CHAPTER XVIII
As the distanced equestrian party came within view of the two in advance they perceived that Lloyd was riding forward toward a young mountaineer who stood at gaze in the path which intersected the somewhat more definitely marked main road. They could hear Lloyd's cheery, vibrant voice as he called out to him:
"Where does this road lead?"
The man responded in somewhat surly wise, eyeing, gloweringly, the dashing apparition of the young horseman, springing up so suddenly in the midst of the woods, for Lloyd's appearance, thus well mounted, was doubly effective.
"Why—it jes' leads round an' round about 'n the mountings." He spoke as if constrained to elucidate a self-evident proposition. His large brown eyes, which had a special lustre of surface, not depth, seemed vaguely familiar, and somehow inimical, to Lloyd, who started as he heard Lucia speak, although her voice was too restrained to reach the mountaineer's ears.
"Look, look! it is an old acquaintance of ours," said Lucia, wheeling her horse to accost the laggards in the rear. "It's Diogenes. Don't you see the lantern in his hand? It's Diogenes! What distinguished people one does meet in the Great Smoky Mountains!"
The young mountaineer shifted his gaze to the approaching group for an instant only; then he fixed his intent eyes once more on Lloyd's face.
He was a fine type of his class, well built, tall, with a peculiarly trig, trim effect. He wore no coat, and his shirt of blue homespun showed how slim, yet muscular, was his body, and his long boots, drawn to the knee over his trousers of blue-jeans, encased legs of which every movement suggested activity. He had a large brown hat, the brim in front turned up, and showing a jagged, ill-cut fringe of hair that resembled an old fashion of ladies' coiffure, called a "bang." He was as surly, as ill-conditioned, as unattractive of aspect as a panther; his handsome traits appealed as little to one's liking.
Lucia's airy, debonair manner bespoke the blithest spirits. "Oh, joy! Diogenes is looking for you, Mr. Jardine. His quest is successful at last. You are the honest man! You know itmustbe you, for we are all aware how politic poor Frank is."
For the first time Mr. Jardine deigned to mention Lloyd. Heretofore he would not so much as glance at him. But he could not resist converting her pleasantry into a slur, and barbing the point. "And is not Mr. Lloyd a competitor for distinction as an honest man? Am I alone?"
Lloyd discerned the acrid taunt in the smooth tones and flashed a fierce glance into Mr. Jardine's bland and smiling countenance.
"Oh, my, no," exclaimed Lucia unexpectedly. "How can you ask? Didn't Mr. Lloyd fake up Wick-Zoo as a wild man—shall I ever cease to shiver when I think of his blood-curdling howls—when he is really as tame as—as—as you? And didn't Mr. Lloyd make out that he was nobody much, and nothing, when he is the grandson of Judge Clarence Jennico Lloyd, one of the most distinguished jurists of the day, and is a representative of one of the oldest and best families in the South. Oh, Diogenes wouldn't light his lantern to examine such a patent fraud as we have discovered Mr. Lloyd to be."
Jardine's thin cheek was flushed, but his tact enabled him to carry off the "slugging," as Lucia's retort featured itself in Lloyd's triumphant consciousness, as jauntily as a man well could.
"But really why is he going about here in the sunshine with that lantern in his hand?" Jardine pressed his horse forward, and spoke to the mountaineer. "What are you doing with that lantern, my man?"
The mountaineer turned his head slowly and looked up at Jardine with so sinister an expression of countenance that Ruth was moved to a subtle affright.
"Why does Mr. Jardine speak so—so discourteously to an inferior?" she said discontentedly.
"Because he is that kind of hairpin," said Frank lucidly.
"Well, it isn't nice; mamma always insists on special politeness to humble folk."
"You will have a harder hunt than Diogenes, if you look for mamma's precepts and practice in general action," said the loyal Frank.
There was something so incongruous with the inimical, tigerish glow in the mountaineer's eyes, and the youth and comeliness of his face, that his sharp retort seemed whetted to an edge.
"Doin' with it? Totin' it—can't ye see?"
Frank laughed out gaily, with an applausive cadence. "Butwhy, partner? You understand that we are from the New Helvetia Springs—strangers—going around to see what we can see, and we are asking a million questions of anybody that will have patience to answer them. And we can't make out any good reason for you to carry that lantern out here on this sunlit mountain."
One might think it impossible to look at Frank's gay, pink, dimpled face and not be mollified. But the lowering, glum disaffection of the yokel's expression remained unmitigated. He continued silent, vouchsafing no response, while his eyes travelled from one to another of the faces of the group, successively studying their lineaments with no friendly result. There was a pause of embarrassment disproportioned to the trifling cause that provoked it. To break the awkwardness a few words were interchanged amongst the riders.
