And thus it was Adrian Ducie,—Randal’s brother—who had saved the child, shut up in the overturned stateroom like a rat in a trap. She knew, too, how lightly Floyd-Rosney would treat this if it were brought to his knowledge—he would say that not a drop of water had touched the child; he had sustained not an instant’s hurt. That he and his nurse had for a few moments been unable to turn the bolt of a door was only a slight inconvenience, as the result of a hurricane. One of the passengers had a badly bruised arm, on which a chandelier had fallen, another was somewhat severely cut about the head and face by the shattering of a mirror. The baby was particularly safe in the restricted littlestateroom, where naught more deadly fell upon him than a pillow.
But it mattered not now to her what Floyd-Rosney said or thought. All dwindled into insignificance, was nullified by the fact of the covert blow, on the sly,—how she scorned him—that these men might not see and despise him for it!—dealt in the folds of the child’s cloak, their child, his and hers! She wondered that he dared, knowing how she had surrendered him to scorn in their earlier difference. Perhaps he knew, and, indeed, she was sure, instinctively, that none would believe; the blow would be considered unintentional, the incident of the struggle to wrest the child from her grasp.
If a moment ago she had seemed pale, haggard, a flaccid presentment of an ordinary type, that aspect had fallen from her like a mask. Her cheeks burned, and their intense carmine gave an emphasis to the luster and tint of her redundant yellow hair. Her eyes were alert, brilliant, not gray, nor brown, nor green, yet of a tint allied to each, and were of such a clarity that one could say such eyes might well gaze unabashed upon the sun. All her wonted distinction of manner had returned to her unwittingly, with the resumption of her normal identity, the reassertion of her courage. The necessity to endure had made her brave, quick to respond to the exigencies of the moment.
As the child’s voice came to her through the torrents in a plaintive bleat of reluctance and terror, full of the pain and fear of parting from her, who was his little Providence, omnipotent, all-caring, infinitely loving, she nerved herself to call out gaily to him and wave her hand, and exhort him in the homelyphrase familiar to all infancy, “to be a good boy.” The tears started to her eyes as she noted his sudden relapse into silence, and saw, through the rain, how humbly and acquiescently he lent himself to the bestowal of his small anatomy in the corner deemed fit by the imperious paternal authority.
Little Marjorie Ashley had been almost stunned into silence for a time. The terrors of the experience, the exacerbation of nerves in the tempestuous turmoils, the suspense, the agitation, the fear of injury or even of death, all seemed nullified now in the expectation of rescue and under the protective wing of Mrs. Floyd-Rosney. Her father, going within to the office for some valuable which he had deposited in the safe of the boat, had charged Marjorie to stand beside Mrs. Floyd-Rosney till his return. The little girl utilized the interval more acceptably to that lady than one might have deemed possible, by her extravagant praises of baby Ned and her appreciative repetition of his bright sayings.
Catching sight of him as he looked up from the yawl, she called out in affected farewell,—“So long, partner!”—her high, reedy voice penetrating the down-pour with its keenly sweet and piercing quality, and she fell back against Mrs. Floyd-Rosney, laughing with delight and gratified mirth, when the response came shrill, and infantile, and jubilant,—“So long, Mar’jee! So long, Mar’jee!”
Floyd-Rosney’s look of inquiry as the business of embarkation brought him near his wife was so marked as to be almost articulate. He could not understand her changed aspect. He was prepared for tears, for reproaches, even for an outbreak of indecorous rage. He had intended that, in anyevent, she should feel his displeasure, his discipline, and it was of a nature under which she must needs writhe. Anything that affected the boy, however slightly, had power to move her out of all proportion to its importance. In this signal instance of danger, almost of despair, her conduct, her accession of beauty, seemed inexplicable. Her manner of quiet composure, her look, the stately elegance so in accord with her slender figure, her attitude, her gait, peculiarly characteristic of her personality, seemed singularly marked now, and out of keeping with the situation, challenging comment.
“Mrs. Floyd-Rosney has got the nerve!” said the Captain admiringly. “She is fit for the bridge of a man-of-war. Are you going to stand by the deck till the last passenger has taken to the boats, madam?”
For Floyd-Rosney, knowing full well that he was imposing on her no danger that the others did not share, had made it a point to pass her by in summoning the ladies to descend to the yawl. In fact, a number of men were seated on the thwarts by his orders. He had only intended to impress her with a sense of his indifference, his displeasure, his power. But he had given her the opportunity to assert her independence, and, incidentally, to levy tribute on the admiration of the whole boat’s company.
“Mrs. Floyd-Rosney doesn’t care for a living thing but little Ned,” cried the voluble Marjorie. “If little Ned is safe she had just as lief the rest of us would go to the bottom as not.”
Mr. Floyd-Rosney took his wife by the elbow. “Come on,” he said, “why are you lagging back here,—afraid to get in the yawl?” Then he addedin a lower voice, “Can you do nothing to stop that miserable girl’s chatter?”
But the voice, even hissing between his set teeth, was not so low that Marjorie, being near, did not hear it. At all events,shehad had no schooling in self-repression, in the humiliation of a politic deference. She flamed out with all the normal instincts of self-asserting and wounded pride.
“No, there isn’t any way to stop my chatter,”—she exclaimed hotly, “for I have as good a right to talk as you. I amnota ‘miserable girl.’ But I don’t care whatyousay. I don’t train with your gang, anyhow!”
“Why, Marjorie,” cried Mrs. Floyd-Rosney, and her husband had a moment’s relief in the expectation that the indignity offered to him would be summarily, yet tactfully rebuked. But his wife only said, “What slang! Is that the kind of thing you learn at Madame Gerault’s?”
She passed her arm about the girl’s shoulder, but Marjorie had as yet learned no self-control at Madame Gerault’s or elsewhere, and burst into stormy tears. Even after she was seated in the yawl, beside Mrs. Floyd-Rosney, she wept persistently, and sobbed aloud. The grief-stricken spectacle greatly affected little Ned Floyd-Rosney at the further end of the yawl. After staring, in grave and flushed dismay and amaze for a few moments, he made one or two spasmodic efforts to cheer his boon companion from the distance. Then he succumbed to sympathy and wept dolorously and loudly in concert.
Mrs. Floyd-Rosney made no effort to reach him by word or look. Her husband, whose nerves acrying child affected with such intense aggravation that he was seldom subjected to this annoyance, was compelled to set his teeth in helpless discomfort, and endure the affliction, intensified by the difference in age, and the variance in pitch and vocal volume of the two lachrymose performers.
Thus freighted, the yawl pushed off, at length, into the steely rain, the white foam, and the surging, tawny currents of the river. All looked back at the sand-bar, doubtless, with some apprehensive regret. The sight of the stanch Captain on the deck waving his farewell was not calculated to dispel anxiety. The sand-bar, too, was big,—on board they had scarcely realized its extent. In comparison with the yawl it seemed very solid, continental. They sheered off cautiously from it lest the yawl, too, go aground on some submerged and unsuspected process of land building. It was obviously safer in the middle of the river, despite the menacing aspect of the swift tumultuous current, lashed into foaming swirls by the blast. The tremendous impetus of the flow was demonstrated by the speed of the yawl; in one moment the steamer had disappeared, its great white bulk, lifted high on the sand-bar, showed like a mirage through a sudden parting of the dashing torrents, then fell astern to be glimpsed no more. When the yawl began to run precipitately toward the bank there was a general outcry of fear, but the mate, who was navigating the little craft, explained that it must needs go with the sweep of the current, which now hugged the shore, for the strength of his crew could not make headway against it, heavily laden as the yawl was.
