That fantastic illusion, as of one come, after adventures, to the
kingdom of some Magus, was preserved to the Duke of Dorset by the days
that followed. He was for the most part wholly alone. He arose early,
and lived the long day in the open; in the evening he dined with his
host, and sat with him in the great library until midnight. At no other
time did he see this curious old man.
He was distinctly conscious of two moods, contrary and opposite,
changing with the day and night, like one going alternately into and
out of the illusions of an opiate. Under the sun, in the dreamy haze of
Indian summer, this beautiful château of yellow stone, set about with
exquisite gardens, rimmed in the smoky distance with an amphitheater of
mountains, was the handiwork of fairies, reset by enchantment from an
Arabian tale. But at night, in the presence of Cyrus Childers, that mood
vanished, as when one passing behind the staged scenery of a play meets
there the carpenter.
The days, one following like the other, were not wholly lacking in
interest. The Duke of Dorset tramped about the estate, but more usually
he shot quail over dogs in the river bottoms; he found this game bird
smaller than the English quail, but hardy, strong winged, wild, getting
up swiftly and sailing over long distances into the forest when alarmed.
When the tramping tired him, he sat down under some tree by the river
and watched the panting setters swim, their red coats spreading out
like a golden fleece in the amber water. The servant at the château had
provided him with a gun for this shooting, since he had brought with him
only a rifle, and this remained in his dressing room, unopened, locked
in the ordinary luggage box.
On one of these long tramps, he solved the riddle of the vague smoke
pillar, rising above the mountains east of the château. He presently
observed that the great road, leading from the coast over the wilderness
to this country place, continued through the park, eastward from the
turf court, crossed the river, and ascended the mountain. He followed
the road for an entire morning to the summit; there the mystery of the
dark wisp of cloud was revealed to him. Far inland, beyond the crest of
this mountain, that smoke arose from great mills for the manufacture of
lumber. From huge stacks, dimly to be seen, a line of thin smoke
climbed skyward, twining into that faint blot--that sign, marked by the
superstitious mountaineer.
That night after dinner the Duke of Dorset brought the conversation
to this wisp of smoke, and diverging from the query, he got a flood
of light on the career of Childers. The sinister vapor was commercial
incense. Great mills for the manufacturing of the forests into lumber
were gathered into that valley. It was one example of this man's policy
of consolidation, his rooting up of competition everywhere in trade, a
detail of his plan for gathering the varied sources of wealth compactly
together. The ambition of the man presented itself as he warmed to the
discussion. The motive, moving him here in this republic, was merely
that moving Alexander in Asia--moving the Corsican in France. But the
times had changed and the ancient plan was no longer adapted to the
purpose; the seizure of authority by force was out of fashion; one must
not provoke a revolt of the eye.
The Duke of Dorset, as he listened, was struck with an inconsistency. If
the secret of this man's dominion lay in covering it from the eye,
was not that secret out here? No Eastern despot was more magnificently
housed. His host, for explanation, again pointed out that there was no
native laborer on this whole estate. Every man, every woman to be seen
was Japanese, brought directly over sea here to service. The whole
estate inland was sentineled with keepers. Cut off thus from the
republic, as though it were a foreign province, into which no man
went without a passport, except, now and then, a mountaineer traveling
through the forest, and, to add thus more to this isolation, the labor
employed in the group of industries lying east of this estate were
wholly Japanese--the jetsam of the Orient.
The old man, moving on this topic, spoke with a certain hesitation, and
the Duke of Dorset understood why it was; after all, like every other
despot, this man craved his gilded chair; pride clamored for authority
made manifest, for the pomp of sovereignty, and he had yielded to that
weakness, as the Corsican, in the end, had yielded to it, magnificently,
in a riot of purple. But he saw clearer than the Corsican; he was not
convinced, as that other of the Titans was; he sought cover--the deeps
of the wilderness for the staging of his sovereignty.
Then, as this old man sketched in detail the first big conception of his
estate, the care, the mammoth labor, the incredible sums expended, pride
moved him; whatever thing of beauty any people in any land had made,
he had made here; whatever thing of beauty they had treasured, he
had bought with money. He had commanded, like that one looking up at
Babylon, myriad human fingers, backs that strained, faces that sweated.
And he told the story of it, striding through his library under its
mellow light, in pride, like that barbarian king might have told the
story of his city.
And in this library, beautiful as deft human fingers could make it,
lighted softly from above, on its floor a treasure of India, where in
colored threads an Eastern weaver had laboriously told the tale of a
religion, occult and mystic, its domed ceiling covered with a canvas,
painted by a Florentine, wherein the martyred dead winged upward at the
last day; here--between mysteries, between, as it were, the oldest and
the newest religion of the world, both disregarded, the sacred cloths of
both, a spoil to profane decorative uses--the Duke of Dorset listened
to this story. And, strangely, as he listened, the words of that curious
priest, reading in the blood light, painfully by his fire, returned
striding through his memory.
_I will also make it a possession for the bittern, and pools of water:
and I will sweep it with the besom of destruction, saith the Lord of
hosts.... And owls shall dwell there, and satyrs shall dance there._
And on his way up to his bedchamber at midnight, as though that ancient
prophecy moved here to some sinister fulfillment, as though the sign
of it fantastically preceded, the naiads, the fauns, and those bronze
figures with their leering human faces and their goat loins, forming the
exquisite frieze under the rail of the great stairway, seemed to follow,
trooping at his heels.
