A VISION.
That which Adela had seen and overheard so startled and horrified her,
it raised such a war of emotions, that she was unable to reflect upon
what she ought to do. In coming through the woods, obedient to the vague
need she felt of following Dennis, she had heard the rising voices of
the disputants, and when she reached a spot where she could command a
view, she beheld her lover with his gun raised, on the very verge of
committing murder.
For a moment her every faculty was paralyzed. Had the weapon been
levelled at herself, her dread would have been less freezing: she could
have been brave and active on her own behalf. To see another person
threatened with mortal danger, and he the brother of Dennis, was
different. In the presence of impending crimes, human beings seem to
yield to a painless lethargy like that which is said to overcome the
victim of a tiger, even before the claws have made a single wound. The
extreme of terror suspends the faculty of feeling, as of action; and
this is what renders possible the enactment of the most dreadful deeds
in broad day, before a crowd of witnesses.
To shriek would have been the easy resource of some women. Adela Reefe
did not know how to shriek. She might have bounded forward, to stay
Dennis's hand or divert his aim; but her muscles failed her as if they
had been caught and webbed with invisible cords. Besides, any sudden
movement might have resulted only in precipitating a tragic end.
Just then it was that Sylv called out; and Adela echoed him,
half-unconsciously, but with a wilder earnestness. The two exclamations
dissolved the spell that had held her. The crisis was over, and the
catastrophe had been warded off. What was she to do next? If she
appeared, the effect of her sharp outcry might be lost; Dennis might be
maddened to some fresh outbreak worse than the first, by the knowledge
that she had seen him in that awful situation. The difficulties, the
quarrel that might ensue, were she to confront the brothers then, would
be full of peril. There was nothing for it but to hide; and, gliding
from tree to tree, she made her escape.
It was a long time before she finally reached her father's house at
Hunting Quarters that night; for, driven by the agitation which followed
the episode in the woods, and troubled by a cloud of doubts, wonders,
and anxieties that rose upon her mind, she wandered restlessly along the
shore, as homeless and unfettered as the marsh-ponies that were tossing
their manes above the dim, low line of that outer strip of land which,
across the Sound, ran out thirty or forty miles under the evening sky
toward Ocracoke and Hatteras.
Now it happened that Mr. Edward Lance, the guest at Colonel Floyd's, had
been out on a solitary excursion of scientific inquiry, diversified by
fishing, along that same sandy barrier. He stayed later than he
expected; and, boating over to the main in the nightfall, he came
walking along the uneven and indented shore, on his way to Fairleigh
Park, while Adela was still abroad.
Lance was sorry to be so late, but he had abundant material for
agreeable revery with which to occupy himself until he should get back
to the society of Miss Jessie and her father. Some three weeks had
passed since he had come to the hospitable shelter of the colonel's
roof, and he had had time to become much interested in other things than
the errand which had originally brought him hither.
The young man, it should be explained, was a New Yorker, whose tastes
were cultivated and progressive; fortunately for him, he likewise had
money enough to admit of following his bent.
"He is the son of my agent's former partner in business," Colonel Floyd
had told his daughter, when he received the letter which led to his
sending Lance an invitation to visit them. "You don't know his name, my
dear, and indeed it is unfamiliar to me. Mr. Lance senior died some
years since, before my relations with Mr. Hedson, who was in business
with him, began. But I understand that he is an accomplished young
gentleman, who wishes to inquire into the resources of our State--more
especially the coast-belt."
"That's where _we_ live, isn't it, pa?" Miss Jessie inquired.
"Yes, my child," said the colonel, impressively. "He desires to study
our fisheries and other industries--with a view, perhaps, to
establishing some manufacturing or agricultural enterprise. It would not
be at all strange, Jessie, if he were to put capital into something in
our neighborhood. I think he may invest. Yes; he is probably seeking a
field for his capital."
Colonel Floyd said all this as if he were reading a letter or quoting
from a cyclopaedia. That was his habitual way of saying things. I should
hardly call it an affectation, but he seldom spoke at any length without
producing the effect of his being a standard work of reference, which
would always tell you exactly what you wanted to know, and would state
it in the best language.
