Paula looked down through the broken roof of the portico supported by
the massive Corinthian columns. A group of men stood on the stone floor
below, men of slouching, ill-favored aspect. She could not for one
moment confuse them with the inmates of the house, now silent and
asleep, although her first hopeful thought was that some nocturnal alarm
had brought forth the refugees of the _Cherokee Rose_.
The newcomers made no effort at repression or secrecy. They could have
had no idea that the house was occupied. Evidently they felt as alone,
as secluded, as secure from observation, as if in a desert. They were
not even in haste to exploit their design. A great brawny, workman-like
man was taking to task a fellow in top-boots and riding-breeches.
“Why did you go off an’ leave Cap’n Treherne?” he asked severely.
The ex-jockey seemed somewhat under the influence of liquor, not now
absolutely drunk, although hiccoughing occasionally--in that dolorous
stage known as “sobering up.”
“If you expected me to stay here all that time, with no feed at all, you
were clear out of the running,” he protested. “I lit out before the blow
came, an’ after the storm was over I knowed you fellers couldn’t row
back here against the current with the water goin’ that gait. So I took
my time as you took yourn.”
The next speaker was of a curiously soaked aspect, as if overlaid with
the ooze, and slime, and decay of the riverside, like some rotting log
or a lurking snag, worthless in itself, without a use on either land or
water, neither afloat nor ashore, its only mission of submerged malice
to drive its tooth into the hull of some stanch steamer and drag it
down, with its living freight, and its wealth of cargo, and its
destroyed machinery, to a grave among the lifeless roots. His voice
seemed water-logged, too, and came up in a sort of gurgle, so defective
was his articulation.
“You-all run off an’ lef’ me las’ night, but Jessy Jane put me wise this
mornin’, an’ I was away before the wind had riz. I stopped by here to
see if you was about, but I declar’ if I had knowed that you had lef’
Cap’n Treherne in thar tied up like a chicken, I’m durned if I wouldn’t
hey set him loose, to pay you back for the trick you played me. But I
met up with Colty,” nodding at the jockey, “an’ we come back just now
together.”
Binnhart’s brow darkened balefully as he listened to this ineffective
threat while old Berridge chuckled.
Another man with a sailor-like roll in his walk was leaning on an axe.
Suddenly he cast his eyes up at the pilaster. Paula on the shadowy side
of the window sat quite still, not daring to move, hoping for
invisibility, although her heart beat so loud that she thought they
might hear its pulsations even at the distance.
“Durned if I got much sense out of that fool builder’s talk to you,
Jasper,” he said. “I think you paid out too much line,--never held him
to the p’int. You let him talk sixteen ter the dozen ’bout things we
warn’t consarned with, pediments, an’ plinths, an’ architraves, an’
entablatures, an’, shucks, I dunno now what half of ’em mean.”
“I had to do that to keep him from suspicionin’ what we were after,”
Binnhart justified his policy. “All I wanted to know was just what a
‘pilaster’ might be.”
“An’ this half column ag’in the wall is the ‘pilaster’ the Crazy talked
about?” And once more the shanty-boater cast up a speculative eye. “But
I ain’t sensed yit what he meant by his mention of a capital.”
“Why, Jackson, capital of Miss’ippi, ye fool you, fines’ city in the
Union,” exclaimed a younger replica of the old water-rat, coming up from
the shrubbery with a lot of tools in a smith’s shoeing-box, from which,
as he still held it, Binnhart began with a careful hand to select the
implements that were needed for the work.
“How do you know the plunder is in the ‘pilaster’?” asked Connover, the
dejected phase of the “after effects” clouding his optimism.
“Why, he talked about it in his sleep. He may be crazy when he is awake,
but he talks as straight as a string in his sleep. Fust chance, as I
gathered, that he has ever had to be sane enough to make a try for the
swag,” explained Berridge. “But I dunno why you pick out this partic’lar
pilaster,” and he, too, gazed up at its lofty height.
“By the way he looked at it when we was fetchin’ him in from the skiff,
that’s why, you shrimp,” exclaimed the shanty-boater.
“I don’t call _that_ a straight tip,” said Connover, discontentedly.
“Why, man, this Treherne was with Archie Ducie when they hid the
plunder. This is the column he says in his sleep they put it in, an’, by
God, I’ll bring the whole thing to the ground but what I s’arches it,
from top to bottom. I’ll bust it wide open.”
With the words the shanty-boater heaved up the axe and smote the column
so strong a blow that Paula felt the vibrations through the wall to the
window where she sat.
“What are ye goin’ to do with Crazy?” demanded old Berridge with a
malicious leer.
“Better bring Cap’n Crazy out right now an’ make him tell, willy nilly,
exactly where the stuff _is_ hid,” urged the disaffected Connover.
