IT chanced that Maurice Brennett’s varied cotton ventures took him to
New Orleans in February. He found the city ablaze with illuminations
and wild with excitement, for it was the evening of Mardi Gras and the
Mystick Krewe procession was on the march.
In the enchantment suddenly turned loose in the streets, the past and
the present were fantastically blended. The Pickwick Club-house lent
the radiance of a thousand gas jets to the triumphal pageant of the
“Faërie Queene.” A salute of artillery thundered from Lafayette Square,
and made the hero of those mystic weapons, “Caliburn” and “Ron,”
acquainted with the realistic magic of modern warfare. In front of
the City Hall the procession halted, and Prince Arthure dismounted to
exchange the compliments of the season with his honor the Mayor of New
Orleans.
It seemed as if all the nations of the earth had gathered here between
the Mississippi and the Swamp. From among the banners fluttering from
every balcony and open window, and house-top, looked out creole eyes,
potent enough to have laid their languorous spell upon the splendid,
glittering swarm, and held it there motionless for all time to come.
These southern beauties had a pretty contrast in the fairer faces from
the north. And below, jostling along the sidewalks, sternly repressed
by the police, was a motley throng of every grade of swarthiness, from
the broadly grinning African, the mulatto, the Indian, the cream-tinted
Chinaman--gazing with oblique smiles at the wild vagaries of the
“Melican man”--to the Sicilian, and the dark-browed Spanish vagrant,
wearing his tattered garb with the dignity of a hidalgo.
And beneath the inspiring melodies, and the cheers of the enthusiastic
populace, and those louder iron-throated plaudits of the guns, were all
the echoes of Babel. One heard here a resonant German “ach!” and there
the nimble Gallic tongue demanding of a just Heaven if this were not
_too_ magnificent, and the neat, precise Yankee pronunciation,
and the languid, Southern drawl, and the Englishman’s broad “a,” of
which the swelling proportions overlapped all the other letters of the
alphabet. The mirthful guttural negro dialect rose too, mingled with
unique clippings known as pigeon-English, and that _vox populi_,
slang, which, like “don’t care,” has no home, was loud upon the air.
Orion looked over the western house-tops at this strange red
constellation wheeling through the streets so far below. Cassiopeia sat
in her splendid chair, and Berenice’s shining hair streamed athwart the
moonless heavens. But the stellular display of the _ignis fatuus_
of the Swamp was soon over; the Opera House was reached, the ruthless
door shut the rabble from “faërie land,” and it hung hungrily about
outside, reluctantly making way for the richly-attired freight of
carriages privileged to behold the tableaux within.
Among those thus favored was one who had less greedy an appetite than
the untutored mob for the gracious and splendid. Only a very short
time elapsed before Maurice Brennett emerged and walked up Toulouse
Street--slowly, meditatively, as if he had less an object in view
than a desire of the motion and the fresh air. Little affinity had
he with this night of enchantment, these beautiful presentations and
responsive enthusiasms. The dominant instinct of his nature was the
instinct of prey. He pursued it in his varied speculations with as
little conscience as his cousin, the “feathered hawk,” pursues his own
peculiar line of business.
Now, as he walked on listlessly, his mind was filled with complex
calculations, with rigidly severe retrospections as to whether he might
not have been more adroit even than he was, with careful reconnoitering
of tortuous alternatives of future policy. They all led him to the
wall. This realization roused him. He raised his head and looked
tentatively about him in the darkness as if he sought an inspiration.
Slowly a purpose began to shape itself in his thoughts. He paused
irresolute for a moment. Then he slipped on his overcoat and took his
way briskly toward the levee.
A silence had fallen with the night upon the great embankment that
lies like a guardian dragon along the sinuous borders of the city.
Numbers of steamboats--dark and silent--lurked at the wharves, their
smokeless chimneys rising high, high into the mists that hovered about
the great river. One felt the presence rather than saw that leafless
forest of masts where the sea-going craft was lying. The monotony of
the interval, while he waited, was broken only by the measured tread
of watchmen echoing along the planks, and once by the swift sibilant
rushing of a locomotive upon the branch line of a railway close at
hand, the glare of its cyclopic eye rending the darkness.
