The insubordination of the youthful students at Great Oaks was happily
at an end, but their educational problems remained. These promised
Desmond food for much thought for an indefinite time, and roused him to
an ingenuity of expedients to secure the best efforts of the young
scholars themselves. For a time success swayed in the balance
indeterminate. Sometimes it seemed impossible to break to habits of
application, to harness the attention of these wildly roving minds. He
did not love the spectacle of wounded pride, but the heroic treatment of
bluff ridicule had the happiest effect.
“For a fellow to have passed through the Suez Canal, to have seen the
Assouan Dam, and the Sault Canal, and the Segovia Aqueduct, and the
Ganges Canal, and the Solani Aqueduct, and have no more conception of
the principles of hydraulics than a mule shipped in a stock-car has of
the motive powers of a steam-engine! You didn’t notice?—neither does the
mule.”
Reginald was letter perfect the next day in such elementary exposition
as the text-book on Natural Philosophy afforded concerning locks, dams,
jetties, and the varied utilities of controlled waters; and Desmond,
with a touch of self-reproach, called him into the library that evening
after dinner, and made himself very gay and entertaining with stories of
college life, details of hazing, rushes, athletics, such as had but a
bitter flavor to his memory now, though likely to please the fancy of a
destined collegian. Once or twice afterward Reginald dropped in again,
his eyes bright and expectant; but the tutor had no immediate cruelties
to atone for, and was dreary and sad himself, and of no mind to lacerate
his sensibilities with reminiscences of happier days. He gave himself up
to such solace as he could find in a book, and Reginald, quick of
apprehension, sat on the other side of the table, a book in his own
hands, albeit his attention wandered now and again to the black panes of
the windows, where he could see the moon in the sky and a brilliant and
shattered luminary fallen below, which he knew was the lunar reflection
in the Mississippi River. The very touch of a book Desmond considered
salutary, and thus he did not rebuke Reginald’s failure of attention.
In truth, Desmond felt that he needed his evenings apart. He worked so
hard with his difficult and unmalleable material during the day that he
was likely to forget his disappointments, his perverted destiny, his
many feuds with Fate. But he had not ceased when alone to set them in
order before him, to canvass futile ways and means for a counter-stroke,
to ponder with rancor on men who had made settlement of the financial
difficulties impossible, and others who had found profit in pushing him
to the wall. He would have his revenge, he resolved; he would pay them
back in their own coin, some day,—some day,—and suddenly he would feel
the sting of his own sharp ridicule as he would bitterly laugh aloud and
demand of his utter helplessness how this might betide. Though it was
now little more than a year since his father had died at the critical
moment of a business enterprise of magnitude, which wrecked in its
collapse his other interests, it had been already demonstrated that, had
he lived, it would have succeeded signally,—indeed, in the hands into
which it had gone, it was more than justifying the confidence of its
projector. Desmond, who could not retain a single share for the lack of
means, meditated ruefully on the sums spent in completing his course of
study according to his father’s directions, before the condition of the
decedent’s estate was definitely ascertained, and how these funds might
have been applied to more utilitarian purposes. He was often too
depressed, too distrait, too irritated by the untoward results of the
day’s labor, to care to read; but a book in the hand was a protection
from the intrusion of the family on the polite theory of not seeming to
exclude him from their social life. He had been sent for once or twice
in the evening to join a game at cards with Mr. Stanlett, Mrs. Faurie,
and Reginald; but afterward, when he saw the boy’s figure appear on the
veranda without and flit away softly from the library window, he was
glad that the report that he was busy with books and papers had
protected him from that irksome interruption. His leisure was not of
pleasant flavor with his embittered memories, but it was his own bit of
time with himself, and if he had come to be not a merry man, he could
make no compact with a new identity. Sometimes he had a sudden thought,
an abstract thought, as unsolicited, as unexpected, as beneficent as an
angel’s visit, and he wrote. So late the light burned from the library
windows night after night, so consecutively, that the pilots of the
river craft came to reckon that stellular gleam among their nocturnal
bearings betokening the Great Oaks mansion.
Desmond soon began to take little note of other interests save indeed
his pedagogic duties. He had begged off several times when guests,
strangers of course to him, had come to dine. He was writing something,
he once told Mrs. Faurie, confidentially; then he was offended by the
eager alacrity with which she had excused his presence at the table, and
the promptness and deftness with which the brisk waiter had served his
dinner alone in the library. He did not write at all, that night. He
smoked pipe after pipe of his own strong tobacco, instead of Mr.
Stanlett’s fine mild cigars sent in with the dinner tray, although he
esteemed it in the nature of “breaking training” as much now as when he
was a star “half-back” on a crack Eleven. He meditated much and long
over the bitter problems of the various degrees of want and woe
expressed in poverty absolute and poverty relative, and in what actual
wealth consists, and if the rich are not often paradoxically the poor,
and if the poor,—but he felt that the converse was a more difficult
proposition to be maintained, to demonstrate that the poor are ever by
any fortuitous circumstance to be considered the rich.
The winter was wearing away,—the passing of time marked only by the
gradual development of approximate symmetry in the minds of the pupils;
the slow budding of the trees of the grove, that had been the favored
haunt of deer some fifty years earlier, before the marauding currents of
the river had carried away the point called formerly “Faurie’s Landing,”
amounting to near a thousand acres, thus bringing the mansion house
forward on the banks of the stream, within half a mile of the levee,
indeed; the adding of page after page to the record of the thought that
had come to him in the deserted library in the midnight;—when there
suddenly befell one of those incidents in which he played an important
part, that were as links in a chain of events, fettering the lives and
fortune of all in the house and many besides. This, the first of these
significant happenings, came about in the simplest way, its importance
all unrecognized at the time.
