The effect on Floyd-Rosney of his wife’s legal proceedings was deep and
radical. His counsel constantly noted in him a sort of stunned surprise,
as if contemplating some fantastic revulsion of the natural course of
events. He had fashioned this result as definitely as if he had planned
its every detail, yet he regarded it with an affronted amazement that he
should be called upon to experience events so untoward. He had a
disposition to belittle the efficiency of the demonstration. He
perceived with a snort of rage and contempt the seriousness with which
his counsel regarded it and declared violently that she could never get
a decree.
“You mean to defend the suit, then?” Mr. Stacey asked, very cool, and
pallid, and dispassionate.
“What else?” thundered Floyd-Rosney, the veins in his forehead blue and
swollen, his face scarlet, his hands quivering.
“I can’t see upon what grounds, in view of the terms of _retraxit_.”
“_You_ dictated the terms of that precious performance,” declared
Floyd-Rosney, with vindictive pleasure in shifting the blame.
But Mr. Stacey easily eluded the burden.
“Under your specific instructions as to the facts to which you made
affidavit,” he said, coldly.
It was perhaps evidence how Floyd-Rosney was beginning to acquire a
modicum of prudence under the fierce tuition of circumstance that he
avoided a breach with his lawyers. He heartily cursed them in his heart,
recollecting the many large fees they had received at his hands,
minimizing altogether the arduous work and professional learning that
had earned them. He broke off the consultation, which he postponed to a
future day, and left them with a stunned realization that these men,
whose capacity and experience he had so often tested, were of opinion
that he had no defense against the preposterous suit of his wife, that
she would receive her decree and be awarded the custody of the child and
ample alimony which it would be adjudged he should pay.
He set his teeth, gritting them hard when he remembered how these
lawyers had sought to induce him to defer filing his bill, to mitigate
his allegations, to investigate the circumstances more closely. Their
judgment had been justified in every particular, and though showing no
triumph--Mr. Stacey was too completely a legal machine for such
manifestation--he gave attestation of his human composition by the cold
distaste, which he could not disguise, for the subsequent developments.
“Damned if _he_ is not ashamed to be concerned with _me_,” Floyd-Rosney
said to himself, fairly staggered by the preposterous climax of the
situation.
He began to have a great desire to get out of the country, to be quit of
all the sights and associations of his recent life, but he had pressed
the preparations for the Duciehurst suit, and his absence now as the
date of the trial approached would have the aspect of a pusillanimous
retreat, specially obnoxious to him in view of the fact that the Ducies
were his opponents. The overthrow of his plans and expectations of his
wife’s return to him and the rehabilitation of their life together was
like the demonstration of some great earthquake or cataclysmal disaster;
it had destroyed all the symmetry and purpose of his life; his outlook
was as upon a blank desert of despair, an “abomination of desolation.”
That human heart of his, despite its overlay of selfish aims and
turbulent pride, had depths seldom stirred of genuine feeling; he
yearned for sympathy; he poignantly lacked the touch of his absent
child’s hand; the adoring look in the limpid infantile eyes; he felt at
every turn the loss of the incense of adulation that his wife had been
wont to burn before him. It had made sweet the atmosphere of his life,
and until it ceased he had never known how dependent upon it his very
respiration had grown to be--it was as the breath of his life. While he
sat in his solitary library, brooding and silent, reviewing in his
enforced leisure and loneliness the successive steps by which the
destruction of his domestic happiness had been compassed, his brow
darkened and grew fierce as he fixed the date of its inception to the
meeting with Adrian Ducie on the _Cherokee Rose_, and the discovery that
his wife could subtly distinguish between these facsimile faces of the
two brothers the lineaments of her former lover. Even now his logic
strove to reassert itself. Of course, the man’s face was intimately
familiar to her; there must be tricks of expression, the lift of an
eyebrow, the curl of a lip, methods of enunciation peculiar to one and
alien to the other, distinctive enough to a keen and habituated
observer. But, alack! this was not all, offensive as were its
suggestions to his pride of monopoly. He said to himself that from the
moment of the presentation of this vivid reminder of her old lover’s
face was inaugurated the recurrence of the Ducie influence in her life.
