A sudden scream from the ladies’ dormitory broke the momentary pause. A man, nay, three or four men, had rushed past the windows on the portico.
“I hear them now!” cried Hildegarde Dean; “they are crashing through the shrubbery.”
“Nonsense,” Floyd-Rosney brusquely exclaimed. “There are no robbers here.” Then to his wife, “Is this hysteria, Paula, or are you spoiling for a sensation?”
She did not answer. She did not heed. She still stood in the attitude of putting the heavy box into Adrian Ducie’s grasp and while he mechanically held it she looked at him, her eyes wild and dilated, shining full of moonlight, still exclaiming half in sobs, half in screams, “I have found it! I have found it!—the Duciehurst treasure.”
Floyd-Rosney cast upon the casket one glance of undisciplined curiosity. Then his proclivity for thefirst place, the title rôle, asserted itself. He did not understand his wife. He did not believe that she had found aught of value, or, indeed, that there was aught of value to find. Beyond and above his revolt of credulity was his amazement at his wife’s insurgent spirit, so signally, so unprecedentedly manifested on this trip. He connected it with the presence of Adrian Ducie, which in point of facial association was the presence of his twin brother, her former lover. The mere surmise filled him with absolute rage. His tyrannous impulse burned at a white heat. A wiser man, not to say a better man, would have realized the transient character of the incident, her natural instinct to assert herself, to be solicitous of the judgment of the Ducies on her position, to seem no subservient parasite of the rich man, but to hold herself high. Thus she had resented too late the absolute dominion her husband had taken over her, and she felt none the lack of the manner of consideration, even though fictitious, which was her due as his wife.
He took her arm that was as tense as steel in every muscle. “You are overwrought, Paula,—and this disturbance is highly unseemly.” Then, lowering his voice and with his frequent trick of speaking from between his set teeth, “you should be with the other ladies, instead of the only one among this gang of men.”
“Why not?” she flared out at full voice, “we don’t live in Turkey.”
“By your leave I will ask Mrs. Floyd-Rosney to witness the opening of this box, which she has discovered,” said Ducie gravely, “and you also inview of your position in regard to the title of the property.”
“Certainly I will,” said Mrs. Floyd-Rosney, defiantly forestalling her husband’s reply, “by his leave, or without it. I am no bond-slave.” Her eyes were flashing, her bosom heaved, she was on the brink of tears.
“Beg pardon,” stammered Ducie. “It was a mere phrase.”
“Foolish fellow! He thought you had promised to love, honor andobey!” said Floyd-Rosney, ill-advised and out of countenance.
“Foolish fellow!” she echoed. “He thought you had promised to love, honor and cherish.”
But she was dominated by the excitement of the discovery. She ran to the door of the ladies’ dormitory. “No danger! No danger!” she cried, as it was cautiously set ajar on her summons. “The robbers are gone. We have more than twice as many men here, and the Duciehurst treasure is found. Come out, Hildegarde, and give me that lamp. They are going to open the box. Oh, oh, oh!” She was shrilling aloud in mingled delight and agitation as she came running down the hall in the midst of the silvery moonlight and the dusky shadows, the wind tossing her white skirt, the lamp in her hand glowing yellow, and flaring redly out of the chimney in her speed, to its imminent danger of fracture, sending a long coil of smoke floating after it and a suffocating odor of petroleum.
Paula placed the lamp on the table in the dining-room, where the box already stood. Around it the men were grouped on the boards which had hitherto served as benches. Several were shivering in shirt-sleeves,the suspenders of their trousers swinging in festoons on either side, or hanging sash-wise to their heels. Others, more provident, with the conviction that the sensation was not so ephemeral as to preclude some attention to comfort, left the scene long enough to secure their coats, and came back with distorted necks and craned chins, buttoning on collars. Hildegarde obviously had no vague intention of matching her conduct to the standards of Turkey, for she joined the party precipitately, her blue eyes shining, her cheeks flushed with recent sleep, her hair still piled high on her head and her light blue crêpe dress hastily donned. The elderly ladies, mindful of the jeopardy of neuralgia in the draughty spaces without, had betaken themselves again to bed. The Duciehurst treasure had no possibilities for their betterment and they did not even affect the general altruistic interest.
There was ample time for the assembling of the party for no key among them would fit or turn the rusted lock. The box on the table held its secret as securely within arm’s length as when hidden for more than forty years in the capital of the pilaster. Hildegarde suggested a button-hook, which, intended seriously, was passed as an ill-timed jest. Mr. Floyd-Rosney had a strong clasp-knife, with a file, but the lock resisted and the lid was of such a shape that the implement could not be brought to bear.
“The robbers were working with a lot of tools,” said Paula, suddenly. “Perhaps they left their tools.”
The gentleman who was testing his craft withthe lock looked up at her with a significant, doubtful inquiry. “The robbers?” he drawled, slightingly.
They possibly number thousands in this wicked world. Their deeds have filled many court records, and their reluctant carcasses many a prison. But the man does not live who credits their proximity on the faith of a woman’s statement. “The robbers?” he drew in his lower lip humorously. “Where do you think they were working?”
“Come, I can show you exactly.” Paula sprang up with alacrity.
He rose without hesitation, but he took his revolver from the table and thrust it into his pistol-pocket. While he did not believe her, perhaps he thought that stranger things have happened. They did not carry the lamp. The moon’s radiance poured through all the shattered windows of the great ruin with a splendor that seemed a mockery of the imposing proportions, the despoiled decorations, the lavish designs of the fresco, the poor travesties of chandeliers, making shift here and there to return a crystal reflection where once light had glowed refulgent.
Floyd-Rosney had sat silent for a moment, as if dumfounded. Then he slowly and uncertainly threw his legs athwart the bench and rose as if to follow. But the two had returned before he could leave the room, the “doubting Thomas” of an explorer with his hands full of tools and an expression of blank amazement on his face.
“Somebodyhasbeen working at that wall,” he announced, as if he could scarcely constrain his own acceptance of the fact. “The wainscot has been freshly ripped out, but there is nothing at all in thehollow of the pilaster. Mrs. Floyd-Rosney examined it herself.”
“You were looking for another find, eh?—like a cat watching a hole where she has just caught a mouse,” said Floyd-Rosney to his wife with his misfit jocularity.
No one sought to reply. Every eye was on Adrian Ducie, who had found a cold chisel among the tools and was working now at the hinges and now at the lock, wherever there seemed best promise of entrance. The hinges were forced apart finally, the lock was broken, and once more the box was opened here where it was packed forty-odd years ago. A covering of chamois lay over the top, and as Adrian Ducie put it aside with trembling fingers the lamplight gloated down on a responsive glitter of gold and silver, with a glint here and there, as of a precious stone. There was obviously insufficient room in the box for the vanished table service of the family silver, but several odd pieces of such usage were crowded in, of special antiquity of aspect, probably heirlooms, and thus saved at all hazards. The method of packing had utilized the space within to the fraction of an inch. Adrian drew out a massive gold goblet filled with a medley of smaller articles, a rare cameo bracelet, an emerald ring, an old seal quaintly mounted, a child’s sleeve-bracelets, a simple ornament set with turquoise, and a diamond necklace, fit for a princess. None of these were in cases, even the protection of a wrapping would have required more space than could be spared.