He was about to turn away in disappointment, when suddenly from up the
river sounded three husky, remonstrant whistles. They conjured up a
hundred twinkling lights among the glooms by the water side, and soon
the levee was swarming with the dusky figures of roustabouts, running
hither and thither with clattering steps and an uncouth chatter.
Presently the white mists up the river were gemmed, first with a ruby,
then with an emerald gleam; both appeared close together, and from that
moment until he could see all the side-lights of the great illuminated
floating palace; until he could hear the water surging in the darkness
about her wheels, and the throb of her machinery; until she was
swinging, with a slow, easy grace, to the sharp jangling of her pilot’s
bells, into her allotted berth by the levee, the man who watched her
landing was in the grip of a strong emotion. It brought a quiver to
the hard lines of his parted lips; it shook his hand; a faint flush
sprang into his cheek; his eyes were eager--so eager and so fierce. He
accosted the first man ashore--one of the deck hands, who was making
the boat fast.
“Is that the Marchesa?”
“Yes, sah.”
“Why is she so long behind time?”
“Well, sah, disher boat jis’ run aground ob a sand-bar up dere in
Choctaw Bend--stayed dere twenty hours. Den we kem a-bustin’ down de
ribber, makin’ de fastes’ time eber seed on de Mis’sippi. Didn’t do no
good, dough. An’ dese yere passygers, wot’s gwine ter be landed too
late fur de Moddy-Graw is a-tearin’ deir shirts ’bout it. Sich cussin’!”
As Brennett scanned the passengers crowding down the stage-plank, he
stepped forward with a sudden look of recognition.
“Have you heard from _her_?” he exclaimed, with quick
impulsiveness, as he mechanically grasped Travis’s outstretched hand.
His manner was so pronounced that a lady who was passing at the
moment, and who caught his words, glanced at him with covert sympathy.
This was surely a phase of some delicate and tender heart-drama, which
is forever on the human stage, but which shirks an audience, who may
only catch a glimpse of a scene, now and then, by some chance lifting
of the curtain, such as this. And so she went her way, speculating
futilely about this important “her.”
“Got a letter just as I started,” said Travis, slowly separating an
envelope from a dozen missives which he had drawn from his pocket,
and handing it to Brennett, who hastily slipped out the inclosure,
and read it by the lamps of a carriage near which they stood. Miss
St. Pierre’s letter was in response to the one which her step-brother
had written immediately after his visit, urging still further the
proposed exchange of property. The reply was a marvel of non-committal
temporizing. To reconcile its cool and formal tone with the sanguine
expectation which Travis had deduced from her delight in receiving the
cross was difficult. He had believed, when they parted, that she was
far more kindly disposed toward him than ever before, and that, thus
propitiated, she could be readily influenced.
But now her feeling, as expressed in this letter, had changed to
distant reserve. There was even, indefinably suggested, an undercurrent
of distrust. She had come to no decision; not a word foreshadowed her
ultimate course; she might have written chiefly with a view of gaining
time.
“She will or she won’t, Brennett,” drawled Travis. “It’s like her to
want to eat her cake and have it too.”
As he stood in the light of the carriage lamps, listlessly twirling
his gloves in one hand, and glancing about him with that disparaging
superficial interest characteristic of the professional loafer, there
was nothing in the contemplative placidity of his manner to suggest
disappointment or irritation. In fact, he had given with the letter all
anxiety for the future into Brennett’s hands. For he was an expert in
the matter of shifting responsibility and “taking it easy.”
But Brennett’s was a face on which every emotion and thought had left
its mark. He read and re-read the letter without speaking, but with a
perplexity, and a baffled avidity, and a doubt, which nearly approached
dismay, vividly expressed on his sharp features. At length he carefully
folded and returned the delicate sheets, with a significant glance, and
a smile that was curiously related to a sneer.