Here began that strange, covert revolt against him and all his theories
and plans, which had grown inch by inch till it possessed her. She had
never been the same, and he--fool that he was--through his magnanimity
in withdrawing the allegations of his bill, had furnished her with the
certainty of gaining a decree in her counter suit for divorce, of
securing an ample fortune in the belittling name of alimony, and the
opportunity of marrying and endowing with this wealth, derived from him,
the penniless Randal Ducie, whose baleful influence had destroyed for
him all that made life worth living.
Floyd-Rosney had never been an intemperate man, but in this grim
seclusion he began to drink heavily. He had piqued himself upon his
delicate taste, his acumen as a judge of fine wines, but the Chambertin
and Château Yquem remained untouched during his hasty dinners, while the
brandy decanter had taken up a permanent position on the library table,
and he had ordered up from the cellar an old and rich whisky that had
been laid down by his father before he was born, and that he had, so far
as the butler knew, never yet tasted.
It was difficult for the lurking magnate, in his sullen seclusion, to
face the eyes of his own domestic staff; he could not bring himself to
confront the questioning, speculative gaze of the streets, the club, the
driving park. Even such _rencontres_ as chanced when he went to consult
his counsel, whom, but for very shame he would have summoned to him, he
found an ordeal. He had grown poignantly sensitive and keenly perceptive
as well, and was discriminating in minute points of facial expression
and gradations of manner. He could differentiate embarrassment,
commiseration,--and how pity stung him!--reprobation, and oftenest of
all, a sort of covert relish, an elation, that with any personal
relation would have meant triumph. “They are nearly as well pleased as
if I were broken,” he would say cynically to himself. But there was no
breach of courtesy, no abatement of the deep respect usually tendered to
a magnate and millionaire. He was keenly alive to detect the insignia of
a diminution of consideration, but his little world salaamed as
heretofore, for he was by no means broken, not even if he should have to
pay heavy alimony, and lose Duciehurst into the bargain. The experience
of these encounters, however, weighed heavily on his nerves, now all
a-quiver and jangling with the effects of his deep potations.
His home was odious to him; his covert speculations as to the deductions
of the servants, whom ordinarily he would have disregarded as mere worms
of the earth, afflicted him. He was keenly conscious of his humiliated
position in their eyes, cognizant as he knew them to be of his
expectation of his wife’s return, and the elaborate preparations he had
made and personally supervised for her reception. He found a greater
degree of privacy and comfort on his yacht, which he ordered up from New
Orleans, where she had been lying for a month past, refitted and
revictualed, awaiting his summons. He steamed down the river to the
Gulf on one occasion, but finding himself out of touch with his counsel
in the Duciehurst case, and realizing that some final decision must be
reached as to his course in the divorce suit, he confined his wanderings
to idly cruising up and down the river, stopping at prearranged points
for mail or telegrams.
In this resource he experienced a surcease of the harassments that
infested his life on shore. His skipper knew little and cared less of
land-lubber interests--as maritime an animal as a crab. He had, indeed,
with a brightening eye and a ready courtesy, asked, when Floyd-Rosney
came over the side of the _Aglaia_, if the madam was not going to favor
the ship’s company with her presence. Being answered shortly in the
negative he heartily protested his regret.
“The best sailor she is of any lady I ever saw,” he declared, and added
that if they were to do some deep-sea stunts they need not consult the
barometer for weather signs. She cared no more for weather than a stormy
petrel. He always looked on the madam’s presence as a good omen, he
said; he had a bit of the blarney and a bit of poesy in his composition,
his ancestry hailing from the Emerald Isle.
“She has brought no good luck to her husband,” Floyd-Rosney reflected,
grimly.
It was grateful to him, however, to perceive that the man knew naught of
his recent discomfitures and humiliation; of very meager consequence
such an opinion would have been ordinarily, but the evident ignorance of
the skipper enabled him to hold his head higher. The skipper read
nothing in the newspapers but the shipping news, and but for the change
in Floyd-Rosney’s bibulous habit he might never have been the wiser.
“He’s drinking like a fish,” he said in surprise to the second officer.
“That’s new with him.”
“Seems to me,” responded the subordinate, meditatively, “I heard
something when we was in port in Boloxi about him and the madam havin’
had some sort o’ row.”
“I hate to trust him with the brand new dinky skiff,” said the skipper.
