sake of
verisimilitude. He smiled with satisfaction to have regained it.
Then--"I must have something to fix that in my memory," he said.
He looked fruitlessly about. He had no paper, save the map in the lining
of his boot, no pencil, no pen and ink, naught for a memorandum. Then
with his gay youthful inconsequence--"Constant repetition will settle
it--Mr. John Wray--Mr. John Wray; Mr. John Wray. How do you do to-day?"
He threw himself back on his pillow, laughing at the unintentional
rhyme.
"I'm a poet--if I did but know it!"
His irrepressible youthful mirth found its account in the most untoward
trifles.
"There it is again!" he said to himself, "I have destroyed the sequence
of my ideas. I am just as likely now to say, 'I am Mr. Poet'--or perhaps
with the notion that I have got to butt out of this somehow--'I am Mr.
Goat!'"
He laughed again, yawned lazily, stretched his arms upward, and fell
back luxuriously on the bed, resting his tired muscles.
He lay staring at the design of the wall-paper, which was in scrolls of
brown that, as they whorled over clear enamelled spaces of creamy white,
enclosed an outline in fainter browns and yellow,--a scene of waves
breaking on rocks and surmounted by a lighthouse; a far and foreign
suggestion to this deeply inland nook, and refreshing, for there was
more than vernal warmth in the air. And presently, still repeating--"Mr.
John Wray, how do you do to-day?" he slipped off into a half-conscious
doze from which he was roused only by a knock at the door.