The Duke turned instantly.
"This way," he said, "through the house to the garden."
At the word the Marchesa caught Caroline Childers by the arm, and
hurried with her through the corridor; the Duke followed. They crossed
the south wing of the château; through picture galleries; through
corridors, beautified by innumerable human fingers, hung with paintings
worth the taxes of a province, decked with bits of wood, bits of ivory,
cut curiously by masters who sat over that one work for a lifetime.
Finally they came to a last drawing-room, opening from the south tower
of the château into the Italian garden. Its west windows, hung with
curtains, looked out over the turf court. They hurried through this
chamber out onto the terrace, and from there halfway along the wall of
the Italian garden, running here beside the south border of the court.
The situation south of the château was curiously puzzling. The gardens,
lying in terraces, one below the other, had not been entered; the road,
too, running south was clear. But beyond the gardens, in the meadow land
to which the road descended, tiny groups of figures moved out from
the river as though stretching a cordon that way, westward toward
the mom-tains. But no group advanced, from this direction, toward the
château. The situation gave a minute's respite.
The Duke of Dorset, in that respite, again considered the avenues of
escape, and that way up the mountain, under cover of the vines, seemed
the only one remaining. The mob was evidently advancing wholly from the
east; spreading from the stone bridge on the north, through the park,
and on the south, through the meadows. The mountain, due west, was
perhaps clear, except for the one man whom the Duke had just discovered
among the vines. If that man were out of the way, then, doubtless, the
whole of the steps to the top would be open. The man could not be seen
from the garden, but he could be seen from the west windows of the
drawing-room through which they had just passed. Moreover, the shot
would better be fired from there so that the report of the rifle would
indicate that they were still in the château. The Duke explained the
plan in a dozen words. The Marchesa Soderrelli understood at once and
assented.
The Duke knew that little time remained to him. At any moment those
entering the house on the north might come out into this garden. He ran
to the drawing-room, entered it, and crossed quickly to a window looking
out over the turf court. He drew aside the curtain, and stepped in
behind it with his rifle. But he came now on the heels of chance. The
heavy vines at the foot of the stairway moved. The lighter tendrils
above were shaking. The man, whom he had come to kill, was going up the
stone steps hidden by the leaves.
There was no moment to be lost, and the Duke immediately returned to the
garden.
The situation east of the château had changed. Not only was that curious
cordon, stretching from the river southwest to the meadows, drawing
nearer, but a body of several hundred was coming up the great road,
leading to the court west of the gardens.
He stood for a moment on the terrace before the door; his body rigid,
the rifle in his hand. He knew what this advance meant. The end of this
business was approaching. The play hurried to its last act--a single
moment of desperate fighting in some corner of the wall. He saw with
what patience, with what order, events had gathered to this end. The
time wasted in that fatal parley before the door; the moment lost at the
window; the escape of that one among the vines; this advance now on the
south road. Events, all moving to a single, deadly purpose, as under the
direction of some intelligence, infinite and malicious.
The thing looked like a sentence of death deliberately ordered; and
the man took it for such a sentence, but he took it in no spirit of
submission. He took it as a desperate challenge; before he died he would
kill every man that he could kill, and he would do it with care, with
patience, with caution.
Caroline Childers, and the Marchesa Soder-relli remained where they had
been standing by the wall. The Duke, on the terrace before the door, saw
that the steps up the face of the mountain was the only route not now
visibly hopeless. He had seen but one man there; doubtless there were
others, but there was a chance against it, and he determined to take
that chance.
At this moment a crowd of figures poured out into the road from the
shelter of the wall running parallel with the gardens. They swarmed onto
the open road before the stone pillars. Then they saw the two women, and
they swept with a babel of cries across the garden. The Duke was about
an equal distance away from the Marchesa and Caroline Childers when
he saw the rush start. He was strong; hard as oak. Every nerve,
every muscle in him lifted instantly to its highest tension. It was a
breathless race, but the man whose body had been trained, disciplined,
made fit by the perils of the wilderness, won it. He was on the gravel
beside them, with the mob forty paces to come. He had perhaps thirty
seconds remaining to him, and each one of them was worth a life, but he
took the time to say: "Don't move."
Then a thing happened that would convince any student of warfare of
the utter futility of the bayonet as against the modern rifle at close
range. Within twenty seconds the Duke emptied the magazine of the
Mannlicher four times into the mob--a shot for every second. And yet the
man did not fire with a mere convulsive working of the trigger. He shot
with a precise, deadly, catlike swiftness, choosing and killing his
man like one driving the point of a knife with accuracy into a dozen
different spots on a table before him. The momentum of the massed rush
carried the mob almost to his feet before it fell back and scattered
into the garden, and yet the Duke never clubbed his rifle. The one man
who almost reached him, who fell against his feet, was shot through the
head, or rather the whole top of his head was removed by the expanding
bullet of the Mannlicher.
The conduct of women in the presence of violent death has usually been
imagined, and they stand thus charged with a coma, a hysteria, that
observation does not justify. The testimony of those who observed the
English women during the Mutiny, who marked the carts passing through
the streets of Paris under the Terror, is to the contrary. When the Duke
swung around with the rifle in his hand the two women were close beside
him; they had neither moved nor uttered a sound. He indicated the
mountain with a gesture, and the three of them ran along the wall,
beside the dead bodies, across the road, and over the dozen yards of
green turf to the stone steps.
He saw that no minute was to be wasted. The crowd advancing on the road
was now running, and the mob, scattered by the fire, would remain only
for a moment in confusion. He ran with the rifle held ready in his hand,
his finger on the trigger guard. But the precaution was unnecessarily
taken. The stone stairway at its foot was wholly clear. They began to
ascend it, the Duke going first, with the muzzle of the rifle presented
before him.
It is doubtful if any man ever accurately anticipated a coming event,
even when that event was beginning to appear on the sky line. The man
whom the Duke had seen was not on these steps; the way was clear to the
top. Here was a change of status as complete and swift as any related
of the fairy. The three persons, come now to the top of this stairway,
stood above and outside the zone of death, within the shelter of the
forest. Below, the scene was wholly unreal and fantastic. It was not
possible to believe that all the savage, bestial, primitive passions
of the Oriental swarmed here to a work of ruin; that the beast was
in control of this place of exquisite beauty; that the cordon of
civilization had been forced here at its most perfect quarter.
For a moment the scene held the Duke as a thing staged under his eye in
some elaborate drama. Then groups of figures began to emerge from the
doors of the château and a thin line of scarlet crept along the whole
face of the north wing under the roof--flames licking the wooden
cornice. He realized, then, that he and the two women had not escaped;
that they would be hunted through these mountains; that the struggle
would be one of extermination; that he faced a condition as primitive as
any obtaining in the morning of the world.
He stepped back, tucked the rifle under his arm, and looked about for
the trail leading down to the river and the great road. He found it in
a moment and began to descend, followed by the two women. The three
figures hurried, a curious moving picture in the moonlit forest. The
Duke of Dorset, bare-headed, forcing his way through the brush of the
mountain, a rifle in his hand; the Marchesa Soderrelli in a trailing,
elaborately embroidered evening dress, the skirt of it tearing at every
step; Caroline Childers with bare arms, bare shoulders, her white gown
fouled by the leaves--all on their way to the wilderness. So swiftly had
conditions been reversed.