It was morning, and in the library his pupils sat at their books, when
there sounded a sudden tap at the door. Desmond turned, frowning, and
looked over his shoulder. In response to his summons the footman
entered, his face irradiated by subdued excitement; he presented
formally, however, the compliments of Mrs. Faurie, who would be glad to
see Mr. Desmond and his pupils in the parlor, Colonel and Mrs. Kentopp
having arrived.
Chubby sprang up with a whoop. It would be difficult to say whom he
would not have welcomed with like enthusiasm to rescue him from the
grisly lessons.
Desmond rebuked him sternly, while the young servant looked on in amaze.
“Say to Mrs. Faurie that Mr. Desmond and his pupils beg to be excused,
as the hours for lessons are not over.”
It is impossible to describe the look of wall-eyed remonstrance with
which the footman hearkened to this message, and to emphasize his own
opinion of it he closed the door so slowly that Desmond was sorely
tempted to bound up and kick it to after him.
Chub, on the verge of tears, was tempestuous in argument,—his mother had
sent for him, he plained, and he was not allowed to go,—in the midst of
which a second tap at the door heralded the footman, with a change of
face if not of heart. Mrs. Faurie begged Mr. Desmond’s pardon for the
interruption, but would be glad if Mr. Desmond would shorten the study
hours by ten minutes in order to meet Colonel and Mrs. Kentopp in the
parlor before luncheon.
“Hi, Bob, they goin’ to stay to lunch?” cried Chub, hilariously. “Did
the children come?”
Bob’s grin of assent was petrified on his face.
“Take your seat, Rufus,” said Desmond, sharply. “You must want to do
some extras for penance.” Then to Bob, “Shut—that—door!”
A great gush of talk and laughter issued from the parlor as Desmond
approached it before luncheon. It scarcely seemed as if so limited a
coterie could keep astir so cheery a conversational breeze, but Mrs.
Kentopp was vivacity itself. She was about thirty-eight years of age, of
medium height, but very slight. She impressed him at first as somewhat
haggard, but he soon perceived that this was the effect of the dye or
blondine, which heightened the natural tint of her light hair to a
golden hue, that required special freshness of complexion to accord with
this embellishment. This disparagement was obviated when she laughed,
for a becoming flush came and went in her cheeks, and her light blue
eyes danced. She was handsomely gowned in pastel-blue cloth, heavily
braided, with a hat of the same shade trimmed with the breast of the
golden pheasant. She wore long tan gloves on a hand so small and soft
that Desmond almost thought the fingers boneless, for despite her air of
condescension, she shook hands with him in the cordial southern fashion
on informal occasions.
“You have not given us the opportunity to welcome you earlier to this
benighted region, Mr. Desmond,” she said, laughing always. “Misery loves
company!”
Her husband was tall, portly, fair, and flushed, with a bright, round,
brown eye, dark hair, and a clean-shaven, square face. He was dressed in
sedulous conformity to the dictates of the most recent fashion of
gentleman’s garb, and this dudish suggestion was queerly accented by his
peculiarly open and genial manner and his ringing, hearty voice. He
strode quite across the room, and most cordially clasped the stranger’s
hand. But Desmond appreciated that it was a very keen, searching, and
business-like glance that Colonel Kentopp bent upon him, singularly
unrelated to his jovial, haphazard manner and joyous tones. Desmond felt
that it held an element of surprise, and that he was altogether
different, for some reason, from what Colonel Kentopp had expected to
see. Mrs. Kentopp, too, turned after a moment and seriously surveyed him
through her gold-handled lorgnette, as he was replying to the civilities
addressed to him by her husband. Concerning the newcomers Desmond made
his own cursory deductions, almost mechanically, for they did not
interest him in the least. He fancied that Colonel Kentopp rather valued
himself upon his amiability and popularity, and was even prone to make
it evident that his two children, a girl and a boy, were fonder of him
than of their mother. They came in ever and anon from the veranda, where
they raced and chased with Chubby, to acquaint him with some juvenile
news, some change of moment to them, such as they had fed the parrot, or
that Chubby had a Shetland pony, and they hung upon him, one on either
side, their cheeks against his hair, their arms around his neck. Their
neglected mother seemed no whit disconcerted by her supersedure in their
affections, and talked on blithely to Mrs. Faurie and Mr.
Stanlett—especially to the old gentleman, with whom Mrs. Kentopp
exchanged many compliments and affected to hold a very gay flirtation.
At the lunch-table Desmond would have felt quite apart from the
occasion, since they were all old friends and had many subjects in
common of which he knew naught, but that Colonel Kentopp, with his
genius for geniality, persisted in drawing him out, making him talk,
appealed again and again directly to him, and would not suffer him to be
ignored by Mrs. Kentopp, who seemed disposed now to flaunt her
condescension and now to give him the cold shoulder, albeit ever and
anon she fixed upon him a surprised, contemplative gaze that temporarily
stilled her brilliant, laughing face. Desmond could not imagine and he
did not care in what respect he did not meet their expectations, and
although he responded in good form to Colonel Kentopp’s lead, he was not
sorry when the meal, unusually prolonged, was over at last, and he was
free for the afternoon.
