The aspect of the Duciehurst mansion gave no token of its ruinous
condition when first it broke upon the view. Its stately portico, the
massive Corinthian columns reaching to the floor of the third story of
the main building, impressively dominated the scene, whitely glittering,
surrounded by the green leaves of the magnolia grandiflora, ancient now,
and of great bulk and height. The house was duplicated by the reflection
in water close at hand, whether some lake or merely a pool formed by the
rain, Paula could not determine. A wing on either side expressed the
large scope of its construction, and from a turn in the road, if a
grass-grown track could be so called, came glimpses, in the rear of the
building, of spacious galleries both above and below stairs, shut in by
Venetian blinds, so much affected in the architecture of Southern homes
in former years. A forest of live oak, swamp maple, black gum closed the
view of the background, and cut off the place from communication with
the cotton lands appurtenant to it, but at a very considerable distance.
For the region immediately contiguous to the house had become in the
divagations of the great river peculiarly liable to overflow, and thus
the forest, known, indeed, as the “open swamp,” continued uncleared,
because of the precarious value of the land for agricultural
operations. In fact, the main levee that protected the fields now lay
far in the rear of the old Duciehurst mansion. Doubtless in times of
specially high water seeping rills effected entrance at door and
casement and ran along the floors and rose against the walls, and
brought as tenants crayfish and frogs, water-snakes and eels, and other
slimy denizens of the floods, who explored the strange recesses of this
refuge, and, perhaps, made merry, thus translated to the seat of the
scornful.
Paula paused on the crest of the old levee. It had been in its day a
redoubtable embankment, and despite the neglect of a half century, it
still served in partial efficiency, and its trend could be discerned far
away. She gazed at the place with emotions it was difficult for her to
understand. She could not shake off the consciousness of the presence of
Adrian Ducie, nor could she cease to speculate how it must affect him to
see his ancestral estate in the possession of the usurper, for thus he
must consider her husband. Ducie had grown silent since they had
disembarked, and walked a little apart from the cluster of tramping
refugees. She dared not look at his face.
But law is law, she argued within herself. It was not the fiat of her
husband or of his predecessors, but the decree of the court that had
given the property to them. Nevertheless, there was to her mind an
inherent coercive evidence of the truth of the tradition of the released
mortgage, duly paid and satisfied, and she looked at the old place with
eyes rebuked and deprecatory, and not with the pride or interest of the
rightful owner.
It was still raining as the group reached the pavement of heavy stone
blocks. These had defied the growths of neglect and the wear of time,
and were as they had always been save that one of them had scaled and
held a tiny pool of shallow water, which reflected the sky. Her husband
walked beside her, now and again glancing inquiringly at her. Never
before in all their wedded life had so long a difference subsisted
between them. For, even if she were not consciously at fault, Paula had
always hitherto made haste to assume the blame, and frame the apology,
for what odds was it, in good sooth, who granted the pardon, she was
wont to argue, so that both were forgiving and forgiven. Now, she recked
not of his displeasure. She seemed, indeed, unusually composed,
absorbed, self-sufficient. She did not even glance at him, yet how her
eyes were accustomed to wait upon him. She looked about with quiet
observation, with obvious interest. One might suppose, in fact, that she
did not think of him at all, as she walked so daintily erect and
slender, with such graceful, sober dignity beside him. He had acquitted
himself well that day, he thought, had certainly earned golden opinions,
but he was beginning to miss sadly the most adroit flatterer of all his
experience, the woman who loved him. As together they ascended the broad
stone steps he suddenly paused, took her hand in one of his and with
ceremony led her through the great arched portal, from which the massive
doors had been riven and destroyed long ago.
“Welcome to your own house, my wife,” he said with his fine florid smile
and a manner replete with his conscious importance and his relish of it.
At that moment there came a sound from the ghastly vacancy glimpsed
within, a weird, shrill sound, full of sinister suggestion. The group,
peering in from behind them, thrilled with horror, broke into sudden
frightened exclamations, before its keen repetition enabled them to
realize that it was only the hooting of an owl, roused, doubtless, from
his diurnal slumbers by the tones of the echoing voice and the
vibrations of the floor under an unaccustomed tread. Some sheepish
laughter ensued, at themselves rather than at Floyd-Rosney, but at this
moment any merriment was of invidious suggestion and he flushed deeply.
“Here, you fellow,” he hailed one of the roustabouts, “get that owl out
of here, and any other vermin you can find,” and he tossed the darkey a
dollar.
The roustabout showed all his teeth, and he had a great many of them,
and with a deprecatory manner ran to pick up the silver coin. He was
trained to a degree of courtesy, and he fain would have left it where it
had fallen on the pavement until he had executed the commission. But he
knew of old his companions of the lower deck, now busied in bringing up
the luggage of the party. Therefore, he pocketed the gratuity before he
went briskly and cheerfully down the long hall to one of the inner
apartments whence proceeded the sound of ill-omen.