Finally they came to the river at the point where the Duke had crossed
on his way to the château. Here not only was the current swift, but the
water was up to a man's waist. That meant to the shoulders of the
women, and consequently too deep to ford. He did not stop to discuss the
crossing, but set out along the bank of the river in the hope of
finding a shallow. This bank, unlike the opposite one, was dense with
underbrush. The two women followed close behind the man's shoulders in
order to escape the bushes that he thrust aside. Sometimes they touched
him, crowded against him, stumbled against him. Caroline Childers was
more fortunate than the Marchesa Soder-relli. Her dinner dress had
no train. The older woman's long, heavy skirt caught in every bush,
sometimes she was thrown down by it, sometimes it tore. Finally she
stopped, reached back to the skirt band, gave it a jerk that wrenched
off the delicate hooks, and when the garment fell about her feet,
stepped out of it. Under it was a black-satin petticoat. She went on,
leaving the skirt lying in the trail.
It was the first toll taken of civilization by the wild.
The bank continued for several hundred yards, thus, through thickets,
then it became a forest, clear of undergrowth, but close set with trees,
and dark. A forest that grew thicker and consequently darker as they
advanced. There was now scarcely any light. Here and there a vagrant ray
descended through some opening in the tree tops, or a patch lay, like a
detached fragment, on the boles of the trees.
The Duke watched the river as they advanced, but for perhaps half a
mile he found no favorable change in the swift current. Finally the
bank ascended to a heavily wooded knoll; below it the river pounded over
bowlders. But above, there was evidently a shallow, where the sheet of
water glided at no great depth over a rock bed. They stopped on this
knoll, among the trees in the dark; the bank was clear of any brush, and
dry, covered with a rug of moss, browned by the autumn sun, and yielding
like velvet to the foot. The river glistened in the white moonlight,
black, viscous, sinister, slipping through the forest. The road, lying
beyond it, was also in the light, while the mountains, stretching off
westward from this road, lay under a vast inky shadow.
The Duke of Dorset took off his coat, laid it at the foot of a tree, set
the rifle beside it, bade the women await his return, and went down the
bank into the river. He found the water not deeper than he had judged
it, but the current was rather stronger, and the rock bed uneven and
seamed with cracks. He crossed to the opposite bank and was returning,
when something dropped into the river beside him with a slight splash.
He looked up and behind him.
The road, white here under the moon, stretched up the river gradually
into shadow. From the direction of the chateau, a man was advancing,
running in a long, slouching trot. The Duke remembered that the river,
like the road, was in light. He stooped, hooked his fingers into a crack
of the rock bed, and lowered himself into the water. He remained thus
with the water pouring over him until a second splash advised him that
the man had gone on. He got slowly to one knee, and in a moment to his
feet. The road was now clear. The Duke hurriedly waded to the bank and
came to the shelter of the trees. It was dark under the trees, but he
could make out the figure of a woman sitting by the tree where he had
placed the rifle, and a second figure, vaguely white, standing at the
edge of the bank against a fir trunk. He spoke to this standing figure.
"Where did the man go?" he said. "I could not see from the river."
"He followed the road," replied the figure; "can we cross?"
The Duke looked out at the moon. It stood high in the heavens, bright
and clear, a disk of silver. Behind it the sky was clean and swept,
but to the eastward, traveling slowly up, were a company of clouds, one
flying like a wild goose behind the other.
"We can cross," he answered, "but not until the moon is hidden. There
may be others on the road."
Then he sat down on the dry moss.
Immediately the figure by the tree moved toward him. He noticed that it
was but half white, as it stood, and now, as it drew nearer, it became
wholly white. The explanation followed, his coat was put around his
shoulders. He got up at once.
"No, no," he said, "please keep it on; I am not cold."
"But you are wet," replied Caroline Childers, "and you will be cold."
Then she added, as though to settle the discussion, "I put the coat on
because the cartridges were in the pocket. I have the rifle."
And she held out the Mannlicher.
The Duke hesitated. Then he put the coat on and took the gun out of her
hand. The girl remained where she was standing.
A question came into the man's mouth, but he closed his lips on it,
and dropped the butt of the rifle on the moss beside him. A swift
comprehensive understanding came to him. A picture arose strikingly
before him: the mob arriving on the road, he in the river there, and
this white figure, wearing his coat, fighting with a rifle from behind
a fir tree, like the first resolute women of this republic, holding the
log house against the savage. She had flung the bits of stone into the
river to warn him, and had taken up the rifle to defend him.
"Sit down," he said; "we shall doubtless have a long distance to walk."
The girl sat down where she stood. The man remained a moment leaning on
the muzzle of the rifle, then he, too, sat down, placing the gun across
his knees.
It was that hour when the wilderness is silent; before the creatures
that hunt at daybreak have gone out; before the temperature of the night
changes; when the solitary places of the world seem to wait as with a
reverential stillness for the descending of some presence--the hour when
the discipline of life is lax, and the human mind will turn from every
plan, every need of life, however urgent, to any emotion that may enter.
The Duke of Dorset did not move. The desperate and crying difficulties
that beset him became gradually remote. He could not take the road to
the coast as he had hoped; he dared not cross the river under this moon.
And every moment here was one of almost immediate peril. They had been
quickly followed on the road. They would be as quickly followed down the
mountain. These things were impending and real, but they seemed, in this
silence, remote and unreal. The man sat in contentment, like one drawing
at a pipe of opium; a peace, a serenity like that of the night entered
into him; a thing for which we have no word; something strange,
mysterious, wonderful, drew near--was at hand--a thing that was,
somehow, the moving impulse of life, the object of it, the focus into
which drew every act running back to the day that he was born.
A certain vast importance seemed now to attend him. The horror and
turbulence of this night had been benefits to him. Events, ruthless to
others, kind to him. Some god, bloody and old, savage and cruel, but
somehow loving him, had stamped out the world for his benefit, and left
him sitting among the wreck of it, with the one thing he wanted. It
could not escape from him; he had only to put out his hand.
An hour passed. The world still lay silent. The very dead fringe
clinging to the fir limbs were motionless; the dull, monotonous sound of
the river, rolling in its bed, was a sort of silence. Brief periods
of darkness now covered the river and the road as the moon entered the
company of clouds. No one of the three persons moved. The white figure
so near to the Duke of Dorset might have been wholly an illusion of the
sense. The wet clothes on the man's body dried. Another hour passed.
Then faint cries, hardly to be distinguished, descended from the
mountain behind them. The man arose and listened, he now heard the
sounds distinctly; he heard also a second sound carrying through the
forest.
Some one was coming along the river bank, through the undergrowth, a
mile away.
CHAPTER XIII--THE GREAT PERIL
The remote sounds, caught by the man's trained ear, were now audible to
the women. They arose. The Marchesa Soderrelli moved over to where the
Duke stood looking up at the sky.
"They are coming," she said.
The man did not answer, and he did not move. The sounds, carried down to
them on the night air, grew louder. The Marchesa became impatient.
"We must go on," she said.
The words, the tone of the woman's voice, were urgent. But the Duke
remained with his face lifted to the tree tops. Presently, he turned
swiftly and handed the rifle to Caroline Childers.
"We must try it now," he said, "while the moon is under that cloud. Each
of you give me your hand."
The two women instantly obeyed, and the three persons went hurriedly
down the bank into the river. The whole world was now dark. The man thus
entered the water, between the two women; he held each by the wrist, his
arms extended. It was the only way to cross the river swiftly, and to
be certain that neither woman was carried away by the current. Caroline
Childers was above with the rifle. The Marchesa Soderrelli was below.