He betook himself, as soon as the party had scattered sufficiently, to
the library, where he sank down in one of the easy chairs to rest, not
his bodily frame, but his tired mind and heart. He had not wished to
seem to hold aloof from the family by withdrawing to his own room, yet
he felt intrusive with them and their friends, who were no friends of
his. He found the library a neutral ground; in some sort it befitted him
and his calling. The quiet solaced him; the atmosphere of the books was
always friendly; the traces of the scholastic labors were all effaced,
shut up in the deep abysses of the drawers of the table; the fire glowed
upon the hearth. He was more and more at ease as he rested, and the slow
hours of the afternoon wore on. The shadows began to slant on the level
reaches of the long vistas under the oaks; the sunlight had that dreamy,
burnished splendor that embellishes the southern winter; it loitered
slow, content, its progress imperceptible. All was still; not a sound
reached his ear save the distant chatter of paroquets flitting about the
pecan trees as if still in search of nuts. He could see from where he
lounged in the great armchair the long stretch of the Mississippi River,
the light reddening the hue of its murky floods, the ripples tipped with
a sparkle like gold; he noted as often before the peculiar conformation
of its surface, the curving centre rising apparently so much higher than
the margins, which slanted downward still toward the interior after the
manner of the banks of deltaic rivers; the opposite shores were merely
distinguishable as a line of soft, tender green. Here and there a trio
of white sea-gulls poised, then winged away, and again darted down
toward the water, evidently roving hundreds of miles up from the Gulf
intent on fishing. He was not reading; his mind seemed quiescent, blank.
The intensity of his emotions, the dull discouragements of his position,
had worn on him more than he was aware. He was mentally resting. He had
no conscious thought, no recognized intellectual process, when suddenly
he gave a start to perceive a figure standing at the French window that
came down to the floor of the veranda. It was Mrs. Faurie. She opened
one of the long sashes from outside, and entered without ceremony.
“Why, how cosy you look in here!” she exclaimed. “‘There are none so
deaf as those who will not hear.’ No wonder you did not answer.”
“Were you calling me?” he asked, with an apologetic cadence. He had
started to rise, but Mrs. Faurie had herself sunk into a chair, and he
resumed his seat.
She was looking about her with an intent, bright interest. “I think that
we never quite appreciated this old room. What a scholarly look your
rearrangement has brought into it! That old telescope,—why, you have
mounted it again! How nice to put it in the centre of the bay-window—it
is just the right height for observations of the sky, and can sweep it
in three directions. Somebody yanked it off its stand long ago to read
the names on passing steamboats from the veranda.”
As she leaned her elbow on the arm of the chair and turned her
beautifully poised head, he could not keep his eyes from her. She
embodied to his mind the poetic ideal of all the beauties of fable or
history. She was as a flout to the commonplace aspect of the day, to her
associates, her surroundings, her own words and identity, and to
himself. He could not accustom his eyes to such peculiar and preëminent
perfection. Her charms seemed heightened at the moment by the
embellishments of dress; for since luncheon she had made a toilet for
the afternoon, of a richness which she had not hitherto affected,—a note
of compliment to her guests. She was younger of aspect; her face seemed
that of some radiant girl, though proud, assured, dominant. Her gown was
of gray silk, quiet in tone and not heavy of texture, the brocaded
pattern being a plume shading from darker gray to a tip of white. She
wore on her richly tinted brown hair a velvet picture-hat of the same
gray hue, with a line of vivid white about the brim, and apparently the
ostrich plume of gray, that the brocaded gown simulated, coiled about
the crown, its white tip drooping to her shoulder. And against this
neutral background the splendor of her beauty glowed, her complexion so
exquisite, her lips scarlet, her gray eyes so full and fine and lordly
in their expression, and with those imperious brows so delicately drawn
above. Somehow he could not hold his own before them. Never heretofore
had eyes challenged him that he dared not meet. Her evident
unconsciousness of the impression her beauty must make upon him added to
his embarrassment. It was like talking to one in a mask or under a
disguise. He could not speak to mother of hobbledehoys, householder,
butterfly of fashion, while these incongruous characters were blended
into the personality of Juno, or the ideal of the moon, or a muse of
poetry. He was glad that she busied those radiant glances in scanning
the sombre old room, and his chance bedizenment of it with such cast-off
gear as had come to his hand.
“Are the lenses of the telescope all right? Well, that’s a blessing! And
you have brought out that old geological cabinet.”
“It contains some quite valuable specimens,” said Desmond. He deprecated
his tone; it seemed to him as if he were making excuses. “A few are
genuinely rare.”
Mrs. Faurie nodded her comprehension. “So I suppose; an uncle of Mr.
Faurie’s had quite a fad in that direction.”
“Mr. Stanlett?” asked Desmond, surprised.
“No,—Mr. Stanlett is my uncle. This was a relative of Mr. Faurie’s, with
quite literary tastes; and oh,—that old screen!—I had forgotten it
completely,—skeleton leaves mounted between plates of crystal.”
“There is nothing so symmetrical, to my mind, in all nature as the
various tree-forms,” Desmond commented; “those outlines are grace
itself, both in the denuded shape of the leaf and the tracery of the
veins. Their preparation is exquisitely done.”
“They look like lace!” she remarked. “If you are fond of tree-forms, you
ought to have a beautiful time in the woods at Great Oaks”—she drew a
deep sigh. “We have little else to offer as entertainment; but we are
long on wilderness! Will the children study botany?”
“Perhaps,—as a reward of merit,—when they shall have learned something
in the indispensable branches.”
Mrs. Faurie hastily changed the subject. “I am glad that you find enough
interest in these things to resurrect them. I remember now that they
were in that big old mahogany press in the alcove.”
She rose suddenly, opened the door of the press, and looked in, her head
poised inquiringly. There seemed nothing to attract her explorations,
and she returned to her chair.
“That’s where you found the frames for those old steel engravings; the
arrangement of them is very inspiring, much better than that ragged old
portfolio, which I see you have relegated to the press, where it ought
to be. I wonder what used to be in those frames; but they are the very
thing for steel engravings.” For between the bookshelves and the row of
cupboards below, a blank space of paneled wood had received a series of
small framed portraits of the great men in the world of letters and
scientific achievement. The pictures were unharmed by time, save for
spotted and yellowed margins, but the suggestion of antiquity better
accorded with the old and worn fittings of the place than fresher
equipment.