“He ain’t a practiced hand; I seen him run her nose up on a drift log
lying on the levee with a shock that might have started every seam in
her.”
But the yacht, with all that appertained to it, was Floyd-Rosney’s
property, and the skipper could only enjoy his fears for the proper care
of its appurtenances.
For Floyd-Rosney had contracted the habit of scouting about in the
skiff, while the yacht swung at anchor, awaiting his pleasure. The
solitude was soothing to his exacerbated nerves. He could, indeed, be
alone, for he took the oars himself, and as he was a strong, athletic
man the exercise was doubtless beneficial and tonic. The passing of the
congestion of commerce from the great river to the railroads had brought
the stream to an almost primitive loneliness. Thus he would often row
for hours, seeing not a human being, not the smoke of a riverside
habitation, not a craft of any of the multifarious species once wont to
ply the waters of this great inland sea. The descriptive epithet was
merited by its aspect at this stage of the water. Bank-full, it
stretched as far as the eye could reach. Only persons familiar with the
riparian contours could detect in a ruffled line on the horizon the
presence of a growth of cottonwood on the swampy Arkansas shore.
One of these days, when he was thus loitering about, the sky was dull
and clouded; the river was dark, and reflected its mood. The tender
green of spring was keen almost with the effect of glitter on the bank,
and he noted how high the water stood against the levees of plantations,
here and there, menacing overflow. When a packet chanced to pass he bent
low to his oars, avoiding possible recognition from any passenger on the
guards or officer on deck, but he uncharacteristically exchanged
greetings with a shanty boat, now and again propelled down the stream
with big sweeps; none of the humble amphibians of the cabins had ever
heard, he was sure, of the great Floyd-Rosney. Sometimes he called out a
question, courteously answered, or with a response of chaff, roughly
gay. Once, being doubtful of the locality, he paused on his oars to ask
information of an ancient darkey, who was paddling in a dug-out along
the margin of the river.
“You are going to have an overflow hereabout,” added Floyd-Rosney.
The old darkey, nothing loath, joined in the dismal foreboding, keeping
his craft stationary while he lent himself to the joys of conversation
with so aristocratic a gentleman.
“Dat’s so, Boss; we’se gwine under, shore, ef de ribber don’t quit dis
foolishness.”
“Whose plantation is that beyond the point, where the water is standing
against the levee?”
“Dat, sah, is de Mountjoy place, but hit’s leased dis year ter Mr. Ran
Ducie. I reckon mebbe you is ’quainted wid him. Mighty fine man, Mr.
Ran is, an’ nobody so well liked in the neighborhood.”
Without another word Floyd-Rosney bent to his oars. Was there no escape
from this ill-omened association of ideas?
The old darkey, checked in the exploitation of his old-time manners and
balked in the opportunity of polite conversation, gazed in amazed
discomfiture after Floyd-Rosney’s skiff, as it sped swiftly down the
river, then resumed his progress, gruff and lowering, ejaculating in
affront:
“White folks is cur’ous, shore; ain’t got no manners, nor no raisin’,
nor no p’liteness, nohow.”
Floyd-Rosney’s equipoise had been greatly shaken by the strain upon his
nerves and mental forces, this depletion of his powers of resistance
supplemented by constant and inordinate drinking, contrary to his usual
custom. Thus he had become susceptible to even the slightest strain on
his self-control. He noticed that with the renewal of the mental
turmoils that he had sought to elude--conjured up by the chance mention
of the man’s name that meant so much to him in many ways--his stroke
grew erratic and uncertain; once one of the oars was almost wrenched
from his grasp by a swirl of the current. He was well in mid-stream, in
deep water, and he realized that should he lose his capacity to handle
the little craft he would be in immediate danger of capsizing and
drowning, for his strength in swimming could never enable him to breast
that tumultuous tide at flood height. The yacht was out of sight, lying
at anchor in the bight of a bend, that cut him off from all chance of
being observed and rescued by the skipper. He summoned his presence of
mind and let the boat drift for a few moments while he took from his
pocket a brandy flask, and drank deeply from its undiluted contents. The
potent elixir rallied his forces--steadied his nerves. With its
artificial stimulus his hand was once more firm, his eye bright and
sure. But its stimulus was not lasting, as he knew, and fearing an
incapacity to handle the boat in this swirling waste of waters he
directed his course toward an island, as it seemed, thinking that thence
he would signal the _Aglaia_ and wait for her to steam up and take him
off. There he would be in full view from the yacht.