From this proximity to the land the voyagerscould mark the evidences of the fury of the hurricane. Its track through the woods was near a hundred yards wide, in almost a perfectly straight line, and in this avenue the trees were felled, the ground cleared, the levee laid flat. It was impossible to say what dwellings or farm-buildings shared the disaster, for no vestige was left to tell the tale. As the yawl fared onward it encountered one of the great monarchs of the woods, tossed into the river by the gusts that had uprooted it and now borne swiftly on by the combined force of the wind and the current. It required all the strength of the oarsmen to hold back and give precedence to this gigantic flotsam, lest some uncovenanted swirl of the waters fling it with all its towering intricacies of boughs upon the boat, and, hopelessly entangling it, thrash out the life of every creature on board. For the wind was rife in its branches and thus contorted its course. It tossed them high; whistled and screamed madly among them, and the yawl, following reluctantly in the rear, was witness of all the fantastic freaks of these wild gambols of the gusts. This unlucky blockade of their course gave rise to some discussion between the mate and the passengers, and Floyd-Rosney would fain seek to pass the obstruction by a spurt of rowing to one side.
“I am not well acquainted with the current just along here,” said the mate, “but if it should make in toward the land with us between it and the bank we would be flailed alive and drowned besides.”
There was a general consensus of opinion with the mate’s position, and one of the elderly ladies openly remonstrated against Floyd-Rosney’s risky proposition, but his wife said never a word.
Suddenly the mate called out in a startled voice: “Back oars,—back,—back,” and every roustabout put his full force against the current, but their utmost strength only sufficed to retard the progress of the boat. The tree had been struck by a flaw of wind which almost turned it over on the surface of the water, and then went skirling and eddying down the river. The whirling foliage gave an effect as of a flash of iridescent light through the sad-hued landscape; the leaves all green and yellow, as in a blend of some gorgeous emblazonry, showed now against the white foam and now against the slate-tinted sky. The myriad wild waves, surging to and fro in the commotion, leaped in long, elastic bounds, and shook their tawny manes. In the tumultuous undulations of the waters it required all the skill of the experienced boat-hands to keep the yawl afloat.
“Give it up,” said Floyd-Rosney, at length. “We must go back to theCherokee Rose.”
“Impossible,—against the current with this load,” said the mate.
“We can try, at least,” urged Floyd-Rosney. “If we don’t turn back the current will carry us down into the midst of that cursed tree in case we have another gust.”
“Isn’t there a bayou about half a mile further?” suggested Adrian Ducie. “Does the current make in?”
“I am not sure whether it’s a creek or a bayou,” said the mate, “but the current does make in along there.”
“As if it matters asou marquéwhether it is a creek or a bayou,” fleered Floyd-Rosney contemptuously.
“It makes all the difference in the world,” retorted Ducie. “If it is a creek it flows into the Mississippi,—a tributary. If it is a bayou the Mississippi flows into it, for it is an outlet. If the current sets that way it may carry the tree into the bayou, provided it is wide enough, and, if it is narrow, the boughs may be entangled there.”
It was one of the misfortunes under which the voyagers labored that these consultations of the leaders must needs be made in the hearing of the others, owing to the restricted space which they occupied. Several had begun to grow panicky with the suggestion that progress was so environed with danger, and yet that return was impossible. Perhaps the mate was skilled in weather-signs not altogether of the atmosphere when he said, casually,
“You seem to be well acquainted with the river hereabouts, Mr. Ducie.”
“Not the river itself, but I have made a study of a plot of survey of the Duciehurst lands. Bayou Benoit touches the northwestern quarter-section just where it leaves the river. We cannot be far now.”
And, indeed, a sudden rift in the sullen cypress woods on the eastern shore revealed, presently, a stream not sluggish as was its wont, when one might scarce have discerned the course of the water, whether an inlet or an outlet of the river. Now it was flowing with great speed and volume obviously directly from the Mississippi. As the mate had said, the current hugged the shore. The oarsmen made as scant speed as might be while the great tree, in its rich emblazonment of green and gold, went teetering fantastically on the force of theriver. Its course grew swifter and swifter with the momentum of the waters, seeking liberation, until, all at once, it became stationary. As Ducie had thought probable, its boughs had entangled themselves with the growths on one side of the narrow bayou. It was effectually checked for the nonce, although, at any moment, the force of the stream might break off considerable fragments of the branches and thus compass its dislodgment.
“Give way, boys,” cried the mate in a stentorian voice. “Give way.” The crew stretched every muscle, and the yawl skimmed swiftly past the great, flaring obstruction, swinging and swaying as if at anchor in the mouth of the bayou. Now and again anxious, frightened glances were cast astern. But a pursuit by the woodland monster did not materialize.
Theaspect of the Duciehurst mansion gave no token of its ruinous condition when first it broke upon the view. Its stately portico, the massive Corinthian columns reaching to the floor of the third story of the main building, impressively dominated the scene, whitely glittering, surrounded by the green leaves of the magnolia grandiflora, ancient now, and of great bulk and height. The house was duplicated by the reflection in water close at hand, whether some lake or merely a pool formed by the rain, Paula could not determine. A wing on either side expressed the large scope of its construction, and from a turn in the road, if a grass-grown track could be so called, came glimpses, in the rear of the building, of spacious galleries both above and below stairs, shut in by Venetian blinds, so much affected in the architecture of Southern homes in former years. A forest of live oak, swamp maple, black gum closed the view of the background, and cut off the place from communication with the cotton lands appurtenant to it, but at a very considerable distance. For the region immediately contiguous to the house had become in the divagations of the great river peculiarly liable to overflow, and thus the forest, known, indeed, as the “open swamp,” continued uncleared, because of the precarious value of the land for agricultural operations.In fact, the main levee that protected the fields now lay far in the rear of the old Duciehurst mansion. Doubtless in times of specially high water seeping rills effected entrance at door and casement and ran along the floors and rose against the walls, and brought as tenants crayfish and frogs, water-snakes and eels, and other slimy denizens of the floods, who explored the strange recesses of this refuge, and, perhaps, made merry, thus translated to the seat of the scornful.
Paula paused on the crest of the old levee. It had been in its day a redoubtable embankment, and despite the neglect of a half century, it still served in partial efficiency, and its trend could be discerned far away. She gazed at the place with emotions it was difficult for her to understand. She could not shake off the consciousness of the presence of Adrian Ducie, nor could she cease to speculate how it must affect him to see his ancestral estate in the possession of the usurper, for thus he must consider her husband. Ducie had grown silent since they had disembarked, and walked a little apart from the cluster of tramping refugees. She dared not look at his face.
But law is law, she argued within herself. It was not the fiat of her husband or of his predecessors, but the decree of the court that had given the property to them. Nevertheless, there was to her mind an inherent coercive evidence of the truth of the tradition of the released mortgage, duly paid and satisfied, and she looked at the old place with eyes rebuked and deprecatory, and not with the pride or interest of the rightful owner.