“You know that face?” Ducie demanded, holding a miniature out to Floyd-Rosney, catching the lamplight upon it.
“Can’t say I do,” Floyd-Rosney responded, cavalierly and with apparent indifference.
“Perhaps Colonel Kenwynton will recognize it,” said Ducie, with composure.
“Eh, what? Why certainly—a likeness of your grandfather, George Blewitt Ducie,—an excellent likeness! And this,” reaching for a small oval portrait set with pearls, “is his wife—what a beauty she was! Here, too,” handling a gold frame of more antiquated aspect, “is your great grandfather—yes, yes!—in his prime. I never saw him except as an old man, but he held his own—he held his own!”
The miniatures thus identified and his right to the contents of the box established, Ducie continued to lift out the jammed and wedged treasures as fast as they could be disengaged from their artful arrangement. An old silver porringer contained incongruities of value, a silver mug of christening suggestions, a lady’s watch and chain with a bunch of jeweled jangling “charms,” a filagree pouncet-box, a gold thimble, a string of fine and perfect pearls with a ruby clasp, a gold snuff-box with an enameled lid. The up-to-date man thrust his monocle in his eye to better observe, with a sort of æsthetic rapture, the shepherds dancing in the dainty workmanship. There was an array of spoons of many sorts and uses, soup ladles, salt ladles, cream ladles, and several gold and silver platters. These had kept in place one of the old-fashioned silver coasters, which held contents of value that the least æsthetic could appreciate. It was nearly half full of gold coin, worth many times its face value in the days when thus hidden away from the guerrilla and thebushwhacker. Every man’s eyes glittered at the sight except only those of Ducie. He was intent upon the search for the papers, the release of the mortgage that he had believed all his life was stowed away here.
To every man the knowledge that he has been befooled, whether by foible or fate, is of vital importance. In many ways he has been influenced to his hurt by the obsession. His actions have been rooted in his mistaken persuasions. His mental processes issue from false premises. He is not the man he would otherwise have been.
All his life Adrian Ducie had raged against the injustice that had involved in absolute oblivion the release of the mortgage, that had wrested from his father both the full satisfaction of the debt and the pledged estate as well. Otherwise he would have inherited wealth, opportunity, the means of advancement, luxury, pleasure. He was asking himself now had he made less of himself, the actual good the gods had doled out, because he had bemoaned fictitious values in case there had never been a release and the lands had gone the facile ways of foreclosure, the imminent, obvious, almost invariable sequence of mortgage. Ah, at last a paper!—carefully folded, indorsed. His grandfather’s will, regularly executed, but worthless now, by reason of the lapse of time. An administrator had distributed the estate as that of an intestate, and defended the action of foreclosure. The incident was closed, and the sere and yellow paper had not more possibility of revivification than the sere and yellow leaves that now and again came with sibilant edge against the windowpane,or winged their way on an errant gust within the room through a rift in the shattered glass.
As Ducie flung the paper aside he chanced to dislodge one of the gold pieces, a sovereign, the money being all of English coinage. It rolled swiftly along the table, slipped off its beveled edge, and was heard spinning somewhere in the shadows of the great dusky room. More than one of the gentlemen rose to recover it, and Paula, with unbecoming officiousness, her husband thought, joined in the search. It was she who secured it, and as she restored the coin she laid a glittering trifle before the box, as if it, too, had fallen from the table. “Here is one of the Ducie jewels,” she said.
“Why, it is a key, how cute,” cried Hildegarde.
Ducie had paused, the papers motionless in his hand. He was looking at Paula, sternly, rebukingly. Perhaps his expression disconcerted her in her moment of triumph, for her voice was a little shrill, her smile both feigned and false, her manner nervous and abashed, yet determined.
“Oh, it is a thing of mystic powers,” she declared. “It commands the doors of promotion and pleasure, it can open the heart and lock it, too; it is the keynote of happiness.” She laughed without relish at the pun while the up-to-date man thrust his monocle in his eye and reached out for the bauble. There was a moment of silence as it was subjected to his searching scrutiny.
“A thing of legend, is it?” he commented. “Well, I must say that it does not justify its reputation—it has a most flimsy and modern aspect, nothing whatever in conformity with those exquisite examples of old bijouterie.” He waved his hand toward theDucie jewels blazing in rainbow hues, now laid together in a heap on the table. “Its value, why I should say it could not be much, though this is a good white diamond, and the rubies are fair, but quite small; it is not worth more than two hundred dollars or two hundred and fifty at the utmost.”
Adrian Ducie had finally remitted his steady and upbraiding gaze, but Paula was made aware that he still resented unalterably and deeply her conduct to his brother. It was Randal’s option to forgive, if he would,—Adrian Ducie held himself aloof; he would not interfere. His hands were occupied in opening a paper as the up-to-date man tendered him the jeweled key, and this gave him the opportunity to decline to receive it without exciting curiosity. His words were significant only to Paula when he said, “Excuse me, Mrs. Floyd-Rosney, perhaps, will kindly take charge of this article.”
With unabated composure, with extreme deliberation, he opened this, the last paper in the box, which held an enclosure. The yellow glow of the lamp at one end of the table was a rayonnant focus of light amidst the gloom of the great, lofty apartment, and showed the variant expressions of the faces grouped about it. Floyd-Rosney, seated with one side toward the table, resting an elbow on its surface, had an air of tolerant ennui, his handsome face, fair, florid, and impressive, was imposed with its wonted fine effect against the dun, dull shadows which the lamplight could not dissipate, so definite that they seemed an opaque haze, a dense veil of smoke. The countenances of the others, less conscious, less adjusted to observation, wore different degrees of intelligent interest. Hildegarde’s disheveledbeauty shone like a star from the dark background of the big bow-window where she sat—through the shattered glass came now and then a glittering shimmer when the magnolia leaves, dripping and lustrous in the moonlight, tossed in some vagrant gust. Mrs. Floyd-Rosney’s aspect was of a conventional contrast, as point-device as if she sat at table at some ordinary function. The sheen of her golden hair, the gleam of her white dress, her carmine cheeks, her elated and brilliant eyes, her attentive observation of the events as they deployed, were all noted in turn by her domestic tyrant, with a view to future reference. “I’ll have it out with Paula when we get away from here, if ever,” he said grimly within his own consciousness.
The next moment he had incentive for other thoughts. Ducie scanned the caption of the paper in his hand, turned the page to observe its signature, then lifted his head. His voice, although clear, trembled.
“Here is the release of the mortgage, duly executed and with the original deed of trust inclosed.”
There was a moment of tense silence. Then ensued a hearty clapping of hands about the table.
Floyd-Rosney satirically inclined his head to this outburst of involuntary congratulation. “Thank you, very much,” he said with an ironical smile.
The group seemed somewhat disconcerted, and several attempted justification.
“Always gratifying that the lost should be found,” said one. “Nothing personal to you, however.”
“I am sure you, too, would wish the right to prevail,” said a priggish gentleman, who looked as if he might be a Sunday-school superintendent.
“Well, I hate to see an old family kept out of its own on a legal quibble,” said one fat gentleman uncompromisingly; he knew better how to order a dinner acceptably than his discourse.
