Certainly no institution of its type ever had such cheerful inmates as
the Glenrose Sanatorium could boast so long as Colonel Kenwynton and the
blind Major sojourned within its gates, the guests of the alienist and
Captain Hugh Treherne. The patient experienced no recurrence of his
malady during the visit. Indeed, the beneficial influence, with the
incident change of thought, conversation, and occupation, was so obvious
that the physician acceded to Colonel Kenwynton’s earnest urgency to
allow the Captain to go home with him and spend a few weeks at his
plantation, in a neighboring county. They made a solemn compact for the
conservation of his safety and the promotion of his mental health.
“Captain,” said the Colonel the first evening that they spent together
over the wood fire in the old plantation house, “I don’t know what is
the particular devil that you say possesses you at times, and I don’t
want to know. He is an indignity to you and an affront to me. Never
mention the nature of the obsession to me for I won’t hear it. Never let
me have so much as a glimpse of his horn or his hoof. But if you,
unhappily, ever feel again the clutch of his claw fastening on you, just
report to me, and we’ll both strike out in a dog-trot for that insane
asylum, and let the doctor exorcise him a bit. And I swear to you before
God on our sacred bonds as comrades in the Lost Cause I will stay there
with you till you are ready to come home with me. Shake hands on it,
dear old fellow--shake hands on it.”
Perhaps because the topic was interdicted in conversation it was the
less intrusive in thought. Hugh Treherne maintained an observance of the
Colonel’s mandate as strict and as soldierly as if it had been read in
general orders at the head of the regiment. He found an interest in the
Colonel’s affairs in the ramshackle old place, which was but a meager
remnant of his former princely domain. Colonel Kenwynton had brought
down from the larger methods of the old times a constitutional disregard
of minutæ. Hence men, “indifferent honest,” otherwise would overreach
him in negotiation. Servants filched ruthlessly his minor possessions.
His pastures, fields, barns, orchards, were plundered with scarcely a
realization of the significance of robbery, the facile phrase, “The old
Cunnel won’t care,” or “The old Cunnel won’t ever know the difference,”
sufficient to numb any faint prick of conscience.
And thus it was that his home had fallen to decay; his barns and fences
rotted; his gin was broken and patched and deteriorated in common with
all his farm machinery; his hedges of Cherokee rose, widened, unpruned
and untended, becoming veritable land grabbers, rather than boundaries,
and yearly more and more of his acres must needs be rented for lack of
funds to pay a force of laborers. Colonel Kenwynton lived on in his
mortgaged home and “scuffled up the money,” as he phrased the process,
to meet the interest year by year, and kept but sorry cheer by a bleak
and lonely fireside. Nevertheless, he twirled up the ends of his white
mustachios jauntily and faced the world with a bold front.
From his own account it seemed wonderful that he had any income at all,
and as if much business tact must be requisite to hold his mortgages
together in such shape that they should assume all the enlightened
functions of a fortune. The age of some of these obligations was a
source of special pride with him, although sometimes with an air of
important dismay he would compute the amount of interest he had paid in
the course of years on their several renewals aggregating more than the
property would sell for in the present collapsed condition of such real
estate values. When he came to speak of the interest he had promised to
pay, he would pause with an imperative shake of the head, as if to abash
the futurity which was fast bringing about the maturity of these notes.
“Why, Colonel, this is not good business,--you have practically bought
your own property twice over,” Treherne attempted to argue with him one
day when his mood waxed confidential. “You should have given up the
fight long ago and let them foreclose.”
“Foreclose on my home place, sir,--the remnant of my father’s
plantation?” he replied in amaze. “Why, what would the snail do without
the shell he was born with? I shall need a narrower one before that day
comes, I humbly trust in Providence.”
Colonel Kenwynton could scarcely imagine existence without a mortgage. A
deed of trust seemed as natural and essential an incident of a holding
in fee simple as the title papers.
