Walter Wyatt had known the time when the incident would have held an incomparable relish for him. But now he gazed all forlorn into the empty building with a single thought in his mind. "Not one of 'em keered a mite! Nare good word, nare sigh, not even, 'Fare ye well, old mate!'"
His breast heaved, his eyes flashed.
"An' I hev loant money ter Jim, whenst I hed need myself; an' holped George in the mill, when his wrist war sprained, without a cent o' pay; an' took the blame when 'Dolphus war faulted by his dad fur lamin' the horse-critter; an' stood back an' let Pete git the meat whenst we-uns shot fur beef, bein' he hev got a wife an' chil'ren ter feed. All leetle favors, but nare leetle word."
He had turned from the window and was tramping absently down the road, all unmindful of the skulking methods of the spectral gentry. If he had chanced to be observed, his little farce, that had yet an element of tragedy in its presentation, must soon have reached its close. But the fog hung about him like a cloak, and when the moon cast aside the vapors, it was in a distant silver sheen illumining the far reaches of the valley. Only when its light summoned forth a brilliant and glancing reflection on a lower level, as if a thousand sabers were unsheathed at a word, he recognized the proximity of the river and came to a sudden halt.
"Whar is this fool goin'?" he demanded angrily of space. "To the graveyard, I declar', ez ef I war a harnt fur true, an' buried sure enough. An' I wish I war. I wish I war."
He realized, after a moment's consideration, that he had been unconsciously actuated by the chance of meeting the wagon, returning by this route from the cross-roads' store. He was tired, disheartened; his spirit was spent; he would be glad of the lift. He reflected, however, that he must needs wait some time, for this was the date of a revival-meeting at the little church, and the distillers' wagon would lag, that its belated night journey might not be subjected to the scrutiny and comment of the church-goers. Indeed, even now Walter Wyatt saw in the distance the glimmer of a lantern, intimating homeward-bound worshipers not yet out of sight.
"The saints kep' it up late ter-night," he commented.
He resolved to wait till the roll of wheels should tell of the return of the moonshiners' empty wagon.
He crossed the river on the little foot-bridge and took his way languidly along the road toward the deserted church. He was close to the hedge that grew thick and rank about the little inclosure when he suddenly heard the sound of lamentation from within. He drew back precipitately, with a sense of sacrilege, but the branches of the unpruned growth had caught in his sleeve, and he sought to disengage the cloth without such rustling stir as might disturb or alarm the mourner, who had evidently lingered here, after the dispersal of the congregation, for a moment's indulgence of grief and despair. He had a glimpse through the shaking boughs and the flickering mist of a woman's figure kneeling on the crude red clods of a new-made grave. A vague, anxious wonder as to the deceased visited him, for in the sparsely settled districts a strong community sense prevails. Suddenly in a choking gust of sobs and burst of tears he recognized his own name in a voice of which every inflection was familiar. For a moment his heart seemed to stand still. His brain whirled with a realization of this unforeseen result of the fantastic story of his death in Eskaqua Cove, which the moonshiners, on the verge of detection and arrest, had circulated in Tanglefoot as a measure of safety. They had fancied that when the truth was developed it would be easy enough to declare the men drunk or mistaken. The "revenuers" by that time would be far away, and the pervasive security, always the sequence of a raid, successful or otherwise, would once more promote the manufacture of the brush whisky. The managers of the moonshining interest had taken measures to guard Wyatt's aged father from this fantasy of woe, but they had not dreamed that the mountain coquette might care. He himself stood appalled that this ghastly fable should delude his heart's beloved, amazed that it should cost her one sigh, one sob. Her racking paroxysms of grief over this gruesome figment of a grave he was humiliated to hear, he was woeful to see. He felt that he was not worth one tear of the floods with which she bewept his name, uttered in every cadence of tender regret that her melancholy voice could compass. It must cease, she must know the truth at whatever cost. He broke through the hedge and stood in the flicker of the moonlight before her, pale, agitated, all unlike his wonted self.