"Had we not better move on?" suggested Jardine.
"Give Lucia a little time to rest," said Ruth. Then to Lucia, "How fast you must have been riding! You look pale with fatigue."
"Oh, I'm not tired at all," said Lucia, flushing suddenly. "You can preach hygiene nearly equal to Aunt Dora. I'd be a poor stick if that little canter could make me pale."
"Mebbe thar's no use fur a lantern on top the mounting," the mountaineer spoke so suddenly that more than one of the group started in surprise. "But how about the inside o' the mounting—ain't much sunlight thar."
"What! a cave?" Frank asked interested.
The mountaineer nodded. His face now had a slow, pondering expression. He was evidently following out a line of intricate introspection. When he looked up again, he seemed a different creature.
"Finest cave you uns ever seen," he said. The gleam of his white teeth gave his face an unexpected geniality. "It's all plumb white inside, an' shines powerful in the light of the lantern. Thar ain't a room at the New Helveshy Springs ez fine, nor in the hotel at Colbury, nuther."
These instances expressed the limits of his comprehension of magnificence, but the incongruity passed unremarked in the interest of his disclosure. Ruth and Lucia instantly began to clamour.
"Oh, couldn't we go to see it?" one cried.
"Oh, what a novelty!" exclaimed the other.
"Is it far?" asked Lloyd, a little doubtfully.
The man's eyes had been so charged with rancour, with a sense of burning wrath as he had encountered their gaze, that Lloyd had been reluctant in the presence of ladies to elicit words from him. Lloyd could not, of course, imagine any reason for this, save the unassuaged hatred that the poor of a certain type entertain for the presumably rich and favoured, without regard to individuals or circumstances. But the reply was as suave and courteous as the man's limitations rendered possible. "Thar air two openings ter it. One's a mile away, but thar's another clost by. I never know'd about it till one day las' spring. I war huntin' hyarabouts, an' viewed a dark hole 'mongst some rocks, an' crope in. I fund the place was a part of a cave I knowed afore. The door ter it is ever yander nigh the valley. I hed some matches in my pocket, but I was feared ter trest 'em fur. So I fetched a lantern, an' went plumb through ter the other eend. It's a s'prisin' sight."
"Could you guide us in a little way—so that the ladies might see something of it—what is best worth seeing?" said Lloyd. "We will pay you for your trouble, and your loss of time."
The mountaineer was standing near the showman's horse; he cast up his eyes reflectively, and presumably named a sum of money, for Lloyd replied:
"That seems pretty stiff, but we will pay you that, if you have enough candle, or oil; let me see?" and he took the grimy lantern gingerly between his gloves.
Jardine, tingling with irritation, was constrained once more to address Lloyd directly. Frank Laniston, he said to himself, was such a boy, so plastic to every impulse, that he could do more, perhaps, by allying himself with this man.
"Don't you think this rather risky?" he asked distantly.
"I can't judge without investigating," Lloyd replied, with that quiet dignity which accorded so ill with his bizarre profession. "I thought I might go in the cave a reasonable distance with the guide, and, if it seems safe and worth while, the ladies might venture a short excursion."
"Whysurely, Mr. Jardine." Even the ultra-amiable Ruth had reached the point of irritation expressed by emphasis.
"What could be more reasonable?" said Lucia, also with the countenance of reproach.
Mr. Jardine often felt at these crises that such a degree of popularity as he enjoyed with them was hardly worth conserving, but he made many sacrifices to prevent its impairment, and he was glad now of an opportunity to recede gracefully.
"That's a very good idea. I had not thought of a reconnoitering expedition."
They set out at a moderate pace, to enable their guide to keep abreast of the horses. The direction necessitated a divergence from the main road, a circumstance which aroused in Mr. Jardine a degree of anxiety and suspicion. He looked about him sharply, fixing landmarks as well as he might in his recollection—the situation of a great dome, the horizontal summit of a range, a high precipitous cliff, looking far away over a hundred minor ridges and valleys, a green abyss intervenient among steep slopes, as dank, as lush, as luxuriantly leafy as if summer had fled for hiding in this lonesome dell. But the incidents of the way were repetitious; he could not have discriminated the difference in the outlook now before his eyes, and the one which a sudden turn had served to obliterate. The path grew more narrow, less distinctly marked; it was necessary to proceed in single file, so closely did the dense rhododendron boughs press upon the dim outline of a trail. Presently all outlook was shut off by the redundant evergreen growth, almost meeting above their heads, the jungle of indefinite extent, and, but for this slender line betokening a foot-passage, impenetrable. Jardine was as courageous as a reasonable man need be, but he felt as if he had been foolhardy when he considered the down-looking, ill-conditioned aspect of their guide—like that of an implacable and surly cur—the fact of his gold watch, and those of his companions, the diamonds on the daintily gloved hands of the ladies, the well-filled purses of the men. They were indeed easy victims to highwaymen in this remote and inaccessible wilderness, and he wondered futilely how he could have so submitted his judgment to a lady's unthinking whim. As to Lloyd's indifference, he was a man experienced only in towns and town ways; he either did not realise what he might be encountering, or he was so used to jeopardy in his fantastic profession that needless risks seemed the normal incidents of life.