“It will be difficult to prove an ouster after forty years of adverse possession,” said Floyd-Rosney, “even if the release or quit-claim, or whatever the paper is, shall prove to be entirely regular.”
“You surely will not plead the prescription in bar of the right,” the broker seemed to remonstrate.
“Of the remedy, you mean,” Floyd-Rosney corrected with his suave, unsmiling smile. “I should, like any other man of affairs, act under the advice of counsel.”
“Why, yes, of course,” assented the broker, accessible to this kind of commercial logic. However, the situation was so contrary to the general run of business that it seemed iniquitous somehow that the discovery of the papers restoring the title of this great estate to its rightful owners, after forty years of deprivation of its values, should be at last nullified and set at naught by a decree of a court on the application of the doctrine of the statute of limitations. There was a pervasive apprehension of baffled justice even before the paper was examined.
Ducie was disposed to incur no further Floyd-Rosney’s supercilious speculations as to the contents of the paper. Instead, he spread it before Colonel Kenwynton.
“Read it, Colonel,” he said, moving the lamp to the old gentleman’s elbow.
It seemed that Colonel Kenwynton in his excitement could never get his pince-nez adjusted, and when this was fairly accomplished that he wouldbe balked at last by an inopportune frog in his throat. But finally the reading was under way, and each of the listeners lent ear not only with the effort to discriminate and assimilate the intendment of the instrument, but to appraise its effect on a possible court of equity. For it particularized in very elaborate and comprehensive phrase the reasons for the manner, time, and place of its execution. It recited the facts that the promissory notes secured by the mortgage were in bank deposit in the city of Nashville, State of Tennessee, that the said city and State were in the occupation of the Federal army, that since the said notes could not be forwarded within the Confederate lines, by reason of the lack of mail facilities or other means of communication, the said promissory notes were herein particularly described, released and surrendered, the several sums for which they were made having been paid in full by George Blewitt Ducie in gold, the receipt of the full amount being hereby acknowledged, together with a quit-claim to the property on which they had been secured. For the same reason of the existence of a state of war, and the suspension of all courts of justice in the county in which the mortgage was recorded, and the absence of their officials, this release could not at that time be duly registered nor the original paper marked satisfied. Therefore the party of the first part hereunto appeared before a local notary-public and acknowledged the execution of this paper for the purposes therein contained, the reasons for its non-registration, and the lack of the return of the promissory notes.
Colonel Kenwynton took careful heed of thenotarial seal affixed, and the names of five witnesses who subscribed for added security.
“Every man of them dead these forty-odd years and both the principals,” he commented, lugubriously.
“Great period for mortality, the late unpleasantness,” jeered Floyd-Rosney. With a debonair manner he was lighting a cigar, and he held it up with an inquiring smile at the tousled Hildegarde on the sill of the bow-window, her dilated blue eyes absorbed and expressive as she listened. She gave him a hasty and transient glance of permission to smoke in her presence and once more lapsed into deep gravity and brooding attention.
The incident was an apt example of the power of Fate. With the best mutual faith, with one mind and intention on the part of both principals in the procedure, with every precaution that the circumstances would admit, with the return of the original deed of trust, with a multiplicity of witnesses to the execution of the quit-claim and release, which would seem to preclude the possibility of misadventure, the whole was nullified by the perverse sequence of events. The papers were lost, and not one human being participating in the transaction remained to tell the tale. The solemn farce of the processes of the courts was enacted, as if the debt was still unsatisfied, and the rightful owner was ejected from the lands of his ancestors.
“But for the casual recollection of your father, Julian Ducie, who was a child at the time his mother quitted Duciehurst, and this box of valuables was hidden here to await her return, there would not have been so much as a tradition of the satisfactionof this mortgage,” Colonel Kenwynton remarked in a sort of dismay.
“I have often heard my father describe the events of that night, the examination of my grandfather’s desk by my Uncle Archie and Captain Treherne, and their discussion of the relative importance of the papers and valuables they selected and packed in this box; one of the papers they declared was in effect the title to the whole property. He was a little fellow at the time, and watched and listened with all a child’s curiosity. But he did not know where they hid the box at last, although he was aware of their purpose of concealment, and, indeed, he was not certain that it was not carried off with the party finally to Arkansas, his uncle, Archie, and Captain Hugh Treherne rowing the skiff in which he and his mother crossed to the other side.”
“Ah-h,Captain Hugh Treherne”—Colonel Kenwynton echoed the name with a bated voice and a strange emphasis. He had a fleeting vision of that wild night on the sand-bar, all a confused effect of mighty motion, the rush of the wind, the rout of the stormy clouds, the race of the surging river, and overhead a swift skulking moon, a fugitive, furtive thing, behind the shattered cumulose densities of the sky. He started to speak, then desisted. It was strange to be conjured so earnestly to right this wrong, to find this treasure, to visit this spot, and within forty-eight hours in the jugglery of chance to be transported hither and the discovery accomplished through no agency of his, no revelation of the secret he had promised to keep.
“Yes, Captain Hugh Treherne,” assented Ducie. “He was known to have been severely wounded towardthe end of the war, and as he could never afterward be located it is supposed he died of his injuries. Every effort to find him was made to secure his testimony in the action for the foreclosure of the mortgage.”
“But he was not dead,” said Paula, unexpectedly. “‘Captain Treherne,’ that’s the very name.”
“Why, Paula,” exclaimed Floyd-Rosney, astounded. “What do you mean? You know absolutely nothing of the matter.”
“The robbers spoke of him,” she said, confusedly. “I overheard them.” Then with more assurance: “They derived their information from him as to the hiding-place. That’s how I found it out. Not that he disclosed it intentionally. They spoke as if—as if he were not altogether sane. They said that he could not remember. But in his sleep he talked ‘as straight as a string.’”
“Oh, stuff and nonsense! You heard no such thing!” exclaimed Floyd-Rosney. “You are as crazy as he can possibly be.”
The ridicule stimulated self-justification, even while it abashed her, for every eye was fixed upon her. Colonel Kenwynton looked at once eager, anxious, yet wincing, as one who shrinks from a knife.
“They did not understand the meaning of his sleeping words,” Paula persisted. “He spoke of pillar and base and pilaster and capital——”
“Oh, oh,” exclaimed Floyd-Rosney, in derision.
Paula had the concentrated look of seeking to shake off this embarrassment of her mental progress and to keep straight upon a definite trend. “They spoke, indeed, as if they had Captain Treherne inreach somewhere,—I wish I had remembered to mention this earlier,—as if he were to be forced to further disclosures if they should fail to find the treasure.”
“Oh, this is too preposterous,” cried Floyd-Rosney, rising. He threw away the stump of his cigar into the old and broken fireplace. “I must beg of you, Paula, for my credit if not your own, to desist from making a spectacle of yourself.”
Colonel Kenwynton lifted a wrinkled and trembling hand in protest. “I ask your pardon; Mrs. Floyd-Rosney will do no one discredit. I must hear what she has to say of this. The gentleman is my dear, dear friend. I had lost sight of him for years.” Then turning toward Paula: “Did I understand you to say, madam, that they spoke as if he were in their power?”