While they were still making their way into the main hall they heard a
great commotion of hootings and halloos, and all at once a tremendous
crash of glass. It is a sound of destruction that rouses all the
proprietor within a man.
“Great heavens,” cried Floyd-Rosney, “is the fool driving the creature
through the window without lifting the sash, little glass as there is
left here.”
It seemed that this was the case, for a large white owl, blinded by the
light of day, floundering and fluttering, went winging its way clumsily
scarcely six feet from the ground through the rain, still falling
without, and after several drooping efforts contrived gropingly to perch
himself on a broken stone vase on the terrace, whence the other
roustabouts presently dislodged him, and with gay cries and great
unanimity of spirit, proceeded to dispatch him, hooting and squawking in
painful surprise and protesting to the last.
Paula had caught little Ned within the doorway to spare his innocence
and infancy the cruel spectacle. And suddenly here was the roustabout
who had been sent into the recesses of the house, coming out again with
a strange blank face, and a peculiar, hurried, dogged manner.
“Did you find any more owls? And why did you break the glass to get him
out?” Floyd-Rosney asked, sternly.
“Naw, sir,” the man answered at random, but loweringly. He bent his head
while he swiftly threaded his way through the group as if he were
accustomed to force his progress with horns. He was in evident haste; he
stepped deftly down the flight to the pavement and, turning aside on the
weed-grown turf, reached the shrubbery and was lost to view among the
dripping evergreen foliage.
As it is the accepted fad to admire old houses rather than the new, a
gentleman of the party who made a point of being up-to-date began to
comment on the spacious proportions of the hall, and the really stately
curves of the staircase as it came sweeping down from a lofty
_entresol_. “It looks as if it might be a spiral above the second story,
isn’t that an unusual feature, or is it merely the attic flight?” he
interrogated space.
For Floyd-Rosney, all the host, was looking into the adjoining rooms and
giving orders for the lighting of fires wherever a chimney seemed
practicable.
“Listen how the old rattle-trap is leaking,” said one of the elderly
ladies, ungratefully.
Paula made no comment. She was hearing the melancholy drip, drip, drip
of the rain through the ceilings of the upper stories. As the drops
multiplied in number and increased in volume they sounded to her like
foot-falls, now rapid, now slow, circumspect and weighty; sometimes
there was a frenzied rush as in a wild catastrophe, and again a light
tripping in a sort of elastic tempo, as of the vibrations of some gay
dance of olde. The echoes,--oh, the echoes,--she dropped her face in her
hands for a moment, lest she should see the echoes materialized, that
were coming down the stairs, evoked from the silence, the solitude, the
oblivion of the ruined mansion. Neglected here so long, who would have
recked if the old memories had taken wonted form--who would have seen,
save the moonbeam, itself wan and vagrant, or the wind of kindred
elusiveness, going and coming as it listed.
Yet there had been other and more substantial tenants. “The damned
rascals have pulled up nearly every hearth in the house,” Floyd-Rosney
was saying, as he came forging back through the rooms on the right. Then
once more among the ladies he moderated his diction. “Destroying the
hearths, searching for the hidden treasure of Duciehurst--idiotic
folly! River pirates, shanty-boaters, tramps, gipsies, and such like
vagrants, I suppose.”
Paula, seated on one of the steps of the stair, cast a furtive glance at
Adrian Ducie, who had followed Floyd-Rosney from the inner apartments.
His face was grave, absorbed, pondering. Doubtless he was thinking of
the persistence of this tradition to endure, unaided, unfostered for
forty years. It must have had certainly some foundation in fact.
“Perhaps the vagrants discovered it and carried it off,” suggested the
up-to-date man.
“Not in the chimney-places,” fretted Floyd-Rosney, “which makes it all
the more aggravating. The solid stone hearths are laid on solid masonry,
each is constructed in the same way, and you couldn’t hide a hair-pin in
one of them. Why did they tear them _all_ up?”
But fires were finally started in two of the rooms on the ground floor
where the hearths were found intact. They were comparatively dry,
barring an occasional dash of the rain through the broken glass of one
of the windows, the ceilings being protected from leakage by the floor
of the upper story. Floyd-Rosney began to feel that this was sufficient
accommodation for the party under the peculiar difficulties that beset
them. The scarcity of wood rendered the impairment of the fire-places
elsewhere of less moment. The sojourners were fain to follow the example
of the lawless intruders hitherto, who tore up the flooring of the rear
verandas, the sills of the windows, the Venetian blinds for fuel. This
vandalism, however, in the present instance, was limited, for its
exercise required muscle, and this was not superabundant. True, the
Captain’s forethought had furnished them with an axe, and also a cook,
in the person of one of the table waiters, understood to be gifted in
both walks of life. There was present, too, the Major’s negro servant,
who, although sixty years of age, was still stalwart, active and of
unusual size. But neither of these worthies had hired out to cut wood.