The wisdom of the Duke's plan was at once apparent. Neither of the women
could have kept her footing without his aid; thus held, they managed to
reach the middle of the river, and would doubtless have crossed without
accident had the rock bed continued smooth. But there is to be found
in the beds of rivers, especially when seamed with cracks, a species of
green slimy fungus, clinging to these cracks, and streaming out below,
slippery, like wisps of coarse hair boiled in soap.
As they approached the opposite shore, the Marchesa trod on one of these
bits of fungus and fell. The current, at that point, was swift, but the
water was shallow. Her knee struck heavily on the rock. The Duke held
her, but she seemed unable to get again to her feet; her body swung
out with the current; the river was intensely dark. Fortunately, in
the shallow water, Caroline Childers managed to get ashore without the
Duke's assistance; and having now his other arm free, he was able to
lift the Marchesa, and carry her out of the river. He did not stop on
the bank; he went on across the road, and into the wood beyond, still
carrying the Marchesa Soderrelli. Caroline Childers followed with the
rifle.
The wood, skirting the foot of the mountains, was here less densely
packed than on the other side of the river. The Duke wished to cross
it into the deeps of the forest before the moon emerged. He walked with
tremendous strides in spite of his burden and in spite of the darkness.
The ground under foot was open, and he was able to cross the strip of
wood to the foot of the mountain before the moon came out. He stopped
and put the woman down. There was a little light entering among the
trees, although neither the road nor the river could be seen.
The Marchesa was not able to determine the extent of her injuries. The
blow had been on the left knee; she did not think that any bone was
broken, nevertheless, the joint gave way when she tried to get up. The
three persons fully realized the alarming extent of this misfortune.
Still no one spoke of it. Caroline Childers wanted to stop here, but the
Duke insisted that they go on. He put his arm around the Marchesa, and
she tried to walk. But she presently gave it up and sat down. Caroline
Childers now insisted that they should stop; perhaps the Marchesa might
be able to walk when the knee was rested. The Duke refused. He pointed
out that the leg, if not broken, would presently be stiff, and more
painful than it now was; that they were still so close to the road that
beaters would easily find them; that the rising clouds indicated rain;
and that the mountain would be infinitely harder to climb if the moss
and leaves were wet. Moreover, he could not determine the lie of the
mountains from this valley, and he wished to be high enough to locate
directions when the dawn arrived.
He announced his intention to carry the disabled woman. The Marchesa
protested. The Duke simply paid no attention. He took her up, and set
out through the mountains. The forest grew more dense; the ascent
became more difficult; still the man went on without slacking his pace.
Sometimes he paused to rest, holding the woman on his knee; sometimes he
put her down while he tried to discover the lie of the mountain. But he
refused to stop, and always he continued to advance.
Usage, training, the rigor of discipline long followed toughen and
strengthen the human body to an excellence past belief. This man carried
the woman, hour after hour, up the mountain, through the fir forest, and
he traveled quite as fast with his unwieldy burden as the girl behind
him was able to do with no weight except that of the rifle. The night
lengthened and darkened. The morning began to approach. Still black tree
trunk followed black tree trunk, and the brown moss carpet under their
feet stretched upward. The air, instead of cooling with the dawn, became
warmer. A thin mist of rain began to fall. Presently the contour of the
ground changed; the carpet became level; more light entered among the
trees, and they came out into a bit of open.
It was now morning. They came into an ancient clearing; a patch once cut
out by some pioneer's ax; the scar of an old wound, that the wilderness
had taken from the invader. The blackened stumps still stood about,
fragments of charred tree tops remained; and in the center of the
clearing stood a log cabin, roofed with clapboards, its door fallen from
its wooden hinges, its chimney, built of crossed sticks, daubed between
with clay, tumbled down, but the hewn logs and the clapboards, split
with the grain of the wood, remained.
The Duke crossed the bit of open and entered the cabin. It was dry, and
covered with leaves carried in through the door by the wind. The three
persons were scarcely under the protection of this shelter, when the
threatening rain began to fall. It was one of those rains common to the
coast line. There was no wind; the atmosphere seemed to form itself into
a drenching mist that descended through the trees.
The Marchesa Soderrelli complained of pain in the injured knee, and the
two women determined to improvise a bandage. The Duke arose and went out
into the clearing. The forest was beginning to steam, and he wished, if
possible, to get the lie of the mountain range before they were hemmed
in with mist. The two women improvised a bandage from a petticoat
ruffle, and bound the knee as tightly as they could. They did not talk;
both were greatly fatigued, and both realized the desperate situation.
They did not discuss it, but each prepared to meet it, in her own
manner, with resolution.
When the Duke had got the points of the compass, he was not disturbed
about what ought to be done. He knew that as soon as the two women were
a bit rested, they should at once go on. It would be a day of fatigue
and hunger; but no one of them would die of hunger in a day, and by
night he hoped to come in sight of the coast. Then they could stop and
meet the problem of food.
He was going back into the cabin to explain the necessities of this
plan, when the Marchesa Soderrelli called him. He entered. Caroline
Childers was standing, leaning against the logs by the tumbled-in
fireplace; the Marchesa Soderrelli sat on the ground among the leaves;
both, in physical aspect, had paid their tribute to the wilderness.
The girl's hair and eyes seemed to dominate her face; the soft
indiscriminate things, common to youth, were gone; she had become, in
the eight hours departed, a woman, acquainted with the bitterness of
fife, and facing its renunciations. The Marchesa Soderrelli, sitting on
the floor of the abandoned cabin, was an old woman, her face flabby, her
body fallen into baggy lines. But the spirit in her was unshaken, and
her voice was compact and decisive.
"I wish to speak to you, my friend," she said; "won't you please sit
down?"
The man looked from one woman to the other and sat down on the corner of
a log, jutting out from the door wall. For the last half of this night,
he had been, upon one point, content. He was like one who, desiring
a thing above all others, and despairing of his ability to obtain it,
finds that thing seized upon by a horde of brutal and hideous events and
thrust into his arms. He stood now, past the outposts of uncertainty,
with the possession in his hand.
Those under the oldest superstition in the world warn us that such a
moment is above all others perilous. That it is the habit of Destiny
to wait with fatal patience until one's life swims over this mark, and
then, rising, like a whaler to drive in the iron.
The Marchesa Soderrelli continued, like one who has a final and
difficult thing to say.
"My friend," she began, "I am a woman, and consequently you must expect
me to go round about in what I have to say, and you must forgive me when
I seem unreasonable."
She lifted her hands and put back her hair.
"I have no religion, as that word is generally defined, but I have a
theory of life. I got it out of a book when I was little. In that book
the disciples of a wise man came to him and said: 'Master, we can
endure no longer being bound to this body, giving it food and drink,
and resting it and cleansing it, and going about to court one man after
another for its sake. Is not death no evil? Let us depart to whence we
came.' And he answered them: 'Doth it smoke in the chamber? If it is
not very much I will stay. If too much, I will go out; for remember this
always, and hold fast to it that the door is open.' Well, the smoke has
come to be intolerable."
She moved in the leaves.
"I have tested my fortune again and again as that wise man said one
ought to do. There can be no longer any doubt. It is time for me to go."
The woman looked from the man to the girl standing by the chimney. Her
eyes were appealing.
"You must forgive me," she said, "but you must believe me, and you must
try to understand me. I want you and Caroline to go on."
She put up her hand.