The old man was gasping and his agitation frightened Paula. Her face had grown ghastly pale. Her eyes were wide and startled. “I wonder that I did not think of it earlier,” she said, contritely. “But it did not impress me as real, as the actual fact, I was so excited and alarmed. I remember now that they said they had gagged him,—I don’t know where he was, but they spoke as if he were near and they could produce him and force him to point out the spot. They had ‘brought him down,’—that was their expression,—for this purpose. Did they mean,—do you suppose,—he could have been near, in this house?”
Colonel Kenwynton rose, the picture of despair.
“Oh, my God!” he exclaimed, holding up his hands and wringing them hard. “That man saved my life at the risk of his own. And if, by blindnessand folly, I have failed him at his utmost need, may God do as much to me and more when I call from out of the deep. The lamp! The lamp! Bring the lamp! Search the house—the grounds!”
Captain Treherne had endured many hours of duress, of the torture of bonds and constraint, of dread, of cold, of hunger, but the terror of ultimate doom filled his heart when he heard the approach of roving footsteps, the sound of voices unnaturally loud and resonant, echoing through the bare rooms, when he saw a flickering glimmer of yellow light wavering on the ceiling but lost presently in gloom as the party wandered hither and thither through the vacant place. The miscreants who had overpowered and bound him were returning, he thought. In the impaired mental condition from which he had so long suffered, one of his great sorrows lay in his incapacity at times to differentiate the fact from hallucination. He could not be sure that the whole scene of ghastly violence through which he had passed was not one of the pitiable illusions of his mania, and he lay here bound and gagged and famished as treatment designed to mend his mental health. He sought to recall the aspect of the men who, as perhaps he fancied had brought him here,—his flesh crept with repulsion at the thought of them. One had the rolling walk of a sailor. Another was garbed like a jockey,—some brain-cell had perchance retained this image from the old half-forgotten associations of the race course. So much of the jargon of pathology he had picked up in his melancholy immurement in the sanatorium. But these impressions were so definite, so lifelike that if they should prove illusory and thisexperience another seizure of his malady it was worse than those that had beset him hitherto, when he had often had a lurking doubt of their reality, even while he had acted as if they were demonstrable fact. It was a terrible thing to harbor such strange discordant fancies. He remembered that during the day, he could not be sure of the time, he awoke from a sleep or swoon to find himself here (or, perchance, he had dreamed), bound and gagged, and the great rough figure of a gigantic negro standing in the doorway of the room gazing upon him with an expression of stupid dismay, and then of horrified fright. The negro disappeared suddenly,—many of the images present to the diseased brain of Captain Treherne were subject to these abrupt withdrawals. Afterward he saw, or, as he stipulated within himself, he thought he saw, through an open door, this swart apparition again, chasing and beating with a boat-hook a large white owl. Now and then, throughout the afternoon, he imagined he heard sounds, faint, distant; footsteps, voices and again silence. Deep into the weary night the hapless prisoner watched the moonlight trace the outline of the leafless vines outside upon the ceiling and wall. This was the only impression of which he was certain. He could not be sure what this seeming approach might mean; whether a fact, direful and dangerous, to which the helpless must needs submit; or whether a fantasy of merely seeming menace.
Suddenly a voice—resonant, yet with a falling cadence; hearty and whole-souled, yet quavering with trouble. “Hugh Treherne! Hugh Treherne!”it was calling, and a thousand echoes in the bare and ruinous building duplicated the sound.
A rush of confidence sent the blood surging through the veins of Captain Treherne, almost congested with the pressure of the cords. He gave a start that might have dislocated every bone in his body, yet the bonds held fast. He could not stir. He could not reply. He had recognized the voice of Colonel Kenwynton, his old commander,—he felt that he could take his oath to the reality of this fact. There were other voices,—many foot-falls; it was a searching party with lights, with arms,—he heard the familiar metallic click as one of the men cocked a revolver. But what was this? They were taking the wrong turn in the maze of empty apartments; the steps of their progress had begun to recede, sounding farther and farther away; their voices died in the distance; the light had faded from the wall.
He thought afterward that in the intensity of his emotions he must have fainted. There was a long gap in his consciousness. Then he saw a well-remembered face bending over him, but oh, so changed, so venerable. He knew every tone of the voice calling his name, amidst sobs, “Oh, Hugh, my dear, dear boy!” He felt the eager hands of younger, strong men deftly loosening the bonds, and the sound of their voices in muttered imprecations, not loud but deep, filled him with a surging sense of sweet sympathy. It was swearing, doubtless, but the sentiment that prompted it was pious. It is not of record that the good Samaritan swore at the thieves, but it is submitted that, in the fervor of altruism, he might have done so with greatpropriety. Treherne felt the taste of brandy within his aching jaws. These profane wights were lifting him with a tenderness that might have befitted the tendance of a sick infant. He could not restrain the tears that were coursing down his cheeks, although he had no grief,—he was glad,—glad! for now and again Colonel Kenwynton caught his hand in his cordial grasp and pressed it to his breast.
Daywas breaking. The luster of the moon had failed. Gaunt and grisly the old ruin began to increase in visibility. The full, gray, prosaic light emphasized details, whether of workmanship or wreck, which the silver beams had been inadequate to show. It was difficult to say if the fine points of ornamentation had the more melancholy suggestion in the wanton spoliation where they were within easy reach, or in those heights and sequestered nooks where distance had saved them from the hand of the vandal. The lapse of time itself had wrought but scant deterioration. The tints of the fresco of ceilings and borders were of pristine delicacy and freshness in those rooms where the destroyed hearths had prevented fires and precluded smoke, save that here and there a cobweb had veiled a corner, or a space had gathered mildew from exposure to a shattered window, or a trickling leak had delineated the trace of the falling drops down the decorated wall.
All exemplified the taste of an earlier period, and where paper had been used in great pictorial designs it fared more hardly than had the painting. The vicissitudes of the voyage of Telemachus, portrayed in the hall, were supplemented by unwritten disaster. His bark tossed upon seas riven in gaps and hanging in tatters. The pleasant land wherehe and his instructive companion met the Island goddess and her train of nymphs, laden with flowers and fruit for their delectation, was cataclysmal with torrential rains and broken abysses. The filial adventurer was flung from the storied cliffs into a Nirvana of blank plaster.
It had required some muscular force and some mental energy to destroy the marble mantel-pieces. Here and there bits of the carving still lay about the floor, the design thus grossly disfigured, showing with abashed effect above the gaping cavity of the torn-out hearth.
The up-to-date man with his glass in his eye, one hand always ready to readjust it, the fingers lightly slipped into the pocket of his trousers, his attitude a trifle canted forward after the manner of the critical connoisseur, was going about, exploring, discriminating and bemoaning. Now and again he was joined by one of his fellow-passengers, who stood with his hat on the back of his head, and gazed with blank, unresponsive eyes, and listened in uncomprehending silence. The interior decoration of the old house represented several periods. The salient fact of wreck and ruin was apparent, however, to the most limited discernment, and the knots of refugees from theCherokee Rosediscussed its woeful condition as they wandered restlessly about. They expressed a doubt whether repair would not cost more than the house was worth, argued on the legal effect of the belated discovery of the quit-claim papers, and contemned the spirit of the men in possession in the last forty years to allow so fine a thing in itself to fall into such a desperate condition, while the lands appurtenant wereworked to the extremest capacity of money-making. There was a disposition to deduce from the fact a suspicion on the part of the holders that their title was vulnerable, and a sordid desire to make the most possible out of the property while it was still in possession. It was always Floyd-Rosney’s fate to be in a measure justified of circumstances, yet to seem at fault. The question of mesne profits in case of the recovery of property did not suggest itself for some time, and when it did arise it was submitted that mesne profits were mighty hard to get and often could not be made from the interloper.
