Day was breaking. The luster of the moon had failed. Gaunt and grisly
the old ruin began to increase in visibility. The full, gray, prosaic
light emphasized details, whether of workmanship or wreck, which the
silver beams had been inadequate to show. It was difficult to say if the
fine points of ornamentation had the more melancholy suggestion in the
wanton spoliation where they were within easy reach, or in those heights
and sequestered nooks where distance had saved them from the hand of the
vandal. The lapse of time itself had wrought but scant deterioration.
The tints of the fresco of ceilings and borders were of pristine
delicacy and freshness in those rooms where the destroyed hearths had
prevented fires and precluded smoke, save that here and there a cobweb
had veiled a corner, or a space had gathered mildew from exposure to a
shattered window, or a trickling leak had delineated the trace of the
falling drops down the decorated wall.
All exemplified the taste of an earlier period, and where paper had been
used in great pictorial designs it fared more hardly than had the
painting. The vicissitudes of the voyage of Telemachus, portrayed in the
hall, were supplemented by unwritten disaster. His bark tossed upon seas
riven in gaps and hanging in tatters. The pleasant land where he and
his instructive companion met the Island goddess and her train of
nymphs, laden with flowers and fruit for their delectation, was
cataclysmal with torrential rains and broken abysses. The filial
adventurer was flung from the storied cliffs into a Nirvana of blank
plaster.
It had required some muscular force and some mental energy to destroy
the marble mantel-pieces. Here and there bits of the carving still lay
about the floor, the design thus grossly disfigured, showing with
abashed effect above the gaping cavity of the torn-out hearth.
The up-to-date man with his glass in his eye, one hand always ready to
readjust it, the fingers lightly slipped into the pocket of his
trousers, his attitude a trifle canted forward after the manner of the
critical connoisseur, was going about, exploring, discriminating and
bemoaning. Now and again he was joined by one of his fellow-passengers,
who stood with his hat on the back of his head, and gazed with blank,
unresponsive eyes, and listened in uncomprehending silence. The interior
decoration of the old house represented several periods. The salient
fact of wreck and ruin was apparent, however, to the most limited
discernment, and the knots of refugees from the _Cherokee Rose_
discussed its woeful condition as they wandered restlessly about. They
expressed a doubt whether repair would not cost more than the house was
worth, argued on the legal effect of the belated discovery of the
quit-claim papers, and contemned the spirit of the men in possession in
the last forty years to allow so fine a thing in itself to fall into
such a desperate condition, while the lands appurtenant were worked to
the extremest capacity of money-making. There was a disposition to
deduce from the fact a suspicion on the part of the holders that their
title was vulnerable, and a sordid desire to make the most possible out
of the property while it was still in possession. It was always
Floyd-Rosney’s fate to be in a measure justified of circumstances, yet
to seem at fault. The question of mesne profits in case of the recovery
of property did not suggest itself for some time, and when it did arise
it was submitted that mesne profits were mighty hard to get and often
could not be made from the interloper.
“They can make the money out of Floyd-Rosney, though,--he has got money
to burn. For one, I don’t care if he does lose. It would be outrageous
for him to defend the suit for recovery and plead the statute of
limitations,” said the fat man, who did not mince his opinions.
“But he may win out,” said the broker. “Possession is nine-tenths of the
law,--and for forty years under a decree of the Chancery court.”
“Forty thousand years would do him no good in the face of that release,”
protested another. “It was wrongful possession from the beginning.
Floyd-Rosney is a trespasser here and nothing more.”
“But can you call a man a ‘trespasser’ who holds under color of title?
His is an adverse possession,” argued the broker.
And the wrangle began anew with revived spirit. It was well, perhaps,
that the refugees had a subject of discussion so charged with immediate
and general interest, since they had no resource but to roam the old
place until breakfast should be announced. After this meal they would
resume their fitful wanderings till a boat should be sighted. They had
turned out of their comfortable quarters when Captain Treherne had been
brought to the restricted inhabited space of the old building,
relinquishing the shake-down and the fire to him and his special
ministrants.
Now and again a speculation concerning breakfast agitated the group of
men, and one venturesome spirit made a journey down the quaking old rear
verandah to the kitchen, stepping over gaps where the flooring had been
torn up for fuel and walking the rotting sills when the hiatus was too
wide to be leaped. His errand to expedite breakfast was, apparently,
without result.
“Yes, sah,” said the waiter-cook, into whose gloomy soul morning had yet
cast no illuminating ray. “I gwine ter dish up when de breakfast is
cooked,--nuver knowed you wanted it raw. Cap’n nuver treated me
right,--no range, no cook-fixin’s,--nuthin’--an’ breakfast expected to
be smokin’ on de table ’fore de fog is off de river. Naw, Sah,--ef you
kin cook it any quicker, why cook it yourself, Sah. I ain’t got no
dijections to your cookin’ it.”