“Oh, he’ll tell, fas’ enough,” rejoined old Berridge. He began to dwell
gleefully on the coercive effects of burning the ends of the fingers and
the soles of the feet with lighted matches.
“Lime is better,” declared his son, entering heartily into the scheme.
“Put lime in his eyes, ef he refuses to talk, an’ he won’t hold out.
Lime is the ticket. Plenty lime here handy in the plaster.”
“Slaked, you fool, you!” commented Binnhart. Then, “I ain’t expectin’ to
git the secret out’n Cap’n Treherne now, I b’lieve he’d die fust!”
“He would,” said the shanty-boater, with conviction. “I know the cut of
the jib.”
“We had to keep him here handy, though, or he might tell it to somebody
else. But, Jorrocks, can’t you see with half an eye that there has
never been an entrance made in that pillar. Them soldier fellows were
not practiced in the use of tools. The most they could have done was to
rip off the washboard of the room, flush with the pilaster. They must
have sot the box on the top of the stone base inside the column. This
base is solid.”
He was measuring with a foot-rule the distance from the pilaster to the
nearest window. It opened down to the floor of the portico and was
without either sash or glass. As the group of clumsy, lurching figures
disappeared within, Paula, with a sudden wild illumination and a
breathless gasp of excitement, sprang to her feet. The capital, said
they? The pilaster! She fell upon the significance of these words. The
treasure, long sought, was here, under her very hand. She caught up a
heavy iron rod that she had noticed among the rubbish of broken plaster
and fallen laths on the floor. It had been a portion of a chandelier,
and it might serve both as lever and wedge. The rats had gnawed the
washboard in the corner, she trembled for the integrity of the storied
knapsack, but the gaping cavity gave entrance to the rod. As she began
to prize against the board with all her might she remembered with a
sinking heart that they builded well in the old days, but it was
creaking--it was giving way. It had been thrust from the wall ere this.
She, too, took heed of the fact that it was the clumsy work of soldier
boys which had replaced the solid walnut, no mechanic’s trained hands,
and the thought gave her hope. She thrust her dainty foot within the
aperture, and kept it open with the heel of her Oxford tie, as more and
more the washboard yielded to the pressure of the iron rod, which, like
a lever, she worked to and fro with both arms.
In the silence of the benighted place through the floor she heard now
and then a dull thud, but as yet no sound of riving wood. The washboard
there--or was it wainscot?--had never been removed, and the task of the
marauders was more difficult than hers. She was devoured by a turbulent
accession of haste. They would make their water-haul presently, and then
would repair hither to essay the capital of the pilaster. Was that a
step on the stair?
In a wild frenzy of exertion she put forth an effort of which she would
not have believed herself capable. The board gave way so abruptly that
she almost fell upon the floor. The next moment she was on the verge of
fainting. Before her was naught but the brickwork of the wall. Yet,
stay, here the bricks had been removed for a little space and relaid
without mortar. She gouged them out again after the fashion of the
marauder, and behind them saw into the interior of the pilaster. The
cavity was flush with the floor. She thrust in her hand, nothing! Still
further with like result. She flung herself down upon the floor and ran
her arm in to its extreme length. She touched a fluffy, disintegrated
mass, sere leaves it might have been, feathers or fur. Her dainty
fingers tingled with repulsion as they closed upon it. She steadily
pulled it forward, and, oh, joy, she felt a weight, a heavy weight. She
thrust in both arms and drew toward her slowly, carefully--a footfall on
the stair, was it? Still slowly, carefully, the tattered remnants of an
old knapsack, and a box, around which it had been wrapped. A metal box
it was, of the style formerly used, inclosed in leather as jewel-cases,
locked, bound with steel bands, studded with brass rivets, intact and
weighty.
Paula sprang up with a bound. For one moment she paused with the burden
in her arms, doubting whether she should conceal the chest anew or dare
the stairs. The next, as silent as a moonbeam, as fleet as the gust that
tossed her skirts, she sped around the twists of the spiral turns and
reached the second story. She looked over the balustrade, no light, save
the moonbeams falling through the great doorless portal, no sign of
life; no sound. But hark, the gnawing of a patient chisel, and presently
the fibrous rasping of riving wood came from the empty apartments on the
left. Still at work were the marauders, and still she was safe. She
continued her descent, silently and successfully gaining the entresol,
but as she turned to essay the flight to the lower hall she lost the
self-control so long maintained, so strained. Still at full speed she
came, silent no longer, screaming like a banshee. Her voice filled the
weird old house with shrill horror, resounding, echoing, waking every
creature that slept to a frenzied panic, and bringing into the hall all
the men of the steamboat’s party, half dressed, as behooves a
“shake-down.” The women, less presentable, held their door fast and
clamored out alternate inquiry and terror.