She did not hear, amid the tumult of her weeping, the rustling of the boughs, but some subtle sense took cognizance of his presence. She half rose, and with one hand holding back her dense yellow hair, which had fallen forward on her forehead, she looked up at him fearfully, tremulously, with all the revolt of the corporeal creature for the essence of the mysterious incorporeal. For a moment he could not speak. So much he must needs explain. The next instant he was whelmed in the avalanche of her words.
"Ye hev kem!" she exclaimed in a sort of shrill ecstasy. "Ye hev kem so far ter hear the word that I would give my life ter hev said before. Ye knowed it in heaven! An' how like ye ter kem ter gin me the chanst ter say it at last! How like the good heart of ye, worth all the hearts on yearth—an' buried hyar!"
With her open palm she smote the insensate clods with a gesture of despair. Then she went on in a rising tide of tumultuous emotion. "I love ye! Oh, I always loved ye! I never keered fur nobody else! An' I war tongue-tied, an' full of fool pride, an' faultin' ye fur yer ways; an' I wouldn't gin ye the word I knowed ye war wantin' ter hear. But now I kin tell the pore ghost of ye—I kin tell the pore, pore ghost!"
She buried her swollen, tear-stained face in her hands, and shook her head to and fro with the realization of the futility of late repentance. As she once more lifted her eyes, she was obviously surprised to see him still standing there, and the crisis seemed to restore to him the faculty of speech.
"Minta Elladine," he said huskily and prosaically, "I ain't dead!"
She sprang to her feet and stood gazing at him, intent and quivering.
"I be truly alive an' kickin', an' ez worthless ez ever," he went on.
She said not a word, but bent and pallid, and, quaking in every muscle, stood peering beneath her hand, which still held back her hair.
"It's all a mistake," he urged. "This ain't no grave. The top war dug a leetle ter turn off a revenuer's suspicions o' the moonshiners. They put that tale out."
Still, evidently on the verge of collapse, she did not speak.
"Ye needn't be afeared ez I be goin' ter take fur true all I hearn ye say; folks air gin ter vauntin' the dead," he paused for a moment, remembering the caustic comments over the deal of the cards, then added, "though I reckon I hev hed some cur'ous 'speriences ez a harnt."
She suddenly threw up both arms with a shrill scream, half nervous exhaustion, half inexpressible delight. She swayed to and fro, almost fainting, her balance failing. He caught her in his arms, and she leaned sobbing against his breast.
"I stand ter every word of it," she cried, her voice broken and lapsed from control. "I love ye, an' I despise all the rest!"
"I be powerful wild," he suggested contritely.
"I ain't keerin' ef ye be ez wild ez a deer."
"But I'm goin' to quit gamesome company an' playin' kyerds an' sech. I expec' ter mend my ways now," he promised eagerly.
"Ye kin mend 'em or let 'em stay tore, jes ez ye please," she declared recklessly. "I ain't snatched my lovyer from the jaws o' death ter want him otherwise; ye be plumb true-hearted, I know."
"I mought ez well hev been buried in this grave fer the last ten year' fer all the use I hev been," he protested solemnly; "but I hev learnt a lesson through bein' a harnt fer a while—I hev jes kem ter life. I'm goin' ter live now. I'll make myself some use in the world, an' fust off I be goin' ter hinder the murder of a man what they hev got trapped up yander at the still."
This initial devoir of his reformation, however, Wyatt found no easy matter. The event had been craftily planned to seem an accident, a fall from a cliff in pursuing the wagon, and only the most ardent and cogent urgency on Wyatt's part prevailed at length. He argued that this interpretation of the disaster would not satisfy the authorities. To take the raider's life insured discovery, retribution. But as he had been brought to the still in the night, it was obvious that if he were conveyed under cover of darkness and by roundabout trails within striking distance of the settlements, he could never again find his way to the locality in the dense wilderness. In his detention he had necessarily learned nothing fresh, for the only names he could have overheard had long been obnoxious to suspicion of moonshining, and afforded no proof. Thus humanity, masquerading as caution, finally triumphed, and the officer, blindfolded, was conducted through devious and winding ways many miles distant, and released within a day's travel of the county town.