Upon his return from his tour of discovery, being earnestly interrogated
as to the prospects by his fellow-refugees, the gentleman gave this sage
advice: “If you don’t want to have to knock an impudent nigger down you
will stay here and eat breakfast when he has a mind to serve it.”
The fog clung to the face of the river. It stood blank and white at the
great portal of the house, and sifted through the shattered windows, and
silence dominated it. One felt infinitely removed from all the affairs
of life. The world was not even a neighbor. Time seemed annihilated. It
could not be that yesterday, at this hour, they stood on the stanch deck
of the _Cherokee Rose_, or that only the week before they trod the
streets of Memphis, or Vicksburg, or Helena. That white pall seemed to
shut off all the possibilities of life, and there was a sort of shock,
as of a revulsion of nature, when there came through this flocculent
density the sound of a horse’s hoofs on the graveled drive, and then, on
the portico, the ponderous measured tread of a man of weight and bulk.
He was in the hall before the group was aware of his entrance. Hale and
strong, although of advanced years, well dressed in a sober fashion,
grave, circumspect, reticent of manner, he had turned toward the second
door before a word of his intent could be asked. A gesture had answered
his inquiry for Captain Hugh Treherne. He entered, without knocking, and
the door closed on silence. The group in the hall stared at one another,
aware, in some subtle way, of a crisis which the simple facts did not
explain.
Suddenly a wild cry of defiance rose from within,--a quivering, aged
voice full of rancor and of rage.
“I will resist to the death,--begone, begone, sir, before I do you a
mischief.”
It was the voice of Colonel Kenwynton, furious, fierce, beyond
placation, beyond argument, beyond self-control.
A murmur of remonstrance rose for a moment. Then the group outside
followed the example of the stranger and, without ceremony, burst in at
the door.
The stranger stood in quiet composure with his back to the fire while
the old Colonel, his bushy white eyebrows bent above eyes that flashed
all the lightnings of his youth, waved his hand toward the door,
exclaiming with an intonation of contempt that must have scathed the
most indurated sensibilities, “Begone, sir,--out of the door, if you
like, or I will throw you out of the window.” He stamped his foot as if
to intimidate a cur. “Begone! Rid us of your intolerable presence.”
Captain Treherne, who had lain all the early morning hours on the rugs
and blankets on the floor, seeking to recuperate from his terrible
experience of constraint, had arisen with an alertness scarcely to be
expected. He laid a restraining hand on the old man’s arm. Colonel
Kenwynton placed his own trembling hand over it.
“Captain Treherne is among his friends who will revenge it dearly if you
attempt the least injury. Insane! He is most obviously, most absolutely
sane, and on that fact I will stake my soul’s salvation. Any attempt at
his incarceration,--you despicable trickster, I have no doubt you turn
your penny out of this burial alive,--before God, sir, I’ll make you rue
it. I will publish you throughout the length and the breadth of the
land, and I will beat you with this stick within an inch of your life.”
He brandished his heavy cane, and, despite his age and his depleted
strength, he was a most formidable figure as he advanced. Once more
Treherne caught at his arm. So tense were its muscles that he could not
pull it down, but he hung upon it with all his weight.
The stranger eyed Colonel Kenwynton with the utmost calm, a placidity
devoid alike of fear and of the perception of offense. He spoke in a
quiet, level tone, with an undercurrent of gentle urgency.
“Sane or insane, Hugh Treherne never intentionally deceived a friend,”
he remarked composedly. “Tell him the facts, Captain Treherne,--he
deserves to know them.”
He met at the moment Treherne’s eye. A long look passed between them,--a
terrible look, fraught with some deep mystery, of ghastly intendment,
overwhelming, significant, common to both, which neither would ever
reveal. There was in it something so nerve-thrilling, so daunting, that
Colonel Kenwynton’s bold, bluff spirit revolted.
“None of your hypnotism here!” he cried, again brandishing his stick. “I
will not stand by and see you seek to subjugate this man’s mind with
your subtle arts. So much as cast your evil eye upon him again and I
will make you swallow a pistol-ball and call it piety. (Where is that
damned revolver of mine?)” He clapped his hand vainly to his
pistol-pocket.
“Hugh,” the stranger’s tone was even more gently coercive than before.
“Tell him, Hugh. He is not a man to delude.”
“Colonel,” cried Treherne, still hanging on the old man’s arm, “this
gentleman means me nothing but kindness. He would not,--he could
not,--why, don’t you know he was a surgeon in the Stones’ River
campaign? For old sake’s sake he would do me no harm.”
Colonel Kenwynton himself looked far from the normal, his white hair
blowsing about his face, fiery red, his blue eyes blazing with a bluer
flame, his muscles knotted and standing out as he clutched his stick
and brandished it.