Treherne discovered as time went on opportunities for betterment in the
Colonel’s affairs, small it is true, pitiful in comparison with the
ideals of the old gentleman, who lifted his brows in compassionate
surprise when the subject was broached, and, but that he could not
contravene the common sense of the proposition, he might have thought it
an insane impulse, manifesting itself in schemes of domestic economy on
a minute scale.
“Colonel, this place ought to make its own meat. There is plenty of corn
in that rearward barn. I put a padlock on its door to-day. Those young
shoats will be as fine a lot of meat as ever stepped by hog-killing
time. I had them turned into the oak woods to-day,--to give them a
chance at the mast,--makes the meat streaked lean and fat, you know.”
“You surprise me,” said the Colonel, looking blankly over his
spectacles. “I didn’t know there was any corn left. And a few hogs
didn’t seem worth wasting time about. I don’t go into such matters, dear
boy,--cotton is my strong suit. Cotton is the only play.”
“You spent your time in the war mostly on the firing line, Colonel.
Somebody ought to be mighty thankful you were not in the quartermaster’s
office. That ham we cut to-day came from the store, and the cook tells
me so does every pound of lard that goes into your frying pan, and all
the bacon you furnish to your force of hands. And yet you have here an
ample lot of bacon on the hoof and abundance of good feed to fatten it.”
The Colonel appraised the logic and sat humiliated and silent.
“I had the shoats all marked and sent the mark to the county court to be
registered. And now you’ll eat your own meat after January or go
without,” said Treherne sternly, in command of the situation.
By some accident, searching in the Colonel’s desk for an envelope or
some such matter, Treherne chanced to discover a receipt for a bill
which the old gentleman had carelessly paid twice.
“I took his word, of course,” said the Colonel in vicarious abasement,
“as the word of a gentleman and an old soldier.”
“An old soldier on the back track generally. I remember him well,” said
Treherne uncompromisingly. “He shall refund as sure as my name is
Treherne.”
And he did refund, protesting that the matter was an accident, an
oversight, which excuses the Colonel accepted in good faith and brought
back to the skeptical Hugh Treherne.
“So queer those mistakes never happen to your advantage, Colonel,” he
snarled, and although his contention was obviously logical, the Colonel
listened dubiously.
In truth, Colonel Kenwynton was of a different animus, of a dead day, of
a species as extinct as the Plesiosaurus. He could not even adapt
himself to the conditions of his survival. He could neither hear nor
speak through the telephone, although all his faculties were unimpaired.
He held himself immune from diseases of modern diagnosis; for him there
was no microbe, no appendicitis, no neurasthenia. His credulity revolted
against the practicability of wireless telegraphy and aviation. He clove
to his old books, and, except for the newspapers, he read nothing that
had been printed within the last fifty years. His ideas of amusement
were those of previous generations. He was a skilled sportsman, a dead
shot, indeed; his play at billiards held the record at his club; he was
versed in many games of chance and had the nerve to back his hand or his
opinion to the limit of his power.
He was a shrewd judge of horseflesh, and, as he often remarked since he
could no longer own and race a string, he took pleasure in seeing the
fine animals of other men achieve credit on the turf. Despite his early
gambling and racing proclivities he had always been esteemed a man of
immaculate honor and held a high social position. This ascendancy was
supplemented by certain associations of special piety incongruously
enough. As long as his wife had lived he accompanied her to church every
Sunday morning; he drew the line, it is true, at the evening service. He
carried a large prayerbook, and his notable personality rendered his
presence marked. He read the responses with a devotional air and a
solemn voice and listened to the sermon with an appearance of unflagging
interest and absorption; as he seemed to take it for granted that he
could go to heaven on the footing of an honorary member, his persuasion
was in a manner accepted, and it might have been a source of surprise to
his friends to realize that, after all, he was not a professedly
religious man.
For some weeks the two incongruous companions lived on in great peace
and amity in the seclusion of the old plantation house, a rambling frame
structure far too large for the shrunken number of its inmates. The
broad verandas surrounding it on three sides scarcely knew a footfall;
the upper story was unoccupied save for the Colonel’s bedroom, for
Treherne had selected a chamber among the vacant apartments on the
ground floor that, through a glass door opening on the veranda,
permitted his egress betimes to take up his self-arrogated supervisory
duties on the place hours before his host, always a late riser, was
astir.