The crisis was acute. Floyd-Rosney offered handsome financial
inducements in vain and then sought such urgency as lay in miscellaneous
swearing. His language was as lurid as any flames that had ever flared
up the great chimney, but ineffective. The group stood in a large
apartment in the rear, apparently a kitchen, of which nearly half the
floor was already gone, exhaled in smoke up this massive chimney. It
occupied nearly one side of the room, and still a crane hung within its
recesses and hooks for pots. There was also a brick oven, very quaint,
and other ancient appurtenances of the culinary art, hardly understood
by either of the modern claimants of ownership, but of special interest
to the up-to-date man who had followed them out to admire the things of
yore, so fashionable anew.
“Naw, sir,” said the Major’s retainer. “I can’t cut wood. I ain’t done
no work since me an’ de Major fought de war, ’cept jes’ tend on him.
Naw, sir, I ain’t cut no wood since I built de Major’s las’ bivouac
fire.” He was perfectly respectful, but calm, and firm, and impenetrable
to argument.
The other darkey, a languid person with an evident inclination to high
fashion, perceived in the demand an effort at imposition. With his
spruce white jacket and apron, he lounged in the doorway leaning
against its frame in a most negative attitude. His voice in objection
took on the plaint of a high falsetto. “The Cap’n nuver mentioned nare
word to me ’bout cuttin’ wood. I’ll sure cook, if I have got a fire to
cook with.”
“You black rascal, do you expect me to build your fire?” sputtered
Floyd-Rosney.
“The Cap’n nuver treated me right,” the provisional cook evaded the
direct appeal. “He nuver tole me that I was gwine to be axed to cut
wood.”
“How were you going to cook without a fire?” demanded Ducie.
“I ’spected you gemmen had a fire somewhere.”
“In my coat-pocket?” asked Floyd-Rosney.
The waiter would not essay the retort direct. He, too, was perfectly
polite. “I ain’t gwine to cut wood,” he murmured plaintively.
“I wish we had kept one of those roustabouts to cut wood instead of
letting them all go with the yawl back to the _Cherokee Rose_,” said
Floyd-Rosney, in great annoyance. “They are worth a hundred of these
saloon darkies.”
“Don’t name _me_ ’mongst dat triflin’ gang, Mr. Floyd-Rosney,” the
Major’s retainer said, in dignified remonstrance. “But I jes’ come along
to wait on de Major, an’ cuttin’ wood is a business I ain’t in no wise
used to. Naw, sir.”
“I never was expectin’ to cut wood,” plained the high falsetto of the
saloon darkey.
“Pshaw!” exclaimed Ducie. “If this keeps up I’ll split some fool’s head
open.”
He threw off his coat, seized the axe, heaved it up and struck a blow
that splintered a plank in the middle. Floyd-Rosney, his coat also on
the floor, inserted the blade of a hatchet edgewise beneath it and
pried it up, then began to chop vigorously while Ducie prepared to rive
another plank.
The two negroes looked on with sulky indifference.
Suddenly the Major’s servant grinned genially, without rhyme or reason.
“You two gemmen git out of yere. Make yerselfs skeerce. You think I’m
gwine to stand yere an’ let you chop wood. I know de quality. I have
always worked for de quality. I’m gwine to l’arn dis yere little coon,
dat dunno nuthin’ but runnin’ de river, how to behave hisself before de
quality. Take up dat hatchet, boy, an’ mind yer manners.”
Floyd-Rosney surrendered the implement readily and with all the grace of
good-will, but Ducie continued to deal the stanch old floor some
tremendous blows and at last laid the axe down as if he did not half
care.
“We had best run as few fires as possible,” Ducie commented as they left
the room, “change of heart might not last.”
Thus it was that only two of the many spacious apartments were put into
commission. One, the walls of which betokened in the scheme of their
decoration its former uses as a music-room, was filled with the effects
of the ladies of the party, while the gentlemen were glad to pull off
their shoes and exchange for dry hose and slippers before the fire of an
old-time smoking-room, that must have been a cozy den in its day. The
house had long ago been stripped of all portables in decoration as well
as furnishing. A few mirrors still hung on the walls, too heavy or too
fragile to be safely removed, wantonly shattered by the vandal hands of
its occasional and itinerant inmates. Several of these had been a
portion of the original construction, built into the walls, and in lieu
of frames were surrounded by heavy mouldings of stucco-work, and this,
too, had given opportunity to the propensity of destruction rife
throughout the piteous wreck of a palace. In the smoking-room, the haunt
of good-fellowship and joviality, Bacchus seemed doubly drunk, riding a
goat of three legs and one horn, at the summit of the mirror, and
really, but that the figure in half relief was too high to be
conveniently reached all semblance of the design might have been
shattered. Only here and there was it possible to follow the rest of the
rout of satyrs and fauns, the tracery of bowls and beakers and gourds,
and bunches of grapes, the redundant festoons of tobacco leaves and
replicas of many varieties of pipes, all environed with the fantastic
wreathing of smoke, and the ingenious symbolism in which the interior
decorator had expended a wealth of sub-suggestion.