But on every night, at the bend of this stairway, as he ascended,
any mood, any fancy coming with him was exorcised out of his mind
and replaced by another. Here, as he turned, by a trick of the canvas
cunningly hung, by a trick of obscured lights cunningly descending, a
woman seemed to meet him passing on this stair, going down like one
who hurried. A woman, perhaps thirty, in the fantastic costume of some
princess out of an ancient story, without a jewel on her body, as though
the delicate pink skin, the exquisite full throat, the purple dark hair,
despised a lesser glory.
It was not merely the beauty of this woman that stopped the Duke of
Dorset coming up this stair at night, it was two fancies attending her
that seized him. One that she wished to pass him swiftly, thus with her
head bowed; because from some emotion held down within her, going to the
very roots of life, she did not dare, she did not trust herself to look
into his face. And the other that she was passing, going at this moment
down the steps on which he stood, passing there at his elbow, now
swiftly, out of the influence under which he held her--escaping for this
life, for all time, forever. And, strangely, there attended on these two
fancies a conviction, a truth established, that this woman, ten years
older, was yet, somehow, Caroline Childers.
Every night as he came up the great turning staircase, he met her thus
going down; and every night as he came, as his feet moved on the stair,
the huge emotion, skulking within him, behind disguises, seized him and
pointed to what he already desperately saw; that he could put out his
hands ever so gently and she would stop; that he could speak her name
ever so softly and she would come with a cry into his arms.
The impelling, moving, overwhelming power of this illusion lay in the
conviction that this moment, here on the stair, now, was final--that
for this moment only, the opportunity was in his hand. The next second,
ticked off by the clock, she would be gone, and something like the door
of death would swing to, clicking in its lock.
Every night, when he passed on up the stairway, when his foot came to
the step which followed, a sense of loss, complete and utter, like the
darkness of the pit, descended on him. Loss is a word too feeble. The
thing was a sense of death. Somehow the one thing, the one only thing
for which he was born and suckled and ate bread and became a man--a
thing, hidden until now--had, in that moment, gone, stepped out into the
light, and beckoned, and he had failed it. 'And so, now, the reason for
his being here was ended; all the care, the patience, the endless labor
of Nature, bringing him in strength to the fullness of his life, was
barren; all the agony that he had given to his mother, the milk that he
had drunk, the fruits of the earth that he had eaten, were wasted; he
was now a thing of no account, useless to the great plan--a thing, to be
broken up by the forces of Nature in disgust. The thing was more than a
sense of death. It was a sense of extermination, merited by failure.
And further, his fathers, sleeping in the earth, seemed to approach and
condemn him. The gift of life handed down to him must be passed on
to another; it was a chain which, for great, mysterious, unknowable
reasons, must continue, lest somehow the destiny of all was periled.
Did he break it, then the labor of all was lost, the immortality of all
endangered. Some doom, reaching equally to the farthest ancestor, some
doom, not clear, not possible to get at, but sinister and threatening,
attended the breaking of that chain. The emotion, clouding his blood,
was an agent in the service of these dead men. These illusions, these
fancies, were from them, doing what they could to move him. They had
found one pleasing to them, one suited, one fit; they had led him by
invisible influences to that one; they had prevailed in argument against
him; they had colored and obscured his reason; they had lured him over
four thousand miles of sea to that one whom they, wise with the wisdom
of the dead, had chosen. And he had failed them! They pressed around
him, their faces ghastly.
The man, do what he liked, could not escape from the dominion of this
mood. He stopped every night on the stair; he came every night with a
quicker pulse, and he passed on with that sense of desolation. The Duke
of Dorset called reason and common sense to his aid, but neither could
exorcise this fancy. That emotion, cunning past belief, in the service
of the principle of life, had got him under its hypnotic fingers! He
spoke calmly with himself; he made observations, verbally correct,
arguments, to the ear sound, conclusions that no logic could assail;
this was only a picture, as he had been told, of Caroline's mother
painted in a fancy costume; and he a sentimentalist, but they availed
him nothing.
In the morning, when he descended, there was only the full-length
portrait of a beautiful woman hanging in its frame. The illusion
attending it was gone, but not wholly gone; like some fairy influence,
coming to men's houses in the night, and departing to solitudes at
cock-crow, it awaited him outside--in the deep places of the forest, in
the high grasses by the river, in the gardens when he sat alone on the
benches in the sun.
If, after three hours of shooting, he sat down at the foot of a great
tree to rest, some one came and stood behind it. If, desperately,
he followed some lost trail of the red Indian, twining through the
mountain, at every turn of it, some one barely escaped him, and the
conviction grew upon him, like a madness, that at the next turn of
the trail, if he went softly forward, he would find that one. Not the
serious, beautiful woman of the picture, but truant hair, whipped by
the wind, eyes that danced, a mouth, sweet and young, that laughed. And
drugged with the oldest opiate, the Duke of Dorset stalked the oldest
illusion in the world.
So ridden was he by this mood that the significance of an incident,
which he otherwise would have marked, escaped him. In the last few days
he had met, more than once, a Japanese who did not seem to be engaged in
any particular labor. He met this man always in the mountains, east of
the château, coming down toward it or returning; twice the Duke had seen
him late in the evening, and once at midday, lying under a tree watching
the château below him.
The man cringed when the Duke called to him, and replied, in excellent
English, that he was a forester engaged on the estate.