“What did you find of interest in the cupboards of the bookcases?”
“They are locked,” said Desmond, a trifle out of countenance to have
tried doors obviously closed against intrusion.
“Why, how odd! There must be lots of things in them which would interest
you.” As if she could not trust the vigor of his experiment, she rose
once more and flitted across the room, trying first one, then another of
the small doors. They were without knobs, and only a key that might fit
could open them. She had evidently broken a nail in her efforts to draw
the doors ajar by the moulding, and she was looking somewhat ruefully at
her dainty fingers as she returned. Not to remain seated at ease while
she labored to open the obdurate cabinets, Desmond had followed her
about the room, making similar efforts wherever the door seemed a less
close fit; and as she took her chair by the fire he resumed his place
near her, listening attentively as she talked on. “I remember that there
are many old English periodicals there,—the ‘Gentleman’s Magazine,’ the
‘London Magazine,’ the ‘Annual Register,’ all from the beginning of
their issue, and a thousand old scientific and literary pamphlets. Why
should they be locked up? Perhaps Uncle Clarence may have the key; if
not, we may find one about the house that will fit, or on that little
trading-boat where Chubby bought my apple, don’t you know?”—with an
animated glance. “It has been off on the bayous and lakes since then,
and it dropped down the river to-day and tied up at our landing—it may
have a bunch of keys among its treasures of junk. We must try that
expedient, at all events. I know you would enjoy exploring those nooks,
and you might find something that would interest you. What are you
writing?—something for publication?”
He drew back in surprise, embarrassed, half flattered, protesting. “Oh,
no,—only jotting down a few thoughts that struck me,—of no value to the
public,—for my own entertainment, or rather my own satisfaction,—a sort
of argument, pro and con, on some questions of political economy that
were never clear to my own mind, never justified to my own point of
view. It is in a sort a dialogue, thoughts that, expressed otherwise,
would bore the life out of any interlocutor.”
“But why don’t you arrange to write something for publication while you
are here, Mr. Desmond?—not history, for of course this library is too
general in selection to afford you the data requisite, but—something
else; why won’t questions of political economy do? something—I don’t
know what,—but something for publication and permanent interest.”
“Why, I couldn’t,” said Desmond, flushing painfully, so close had she
come to his grief for the relinquished ambitions of achievement. “I am
not capable of that kind of thing. Besides, I came here to teach—”
“Surely you don’t have to sit up o’ nights to prepare for Chubby’s
lessons! And you can’t work the boys all day; you have to let them
stretch their muscles in the afternoon. You think that more consecutive
time would be necessary,—more concentration—well, perhaps,—I am not up
to such things myself. Such ideas as I have are originated in the
twinkling of an eye. At all events, you have made this a mighty pleasant
place to read and rest and jot down any vagrant ideas that may be
roaming around when your day’s work is done.”
She lay back in her chair and let her eyes rove smilingly about the
changes in the aspect of the room. “I shouldn’t be surprised if you will
have to share the library now. I dare say that all the rest of us will
want to ‘butt in,’ as the boys say.” She laughed with a mischievous
relish of the grotesque phrase and its unseemliness on her dainty lips.
On the low marble mantelpiece were figures in bronze of two of the
muses, Clio and Calliope, evidently costly and of some artistic merit,
and Desmond had crossed on the wall above them two long swords, that had
stood in a corner of the room, genuine relics of warfare that had seen
grim service, and in their way carved out records in both history and
poetry. An oil painting, a spirited battle-piece, was still above, the
scarlet uniforms giving an intense note of color among the prevailing
tints of grape-blue with which the room was furnished. Desmond had not
inquired as to its subject, and the signature of the painter was not
familiar to him. Its execution did not rise above a respectable
mediocrity, save for the central figure, a commanding officer, who, with
raised hat and mounted on a white charger, seemed galloping down the
line of troops and straight out of the picture at the spectator.
All these details did Mrs. Faurie successively scan as she sat languidly
pulling on a pair of long gray gloves; all were brought into new
significance, into added harmony, in the readjustment of the room. She
seemed at great leisure, and it was some time before she spoke again.
“You give a very beguiling aspect to scholastic labor. I don’t think
that I should mind learning a thing or two, myself, from you here.”
She looked at him with a smile touching the curving lines of her lips.
His cheek flushed. He lifted his head as he returned her look. It was a
fine head, and was well poised on his broad shoulders. That wonderful
magnetic smile of hers was addressed to him, and he must needs have been
more than human had he not responded to its subtle, unconscious
flattery. He had been so reduced in pride, in the esteem of the specious
world, so thwarted, agonized, deprived, humiliated, that this look of
interest, of rallying mirth, of alluring charm, was singularly suave to
his sensitive perceptions. For a moment his face was as it used to be;
his dark blue eyes had a serene light, confident, spirited; they were
smiling in their turn. His expression was lifted out of its wonted cold
constraint,—it was earnest, ardent; and he seemed to Colonel Kentopp,
pausing at the window on the veranda, as handsome a man as could be
found between Lake Itasca and the Balize; he was stricken with amaze by
the mutual expression of the two.
“It would be my place and privilege to sit at your feet, Mrs. Faurie,”
said Desmond.
Perhaps because she was acclimated to the language of admiration and
missed it sorely at Great Oaks, perhaps because she was so genuinely
pleased with the tutor as a tutor that she could but approve him as a
man, she cast upon him a warm radiance from her beautiful eyes, and
broke out laughing and flushing as a much younger woman might have done.
“What a pretty speech, Mr. Desmond,—and how pitifully insincere! What
under heaven could you hope to learn from me?”