“They can make the money out of Floyd-Rosney, though,—he has got money to burn. For one, I don’t care if he does lose. It would be outrageous for him to defend the suit for recovery and plead the statute of limitations,” said the fat man, who did not mince his opinions.
“But he may win out,” said the broker. “Possession is nine-tenths of the law,—and for forty years under a decree of the Chancery court.”
“Forty thousand years would do him no good in the face of that release,” protested another. “It was wrongful possession from the beginning. Floyd-Rosney is a trespasser here and nothing more.”
“But can you call a man a ‘trespasser’ who holds under color of title? His is an adverse possession,” argued the broker.
And the wrangle began anew with revived spirit. It was well, perhaps, that the refugees had a subject of discussion so charged with immediate and general interest, since they had no resource but to roam the old place until breakfast should be announced. After this meal they would resume theirfitful wanderings till a boat should be sighted. They had turned out of their comfortable quarters when Captain Treherne had been brought to the restricted inhabited space of the old building, relinquishing the shake-down and the fire to him and his special ministrants.
Now and again a speculation concerning breakfast agitated the group of men, and one venturesome spirit made a journey down the quaking old rear verandah to the kitchen, stepping over gaps where the flooring had been torn up for fuel and walking the rotting sills when the hiatus was too wide to be leaped. His errand to expedite breakfast was, apparently, without result.
“Yes, sah,” said the waiter-cook, into whose gloomy soul morning had yet cast no illuminating ray. “I gwine ter dish up when de breakfast is cooked,—nuver knowed you wanted it raw. Cap’n nuver treated me right,—no range, no cook-fixin’s,—nuthin’—an’ breakfast expected to be smokin’ on de table ’fore de fog is off de river. Naw, Sah,—ef you kin cook it any quicker, why cook it yourself, Sah. I ain’t got no dijections to your cookin’ it.”
Upon his return from his tour of discovery, being earnestly interrogated as to the prospects by his fellow-refugees, the gentleman gave this sage advice: “If you don’t want to have to knock an impudent nigger down you will stay here and eat breakfast when he has a mind to serve it.”
The fog clung to the face of the river. It stood blank and white at the great portal of the house, and sifted through the shattered windows, and silence dominated it. One felt infinitely removed from all the affairs of life. The world was not even a neighbor.Time seemed annihilated. It could not be that yesterday, at this hour, they stood on the stanch deck of theCherokee Rose, or that only the week before they trod the streets of Memphis, or Vicksburg, or Helena. That white pall seemed to shut off all the possibilities of life, and there was a sort of shock, as of a revulsion of nature, when there came through this flocculent density the sound of a horse’s hoofs on the graveled drive, and then, on the portico, the ponderous measured tread of a man of weight and bulk.
He was in the hall before the group was aware of his entrance. Hale and strong, although of advanced years, well dressed in a sober fashion, grave, circumspect, reticent of manner, he had turned toward the second door before a word of his intent could be asked. A gesture had answered his inquiry for Captain Hugh Treherne. He entered, without knocking, and the door closed on silence. The group in the hall stared at one another, aware, in some subtle way, of a crisis which the simple facts did not explain.
Suddenly a wild cry of defiance rose from within,—a quivering, aged voice full of rancor and of rage.
“I will resist to the death,—begone, begone, sir, before I do you a mischief.”
It was the voice of Colonel Kenwynton, furious, fierce, beyond placation, beyond argument, beyond self-control.
A murmur of remonstrance rose for a moment. Then the group outside followed the example of the stranger and, without ceremony, burst in at the door.
The stranger stood in quiet composure with hisback to the fire while the old Colonel, his bushy white eyebrows bent above eyes that flashed all the lightnings of his youth, waved his hand toward the door, exclaiming with an intonation of contempt that must have scathed the most indurated sensibilities, “Begone, sir,—out of the door, if you like, or I will throw you out of the window.” He stamped his foot as if to intimidate a cur. “Begone! Rid us of your intolerable presence.”
Captain Treherne, who had lain all the early morning hours on the rugs and blankets on the floor, seeking to recuperate from his terrible experience of constraint, had arisen with an alertness scarcely to be expected. He laid a restraining hand on the old man’s arm. Colonel Kenwynton placed his own trembling hand over it.
“Captain Treherne is among his friends who will revenge it dearly if you attempt the least injury. Insane! He is most obviously, most absolutely sane, and on that fact I will stake my soul’s salvation. Any attempt at his incarceration,—you despicable trickster, I have no doubt you turn your penny out of this burial alive,—before God, sir, I’ll make you rue it. I will publish you throughout the length and the breadth of the land, and I will beat you with this stick within an inch of your life.”
He brandished his heavy cane, and, despite his age and his depleted strength, he was a most formidable figure as he advanced. Once more Treherne caught at his arm. So tense were its muscles that he could not pull it down, but he hung upon it with all his weight.
The stranger eyed Colonel Kenwynton with the utmost calm, a placidity devoid alike of fear andof the perception of offense. He spoke in a quiet, level tone, with an undercurrent of gentle urgency.
“Sane or insane, Hugh Treherne never intentionally deceived a friend,” he remarked composedly. “Tell him the facts, Captain Treherne,—he deserves to know them.”
He met at the moment Treherne’s eye. A long look passed between them,—a terrible look, fraught with some deep mystery, of ghastly intendment, overwhelming, significant, common to both, which neither would ever reveal. There was in it something so nerve-thrilling, so daunting, that Colonel Kenwynton’s bold, bluff spirit revolted.
“None of your hypnotism here!” he cried, again brandishing his stick. “I will not stand by and see you seek to subjugate this man’s mind with your subtle arts. So much as cast your evil eye upon him again and I will make you swallow a pistol-ball and call it piety. (Where is that damned revolver of mine?)” He clapped his hand vainly to his pistol-pocket.
“Hugh,” the stranger’s tone was even more gently coercive than before. “Tell him, Hugh. He is not a man to delude.”
“Colonel,” cried Treherne, still hanging on the old man’s arm, “this gentleman means me nothing but kindness. He would not,—he could not,—why, don’t you know he was a surgeon in the Stones’ River campaign? For old sake’s sake he would do me no harm.”
Colonel Kenwynton himself looked far from the normal, his white hair blowsing about his face, fiery red, his blue eyes blazing with a bluer flame, hismuscles knotted and standing out as he clutched his stick and brandished it.
“I don’t care if he was commander-in-chief, he shall not mesmerize you, if that is what he calls his damnable tricks. Hugh,—forty years! Oh, my dear boy, that I should have lost sight of you for forty years, what with my debts, and my worries, and my shifts to keep a whole roof over my head, and a whole coat on my back. Forty years,—I thought you were dead. I had been told you were dead,—that is your Cousin Thomas’s work,—I’ll haulhimover the coals. And you as sane as I am all the time! Begone, sir!” and once more he waved his stick at the stranger. “I will see to it that every process known to the law is exhausted on you! The vials of wrath shall be emptied! Oh, it is too late for apology, for repentance, for sniveling!”