“Well,” said Travis, “I’m afraid our getting hold of that property is a
thing that will never come to pass.”
“Travis,” said Brennett, laying his hand lightly upon his friend’s arm,
which was swinging the gloves, and thus arresting the motion, “other
men expect events to come to pass. _I make_ things happen.”
Travis’s contemplative eyes, staring intently for a moment from under
his hat-brim, held a sharp touch of surprise, and he laid his hand
meditatively on his silky, straw-colored whiskers, which the lamplight
seemed to burnish to a deeper yellow.
“Stick to that!” he exclaimed, gradually taking in his friend’s
meaning. Then, as Brennett’s grasp relaxed upon his arm, he fell once
more to twirling his gloves, and glancing casually up and down the
levee.
“Well!” he presently exclaimed, with a cheerful intonation, as he
turned toward the door of the carriage, “I have to go and dress.”
“What for?” demanded Brennett, rousing himself with difficulty.
“For the ball. I might as well see what is left of the poor little
show.”
And when they were rolling along the street toward the hotel, he had no
graver absorption than swearing at the bar in Choctaw Bend, and asking
questions, that were hardly answered, concerning the relative splendors
of the procession and tableaux to-night and those of former years.
Travis was like a cork. The surface was his element. He knew nothing
below. Perhaps, however, he might not have been able to maintain his
constitutional buoyancy had he divined that, behind Brennett’s boast,
was an absolute chaos, in which not even an indefinite plan of action
was vaguely shaping itself.
With secret wonder at his own poverty of resource, Brennett only
suggested, after a day or so, that Travis should write to her again.
“If this produces no appreciable result,” he said to himself, “I must
try heavier artillery.”
As the time went by no more letters were received from Miss St. Pierre.
And for the nonce Maurice Brennett was at a loss for his ordnance.
One lingering sunshiny morning it chanced that he and Travis were in
the reading-room of the St. ---- Hotel. The murmur of the streets below
rose drowsily, and within it was very still. The other occupants of the
room had dropped out gradually one by one, and only the rustle of the
journal in Travis’s hand broke the quietude as he hastily turned the
sheet. Brennett was not reading. There was a folded newspaper on his
knee, his eyes were fixed absently on the floor, and his thoughts were
busy with that baffling perplexity never in these days far from them.
“The Tichborne case!” exclaimed Travis as he glanced at the head-lines.
“I’m devilish tired of the Tichborne case. What do you think of it,
Brennett? Is the claimant an impostor?”
It was as if he had touched a match to a fuse. The air was full of
strange forces hitherto latent.
Brennett sat silent, motionless, looking at his companion with an
expression in his brilliant eyes difficult of analysis.
“Eh! What do you think of the Tichborne case?” reiterated Travis.
And still on Brennett’s face was a fixed expression of introversion--as
of one who ponders deeply, who is carefully evolving an intricate
train of sequences. A new idea had been projected on his mental
horizon--vague, diffuse, but soon to be focussed in action. Even
Travis, unobservant though he was, felt that his friend’s mind was
coming back through wide spaces as Brennett replied, absently, “The
Tichborne case?--why, I hardly know what to think about it.”
And then he was silent again.
And so Travis left him.
He remained there for an hour or two, sunk in this new absorption,
uninterrupted by friend or acquaintance. Then he wrote and mailed a
letter, and by four o’clock that afternoon it was on its way to New
York.
Travis’s ruminant moods--the mental process could scarcely be dignified
as reflection--were rare. One of the most memorable of his life was
superinduced within the next week by a casual meeting with Brennett in
the lobby of the Opera House. The performance was over, and Travis was
in the midst of the surging crowd near the door when he first caught
sight of his friend in the jam on the stairs. Brennett made a slight
gesture with the opera glass in his hand, which Travis interpreted
as a request to wait for him without. He went on, experiencing at
the moment a faint and fleeting amusement that a man like Brennett,
who seemed, however illogically, harder and sharper than the hardest
and sharpest, whose whole heart and soul were in his eager haste to
be rich, should nevertheless affect a sentimental interest in music,
and to enjoy the gentle illusions of the lyric stage. There recurred
to him, too, a vague perception, of which he had often before been
conscious, that men of Brennett’s stamp usually care little for
externals, and that there was a sort of incongruity in the glitter of
diamonds on his shirt-front when he moved beneath the gas-jets, and in
the fact that he was always so carefully plumed.