Walter Wyatt was scarcely welcomed back to life by the denizens of the cove generally with the enthusiasm attendant on the first moments of his resuscitation, so to speak. He never forgot the solemn ecstasy of that experience, and in later years he was wont to annul any menace of discord with his wife by the warning, half jocose, half tender: "Ye hed better mind; ye'll be sorry some day fur treatin' me so mean. Remember, I hev viewed ye a-weepin' over my grave before now."
A reformation, however complete and salutary, works no change of identity, and although he developed into an orderly, industrious, law-abiding citizen, his prankish temperament remained recognizable in the fantastic fables which he delighted to recount at some genial fireside of what he had seen and heard as a ghost.
"'Pears like, Watt, ye hed more experiences whenst dead than living'," said an auditor, as these stories multiplied.
"I did, fur a fack," Watt protested. "I war a powerful onchancy, onquiet ghost. I even did my courtin' whilst in my reg'lar line o' business a-harntin' a graveyard."
Tall, delicate, and stately, with all the finished symmetry and distinction that might appertain to a cultivated plant, yet sharing that fragility of texture and peculiar suggestion of evanescence characteristic of the unheeded weed as it flowers, the Chilhowee lily caught his eye. Albeit long familiar, the bloom was now invested with a special significance and the sight of it brought him to a sudden pause.
The cluster grew in a niche on the rocky verge of a precipice beetling over the windings of the rugged primitive road on the slope of the ridge. The great pure white bloom, trumpet-shaped and crowned with its flaring and many-cleft paracorolla, distinct against the densely blue sky, seemed the more ethereal because of the delicacy of its stalk, so erect, so inflexibly upright. About it the rocks were at intervals green with moss, and showed here and there heavy ocherous water stain. The luxuriant ferns and pendant vines in the densely umbrageous tangle of verdure served to heighten by contrast the keen whiteness of the flower and the isolation of its situation.
Ozias Crann sighed with perplexity as he looked, and then his eye wandered down the great bosky slope of the wooded mountain where in marshy spots, here and there, a sudden white flare in the shadows betokened the Chilhowee lily, flowering in myraids, holding out lures bewildering in their multitude.
"They air bloomin' bodaciously all over the mounting," he remarked rancorously, as he leaned heavily on a pickaxe; "but we uns hed better try it ter-night ennyhows."
It was late in August; a moon of exceeding lustre was in the sky, while still the sun was going down. All the western clouds were aflare with gorgeous reflections; the long reaches of the Great Smoky range had grown densely purple; and those dim Cumberland heights that, viewed from this precipice of Chilhowee, were wont to show so softly blue in the distance, had now a variant amethystine hue, hard and translucent of effect as the jewel itself.
The face of one of his companions expressed an adverse doubt, as he, too, gazed at the illuminated wilderness, all solitary, silent, remote.
"'Pears like ter me it mought be powerful public," Pete Swofford objected. He had a tall, heavy, lumpish, frame, a lackluster eye, a broad, dimpled, babyish face incongruously decorated with a tuft of dark beard at the chin. The suit of brown jeans which he wore bore token variously of the storms it had weathered, and his coarse cow-hide boots were drawn over the trousers to the knee. His attention was now and again diverted from the conversation by the necessity of aiding a young bear, which he led by a chain, to repel the unwelcome demonstrations of two hounds belonging to one of his interlocutors. Snuffling and nosing about in an affectation of curiosity the dogs could not forbear growling outright, as their muzzles approached their shrinking hereditary enemy, while the cub nestled close to his master and whimpered like a child.