For still the stranger’s manner was mild and gravely conciliatory. “Oh, Hugh,” he said reproachfully, “why don’t you tell him?”
Once more their glances met.
“Colonel,” said Treherne falteringly, “I am not sane. I admit it.”
“I know better,” Colonel Kenwynton vociferated, facing around upon him. “You are as sane as I am, as any man. This is hypnotism. I saw how that fellow looked at you. I marked him well. Why, sanity is in your every intonation.”
Treherne took heart of grace. “But, Colonel, this is a lucid interval. Sometimes I am not myself,—in fact, for many years I wasabsent.” He used the euphemism with a downcast air, as if he could not brook a plainer phrase. Then, visibly bracing himself, “It was the effects of the old wound,—thesabre cut on the skull. It injured the brain. I have persuasions—obsessions.” His words faltered. His eyes dilated. There was a world of unexpressed meaning in his tone, as he lowered his voice, scarcely moving his lips. “Sometimes I am possessed by the Devil.”
“We will not speak of that to-day,” said the stranger suavely.
“It is impossible!” exclaimed the Colonel dogmatically. “Look at the facts,—you come to me out on that sand-bar to induce me to aid you in the search for the Ducie treasure and title papers, their recovery is due to your effort and, in all probability, the restoration of this great estate to its rightful owners.”
“Ah,” exclaimed the stranger with intense interest. He look elated, inordinately elated.
“And because you had forgotten in the lapse of time—forty years,—the exact spot where you and Archie Ducie hid the box away, and the wind was blowing, and the rain imminent, I put it off—like a fool—and these fiends of river pirates, or gipsies, or what not, got the information from you when you were asleep,—talking in your sleep.”
“Subconscious cerebration,” murmured the alienist.
“And because they did not exactly understand the terms of architecture you used they brought you down here to force you to point out the spot, and bound and gagged you,—oh,—Hugh, my heart bleeds for you!”
“But can’t you think for him a little, Colonel—can’t you advise him? Forty years of seclusion does not fit a man to cope with the world without somepreparation for the encounter,—he was in danger of his life, in falling among these thieves. He incurred a jeopardy which I know he esteems even greater. He is on the verge of a most extraordinary cure,—in all my experience I have never known its parallel. Any disastrous chance might yet prevent its completion. Now that he has accomplished all that he so desired to do, can’t you advise him to go back with me to treatment, regimen, safety.”
“Not unless I know what ails him,” said the Colonel stoutly.
Once more the eyes of Treherne and the stranger met, with that dark and dreadful secret between them. Colonel Kenwynton appraised the glance and its subtle significance, and fell to trembling violently.
“It is something that we cannot mention this day,—this day is clear,” said the alienist firmly.
“I cannot go back,—I cannot go back,—and meet it there,” cried Treherne wildly. “It is waiting for me,—where I have known it so long. I shall pass the vestibule, perhaps,—but there in the hall”—he paused, shivering.
“You see that, as yet, you cannot protect yourself in the world, even now, when you are as sane as the Colonel. But, for the accident that brought these people here, you might have been murdered by those miscreants for the secret hiding-place that had slipped your memory. You might have been heedlessly left on the floor bound and gagged to die. It was the merest chance that I happened to think you might be at Duciehurst.”
Treherne was trembling in every fiber. Cold drops of moisture had started on his brow. Hiseyes were dilated and quickly glancing, as he contemplated this obsession to which neither dared to refer openly, lest the slight bonds that held the mania within bounds, the exhaustion of the spasm of insanity, called the lucid interval, be overstrained and snap at once.
“I believe I would not meet it here, in the world,—away from where it has been so long,” he said doggedly.
“What would you do if you should? You might hurt yourself,—and Hugh, and this you would deplore more, you might injure some one else,” said the doctor.
Treherne suddenly turned, throwing his arms about Colonel Kenwynton in a paroxysm of energy.
“Colonel, lead the way. Go with me, for I would follow you to hell if you led the charge. God knows I have done that often enough. Lead the charge, Colonel!”
“Yes, come with us, Colonel,” said the alienist cordially,—it could but seem a sinister sort of hospitality. “We should be delighted to entertain you for a few days, or, indeed, as long as you will stay. It is not a public institution, but we have a beautiful place,—haven’t we, Hugh?—something very extra in the way of conservatories. Hugh has begun to take much interest in our orchids. It is a good distance, but Mr. Ducie drove me down here from Caxton with his fast horse in less time than I could have imagined.”
“Mr. Ducie?” said Adrian Ducie, with a start. “Where is he? Has he gone?”
The doctor stared as if he himself had taken leave of his senses. “You remember,” he said confusedly,blending the reminder with an air of explanation to the group generally, “that when we had that game of billiards at your hotel in Caxton last evening I asked you a question or two about the Duciehurst estate; I didn’t like to say much, but your replies gave me the clew as to where Captain Treherne had gone after his escape from the Glenrose sanatorium. He had inquired about Duciehurst as soon as he began to recover his memory, and seemed to recur to the subject and to brood upon it. The idea stayed with me all night, for I was very anxious, and about daybreak I took the liberty of rousing you by telephone to ask if the roads here from Caxton were practicable for a motor-car. You remember, don’t you?”
He paused, looking in some surprise at Adrian.
“You told me,” he continued, “that the roads would be impracticable after these rains, and as I disclosed the emergency, in my great perturbation for Captain Treherne’s safety, you offered to drive me down, as you had an exceptionally speedy horse which you kept for your easy access from Caxton to the several plantations that you lease in this vicinity.”
Captain Treherne, the possession of his faculties as complete at the moment as if he had never known the aberrations of a mania, listened with an averse interest and a lowering brow to these details of the preparations made for his capture and reincarceration. The alienist did not seem to observe his manner but went on, apparently at haphazard. “I regretted to put you to so great an inconvenience at this hour, but you relieved my mind by saying that you knew that Captain Treherne had been a valuedfriend of your uncle’s, and that you not only felt it incumbent on you to be of any service possible to him, but esteemed it a privilege.”
“But where,—where is Randal Ducie now?” asked Adrian, turning hastily to the door.
The doctor’s face was a picture of uncomprehending perplexity. “Why, isn’t this you?” he asked.
“Oh, no. It is my brother,” exclaimed Adrian, amidst a burst of laughter that relieved the tension of the situation. Several followed from the room to witness, at a distance not very discreet, the meeting of the facsimile brothers.
Randal Ducie had hitched the horse and the four-seated phaeton which they had had the precaution to provide to the old rack, and, awaiting the return of the physician, had strolled aimlessly up the pavement through the rolling fog to the steps of the portico. There he was suddenly confronted by the image of himself. He looked startled for a moment; then, with a rising flush and a brightening eye, ascended the flight with an eager step.
“Hello,” said one brother cavalierly.
“Hello yourself,” responded the other.
“Let me show you how the fellows kiss the cheek in old France,” said Adrian.