Of all his anticipations Jardine least expected to be led to a veritable cave, instead of an ambuscade, and his spirits rose incalculably when the voices of Lloyd and Frank sounded in the van, proclaiming their arrival at the spot.
It was a wild and lonely place; the sunshine filtered through the red and gold foliage of the trees with a lucent glister, as through stained glass. The rhododendron jungle clustered about, and fenced off the world impenetrably. A high slope on one side was bestrewn with gigantic boulders; great fragments of a fractured cliff towered above, and amongst them was a vertical crevice of irregular shape, some eight feet in height. It looked black, uninviting, sinister; but there were moss-grown ledges hard at hand, and a dimpling, swirling rill ran down the declivity and was lost in the great lush ferns. A breath of exquisite freshness and blended perfumes pervaded the air, and a steady current, outward set, was perceptible from the mouth of the cave.
"The horses can be picketed here, and doubtless Mr. Jardine will be kind enough to look after you two while we are gone," said Frank officiously.
"But why don't you wait also," asked Mr. Jardine, by no means relishing the exclusive charge of five fine horses, to swell the booty of the highwaymen, should he be molested.
"Surely Mr. Lloyd does not have to ascertain if the excursion is safe for me," said Frank bluffly. "Either you or I have to stay with the girls, and I thought you could entertain them best. They know all my patter from 'way back."
"Oh, certainly," said Mr. Jardine frigidly; "with pleasure."
Despite his irritation, his preoccupation, he noticed the sudden, acute disappointment on the mountaineer's face. His jaw dropped, his fierce eyes stared, disconsolate, doubtful; he was all at once crestfallen, stumbling, slow. Had he expected only Lloyd to venture with him into those bleak abysses? Why should he deprecate the company of the stalwart young Laniston? The inference was too plain—they made two to one. Any false dealing, any foul treachery was now impracticable. Still Jardine could not refrain from remonstrating with Lloyd, so imperative was his persuasion of some strangely inimical element.
"Mr. Lloyd," he said, with more geniality than one would have thought it possible for him to show, "let's call this thing off. We have made a mistake—a serious mistake in contemplating it. I have my reasons which I will tell you without reserve at our first opportunity. We will pay this man all the same, and consider the money a forfeit. But I beg of you—I am a serious man, no trifler—let's call this cave excursion off, right here and now."
His appeal seemed to impress Lloyd, but Frank Laniston broke out into his gruffly callow remonstrances, and the two young ladies set up a plaintive duet of reproach.
"Lloyd may back out, if he likes," said Frank, "but I will let no such show as this escape me."
"Oh, Mr. Jardine, how you shilly-shally," cried Lucia. "You agreed there was no objection if Mr. Lloyd would reconnoitre the place."
"Oh, Mr. Jardine, how you willy-nilly," cried Ruth. "You will have it that there's death and destruction in every earthly thing we propose. A serious man! Yes, as serious as the grave."
The two girls flung about in mock despair, and finally subsided, their arms interlocked, on one of the mossy ledges.
"I submit to Fate," said Lucia, "if nobody will take me in to see this cave I reckon I shall never have another chance."
"I submit to Fate," echoed Ruth. "If nobody will take me in to see this cave I shall try to lead him a life, the rest of my natural existence!"
And she fixed her eyes on her brother.
"Oh, come on, Lloyd," laughed Frank, in his gruff, callow fashion. "It's up to us."
And he plunged toward the entrance of the cavern.
The mountaineer turned and looked at Jardine with so insolent a triumph, so scornful a relish, as he stood disregarded and disconcerted, that the force of his inchoate anxieties and suspicions was redoubled. The trio disappeared, the lantern glimmering feebly in the light of the day, but casting a stronger glow in the black mouth of the cave, and suddenly shining like a star, seen through a crevice higher in the wall of rock.