"Jes' so, jes' so, Honey. I'll make 'em cl'ar out!" Swofford replied to the animal's appeal with ready sympathy. Then, "I wish ter Gawd, Rufe, ye'd call yer dogs off," he added in a sort of aside to the youngest of the three mountaineers, who stood among the already reddening sumac fringing the road, beside his horse, athwart which lay a buck all gray and antlered, his recently cut throat still dripping blood. The party had been here long enough for it to collect in a tiny pool in a crevice in the rocky road, and the hounds constrained to cease their harassments of the bear now began to eagerly lap it up. The rifle with which Rufe Kinnicutt had killed the deer was still in his hands and he leaned upon it; he was a tall, finely formed, athletic young fellow with dark hair, keen, darkly greenish eyes, full of quickly glancing lights, and as he, too, scanned the sky, his attitude of mind also seemed dissuasive.
"'Pears like thar won't be no night, ez ye mought call night, till this moon goes down," he suggested. "'Pears nigh ez bright ez day!"
Ozias Crann's lank, angular frame; his narrow, bony face; his nose, long yet not large, sharp, pinched; his light grey eyes, set very closely together; his straggling reddish beard, all were fitting concomitants to accent the degree of caustic contempt he expressed. "Oh, to be sure!" he drawled. "It'll be powerful public up hyar in the mounting in the midnight,—that's a fac'!—an' moonlight is mighty illconvenient to them ez wants ter git spied on through totin' a lantern in cur'ous places."
This sarcasm left the two remonstrants out of countenance. Pete Swofford found a certain resource in the agitations of his bear, once more shrinking and protesting because of the dogs. "Call off yer hound-dogs, Rufe," he cried irritably, "or I'll gin 'em a bullet ter swallow."
"Ye air a plumb fool about that thar bar, Pete," Kinnicutt said sourly, calling off the hounds nevertheless.
"That thar bar?" exclaimed Swofford. "Why, thar never war sech a bar! That thar bar goes ter mill, an' kin fetch home grist,—ef I starts him out in the woods whar he won't meet no dogs nor contrairy cattle o' men he kin go ter mill all by his lone!—same ez folks an' the bes' kind o' folks, too!"
In fact the bear was even now begirt with a meal-bag, well filled, which although adding to his uncouth appearance and perhaps unduly afflicting the sensibilities of the horse, who snorted and reared at the sight of him, saved his master the labor of "packing" the heavy weight.
Swofford had his genial instincts and in return was willing to put up with the cubbishness of the transport,—would wait in the illimitable patience of the utterly idle for the bear to climb a tree if he liked and pleasantly share with him the persimmons of his quest;—would never interfere when the bear flung himself down and wallowed with the bag on his back, and would reply to the censorious at home, objecting to the dust and sand thus sifting in with the meal, with the time honored reminder that we are all destined "to eat a peck of dirt" in this world.
"Whenst ye fust spoke o' diggin'," said Kinnicutt, interrupting a lengthening account of the bear's mental and moral graces, "I 'lowed ez ye mought be sayin' ez they air layin' off ter work agin in the Tanglefoot Mine."
Ozias Crann lifted a scornful chin. "I reckon the last disasters thar hev interrupted the company so ez they hain't got much heart todes diggin' fur silver agin over in Tanglefoot Cove. Fust," he checked off these misfortunes, by laying the fingers of one hand successively in the palm of the other, "the timbers o' one o' the cross cuts fell an' the roof caved in an' them two men war kilt, an' thar famblies sued the company an' got mo' damages 'n the men war bodaciously wuth. Then the nex' thing the pay agent, ez war sent from Glaston, war held up in Tanglefoot an' robbed—some say by the miners. He got hyar whenst they war out on a strike, an' they robbed him 'cause they warn't paid cordin' ter thar lights, an' they did shoot him up cornsider'ble. That happened jes' about a year ago. Then sence, thar hev been a awful cavin' in that deep shaft they hed sunk in the tunnel, an' the mine war flooded an' the machinery ruint—I reckon the company in Glaston ain't a-layin' off ter fly in the face o' Providence and begin agin, arter all them leadin's ter quit."