As he neared his destination he perceived--as he had not hitherto,
because of the potency of the brandy--that the island of his beclouded
mirage was the wreck of the _Cherokee Rose_, still aground on the
sand-bar, although waters swirled around her, and fish swam through her
cabin doors and the slime and ooze of the river had befouled the
erstwhile dapper whiteness of her guards and saloon walls. He lay on his
oars for a space, regarding with meditative eyes the ruin, analogous, it
seemed to the far-reaching ruin that had its inception here and that had
trailed him so ruthlessly many a day. In his dreary idleness he was
sensible of a species of languid curiosity as to the extent of the
ravages of water and decay in comparatively so short a time. Only a few
months ago, in the past October, he had been aboard the packet, when
trim and sound, and immaculately white and fully equipped, she had run
aground on this treacherous bar, where her bones were destined to rot.
He wondered that the wreckers had left so much, unless, indeed, their
operations were frustrated by the sudden impending rise of the waters.
The craft lay listed to one side, the hull evidently smashed like an
egg-shell by the furious onslaught of the storm, but a part of the
superstructure--the texas and the pilot-house--was still above water,
though canted queerly askew.
Floyd-Rosney rowed briskly to the stair that formerly served to ascend
to the hurricane deck, the skiff running up flush with the flight. He
sprang out--first trying the integrity of the wood with a cautious foot,
and tied the painter firmly to one of the posts that supported the
hurricane deck, leaving the boat leaping on the ripples, as if seeking
to break away from some ponderous creature of its own kind that would
fain drag it down into the hopeless devastations of a lair in the
depths.
With a deep sigh Floyd-Rosney slowly ascended the few steps of the stair
above the current, and stood looking drearily down upon the structure
wherein were lived those scenes so momentous in his fate so short a time
ago. As he walked along the canted floor, his white cap in his hand, his
head bared to the breeze, he glanced now and again through the shattered
cabin lights down into the saloon, seeing there the water continuously
swirling in the melancholy spaces, once full of radiance and cheer and
genial company. All the doors of the staterooms had been removed, both
those opening on the guards and the inner ones, of which the panels were
decorated with mirrors and which gave upon the saloon. A vague jingle
caught his attention; a fragment of an electrolier still clung to the
ceiling and sometimes, shaken by the ripples, its glass pendants sent
forth a shrill, disconsolate vibration, like a note of funereal keening.
Suddenly from amidst that weird desolation of shifting waters a face
stared up at him. It was unmistakable. He saw it distinctly. But when he
looked again it was gone.
Floyd-Rosney was trembling from head to foot. He had turned ghastly
pale. But for the wall of the texas against which he staggered he might
have fallen. He did not question the reality of his impression. It was
as definite as the light of day,--a face strangely familiar, yet
sinister, seen in the murky depths. He wondered wildly if it could be
the drowned face of some victim of the wreck, or if this were now
impossible, some curious explorer such as himself, meeting here more
serious mystery than any he had sought. The next moment he broke into a
harsh laugh of scorn. It was his own reflection! At the end of the
saloon, where the craft lay highest on the bar, one of the mirrored
doors, shattered doubtless in careless handling in process of removal,
had been left as useless. In this fragment he had seen his face for one
moment, and then the ripples played over the glass and the semblance was
gone, returning now again. But Floyd-Rosney had no mind to watch these
weird, illusory antics. It was horrible to him to see his face mirrored
anew, distorted in those foul depths where he had been once well and
happy and full of exuberant life and hope, with wife and child and
fortune, every desire of his heart gratified, both hands full and
running over.
As he turned away he was surprised to note how the shock had shaken his
composure, his nerves. He was loath to quit his posture against the wall
of the texas that had supported him. His long, intent gaze into the
swirl of the waters had induced a tendency to vertigo, and he looked
about for something that might serve for a seat. The pilot-house was but
two or three steps above, and there were seats built into the wall, he
remembered.