There was only a “shake-down” on the floor for the men, and two or three
were already disposed upon it at length, since this was a restful
position and there were no chairs available. Floyd-Rosney stood with his
back to the fire, his hands behind him, his head a trifle bent, his eyes
dull and ruminative. He had much of which to think. Adrian Ducie sat
sidewise on the sill of a window and looked out through the grimy panes
at the ceaseless fall of the rain amidst the glossy leaves of the
magnolias which his grandmother,--or was it his great-grandmother?--had
planted here in the years agone. Was that the site of her
flower-garden, he wondered, seeing at a distance the flaunting of a
yellow chrysanthemum. How odd it was that he should sit here in his
great-grandfather’s den, smoking a cigar, practically a stranger, a
guest, an intruder in the home of his ancestors. He and his brother, the
lawful heirs of all this shattered magnificence, these baronial tracts
of fertile lands, were constrained to work sedulously for a bare living.
He, himself, was an exile, doomed to wander the earth over, with never a
home of his own, never a perch for his world-weary wings. His brother’s
fate was to juggle with all those vicissitudes that curse the man who
strives to wrest a subsistence from the soil, to pay a price of purchase
for the rich products of the land which his forbears had owned since the
extinction of the tribal titles of the Indians. A yellow
chrysanthemum,--a chrysanthemum swaying in the wind!
There had begun to be strong hopes of dinner astir in this masculine
coterie, and when the door opened every head was turned toward it. But
melancholy reigned on the face of the cook, and it was a dispirited
cadence of his falsetto voice that made known his lack.
“Mr. Floyd-Rosney,” he plained, “I can’t dress canned lobster salad
without tarragon vinegar. This yere cruet has got nuthin’ in it in dis
world but apple vinegar. The Cap’n nuver done me right.”
“God A’mighty, man, ‘_lobster_!’ I could eat the can,” cried one of the
recumbents, springing up with such alacrity that his bounce awakened
Colonel Kenwynton, who had been able to forget his fatigue and hunger in
a doze.
“Get that dinner on the table, or I’ll be the death of you,” cried
Floyd-Rosney. “We are hungry. It is nearly five o’clock and we have had
nothing since breakfast.”
The door closed slowly on the disaffected cook, who was evidently a
devotee to art for art’s sake, for he presently reappeared in his
capacity of table servant, as if he had been rebuked in an altogether
different identity as cook. He drooped languidly between the door and
the frame and once more in his high falsetto plaint he upbraided the
Captain.
“The Cap’n nuver done me right. He oughter have let _me_ pack that box,
instead of the steward. There ain’t no fruit napkins, Mr. Floyd-Rosney.
Jes’ white doilies,” he was not far from tears, “white _doilies_ to
serve with o’anges!”
The mere mention was an appetizer.
“Let me get at ’em, whether they are served with doilies or
bath-towels!” cried the recumbent figure, recumbent no longer. “Call the
ladies. Ho, for the festive board. If you don’t want scraps only, you
had better not let me get there first. Notify the ladies. Does this vast
mansion possess nothing that is like a dinner-bell, or a gong, or a
whistle, that may make a cheerful sound of summons. Ha, ha, ha!”
“It compromises on something like the crackling of thorns under a pot,”
said Floyd-Rosney, sourly. Then with gracious urbanity, “Major, let me
give you my arm, perhaps our presence at the festive board may hasten
matters.”
The ladies had already surged out into the great, bare, echoing hall,
Hildegarde Dean, freshly arrayed in an Empire gown, as blue as her eyes,
protesting that she was as hungry as a hunter. Ducie offered his arm
ceremoniously to her mother, and Floyd-Rosney, who had intended his
attention to the old blind Major as a bid for his wife’s notice and
approval, was not pleased to see the procession, stately and suggestive,
by reason of the lordly expansiveness of the place, headed by the heir
of the old owners in the guise of host. It was an idea that never
entered Ducie’s mind, not even when whetting the carving knife on the
steel in anticipation of dispensing shares of the saddle of mutton from
his end of the table. At this table, in truth, his grandfather had sat,
and his great-grandfather also, and dispensed its bounty. So heavy it
was, so burdensome for removal, that in the various disasters that had
ravaged the old house, war and financial ruin, marauders and tramps,
wind and rain, lightning and overflow, it had endured throughout.