One night,--a memorable night,--a dreadful thing happened. The Colonel
lay asleep in his big mahogany four-poster; the placidity of venerable
age on his face was scarcely less appealing than the innocence of
childhood; his snowy hair on the pillow gave back a silvery gleam to the
red suffusions from the hearth. If he dreamed, it was of some gentle
phase of yore, for his breathing was soft and regular, his consciousness
far away adown the misty realms of the past, irrevocable save in these
soft and sleeping illusions. The old house was still and silent. At long
intervals an errant gust stole around a corner and tried a window. Then
it skulked away and, for a time, a mute peace reigned.
Suddenly a sound,--not of the elements, not from without. A sound that
in the deep peace of dreams smote no fiber of consciousness. It came
again and again. It was the sound of a step ascending the stair. A
slender shaft of light preceded it--the dim radiance showed first in a
line under the door. Then the door slowly swung ajar, and Hugh Treherne
entered, his candle in his hand--not the officer that the old Colonel
had known and trusted in the years that tried men’s souls, who never
broke faith or failed in a duty; not the piteous wreck whom he had met
on the tow-head where the _Cherokee Rose_ lay aground, who wept on his
neck and besought his aid; not the earnest altruist, who planned and
contrived his escape from durance, through suffering and dread, to
retrieve the injustice done to an old comrade’s heirs, and with his
first recall of memory to reveal hidden treasure to enrich other men.
This was Hugh Treherne, of the obsession, a man who believed himself
possessed of the devil.
Colonel Kenwynton, gazing wincingly up with eyes heavy with sleep, and
dazed by the glare of the candle held close to his face, hardly
recognized the lineaments bent above him--wild, distorted, with a
sinister smile, a queer furtive doubt, as if some wicked maniacal
impulse debated with the vanishing instinct of reason in his brain.
The Colonel feared no man. The instinct of fear, if ever it had existed
in him, was annulled, atrophied. But in this lonely house, in the
presence of this strange and inexplicable possession, in all that this
change, so curiously wrought, so radical, so sinister, intimated, his
blood ran cold.
“He has come, Colonel,” hissed the strange man, for the Colonel could
hardly make shift to recognize him, “the Devil has come!”
There was an aghast pause. Then Colonel Kenwynton understood the
significance of the catastrophe. He plunged up in the bed, throwing off
the cover, and gazed wildly around the room.
“The Devil has come?--Then skirmish to the front, Hugh! Hold him in
check, while I get on my clothes, and I’ll flank him. By George, I’ve
led a forlorn hope in my time, and I’m not to be intimidated by any
little medical fiend like this!”
It was not long, however, that they sojourned at the sanatorium, but the
doctor, who had heard of the suddenness of the seizure, warned Colonel
Kenwynton that he had always best have help at hand in case of a
relapse as sudden.
“You might be in danger of violence from him,” the doctor explained,
seeing that Colonel Kenwynton stared in blank amaze.
“In danger of violence, sir, _from my own officer_,” he exclaimed,
flouting the obvious absurdity, as if the Confederate army were in
complete organization, the loyal submission to a superior in rank at
once the dearest behest and the instinct of second nature with the
soldier.
And, indeed, Hugh Treherne justified the trust. He wrought Colonel
Kenwynton nothing but good. His mental health was so far restored to its
normal strength that when they had returned together to the old home he
took the lead in all those practical little affairs of life which bored
the Colonel, and which he at once misunderstood and despised. He shrank
from society, in which, indeed, he was more feared than welcomed, and
the Colonel, in compassion for his infirmity and loneliness, had given
up most of his cronies. The Colonel suffered from this deprivation more
than Treherne, who took an intense and almost pathetic interest in
trifling improvements; the fences were mended; the farm buildings were
repaired; various small peculations ceased, for the servants and the
hands whose interests brought them about the place were afraid of the
“crazy man,” and were alert and capable in obeying his orders,--the
anger that flashed in his wild dark eyes was not reassuring. He pottered
in placid content about these industrial pursuits till chance led to a
greater utility.