He made shift to clamber up the short flight. The door was still on its
hinges, but so defaced and splintered as to be not worth removing, and
so askew as to be difficult to open. With one strong effort, for
Floyd-Rosney was a powerful man, he burst it ajar, although it swung
back to its previous position, implying a like difficulty in opening it
again.
He sat down on the farther side, on the bare bench, the upholstery
having disappeared, and waited to regain his composure. Once more he had
recourse to the brandy flask, now nearly empty. Once more the fires
streamed through nerve and fiber, revivifying his every impulse. He felt
that he was himself again, as he gazed through the blank spaces where
the glass was wont to be, at the vast expanse of the great river, now a
glittering sheen under a sudden cast of the sun. Beautiful chromatic
suggestions were mirrored back from the sky; a stretch of illuminated
lilac, an ethereal hue touched the vivid green of the opposite bank. A
play of rose and gold was in the westward ripples, and one bar, athwart
the tawny reach, of crude, intense vermillion betokened a cloud of
scarlet, harbinger of sunset in the offing. He could see the little
house on stilts to the left hand, now like a boat on the water. In the
enforced stay here, when aground on the sand-bar, he had time to
familiarize himself with even unvalued elements of the landscape. To
the right was a bayou, the current running with great force down its
broad channel, as wide as an ordinary river, and on the other side of
the bight of the bend, lay the _Aglaia_. He wondered if the _Cherokee
Rose_ was an object of the scrutiny of the skipper’s binocle.
Floyd-Rosney thought that he should be on the watch for his employer’s
return, which was doubtless the fact, as he had no other duties in hand.
Floyd-Rosney was still eyeing the craft, meditating how best to signal
his wish to be taken back to the _Aglaia_, when a sudden sound caught
his attention--a sound of swift steps. They came rapidly along the
hurricane deck, where he himself had found footing, mounted the short
stair to the texas, and the next moment the door of the pilot-house was
burst ajar and the face and form of Adrian Ducie appeared at the
entrance.
Floyd-Rosney staggered to his feet.
“What does this mean, sir?” he cried, thickly, the veins of his forehead
swollen stiff and blue, his face scarlet, his eyes flashing fire.
The newcomer seemed surprised beyond measure. He stared at Floyd-Rosney
as if doubting his senses and could not collect his thoughts or summon
words until Floyd-Rosney blustered forth:
“Why this intrusion! Leave this place instantly!”
“It is no intrusion, and I will go at my own good pleasure. I came here
thinking to find a man with whom I have business.”
“Well, you have found him. A business that should have been settled
between us long ago!” He advanced a step, and he had his right hand in
his pocket.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“You’ll find out, as sure as your name is Randal Ducie,” hissed
Floyd-Rosney.
“That’s exactly what it is not. I am Adrian Ducie.”
“You can’t play that game with me. I know your cursed face well enough.
I will mark it now, so that there will never be any more mistakes
between you.”
Adrian had thought he had a pistol, but it was a knife--a large clasp
knife which he had opened with difficulty because of the strength of its
spring as he fumbled with it in his pocket. He thrust violently at
Ducie’s face, who only avoided the blow by suddenly springing aside; the
blade struck the door with such force as to shiver off a fragment of the
wood.
Taken at this disadvantage it was impossible for Adrian to retreat in
the precarious footing of the wreck and useless to call for help. He
could only defend himself with his bare hands.
“I call you to observe, Mr. Floyd-Rosney,” he exclaimed, “that I am
unarmed!”
“So much the better!” cried Floyd-Rosney, striking furiously with the
knife at the face he hated with such rancor.
But this time Adrian caught at the other man’s arm to deflect the blow
and there ensued a fierce struggle for the possession of the knife, the
only weapon between them. While Floyd-Rosney was the heavier and the
stronger of the combatants, Adrian was the more active and the quicker
of resource. He had almost wrested the knife from Floyd-Rosney’s grasp;
in seeking to close the blade the sharp edge was brought down on
Floyd-Rosney’s hand, and the blood spurted out. The next moment he had
regained it and he rushed at his adversary’s face--the point held high.
Pushing him back with one hand against his breast Adrian once more
deflected his aim from his eyes and face, but the point struck lower
with the full force of Floyd-Rosney’s terrific lunge, piercing the
throat and severing the jugular vein.