“I don’t care if he was commander-in-chief, he shall not mesmerize you,
if that is what he calls his damnable tricks. Hugh,--forty years! Oh, my
dear boy, that I should have lost sight of you for forty years, what
with my debts, and my worries, and my shifts to keep a whole roof over
my head, and a whole coat on my back. Forty years,--I thought you were
dead. I had been told you were dead,--that is your Cousin Thomas’s
work,--I’ll haul _him_ over the coals. And you as sane as I am all the
time! Begone, sir!” and once more he waved his stick at the stranger. “I
will see to it that every process known to the law is exhausted on you!
The vials of wrath shall be emptied! Oh, it is too late for apology, for
repentance, for sniveling!”
For still the stranger’s manner was mild and gravely conciliatory. “Oh,
Hugh,” he said reproachfully, “why don’t you tell him?”
Once more their glances met.
“Colonel,” said Treherne falteringly, “I am not sane. I admit it.”
“I know better,” Colonel Kenwynton vociferated, facing around upon him.
“You are as sane as I am, as any man. This is hypnotism. I saw how that
fellow looked at you. I marked him well. Why, sanity is in your every
intonation.”
Treherne took heart of grace. “But, Colonel, this is a lucid interval.
Sometimes I am not myself,--in fact, for many years I was _absent_.” He
used the euphemism with a downcast air, as if he could not brook a
plainer phrase. Then, visibly bracing himself, “It was the effects of
the old wound,--the sabre cut on the skull. It injured the brain. I
have persuasions--obsessions.” His words faltered. His eyes dilated.
There was a world of unexpressed meaning in his tone, as he lowered his
voice, scarcely moving his lips. “Sometimes I am possessed by the
Devil.”
“We will not speak of that to-day,” said the stranger suavely.
“It is impossible!” exclaimed the Colonel dogmatically. “Look at the
facts,--you come to me out on that sand-bar to induce me to aid you in
the search for the Ducie treasure and title papers, their recovery is
due to your effort and, in all probability, the restoration of this
great estate to its rightful owners.”
“Ah,” exclaimed the stranger with intense interest. He look elated,
inordinately elated.
“And because you had forgotten in the lapse of time--forty years,--the
exact spot where you and Archie Ducie hid the box away, and the wind was
blowing, and the rain imminent, I put it off--like a fool--and these
fiends of river pirates, or gipsies, or what not, got the information
from you when you were asleep,--talking in your sleep.”
“Subconscious cerebration,” murmured the alienist.
“And because they did not exactly understand the terms of architecture
you used they brought you down here to force you to point out the spot,
and bound and gagged you,--oh,--Hugh, my heart bleeds for you!”
“But can’t you think for him a little, Colonel--can’t you advise him?
Forty years of seclusion does not fit a man to cope with the world
without some preparation for the encounter,--he was in danger of his
life, in falling among these thieves. He incurred a jeopardy which I
know he esteems even greater. He is on the verge of a most extraordinary
cure,--in all my experience I have never known its parallel. Any
disastrous chance might yet prevent its completion. Now that he has
accomplished all that he so desired to do, can’t you advise him to go
back with me to treatment, regimen, safety.”
“Not unless I know what ails him,” said the Colonel stoutly.
Once more the eyes of Treherne and the stranger met, with that dark and
dreadful secret between them. Colonel Kenwynton appraised the glance and
its subtle significance, and fell to trembling violently.
“It is something that we cannot mention this day,--this day is clear,”
said the alienist firmly.
“I cannot go back,--I cannot go back,--and meet it there,” cried
Treherne wildly. “It is waiting for me,--where I have known it so long.
I shall pass the vestibule, perhaps,--but there in the hall”--he paused,
shivering.
“You see that, as yet, you cannot protect yourself in the world, even
now, when you are as sane as the Colonel. But, for the accident that
brought these people here, you might have been murdered by those
miscreants for the secret hiding-place that had slipped your memory. You
might have been heedlessly left on the floor bound and gagged to die. It
was the merest chance that I happened to think you might be at
Duciehurst.”
Treherne was trembling in every fiber. Cold drops of moisture had
started on his brow. His eyes were dilated and quickly glancing, as he
contemplated this obsession to which neither dared to refer openly, lest
the slight bonds that held the mania within bounds, the exhaustion of
the spasm of insanity, called the lucid interval, be overstrained and
snap at once.
“I believe I would not meet it here, in the world,--away from where it
has been so long,” he said doggedly.
“What would you do if you should? You might hurt yourself,--and Hugh,
and this you would deplore more, you might injure some one else,” said
the doctor.
Treherne suddenly turned, throwing his arms about Colonel Kenwynton in a
paroxysm of energy.