He displayed unexpected judgment in advice which saved the Colonel from
taking a financial step that would, indeed, have bereft the simple snail
of his rickety old shell in his defenseless years, and certain
financiers of a dubious sort, baffled in the expectation of gain at the
old man’s loss, looked askance at Hugh Treherne and his influence with
his former commander which promised in time to remove him altogether
from their clutches. They made great talk of having considered his
interest rather than their own, and in set phrase withdrew the sun of
their favor to shine on his shattered affairs no more. But his affairs
were on the mend. Through Treherne’s urgency he devoted the returns from
the bulk of his cotton crop, unusually large this year, to the lifting
of a mortgage on a pretty tract of land nearer the county town than his
plantation, almost in the suburbs, in truth, and which was thus left
unencumbered. In this matter he was difficult of persuasion, and yielded
only at last to be rid of importunacy.
“Lord, Hugh, how lonesome I do feel without that money,” he said
drearily, lighting his candle one night.
“But you have got the land free of all encumbrance, Colonel,--dead to
rights,--within two miles of the town, right out there in the night.”
“It is a cold night and dark,” said the Colonel, toying with the
snuffers. “It seems cruel to leave it there, bare and bleak, with no
sort of a little old mortgage to cover it.”
But then he laughed and took himself upstairs to his rest.
A similar application of funds betided his later shipments of bales, the
receipts from which were formerly wont to vanish in driblets he hardly
knew how.
“Hugh, this way of paying debts that I thought would last through my
time and be discharged by my executors almost takes my breath away,” he
said half jocosely, half upbraiding. “You scarcely leave me a dollar for
myself,--to buy me a little ‘baccy.’” And then they both laughed.
In the forty years of Hugh Treherne’s incarceration such independent
means as he had possessed had barely sufficed for his maintenance at the
sanatorium, constantly dwindling until now becoming inadequate for that
purpose. His relatives greatly disapproved of the course that events had
taken and were also solicitous for his safety while at large and the
possibility of injury to others at his hands. One of them, a man of
ample fortune, by way of coercing acquiescence in their views, notified
Colonel Kenwynton that they would not be responsible for any expenses
which Captain Treherne might incur during his absence from the asylum,
where he had been placed with the sanction of his kindred, and where the
writer of this communication was prepared to defray all the costs of his
sojourn and treatment. Colonel Kenwynton, in a letter as formal and
courteous as a cartel and as smoothly fierce, expressed his ignorance
that any moneys had been asked of Captain Treherne’s relatives, and
begged to know when and by whom such requests had been made. Then a
significant silence settled on the subject.
The old Colonel felt that he had routed the enemy, but Hugh Treherne, to
whom he detailed the circumstances, for he treated his friend in every
respect as a sane man and kept nothing from him, did not share his
host’s elation. A deep gloom descended upon his spirits and a furtive
apprehension looked out of his eyes. He cautiously scanned the personnel
of every approach to the house before he ventured to appear and greet
the newcomers, and in his small interests about the place he kept within
close reach of refuge. The negroes began to notice that he discontinued
his supervisory errands to the fields where the picking of cotton was
still in progress and where he had shown himself exceedingly suspicious
of the accounts of the weigher and the bulk of the cotton delivered as
compared with the distribution of the money furnished by Colonel
Kenwynton for paying the cotton pickers. “The ole Cunnel’s crap will
sho’ly turn out fur all hit is worf’ dis time,” the grinning darkeys
were in the habit of commenting.
The old gentleman was constitutionally and by training incapable of
detecting this deviation from the established routine, but affection
whetted his wits and he observed the change in Hugh Treherne’s
appearance when it began to be so marked as scarcely to be imputed to
fluctuations in his malady.