"No, please hear me to the end of it. I know how the proposal looks to
you. It seems cruel. But is it? I am come to the door, and I am going
out through it. Is it not more cruel to force me to put my own hand to
the latch?"
The woman paused. She sat huddled together in the leaves; there was
something old, fated, irrevocable in the pose of her figure.
"I beg of you," she added, "as my friends, to spare me that."
The mist streaming up from the soaked forest lay in the cabin. It
gathered about the woman on the floor. Presently she went on:
"I am afraid that I cannot make you see how completely I am done with
life, but I will try. So long as one has a thing to love, or a thing
to do in this world, the desire to remain here is a strong and moving
impulse in him. But when these two things go, that desire also goes. And
the loss of it is the sign--the beck to the door. That old wise man made
it very clear, I think. He said: 'Another hath made the play, and
not thee, and hath given thee thy lines to speak, and thou art not
concerned, except to speak them well, and at the end of them to go....
And why shouldst thou wish to remain after that, until He, who conducts
the play, shall come and thrust thee off?'"
"Now," she continued, "I have come to the end of my lines. They have not
always been very pleasant lines. But I have contrived to speak them with
a sort of courage. And I would not now be shamed before the Manager."
She peered through the thickening mist, as through a smoke, straining
her eyes to see the face of the man by the door, the girl by the
chimney; but she could not, and she tried a further argument.
"You must be fair to me," she said, "look at the situation. I cannot
go on, that is certain, and for the two of you to remain here, on my
account, is to charge me with your death. Dear me! I have enough on the
debit side of the ledger without that."
The woman's head oscillated on her shoulders. Her right hand wrung the
fingers of her left. She considered for a moment, her chin fallen on
her bosom. Then she sat up, like one under the impulse of some final and
desperate hazard.
"I am going to ask each of you a question," she said, "and I entreat
you, as one in the presence of death, to answer the truth. And let it be
a test between us."
Then she leaned forward, straining through the mist, to the Duke of
Dorset.
"My friend," she said, "can you think of any interest in this life that
you would like to follow; any plan that you would like to carry out; any
hope that you would like to realize? because I cannot, and if you can,
it is I, and not you who should remain here."
There was absolute silence. The wet mist continued to enter, to obscure,
to separate each of the three persons. The man did not reply, and the
Marchesa swung around toward the dim figure of the girl, standing by the
ruined chimney. The leaves crackled under the woman's body. She rested
on her hand.
"Caroline," she said, "a man may have many interests in life, but we
do not. With us all roads lead through the heart. Now, if you have any
affection for any living man, you must go on. I make it the test before
God. If you have, you must go. If you have not, you may remain. But I
have the right to the truth--the right of one about to decide who shall
live and who shall not live."
The man at the door arose slowly to his feet, as under the pressure of
a knife, breaking the skin between his shoulders. Every fiber in him
trembled. Every muscle in his body stood out. Every pore sweated. The
shadow of the descending iron was black on him.
But if this question disturbed Caroline Childers, there was now
no evidence of it. She replied at once, without pause, without
equivocation.
"I shall remain with you," she said.
The Marchesa Soderrelli, sitting on the floor among the leaves, bit her
lip, until the blood flowed under her teeth.
The man, standing by the door, did not move. The mist mercifully hid
him; it packed itself into the cabin. The three persons changed into
gray indefinite figures, into mere outlines, into nothing. The mist
became a sort of darkness. It became also a dense, tangible thing, like
cotton-wool, that obscured and deadened sound.
Something presently entered the clearing from the forest, tramped about
in it, and finally approached the door.
CHAPTER XXIV--THE TASTE OF DEATH
There is no phenomenon of weather so swiftly variable as that of mist.
It may lie at a given moment on the sea or on the mountain--a clinging,
opaque mass, as dense and impenetrable as darkness; darkness, in
fact, leeched of its pigment, a strange, hideous, unnatural, pale
darkness--and the next moment it may be swept clean away by the wind.
This is especially true on high altitudes; the ridges of hills; the
exposed shoulders of mountains, where the fog lies clear in the path of
the wind. On Western mountain ranges, adjacent to the sea, this protean
virtue of the weather is sometimes a thing as instantaneous as sorcery.
The soft rain is often followed by a stiff, heady breeze, sucked in
landward from the ocean. This breeze travels like a broom sweeping its
track. Thus, the Marchesa Soderrelli, wrapped in this mist, like a toy
in wool, sitting on the floor of the cabin, believed herself present at
some enchantment, when suddenly the mist departed, a cool wind blew in
on her, and the sun entered.
She uttered a cry of astonishment, and pointed to the door. A huge,
gaunt mule stood directly before the cabin, and almost instantly the
tall figure of a man, equally gaunt, loomed in the door.
"Good mornin'," he said, with an awkward, shy bob of the chin. His eyes
were gentle; his craggy, rugged feature placid like those of some old
child. "I had a right smart trouble to find you."
The tragic nature of a situation is an intangible essence purely mental.
It does not lie in any physical aspect; it is a state of the mind. Let
that state of the mind change, and the whole atmosphere of the situation
changes. The scene may stand in every detail precisely as it was, the
actors in it remain the same, Nature and every phase of Nature the
same, and yet everything is changed. It is a state of the mind! On the
instant, the scene of breaking tension staged in this mountain cabin
descended into commonplace. Life, and the promise of life travel always
in one zone; death, and the threat of death in another--but shifting
imperceptibly, and on the tick of the clock.
One arriving now at this cabin would have marked only signs of fatigue
in the aspect of the three persons in it. Of this fatigue, the girl and
the older woman gave much less evidence than the man. He seemed wholly
exhausted. The vitality of the two women arose with the advent of the
mountaineer. They gave interest and aid to his efforts to provide a
meager breakfast. He produced from a sack across the mule's saddle a
piece of raw bacon, flour and a frying pan.
The Duke of Dorset, after his first welcome to the mountaineer, and his
brief explanation to the others, had returned to his seat on the log by
the door. He seemed too tired even to follow events. The mountaineer had
produced sulphur matches from the inside of his hat--the only dry spot
about him--wrapped in a piece of red oilcloth, cut doubtless from the
cover of some cabin table. He was now on his knees by the tumbled-in
chimney, lighting a fire. Caroline Childers, with the knife, which the
Duke had once borrowed, was cutting the bacon into strips. The Marchesa
Soderrelli, still seated on the floor, was in conversation with the
mountaineer, her strong, resolute nature recovering its poise.
The contrast between the degrees of fatigue manifest in the two women
and the man by the door was striking. He looked like a human body from
which all the energies of life had been removed. In the case of the two
women, Nature was beginning to recover. But, in the aspect of the man,
there was no indication that she ever intended to make the effort.
Now, as the effect of mere exertion, this result was excessive. The
man was hardy and powerful; he was young; he was accustomed to fatigue.
Eight hours of stress would not have brought such a frame to exhaustion.
Eight days would hardly have done it. Moreover, within the last hour,
the man had entered the clearing with no marked evidence of fatigue. The
transformation carried the aspect of sorcery, or that of some obscure
and hideous plague, traveling in the mist.
Occult and unknowable, swift and potent are the states of the mind. The
blasting liquors, fabled of the Borgia, were not more toxic than certain
ones brewed, on occasion, in the vats of the brain.