“Colonel, lead the way. Go with me, for I would follow you to hell if
you led the charge. God knows I have done that often enough. Lead the
charge, Colonel!”
“Yes, come with us, Colonel,” said the alienist cordially,--it could but
seem a sinister sort of hospitality. “We should be delighted to
entertain you for a few days, or, indeed, as long as you will stay. It
is not a public institution, but we have a beautiful place,--haven’t we,
Hugh?--something very extra in the way of conservatories. Hugh has begun
to take much interest in our orchids. It is a good distance, but Mr.
Ducie drove me down here from Caxton with his fast horse in less time
than I could have imagined.”
“Mr. Ducie?” said Adrian Ducie, with a start. “Where is he? Has he
gone?”
The doctor stared as if he himself had taken leave of his senses. “You
remember,” he said confusedly, blending the reminder with an air of
explanation to the group generally, “that when we had that game of
billiards at your hotel in Caxton last evening I asked you a question or
two about the Duciehurst estate; I didn’t like to say much, but your
replies gave me the clew as to where Captain Treherne had gone after his
escape from the Glenrose sanatorium. He had inquired about Duciehurst as
soon as he began to recover his memory, and seemed to recur to the
subject and to brood upon it. The idea stayed with me all night, for I
was very anxious, and about daybreak I took the liberty of rousing you
by telephone to ask if the roads here from Caxton were practicable for a
motor-car. You remember, don’t you?”
He paused, looking in some surprise at Adrian.
“You told me,” he continued, “that the roads would be impracticable
after these rains, and as I disclosed the emergency, in my great
perturbation for Captain Treherne’s safety, you offered to drive me
down, as you had an exceptionally speedy horse which you kept for your
easy access from Caxton to the several plantations that you lease in
this vicinity.”
Captain Treherne, the possession of his faculties as complete at the
moment as if he had never known the aberrations of a mania, listened
with an averse interest and a lowering brow to these details of the
preparations made for his capture and reincarceration. The alienist did
not seem to observe his manner but went on, apparently at haphazard. “I
regretted to put you to so great an inconvenience at this hour, but you
relieved my mind by saying that you knew that Captain Treherne had been
a valued friend of your uncle’s, and that you not only felt it
incumbent on you to be of any service possible to him, but esteemed it a
privilege.”
“But where,--where is Randal Ducie now?” asked Adrian, turning hastily
to the door.
The doctor’s face was a picture of uncomprehending perplexity. “Why,
isn’t this you?” he asked.
“Oh, no. It is my brother,” exclaimed Adrian, amidst a burst of laughter
that relieved the tension of the situation. Several followed from the
room to witness, at a distance not very discreet, the meeting of the
facsimile brothers.
Randal Ducie had hitched the horse and the four-seated phaeton which
they had had the precaution to provide to the old rack, and, awaiting
the return of the physician, had strolled aimlessly up the pavement
through the rolling fog to the steps of the portico. There he was
suddenly confronted by the image of himself. He looked startled for a
moment; then, with a rising flush and a brightening eye, ascended the
flight with an eager step.
“Hello,” said one brother cavalierly.
“Hello yourself,” responded the other.
“Let me show you how the fellows kiss the cheek in old France,” said
Adrian.
“Let me show you how the fellows punch the head in old Mississippi,”
said Randal.
There was a momentary scuffle, and then, arm in arm and both near to
tears, they strolled together down the long portico of their ancestral
home with much to say to each other, after their separation, and much to
hear.
The group of men at the door, looking laughingly after them, might
readily have discriminated the moment of the disclosure of the discovery
of the Duciehurst treasure with the release of the mortgage foreclosed
so long ago. Randal paused abruptly, facing round upon his brother and
apparently listening in stunned amaze. They were too distant for words
to be distinguished, but his voice came on the air, loud and excited, in
eager questioning. He was, evidently, about to turn within the house,
possibly to have the evidence of his eyes to the intendment and validity
of this paper, when Adrian, by a gesture, checked him. The fog was
beginning to lift, and the figures of the two men were imposed on a
vista of green, where the sunlight in a delicate clarity after the
rains, in a refined glister of matutinal gold, was beginning to send
long glinting beams among the glossy foliage of the magnolias, and to
light with reverent tapering shafts the solemn aisles of the weeping
willows where the tombstones reared unchanged their mortuary memorials,
unmindful of sheen or shadow, of fair weather or foul, even of time, as
the years came and went, a monition only of death and a prophecy of
eternity.
“There is one thing I must tell you, Ran,” Adrian said, laying both
hands on his brother’s shoulders.
Randal threw up his head, excited, expectant, apprehensive.
“_She_ is here,--one of the passengers of the _Cherokee Rose_.”
“She?” exclaimed Randal in blank mystification. “Who?”