He had not seen before that exquisite dimple in her cheek, for she
seldom laughed with such exuberant mirth, or perhaps he might not have
answered with such definite aplomb.
“I should learn those higher things beyond the ken of books,” he
declared.
Before the fire was quenched in Desmond’s eyes, the pose of his head
shifted, the flush on his cheek faded, while yet the whole changed
aspect of the man was patent, Colonel Kentopp conceived it beneath his
dignity to stand on the veranda and look in the library window at what
seemed to him singularly like a flirtation between his hostess and the
tutor of her sons. He forthwith laid his hand on the window-catch, and
as it clicked in opening, Mrs. Faurie turned and burst into a peal of
silvery laughter while he slowly and ponderously entered.
“How funny!” she exclaimed. “Where is our walk on the levee? Have all
our party fallen by the way or dispersed? I took upon me the mission to
find Mr. Desmond, and I suppose the rest sent you to find me.”
Colonel Kentopp could not smooth out the frown that would gather and be
dissipated to corrugate his brow anew as he listened. She seemed all
joyous unconsciousness and insouciance, yet this might be affected. He
could not judge whether she was merely carrying off the awkwardness of
having been so absorbed in the tutor’s conversation as to forget her
waiting guests and her own errand, which was to invite him to join the
party in a walk along the levee, or whether she was genuinely interested
as she called Colonel Kentopp’s attention to the changes by which Mr.
Desmond had so enhanced the attractions of the library. Colonel Kentopp,
who was as far removed from the possibility of the appreciation of any
literary point as a man of intelligence and education can well be,
surveyed with blank assent the details which she indicated to him.
“I thought,” he could not refrain from saying, “that you always declared
that you did not care _un sou marqué_ how things look at Great Oaks
Plantation.”
“But this is not ‘things’—it is thought; it was done with an idea,—an
inspiration. There never was a duller and a dowdier old room, and now it
is replete with suggestion, with charm, with all the allurements of
learning; and miracle of all, without the expenditure of a cent of
money.”
“Take care, Mrs. Faurie,” said Colonel Kentopp, laughing in that
mirthless, rallying way in which privileged friends give themselves the
pleasure of saying a disagreeable thing in the guise of jest; “after all
your open-handed career, you may become a miser yet.”
“Heaven send the day!” she exclaimed. And long, long afterward Desmond
remembered the phrase and her look as she uttered the words. “It might
be better for me and mine if the open hand had been always the close
fist.” Then she broke off suddenly,—“Why, there is Mrs. Kentopp.”
For that lady was coming in, laughing very much, which always started
her pink flush to justify her blonded hair, and declaring that she had
almost gone to sleep on the sofa in the parlor, while they neglected her
and kept her waiting. If Colonel Kentopp had had scant appreciation of
the esthetic value of the changes that Desmond had wrought in the aspect
of the library, Mrs. Kentopp’s glacial, superficial glance at its
details implied absolute disregard. It might have been a lesson to
reduce the vanity of those purblind insects denominated men of science,
who grope about the hidden meanings of the universe, who seek to
“unclench from the granite hand of Nature her mighty secrets,” to bring
near the stars, to revive the dead life of the rocks, to discern the
brush that paints the flower and leaf, to descry whence comes the
fashion of the cloud, to find out the paths of the trackless oceans,
could they have appraised the degree of Mrs. Kentopp’s contempt for
their objects as her eyes rested upon the insignia afforded by the
telescope, the geological cabinet, the skeleton leaves, the epitome of
history and poetry above the mantelpiece. Her flout of intentional
inattention was so patent, her air of minimizing, almost ridiculing the
importance of the tutor and all which to him pertained, that it became
obvious to the other two that the afternoon walk was in order, and they
were presently sauntering down the veranda, while Desmond ran for his
hat.
To Desmond’s surprise, he was not in the slightest degree mortified, nor
intimidated, nor crushed by Mrs. Kentopp’s manner, as she had doubtless
intended he should be. He was noting the fact that, despite their
apparent intimacy, these people did not call each other by their
Christian names after the manner of their sort elsewhere. It had never
been the custom in this region, where a certain formality of the old
regime still lingers, and he felt a kind of special gratitude that he
was not called upon to endure to hear Mrs. Faurie address Colonel
Kentopp as “Tom,” and his wife as “Annetta,” and their responsive
familiarity to her as “Honoria.”
The four walked abreast along the winding avenue under the boughs of the
dense trees of the grove, which was perfectly clear of undergrowth and
as level as a floor. Now and again the colonnades formed by the great
boles parted to show beautiful open, grassy vistas amongst the gigantic
growths that had given the place its name; but the eye could reach no
limits of the forest, save on one side where the river had come
“cranking in and cut a monstrous cantle out.” The party struck off
presently into a byway, which at length brought them into the road at
the base of the levee. Here they climbed the great embankment covered
with Bermuda grass. The short, dense growth was evidently feeling the
spring of the year in its thick mat of roots that held the earth
together, being an almost impervious network of innumerable, interlacing
fibres, and of special utility because of its imperviousness in times of
“fighting water.” As they took their way along the broad path upon the
summit, they could view from the elevation, of peculiar advantage in so
flat a country, a vast circuit of the surrounding landscape. The water
was high and the river was still on the rise. The space outside the
levee seemed to Desmond to have shrunken very perceptibly since he had
seen it a few days before. This strip varied greatly in width; now it
looked at the distance as if it might measure a mile or more, and at
certain points it showed only a few hundred yards, with here and there
marshy intimations and disconnected pools where the water stood and
reflected the light like oval mirrors. The sun, down-dropping, vermilion
red, had turned all the currents of the great stream to crimson, and as
it sunk lower and lower the shadows began to gloom in the dense woods on
the hither shore, albeit there was still a line of gilding sunlight
glinting along the forest summits.