The Marchesa Soderrelli took over the conduct of affairs. She brought
now to the promise of life that same resolution and directness which she
had summoned to confront the advent of death. She spoke from her
place on the floor, her voice compact and decisive. She estimated with
accurate perspective the difficulties at hand, and those likely to
arise. Now as determined to go on as she had been a little earlier
determined to remain. Her conversation, almost wholly to the
mountaineer, was concise, deliberate and to the point. But while she
talked directly to him, she looked almost continually at the Duke
of Dorset. She seemed to carry on, side by side, two distinct mental
processes--one meeting the exigencies of the situation, and the other
involving a study of the man seated by the door--and to handle each
separately as a thing apart from the other.
The coast could be reached by trails known to the mountaineer in eight
or nine hours, perhaps in less time. If they set out at once they would
arrive in the afternoon. Nevertheless, the Marchesa Soderrelli, coming
to a decision on the two problems before her, declared that they should
remain where they were until midday. It is possible that she considered
the Duke of Dorset too fatigued to go on; but she gave no reason.
This careful scrutiny of the changed aspect of the man by the door was
not confined to the Marchesa Soderrelli. The circuit rider observed it,
considered the man's physical needs, and agreed to the delay. Caroline
Childers, behind the Marchesa Soderrelli, sitting by the bit of fire,
her hands around her knees, also studied the man; but she did not regard
him steadily. She sat for the most part, looking into the fire at the
cooling embers, at the white ash gathering on the twigs. Now and then,
fitfully, at intervals, her eyes turned toward him. The expression of
the girl's face changed at such a time. It lifted always with concern
and a certain distress, and it fell again, above the fire, into a cast
of vague, apparently idle speculation; but, unlike the scrutiny of the
other woman, it continued.
The Marchesa having reached a conclusion turned about and began to probe
the mountaineer with queries. She wished to know where he had been, how
he had come to follow, and by what means he had found them.
The old man was not easily drawn into a story. The history of the night
came up under the Marchesa's searching hand in detached fragments.
Fragments that amazed and fixed her interest. This story failed to hold
the girl's exclusive interest, although absorbing that of the Marchesa.
Her eyes traveled continually to the Duke of Dorset while she listened
to it as though placing each incident in its proper relation to him.
As though each incident, so coupled up, entered in and became a part
of some big and overpowering conception that her mind again and again
attempted to take hold of. She seemed, unlike the older woman, not able
to carry the two things side by side in her mind. She swung from the one
abruptly to the other.
The mountaineer, under the searching queries of the Marchesa, was
disturbed and apologetic. He had been slow to find the party, he
thought; and, as preface to the story, meekly issued his excuse,
including a word for the mule.
"Jezebel's a-gittin' on, an' I hain't as spry as I was."
Not as spry as he was! The traveling of this man for the last half of
the night would have appalled a timber wolf. He had beat the mountains,
on both sides of the river, for four hours, running through the forest.
He had gone along the face of the mountains for at least five miles,
backward and forward, parallel with the great road, traveling faster
than that wolf. He was desolated, too, because "God Almighty" had sent
him in haste, like that man of God out of Judah, and he had stopped "to
eat bread and to drink water."
Stopped to eat bread and to drink water!
For eight hours the man had not stopped except to feed the mule. For
ten hours he had not eaten a mouthful, and had drank only when he waded
through a river. Why, since he carried food, he had not eaten, the
Marchesa So-derrelli, with all her dredging, could not get at. The man
seemed to have had some vague idea that the food would be needed, and
an accounting of it required of him. He was distressed for what the mule
had eaten, but one must be merciful to his beast, for the Bible said it.
Moreover, he had been "afeard."
Afeard! The man had been all night in the immediate presence of death.
He had stood unmoved and observing under the very loom of it. He had
crossed again and again under its extended arm, under its descending
hand; within a twinkling of the eye, a ticking of the clock of death.
It ought to be remembered that the Marchesa Soderrelli was an
experienced and educated woman, skilled in the subtleties of speech, and
in deft probing. And yet, with all the arts and tricks of it, she was
not clearly able to discover wherein the mountaineer accused himself of
fear.
It seemed that the man, following a definite impulse which he believed
to be a direction of God, had arrived on the spur of the mountain above
the château before the revolt was on. But here in the deeps of the
forest he had stopped to consider what he ought to do, and in this he
had been "afeard," not for his life, but to trust God. He should have
gone on into the château, then he might have brought all safely away.
But he had "taken thought."
When he heard the cracking of the rifle, he had tied the mule to a tree,
and descended the stone steps. But he arrived there after the attack was
ended. Concealed by the vines, he had concluded that the occupants of
the château were already gone out on the road to the coast.
He had returned for the mule, made a detour around to the road, and
advanced toward the château. But he found no one. The château was in
flames. He now thought that if any of its occupants had escaped, they
would be in the mountain from which he had descended, and would come
down the trail to the river. He had, therefore, traveled with the mule
as fast as he could to that place on the road. But no one had come over
the river there. He could tell that, because one, coming up out of the
water, would have made wet tracks on the dry moss of the bank, and the
dry carpet of the road.
Now, extremely puzzled, he had hidden the mule in the forest, and set
out to see if the escaping persons had crossed the road farther on. He
had traveled for several miles, but had found no wet track on the dry
road. Then he had crossed the river and followed up on the opposite
bank. He had hunted that face of the mountain before the pursuing mob.
Finally ascending the bank of the river, he had come by chance on the
Marchesa's skirt. This had given him a clew to the direction taken by
the party, and following it he had finally located, by the trodden
moss, the place where the river had been crossed. He had waded the river
there, hoping to follow the wet tracks, but the rain had now begun to
descend, and he could not tell what direction they had taken. He had
returned for the mule, and followed the road to the summit of the
mountain. Here he again tied the mule in the woods and began that long,
tireless searching, backward and forward along the whole face of the
mountain.
Finally, in despair, he returned to the mule, and as he put it,
"left the thing to Jezebel an' God Almighty." And the mule, doubtless
remembering, in the uncomfortable rain, the shelter of the abandoned
cabin, had gone along the backbone of the mountain into the clearing.
And so he had found them.
But to the circuit rider it was God's work; the angel of the Lord in the
night, in the impenetrable mist, walking by the beast's bridle. He was
depressed and penitent. He had been one of little faith, one of that
perverse and headstrong generation; afraid, like the Assyrian, to trust
God. And so, in spite of him, they had been found.
The man was so evidently distressed that the Marchesa Soderrelli
hastened to reassure him. She told him how the Duke of Dorset had gone
twice to a window to kill him. She thought the deep religious nature of
the man would see here a providential intervention--the hand of Yahveh
thrust out for the preservation of His servant. But in this she was
mistaken. He had been in the presence, not of God's mercy, but of His
anger. The hand had been reached out, not to preserve, but to dash him
into pieces. He believed in the austere God of the ancient Scriptures,
who visited the wavering servant with punishments immediate and
ruthless; the arrow drawn at a venture and the edge of the sword.
The astonishment of the Marchesa Soderrelli at the man did not equal his
astonishment at her. He sat looking at the woman in wonder. How could
she doubt a thing so clear? Was not the Bible crowded with the lesson?
Presently he arose and went out into the clearing. The gaunt mule was
cropping vines in the open before the door. He paused to caress her
lovingly with his hands. Then he crossed the clearing and disappeared
into the forest. The Marchesa concluded that the man had gone to post
himself somewhere as a sentinel, and she composed herself to wait.
The morning was drawing on to midday. The sun lay warm on the forest.