Mahogany was not earlier the rage as now, and the enthusiasm of the
up-to-date man could scarcely be restrained. There were no chairs;
planks from the flooring elsewhere had been hastily stretched benchwise
on the boxes that had held the provisions and bedding, but even this
grotesque make-shift did not detract from his keen discernment of the
admirable in the entourage. The size and shape of the room, the
old-fashioned bow-window, the ornate mantel-piece, the cabinets built
into the walls for the silver and choice show of old china, now without
even a shelf or a diamond-shaped pane of glass, the design of the paper,
the stucco ornaments about the chandelier, or rather the rod which had
once supported it, for the pendants had been dismembered in wanton
spoliation and now lay in fragments on the lawn without, the pantry, the
china-closet, the storeroom contiguous all came in for his
commendation, and much he bewailed the grinning laths looking down from
the gaps in the fallen plaster, the smoke-grimed walls, the destroyed
hearth, half torn out from the chimney-place. The stream of his talk was
only stemmed by the reappearance of the cook, now with his white jacket
and apron in the rôle of waiter. Every eye was turned apprehensively
toward him lest he was moved to say that the Cap’n had ordered no dinner
to be put into the box. He dolorously drooped over Ducie’s shoulder in
the place of host, and at once disclosed the melancholy worst. “Dere
ain’t no soup, sir. While I was speakin’ to you gemmen in de--de--in de
library, sir, de soup scorched. I had set dat ole superannuated mule of
de Major’s ter watch de pot an’ he didn’t know enough to set it off de
fire when it took to smokin’. Hit was ’p’tage Bec’mul, sir.”
Ducie laughed and called for the roast, and the company, as soon as the
functionary had disappeared, addressed their wits to the translation of
the waiter’s French to discover what manner of soup they had lost.
Paula was not sorry to see Adrian Ducie in his hereditary place; somehow
it would have revolted her that she and hers should sit in the seat of
the usurper. Accident had willed it thus, and it was better so. She had
noted the quick glance of gauging the effect which her husband had cast
at her as he made much ado of settling the old Major at the table. Even
without this self-betrayal she would have recognized the demonstration
as one of special design. How should she now be so discerning, she asked
herself. She knew him, she discriminated his motives, she read his
thoughts as though they were set forth on the page of an open book. And
of this he was so unconscious, so assured, so confident of her attitude
as hitherto toward him, that she had the heart to pity while she
despised him, while she revolted at the thought of him.
She wished to risk not even a word aside with him. She was eager to get
away from the table, although the dinner that the Captain had ordered to
be packed made ample amends for the delay. It had its defects,
doubtless, as one might easily discern from the disconsolate and
well-nigh inconsolable port of the waiter at intervals, but these were
scarcely apparent to the palates of the company. It was, of course,
inferior to the menus of the far-famed dinners of the steamboats of the
olden times, but there is no likelihood of famishing on the Mississippi
even at the present day, and the hospitable Captain Disnett had no mind
that these voluntary cast-a-ways should suffer for their precipitancy.
It was still a cheerful group about that storied board as Paula slipped
from the end of the bench and quietly through the door. If her
withdrawal were noted it would doubtless be ascribed to her anxiety
concerning little Ned, and thus her absence would leave no field for
speculation. She did not, however, return to the room devoted to the use
of the feminine passengers of the _Cherokee Rose_, where the child now
lay asleep. She walked slowly up and down the great hall, absorbed in
thought. She was continually surprised at herself, analyzing her own
unwonted mental processes. She could not understand her calmness, in
this signal significant discovery in her life, that she did not love her
husband. She would not rehearse his faults, retrace in her recollection
a thousand incidents confirmatory of the revelation of his character
that had been elicited on this unhappy voyage. How long, she wondered,
would the illusion have continued otherwise,--to her life’s end? Somehow
she could not look forward, and she felt a sort of stupefaction in this,
although she realized that her faculties were roused by her perception
of the truth. The spirit-breaking process, of which she had been
sub-acutely aware, was ended. She could not be so subjugated save by
love, the sedulous wish to please, the tender fear of disapproval, the
ardent hope of placating. Suddenly she was aware that she was laughing,
the fool, to have felt all this for a man who could strike her, cruelly,
painfully, artfully, on the sly that none might know. But even while she
laughed her eyes were full of tears, so did she compassionate the self
she ridiculed with scorn as if it were some other woman whom she pitied.
She felt as if she must be alone. All the day since that crisis the
presence of people had intruded clamorously upon her consciousness. She
would fain take counsel within herself, her own soul. Above all, she
wished to avoid the sight of her husband, the thought of him. Whenever
the sound of voices in the dining-room broke on her absorption as she
neared the door in her pacing back and forth, she paused, looking over
her shoulder, tense, poised, as if for flight. And at last, as the
clamor of quitting the table heralded the approach of the company, with
scarcely a realized intention, the instinct of escape took possession of
her, and she sped lightly up the great staircase, as elusive, as
unperceived as the essence of the echoes which she had fancied might
thence descend.