“Why are you looking so down-in-the-mouth, Hugh?” he demanded one
morning after breakfast as he sprawled comfortably with his pipe before
the crackling fire, agreeable in the chill of the early December day
despite the bland golden sunshine of the southern winter. Treherne cast
at him a glance helplessly terrified, like a child in the face of
danger, and said not a word. “You are losing your relish for country
life, I am afraid,” the Colonel went on. “Why, you haven’t put your foot
in stirrup for a week. Why don’t you take your horse out for a canter?”
The hearty genial tones opened the floodgates of confidence. It was
impossible for Treherne to resist the look of affectionate solicitude,
of kindly sympathy in those transparently candid eyes.
“Colonel,--I’m--I’m--afraid.”
“Zounds, sir. Afraid of what?”
“Capture,” the hunted creature replied succinctly.
“Why, look here, man,” the Colonel rallied him, “I really think you have
been captured before this time. How long were you in prison at Camp
Chase?”
“But, Colonel, this is different. I think my friends--my unfriends,--are
bent on restoring me to seclusion.”
“Doctor Vailer won’t receive you,--professional pride much lacerated by
the criticism of his course expressed by your precious relative, Tom
Treherne,--excuse me if I pause here to particularly curse him--and you
know when you touch a really learned technician of any sort on his
professional pride, you have got hold of his keenest susceptibility,
where he feels most acutely and most high-mindedly, the very nerves of
his soul, so to speak, his spiritual essence. Doctor Vailer won’t have
you.”
“But there are other alienists, other asylums in Mississippi.”
“And under your favor there is _me_ in Mississippi,--and there is the
law of the land. I tell you, Hugh, that Tom Treherne might as well try
to bottle up the Mississippi River as to incarcerate you again without
Doctor Vailer’s sanction, of course, so long as I am out of the
ground.”
Hugh Treherne stirred uneasily and crossed and uncrossed his legs as he
sat opposite the Colonel in a big mahogany chair before the frowsy
hearth where the ashes of nearly all the fires since fall set in were
banked behind the big tarnished brass dogs--the Colonel was no dainty
housekeeper, and deserved the frequent declaration that “de Cunnel don’t
know de diffunce.”
“People generally, Colonel, will approve the course of my relations,”
Treherne argued. “It will seem the proper thing as long as I
am--am--occasionally--absent.”
“Well, you are all here, now, in one piece,” declared the old man,
wagging his head with vehement emphasis.
“It will seem very generous of Tom Treherne to offer, to desire to
maintain me at his own expense at a high-priced private sanatorium,
since I have no means of my own.”
He paused, a bitter look of repulsion on his face. All these
years--these long years, the men of his own age, the compeers of his
youth, had been at work restoring their shattered fortunes, after the
terrible cataclysm of war that had wrecked the financial interests as
well as the face of the southern country, achieving eminence and
distinction in their varied lines of effort, life signifying somewhat of
attainment even to those of meanest ability, while he was gone to waste,
destroyed by his own gallant exploit; the blow of the sabre, the jeering
accolade of Fate, when he had triumphantly led his troop to the capture
of a strong battery, had consigned him to forty years of idleness,
helplessness, imprisonment, in effect. “Be brave, loyal, and
fortunate,” quotha.
He was silently revolving these reflections so long that Colonel
Kenwynton, puffing his pipe with gusto, declared:
“I’ll make Tom Treherne’s liberality look like thirty cents before I am
done with him. He can’t choke you off and hide you out because he is
afraid you might be troublesome to _him_ in the future,--dispose of you
for good and all,--not while I am alive. Why, damme, man, you commanded
a troop in my regiment.”
“If he should once more lay hands on me I could never get away from him
and his precautions and anxieties, and considerations for the safety of
the public and open-handed generosity. And, Colonel, you might not know
where he had stowed me away next time.”
“Hoh,” snorted the Colonel, “I never lose sight of you longer than
between breakfast and dinner. I’d be on his track with every detective
in the State before dark. Why, Hugh, I’m a moneyed man. I’d take
advantage of your absence to mortgage that little tract of land out
yonder bare of all encumbrance, and I’d spend the last nickel of it
making publicity for Tom Treherne. _He_ isn’t going to spend any money
except for his own objects. Now, boots and saddles! Time for you to be
on the march!”