Jardine seated himself upon a boulder near the two young ladies. He lifted his hat to bare his head to the breeze, for the sun had waxed hot, and he took out his white handkerchief and mopped his brow wearily. He did not lift his lashes, but absently regarded his riding-boots, now and again flicking them lightly with the whip in his hand. He knew that the eyes of both were fixed, beguilingly, upon him. He was angry with them, and he did not wish to be easily placated. But he did not evade their blandishments.
"Don't you know," said Ruth to Lucia, "that he is just hoping and praying that Mrs. Jardine (when he finds her) will be like neither of us."
"And don't you know," said Lucia, in an aside to Ruth, "that he will just dedicate himself to teaching Mrs. Jardine (when he finds her) not to be headstrong and hard-headed, as we are."
It were churlish to resist their fantastic amende, and he raised his eyes with a positive plea of anxiety in them.
"If you would only consider my views!" he urged. "If you would but trust to my larger experience! It sends me frantic for you to endanger your precious lives. Ihavedone—I am willing to do everything for your pleasure that is safe for you. I don't consider my own taste. Iloveto be at your service. I care for nothing so much as your happiness. I think I have shown this, and I ask in return but one boon—that you do not run your precious selves into danger—that——"
But they desired to hear no more from him on this theme.
"I shall tell Mrs. Jardine (when he finds her) that she is not the first!" cried Ruth, dimpling; "that he made love tobothof us!"
"The jealousy of Mrs. Jardine (when he finds her) will never know surcease, when she hears he calls both of us 'precious,'" echoed Lucia, with mock solemnity.
Then they collapsed into their silvery laughter as they sat on the mossy ledge, and guyed him.
His remonstrances were obviously futile, but before he had time to attempt another Ruth spoke, suddenly serious.
"You know I have practised drawing faces so much—the individual features from the flat, and the whole countenance in the life class—that I have become just dead letter perfect in the discrimination of human physiognomy. I don't pretend to discern character, and all that sort of thing—to set up as a second Lavater—but a face with any distinctiveness that I have once seen I recognise on a second view."
Jardine felt a sudden premonition, as of discovery—a sudden inexplicable sinking of the heart. He looked at her intently as she paused, leaned aside, plucked a tiny flowering weed from a niche in the rock, and turned it in her gauntleted hands. Lucia, one elbow on the ledge behind her, gazed indifferently into the great encompassing stretch of the woods, where in the illuminated air there was a continual wafting down of the rich, glinting, yellow leaves.
"I thought I knew that young mountaineer the moment I saw him," continued Ruth. "And now I have placed the recollection. He is the young man who sat in front of us at the song-and-dance turn, disguised as an old man. I knew his eyes, and that slight rise in the bridge of his nose, breaking the insipidity of contour—very good shape."
Lucia was erect, looking at her with startled eyes. "Sure enough?" she said.
Ruth glanced at her with a laughing rebuke of the slang phrase. "Sure enough!" she assented.
"Why, that man was in the Ferris Wheel that night!" exclaimed Lucia. "And I am morally certain he slung a stone, or iron missile of some sort, and knocked this Mr. Lloyd out of the swing. Why didn't you tell him?"
"It only came to me a moment ago," said Ruth. "Besides, you know Mr. Jardine and Frank thought that idea was just our notion—the vapourings of semi-idiots."
She glanced with pink and beguiling smiles at Mr. Jardine, expecting his complimentary protest. But he was too seriously ill at ease to respond. He, too, had realised the belated recognition, realising as well that it was unconsciously at the root of his objection to the cave expedition, and his strong, though undefinable, uneasiness. He was thinking that if the mountaineer had had the motive and the venom to attack the manager, his vindictive rancour would not have been allayed by the ineffectiveness of his assault. He doubtless would make another attempt, and this with his unsuspecting victim at his mercy in the recesses and dangers of an unexplored cave. He remembered the guide's patent dismay when Frank Laniston joined the party, and he began to take comfort from the fact that the incident was evidently unpremeditated, and that the man was unable to cope with odds. If Lloyd and Laniston had but the discretion to keep together, as indeed they needs must, for the paucity of the means of light, no disaster might befall them. True they might be led into difficult and remote labyrinths and left—the lantern extinguished—to wander till they fell into abysses, or perished with hunger.
He caught himself sharply. What fantastic folly was this? The whole theory was based upon a girl's romantic version of a fall from a foolish, mechanical contrivance—heaven knows how inefficiently constructed—and a fancied resemblance to a face seen only twice before, each time in a dim light, and apparently half eclipsed by a disguise.