It was all very quiet; not a craft was visible on the currents; the vast
river was absolutely mute. Despite the fact that this is one of the
great highways of the world, a natural channel from boreal to
subtropical climes, designed, one might fancy, to bring man near his
brother man, without reference to his own ingenuity of device,—in
conquering the wilderness, harnessing the steam, annulling time, and
obliterating distance,—it could have seemed no lonelier were theirs the
first of human eyes to rest upon it. There was no trace, no suggestion
of man’s presence, save the great embankment of the levee along the
river-side, now and again receding so far inland as to elude the sight,
and the newly arrived “shanty-boat” lying at the landing.
This craft held the degree of comparison with the usual trading-boat of
these waters that a junk-shop bears to a warehouse. Desmond’s attention
was first attracted to the humble and grotesque nondescript vessel when
Chub, nimbly footing it in his trim little knickerbockers and
well-filled stockings and natty Paris shoes, to overtake the group,
joined his mother; he began to bang upon her, his arm about her waist,
his head lolling against her arm, begging and pleading with her to buy
him a bicycle,—a beautiful second-hand wheel,—which the amphibious
trader had assured him was as good as new.
“But you have your own wheel,” she remonstrated. “You actually want
another? You would have to be a quadruped to ride both.”
“And a long-eared one at that!” Colonel Kentopp declared, somewhat
nettled; for his own small son had come up on the other side, casting up
lustrous, anxious eyes, beseeching that if Chub did not secure this
treasure, dear, _dear_ papa would open his heart and purse and bestow it
upon him; for woe to tell! he had no bicycle whatever,—he had only a
tricycle, and a bitter blow it was to his pride when Chub rode a safety
and he could only accompany him, bowed to the earth, as it were, on a
humiliating three-wheeler.
“My wheel?—Gracious! my wheel is all out of whack!” cried the tumultuous
Chub. “Just look at it, mamma,—that is all I ask. Just go down to the
trading-boat and look at the wheel,—a—beautiful—second-hand—bike!”
“But, Chubby, it would be out of the question for you to own two wheels
and both already used—”
“Mine’s got a punctured tire,” wailed Chub.
“Gimme second choice,—if Chub don’t make it; lemme have it, papa dear,”
beguiled the Kentopp hopeful.
It had been Desmond’s firm determination, rigidly observed so far, that
he would have no concern with his pupils other than scholastic. He would
consider the trend of the conversation in their presence, as indeed is
necessary always in association with young persons, that the equilibrium
of their moral, political, or religious convictions be not shaken till
they are of sufficient age and discretion to exercise a sober and
independent judgment. He would direct their thoughts to subjects of
value in their general reading. He would impart information or correct
mistaken impressions in the course of casual chat. He would in moments
of recreation narrate details of special interest or amusement, and thus
further incidentally the judicious development of their mental
faculties. But with the problems of their control outside the
schoolroom, their sports, their manners, their moral training, he would
not tax himself. This was in a manner interference, however salutary,
and might be resented by those in actual authority, resulting in anarchy
for the youths, and their last estate would be worse than their first.
He thus argued that he did not stand in _loco parentis_; he was simply a
machine for the furtherance of learning, a paid purveyor of wisdom, and
when his day’s work was ended his responsibility ceased for the day.
Therefore he was surprised at himself when he stepped forward briskly,
as Mrs. Faurie, with a somewhat doubtful and disconsolate air, yielded
so far as to agree to examine the treasure, and turned to the descent of
the levee on the outer side.
“Let me go and examine the wheel, Mrs. Faurie, and report its condition
to you; I understand these machines better, probably, than you do.”
She turned back with a wave of the hand,—a fine, free gesture at arm’s
length. “A rescue!” she exclaimed. “I was just wondering if I could
survive the unmitigated boredom of the tires, and the bell, and the
handle-bar, and the pedals, and the saddle. Is the date set for your
canonization, Mr. Desmond? Go, by all means, and add another to your
deeds of grace.”
But Chub emitted a disconcerted whine. “I don’t wish you to go, Mr.
Desmond,” he plained, with the unwitting insolence of juvenile
sincerity.
Desmond was not out of countenance; he even sustained the furtive sneer
in Mrs. Kentopp’s face. “Just as it happens, I don’t care in the least
what you wish.”
“Now, there it is, mamma. I want the bike, and Mr. Desmond doesn’t care
what I want; _he says so_.”
“It ought to be little trouble to teach the logical ideas of the clever
Chub to shoot straight,” commented Colonel Kentopp.
“Well, then,” Mrs. Faurie could not resist, “suppose I go, too. Mr.
Desmond can instruct me as to the perfection of the tires and the bell
and the handle-bar, and the tumbling guaranty, warranted to give the
best headers in the market,”—she was looking down with her gracious
maternal smile at Chub, as in his tumultuous callowness he clamored and
clung about her skirts (“Oh, rats! mamma, it’s got no tumbling
guaranty,” he interposed),—“and in the mean time I can meditate on the
price.”
“But, mamma, it is cheap, it is dirt cheap, it is dog cheap.”
“What is the price?” Desmond demanded.
When Chub responded, the tutor might have had a salutary monition of the
discretion of his resolution to keep apart from the affairs of his
pupils outside the schoolroom. “You just wait and see,” said Chub,
sullenly.
“Come!” cried Mrs. Faurie, her foot poised on the verge of the outer
descent of the levee, her skirts held daintily clear of the grass with
her left hand, her right about the shoulders of the enterprising Chub.
She looked back with bright expectation at the Kentopps as they stood
motionless.
“Thank you, no,” said Colonel Kentopp. “We will await you here. I shan’t
put myself in temptation’s way. To be dragooned into buying a crippled
bike from such a trading-boat as that would be the final blow to my
paternal authority.”