He was a slender man, with a small but well-shaped head encased in
closely cut hair that had begun to silver; the gray and the black
intermingled, and shone with a glimmering changefulness, like the sheen
of mica. He wore spectacles, and had that precise, tactical expression
noticeable in Confederate veterans of the war and so wholly at variance
with our conventional idea of the romantic Southern type. As the colonel
held the lease of a turpentine plantation which he was working, near his
own modest estate, he was naturally interested in the development of the
"coast-belt," and was disposed to welcome the young Northern capitalist
of whom his agent, Hedson, spoke so highly.
"What do you say, my daughter?" he asked Jessie, after a pause. "Would
it be agreeable to you to have a visitor? Shall we invite Mr. Lance to
stay with us?"
He inspected her kindly through his glasses, as if she had been some
harmless little prisoner of war.
"It shall be just as you like, pa dear," said Jessie, artlessly. "And if
Mr. Lance is coming--why, there's no other place for him to stay. Is
there?"
The unsuspicious would have been forced to suppose, from the forlorn
manner in which Miss Jessie cast her eyes around, that she regretted the
absence of any convenient hostelry for the stranger's harborage.
The veteran, however, saw through her, or fancied that he did. At all
events, he knew that the solitude of the Park, with only a few liberated
slaves and the old housekeeper for company, could not be much more
desirable for his daughter than the presence of a promising young man
like Lance.
Accordingly, it was settled that Lance should come. Here he was, then,
fully established, and--thanks to the perfect hospitality of the old
officer--rejoicing in an unexpected sense of being thoroughly at home in
those warm latitudes. It was now the end of July--a hot time to be so
far South--but Lance's satisfaction with his new surroundings was so
great, that he had decided to remain through the summer, and already
began to think that that period would seem all too short.
While his scientific eye had been riveted upon the processes of
turpentine manufacture, on the number and kinds of food-fish inhabiting
the shallows of the sea, and on the feasibility of turning Elbow Crook
Swamp into a luxuriant market-garden, a finer vision--which he possessed
in common with some others of us who belong to the masculine side of our
species--had been occupied with the dainty yet commanding outline of
Jessie Floyd's face; the saucy charm of her dark hair parted on one
side; her novel, half-childish, yet imperious ways.
He was thinking of her, now, as he traversed the bit of open,
marsh-bordered land alongside the pines, where Dennis and Adela had
taken their unpropitious walk, that day.
The sun had set long before; the twilight had deepened and deepened
until all at once it seemed to meet, in its meditativeness, a thought,
an inspiration, a celestial surprise--and the moon rose, silent and
beautiful, like the embodiment of that thought.
A panorama of memory passed before Lance's mind, embracing pictures of
all the things he had observed during the day, and all that he had seen
since he came to North Carolina. He stood there alone, with the ocean
moaning subduedly beyond the sandy dunes, four miles away, yet audible
through the plash of the nearer waters of the Sound, across which the
warm breeze brought its voice to him. He saw in fancy the green waves,
the ardent sunshine, the low shore with huts or hamlets clustering
occasionally in some favoring nook, surrounded by evergreen oaks and
other verdant growths; the chalky lighthouses, the random sails of
shore-fishers; the green, inaccessible marshes that fringed so much of
the mainland. The poor folk he had met in his rambles, hearty, simple,
ignorant and superstitious, came back to his eye in groups, with the
surroundings amid which he had happened to encounter them. The gloomy
recesses of Elbow Crook Swamp filled in the background of his
memory-pictures; wild birds rose and flew across the sky, as it seemed;
and all the while Lance was oppressed with a sense of the great natural
resources of the region, against which its loneliness, the prevailing
ague, and the shiftless languor of the population opposed themselves as
a dead-weight on all improvement. Yet, stranger and alone though he was,
his soul expanded with the idea of somehow bettering the condition of
affairs and making life there brighter and more prosperous.
Then he, too, emerged from revery as the twilight had from its
sombreness, and faced clearly the new thought that glowed upon him like
the large, sweet moon so dreamily brooding in the sky.