The soft haze stretched a blue mist through the hollows of the
mountains. The peace, the stillness, the serenity of autumn lay through
the cabin. The air was soft. No one in the cabin moved. Caroline
Childers sat where she had been, fallen apparently into some vague and
listless dreaming. Her hands wandered idly among the leaves, breaking
a twig to bits, making now and then a foolish, irrelevant gesture. The
Duke sat with his elbow on his knee, and his chin resting in the hollow
of his hand. The girl, now and then, looked up at him and then back
again to her aimless fingers crumbling the leaves.
A droning as of bees outside arose. It seemed in the intense stillness,
to increase, to take on volume. The sound deepened. It became like the
far-off humming of a wheel under the foot of a spinner. It drew the
attention of the Mar-chesa Soderrelli. She began to listen intently.
"Do you hear that sound, Caroline?" she said, "what is it?"
The girl arose and listened. She went noiselessly to the door, and out
into the clearing. She came to the mule, stopped, and began, like
the old mountaineer, to stroke its big, kindly face. A breath of wind
carried the sound to her from the forest. It was a human voice, rising
and falling in a deep muttering cadence.
_"I've been in the presence of Thy wrath, O God Almighty, an' the j'ints
of my knees are loosened. I hain't like David, the son of Jesse. Uit's
Thy hand, O Lord, that skeers me. Preserve me from Thy sword, an' I'll
take my chancet with the sword of mine enemies. Fur I'm afeard of Thee,
but I hain't afeard of them."_
The girl stood a moment, her hand under the mule's muzzle, then she
walked slowly back to the cabin. At the door she stopped and answered
the Marchesa's question.
"It's the wind," she said, "in the tops of the fir trees."
CHAPTER XXV--THE WANDERING
At noon they set out through the mountains, the Marchesa Soderrelli
riding the mule, the old man leading with the rope bridle over his arm,
and the sack swinging on his shoulder. Caroline Childers walked beside
the mountaineer. The Duke followed with the rifle. The world had
changed; it was now a land of sun, of peace, of vast unending stillness.
The carpet of the wilderness was dry; the dark-green tops of the fir
trees brightened as with acid; the far-off stretch of forest, fresh, as
though wiped with a cloth; the air like lotus.
The old man traveled along the backbone of the mountain, not as the crow
flies, to the coast, but in the great arc of a circle swinging to
the west. He thus avoided abrupt and perilous descents and the dense
undergrowth of the hollows. The forest along these summits was open.
Cyrus Childers had cleaned them of their fallen timber. They were now
great groves of fir trees, shooting up their brown bodies into the
sky, and stretching there a green, unending trellis through which the
sunlight filtered.
[Illustration: 0359]
The little party, traveling in these silent places, through this
ancient wilderness, would have fitted into the morning of the world. The
gigantic old man, the lank, huge mule, and the woman riding on the pack
saddle might have come up in some patriarchal decade out of Asia. The
girl, straight, slim, lithe and beautiful as a naiad, her cloudy black
hair banked around her face, belonged in sacred groves--in ancient
sequestered places--one of those alluring, mysterious, fairy women of
which the fable in every tongue remains. Called by innumerable sounds
in the mouths of men, but seen thus always in the eye of the mind when
those sounds are uttered. The Marchesa Soderrelli was right, on that day
in Oban, when she set youth first among the gifts of the gods. It is the
beautiful physical mystery that allures the senses of men. And youth, be
it said, is the essence of that sorcery.
The Duke of Dorset came, too, with fitness into the picture; he was the
moving, desolate figure of that canvas. Man arriving at his estate
in pride, in strength, in glory, and fallen there into the clutch of
destiny. In his visible aspect he had recovered in a degree; he no
longer bore the evidences of extreme fatigue, he walked with the rifle
under his arm, and with a casual notice of events.
There is a certain provision of Nature wholly blessed. When one is
called to follow that which is dearest to him, nailed up in a coffin,
to the grave; when the bitterness of death has wracked the soul to the
extreme of physical endurance; then, when under the turn of the screw
blood no longer comes, there exudes, instead of it, a divine liquor
that numbs the sensibilities like an anæsthetic, and one is able to
walk behind the coffin in the road, to approach the grave, to watch the
shovelful of earth thrown in, and to come away like other men, speaking
of the sun, the harvest, the prospects of the to-morrow; it is not this
day that is the deadliest; it is the day to follow--the months, the
years to follow, when the broken soul has no longer an opiate.
The Duke of Dorset was in the door of life, in that golden age of it
when the youth has hardened into the man, when the body has got its
glory, and the mind its stature. And he moved here in this forest behind
the others, a weapon in his hand, a figure belonging to the picture. He
was the leader of the tribe, and its defense against its enemies; but a
leader who had lost a kingdom, and whose followers had been put to the
sword.
They followed the mountain ridges through the long afternoon, through
this ancient, primeval forest. Below, the tops of the fir trees
descended into an amphitheater of green, broken by shoulders of the
mountain, and farther on into hollows that widened in perspective and
filled themselves in the remote distances with haze.
About four o'clock they came out onto the ridge where the two men had
first stopped in their journey from the coast. Here was the knoll,
rising above them like a hump on the ridge, and set about with ancient
fir trees; and here below it was the spring of water gushing into its
stone bowl. The mountaineer stopped and lifted the Marchesa down from
the mule, then he handed the rope bridle to the girl and indicated the
spring with a gesture.
"You'll have to hold Jezebel or she'll poke her nose in hit first
feller," he said; "I guess I'll look around some." Then he went up onto
the crest of the knoll.
The Marchesa Soderrelli drank, scooping up the water with her hands;
Caroline Childers drank, kneeling, wisps of hair falling beside her
slim face into the pool. The Duke of Dorset approached, and remained
standing, the butt of the rifle on the ground, his hands resting on the
muzzle, watching, in his misery, this sylvan creature come out of the
deep places of the wood to drink.
In a few minutes the old circuit rider appeared, and beckoned to the
Duke of Dorset. Then he came down a few steps and spoke to the two
women.
"Don't be skeered," he said, "we're agoin' to try how the gun shoots."
Then he went with the Duke up onto the high ground of the ridge. This
summit commanded a view of the road ascending the mountain in a long,
easy sweep--a beautiful brown ribbon stretched along a bank of scarlet.
On this road two figures were advancing, a mile away, like tiny
mechanical toys moving up the middle of the ribbon. The old man pointed
them out with his finger.
"Them'll be scouts," he said. "How fur will your gun carry?"
The Duke of Dorset estimated the distance with his eye.
"One cannot be certain," he answered; "above six hundred yards."
"That air purty long shootin'; air you certain the bullet'll carry up?"
"Quite certain," replied the Duke.
The old man bobbed his chin, and pointed his finger down the mountain to
a dead tree, standing like a mile post on the road.
"When they come up to that air fir," he said, "draw a bead on'em."
The Duke of Dorset elevated the sights for five hundred yards, and the
two men waited without a word for the tiny toy figures on the velvet
ribbon to approach. The knoll on which they stood was elevated above
the surrounding wilderness of tree tops. Below, these deep green tops
sloped, as though clipped beautifully with some gigantic shears. It was
like looking downward over a green cloth with an indolent sun, softened
by haze, lying on its surface. The Duke of Dorset stood with one foot
advanced, the weight of his body resting on the foot that was behind
the other, in the common attitude of one oppressed by fatigue. The old
circuit rider stood beside him, bare-headed, his hat on the ground, a
faint breeze stirring his gray hair.