“I have found it! I have found it!” she managed to articulate,
wild-eyed, laughing and screaming together, and rushing with the box to
the astonished Ducie, she placed it in his hands. “And, oh, the house is
full of robbers!”
The disheveled group stood as if petrified for a moment, the moonbeams
falling through the open doorway, giving the only illumination. But the
light, although pale and silvery, was distinct; it revealed the intent
half-dressed figures, the starting eyes, the alert attitudes, and
elicited a steely glimmer from more than one tense grasp, for this is
preëminently the land of the pistol-pocket. The fact was of great
deterrent effect in this instance, for if the vistas of shadow and sheen
within the empty suites of apartments gave upon this picture of the
coterie, wrought in gray and purple tones and pearly gleams, it was of
so sinister a suggestion as to rouse prudential motives. There were ten
stalwart men of the steamboat’s passengers here, and the marauders
numbered but five.
A sudden scream from the ladies’ dormitory broke the momentary pause. A
man, nay, three or four men, had rushed past the windows on the portico.
“I hear them now!” cried Hildegarde Dean; “they are crashing through the
shrubbery.”
“Nonsense,” Floyd-Rosney brusquely exclaimed. “There are no robbers
here.” Then to his wife, “Is this hysteria, Paula, or are you spoiling
for a sensation?”
She did not answer. She did not heed. She still stood in the attitude of
putting the heavy box into Adrian Ducie’s grasp and while he
mechanically held it she looked at him, her eyes wild and dilated,
shining full of moonlight, still exclaiming half in sobs, half in
screams, “I have found it! I have found it!--the Duciehurst treasure.”
Floyd-Rosney cast upon the casket one glance of undisciplined curiosity.
Then his proclivity for the first place, the title rôle, asserted
itself. He did not understand his wife. He did not believe that she had
found aught of value, or, indeed, that there was aught of value to find.
Beyond and above his revolt of credulity was his amazement at his wife’s
insurgent spirit, so signally, so unprecedentedly manifested on this
trip. He connected it with the presence of Adrian Ducie, which in point
of facial association was the presence of his twin brother, her former
lover. The mere surmise filled him with absolute rage. His tyrannous
impulse burned at a white heat. A wiser man, not to say a better man,
would have realized the transient character of the incident, her natural
instinct to assert herself, to be solicitous of the judgment of the
Ducies on her position, to seem no subservient parasite of the rich man,
but to hold herself high. Thus she had resented too late the absolute
dominion her husband had taken over her, and she felt none the lack of
the manner of consideration, even though fictitious, which was her due
as his wife.
He took her arm that was as tense as steel in every muscle. “You are
overwrought, Paula,--and this disturbance is highly unseemly.” Then,
lowering his voice and with his frequent trick of speaking from between
his set teeth, “you should be with the other ladies, instead of the only
one among this gang of men.”
“Why not?” she flared out at full voice, “we don’t live in Turkey.”
“By your leave I will ask Mrs. Floyd-Rosney to witness the opening of
this box, which she has discovered,” said Ducie gravely, “and you also
in view of your position in regard to the title of the property.”
“Certainly I will,” said Mrs. Floyd-Rosney, defiantly forestalling her
husband’s reply, “by his leave, or without it. I am no bond-slave.” Her
eyes were flashing, her bosom heaved, she was on the brink of tears.
“Beg pardon,” stammered Ducie. “It was a mere phrase.”
“Foolish fellow! He thought you had promised to love, honor and _obey_!”
said Floyd-Rosney, ill-advised and out of countenance.
“Foolish fellow!” she echoed. “He thought you had promised to love,
honor and cherish.”
But she was dominated by the excitement of the discovery. She ran to the
door of the ladies’ dormitory. “No danger! No danger!” she cried, as it
was cautiously set ajar on her summons. “The robbers are gone. We have
more than twice as many men here, and the Duciehurst treasure is found.
Come out, Hildegarde, and give me that lamp. They are going to open the
box. Oh, oh, oh!” She was shrilling aloud in mingled delight and
agitation as she came running down the hall in the midst of the silvery
moonlight and the dusky shadows, the wind tossing her white skirt, the
lamp in her hand glowing yellow, and flaring redly out of the chimney in
her speed, to its imminent danger of fracture, sending a long coil of
smoke floating after it and a suffocating odor of petroleum.
Paula placed the lamp on the table in the dining-room, where the box
already stood. Around it the men were grouped on the boards which had
hitherto served as benches. Several were shivering in shirt-sleeves,
the suspenders of their trousers swinging in festoons on either side, or
hanging sash-wise to their heels. Others, more provident, with the
conviction that the sensation was not so ephemeral as to preclude some
attention to comfort, left the scene long enough to secure their coats,
and came back with distorted necks and craned chins, buttoning on
collars. Hildegarde obviously had no vague intention of matching her
conduct to the standards of Turkey, for she joined the party
precipitately, her blue eyes shining, her cheeks flushed with recent
sleep, her hair still piled high on her head and her light blue crêpe
dress hastily donned. The elderly ladies, mindful of the jeopardy of
neuralgia in the draughty spaces without, had betaken themselves again
to bed. The Duciehurst treasure had no possibilities for their
betterment and they did not even affect the general altruistic interest.