It was still raining as the group reached the pavementof heavy stone blocks. These had defied the growths of neglect and the wear of time, and were as they had always been save that one of them had scaled and held a tiny pool of shallow water, which reflected the sky. Her husband walked beside her, now and again glancing inquiringly at her. Never before in all their wedded life had so long a difference subsisted between them. For, even if she were not consciously at fault, Paula had always hitherto made haste to assume the blame, and frame the apology, for what odds was it, in good sooth, who granted the pardon, she was wont to argue, so that both were forgiving and forgiven. Now, she recked not of his displeasure. She seemed, indeed, unusually composed, absorbed, self-sufficient. She did not even glance at him, yet how her eyes were accustomed to wait upon him. She looked about with quiet observation, with obvious interest. One might suppose, in fact, that she did not think of him at all, as she walked so daintily erect and slender, with such graceful, sober dignity beside him. He had acquitted himself well that day, he thought, had certainly earned golden opinions, but he was beginning to miss sadly the most adroit flatterer of all his experience, the woman who loved him. As together they ascended the broad stone steps he suddenly paused, took her hand in one of his and with ceremony led her through the great arched portal, from which the massive doors had been riven and destroyed long ago.
“Welcome to your own house, my wife,” he said with his fine florid smile and a manner replete with his conscious importance and his relish of it.
At that moment there came a sound from theghastly vacancy glimpsed within, a weird, shrill sound, full of sinister suggestion. The group, peering in from behind them, thrilled with horror, broke into sudden frightened exclamations, before its keen repetition enabled them to realize that it was only the hooting of an owl, roused, doubtless, from his diurnal slumbers by the tones of the echoing voice and the vibrations of the floor under an unaccustomed tread. Some sheepish laughter ensued, at themselves rather than at Floyd-Rosney, but at this moment any merriment was of invidious suggestion and he flushed deeply.
“Here, you fellow,” he hailed one of the roustabouts, “get that owl out of here, and any other vermin you can find,” and he tossed the darkey a dollar.
The roustabout showed all his teeth, and he had a great many of them, and with a deprecatory manner ran to pick up the silver coin. He was trained to a degree of courtesy, and he fain would have left it where it had fallen on the pavement until he had executed the commission. But he knew of old his companions of the lower deck, now busied in bringing up the luggage of the party. Therefore, he pocketed the gratuity before he went briskly and cheerfully down the long hall to one of the inner apartments whence proceeded the sound of ill-omen.
While they were still making their way into the main hall they heard a great commotion of hootings and halloos, and all at once a tremendous crash of glass. It is a sound of destruction that rouses all the proprietor within a man.
“Great heavens,” cried Floyd-Rosney, “is the fooldriving the creature through the window without lifting the sash, little glass as there is left here.”
It seemed that this was the case, for a large white owl, blinded by the light of day, floundering and fluttering, went winging its way clumsily scarcely six feet from the ground through the rain, still falling without, and after several drooping efforts contrived gropingly to perch himself on a broken stone vase on the terrace, whence the other roustabouts presently dislodged him, and with gay cries and great unanimity of spirit, proceeded to dispatch him, hooting and squawking in painful surprise and protesting to the last.
Paula had caught little Ned within the doorway to spare his innocence and infancy the cruel spectacle. And suddenly here was the roustabout who had been sent into the recesses of the house, coming out again with a strange blank face, and a peculiar, hurried, dogged manner.
“Did you find any more owls? And why did you break the glass to get him out?” Floyd-Rosney asked, sternly.
“Naw, sir,” the man answered at random, but loweringly. He bent his head while he swiftly threaded his way through the group as if he were accustomed to force his progress with horns. He was in evident haste; he stepped deftly down the flight to the pavement and, turning aside on the weed-grown turf, reached the shrubbery and was lost to view among the dripping evergreen foliage.
As it is the accepted fad to admire old houses rather than the new, a gentleman of the party who made a point of being up-to-date began to comment on the spacious proportions of the hall, andthe really stately curves of the staircase as it came sweeping down from a loftyentresol. “It looks as if it might be a spiral above the second story, isn’t that an unusual feature, or is it merely the attic flight?” he interrogated space.
For Floyd-Rosney, all the host, was looking into the adjoining rooms and giving orders for the lighting of fires wherever a chimney seemed practicable.
“Listen how the old rattle-trap is leaking,” said one of the elderly ladies, ungratefully.
Paula made no comment. She was hearing the melancholy drip, drip, drip of the rain through the ceilings of the upper stories. As the drops multiplied in number and increased in volume they sounded to her like foot-falls, now rapid, now slow, circumspect and weighty; sometimes there was a frenzied rush as in a wild catastrophe, and again a light tripping in a sort of elastic tempo, as of the vibrations of some gay dance of olde. The echoes,—oh, the echoes,—she dropped her face in her hands for a moment, lest she should see the echoes materialized, that were coming down the stairs, evoked from the silence, the solitude, the oblivion of the ruined mansion. Neglected here so long, who would have recked if the old memories had taken wonted form—who would have seen, save the moonbeam, itself wan and vagrant, or the wind of kindred elusiveness, going and coming as it listed.
Yet there had been other and more substantial tenants. “The damned rascals have pulled up nearly every hearth in the house,” Floyd-Rosney was saying, as he came forging back through the rooms on the right. Then once more among the ladies he moderated his diction. “Destroying the hearths,searching for the hidden treasure of Duciehurst—idiotic folly! River pirates, shanty-boaters, tramps, gipsies, and such like vagrants, I suppose.”
Paula, seated on one of the steps of the stair, cast a furtive glance at Adrian Ducie, who had followed Floyd-Rosney from the inner apartments. His face was grave, absorbed, pondering. Doubtless he was thinking of the persistence of this tradition to endure, unaided, unfostered for forty years. It must have had certainly some foundation in fact.
“Perhaps the vagrants discovered it and carried it off,” suggested the up-to-date man.
“Not in the chimney-places,” fretted Floyd-Rosney, “which makes it all the more aggravating. The solid stone hearths are laid on solid masonry, each is constructed in the same way, and you couldn’t hide a hair-pin in one of them. Why did they tear themallup?”
But fires were finally started in two of the rooms on the ground floor where the hearths were found intact. They were comparatively dry, barring an occasional dash of the rain through the broken glass of one of the windows, the ceilings being protected from leakage by the floor of the upper story. Floyd-Rosney began to feel that this was sufficient accommodation for the party under the peculiar difficulties that beset them. The scarcity of wood rendered the impairment of the fire-places elsewhere of less moment. The sojourners were fain to follow the example of the lawless intruders hitherto, who tore up the flooring of the rear verandas, the sills of the windows, the Venetian blinds for fuel. This vandalism, however, in the present instance, was limited, for its exercise required muscle, andthis was not superabundant. True, the Captain’s forethought had furnished them with an axe, and also a cook, in the person of one of the table waiters, understood to be gifted in both walks of life. There was present, too, the Major’s negro servant, who, although sixty years of age, was still stalwart, active and of unusual size. But neither of these worthies had hired out to cut wood.
The crisis was acute. Floyd-Rosney offered handsome financial inducements in vain and then sought such urgency as lay in miscellaneous swearing. His language was as lurid as any flames that had ever flared up the great chimney, but ineffective. The group stood in a large apartment in the rear, apparently a kitchen, of which nearly half the floor was already gone, exhaled in smoke up this massive chimney. It occupied nearly one side of the room, and still a crane hung within its recesses and hooks for pots. There was also a brick oven, very quaint, and other ancient appurtenances of the culinary art, hardly understood by either of the modern claimants of ownership, but of special interest to the up-to-date man who had followed them out to admire the things of yore, so fashionable anew.