Suddenly he was aware of a shape looming up in the faint moonlight not
far from him; the form of a woman, half of whose body was concealed by a
curve of the ground, in such a way that it might have been thought she
was just rising out of the earth.
The woman was looking seaward. She did not observe his presence.
Such an apparition would, in any case, have given pause to a preoccupied
man upon whom it came without warning; but there was a special reason
why it should affect Lance in an extraordinary manner. Her face offered
itself to him in profile, and was so irradiated by the nocturnal light
that it came out clearly against the sky. Seeing it thus, Lance was
instantly--I might say, appallingly--struck by its resemblance to a face
he had many times seen, one that, in fact, he had been thinking about
only a little while before.
The face was like a darker profile of Jessie Floyd, touched with
moonlight.
At first, of course, Lance thought that he must be suffering from
hallucination; that the day's exposure to the sun had affected his brain
and brought out in a visible form the thought of Jessie, which had been
so constantly with him. But the unknown woman stirred, and he saw that
she was real. Hereupon he scanned her more carefully, guessing that at
least the resemblance which he traced was an illusion. No; it remained
intact. He could not get rid of it. Clearly, the resemblance was real,
no less than the woman.
I have hinted that Lance was of a modestly scientific turn; but he also
had in his constitution many susceptibilities whereof science as yet
knows little, and the phenomenon so abruptly thrust upon his notice
stirred these susceptibilities to their depths. He did not at all know
what to make of it. A fear crossed him that he was becoming as
superstitious as the ignorant folk on whom he had lately shed the balm
of his pity. What did this strange presence and resemblance mean or
portend? Was there not some omen hidden in them?
Another thing disturbed him, affecting his mind very much as a sudden
contact with the supernatural might have done. In Lance's family, which
had sprung from England, fragments of an old story were still extant,
about an ancestor who had been involved with one of the colonizing
expeditions to Virginia. He did not recall every particular of the
story, but sundry items of it were quite distinct. It was said that this
early predecessor had fallen in love with an Indian girl, from whom he
had been cruelly separated; or that he had come to these virgin shores
in search of some one whom he had lost: accounts differed as to that.
But Lance's belief was, that this long-dead member of his long-dead
English family had been in quest of his plighted wife, and that he had
somehow missed her, returning to England alone. Virginia, in those days,
included the territory of North Carolina--the very place to which Lance
had drifted, propelled by a rather vague purpose and a desire for
knowledge as well as recreation. There was nothing very remarkable in
this, perhaps. The young man himself had not thought much about it; for
one does not have time, in the present age, to linger over little
coincidences and bits of ancient family gossip. The old tale had once or
twice flitted through his mind since his installation at the colonel's
manor, but it was not a thing he would have considered worth mentioning.
Nevertheless, because of those occult susceptibilities which I have
mentioned, at the moment of encountering this mysterious woman with her
face turned seaward, the remembrance flashed up over his mental horizon
like a kindling beacon-fire. A marvelling awe took hold of him, and for
his life he could not have shaken off the fantasy that made him conceive
of her as a projection from the shadowy past, an image that typified the
lost mistress, or the forgotten Indian maiden, with whom his ancestor's
life-history had been linked. The circumstance that she was gazing
eastward also had an effect upon him; he could easily have persuaded
himself that she was waiting for her vanished lover to come to her over
the waves.
But the fancied resemblance to Jessie--that was the most bewildering
element of all. Why should it occur to him? And why should he feel such
an unwonted shiver running through his veins?
The simplest way to banish all this nonsense was, doubtless, to go
forward and speak to the girl. The good nature of the inhabitants, Lance
knew, made such an informality excusable; but, as he was about to try
that solution of his perplexity, and find out who this woman really was,
the figure began to descend the slope on the farther side from him, and
disappeared so noiselessly that she seemed to have crumbled and dropped
back into the earth from which she came.
Lance stood still; that curious warm shiver thrilled his veins anew.
Then he turned away and resumed his tardy progress toward the distant
manor-house, muttering aloud: "How can I be such a fool?"
But the vision, notwithstanding, remained imprinted on his
consciousness, and troubled him.