There was ample time for the assembling of the party for no key among
them would fit or turn the rusted lock. The box on the table held its
secret as securely within arm’s length as when hidden for more than
forty years in the capital of the pilaster. Hildegarde suggested a
button-hook, which, intended seriously, was passed as an ill-timed jest.
Mr. Floyd-Rosney had a strong clasp-knife, with a file, but the lock
resisted and the lid was of such a shape that the implement could not be
brought to bear.
“The robbers were working with a lot of tools,” said Paula, suddenly.
“Perhaps they left their tools.”
The gentleman who was testing his craft with the lock looked up at her
with a significant, doubtful inquiry. “The robbers?” he drawled,
slightingly.
They possibly number thousands in this wicked world. Their deeds have
filled many court records, and their reluctant carcasses many a prison.
But the man does not live who credits their proximity on the faith of a
woman’s statement. “The robbers?” he drew in his lower lip humorously.
“Where do you think they were working?”
“Come, I can show you exactly.” Paula sprang up with alacrity.
He rose without hesitation, but he took his revolver from the table and
thrust it into his pistol-pocket. While he did not believe her, perhaps
he thought that stranger things have happened. They did not carry the
lamp. The moon’s radiance poured through all the shattered windows of
the great ruin with a splendor that seemed a mockery of the imposing
proportions, the despoiled decorations, the lavish designs of the
fresco, the poor travesties of chandeliers, making shift here and there
to return a crystal reflection where once light had glowed refulgent.
Floyd-Rosney had sat silent for a moment, as if dumfounded. Then he
slowly and uncertainly threw his legs athwart the bench and rose as if
to follow. But the two had returned before he could leave the room, the
“doubting Thomas” of an explorer with his hands full of tools and an
expression of blank amazement on his face.
“Somebody _has_ been working at that wall,” he announced, as if he could
scarcely constrain his own acceptance of the fact. “The wainscot has
been freshly ripped out, but there is nothing at all in the hollow of
the pilaster. Mrs. Floyd-Rosney examined it herself.”
“You were looking for another find, eh?--like a cat watching a hole
where she has just caught a mouse,” said Floyd-Rosney to his wife with
his misfit jocularity.
No one sought to reply. Every eye was on Adrian Ducie, who had found a
cold chisel among the tools and was working now at the hinges and now at
the lock, wherever there seemed best promise of entrance. The hinges
were forced apart finally, the lock was broken, and once more the box
was opened here where it was packed forty-odd years ago. A covering of
chamois lay over the top, and as Adrian Ducie put it aside with
trembling fingers the lamplight gloated down on a responsive glitter of
gold and silver, with a glint here and there, as of a precious stone.
There was obviously insufficient room in the box for the vanished table
service of the family silver, but several odd pieces of such usage were
crowded in, of special antiquity of aspect, probably heirlooms, and thus
saved at all hazards. The method of packing had utilized the space
within to the fraction of an inch. Adrian drew out a massive gold goblet
filled with a medley of smaller articles, a rare cameo bracelet, an
emerald ring, an old seal quaintly mounted, a child’s sleeve-bracelets,
a simple ornament set with turquoise, and a diamond necklace, fit for a
princess. None of these were in cases, even the protection of a wrapping
would have required more space than could be spared.
“You know that face?” Ducie demanded, holding a miniature out to
Floyd-Rosney, catching the lamplight upon it.
“Can’t say I do,” Floyd-Rosney responded, cavalierly and with apparent
indifference.
“Perhaps Colonel Kenwynton will recognize it,” said Ducie, with
composure.
“Eh, what? Why certainly--a likeness of your grandfather, George Blewitt
Ducie,--an excellent likeness! And this,” reaching for a small oval
portrait set with pearls, “is his wife--what a beauty she was! Here,
too,” handling a gold frame of more antiquated aspect, “is your great
grandfather--yes, yes!--in his prime. I never saw him except as an old
man, but he held his own--he held his own!”