“Let me show you how the fellows punch the head in old Mississippi,” said Randal.
There was a momentary scuffle, and then, arm in arm and both near to tears, they strolled together down the long portico of their ancestral home with much to say to each other, after their separation, and much to hear.
The group of men at the door, looking laughinglyafter them, might readily have discriminated the moment of the disclosure of the discovery of the Duciehurst treasure with the release of the mortgage foreclosed so long ago. Randal paused abruptly, facing round upon his brother and apparently listening in stunned amaze. They were too distant for words to be distinguished, but his voice came on the air, loud and excited, in eager questioning. He was, evidently, about to turn within the house, possibly to have the evidence of his eyes to the intendment and validity of this paper, when Adrian, by a gesture, checked him. The fog was beginning to lift, and the figures of the two men were imposed on a vista of green, where the sunlight in a delicate clarity after the rains, in a refined glister of matutinal gold, was beginning to send long glinting beams among the glossy foliage of the magnolias, and to light with reverent tapering shafts the solemn aisles of the weeping willows where the tombstones reared unchanged their mortuary memorials, unmindful of sheen or shadow, of fair weather or foul, even of time, as the years came and went, a monition only of death and a prophecy of eternity.
“There is one thing I must tell you, Ran,” Adrian said, laying both hands on his brother’s shoulders.
Randal threw up his head, excited, expectant, apprehensive.
“Sheis here,—one of the passengers of theCherokee Rose.”
“She?” exclaimed Randal in blank mystification. “Who?”
Adrian was embarrassed. It seemed as if even an old love could hardly be of so sluggish a divination,—as if Randal must have probed his meaning.He reflected that it might be some keenly sensitive consciousness that could not yet bear the open recognition of the facts. Between them the subject of the sudden jilting had never been mentioned, save in Randal’s one letter apprising his brother that the engagement was off, by reason of the lady’s change of mind, which came, indeed, later than the item in the Paris journals, chronicling news of interest to Americans sojourning abroad, and giving details of a new betrothal in a circle of great wealth and position. He himself had never known such frenzy of emotion, of rage, and humiliation, and compassion, and pride. The event had racked him with vicarious woe. It had dealt him a wound that would not heal, but now and again burst into new and undreamed of phases of anguish. Even yet he shrank from taking her name on his lips—and to Randal himself, of all people. Yet Randal must be told,—he must not meet her unaware. The pause of indecision continued so long as they stood thus, Adrian’s hands on his brother’s shoulders, that Randal’s eyes dilated with a surprise obviously unaffected. He lifted his own hands to his brother’s elbows, and thus facing each other he said: “What of it? I am in a hurry,—I want to see that release. Who is this ‘she’?”
“Why, Randal,—it is Mrs. Floyd-Rosney,—Paula Majoribanks, that was, and her husband and child.”
There was still a pause, blank of significance.
“Well,” said Randal, meditatively, at length, “they won’t like that quit-claim paper one little bit of a bit.” There was a laugh in his brilliant hazel eyes, and it touched the finely cut corners of hislips. His fresh face was as joyous, as candid, as full of the tender affection of this reunion as if no word of a troubled past had been spoken to jar it.
Oh, that she should come between them on this day when they were so close to each other, Adrian reflected, when absence had made each so dear, when there was so much to say and to do, when separation impended, and time was so short. He felt that he could hardly endure to have their mutual pleasure marred, that he could not brook to see Randal abashed in her presence, and conscious, disconcerted and at a disadvantage before her husband. Above all, and before all, he winced for Randal’s pain in the reopening of these poignant old wounds to bleed and ache anew.
His arms tightened and slipped up from his brother’s shoulders and around his neck. “Oh, Randal, will it hurt you much?”
Randal looked grave. “A lawsuit is always a troublesome, long-drawn-out bother; I shrink from the suspense and the expense. But I am mighty glad to have the chance to be hurt that way.”
“Oh, I meant will it give you pain to meet Paula again as Mrs. Floyd-Rosney?”
“What?” Randal’s hearty young voice rang out with a note of amazement. “Not a bit. What do you take me for?”
“I was afraid—you would feel,” faltered Adrian.
“Is that what’s the matter with you? You look awfully muffish.”
“Well,—as you loved her once,—I thought——”
“That was a case of mistaken identity,” said Randal. “Can’t you realize that it is just because shecouldprefer another man; that she could think a thought of change; that her plighted faith could be broken; that her love,—or what we called love,—could take unto itself wings and fly away; that she was only an illusion, a delusion, a snare. I never loved the woman she is.”
“She is very beautiful,” hesitated Adrian.
“When I thought her mind and heart matched her face she seemed beautiful to me, too,” said Randal.
“You will think so still.”
“Kid, you know nothing about love. A man truly in love may have been attracted by beauty, but it is not that which holds him. It is a unity of soul; he finds a complement of mind; he has a sense of sympathy and, through thick and thin, a partisan, constant faith in a reciprocal heart. He gets used to the prettiest face and it makes little impression on him,—just as he wouldn’t notice, after a time, a fine costume. She is nothing that I imagined. She is not now, and she never was the ideal I loved. I don’t regret her. Don’t grieve for me, little boy. And now will you be so kind as to take those paws off my neck,—you are half strangling me with your fraternal anxiety. Behold, I will smite you under the fifth rib.”
There was once more a brief, boyish scuffle. Then the two turned and came walking decorously back to the group on the portico. The exterior aspect of the old ruin had an added majesty by daylight, despite the more obvious injuries of wreckage. Its fine proportions, the blended elegance and stateliness of its design, the richness even in the restraint of its ornamentation, all showed with telling effect, apart from the wild work within of the marauders.These details the rude usage it had received could not affect. It might have stood as an imposing architectural example of a princely residence of the date of its erection, and it was impossible to gaze upon it with a sense of possessing it, and feel no glow of gratulation.
“Why, the item of glass alone would be a corker,” a practical man was saying, walking backward down the stone pavement and surveying the great black gaps of the shattered windows.
The two brothers cast a meaning glance at each other, the discussion, of which this was obviously a fragment, evidently looked to a rehabilitation of the mansion under a change of owners, for, certainly, it would seem that Floyd-Rosney had neither the interest nor the associations to induce him to set up his staff of rest here. It was only a straw, but it showed how the wind of opinion set, and the brothers were in the frame of mind to discern propitious omens. The sun was bright on the over-grown spaces of the lawn. The Cherokee rose hedge that divided it from the family graveyard, and continued much further, had spread with its myriad unpruned sprangles beyond the space designed for a boundary, growing many feet wide. Beneath the great arch it described stretched a long tunnel-like arbor, throughout its whole extent, dark, mystic, in the shadow of its evergreen leaves. By reason of some natural attraction which quaint nooks have for children, Marjorie and little Ned had discovered this strange passageway, and were running in and out of the darksome space, with their shrilly sweet cries of pretended fright and real excitement, each time venturing a little farther thanbefore. The mists had lifted from the river, which spread a broad, rippling surface of burnished copper in the sunshine under an azure sky. There was no sign of approaching craft, no curl of smoke above the woods beyond the point to herald deliverance by a steamboat. One of the old ladies had established herself on her suitcase on the topmost step of the flight from the portico, and it would, indeed, have been a swift steamer that could have escaped her vigilance and passed without being signaled.