He and his wife looked gravely after the pedestrians while standing
together on the summit of the levee. The sparkle and suavity of their
countenances, addressed to the exigencies of society, were dying out.
They both seemed years older in a moment. Mrs. Kentopp’s haggard pallor
was unrelieved by the flush that was wont to come and go as she laughed,
and a certain pendulous effect of the cheeks became noticeable in the
immobile contemplativeness of her expression. Her husband was more
saturnine than one could have imagined from his arrogations of bonhomie.
He had a spark of irritation in his eyes, too sharply flashing to have
been kindled merely by the persistence of his little son, now picking
his way after the group bound toward the trading-boat, now pausing
irresolute.
“Mr. Stanlett is certainly in his dotage!” Colonel Kentopp exclaimed
acridly. “I never could have imagined him guilty of such folly as to
bring that man here.”
“Why, what is the matter with the man?”—his wife had a short, crisp
tone, level and direct, and all devoid of the little aspirations and
sudden rising inflections and exclamatory interludes which interspersed
the tenor of her usual discourse.
“The matter,—why, he is as handsome as a picture! He has the dignity of
a lord, and I never saw a man who seemed more highly bred.”
“Well,”—she drawled, “don’t you consider those facts advantages? A
stranger in one’s house is always a nuisance, but it is better that a
tutor or governess should be as genteel as possible.”
“Great Scott! Annetta, how can you be so dense? He is a man whom Honoria
Faurie might very well elect to fall in love with and marry.”
Mrs. Kentopp laughed in derision,—not her breathy, flushing, becoming
laughter, but a simple cackle of scorn. “Why, he is young enough to be
her son.”
“He is ten years younger,—that is all.”
“_All!_ Ten years is enough. No doubt she seems an old lady to him.”
“You wouldn’t think so if you had caught a glimpse of his face as I saw
them talking together in the library. They would make a very comely
married couple.”
“Why, Tom Kentopp, you are wild! She would have to give up that big
income if she married, thirty thousand dollars of it every year are as
certain as taxes, chargeable on the whole estate, and the Great Oaks
crops besides,—and take instead only her dower rights in Tennessee,—just
a life-interest in a third of the real property, with that old Nashville
residence, in a locality that is awfully unfashionable nowadays,—she has
never lived there since Mr. Faurie’s death,—and a fourth of the
Mississippi property. And such a sacrifice for such a man,—a penniless
tutor! Why, if it were not way down here in the swamp, he would seem
hardly of more consequence than a courier.”
“Exactly; it is a mighty lonesome country for a pretty widow, and he is
a mighty fine man.”
Mrs. Kentopp grew grave. “I never was more surprised than when he came
into the parlor. I expected to see a little lean, wizened body, like the
man they had last,—little Mr. ——, Mr. ——, I have forgotten the little
animal’s name. This man is not at all what a tutor should be in
appearance; he carries himself as if he owned the world. And his look of
cool, assured gravity is positively insulting. I don’t think that he
gave himself the trouble to fetch out a smile throughout luncheon.”
“He was not amused, perhaps,” Colonel Kentopp suggested.
“But he should be amused when his betters choose to be merry,” the lady
retorted.
“It would be a deuced unpleasant thing for us,” her husband resumed the
matrimonial speculation. “As long as Mrs. Faurie is in the world among
her peers, and the value of that large and certain income is forever in
her mind, with the bliss of spending it, and living like a princess, I
am not afraid. Besides, the lords and counts would back out the instant
the settlements would reveal the awful trap that Faurie set for his
successor. But this man, this Desmond, would be mighty well satisfied
with the division that gives her a life-interest in one third of the
Tennessee real estate and a fourth part of the personalty there, and a
fourth absolutely of everything in Mississippi. It would be a long sight
better than tutoring. He would be mighty glad for another fellow to be
hired to teach Chub,—especially with Chub’s own money. Mrs. Faurie is at
no expense on her sons’ account—except such as is voluntary; she gives
them those costly foreign trips, for instance.”
“But _she_,—she wouldn’t be satisfied with that provision;—she would not
give up her income for any man living.”
“This is a very exceptional man, and this is the jumping-off place of
all creation,” persisted Kentopp.
Mrs. Kentopp’s shallow eyes scanned the far reaches of the Mississippi.
The sun was no longer visible, but the vermilion reflection was still
red upon the rippling waters, for the afterglow was in the sky. “I don’t
see how Honoria Faurie manages so badly as to come to the end of her
income in this way; it is positively ridiculous,” she said, with a sort
of petulance.
Colonel Kentopp bit off the end of his cigar and spat it forth with an
expression that suggested it might be bitter, but his thought was
wormwood. “Oh, she even anticipates her income as far as she can,—she
spends at such a clip! She bought her steam yacht with her _savings_,
Chub told me.” He smiled derisively. “It is in dock now; it ought to
have been chartered while she is on dry land.”
“And her automobile is another extravagance; why couldn’t she hire a
touring-car for the little time that she is rusticating while abroad?”
“Princesses don’t stoop to such economies, that is, abroad. Economy
befits the swamp. I have nothing to say against the diamonds, although I
think she might well have been satisfied with the Faurie family
jewels,—nor yet those wonderful emeralds, for such ‘savings’ have an
intrinsic value. But it does seem a most mischievous mischance that she
should have to _faire maigre_ here in the swamp just at this time, with
such a hero of romance as Mr. Stanlett has introduced as tutor.”
“Mr. Stanlett never saw him till he was engaged and had arrived. I heard
him say that the whole matter was arranged by correspondence through Mr.