The miniatures thus identified and his right to the contents of the box
established, Ducie continued to lift out the jammed and wedged treasures
as fast as they could be disengaged from their artful arrangement. An
old silver porringer contained incongruities of value, a silver mug of
christening suggestions, a lady’s watch and chain with a bunch of
jeweled jangling “charms,” a filagree pouncet-box, a gold thimble, a
string of fine and perfect pearls with a ruby clasp, a gold snuff-box
with an enameled lid. The up-to-date man thrust his monocle in his eye
to better observe, with a sort of æsthetic rapture, the shepherds
dancing in the dainty workmanship. There was an array of spoons of many
sorts and uses, soup ladles, salt ladles, cream ladles, and several gold
and silver platters. These had kept in place one of the old-fashioned
silver coasters, which held contents of value that the least æsthetic
could appreciate. It was nearly half full of gold coin, worth many times
its face value in the days when thus hidden away from the guerrilla and
the bushwhacker. Every man’s eyes glittered at the sight except only
those of Ducie. He was intent upon the search for the papers, the
release of the mortgage that he had believed all his life was stowed
away here.
To every man the knowledge that he has been befooled, whether by foible
or fate, is of vital importance. In many ways he has been influenced to
his hurt by the obsession. His actions have been rooted in his mistaken
persuasions. His mental processes issue from false premises. He is not
the man he would otherwise have been.
All his life Adrian Ducie had raged against the injustice that had
involved in absolute oblivion the release of the mortgage, that had
wrested from his father both the full satisfaction of the debt and the
pledged estate as well. Otherwise he would have inherited wealth,
opportunity, the means of advancement, luxury, pleasure. He was asking
himself now had he made less of himself, the actual good the gods had
doled out, because he had bemoaned fictitious values in case there had
never been a release and the lands had gone the facile ways of
foreclosure, the imminent, obvious, almost invariable sequence of
mortgage. Ah, at last a paper!--carefully folded, indorsed. His
grandfather’s will, regularly executed, but worthless now, by reason of
the lapse of time. An administrator had distributed the estate as that
of an intestate, and defended the action of foreclosure. The incident
was closed, and the sere and yellow paper had not more possibility of
revivification than the sere and yellow leaves that now and again came
with sibilant edge against the windowpane, or winged their way on an
errant gust within the room through a rift in the shattered glass.
As Ducie flung the paper aside he chanced to dislodge one of the gold
pieces, a sovereign, the money being all of English coinage. It rolled
swiftly along the table, slipped off its beveled edge, and was heard
spinning somewhere in the shadows of the great dusky room. More than one
of the gentlemen rose to recover it, and Paula, with unbecoming
officiousness, her husband thought, joined in the search. It was she who
secured it, and as she restored the coin she laid a glittering trifle
before the box, as if it, too, had fallen from the table. “Here is one
of the Ducie jewels,” she said.
“Why, it is a key, how cute,” cried Hildegarde.
Ducie had paused, the papers motionless in his hand. He was looking at
Paula, sternly, rebukingly. Perhaps his expression disconcerted her in
her moment of triumph, for her voice was a little shrill, her smile both
feigned and false, her manner nervous and abashed, yet determined.
“Oh, it is a thing of mystic powers,” she declared. “It commands the
doors of promotion and pleasure, it can open the heart and lock it, too;
it is the keynote of happiness.” She laughed without relish at the pun
while the up-to-date man thrust his monocle in his eye and reached out
for the bauble. There was a moment of silence as it was subjected to his
searching scrutiny.
“A thing of legend, is it?” he commented. “Well, I must say that it does
not justify its reputation--it has a most flimsy and modern aspect,
nothing whatever in conformity with those exquisite examples of old
bijouterie.” He waved his hand toward the Ducie jewels blazing in
rainbow hues, now laid together in a heap on the table. “Its value, why
I should say it could not be much, though this is a good white diamond,
and the rubies are fair, but quite small; it is not worth more than two
hundred dollars or two hundred and fifty at the utmost.”
Adrian Ducie had finally remitted his steady and upbraiding gaze, but
Paula was made aware that he still resented unalterably and deeply her
conduct to his brother. It was Randal’s option to forgive, if he
would,--Adrian Ducie held himself aloof; he would not interfere. His
hands were occupied in opening a paper as the up-to-date man tendered
him the jeweled key, and this gave him the opportunity to decline to
receive it without exciting curiosity. His words were significant only
to Paula when he said, “Excuse me, Mrs. Floyd-Rosney, perhaps, will
kindly take charge of this article.”