Adrian was embarrassed. It seemed as if even an old love could hardly be
of so sluggish a divination,--as if Randal must have probed his
meaning. He reflected that it might be some keenly sensitive
consciousness that could not yet bear the open recognition of the facts.
Between them the subject of the sudden jilting had never been mentioned,
save in Randal’s one letter apprising his brother that the engagement
was off, by reason of the lady’s change of mind, which came, indeed,
later than the item in the Paris journals, chronicling news of interest
to Americans sojourning abroad, and giving details of a new betrothal in
a circle of great wealth and position. He himself had never known such
frenzy of emotion, of rage, and humiliation, and compassion, and pride.
The event had racked him with vicarious woe. It had dealt him a wound
that would not heal, but now and again burst into new and undreamed of
phases of anguish. Even yet he shrank from taking her name on his
lips--and to Randal himself, of all people. Yet Randal must be told,--he
must not meet her unaware. The pause of indecision continued so long as
they stood thus, Adrian’s hands on his brother’s shoulders, that
Randal’s eyes dilated with a surprise obviously unaffected. He lifted
his own hands to his brother’s elbows, and thus facing each other he
said: “What of it? I am in a hurry,--I want to see that release. Who is
this ‘she’?”
“Why, Randal,--it is Mrs. Floyd-Rosney,--Paula Majoribanks, that was,
and her husband and child.”
There was still a pause, blank of significance.
“Well,” said Randal, meditatively, at length, “they won’t like that
quit-claim paper one little bit of a bit.” There was a laugh in his
brilliant hazel eyes, and it touched the finely cut corners of his
lips. His fresh face was as joyous, as candid, as full of the tender
affection of this reunion as if no word of a troubled past had been
spoken to jar it.
Oh, that she should come between them on this day when they were so
close to each other, Adrian reflected, when absence had made each so
dear, when there was so much to say and to do, when separation impended,
and time was so short. He felt that he could hardly endure to have their
mutual pleasure marred, that he could not brook to see Randal abashed in
her presence, and conscious, disconcerted and at a disadvantage before
her husband. Above all, and before all, he winced for Randal’s pain in
the reopening of these poignant old wounds to bleed and ache anew.
His arms tightened and slipped up from his brother’s shoulders and
around his neck. “Oh, Randal, will it hurt you much?”
Randal looked grave. “A lawsuit is always a troublesome, long-drawn-out
bother; I shrink from the suspense and the expense. But I am mighty glad
to have the chance to be hurt that way.”
“Oh, I meant will it give you pain to meet Paula again as Mrs.
Floyd-Rosney?”
“_What?_” Randal’s hearty young voice rang out with a note of amazement.
“Not a bit. What do you take me for?”
“I was afraid--you would feel,” faltered Adrian.
“Is that what’s the matter with you? You look awfully muffish.”
“Well,--as you loved her once,--I thought----”
“That was a case of mistaken identity,” said Randal. “Can’t you realize
that it is just because she _could_ prefer another man; that she could
think a thought of change; that her plighted faith could be broken; that
her love,--or what we called love,--could take unto itself wings and fly
away; that she was only an illusion, a delusion, a snare. I never loved
the woman she is.”
“She is very beautiful,” hesitated Adrian.
“When I thought her mind and heart matched her face she seemed beautiful
to me, too,” said Randal.
“You will think so still.”
“Kid, you know nothing about love. A man truly in love may have been
attracted by beauty, but it is not that which holds him. It is a unity
of soul; he finds a complement of mind; he has a sense of sympathy and,
through thick and thin, a partisan, constant faith in a reciprocal
heart. He gets used to the prettiest face and it makes little impression
on him,--just as he wouldn’t notice, after a time, a fine costume. She
is nothing that I imagined. She is not now, and she never was the ideal
I loved. I don’t regret her. Don’t grieve for me, little boy. And now
will you be so kind as to take those paws off my neck,--you are half
strangling me with your fraternal anxiety. Behold, I will smite you
under the fifth rib.”
There was once more a brief, boyish scuffle. Then the two turned and
came walking decorously back to the group on the portico. The exterior
aspect of the old ruin had an added majesty by daylight, despite the
more obvious injuries of wreckage. Its fine proportions, the blended
elegance and stateliness of its design, the richness even in the
restraint of its ornamentation, all showed with telling effect, apart
from the wild work within of the marauders. These details the rude
usage it had received could not affect. It might have stood as an
imposing architectural example of a princely residence of the date of
its erection, and it was impossible to gaze upon it with a sense of
possessing it, and feel no glow of gratulation.
“Why, the item of glass alone would be a corker,” a practical man was
saying, walking backward down the stone pavement and surveying the great
black gaps of the shattered windows.