The brooding, lonely silence of the afternoon lay on the world. A
vagrant breath of wind moved on the ridge, idly through the tops of the
ancient firs, but it did not descend into the forest. There, under the
blue nimbus, nothing moved but the quaint figures traveling on the long
brown band. When these two figures began to come up the last sweep of
the road toward the dead fir, the Duke of Dorset raised the rifle to his
shoulder. The old circuit rider watched him; he observed that the man's
hand was unsteady, and that the muzzle of the gun wavered.
"Stranger," he said, "air you one of them shots that wobbles onto your
mark?"
Now, there was among the frontiersmen, in the day of the hair trigger,
a school of wilderness hunters, to be found at every shooting match, who
maintained that no man could hold steadily on an object. They asserted
that the muzzle of the rifle should be allowed to move, either in a
straight line up or down onto the target, or across it in the arc of a
circle. The trigger to be pulled when the line of sight touched on the
target. The first disciples of this school were called the "line shots,"
and the second the "wobblers." Almost every pioneer followed one of
these methods, and no more deadly marksmen at short range ever sighted
along a gun barrel. They could drive a nail in with a bullet; they could
split the bullet, at a dozen paces, on the edge of an ax; they could
pick the gray squirrel out of the tallest hickory at eighty, at a
hundred yards, when, lying flat to the limb, it presented a target not
higher than an inch.
The Duke took down the rifle. He understood the delicate reference to
his nerves.
"Perhaps I would better lie down," he said. Then his eye caught the
bullet swinging to its leather string at the old man's middle, and he
remembered the history of it. He handed the rifle to the mountaineer.
"I am not fit to-day," he said; "will you try?" And he explained the
mechanism of the rifle.
The old man took the gun, weighed it in his hands, tried the pull-of the
trigger, and examined the sights.
"Hit air about the weight of the ole Minie rifle," he said, "an' the
sights air fine. Do hit shoot where you hold it?"
"I think it may be depended on at this range," replied the Duke.
"Well," said the old man, "I hain't shot for a purty long spell, but
I'll jist try it a whet."
He lifted the gun to his shoulder, pressed his bronzed cheek to the
stock, and slipped his left hand out to the full length of the arm under
the barrel. The two figures were within a dozen paces of the dead fir
tree. The Duke thought one of them was the Japanese whom he had seen
watching the château, and the other a forester, but he could not be
certain at the distance. For perhaps thirty seconds the mountaineer
stood like a figure cast in plaster, then the muzzle of the rifle began
slowly to descend, and the report crashed out over the tree tops.
The forester, a little in advance of the other, fell in the road, his
head and shoulders doubled up under him. The other, at the report,
jumped as high as he could into the air, turned entirely around before
he touched the earth, and began to run down the road. He ran, evidently
in terror, his legs moving grotesquely on the center of the brown
ribbon. The old mountaineer remained unmoving; his left hand far out
under the barrel of the rifle, his face set to the stock. He moved the
bolt and returned his finger to the trigger. Then the rigid muzzle of
the rifle began once more to descend, in a dead straight line, and the
report followed. The quaint figure, its legs twinkling on the ribbon,
shot up into the air, and then fell spraddled out in the road, its arms
and legs extended.
The Duke of Dorset turned to the mountaineer.
"My friend," he said, "that is the best shooting I ever saw--a moving
target at more than five hundred yards."
The old man removed the gun from his shoulder and handed it to the Duke,
stopped, picked up his hat and put it on his head. Then he replied to
the Duke's compliment.
"Stranger," he said, "hit air the Almighty that kills."
It must be remembered that this man's God was the God of the Tishbite,
who numbered his followers by the companies who drew the sword.
The two men returned at once to the spring, and the little party again
set out through the mountains. The plan of travel was now changed. The
circuit rider took a trail down the mountain in a direct line to the
coast, and he hurried; the trail was at places rough and steep; the
injured woman with difficulty kept her place on the pack saddle. They
reached the low-lying foot hills, crossed the long broken hollow, dense
with thickets, and ascended the next mountain, going due west. The old
man traveled as fast as he could; he urged the mule, speaking to it as
one might to a careless, lagging child, "Come along, Jezebel; mind where
you're walkin'"; and when the mule stumbled, a gentle, scolding note
came into his voice, "Pshaw! Jezebel, air your eyes in the back of your
head?"
But in spite of the direct route and every effort of the old man they
traveled slowly. The sun had gone down when they began the ascent of the
second mountain. They stopped for a few minutes, and ate what remained
of the food, then they pushed on, climbing toward the summit.
Meanwhile, night descended. A deep-blue twilight emerged from the
hollows, the remote valleys, the hidden nooks and corners of the
wilderness, crept in among the brown trunks of the fir trees, and
climbed to the ridges. Then, imperceptibly, as though pigment flowed in,
the twilight deepened, the stars came out, and it was night.
They crossed the summit of the second mountain, descended for perhaps
three hundred yards, then turned due north and came out abruptly into
the great road. The moon was beginning to come up, its hidden disk
preceded by a golden haze that feebly lighted the world. The road lay
outlined in shadow, running in a long sweep around a shoulder of the
mountain on its way to the sea. The four persons continued down this
road to the coast. The mountaineer leading the mule, on which the
Marchesa Soderrelli rode, and the two others following behind them.
Caroline Childers, walking beside the Duke of Dorset, lagged as though
worn out with fatigue. The space between the four persons widened and
drew out into a considerable distance. Presently, when the mule turned
the shoulder of the mountain, the girl stopped. At the same time, as
upon some signal, the moon arose, pouring its silver light into the
wilderness over the green tops of the fir trees and down into the road,
etching delicate fantastic shadows on the bed of brown fir needles,
filtering in among the vines massed on the wall, and turning the dark
earth as by some magic into a soft, shimmering, illumined fairy world.
The whole wilderness of tree tops rising to the sky was bathed in light.
A mist, silvered at its edges, lay on the sea, hiding it, as under an
opaque film.
When the girl spoke, her voice hurried as with an explanation.
"You did not understand the Marchesa Soderrelli. She merely wanted us
to go on; to save ourselves."
"And you," said the man, "was that your reason, too?"
The girl hesitated. Then she answered, adding one sentence out of
sequence to another. "She could not go on. I thought... I mean, you
could get away alone--but not with us. You had done enough. It was not
fair... any more. You had a right to your chance... to... your life."
"To my life!" the man echoed.
"Yes," replied the girl, "I mean your life is worth something. But
she... but I... I have lost so much last night. I have lost... I have
lost everything. But you... everything remains to you. You have lost
nothing."
The man made an abrupt gesture with both hands.
"Lost nothing!" he repeated. Then he said the words over slowly, like
one stating an absurd, incredible accusation before he answers it, each
word distinctly, softly, as though it stood apart from its fellow.
"Lost nothing!"
He took a step or two nearer to the girl. The moon fell on his tall
athletic body, projecting a black, distorted shadow on the road. The
half of his face was in the light, and it was contracted with despair.
The tendons in his hands were visible, moving the doubled fingers. His
voice was low, distinct, compact.
"I have lost," he said, "everything, beginning from the day I was born.
All the care and labor that my mother took when I was little is lost;
all the bread that I have eaten, all the water that I have drunk, all
the sun that has warmed me is lost. And the loss does not stop with
that. I have lost whatever things the days, arriving one after the
other, were bringing to me, except the blessed gift that the last one
will bring. I am utterly and wholly ruined."
The man's words followed, one after the other, as though they were
material things, having dimensions and weight.