With unabated composure, with extreme deliberation, he opened this, the
last paper in the box, which held an enclosure. The yellow glow of the
lamp at one end of the table was a rayonnant focus of light amidst the
gloom of the great, lofty apartment, and showed the variant expressions
of the faces grouped about it. Floyd-Rosney, seated with one side toward
the table, resting an elbow on its surface, had an air of tolerant
ennui, his handsome face, fair, florid, and impressive, was imposed with
its wonted fine effect against the dun, dull shadows which the lamplight
could not dissipate, so definite that they seemed an opaque haze, a
dense veil of smoke. The countenances of the others, less conscious,
less adjusted to observation, wore different degrees of intelligent
interest. Hildegarde’s disheveled beauty shone like a star from the
dark background of the big bow-window where she sat--through the
shattered glass came now and then a glittering shimmer when the magnolia
leaves, dripping and lustrous in the moonlight, tossed in some vagrant
gust. Mrs. Floyd-Rosney’s aspect was of a conventional contrast, as
point-device as if she sat at table at some ordinary function. The sheen
of her golden hair, the gleam of her white dress, her carmine cheeks,
her elated and brilliant eyes, her attentive observation of the events
as they deployed, were all noted in turn by her domestic tyrant, with a
view to future reference. “I’ll have it out with Paula when we get away
from here, if ever,” he said grimly within his own consciousness.
The next moment he had incentive for other thoughts. Ducie scanned the
caption of the paper in his hand, turned the page to observe its
signature, then lifted his head. His voice, although clear, trembled.
“Here is the release of the mortgage, duly executed and with the
original deed of trust inclosed.”
There was a moment of tense silence. Then ensued a hearty clapping of
hands about the table.
Floyd-Rosney satirically inclined his head to this outburst of
involuntary congratulation. “Thank you, very much,” he said with an
ironical smile.
The group seemed somewhat disconcerted, and several attempted
justification.
“Always gratifying that the lost should be found,” said one. “Nothing
personal to you, however.”
“I am sure you, too, would wish the right to prevail,” said a priggish
gentleman, who looked as if he might be a Sunday-school superintendent.
“Well, I hate to see an old family kept out of its own on a legal
quibble,” said one fat gentleman uncompromisingly; he knew better how to
order a dinner acceptably than his discourse.
“It will be difficult to prove an ouster after forty years of adverse
possession,” said Floyd-Rosney, “even if the release or quit-claim, or
whatever the paper is, shall prove to be entirely regular.”
“You surely will not plead the prescription in bar of the right,” the
broker seemed to remonstrate.
“Of the remedy, you mean,” Floyd-Rosney corrected with his suave,
unsmiling smile. “I should, like any other man of affairs, act under the
advice of counsel.”
“Why, yes, of course,” assented the broker, accessible to this kind of
commercial logic. However, the situation was so contrary to the general
run of business that it seemed iniquitous somehow that the discovery of
the papers restoring the title of this great estate to its rightful
owners, after forty years of deprivation of its values, should be at
last nullified and set at naught by a decree of a court on the
application of the doctrine of the statute of limitations. There was a
pervasive apprehension of baffled justice even before the paper was
examined.
Ducie was disposed to incur no further Floyd-Rosney’s supercilious
speculations as to the contents of the paper. Instead, he spread it
before Colonel Kenwynton.
“Read it, Colonel,” he said, moving the lamp to the old gentleman’s
elbow.
It seemed that Colonel Kenwynton in his excitement could never get his
pince-nez adjusted, and when this was fairly accomplished that he would
be balked at last by an inopportune frog in his throat. But finally the
reading was under way, and each of the listeners lent ear not only with
the effort to discriminate and assimilate the intendment of the
instrument, but to appraise its effect on a possible court of equity.
For it particularized in very elaborate and comprehensive phrase the
reasons for the manner, time, and place of its execution. It recited the
facts that the promissory notes secured by the mortgage were in bank
deposit in the city of Nashville, State of Tennessee, that the said city
and State were in the occupation of the Federal army, that since the
said notes could not be forwarded within the Confederate lines, by
reason of the lack of mail facilities or other means of communication,
the said promissory notes were herein particularly described, released
and surrendered, the several sums for which they were made having been
paid in full by George Blewitt Ducie in gold, the receipt of the full
amount being hereby acknowledged, together with a quit-claim to the
property on which they had been secured. For the same reason of the
existence of a state of war, and the suspension of all courts of justice
in the county in which the mortgage was recorded, and the absence of
their officials, this release could not at that time be duly registered
nor the original paper marked satisfied. Therefore the party of the
first part hereunto appeared before a local notary-public and
acknowledged the execution of this paper for the purposes therein
contained, the reasons for its non-registration, and the lack of the
return of the promissory notes.
Colonel Kenwynton took careful heed of the notarial seal affixed, and
the names of five witnesses who subscribed for added security.
“Every man of them dead these forty-odd years and both the principals,”
he commented, lugubriously.
“Great period for mortality, the late unpleasantness,” jeered
Floyd-Rosney. With a debonair manner he was lighting a cigar, and he
held it up with an inquiring smile at the tousled Hildegarde on the sill
of the bow-window, her dilated blue eyes absorbed and expressive as she
listened. She gave him a hasty and transient glance of permission to
smoke in her presence and once more lapsed into deep gravity and
brooding attention.