Adrian paused good-naturedly. “You need give yourself no uneasiness, madam,—it will require half an hour’s time at least for a steamboat to pass this place from the moment that she is sighted,” he said, in polite commiseration.
But the old lady sat tight. “They tell me there is a crazy man in there,” she declared lugubriously. She would leave by the first opportunity.
“He is going presently in a phaeton across the country,” Adrian explained. “There is no possible danger from him, however,—he has only occasional attacks. He is perfectly at himself to-day. But he will not be going on the boat.” This remark was unlucky, as it increased her anxiety to embark.
Randal had lifted his hat after a moment’s pause, and passed on without his brother. He hesitated, looked back, then entered the vestibule, and came suddenly face to face with Paula.
It had been five years since they had met and then it was as lovers. She had not dreamed of seeing him here. She thought him ten miles away at Caxton. She had never been more brilliantly, more delicately beautiful. Her burnished redundant hair that was wont to resemble gold, and to seem so elaboratelytended, had now a luminous fibrous effect at the verges of the smooth pompadour roll that had been hastily tossed up from her forehead. She even appeared taller, more slender than usual, since she wore a clinging gown of princess effect, in one piece, and, obviously, of matutinal usage, in more conventional surroundings. The flowing sleeve showed her bare arm from the elbow, exquisitely white and soft. The V-shaped neck gave to view her delicate snowy throat rising from a mist of lace. The strange large flower-pattern cast over a ground of thick sheeny white was an orchid with a gilded verge, and in the mauve and pearl tones she, too, looked like some rare and radiant bloom. Her eyes were sweet and expectant—her step swift. She was on her way to call back the child. She paused suddenly, dumfounded, disconcerted, confronted with the past.
She recognized Randal in one instant, despite his resemblance to his brother, and for her life she could not command her countenance. It was alternately red and white in the same moment. She felt that his confusion would heighten hers, yet she could not forgive his composure, his well-bred, graceful, gracious manner, his clear, vibrant, assured voice when he exclaimed, holding out his hand: “Mrs. Floyd-Rosney—this is an unexpected pleasure. I have this moment heard that you are here. Is that your husband?” For Floyd-Rosney had just issued from the dining-room and was advancing down the hall toward her with an unmistakable, connubial frown. “Will you kindly present me?”
It seemed for a moment as if Floyd-Rosney had never heard of the simple ceremony of an introduction.Paula could not secure and hold his attention. He passed Randal over with a casual, unnoting glance, and began to take her to task in no measured terms.
“Why do you allow the child to chase back and forth in that dark tunnel under the Cherokee rose hedge? He will be scratched to pieces by the briars, the first thing you know. Why is he with that madcap tom-boy, Marjorie Ashley? Where is his nurse, anyhow?”
“Why, she is completely knocked out by the fatigue and excitements,—she is quite old, you remember,” said Paula meekly, seeking to stem his tide of words. “I was just coming out to play nurse myself. But stop a minute. I want to——”
“I won’t stop a minute,—I don’t care what you want,”—her aspect suddenly seemed to strike his attention. “And why do you trick yourself out in such duds at such a time?”
“Because this is so easy to put on,—and I had to dress the baby,” Paula was near to tears. “But I want to——” she mended the phrase,—“This is Mr. Ducie; he wishes to meet you.”
Floyd-Rosney turned his imperious gaze on Ducie with a most unperceiving effect. “Why, of course, I know it is Mr. Ducie,—have you taken leave of your senses, Paula? Mr. Ducie and I have seen enough of each other on this trip to last us the rest of our natural existence. I can’t talk to you now, Mr. Ducie,—if you have anything to say to me you can communicate it to my lawyers; I will give you their address.”
“It is not business. It is an introduction,” explained Paula, in the extremity of confusion, whileRandal, placid and impassive, looked on inscrutably. “Mr. Ducie wishes to make your acquaintance.”
“Well, he has got it,—if that is any boon,” Floyd-Rosney stared at her, stupefied.
“But this is the brother,—Mr. Randal Ducie,—the one you have never met.” In Paula’s haste to elude her husband’s impatient interruption she could scarcely speak. Her mouth was full of words, but they tripped and fell over each other in her agitation with slips and grotesque mispronunciations.
“Hoh!” said Floyd-Rosney, permitting himself to be enlightened at last. “Why this thing of twin brothers is no end of a farce.” He shook hands with Randal with some show of conventionality. He, too, was mindful of the past. But so impatient was his temperament with aught that did not suit his play that he was disposed to cavil on the probabilities. “Are you sure,”—then he paused.
“That I am myself,—reasonably sure,” said Randal, laughing. And now that Adrian was coming in at the door Floyd-Rosney surveyed them both as they stood together with a sort of disaffected but covert arrogance.
“Well—I can see no sort of difference,” he declared.
“Oh, the difference is very obvious,” said Paula, struggling to assert her individuality.
“I should thank no man for taking the liberty of looking so much like me,” said Floyd-Rosney, seeking to compass a casual remark. Indeed, but for the pressure of old associations, the necessity of taking into consideration the impression made upon the by-standers, all conversant, doubtless, with the former relations of the parties, for several passersbyhad paused, attracted by the opportunity for the comparison of the twins side by side, Floyd-Rosney would have dismissed the Messrs. Ducie and their duplicate countenance with a mere word.
“I didn’t expect we should keep up the resemblance,” remarked Adrian. “While I was abroad I did not know what Randal was getting to look like, and, therefore, I didn’t know which way to look myself. But now that we are together we each have the advantage of a model.”
The broker seemed to gravely ponder this strange statement, the others laughed, and Paula saw her opportunity to terminate thecontretemps. “I’ll call the baby in,” she said, and slipped deftly past and out into the sunshine.
Paula’s instinct was to remove the cause of her husband’s irritation, not because she valued Floyd-Rosney’s peace of mind or hoped to reinstate his pose of dignity. But she could not adjust herself to her habitual humility with him in Randal Ducie’s presence,—to listen to his instruction, to accept his rebukes, to obey his commands, to laugh at his vague and infrequent jests, to play the abased jackal to his lion. She would efface herself; she would be null; she would do naught to bring down wrath on her devoted head,—but beyond this her strength was inadequate. So she hustled the two children into the house and up the stairs, and out of the great front windows of the hall where she told them to stand on the balcony above the heads of the group below and watch for the appearance of a boat.
Now and then their sweet, reedy tones floated down as they conversed with each other at the extreme limit of their vocal pitch, breaking, occasionally,into peals of laughter. Their steps sounded like the tread of half a dozen pairs of feet, so rapidly and erratically they ran back and forth. At intervals they paused and stood at the iron balustrade, surveying the scene from every point of view, up the river and down the river, and again across, in the zealous discharge of their delegated duty to watch for a boat. Below reigned that luxurious sense of quiet which ensues on the cessation of a turbulent commotion. Groups strolled to and fro on the portico, or found seats on the broad stone sills of the windows that opened upon it. Paula, in her white and lilac floriated house-dress, walked a little apart, pausing occasionally and glancing up to caution the two children on the balcony to be wary how they leaned their weight on the grillwork of the iron balustrade, as some rivet might be rusted and weakened.