"Death is nothing. It is life now, that is awful. I shall have to go on
when it is no use to go on. I shall have to go on seeing you, hearing
your voice, remembering every word you have said, the tone and
expression with which you have said it, and every little unimportant
gesture you have made. Every day that I live, I shall see and understand
more vividly all that I have lost. And it will not get better. It will
get worse. Every day I shall see you a little more clearly than I did
the day before; I shall remember your words a little more distinctly; I
shall understand a little more completely all that you would have been
to me. And all of this time I shall be alone. So utterly alone that my
mind staggers at the thought of it. I love you! I love you! Don't you
see, don't you understand how I love you?"
The girl had not moved while the man was speaking.
"Do you love me like that?" she said.
"Yes," he answered.
"And have you loved me all along like that?"
"All along," he said.
"And will you always love me like that?"
"Like that," he said, "although I have lost you."
The girl stood with her arms hanging, her lips parted, her slender face
gleaming like a flower, her hair spun darkness. The silence, the vast
unending silence, the mystery of a newly minted world, lay about her, as
they lay about that first woman, created by Divine enchantment, in the
wilderness of Asia.
When she spoke again, her voice was so low that the man could hardly
hear it. It was like a voice carried by the night over a great distance.
"But you have not lost me," she said.
*****
Meanwhile, out of the mist, out of that opaque film lying on the sea,
a rocket arose, described a great arc, and fell hissing among the tree
tops.
CHAPTER XXVI--THE CITY OF DREAMS
But for the fire burning in the grate, nothing had changed in the
dining room at Old Newton. The table was laid with a white cloth to the
floor; the same massive howl, filled with the white grapes of the
North, stood in the center of it. Nothing had changed since the Marchesa
lunched there, on her way to Oban, except that the light of the morning
rather than the midday entered through the big windows cut in the
south wall. And except that another woman sat there, beyond the Duke of
Dorset, at the table--a dark-haired, beautiful woman, in a rose-colored
morning gown. Some letters lay beside her plate, and she opened one of
them, while the butler moved about, putting breakfast on the sideboard.
A fragment of newspaper clipping fluttered out on the cloth. She put her
finger on it, but, for the moment, did not take it up. She read the note
and then looked across the table smiling.
"The Marchesa is frightfully anxious about our home-coming to Dorset.
She says that a real dowager may slur over the details of an ancient
custom, but that an adopted dowager must have everything to the letter."
Then she took up the fragment of newspaper clipping.
"Oh," she said, "here is something about you," and she read it aloud.
"'The speech of the Duke of Dorset, in the House of Lords, a few days
ago, in which he urged a dissolution of the Japanese alliance, and, in
its stead, a closer relation of all the English-speaking people, was a
significant utterance. It is the direct expression of an opinion that
has been slowly gathering strength, both here and in the United States
of America. It will be recalled that the Duke was on the Pacific Coast
at the time of the recent Japanese rising, and was rescued, with his
party, by His Majesty's gunboat _Cleavewaive_. The gunboat had put the
Duke ashore on the coast of Oregon, on its annual cruise south, in the
interest of British shipping and to show the flag, and it returned to
pick him up when the Captain learned of the opening of hostilities.
"'It is doubtless true, as the Duke said, that the rising was a first
move of Japan in its long-threatened conflict with the United States,
and was only rendered abortive by the fact that all the white men of
the Pacific Coast, both American and Canadian alike, moved as one people
against the Japanese; thereby forcing Great Britain to notify Japan
that, in the event of the matter taking on the aspect of a national
conflict, she would support her colony.
"'It, perhaps, ought to be added that the personal American alliance
which the Duke has recently made may account in some degree for his
ardor.'"
When she came to the last paragraph of this editorial, the tone of her
voice underwent a perceptible change.
"I should have imagined," she said, "that a 'personal alliance' would be
more seriously regarded in England. I have been told that a marriage
is considered in this island to be 'a great hereditary trust in
perpetuity.' Do I quote accurately?"
The bronzed man, in his gray tweeds, watching her over the table, gave
no sign.
"To the letter," he said. "It is so considered."
"And is it not considered," she continued, "that against the great
duties of this trust no mere 'personal inclination' ought to stand?"
"Well," said the Duke, "I should not hold that rule to be always without
an exception."
"Really!" she said. "But I suppose it is always the case in England
that, when a marriage is being arranged, one ought to follow the
direction of one's family, as, for instance, a prince, called to rule a
hereditary kingdom, ought to hear his parliament."
"That," said the Duke, "is always the case."
"Always?" There was now another note in her voice.
"Always," replied the Duke. "There should never be an exception to that
rule; one ought to marry the woman selected by one's family."
"I thought," said the Duchess, "that I knew of an exception to the rule.
I thought I knew of a man who found a wife for himself."
"I know the case quite well," said the Duke, "and you are mistaken."
"Mistaken!" she said.
"Yes," he said, "there was never in this world a woman more definitely
selected by a family than the one you have in mind; there was never
in this world a woman that a family made more desperate, unending,
persistent efforts to obtain. From the day that the first ancestor saw
her in that doomed city, down through generations to the day that the
last one saw her on the coast of Brittany, to the day that the living
one of this house found her in the bay of Oban, this family has been mad
to possess her."
The butler, having placed the breakfast on the sideboard, had gone out.
Caroline sat with her fingers linked under her chin.
"But was he sure," she said, "was he sure that this was the woman?"
The Duke leaned over and rested his arm on the table.
"How could he doubt it!" he said. "He found her by the sea, and he
found, too, the wicked king and the saint of God, and the doomed palace;
and, besides that, the longing, the accumulated longing of all those
dead men who had seen her, and loved her, and been mad to possess her,
was in him, and by this sign he knew her."
"And the others," she said, "all the others, they have received
nothing!"
"Nothing," he said.
"And is there one of them here, in this house, that I could see him!"
"The portrait," he said, "of the last one, the one who saw her on the
coast of Brittany, is above the mantel in the other room."
"Let us go in and see him," she said.
They arose, leaving the breakfast untasted on the sideboard, and went
out along the stone passage, into the other room. It, too, remained the
same as on the day that the Marchesa entered it. The high window looking
out over the fairy village, with the blue-haired ghost dog on his white
stone doorstep; and, between, the Ardoch and the road leading to the
iron door; and, within, the skins on the floor, the books in their
cases, the guns behind the diagonal panes of leaded glass.
They stopped by the fire, under the smoke-stained portrait. For a little
while they were silent there, before this ancestor looking down from his
canvas. Then the man spoke.
"I think, Caroline," he said, "that all the love with which these dead
men have loved you has been passed on to me.... And I think, Caroline,
that you are somehow the answer to their longings.... I think that
with a single consuming passion, one after the other, with an endless
longing, these dead men have finally loved you into life--by the power
of kisses that touched nothing, longings that availed nothing, loving
that returned nothing.... And, with all this accumulated inheritance, is
it any wonder that every nerve, every fiber, every blood drop of me is
steeped in the love of you?"
The woman had remained unmoving, looking at the portrait above the
mantel in its smoke-stained frame, now she turned slowly.
"Lift me up," she said.
He took her up and lifted her from the floor. But the long-withheld
reward of that ancestor was denied him. When she came to the level of
the man's shoulders, he suddenly gathered her into his arms. Her eyes
closed, her lips trembled, the long sleeves of the morning gown fell
away, her bare arms went warm and close around his neck.
And his mouth possessed her.
THE END
End of Project Gutenberg's The Gilded Chair, by Melville Davisson Post