“Naw, sir,” said the Major’s retainer. “I can’t cut wood. I ain’t done no work since me an’ de Major fought de war, ’cept jes’ tend on him. Naw, sir, I ain’t cut no wood since I built de Major’s las’ bivouac fire.” He was perfectly respectful, but calm, and firm, and impenetrable to argument.
The other darkey, a languid person with an evident inclination to high fashion, perceived in the demand an effort at imposition. With his spruce white jacket and apron, he lounged in the doorwayleaning against its frame in a most negative attitude. His voice in objection took on the plaint of a high falsetto. “The Cap’n nuver mentioned nare word to me ’bout cuttin’ wood. I’ll sure cook, if I have got a fire to cook with.”
“You black rascal, do you expect me to build your fire?” sputtered Floyd-Rosney.
“The Cap’n nuver treated me right,” the provisional cook evaded the direct appeal. “He nuver tole me that I was gwine to be axed to cut wood.”
“How were you going to cook without a fire?” demanded Ducie.
“I ’spected you gemmen had a fire somewhere.”
“In my coat-pocket?” asked Floyd-Rosney.
The waiter would not essay the retort direct. He, too, was perfectly polite. “I ain’t gwine to cut wood,” he murmured plaintively.
“I wish we had kept one of those roustabouts to cut wood instead of letting them all go with the yawl back to theCherokee Rose,” said Floyd-Rosney, in great annoyance. “They are worth a hundred of these saloon darkies.”
“Don’t nameme’mongst dat triflin’ gang, Mr. Floyd-Rosney,” the Major’s retainer said, in dignified remonstrance. “But I jes’ come along to wait on de Major, an’ cuttin’ wood is a business I ain’t in no wise used to. Naw, sir.”
“I never was expectin’ to cut wood,” plained the high falsetto of the saloon darkey.
“Pshaw!” exclaimed Ducie. “If this keeps up I’ll split some fool’s head open.”
He threw off his coat, seized the axe, heaved it up and struck a blow that splintered a plank in the middle. Floyd-Rosney, his coat also on thefloor, inserted the blade of a hatchet edgewise beneath it and pried it up, then began to chop vigorously while Ducie prepared to rive another plank.
The two negroes looked on with sulky indifference.
Suddenly the Major’s servant grinned genially, without rhyme or reason. “You two gemmen git out of yere. Make yerselfs skeerce. You think I’m gwine to stand yere an’ let you chop wood. I know de quality. I have always worked for de quality. I’m gwine to l’arn dis yere little coon, dat dunno nuthin’ but runnin’ de river, how to behave hisself before de quality. Take up dat hatchet, boy, an’ mind yer manners.”
Floyd-Rosney surrendered the implement readily and with all the grace of good-will, but Ducie continued to deal the stanch old floor some tremendous blows and at last laid the axe down as if he did not half care.
“We had best run as few fires as possible,” Ducie commented as they left the room, “change of heart might not last.”
Thus it was that only two of the many spacious apartments were put into commission. One, the walls of which betokened in the scheme of their decoration its former uses as a music-room, was filled with the effects of the ladies of the party, while the gentlemen were glad to pull off their shoes and exchange for dry hose and slippers before the fire of an old-time smoking-room, that must have been a cozy den in its day. The house had long ago been stripped of all portables in decoration as well as furnishing. A few mirrors still hung on the walls, too heavy or too fragile to besafely removed, wantonly shattered by the vandal hands of its occasional and itinerant inmates. Several of these had been a portion of the original construction, built into the walls, and in lieu of frames were surrounded by heavy mouldings of stucco-work, and this, too, had given opportunity to the propensity of destruction rife throughout the piteous wreck of a palace. In the smoking-room, the haunt of good-fellowship and joviality, Bacchus seemed doubly drunk, riding a goat of three legs and one horn, at the summit of the mirror, and really, but that the figure in half relief was too high to be conveniently reached all semblance of the design might have been shattered. Only here and there was it possible to follow the rest of the rout of satyrs and fauns, the tracery of bowls and beakers and gourds, and bunches of grapes, the redundant festoons of tobacco leaves and replicas of many varieties of pipes, all environed with the fantastic wreathing of smoke, and the ingenious symbolism in which the interior decorator had expended a wealth of sub-suggestion.
There was only a “shake-down” on the floor for the men, and two or three were already disposed upon it at length, since this was a restful position and there were no chairs available. Floyd-Rosney stood with his back to the fire, his hands behind him, his head a trifle bent, his eyes dull and ruminative. He had much of which to think. Adrian Ducie sat sidewise on the sill of a window and looked out through the grimy panes at the ceaseless fall of the rain amidst the glossy leaves of the magnolias which his grandmother,—or was it his great-grandmother?—had planted here in the years agone.Was that the site of her flower-garden, he wondered, seeing at a distance the flaunting of a yellow chrysanthemum. How odd it was that he should sit here in his great-grandfather’s den, smoking a cigar, practically a stranger, a guest, an intruder in the home of his ancestors. He and his brother, the lawful heirs of all this shattered magnificence, these baronial tracts of fertile lands, were constrained to work sedulously for a bare living. He, himself, was an exile, doomed to wander the earth over, with never a home of his own, never a perch for his world-weary wings. His brother’s fate was to juggle with all those vicissitudes that curse the man who strives to wrest a subsistence from the soil, to pay a price of purchase for the rich products of the land which his forbears had owned since the extinction of the tribal titles of the Indians. A yellow chrysanthemum,—a chrysanthemum swaying in the wind!
There had begun to be strong hopes of dinner astir in this masculine coterie, and when the door opened every head was turned toward it. But melancholy reigned on the face of the cook, and it was a dispirited cadence of his falsetto voice that made known his lack.
“Mr. Floyd-Rosney,” he plained, “I can’t dress canned lobster salad without tarragon vinegar. This yere cruet has got nuthin’ in it in dis world but apple vinegar. The Cap’n nuver done me right.”
“God A’mighty, man, ‘lobster!’ I could eat the can,” cried one of the recumbents, springing up with such alacrity that his bounce awakened Colonel Kenwynton, who had been able to forget his fatigue and hunger in a doze.
“Get that dinner on the table, or I’ll be thedeath of you,” cried Floyd-Rosney. “We are hungry. It is nearly five o’clock and we have had nothing since breakfast.”
The door closed slowly on the disaffected cook, who was evidently a devotee to art for art’s sake, for he presently reappeared in his capacity of table servant, as if he had been rebuked in an altogether different identity as cook. He drooped languidly between the door and the frame and once more in his high falsetto plaint he upbraided the Captain.
“The Cap’n nuver done me right. He oughter have letmepack that box, instead of the steward. There ain’t no fruit napkins, Mr. Floyd-Rosney. Jes’ white doilies,” he was not far from tears, “whitedoiliesto serve with o’anges!”
The mere mention was an appetizer.
“Let me get at ’em, whether they are served with doilies or bath-towels!” cried the recumbent figure, recumbent no longer. “Call the ladies. Ho, for the festive board. If you don’t want scraps only, you had better not let me get there first. Notify the ladies. Does this vast mansion possess nothing that is like a dinner-bell, or a gong, or a whistle, that may make a cheerful sound of summons. Ha, ha, ha!”