"Some believe he warn't robbed at all," Kinnicutt said slowly. He had turned listlessly away, evidently meditating departure, his hand on his horse's mane, one foot in the stirrup.
"Ye know that gal named Loralindy Byars?" Crann said craftily.
Kinnicutt paused abruptly. Then as the schemer remained silent he demanded, frowning darkly, "What's Loralindy Byars got ter do with it?"
"Mighty nigh all!" Crann exclaimed, triumphantly.
It was a moment of tense suspense. But it was not Crann's policy to tantalize him further, however much the process might address itself to his peculiar interpretation of pleasure. "That thar pay agent o' the mining company," he explained, "he hed some sort'n comical name—oh, I remember now, Renfrow—Paul Renfrow—waal—ye know he war shot in the knee when the miners way-laid him."
"I disremember now ef it war in the knee or the thigh," Swofford interposed, heavily pondering.
Kinnicutt's brow contracted angrily, and Crann broke into open wrath: "An' I ain't carin', ye fool—what d' ye interrupt fur like that?"
"Wall," protested Swofford, indignantly, "ye said 'ye know' an' I didn't know."
"An' I aint carin'—the main p'int war that he could neither ride nor walk. So the critter crawled! Nobody knows how he gin the strikers the slip, but he got through ter old man Byars's house. An' thar he staid till Loralindy an' the old 'oman Byars nussed him up so ez he could bear the pain o' bein' moved. An' he got old man Byars ter wagin him down ter Colb'ry, a-layin' on two feather beds 'count o' the rocky roads, an' thar he got on the steam kyars an' he rid on them back ter whar he kem from."
Kinnicutt seemed unable to longer restrain his impatience. He advanced a pace. "Ye appear ter 'low ez ye air tellin' news—I knowed all that whenst it happened a full year ago!"
"I reckon ye know, too, ez Loralindy hed no eyes nor ears fur ennybody else whilst he war hyar—but then he war good-lookin' an' saaft-spoken fur true! An' now he hev writ a letter ter her!"
Crann grinned as Kinnicutt inadvertently gasped. "How do you uns know that?" the young man hoarsely demanded, with a challenging accent of doubt, yet prescient despair.
"'Kase, bubby, that's the way the story 'bout the lily got out. I was at the mill this actial day. The miller hed got the letter—hevin' been ter the post-office at the Crossroads—an' he read it ter her, bein' ez Loralindy can't read writin'. She warn't expectin' it. He writ of his own accord."
A sense of shadows impended vaguely over all the illuminated world, and now and again a flicker of wings through the upper atmosphere betokened the flight of homing birds. Crann gazed about him absently while he permitted the statement he had made to sink deep into the jealous, shrinking heart of the young mountaineer, and he repeated it as he resumed.
"She warnt' expectin' of the letter. She jes' stood thar by the mill-door straight an' slim an' white an' still, like she always be—ter my mind like she war some sort'n sperit, stiddier a sure enough gal—with her yaller hair slick an' plain, an' that old, faded, green cotton dress she mos' always wears, an' lookin' quiet out at the water o' the mill-dam ter one side, with the trees a-wavin' behind her at the open door—jes' like she always be! An' arter awhile she speaks slow an' saaft an axes the miller ter read it aloud ter her. An' lo! old man Bates war rej'iced an' glorified ter the bone ter be able ter git a peek inter that letter! He jes' shet down the gates and stopped the mill from runnin' in a jiffy, an' tole all them loafers, ez hangs round thar mos'ly, ter quit thar noise. An' then he propped hisself up on a pile o' grist, an' thar he read all the sayin's ez war writ in that letter. An' a power o' time it tuk, an' a power o' spellin' an' bodaciously wrastlin' with the alphabit."