The two brothers cast a meaning glance at each other, the discussion, of
which this was obviously a fragment, evidently looked to a
rehabilitation of the mansion under a change of owners, for, certainly,
it would seem that Floyd-Rosney had neither the interest nor the
associations to induce him to set up his staff of rest here. It was only
a straw, but it showed how the wind of opinion set, and the brothers
were in the frame of mind to discern propitious omens. The sun was
bright on the over-grown spaces of the lawn. The Cherokee rose hedge
that divided it from the family graveyard, and continued much further,
had spread with its myriad unpruned sprangles beyond the space designed
for a boundary, growing many feet wide. Beneath the great arch it
described stretched a long tunnel-like arbor, throughout its whole
extent, dark, mystic, in the shadow of its evergreen leaves. By reason
of some natural attraction which quaint nooks have for children,
Marjorie and little Ned had discovered this strange passageway, and were
running in and out of the darksome space, with their shrilly sweet cries
of pretended fright and real excitement, each time venturing a little
farther than before. The mists had lifted from the river, which spread
a broad, rippling surface of burnished copper in the sunshine under an
azure sky. There was no sign of approaching craft, no curl of smoke
above the woods beyond the point to herald deliverance by a steamboat.
One of the old ladies had established herself on her suitcase on the
topmost step of the flight from the portico, and it would, indeed, have
been a swift steamer that could have escaped her vigilance and passed
without being signaled.
Adrian paused good-naturedly. “You need give yourself no uneasiness,
madam,--it will require half an hour’s time at least for a steamboat to
pass this place from the moment that she is sighted,” he said, in polite
commiseration.
But the old lady sat tight. “They tell me there is a crazy man in
there,” she declared lugubriously. She would leave by the first
opportunity.
“He is going presently in a phaeton across the country,” Adrian
explained. “There is no possible danger from him, however,--he has only
occasional attacks. He is perfectly at himself to-day. But he will not
be going on the boat.” This remark was unlucky, as it increased her
anxiety to embark.
Randal had lifted his hat after a moment’s pause, and passed on without
his brother. He hesitated, looked back, then entered the vestibule, and
came suddenly face to face with Paula.
It had been five years since they had met and then it was as lovers. She
had not dreamed of seeing him here. She thought him ten miles away at
Caxton. She had never been more brilliantly, more delicately beautiful.
Her burnished redundant hair that was wont to resemble gold, and to seem
so elaborately tended, had now a luminous fibrous effect at the verges
of the smooth pompadour roll that had been hastily tossed up from her
forehead. She even appeared taller, more slender than usual, since she
wore a clinging gown of princess effect, in one piece, and, obviously,
of matutinal usage, in more conventional surroundings. The flowing
sleeve showed her bare arm from the elbow, exquisitely white and soft.
The V-shaped neck gave to view her delicate snowy throat rising from a
mist of lace. The strange large flower-pattern cast over a ground of
thick sheeny white was an orchid with a gilded verge, and in the mauve
and pearl tones she, too, looked like some rare and radiant bloom. Her
eyes were sweet and expectant--her step swift. She was on her way to
call back the child. She paused suddenly, dumfounded, disconcerted,
confronted with the past.
She recognized Randal in one instant, despite his resemblance to his
brother, and for her life she could not command her countenance. It was
alternately red and white in the same moment. She felt that his
confusion would heighten hers, yet she could not forgive his composure,
his well-bred, graceful, gracious manner, his clear, vibrant, assured
voice when he exclaimed, holding out his hand: “Mrs. Floyd-Rosney--this
is an unexpected pleasure. I have this moment heard that you are here.
Is that your husband?” For Floyd-Rosney had just issued from the
dining-room and was advancing down the hall toward her with an
unmistakable, connubial frown. “Will you kindly present me?”
It seemed for a moment as if Floyd-Rosney had never heard of the simple
ceremony of an introduction. Paula could not secure and hold his
attention. He passed Randal over with a casual, unnoting glance, and
began to take her to task in no measured terms.
“Why do you allow the child to chase back and forth in that dark tunnel
under the Cherokee rose hedge? He will be scratched to pieces by the
briars, the first thing you know. Why is he with that madcap tom-boy,
Marjorie Ashley? Where is his nurse, anyhow?”
“Why, she is completely knocked out by the fatigue and excitements,--she
is quite old, you remember,” said Paula meekly, seeking to stem his tide
of words. “I was just coming out to play nurse myself. But stop a
minute. I want to----”
“I won’t stop a minute,--I don’t care what you want,”--her aspect
suddenly seemed to strike his attention. “And why do you trick yourself
out in such duds at such a time?”
“Because this is so easy to put on,--and I had to dress the baby,” Paula
was near to tears. “But I want to----” she mended the phrase,--“This is
Mr. Ducie; he wishes to meet you.”