She hesitated, gasping and out of breath, at the head of the flight,
looking about aghast at the gaunt aspect of the wrecked mansion. The
hall was a replica of the one below, save that there were three great
windows opening on a balcony instead of the front door. The glass was
broken out, the Venetian blinds were torn away, and from where she stood
she could see the massive Corinthian columns of the portico rising to
the floor of the story still above. A number of large apartments opened
on this hall, their proportions and ornate mantel-pieces all visible,
for the doors, either swung ajar or wrenched from their hinges, lay upon
the floors. Paula did not note, or perhaps she forgot, that the wreck
expressed forty years of neglect, of license and rapine and was the
wicked work of generations of marauders. She felt that the destruction
was actuated by a sort of fiendish malice. It had required both time and
strength, as well as wanton enmity, a class hatred, one might suppose,
bitter and unreasoning, the wrath of the poor against the rich, even
though unmindful and indifferent to the injury. It seemed so strange to
her that the house should be left thus by its owners, despite its
inutilities in the changed conditions of the world. It had a dignity, as
of the ruin of princes, in its vestiges of beauty and splendor, and the
savor of old days that were now historic and should hold a sort of
sanctity. Even the insensate walls, in the rifts of their shattered
plaster, their besmirched spoliation, expressed a subtle reproach, such
as one might behold in some old human face buffeted and reviled without
a cause.
She had a swift illumination how it would have rejoiced the Ducies to
have set up here their staff of rest in the home hallowed as the harbor
of their ancestors. They were receptive to all the finer illusions of
life. They cherished their personal pride; they revered their ancient
name; they honored this spot as the cradle of their forefathers, and
although they were poor in the world’s opinion, they held in their own
consciousness that treasure of a love of lineage, that obligation to
conform to a high standard which imposed a rule of conduct and elevated
them in their own esteem. Their standpoint was all drearily out of
fashion, funny and forlorn, but she could have wept for them. And why,
since the place had no prosaic value, had not Fate left it to those whom
it would have so subtly enriched. Here in seemly guise, in well-ordered
decorum, in seclusion from the sordid world, the brothers who so dearly
loved each other would have dwelt in peace together, would have taken
unto themselves wives; children of the name and blood of the old
heritage would have been reared here as in an eagle’s nest, with all the
high traditions that have been long disregarded and forgotten. It seemed
so ignoble, so painful, so unjust, that the place should be thus
neglected, despised, cast aside, and yet withheld from its rightful
owners. She caught herself suddenly at the word. Her husband, her son,
were the rightful owners now, and it was their predecessor who did not
care.
As she stood gazing blankly forward the three windows of the upper hall
suddenly flamed with a saffron glow, for they faced a great expanse of
the southwestern sky, which, for one brief moment, was full of glory.
The waters of the Mississippi were a rippling flood of molten gold; the
dun-tinted, leafless forests on either bank accentuated in somber
contrast this splendid apotheosis of the waning day. The magnolia trees
about the house shone with every glossy leaf, an emerald for richness of
hue, and all at once, far beyond, Paula beheld the solution of the
mystery that had baffled her, the answer to her question, the Duciehurst
cotton fields, as white as snow, as level as a floor, as visibly
wealth-laden as if the rich yield of the soil were already coined into
gold. Here was the interest of the sordid proprietors; the home was no
home of theirs; they had been absentees from the first of their tenure.
The glimmering marble cross, the lofty granite shaft that showed when
the wind shifted among the gloomy boughs of the weeping willows in the
family graveyard, marked the resting place of none of their kindred.
Their bones were none of these bones, their flesh sprung from none of
these dead ashes. The Duciehurst lands made cotton, and cotton made
money, and the old house, built under other conditions, was suited to no
needs that they could create in the exigencies of a new day. Therefore,
it was left to shelter the owl, the gopher, the river-pirate, the
shanty-boater, the moon in its revolutions, and when the nights were
wild the wind seemed to issue thence as from a lair of mysteries.
Paula suddenly turned from the revelation, and gathering the lustrous
white skirt of her crêpe dress, freshly donned, in one jewelled hand
with a care unconsciously dainty, as was her habit, she noiselessly
slipped up the great dusty spiral of the stair leading to the third
story, lest curiosity induced some exploring intrusive foot thus far,
ere she had thought out her perplexity to its final satisfaction. She
was aware that the day dulled and darkened suddenly; she heard the wind
burst into gusty sobs; the clouds had fallen to weeping anew, and the
night was close at hand. She was curiously incongruous with the place as
she stood looking upward, the light upon her face, at a great rift in
the roof. The rain-drops dripped monotonously from smaller crevices down
upon the floor with a sort of emphasis, as if the number were registered
and it kept a tally. There were doubtless divisions and partitions
further to the rear, but this apartment was spacious above the square
portion of the mansion, and the ceiling had a high pitch. She thought
for a moment that they might have danced here in the old times, so fine
were the proportions of the place. Then she remembered that third-story
ball-rooms were not formerly in vogue, and that she had heard that the
one at Duciehurst was situated in the west wing on the ground floor.