The incident was an apt example of the power of Fate. With the best
mutual faith, with one mind and intention on the part of both principals
in the procedure, with every precaution that the circumstances would
admit, with the return of the original deed of trust, with a
multiplicity of witnesses to the execution of the quit-claim and
release, which would seem to preclude the possibility of misadventure,
the whole was nullified by the perverse sequence of events. The papers
were lost, and not one human being participating in the transaction
remained to tell the tale. The solemn farce of the processes of the
courts was enacted, as if the debt was still unsatisfied, and the
rightful owner was ejected from the lands of his ancestors.
“But for the casual recollection of your father, Julian Ducie, who was a
child at the time his mother quitted Duciehurst, and this box of
valuables was hidden here to await her return, there would not have been
so much as a tradition of the satisfaction of this mortgage,” Colonel
Kenwynton remarked in a sort of dismay.
“I have often heard my father describe the events of that night, the
examination of my grandfather’s desk by my Uncle Archie and Captain
Treherne, and their discussion of the relative importance of the papers
and valuables they selected and packed in this box; one of the papers
they declared was in effect the title to the whole property. He was a
little fellow at the time, and watched and listened with all a child’s
curiosity. But he did not know where they hid the box at last, although
he was aware of their purpose of concealment, and, indeed, he was not
certain that it was not carried off with the party finally to Arkansas,
his uncle, Archie, and Captain Hugh Treherne rowing the skiff in which
he and his mother crossed to the other side.”
“Ah-h, _Captain Hugh Treherne_”--Colonel Kenwynton echoed the name with
a bated voice and a strange emphasis. He had a fleeting vision of that
wild night on the sand-bar, all a confused effect of mighty motion, the
rush of the wind, the rout of the stormy clouds, the race of the surging
river, and overhead a swift skulking moon, a fugitive, furtive thing,
behind the shattered cumulose densities of the sky. He started to speak,
then desisted. It was strange to be conjured so earnestly to right this
wrong, to find this treasure, to visit this spot, and within forty-eight
hours in the jugglery of chance to be transported hither and the
discovery accomplished through no agency of his, no revelation of the
secret he had promised to keep.
“Yes, Captain Hugh Treherne,” assented Ducie. “He was known to have been
severely wounded toward the end of the war, and as he could never
afterward be located it is supposed he died of his injuries. Every
effort to find him was made to secure his testimony in the action for
the foreclosure of the mortgage.”
“But he was not dead,” said Paula, unexpectedly. “‘Captain Treherne,’
that’s the very name.”
“Why, Paula,” exclaimed Floyd-Rosney, astounded. “What do you mean? You
know absolutely nothing of the matter.”
“The robbers spoke of him,” she said, confusedly. “I overheard them.”
Then with more assurance: “They derived their information from him as to
the hiding-place. That’s how I found it out. Not that he disclosed it
intentionally. They spoke as if--as if he were not altogether sane. They
said that he could not remember. But in his sleep he talked ‘as straight
as a string.’”
“Oh, stuff and nonsense! You heard no such thing!” exclaimed
Floyd-Rosney. “You are as crazy as he can possibly be.”
The ridicule stimulated self-justification, even while it abashed her,
for every eye was fixed upon her. Colonel Kenwynton looked at once
eager, anxious, yet wincing, as one who shrinks from a knife.
“They did not understand the meaning of his sleeping words,” Paula
persisted. “He spoke of pillar and base and pilaster and capital----”
“Oh, oh,” exclaimed Floyd-Rosney, in derision.
Paula had the concentrated look of seeking to shake off this
embarrassment of her mental progress and to keep straight upon a
definite trend. “They spoke, indeed, as if they had Captain Treherne in
reach somewhere,--I wish I had remembered to mention this earlier,--as
if he were to be forced to further disclosures if they should fail to
find the treasure.”
“Oh, this is too preposterous,” cried Floyd-Rosney, rising. He threw
away the stump of his cigar into the old and broken fireplace. “I must
beg of you, Paula, for my credit if not your own, to desist from making
a spectacle of yourself.”
Colonel Kenwynton lifted a wrinkled and trembling hand in protest. “I
ask your pardon; Mrs. Floyd-Rosney will do no one discredit. I must hear
what she has to say of this. The gentleman is my dear, dear friend. I
had lost sight of him for years.” Then turning toward Paula: “Did I
understand you to say, madam, that they spoke as if he were in their
power?”
The old man was gasping and his agitation frightened Paula. Her face had
grown ghastly pale. Her eyes were wide and startled. “I wonder that I
did not think of it earlier,” she said, contritely. “But it did not
impress me as real, as the actual fact, I was so excited and alarmed. I
remember now that they said they had gagged him,--I don’t know where he
was, but they spoke as if he were near and they could produce him and
force him to point out the spot. They had ‘brought him down,’--that was
their expression,--for this purpose. Did they mean,--do you suppose,--he
could have been near, in this house?”