Floyd-Rosney turned his imperious gaze on Ducie with a most unperceiving
effect. “Why, of course, I know it is Mr. Ducie,--have you taken leave
of your senses, Paula? Mr. Ducie and I have seen enough of each other on
this trip to last us the rest of our natural existence. I can’t talk to
you now, Mr. Ducie,--if you have anything to say to me you can
communicate it to my lawyers; I will give you their address.”
“It is not business. It is an introduction,” explained Paula, in the
extremity of confusion, while Randal, placid and impassive, looked on
inscrutably. “Mr. Ducie wishes to make your acquaintance.”
“Well, he has got it,--if that is any boon,” Floyd-Rosney stared at her,
stupefied.
“But this is the brother,--Mr. Randal Ducie,--the one you have never
met.” In Paula’s haste to elude her husband’s impatient interruption she
could scarcely speak. Her mouth was full of words, but they tripped and
fell over each other in her agitation with slips and grotesque
mispronunciations.
“Hoh!” said Floyd-Rosney, permitting himself to be enlightened at last.
“Why this thing of twin brothers is no end of a farce.” He shook hands
with Randal with some show of conventionality. He, too, was mindful of
the past. But so impatient was his temperament with aught that did not
suit his play that he was disposed to cavil on the probabilities. “Are
you sure,”--then he paused.
“That I am myself,--reasonably sure,” said Randal, laughing. And now
that Adrian was coming in at the door Floyd-Rosney surveyed them both as
they stood together with a sort of disaffected but covert arrogance.
“Well--I can see no sort of difference,” he declared.
“Oh, the difference is very obvious,” said Paula, struggling to assert
her individuality.
“I should thank no man for taking the liberty of looking so much like
me,” said Floyd-Rosney, seeking to compass a casual remark. Indeed, but
for the pressure of old associations, the necessity of taking into
consideration the impression made upon the by-standers, all conversant,
doubtless, with the former relations of the parties, for several
passersby had paused, attracted by the opportunity for the comparison
of the twins side by side, Floyd-Rosney would have dismissed the Messrs.
Ducie and their duplicate countenance with a mere word.
“I didn’t expect we should keep up the resemblance,” remarked Adrian.
“While I was abroad I did not know what Randal was getting to look like,
and, therefore, I didn’t know which way to look myself. But now that we
are together we each have the advantage of a model.”
The broker seemed to gravely ponder this strange statement, the others
laughed, and Paula saw her opportunity to terminate the _contretemps_.
“I’ll call the baby in,” she said, and slipped deftly past and out into
the sunshine.
Paula’s instinct was to remove the cause of her husband’s irritation,
not because she valued Floyd-Rosney’s peace of mind or hoped to
reinstate his pose of dignity. But she could not adjust herself to her
habitual humility with him in Randal Ducie’s presence,--to listen to his
instruction, to accept his rebukes, to obey his commands, to laugh at
his vague and infrequent jests, to play the abased jackal to his lion.
She would efface herself; she would be null; she would do naught to
bring down wrath on her devoted head,--but beyond this her strength was
inadequate. So she hustled the two children into the house and up the
stairs, and out of the great front windows of the hall where she told
them to stand on the balcony above the heads of the group below and
watch for the appearance of a boat.
Now and then their sweet, reedy tones floated down as they conversed
with each other at the extreme limit of their vocal pitch, breaking,
occasionally, into peals of laughter. Their steps sounded like the
tread of half a dozen pairs of feet, so rapidly and erratically they ran
back and forth. At intervals they paused and stood at the iron
balustrade, surveying the scene from every point of view, up the river
and down the river, and again across, in the zealous discharge of their
delegated duty to watch for a boat. Below reigned that luxurious sense
of quiet which ensues on the cessation of a turbulent commotion. Groups
strolled to and fro on the portico, or found seats on the broad stone
sills of the windows that opened upon it. Paula, in her white and lilac
floriated house-dress, walked a little apart, pausing occasionally and
glancing up to caution the two children on the balcony to be wary how
they leaned their weight on the grillwork of the iron balustrade, as
some rivet might be rusted and weakened.
Hildegarde had found her rough gray suit impracticable because of the
drenching rains of yesterday and was freshly arrayed in a very chic
street costume of royal blue broadcloth, trimmed with bands of
chinchilla fur, with a muff and hat to match. She was standing near a
window, on the sill of which the Major, wrapped in a rug and his
overcoat, was ensconced, having been brought forth for a breath of air.
He had a whimsical look of discovery on his pallid and wrinkled face.
She was recalling to him a world which he had forgotten so long ago that
it had all the flavor of a new existence.