In two hours Treherne was back again, with a flush on his face and a
light in his eyes, bearing the mail, for which he had ridden to the
nearest town, and this contained matters of interest both for him and
the Colonel. It was, indeed, a rare occurrence when he received a
letter--in forty years he could count the missives on the fingers of
one hand. To-day the post brought him one addressed directly to him by
Adrian Ducie, although the counsel for the two brothers wrote instead to
Colonel Kenwynton. In common with all people of advancing years,
Treherne was continually impressed with the superiority of the methods
of the past in comparison with those of to-day. He noted the courtesy,
the consideration of the tone of the letter, and at once likened it to
the manner of the writer’s boy uncle, who had been his chum and comrade
in the ancient days. His heart warmed to the perception of tact which
had induced this one of the brothers to write who had been present at
the finding of the box and the valuable papers, that it was hoped would
return to the Ducie heirs the estate which had been so long wrested from
them. Adrian and Randal had both taken care on that occasion to express
their deep appreciation of the efforts of Archie Ducie’s friend to
restore to them their rights, although they had been the victims of his
disqualified memory. But now Adrian repeated their realization of the
extreme and friendly interest which had caused this object to so
persistently cling to the mind and intention of Captain Treherne, and
asked if he would object to giving testimony in a sort which the counsel
recommended, immediately after the filing of the bill for the recovery
of the property, a proceeding _de bene esse_, to be used in case of
death or a recurrence of a malady which would prevent the taking of his
deposition in the regular proceedings in the cause.
It was a difficult letter to write, a delicate proposition to make, and
it was done with a simple directness, a lack of circumlocution which
might imply that Adrian Ducie thought it a usual matter that gentlemen
could be seized with a recurrence of acute mania, obstructing the course
of business, and tending to impede justice. Treherne declared that it
was exactly the sort of letter that Archibald Ducie would have written,
and he was eager to comply with the request.
“Only,” he began, and paused abruptly.
“Only what?” asked the Colonel, looking up with grizzled eyebrows drawn.
“You don’t know how--how baffling it is to talk, to speak, when you are
aware that everybody is all the time disparaging every word as insanity.
Even you could scarcely hold your own under such circumstances.”
“I could,” declared the Colonel hardily. “I’d know that nine out of
every ten men are crazy anyhow, with no lucid intervals,--natural fools,
born fools--fools for the lack of sense,--only,” with a crafty leer,
“the rest of the fellows are so looney themselves that nobody has found
it out.”
Treherne laughed, and the Colonel went on with his prelection.
“Never stop to consider what people will think, Hugh. They will think
what they damn please. It is the root of most of the troubles that beset
this world,--trying to square our preferences and duty to what people
will think.”
Thus the testimony _de bene esse_ was taken, Captain Treherne’s story
from the beginning;--his part in the concealment of the treasure at
Duciehurst, assisting his friend and comrade Archibald Ducie; his
knowledge of the nature of the papers among the jewels; the early death
of his friend; his own wound and his consequent mental disability; his
incarceration for forty years in an insane asylum; his recent recovery
of memory, and his resolve to right this wrong which impelled him to
make his escape from Glenrose; his meeting with Colonel Kenwynton; the
strange attack he sustained from unknown miscreants after quitting the
sand-bar; the transit, bound and gagged, to Duciehurst, supplemented by
the circumstances of his liberation by Colonel Kenwynton and Adrian
Ducie. The affidavit of the alienist as to his lucid condition at the
time and his present mental reliability completed the proceedings.
This was merely a precautionary measure, designed to guard against a
relapse of Captain Treherne into his malady. The Ducie heirs had already
made formal demand for the restoration of their ancestral estate,
alleging the full satisfaction of the indebtedness, recording the
release of the mortgage and the quit-claim deed, and bringing suit
against all in interest.