He laughed lazily, as he turned his quid of tobacco in his mouth, recollecting the turbulence of these linguistic turmoils.
"This hyar feller—this Renfrow—he called her in the letter 'My dear friend'—he did—an' 'lowed he hed a right ter the word, fur ef ever a man war befriended he hed been. He 'lowed ez he could never furget her. An' Lord! how it tickled old man Bates ter read them sentiments—the prideful old peacock! He would jes' stop an' push his spectacles back on his slick bald head an' say, 'Ye hear me, Loralindy! he 'lows he'll never furget the keer ye tuk o' him whenst he war shot an' ailin' an' nigh ter death. An' no mo' he ought, nuther. But some do furget sech ez that, Loralindy—some do!' An' them fellers at the mill, listenin' ter the letter, could sca'cely git thar consent ter wait fur old man Bates ter git through his talk ter Loralindy, that he kin talk ter every day in the year! But arter awhile he settled his spectacles agin, an' tuk another tussle with the spellin,' an' then he rips out the main p'int o' the letter. This stranger-man he 'lowed he war bold enough ter ax another favior. The cuss tried ter be funny. 'One good turn desarves another,' he said. 'An' ez ye hev done me one good turn, I want ye ter do me another.' An' old man Bates hed the insurance ter waste the time a-laffin' an' a-laffin' at sech a good joke. Them fellers at the mill could hev fund it in thar hearts ter grind him up in his own hopper, ef it wouldn't hev ground up with him thar chance o' ever hearin' the e-end o' that thar interestin' letter. So thar comes the favior. Would she dig up that box he treasured from whar he told her he hed buried it, arter he escaped from the attack o' the miners? An' would she take the box ter Colb'ry in her grandad's wagin, an' send it ter him by express. He hed tole her once whar he hed placed it—an' ter mark the spot mo' percisely he hed noticed one Chilhowee lily bulb right beside it. An' then says the letter, "Good bye, Chilhowee Lily!' An' all them fellers stood staring."
A light wind was under way from the west. Delicate flakes of red and glistening white were detached from the clouds. Sails—sails were unfurling in the vast floods of the skies. With flaunting banners and swelling canvas a splendid fleet reached half way to the zenith. But a more multitudinous shipping still swung at anchor low in the west, though the promise of a fair night as yet held fast.
"An' now," said Ozias Crann in conclusion, "all them fellers is a-diggin'."
"Whut's in the box?" demanded Swofford, his big baby-face all in a pucker of doubt.
"The gold an' silver he ought ter hev paid the miners, of course. They always 'lowed they never tuk a dollar off him; they jes' got a long range shot at him! How I wish," Ozias Crann broke off fervently, "how I wish I could jes' git my hands on that money once!" He held out his hands, long and sinewy, and opened and shut them very fast.
"Why, that would be stealin'!" exclaimed Kinnicutt with repulsion.
"How so? 't ain't his'n now, sure—he war jes' the agent ter pay it out," argued Crann, volubly.
"It belongs ter the mine owners, then—the company." There was a suggestion of inquiry in the younger man's tone.
"'Pears not—they sent it hyar fur the percise purpose ter be paid out!" the specious Crann replied.
"Then it belongs ter the miners."
"They hedn't yearned it—an' ef some o' them hed they warn't thar ter receive it, bein' out on a strike. They hed burnt down the company's office over yander at the mine in Tanglefoot Cove, with all the books an' accounts, an' now nobody knows what's owin' ter who."