Keith, the boys’ guardian. It seems that he and the tutor had some
mutual friends. I understand that this fellow has an exceptional
collegiate record,—though if he has, I should think he could get a
better place. But why should his presence here concern us, do you
think?”
“Because if there were a prospect that the Faurie property might come on
the market for division, as the result of her marriage, at any
reasonably early day, we should never be able to sell Dryad-Dene
Plantation to Jack Loring. He evidently much prefers Great Oaks.”
Her face lowered heavily. “I was just beginning to think of that,” she
said, now dully out of sorts.
“There are actual advantages,” he argued. “Dryad-Dene Plantation is
subject to overflow, and Great Oaks rarely goes under unless their cross
levee breaks. Our lands are cut up with bayous and sloughs, while Great
Oaks has thousands of acres as level as a floor and as dry as a bone.
And then the old house, the groves and the glades. Loring is as new as
yesterday, himself, but he wants a place reeking of ancestors and
aristocratic traditions.”
“I don’t see why; it is his one merit that he grew in a single night! It
is Jack that has shot up so surprisingly this time, and not the
beanstalk,” said Mrs. Kentopp, sourly.
“He isn’t going to stay new. That is the reason he does not locate
somewhere else. The Great Oaks air of the _ancien régime_, its
shabbiness and out-at-elbows look of romantic poverty, the ruin of
princes, on account of that woman’s grudging neglect, when it is really
bursting with richness and luxury, would fill his bill exactly. Loring
would be furnished with all manner of aristocratic hereditaments, and in
ten years people would forget that he was not born at Great Oaks. His
people were natives of this region, and his name is familiar in
Deepwater Bend; he would rather own Great Oaks than anything else his
millions can buy. Let him once hear of that prince-in-disguise-looking
tutor, of fine family and exceptional cultivation, in constant
association with the beautiful Mrs. Faurie! He is not precipitate at
best. He will wait till the division of the Faurie estate consequent
upon a second marriage puts Great Oaks up at auction to the highest
bidder.”
Mrs. Kentopp’s face seemed in anxiety to suffer somewhat of a collapse.
How, it might be impossible to describe, but now her blonde hair showed
that much of it near her face was false, when its naturalness of
arrangement had rendered this suspicion impossible hitherto. She was one
of the women not pretty, but who contrive to compass that reputation by
assuming the pose, the conscious attire, the bridling expression. As she
looked now, the coquettishness of her equipment was a painful commentary
upon her appearance, haggard with disappointment and foreboding. For the
Kentopps had scant affinity with this secluded life in the Mississippi
bottom, and they had not had such resources as Mrs. Faurie for shaking
its mud—one cannot say its dust—from their feet for indefinite periods
of absence. The sale of Dryad-Dene Plantation, with its elaborate
industrial equipment and beautiful modern residence, would make possible
the dream of their lives,—its transmutation into a handsome town house
in New Orleans and a summer cottage on the Gulf coast, with lands enough
somewhere at the minimum price to rent out to tenants to make cotton, as
lands are created to do, to furnish an income for the absentees. But
purchasers for a property of such value as Dryad-Dene are rare, and the
_ci-devant_ swamper, Loring, who had grown very rich by speculation, was
one of the few men who cared to invest in so inconvertible an asset as a
fine house and large plantation in Deepwater Bend. A species of
self-assertion it was to him, perchance. Here where he was born, as poor
as poverty, though of genteel and respectable parentage, he could, as a
bit of luxury, own the finest estate around which the river curved, and
in the scene of his early privations have its magnates in hot
competition to place their splendid holdings in the best light for his
somewhat supercilious appraisement.
“It would be idiotic,—it would positively be ridiculous—and she ten
years older,” Mrs. Kentopp declared bitterly.
Suddenly, like the lightning-change effect of a performer on the stage,
she resumed her wonted aspect as if by magic. Her cheeks rounded out;
her flush came and went; her lips were again curving and plump with
distending smiles over her white teeth; her eyes were all a-sparkle; and
she was waving the end of her long feather boa in a response of
exaggerated mirth to a fancied greeting from the door of the
“shanty-boat” far below. Mrs. Faurie was issuing thence, lifting one of
her delicate hands, gloved to the elbow in gray kid; but the gesture was
one of protest. She was not looking at her guests, but after a loutish,
grotesque, thick-set man, of amphibious suggestions, who was springing
with great leaps up the bank with an open knife in his hand. With this
he so swiftly cut die rope that held the boat to a gnarled old tree,
that the craft, feeling the impulse of the current, began to move from
the shore before Mrs. Faurie could step from the gang-plank of the deck
to the ground. As it was, the ripples ran over her feet, and she
exclaimed aloud in agitation and sudden fright. She was safely on the
bank when Desmond, still on the deck, sprang lightly across the
ever-widening interval of water, now almost impracticable, swinging Chub
ashore with a hand under each of the boy’s arms. As the boatman came
running down the bank Desmond paused, and meeting him at the margin,
struck him between the eyes a blow so fair and furious that the fellow
was weltering saurian-like in the water before he scarcely realized that
he had been felled. Perhaps the deficiencies of his craft, with no
propelling power, constrained his attention; perhaps the vigor of the
blow tamed his rancorous rage. He made no effort at reprisal, though
Desmond lingered on the bank, but struck out swimming after his boat,
and turned, only when once more safe on deck and out of Desmond’s reach,
to gaze lowering and askance across the water, with a look at once
vengeful, amazed, and dismayed.
“What can have happened?” exclaimed Mrs. Kentopp, watching the scene
from afar with wondering eyes. “Mr. Paragon is a muscular Christian, it
seems.”
“He is very injudicious,” said Colonel Kentopp, gravely. “These
water-side vagrants are often dangerous rascals,—river pirates. Their
good-will is safer than their grudges.”