This commodious apartment must have been a place of bestowal. The walls
betokened the remnants of presses, and she could almost fancy that she
could see the array of trunks, of chests, of discarded furniture, more
old-fashioned than that below, the bags of simples, of hyacinth bulbs
which were uprooted every second year to be planted anew. There was an
intensification of the spirit of spoil manifested elsewhere as if the
search for the hidden treasure here had been more desperate and radical.
The chimneys seemed to have been special subjects of suspicion, for
several showed that the solid masonry had been gouged out, leaving great
hollows. As she stood amidst the gray shadows in her lustrous white
crêpe gown with the shimmer of satin from its garniture, she was a
poetic presentment, even while engrossed in making the prosaic deduction
that here was the reason these chimneys smoked when fires were kindled
below.
The solitude was intense, the silence an awesome stillness, her
thoughts, recurring to her own sorry fate, were strenuous and troublous,
and thus even her strong, elastic young physique was beginning to feel
very definitely the stress of fatigue, and excitement, and fear, that
had filled the day as well as the effects of the emotional crisis which
she had endured. She found that she could scarcely stand; indeed, she
tottered with a sense of feebleness, of faintness, as she looked about
for some support, something on which she might lean, or better still,
something that might serve as a seat. Suddenly she started forward
toward the window near the outer corner of the room. The low sill was
broad and massive in conformity with the general design of the house,
and she sank down here in comfort, resting her head against the heavy
moulding of the frame. Her eyes turned without, and she noted with a
certain interest the great foliated ornaments, the carved acanthus
leaves of the capitals of the Corinthian columns, one of which was so
close at hand that she might almost have touched it, for the roof of the
portico here, which had been nearly on a level with the window, was now
in great part torn away, giving a full view of the stone floor below.
This column was the pilaster, half the bulk of the others, being
buttressed against the wall. The size of the columns was far greater
than she had supposed, looking at them from below, the capitals were
finished with a fine attention to detail. The portico was indeed an
admirable example of this sort of adapted architecture which is usually
distinguished rather by its license than its success. But she had scant
heart to mark its values or effect. Her reflections were introspective.
She looked out drearily on the wan wastes of the skies, and the somber
night closing in, and bethought herself of the woeful change in the
atmosphere of her soul since the skies last darkened. She said to
herself that illusions were made for women, who were not fitted to cope
with facts, and that it was better to be a loving fool, gulled into the
fancy that she, too, is beloved, than to see clearly, and judge justly,
and harbor an empty aching heart. For there was no recourse for her. It
was not in her power to frame her future. Her husband had, and he knew
he had, the most complete impunity, and doubtless this gave him an
assurance in domineering that he would not otherwise have dared to
exert. He was cognizant of her delicate pride, the odium in which she
would hold the idea of publicity in conjugal dissension. She would never
have permitted, save under some extreme stress like that of the single
instance of the morning, others to look in upon a difference between
them, yet there had been from the first much to bear from his
self-absorbed and imperious temper, and she had borne it to the extent
of self-immolation, of self-extinction. In fact, she was not, she had
not been for years, herself. She could not say, indeed, when her old
identity had asserted itself before to-day. It was the aspect of the
Ducie face, the associations of the past that had recalled her real self
to life, that had relumed the spark of pride which had once been her
dominant trait, that had given her courage to revolt at rebuke in
Adrian’s presence, to hold up her head, to speak from her own
individuality, to be an influence to be reckoned with. But of what
avail? Life must go on as heretofore, the old semblance of submission,
of adulation, the adjustment of every word, every idea, every desire, to
the mould of her husband’s thought, his preference. She wondered how she
would be enabled to maintain the farce of her love, that had hitherto
seemed capable of infinite endurance, of limitless pardoning power, and
the coercive admiration for him that she had felt throughout all these
five years. He was aware, and this fact was so certain that she was sure
he had never given the matter even a casual, careless thought, that for
the sake of their son, his precious presence, his comfort and care, his
future standing before the world, no recourse was possible for her, no
separation, no divorce. Floyd-Rosney might beat her with a stick if he
would, instead of that deft, crafty little blow he had dealt on her
wrist with his knuckles, and she would hide the wales for her child’s
sweet sake. No law was ever framed comprehensive enough to shield her.
She was beyond the pale and the protection of the law. And as she
realized this she held down her head and began to shed some miserable
tears.