“It compromises on something like the crackling of thorns under a pot,” said Floyd-Rosney, sourly. Then with gracious urbanity, “Major, let me give you my arm, perhaps our presence at the festive board may hasten matters.”
The ladies had already surged out into the great, bare, echoing hall, Hildegarde Dean, freshly arrayed in an Empire gown, as blue as her eyes, protesting that she was as hungry as a hunter. Ducieoffered his arm ceremoniously to her mother, and Floyd-Rosney, who had intended his attention to the old blind Major as a bid for his wife’s notice and approval, was not pleased to see the procession, stately and suggestive, by reason of the lordly expansiveness of the place, headed by the heir of the old owners in the guise of host. It was an idea that never entered Ducie’s mind, not even when whetting the carving knife on the steel in anticipation of dispensing shares of the saddle of mutton from his end of the table. At this table, in truth, his grandfather had sat, and his great-grandfather also, and dispensed its bounty. So heavy it was, so burdensome for removal, that in the various disasters that had ravaged the old house, war and financial ruin, marauders and tramps, wind and rain, lightning and overflow, it had endured throughout. Mahogany was not earlier the rage as now, and the enthusiasm of the up-to-date man could scarcely be restrained. There were no chairs; planks from the flooring elsewhere had been hastily stretched benchwise on the boxes that had held the provisions and bedding, but even this grotesque make-shift did not detract from his keen discernment of the admirable in the entourage. The size and shape of the room, the old-fashioned bow-window, the ornate mantel-piece, the cabinets built into the walls for the silver and choice show of old china, now without even a shelf or a diamond-shaped pane of glass, the design of the paper, the stucco ornaments about the chandelier, or rather the rod which had once supported it, for the pendants had been dismembered in wanton spoliation and now lay in fragments on the lawn without, the pantry, the china-closet, the storeroomcontiguous all came in for his commendation, and much he bewailed the grinning laths looking down from the gaps in the fallen plaster, the smoke-grimed walls, the destroyed hearth, half torn out from the chimney-place. The stream of his talk was only stemmed by the reappearance of the cook, now with his white jacket and apron in the rôle of waiter. Every eye was turned apprehensively toward him lest he was moved to say that the Cap’n had ordered no dinner to be put into the box. He dolorously drooped over Ducie’s shoulder in the place of host, and at once disclosed the melancholy worst. “Dere ain’t no soup, sir. While I was speakin’ to you gemmen in de—de—in de library, sir, de soup scorched. I had set dat ole superannuated mule of de Major’s ter watch de pot an’ he didn’t know enough to set it off de fire when it took to smokin’. Hit was ’p’tage Bec’mul, sir.”
Ducie laughed and called for the roast, and the company, as soon as the functionary had disappeared, addressed their wits to the translation of the waiter’s French to discover what manner of soup they had lost.
Paula was not sorry to see Adrian Ducie in his hereditary place; somehow it would have revolted her that she and hers should sit in the seat of the usurper. Accident had willed it thus, and it was better so. She had noted the quick glance of gauging the effect which her husband had cast at her as he made much ado of settling the old Major at the table. Even without this self-betrayal she would have recognized the demonstration as one of special design. How should she now be so discerning, she asked herself. She knew him, she discriminatedhis motives, she read his thoughts as though they were set forth on the page of an open book. And of this he was so unconscious, so assured, so confident of her attitude as hitherto toward him, that she had the heart to pity while she despised him, while she revolted at the thought of him.
She wished to risk not even a word aside with him. She was eager to get away from the table, although the dinner that the Captain had ordered to be packed made ample amends for the delay. It had its defects, doubtless, as one might easily discern from the disconsolate and well-nigh inconsolable port of the waiter at intervals, but these were scarcely apparent to the palates of the company. It was, of course, inferior to the menus of the far-famed dinners of the steamboats of the olden times, but there is no likelihood of famishing on the Mississippi even at the present day, and the hospitable Captain Disnett had no mind that these voluntary cast-a-ways should suffer for their precipitancy. It was still a cheerful group about that storied board as Paula slipped from the end of the bench and quietly through the door. If her withdrawal were noted it would doubtless be ascribed to her anxiety concerning little Ned, and thus her absence would leave no field for speculation. She did not, however, return to the room devoted to the use of the feminine passengers of theCherokee Rose, where the child now lay asleep. She walked slowly up and down the great hall, absorbed in thought. She was continually surprised at herself, analyzing her own unwonted mental processes. She could not understand her calmness, in this signal significant discovery in her life, that she did not love her husband.She would not rehearse his faults, retrace in her recollection a thousand incidents confirmatory of the revelation of his character that had been elicited on this unhappy voyage. How long, she wondered, would the illusion have continued otherwise,—to her life’s end? Somehow she could not look forward, and she felt a sort of stupefaction in this, although she realized that her faculties were roused by her perception of the truth. The spirit-breaking process, of which she had been sub-acutely aware, was ended. She could not be so subjugated save by love, the sedulous wish to please, the tender fear of disapproval, the ardent hope of placating. Suddenly she was aware that she was laughing, the fool, to have felt all this for a man who could strike her, cruelly, painfully, artfully, on the sly that none might know. But even while she laughed her eyes were full of tears, so did she compassionate the self she ridiculed with scorn as if it were some other woman whom she pitied.
She felt as if she must be alone. All the day since that crisis the presence of people had intruded clamorously upon her consciousness. She would fain take counsel within herself, her own soul. Above all, she wished to avoid the sight of her husband, the thought of him. Whenever the sound of voices in the dining-room broke on her absorption as she neared the door in her pacing back and forth, she paused, looking over her shoulder, tense, poised, as if for flight. And at last, as the clamor of quitting the table heralded the approach of the company, with scarcely a realized intention, the instinct of escape took possession of her, and she sped lightly up the great staircase, as elusive, as unperceivedas the essence of the echoes which she had fancied might thence descend.
She hesitated, gasping and out of breath, at the head of the flight, looking about aghast at the gaunt aspect of the wrecked mansion. The hall was a replica of the one below, save that there were three great windows opening on a balcony instead of the front door. The glass was broken out, the Venetian blinds were torn away, and from where she stood she could see the massive Corinthian columns of the portico rising to the floor of the story still above. A number of large apartments opened on this hall, their proportions and ornate mantel-pieces all visible, for the doors, either swung ajar or wrenched from their hinges, lay upon the floors. Paula did not note, or perhaps she forgot, that the wreck expressed forty years of neglect, of license and rapine and was the wicked work of generations of marauders. She felt that the destruction was actuated by a sort of fiendish malice. It had required both time and strength, as well as wanton enmity, a class hatred, one might suppose, bitter and unreasoning, the wrath of the poor against the rich, even though unmindful and indifferent to the injury. It seemed so strange to her that the house should be left thus by its owners, despite its inutilities in the changed conditions of the world. It had a dignity, as of the ruin of princes, in its vestiges of beauty and splendor, and the savor of old days that were now historic and should hold a sort of sanctity. Even the insensate walls, in the rifts of their shattered plaster, their besmirched spoliation, expressed a subtle reproach, such as one might behold in some old human face buffeted and reviled without a cause.