Kinnicutt's moral protests were silenced, not satisfied. He looked up moodily at the moon now alone in the sky, for only a vanishing segment of the great vermilion sphere of the sun was visible above the western mountains, when suddenly he felt one of those long grasping claws on his arm. "Now, Rufe, bubby," a most insinuating tone, Crann had summoned, "all them fool fellers air diggin' up the face of the yearth, wharever they kin find a Chilhowee lily—like sarchin' fur a needle in a haystack. But we uns will do a better thing than that. I drawed the idee ez soon ez I seen you an' Pete hyar this evenin' so onexpected. 'Them's my pardners,' I sez ter myself. 'Pete ter holp dig an' tote ef the box be heavy. An' you ter find out edzac'ly whar it be hid.' You uns an' Loralindy hev been keepin' company right smart, an' ye kin toll Loralindy along till she lets slip jes' whar that lily air growin'. I'll be bound ez she likes ye a sight better 'n that Renfrow—leastwise ef 't warn't fur his letter, honeyin' her up with complimints, an' she hevin' the chance o' tollin' him on through doin' him sech faviors, savin' his life, an' now his money—shucks it's mo' our money 'n his'n; 't ain't his'n! Gol-darn the insurance o' this Renfrow! His idee is ter keep the money his own self, an' make her sen' it ter him. Then 'Good-bye, Chilhowee Lily!'"
The night had come at last, albeit almost as bright as day, but with so ethereal, so chastened a splendor that naught of day seemed real. A world of dreams it was, of gracious illusions, of far vague distances that lured with fair promises that the eye might not seek to measure. The gorgeous tints were gone, and in their stead were soft grays and indefinite blurring browns, and every suggestion of silver that metal can show flashed in variant glitter in the moon. The mountains were majestically sombre, with a mysterious sense of awe in their great height. There were few stars; only here and there the intense lustre of a still planet might withstand the annihilating magnificence of the moon.
Its glamour did not disdain the embellishment of humbler objects. As Rufe Kinnicutt approached a little log cabin nestling in a sheltered cove he realized that a year had gone by since Renfrow had seen it first, and that thus it must have appeared when he beheld it. The dew was bright on the slanting roof, and the shadow of oak trees wavered over it. The mountain loomed above. The zigzag lines of the rail fence, the bee-gums all awry ranged against it, the rickety barn and fowl-house, the gourd vines draping the porch of the dwelling, all had a glimmer of dew and a picturesque symmetry, while the spinning wheel as Loralinda sat in the white effulgent glow seemed to revolve with flashes of light in lieu of spokes, and the thread she drew forth was as silver. Its murmuring rune was hardly distinguishable from the chant of the cicada or the long droning in strophe and antistrophe of the water-side frogs far away, but such was the whir or her absorption that she did not perceive his approach till his shadow fell athwart the threshold, and she looked up with a start.
"Ye 'pear powerful busy a-workin' hyar so late in the night," he exclaimed with a jocose intonation.
She smiled, a trifle abashed; then evidently conscious of the bizarre suggestions of so much ill-timed industry, she explained, softly drawling: "Waal, ye know, Granny, she be so harried with her rheumatics ez she gits along powerful poor with her wheel, an' by night she be plumb out'n heart an' mad fur true. So arter she goes ter bed I jes' spins a passel fur her, an' nex' mornin' she 'lows she done a toler'ble stint o' work an' air consider'ble s'prised ez she war so easy put out."
She laughed a little, but he did not respond. With his sensibilities all jarred by the perfidious insinuation of Ozias Crann, and his jealousy all on the alert, he noted and resented the fact that at first her attention had come back reluctantly to him, and that he, standing before her, had been for a moment a less definitely realized presence than the thought in her mind—this thought had naught to do with him, and of that he was sure.
"Loralindy," he said with a turbulent impulse of rage and grief; "whenst ye promised to marry me ye an' me war agreed that we would never hev one thought hid from one another—ain't that a true word?"
The wheel had stopped suddenly—the silver thread was broken; she was looking up at him, the moonlight full on the straight delicate lineaments of her pale face, and the smooth glister of her golden hair. "Not o' my own," she stipulated. And he remembered, and wondered that it should come to him so late, that she had stood upon this reservation and that he—poor fool—had conceded it, thinking it concerned the distilling of whisky in defiance of the revenue law, in which some of her relatives were suspected to be engaged, and of which he wished to know as little as possible.