“I can’t give you any idea of the scenery _en route_, Major,”--she was
describing a trip to the far west,--“in fact I slept the whole way. You
see, my social duties were very onerous last spring. Our club had
determined to give twelve dinner dances during the season, and the
weather became hot unusually early, and so many people were leaving town
that as we were pledged to twelve we were compelled to give four of the
dinner dances during the last week and my head was in a whirl. There was
the Adelantado ball, too, and several very elaborate luncheons, and two
or three teas every afternoon, and what between the indigestion and the
two-step lumbago I was in a state of collapse on the journey west.”
“That was a novel campaign,” remarked the old soldier.
“It was a forced march,” declared Hildegarde. “I didn’t revive until I
heard dance music again in the Golden City. Let me prop your head up
against the window frame on my muff, Major. Oh, yes, it is very
pretty,--all soft gray and white.” She made a point of describing
everything in detail for his sightless vision. “You might get a nap in
this fresh air,--for it is a ‘pillow muff.’ Yes, indeed,” watching his
trembling fingers explore its soft densities, “it is very fine, but I
won’t mention the awful sum it cost my daddy lest such a conscienceless
pillow give you the nightmare.”
The air had all that bland luxurious quality so characteristic of the
southern autumn. A sense was rife in the sunlit spaces of a suspension
of effort. The growths of the year were complete; the inception of the
new was not yet in progress. No root stirred; there was never a drop of
sap distilled; not a twig felt the impetus of bourgeonning anew. Naught
was apposite to the season save some languorous dream, too delicate, too
elusive even for memory. It touched the lissome grace of the
willow-wands, bare and silvery and flickering in the imperceptible
zephyrs. It lay, swooning with sweetness, in the heart of a late rose
which found the changing world yet so kind that not a petal wilted in
fear of frost. It silvered the mists and held them shimmering and
spellbound here and there above the shining pearl-tinted water. It was
not summer, to be sure, but the apotheosis of the departing season.
Those far gates of the skies were opening to receive the winged past,
and, surely, some bright reflection of a supernal day had fallen most
graciously on all the land.
“For my part, since that deal is over and done with by this time, I
don’t care how long I have to wait for a boat,--it can neither mar nor
make so far as I am concerned,” said the broker, as he puffed his cigar
and walked with long, meditative strides up and down the stone pavement.
Floyd-Rosney did not concur in this view. He had expected all the early
hours that some of the neighboring negroes would come to the house,
attracted by the rumors of the commotions enacted there during the
night. Thus he could hire a messenger to take a note or a telephone
message to the nearest livery establishment and secure a conveyance for
himself and family to the railroad station some ten miles distant. He
feared that hours, nay a day or so, might elapse before one of the
regular packets plying the river might be expected to pass. Those
already in transit had, doubtless, “tied up” during the storm, and now
waited till the current should compass the clearance of the débris of
the hurricane floating down the river. The steamers advertised to leave
on their regular dates had not cast off, in all probability, but lay
supine in their allotted berths till the effects of the storm should be
past, and thus would not be due here for twelve or twenty-four hours,
according to the distance of their point of departure.
As, however, time went on and the old house stood all solitary in the
gay morning light as it had in the sad moon-tide, Floyd-Rosney reflected
that no one had gone forth from the place except the robbers and the
roustabouts who had rowed the party down from the _Cherokee Rose_,
returning thither immediately. It was, therefore, improbable that any
rumor was rife of the temporary occupation of the Duciehurst mansion.
Hence the absence of curiosity seekers. Moreover, even were the
circumstances known, every human creature in the vicinity with the
capacity to stand on its feet and open and close its fingers was in the
cotton fields this day, for the sun’s rays had already sufficiently
dried off the plant, and the industry of cotton-picking, even more than
time and tide, waits for nobody. For “cotton is money,--maybe more,
maybe less, but cotton is money _every time_,” according to the old
saying. These snowy level fields were rich with coin of the republic.
The growing staple was visible wealth, scarcely needing the transmuting
touch of trade. No! of all the wights whom he might least expect to see
it was any cotton-picker, old or young, of the region.
There being, evidently, no chance of a messenger, he had half a mind, as
his impatience of the detention increased, to go himself in search of
means of telephonic communication. But, apart from his spirit of leisure
and his habit of ease, his prejudices were dainty, and he looked upon
the miry richness of the Mississippi soil as if it were insurmountable.
To be sure, now and again he affected a day of sylvan sport, when, with
dog and gun, he cared as little as might be for mud, or rain, or sleet,
or snow; but then, he was caparisoned as a Nimrod, and burrs and briers,
stains and adhesive mire, were all the necessary accessories, and of no
consideration. In his metropolitan attire to step out knee deep in a
soil made up of river detritus, the depth and blackness of which are the
boast and glory of the cotton belt, was scarcely to be contemplated if
an alternative was possible.
Suddenly a cry smote the air with electrical effect. “A boat! A boat!”