As Travis lounged in the gloom without, beside the posters which
announced in gigantic letters the resplendent attractions of “L’Etoile
du Nord,” billed for Monday the 6th of March, he watched carelessly the
erratic orbits of the carriage lamps far up the instarred perspective
of the street. Presently Brennett came out, and slipping his arm
through Travis’s they took their way along the thoroughfare together.
“I have something to say to you,” Brennett began.
“Say it, my dear fellow,” rejoined Travis, lightly.
The next instant he was struck with a sudden surprise that Brennett’s
arm should be trembling within his own. The circumstance was
significant. He grew abruptly grave, and turned an expectant face upon
his friend.
Brennett seemed to hesitate. It was only after they had traversed the
broad belt of moonlight falling athwart the crossing, and reached the
deep shadow of the opposite block of buildings that he spoke.
“I have heard from Fortescue,” he said.
Travis stopped short in the street.
“Not John Doane Fortescue?” he asked, with a sharp intonation of dismay.
“He is the man,” Brennett assented.
Travis stared hard at him for a moment. He was only a black shadow
sharply outlined upon the dim, gray background of the street. Even the
light in his eyes was eclipsed. But somehow it seemed a keenly vigilant
shadow. Its attitude was intent.
Travis’s observation was the mere embryo of a faculty. But he had an
instinctive aversion to being watched, and, although hardly realizing
that he stood in the moonlight and the other in the gloomy obscurity,
the instinct prevailed. The words and the gesture were almost
mechanical as he said, “Come, let’s get out of this,” and passing his
arm once more through his friend’s they walked on together.
“I thought that man was surely dead by this time,” he said,
desperately. “He has not been heard of for years.”
“He is in New York now,” said Brennett.
“How did _you_ hear of him, Brennett? How did it come about?”
“I remembered that a friend of mine in New York speaks of him
occasionally. I wrote and ascertained that Fortescue has just
arrived there after a prolonged residence abroad. He expects, so my
correspondent says, to come to New Orleans very soon.”
“Of course, then, he will get scent of his right to that Tennessee
property before long. But, Brennett, now I think of it, I don’t see how
that can affect our chance of securing it. His remedy is barred by the
statute,” said Travis, striving to fling off the anxieties that had so
suddenly beset him.
“He will rely on the disability of continuous absence,” said Brennett,
eagerly, showing a strange insight into the intentions of a man whom
he had never seen, and who was as yet presumably in ignorance of the
vested remainder in these houses in Graftenburg. After he had spoken he
recoiled slightly, and was savagely biting his lip.
But Travis’s sense of the artistic was too blunt to recognize
this lapse from veri-similitude. “Ah, the game is up!” he cried,
despairingly. Then with a bitter gesture of renunciation he flung the
stump of his cigar into the street, feeling as if he had put from him
in the moment every cherished prospect of the future.
The air was soft and full of vernal suggestions. The moon hung low in
the western sky. The elongated shadows of the two men dogged their
progress down the deserted streets, and for a time the silence was
unbroken save by the rhythmic beat of their footsteps, and once when
the multitudinous brilliant notes of a mocking-bird’s nocturnal melody
burst forth suddenly.
“In thinking it over,” said Brennett at last, “I doubt whether we are
so much damaged by this new development after all. The project of
exchanging property was beginning to seem very hopeless.”
Travis made no reply. He was wondering whether Brennett’s apparent
astuteness, hitherto so prominent in the invariable success of his
enterprises, might not have been instead only the heavy backing of
circumstance--luck rather than brains. And now, if luck should fail
him, and the man who relied upon him--what would remain?