Perhaps it was this relaxation that overpowered her nerves, this
cessation of resistance and repining. When she opened her eyes after an
interval of unconsciousness her first thought was of the detail of the
Scriptures touching the young man who slept in a high window through the
apostle’s preaching and “fell down from the third loft.” She had never
imagined that she should do so reckless, so wild a thing. Her methods
were all precautionary, her mental attitude quiet and composed. She
still sat in the window, looking out for a little space longer, for she
was indisposed to exertion; her muscles were stiff, and her very bones
seemed to ache with fatigue. The sky had cleared while she slept; only a
few white, fleecy lines, near the horizon, betokened the passing of the
clouds. It had that delicate ethereal blue peculiar to a night of lunar
light, for the stars were faint, barring the luster of one splendid
planet, the moon being near the full and high in the sky. The beams fell
in broad skeins diagonally through the front windows, while the one at
the side gave upon the dark summits of the great magnolias, where the
radiance lingered, enriching the gloss of their sempervirent foliage.
The weeping willows in their leafless state were all a fibrous glister
like silver fountains, and in their midst she could see glimpses in the
moonlight of the white gleam of the marble cross, the draped funereal
urn, the granite shaft where those who had once rested secure beneath
this kindly roof of home now slept more securely still within the shadow
of its ruin. A broken roof it now was, and through the rift overhead the
moonlight poured in a suffusive flood, illuminating all the space
beneath. She heard the plaintive drip, drip, drip, from some pool among
the shingles where the rain had found a lodgment. The river flashed in
myriad ripples, as steadily, ceaselessly it swept on its surging way to
the Gulf. She was familiar with its absolute silence, concomitant with
its great depth, save, of course, in the cataclysmal crisis of a
crevasse, and as she heard the unmistakable sound of a dash of water,
she bent a startled intentness of gaze on the surface to perceive a
rowboat steadily, but slowly, pulling up the current. She wondered at
her own surprise, yet so secluded was the solitude here that any sight
or sound of man seemed abnormal, an intrusion. She knew that a boat was
as accustomed an incident of a riverside locality as a carriage or a
motor in a street. It betokened some planter, perhaps, returning late,
because of the storm, from a neighboring store or a friend’s house. Any
waterside errand might duplicate the traffic of the highway.
How late was it, she wondered, for her interest in the boat had dwindled
as it passed out of sight beneath the high bank. The idea that perhaps
she alone was waking in this great, ruinous house gave her a vague chill
of fear. She began to question how she could nerve herself, with this
overwhelming sense of solitude, to attempt the exit through the
labyrinth of sinister shadows and solemn, silent, moonlit spaces among
the unfamiliar passages and rooms to the ground floor. She remembered
that the railing of the spiral staircase had shaken, here and there,
beneath her hand as she had ascended, the wood of the supporting
balusters having rotted in the rain that had fallen for years through
the shattered skylight. Her progress had been made in the daylight, and
she had now only the glimmer of the moon, from distant windows and the
rift in the roof. She began to think of calling for assistance; this
great empty space would echo like a drum, she knew, but unfamiliar with
the plan of the house she could not determine the location of the rooms
occupied by the party from the _Cherokee Rose_. If the hour were late,
as she felt it must be, and their inmates all asleep, she might fail to
make herself heard. And then she felt she would die of solitary terror.
Paula could not sufficiently rebuke her own folly that she should have
lingered so long apart from the party, that she should have carried so
far her explorations,--nay, it was an instinct of flight that had led
her feet. She dreaded her husband’s indignant and scornful surprise and
his trenchant rebuke. She realized why she had not been already missed
by him as well as by the others. Doubtless the ladies who were to occupy
the music-room as a dormitory had retired early, spent with fatigue and
excitement. Perhaps Hildegarde Dean might have sat for a time in the
bow-window of the dining-room and talked to Adrian Ducie, and Colonel
Kenwynton, and Major Lacey, as they ranged themselves on one of the
benches by the dining-table and smoked in the light of a kerosene lamp
which the Captain had furnished forth, and watched the moon rise over
the magnolias, and the melancholy weeping willows, and the marble
memorials glimmering in the slanting light. But even Hildegarde could
not flirt all day and all night, too. Paula could imagine that when she
came into the music-room, silent and on tip-toe, she stepped out of her
blue toggery with all commendable dispatch, only lighted by the moon,
gave her dense black hair but a toss and piled it on her head and
slipped into bed without disturbing the lightest sleeper, unconscious
that the cot where little Ned should slumber in his mother’s bosom was
empty, but for his own chubby form. The men, too, as they lay in a row
on the shake-down in the smoking-room with their feet to the fire, might
have chatted for a little while, but doubtless they soon succumbed to
drowsiness, and slumbered heavily in the effects of their drenchings and
exhaustion, and it would require vigorous poundings on their door to
rouse them in the morning.
Obviously there was no recourse. Paula perceived that she must compass
her own retreat unaided. She rose with the determination to attempt the
descent of the stairs. Then, trembling from head to foot, she sank down
on the broad sill of the window. A sudden raucous voice broke upon the
spectral silence, the still midnight.