She had a swift illumination how it would have rejoiced the Ducies to have set up here their staff of rest in the home hallowed as the harbor of their ancestors. They were receptive to all the finer illusions of life. They cherished their personal pride; they revered their ancient name; they honored this spot as the cradle of their forefathers, and although they were poor in the world’s opinion, they held in their own consciousness that treasure of a love of lineage, that obligation to conform to a high standard which imposed a rule of conduct and elevated them in their own esteem. Their standpoint was all drearily out of fashion, funny and forlorn, but she could have wept for them. And why, since the place had no prosaic value, had not Fate left it to those whom it would have so subtly enriched. Here in seemly guise, in well-ordered decorum, in seclusion from the sordid world, the brothers who so dearly loved each other would have dwelt in peace together, would have taken unto themselves wives; children of the name and blood of the old heritage would have been reared here as in an eagle’s nest, with all the high traditions that have been long disregarded and forgotten. It seemed so ignoble, so painful, so unjust, that the place should be thus neglected, despised, cast aside, and yet withheld from its rightful owners. She caught herself suddenly at the word. Her husband, her son, were the rightful owners now, and it was their predecessor who did not care.
As she stood gazing blankly forward the three windows of the upper hall suddenly flamed with a saffron glow, for they faced a great expanse of the southwestern sky, which, for one brief moment, wasfull of glory. The waters of the Mississippi were a rippling flood of molten gold; the dun-tinted, leafless forests on either bank accentuated in somber contrast this splendid apotheosis of the waning day. The magnolia trees about the house shone with every glossy leaf, an emerald for richness of hue, and all at once, far beyond, Paula beheld the solution of the mystery that had baffled her, the answer to her question, the Duciehurst cotton fields, as white as snow, as level as a floor, as visibly wealth-laden as if the rich yield of the soil were already coined into gold. Here was the interest of the sordid proprietors; the home was no home of theirs; they had been absentees from the first of their tenure. The glimmering marble cross, the lofty granite shaft that showed when the wind shifted among the gloomy boughs of the weeping willows in the family graveyard, marked the resting place of none of their kindred. Their bones were none of these bones, their flesh sprung from none of these dead ashes. The Duciehurst lands made cotton, and cotton made money, and the old house, built under other conditions, was suited to no needs that they could create in the exigencies of a new day. Therefore, it was left to shelter the owl, the gopher, the river-pirate, the shanty-boater, the moon in its revolutions, and when the nights were wild the wind seemed to issue thence as from a lair of mysteries.
Paula suddenly turned from the revelation, and gathering the lustrous white skirt of her crêpe dress, freshly donned, in one jewelled hand with a care unconsciously dainty, as was her habit, she noiselessly slipped up the great dusty spiral of the stair leading to the third story, lest curiosity induced someexploring intrusive foot thus far, ere she had thought out her perplexity to its final satisfaction. She was aware that the day dulled and darkened suddenly; she heard the wind burst into gusty sobs; the clouds had fallen to weeping anew, and the night was close at hand. She was curiously incongruous with the place as she stood looking upward, the light upon her face, at a great rift in the roof. The rain-drops dripped monotonously from smaller crevices down upon the floor with a sort of emphasis, as if the number were registered and it kept a tally. There were doubtless divisions and partitions further to the rear, but this apartment was spacious above the square portion of the mansion, and the ceiling had a high pitch. She thought for a moment that they might have danced here in the old times, so fine were the proportions of the place. Then she remembered that third-story ball-rooms were not formerly in vogue, and that she had heard that the one at Duciehurst was situated in the west wing on the ground floor. This commodious apartment must have been a place of bestowal. The walls betokened the remnants of presses, and she could almost fancy that she could see the array of trunks, of chests, of discarded furniture, more old-fashioned than that below, the bags of simples, of hyacinth bulbs which were uprooted every second year to be planted anew. There was an intensification of the spirit of spoil manifested elsewhere as if the search for the hidden treasure here had been more desperate and radical. The chimneys seemed to have been special subjects of suspicion, for several showed that the solid masonry had been gouged out, leaving great hollows. As she stood amidst the gray shadows in her lustrouswhite crêpe gown with the shimmer of satin from its garniture, she was a poetic presentment, even while engrossed in making the prosaic deduction that here was the reason these chimneys smoked when fires were kindled below.
The solitude was intense, the silence an awesome stillness, her thoughts, recurring to her own sorry fate, were strenuous and troublous, and thus even her strong, elastic young physique was beginning to feel very definitely the stress of fatigue, and excitement, and fear, that had filled the day as well as the effects of the emotional crisis which she had endured. She found that she could scarcely stand; indeed, she tottered with a sense of feebleness, of faintness, as she looked about for some support, something on which she might lean, or better still, something that might serve as a seat. Suddenly she started forward toward the window near the outer corner of the room. The low sill was broad and massive in conformity with the general design of the house, and she sank down here in comfort, resting her head against the heavy moulding of the frame. Her eyes turned without, and she noted with a certain interest the great foliated ornaments, the carved acanthus leaves of the capitals of the Corinthian columns, one of which was so close at hand that she might almost have touched it, for the roof of the portico here, which had been nearly on a level with the window, was now in great part torn away, giving a full view of the stone floor below. This column was the pilaster, half the bulk of the others, being buttressed against the wall. The size of the columns was far greater than she had supposed, looking at them from below, the capitals were finishedwith a fine attention to detail. The portico was indeed an admirable example of this sort of adapted architecture which is usually distinguished rather by its license than its success. But she had scant heart to mark its values or effect. Her reflections were introspective. She looked out drearily on the wan wastes of the skies, and the somber night closing in, and bethought herself of the woeful change in the atmosphere of her soul since the skies last darkened. She said to herself that illusions were made for women, who were not fitted to cope with facts, and that it was better to be a loving fool, gulled into the fancy that she, too, is beloved, than to see clearly, and judge justly, and harbor an empty aching heart. For there was no recourse for her. It was not in her power to frame her future. Her husband had, and he knew he had, the most complete impunity, and doubtless this gave him an assurance in domineering that he would not otherwise have dared to exert. He was cognizant of her delicate pride, the odium in which she would hold the idea of publicity in conjugal dissension. She would never have permitted, save under some extreme stress like that of the single instance of the morning, others to look in upon a difference between them, yet there had been from the first much to bear from his self-absorbed and imperious temper, and she had borne it to the extent of self-immolation, of self-extinction. In fact, she was not, she had not been for years, herself. She could not say, indeed, when her old identity had asserted itself before to-day. It was the aspect of the Ducie face, the associations of the past that had recalled her real self to life, that had relumed the spark of pridewhich had once been her dominant trait, that had given her courage to revolt at rebuke in Adrian’s presence, to hold up her head, to speak from her own individuality, to be an influence to be reckoned with. But of what avail? Life must go on as heretofore, the old semblance of submission, of adulation, the adjustment of every word, every idea, every desire, to the mould of her husband’s thought, his preference. She wondered how she would be enabled to maintain the farce of her love, that had hitherto seemed capable of infinite endurance, of limitless pardoning power, and the coercive admiration for him that she had felt throughout all these five years. He was aware, and this fact was so certain that she was sure he had never given the matter even a casual, careless thought, that for the sake of their son, his precious presence, his comfort and care, his future standing before the world, no recourse was possible for her, no separation, no divorce. Floyd-Rosney might beat her with a stick if he would, instead of that deft, crafty little blow he had dealt on her wrist with his knuckles, and she would hide the wales for her child’s sweet sake. No law was ever framed comprehensive enough to shield her. She was beyond the pale and the protection of the law. And as she realized this she held down her head and began to shed some miserable tears.