Brennett presently resumed. “It seems to me that, if we are adroit, we
might make the appearance of the claimant serve our interests. Perhaps
we can manage her all the better for it--through him, as it were.”
Travis hardly recognized the caution which, even at midnight and in
the empty streets, used a personal pronoun for a proper name, but under
the magnetic influence which Brennett exerted he unconsciously followed
the example.
“But he, himself! his title is superior to hers.”
“Still he is not in possession, and the law is proverbially uncertain.
We can manage him through her.”
Travis shook his head.
“I don’t altogether make you out, Brennett,” he said.
“Why, see here. When the claimant appears she will stand in immediate
danger of losing the whole property. Perhaps she would be willing to
compromise. Now view the matter from _his_ standpoint. It is
doubtful whether he can dispossess her or secure any concession. It
might be that for a pecuniary consideration he would let us get the
advantage of the compromise if it can be effected. One half of that
property would give us the money we need.”
“You mean buy his claim?”
Brennett assented.
Again Travis shook his head. “It would be a cut-throat sacrifice on his
part for anything we could afford to pay.”
“You lose sight of the uncertainty, Travis,” said Brennett, eagerly. He
seemed anxious that his friend should regard the scheme as practicable.
“It is very possible that Fortescue would get nothing at the end of a
long suit, and have all the costs to pay. And it is possible, too, that
she will not compromise at all. Don’t you see that a substantial sum,
planked down at once, is rather an enticing alternative--especially as
the man is a gambler, so my correspondent intimates, and given over to
riotous living. Men of that stamp prefer ready money to anything in the
way of distant possibilities.”
“It may work,” said Travis. “But it will surprise me. And, Brennett, we
haven’t time to prosecute the suit. You know that.”
“If she will not compromise that is the end of it--at least so far as
the mine is concerned.”
“Well, if I understand you,” said Travis, in great dissatisfaction of
spirit, “the proposal is this--He takes the ready money. And if she
can’t be induced to compromise she takes the houses. And we are left
with the bag to hold.”
“The money we pay him is only a stake. We take the risk. But I am
confident she will compromise. Otherwise she jeopardizes her whole
estate. She has nothing else, you said?”
“Nothing else.”
A pause ensued.
“Look here, Brennett,” said Travis, presently. “This arrangement
with Fortescue is what the lawyers call, in their confounded jargon,
‘champerty.’ It is against the rules of the game, as I understand it.”
“That amounts to nothing. We must keep the affair a secret between
ourselves and him--that is all. The proposal for a compromise will have
to be made in his name, and through his lawyers. And it is much better
that this is the case. It strikes me that, after all, his coming is
rather opportune, though it will bleed us a little. She distrusts you,
and she is predisposed to oppose you. It is very well that you will be
obliged to lie low and seem to have nothing to do with it.”
“But this thing of champerty,” said Travis, dubiously, “it is no
offence, is it? There is no fine, nor penalty, nor”----
“Practically none. That has all fallen into desuetude. But, of course,
we shall take care to keep it quiet.”
“I ask,” said Travis, “because I never had the grit to run against the
law. I am a very Jonah for being found out. It’s my policy to be above
board--else I’m overboard in about a minute and a quarter.”
He laughed a little, in a low-spirited way, at his hobbling witticism.
Then he said, gravely, “Make the thing straight, Brennett, and keep it
straight. I depend on you.”
“I’ll take care of that,” said Brennett.
Then they both fell silent.
The moon was slipping slowly behind the western roofs. The melancholy
tones of a bell close at hand clanged out the hour. Others far away
sounded like its echo. The world was lost in the immensity of the
night--even their shadows seemed to have deserted them, only recalled
now and then by the sudden glare of a gas-lamp as they passed beneath.
And presently, still silent, they turned into the familiar hotel where
they always sojourned during their stay in New Orleans, and which
seemed to them as much like home as any other place.
Shortly after this interview the races began and Travis’s anxieties and
forebodings lost their hold upon him.