He breathed more freely. He had never before had to reproach himself with morbidness. The whole idea was doubtless nonsensical. Even if it had any foundation in fact, the party outside—himself and the two girls—would be a check on treachery of any magnitude. The guide had not means at hand for such wholesale murder as the destruction of the two young men would necessitate; evidently he was not armed, or he would not have flinched, crestfallen and dismayed, when the muscular Frank Laniston had joined the manager. The report of their disappearance, and a search party from the hotel and the neighbourhood might rescue them, if abandoned to the tortuous depths of darkness, or ascertain their fate, if treacherously misled into abysses and over precipices. Despite his careful reasoning of a moment before, he had come back to this horrible possibility.
Suddenly he sprang to his feet. Frank Laniston, the lantern in his hand, his blond hair damp and limp over his forehead, his teeth chattering with cold, his shoulders shrugging with shivers, plunged out of the entrance with the wild cry:
"Come on! Hurry up! Finest thing yet! Great! Perfect palace of wonders! Don't waste a minute!"
He caught Lucia by the wrist, and she shivered at the touch of his cold hand, as he turned, and together they dashed toward the entrance he had just quitted.
"Stop, Laniston, I want to tell you something," exclaimed Jardine insistently.
"Some other day," called back Frank, between his chill teeth.
"But I must—I will speak to you!" began Jardine.
"I have left that man and Lloyd in the dark, waiting. The mountaineer didn't want me to take the light—said it burns faster in motion. He wouldn't stay alone—said he's afraid of harnts—ha! ha! ha! And we couldn't make him come back, said it's bad luck to turn back. So really I can't stop to listen to you. I can't leave them there in that awful blackness longer than I am obliged to. If you are coming—come on! Follow the lantern!"
"I insist—I insist," cried Jardine, advancing with long strides in their wake over the rocky ground, finding it impossible to overtake them. "I insist that you do not take Miss Laniston!"
Frank was infinitely affronted. He stopped short and ceremoniously referred the matter to the lady.
"Are you coming, Lucia?" he asked.
"Yes, yes!" exclaimed the girl, grasping his arm, and pulling him forward. "Oh, don't stop! Let us hurry. Oh, get the light back!"
"Always the pluckiest ever!" said Frank.
They both were running. Jardine made another frantic effort to remonstrate and stop them, as he dashed after them.
"You don't know about that guide!" he called out. "We think he is——"
"I will tell him!" cried Lucia over her shoulder. "Don't stop him. He must get the light back!"
Seeing the utter hopelessness of his effort Jardine desisted, and retraced his steps to the mouth of the cave, where Ruth stood waiting. Lucia did not so much as cast a glance backward, but Frank paused once to look over his shoulder at the two in the shadow of the rocks.
"If you two are coming, follow the lantern—if not, you'll look after Ruth, Mr. Jardine? Thanks, much."
Jardine was very doubtful of his best course. If he and Ruth joined the party none of them might ever be heard of or seen again. Yet he realised the value of the strength in numbers. Still the fact that two were without the cave to report the disappearance of the others, should they not return after a reasonable interval, was a check on the possible malevolence and treachery of the guide.
"The lantern will be out of sight," Ruth pouted. "Shall we follow them?"
"To tell you the truth I distrust that guide," said Jardine. With women he seldom resorted to candid speech, and an appeal to their intelligence and judgment. But he resolved to be frank now, though he marked how her cheek paled, how her eyes dilated. "I think that if he has any sinister intentions our remaining on guard here, so to speak, will be a check upon them. They will be rendered impracticable for fear of our report of the entrance of the party into the cave, and their failure or delay to return. Now I propose that we wait here, say, half an hour, and, if we hear nothing of our friends in that time, we will mount our horses and gallop for help to New Helvetia. What do you say?"
"Yes, yes, by all means! But, oh, why, why did we let them go!"
"We couldn't help it," said Jardine rather bitterly. He was not wont to be so frustrated and set at naught. He was a man of consideration in the ordinary associations of life. Never had he suffered such disparagement as at the hands of these youthful feather-pates.
"But they will probably come out all right," he added, "in a little while, and you and I will have the pleasure of figuring as alarmists and cowards—afraid of the cave."
"What a wild country—what wild people," Ruth shuddered.
"We will give them half an hour," suggested Jardine, drawing out his watch to consult it. "And if they do not rejoin us in that time we will raise the countryside."
She assented rather dolorously, and sat down on the ledge as before, while Jardine resumed his place on the boulder, near at hand.
The wind blew freshly through the odorous woods; the gold leaves shifted down in showers; the crystal rill went purling over the moss, and, as her watch which she held in her hand ticked away the minutes, she looked eagerly ever and anon at the dark crevice-like entrance to the cave, listening vainly, hoping to hear her brother's boisterous, boyish voice.