Perhaps it was this relaxation that overpowered her nerves, this cessation of resistance and repining. When she opened her eyes after an interval of unconsciousness her first thought was of the detail of the Scriptures touching the young man who slept in a high window through the apostle’s preachingand “fell down from the third loft.” She had never imagined that she should do so reckless, so wild a thing. Her methods were all precautionary, her mental attitude quiet and composed. She still sat in the window, looking out for a little space longer, for she was indisposed to exertion; her muscles were stiff, and her very bones seemed to ache with fatigue. The sky had cleared while she slept; only a few white, fleecy lines, near the horizon, betokened the passing of the clouds. It had that delicate ethereal blue peculiar to a night of lunar light, for the stars were faint, barring the luster of one splendid planet, the moon being near the full and high in the sky. The beams fell in broad skeins diagonally through the front windows, while the one at the side gave upon the dark summits of the great magnolias, where the radiance lingered, enriching the gloss of their sempervirent foliage. The weeping willows in their leafless state were all a fibrous glister like silver fountains, and in their midst she could see glimpses in the moonlight of the white gleam of the marble cross, the draped funereal urn, the granite shaft where those who had once rested secure beneath this kindly roof of home now slept more securely still within the shadow of its ruin. A broken roof it now was, and through the rift overhead the moonlight poured in a suffusive flood, illuminating all the space beneath. She heard the plaintive drip, drip, drip, from some pool among the shingles where the rain had found a lodgment. The river flashed in myriad ripples, as steadily, ceaselessly it swept on its surging way to the Gulf. She was familiar with its absolute silence, concomitant with its great depth, save, of course, in the cataclysmalcrisis of a crevasse, and as she heard the unmistakable sound of a dash of water, she bent a startled intentness of gaze on the surface to perceive a rowboat steadily, but slowly, pulling up the current. She wondered at her own surprise, yet so secluded was the solitude here that any sight or sound of man seemed abnormal, an intrusion. She knew that a boat was as accustomed an incident of a riverside locality as a carriage or a motor in a street. It betokened some planter, perhaps, returning late, because of the storm, from a neighboring store or a friend’s house. Any waterside errand might duplicate the traffic of the highway.
How late was it, she wondered, for her interest in the boat had dwindled as it passed out of sight beneath the high bank. The idea that perhaps she alone was waking in this great, ruinous house gave her a vague chill of fear. She began to question how she could nerve herself, with this overwhelming sense of solitude, to attempt the exit through the labyrinth of sinister shadows and solemn, silent, moonlit spaces among the unfamiliar passages and rooms to the ground floor. She remembered that the railing of the spiral staircase had shaken, here and there, beneath her hand as she had ascended, the wood of the supporting balusters having rotted in the rain that had fallen for years through the shattered skylight. Her progress had been made in the daylight, and she had now only the glimmer of the moon, from distant windows and the rift in the roof. She began to think of calling for assistance; this great empty space would echo like a drum, she knew, but unfamiliar with the plan of the house she could not determine the location of the roomsoccupied by the party from theCherokee Rose. If the hour were late, as she felt it must be, and their inmates all asleep, she might fail to make herself heard. And then she felt she would die of solitary terror.
Paula could not sufficiently rebuke her own folly that she should have lingered so long apart from the party, that she should have carried so far her explorations,—nay, it was an instinct of flight that had led her feet. She dreaded her husband’s indignant and scornful surprise and his trenchant rebuke. She realized why she had not been already missed by him as well as by the others. Doubtless the ladies who were to occupy the music-room as a dormitory had retired early, spent with fatigue and excitement. Perhaps Hildegarde Dean might have sat for a time in the bow-window of the dining-room and talked to Adrian Ducie, and Colonel Kenwynton, and Major Lacey, as they ranged themselves on one of the benches by the dining-table and smoked in the light of a kerosene lamp which the Captain had furnished forth, and watched the moon rise over the magnolias, and the melancholy weeping willows, and the marble memorials glimmering in the slanting light. But even Hildegarde could not flirt all day and all night, too. Paula could imagine that when she came into the music-room, silent and on tip-toe, she stepped out of her blue toggery with all commendable dispatch, only lighted by the moon, gave her dense black hair but a toss and piled it on her head and slipped into bed without disturbing the lightest sleeper, unconscious that the cot where little Ned should slumber in his mother’s bosom was empty, but for his own chubbyform. The men, too, as they lay in a row on the shake-down in the smoking-room with their feet to the fire, might have chatted for a little while, but doubtless they soon succumbed to drowsiness, and slumbered heavily in the effects of their drenchings and exhaustion, and it would require vigorous poundings on their door to rouse them in the morning.
Obviously there was no recourse. Paula perceived that she must compass her own retreat unaided. She rose with the determination to attempt the descent of the stairs. Then, trembling from head to foot, she sank down on the broad sill of the window. A sudden raucous voice broke upon the spectral silence, the still midnight.
Paulalooked down through the broken roof of the portico supported by the massive Corinthian columns. A group of men stood on the stone floor below, men of slouching, ill-favored aspect. She could not for one moment confuse them with the inmates of the house, now silent and asleep, although her first hopeful thought was that some nocturnal alarm had brought forth the refugees of theCherokee Rose.
The newcomers made no effort at repression or secrecy. They could have had no idea that the house was occupied. Evidently they felt as alone, as secluded, as secure from observation, as if in a desert. They were not even in haste to exploit their design. A great brawny, workman-like man was taking to task a fellow in top-boots and riding-breeches.
“Why did you go off an’ leave Cap’n Treherne?” he asked severely.
The ex-jockey seemed somewhat under the influence of liquor, not now absolutely drunk, although hiccoughing occasionally—in that dolorous stage known as “sobering up.”
“If you expected me to stay here all that time, with no feed at all, you were clear out of the running,” he protested. “I lit out before the blow came, an’ after the storm was over I knowed youfellers couldn’t row back here against the current with the water goin’ that gait. So I took my time as you took yourn.”
The next speaker was of a curiously soaked aspect, as if overlaid with the ooze, and slime, and decay of the riverside, like some rotting log or a lurking snag, worthless in itself, without a use on either land or water, neither afloat nor ashore, its only mission of submerged malice to drive its tooth into the hull of some stanch steamer and drag it down, with its living freight, and its wealth of cargo, and its destroyed machinery, to a grave among the lifeless roots. His voice seemed water-logged, too, and came up in a sort of gurgle, so defective was his articulation.
“You-all run off an’ lef’ me las’ night, but Jessy Jane put me wise this mornin’, an’ I was away before the wind had riz. I stopped by here to see if you was about, but I declar’ if I had knowed that you had lef’ Cap’n Treherne in thar tied up like a chicken, I’m durned if I wouldn’t hey set him loose, to pay you back for the trick you played me. But I met up with Colty,” nodding at the jockey, “an’ we come back just now together.”
Binnhart’s brow darkened balefully as he listened to this ineffective threat while old Berridge chuckled.
Another man with a sailor-like roll in his walk was leaning on an axe. Suddenly he cast his eyes up at the pilaster. Paula on the shadowy side of the window sat quite still, not daring to move, hoping for invisibility, although her heart beat so loud that she thought they might hear its pulsations even at the distance.
“Durned if I got much sense out of that fool builder’s talk to you, Jasper,” he said. “I think you paid out too much line,—never held him to the p’int. You let him talk sixteen ter the dozen ’bout things we warn’t consarned with, pediments, an’ plinths, an’ architraves, an’ entablatures, an’, shucks, I dunno now what half of ’em mean.”