Colonel Kenwynton rose, the picture of despair.
“Oh, my God!” he exclaimed, holding up his hands and wringing them hard.
“That man saved my life at the risk of his own. And if, by blindness
and folly, I have failed him at his utmost need, may God do as much to
me and more when I call from out of the deep. The lamp! The lamp! Bring
the lamp! Search the house--the grounds!”
Captain Treherne had endured many hours of duress, of the torture of
bonds and constraint, of dread, of cold, of hunger, but the terror of
ultimate doom filled his heart when he heard the approach of roving
footsteps, the sound of voices unnaturally loud and resonant, echoing
through the bare rooms, when he saw a flickering glimmer of yellow light
wavering on the ceiling but lost presently in gloom as the party
wandered hither and thither through the vacant place. The miscreants who
had overpowered and bound him were returning, he thought. In the
impaired mental condition from which he had so long suffered, one of his
great sorrows lay in his incapacity at times to differentiate the fact
from hallucination. He could not be sure that the whole scene of ghastly
violence through which he had passed was not one of the pitiable
illusions of his mania, and he lay here bound and gagged and famished as
treatment designed to mend his mental health. He sought to recall the
aspect of the men who, as perhaps he fancied had brought him here,--his
flesh crept with repulsion at the thought of them. One had the rolling
walk of a sailor. Another was garbed like a jockey,--some brain-cell had
perchance retained this image from the old half-forgotten associations
of the race course. So much of the jargon of pathology he had picked up
in his melancholy immurement in the sanatorium. But these impressions
were so definite, so lifelike that if they should prove illusory and
this experience another seizure of his malady it was worse than those
that had beset him hitherto, when he had often had a lurking doubt of
their reality, even while he had acted as if they were demonstrable
fact. It was a terrible thing to harbor such strange discordant fancies.
He remembered that during the day, he could not be sure of the time, he
awoke from a sleep or swoon to find himself here (or, perchance, he had
dreamed), bound and gagged, and the great rough figure of a gigantic
negro standing in the doorway of the room gazing upon him with an
expression of stupid dismay, and then of horrified fright. The negro
disappeared suddenly,--many of the images present to the diseased brain
of Captain Treherne were subject to these abrupt withdrawals. Afterward
he saw, or, as he stipulated within himself, he thought he saw, through
an open door, this swart apparition again, chasing and beating with a
boat-hook a large white owl. Now and then, throughout the afternoon, he
imagined he heard sounds, faint, distant; footsteps, voices and again
silence. Deep into the weary night the hapless prisoner watched the
moonlight trace the outline of the leafless vines outside upon the
ceiling and wall. This was the only impression of which he was certain.
He could not be sure what this seeming approach might mean; whether a
fact, direful and dangerous, to which the helpless must needs submit; or
whether a fantasy of merely seeming menace.
Suddenly a voice--resonant, yet with a falling cadence; hearty and
whole-souled, yet quavering with trouble. “Hugh Treherne! Hugh
Treherne!” it was calling, and a thousand echoes in the bare and
ruinous building duplicated the sound.
A rush of confidence sent the blood surging through the veins of Captain
Treherne, almost congested with the pressure of the cords. He gave a
start that might have dislocated every bone in his body, yet the bonds
held fast. He could not stir. He could not reply. He had recognized the
voice of Colonel Kenwynton, his old commander,--he felt that he could
take his oath to the reality of this fact. There were other
voices,--many foot-falls; it was a searching party with lights, with
arms,--he heard the familiar metallic click as one of the men cocked a
revolver. But what was this? They were taking the wrong turn in the maze
of empty apartments; the steps of their progress had begun to recede,
sounding farther and farther away; their voices died in the distance;
the light had faded from the wall.
He thought afterward that in the intensity of his emotions he must have
fainted. There was a long gap in his consciousness. Then he saw a
well-remembered face bending over him, but oh, so changed, so venerable.
He knew every tone of the voice calling his name, amidst sobs, “Oh,
Hugh, my dear, dear boy!” He felt the eager hands of younger, strong men
deftly loosening the bonds, and the sound of their voices in muttered
imprecations, not loud but deep, filled him with a surging sense of
sweet sympathy. It was swearing, doubtless, but the sentiment that
prompted it was pious. It is not of record that the good Samaritan swore
at the thieves, but it is submitted that, in the fervor of altruism, he
might have done so with great propriety. Treherne felt the taste of
brandy within his aching jaws. These profane wights were lifting him
with a tenderness that might have befitted the tendance of a sick
infant. He could not restrain the tears that were coursing down his
cheeks, although he had no grief,--he was glad,--glad! for now and again
Colonel Kenwynton caught his hand in his cordial grasp and pressed it to
his breast.