“I had to do that to keep him from suspicionin’ what we were after,” Binnhart justified his policy. “All I wanted to know was just what a ‘pilaster’ might be.”
“An’ this half column ag’in the wall is the ‘pilaster’ the Crazy talked about?” And once more the shanty-boater cast up a speculative eye. “But I ain’t sensed yit what he meant by his mention of a capital.”
“Why, Jackson, capital of Miss’ippi, ye fool you, fines’ city in the Union,” exclaimed a younger replica of the old water-rat, coming up from the shrubbery with a lot of tools in a smith’s shoeing-box, from which, as he still held it, Binnhart began with a careful hand to select the implements that were needed for the work.
“How do you know the plunder is in the ‘pilaster’?” asked Connover, the dejected phase of the “after effects” clouding his optimism.
“Why, he talked about it in his sleep. He may be crazy when he is awake, but he talks as straight as a string in his sleep. Fust chance, as I gathered, that he has ever had to be sane enough to make a try for the swag,” explained Berridge. “But I dunno why you pick out this partic’lar pilaster,” and he, too, gazed up at its lofty height.
“By the way he looked at it when we was fetchin’him in from the skiff, that’s why, you shrimp,” exclaimed the shanty-boater.
“I don’t callthata straight tip,” said Connover, discontentedly.
“Why, man, this Treherne was with Archie Ducie when they hid the plunder. This is the column he says in his sleep they put it in, an’, by God, I’ll bring the whole thing to the ground but what I s’arches it, from top to bottom. I’ll bust it wide open.”
With the words the shanty-boater heaved up the axe and smote the column so strong a blow that Paula felt the vibrations through the wall to the window where she sat.
“What are ye goin’ to do with Crazy?” demanded old Berridge with a malicious leer.
“Better bring Cap’n Crazy out right now an’ make him tell, willy nilly, exactly where the stuffishid,” urged the disaffected Connover.
“Oh, he’ll tell, fas’ enough,” rejoined old Berridge. He began to dwell gleefully on the coercive effects of burning the ends of the fingers and the soles of the feet with lighted matches.
“Lime is better,” declared his son, entering heartily into the scheme. “Put lime in his eyes, ef he refuses to talk, an’ he won’t hold out. Lime is the ticket. Plenty lime here handy in the plaster.”
“Slaked, you fool, you!” commented Binnhart. Then, “I ain’t expectin’ to git the secret out’n Cap’n Treherne now, I b’lieve he’d die fust!”
“He would,” said the shanty-boater, with conviction. “I know the cut of the jib.”
“We had to keep him here handy, though, or he might tell it to somebody else. But, Jorrocks, can’tyou see with half an eye that there has never been an entrance made in that pillar. Them soldier fellows were not practiced in the use of tools. The most they could have done was to rip off the washboard of the room, flush with the pilaster. They must have sot the box on the top of the stone base inside the column. This base is solid.”
He was measuring with a foot-rule the distance from the pilaster to the nearest window. It opened down to the floor of the portico and was without either sash or glass. As the group of clumsy, lurching figures disappeared within, Paula, with a sudden wild illumination and a breathless gasp of excitement, sprang to her feet. The capital, said they? The pilaster! She fell upon the significance of these words. The treasure, long sought, was here, under her very hand. She caught up a heavy iron rod that she had noticed among the rubbish of broken plaster and fallen laths on the floor. It had been a portion of a chandelier, and it might serve both as lever and wedge. The rats had gnawed the washboard in the corner, she trembled for the integrity of the storied knapsack, but the gaping cavity gave entrance to the rod. As she began to prize against the board with all her might she remembered with a sinking heart that they builded well in the old days, but it was creaking—it was giving way. It had been thrust from the wall ere this. She, too, took heed of the fact that it was the clumsy work of soldier boys which had replaced the solid walnut, no mechanic’s trained hands, and the thought gave her hope. She thrust her dainty foot within the aperture, and kept it open with the heel of her Oxford tie, as more and morethe washboard yielded to the pressure of the iron rod, which, like a lever, she worked to and fro with both arms.
In the silence of the benighted place through the floor she heard now and then a dull thud, but as yet no sound of riving wood. The washboard there—or was it wainscot?—had never been removed, and the task of the marauders was more difficult than hers. She was devoured by a turbulent accession of haste. They would make their water-haul presently, and then would repair hither to essay the capital of the pilaster. Was that a step on the stair?
In a wild frenzy of exertion she put forth an effort of which she would not have believed herself capable. The board gave way so abruptly that she almost fell upon the floor. The next moment she was on the verge of fainting. Before her was naught but the brickwork of the wall. Yet, stay, here the bricks had been removed for a little space and relaid without mortar. She gouged them out again after the fashion of the marauder, and behind them saw into the interior of the pilaster. The cavity was flush with the floor. She thrust in her hand, nothing! Still further with like result. She flung herself down upon the floor and ran her arm in to its extreme length. She touched a fluffy, disintegrated mass, sere leaves it might have been, feathers or fur. Her dainty fingers tingled with repulsion as they closed upon it. She steadily pulled it forward, and, oh, joy, she felt a weight, a heavy weight. She thrust in both arms and drew toward her slowly, carefully—a footfall on the stair, was it? Still slowly, carefully, the tattered remnants of an old knapsack, and a box, around which it had beenwrapped. A metal box it was, of the style formerly used, inclosed in leather as jewel-cases, locked, bound with steel bands, studded with brass rivets, intact and weighty.
Paula sprang up with a bound. For one moment she paused with the burden in her arms, doubting whether she should conceal the chest anew or dare the stairs. The next, as silent as a moonbeam, as fleet as the gust that tossed her skirts, she sped around the twists of the spiral turns and reached the second story. She looked over the balustrade, no light, save the moonbeams falling through the great doorless portal, no sign of life; no sound. But hark, the gnawing of a patient chisel, and presently the fibrous rasping of riving wood came from the empty apartments on the left. Still at work were the marauders, and still she was safe. She continued her descent, silently and successfully gaining the entresol, but as she turned to essay the flight to the lower hall she lost the self-control so long maintained, so strained. Still at full speed she came, silent no longer, screaming like a banshee. Her voice filled the weird old house with shrill horror, resounding, echoing, waking every creature that slept to a frenzied panic, and bringing into the hall all the men of the steamboat’s party, half dressed, as behooves a “shake-down.” The women, less presentable, held their door fast and clamored out alternate inquiry and terror.
“I have found it! I have found it!” she managed to articulate, wild-eyed, laughing and screaming together, and rushing with the box to the astonished Ducie, she placed it in his hands. “And, oh, the house is full of robbers!”
The disheveled group stood as if petrified for a moment, the moonbeams falling through the open doorway, giving the only illumination. But the light, although pale and silvery, was distinct; it revealed the intent half-dressed figures, the starting eyes, the alert attitudes, and elicited a steely glimmer from more than one tense grasp, for this is preëminently the land of the pistol-pocket. The fact was of great deterrent effect in this instance, for if the vistas of shadow and sheen within the empty suites of apartments gave upon this picture of the coterie, wrought in gray and purple tones and pearly gleams, it was of so sinister a suggestion as to rouse prudential motives. There were ten stalwart men of the steamboat’s passengers here, and the marauders numbered but five.