The discovery of his fatuity was not of soothing effect. "'T war that man Renfrow's secret—I hearn about his letter what war read down ter the mill."
She nodded acquiescently, her expression once more abstracted, her thoughts far afield.
He had one moment of triumph as he brought himself tensely erect, shouldering his gun—his shadow behind him in the moonlight duplicated the gesture with a sharp promptness as at a word of command.
"All the mounting's a-diggin' by this time!" He laughed with ready scorn, then experienced a sudden revulsion of feeling. Her face had changed. Her expression was unfamiliar. She had caught together the two ends of the broken thread, and was knotting them with a steady hand, and a look of composed security on her face, that was itself a flout to the inopportune search of the mountaineers and boded ill to his hope to discover from her the secret of the cache. He recovered himself suddenly.
"Ye 'lowed ter me ez ye never keered nuthin' fur that man, Renfrow," he said with a plaintive appeal, far more powerful with her than scorn.
She looked up at him with candid reassuring eyes. "I never keered none fur him," she protested. "He kem hyar all shot up, with the miners an' mounting boys hot foot arter him—an' we done what we could fur him. Gran'daddy 'lowed ez he warn't 'sponsible fur whut the owners done, or hedn't done at the mine, an' he seen no sense in shootin' one man ter git even with another."
"But ye kep' his secret!" Kinnicutt persisted.
"What fur should I tell it—'t ain't mine?"
"That thar money in that box he buried ain't his'n, nuther!" he argued.
There was an inscrutable look in her clear eyes. She had risen, and was standing in the moonlight opposite him. The shadows of the vines falling over her straight skirt left her face and hair the fairer in the silver glister.
"'Pears like ter me," he broke the silence with his plaintive cadence, "ez ye ought ter hev tole me. I ain't keerin' ter know 'ceptin' ye hev shet me out. It hev hurt my feelin's powerful ter be treated that-a-way. Tell me now—or lemme go forever!"
She was suddenly trembling from head to foot. Pale she was always. Now she was ghastly. "Rufe Kinnicutt," she said with the solemnity of an adjuration, "ye don't keer fur sech ez this, fur nuthin'. An' I promised!"
He noted her agitation. He felt the clue in his grasp. He sought to wield his power, "Choose a-twixt us! Choose a-twixt the promise ye made ter that man—or the word ye deny ter me! An' when I'm gone—I'm gone!"
She stood seemingly irresolute.
"It's nuthin' ter me," he protested once more. "I kin keep it an' gyard it ez well ez you uns. But I won't be shet out, an' doubted, an' denied, like ez ef I wan't fitten ter be trested with nuthin'!"
He stood a moment longer, watching her trembling agitation, and feeling that tingling exasperation that might have preceded a blow.
"I'm goin'," he threatened.
As she still stood motionless he turned away as if to make good his threat. He heard a vague stir among the leaves, and turning back he saw that the porch was vacant.
He had overshot the mark. In swift repentance he retraced his steps. He called her name. No response save the echoes. The house dogs, roused to a fresh excitement, were gathering about the door, barking in affected alarm, save one, to whom Kinnicutt was a stranger, that came, silent and ominous, dragging a block and chain from under the house. Kinnicutt heard the sudden drowsy plaints of the old rheumatic grandmother, as she was rudely awakened by the clamors, and presently a heavy footfall smote upon the puncheons that floored the porch. Old Byars himself, with his cracked voice and long gray hair, had left his pipe on the mantel-piece to investigate the disorder without.
"Hy're Rufe!" he swung uneasily posed on his crutch stick in the doorway, and mechanically shaded his eyes with one hand, as from the sun, as he gazed dubiously at the young man, "hain't ye in an' about finished yer visit?—or yer visitation, ez the pa'son calls it. He, he, he! Wall, Loralindy hev gone up steers ter the roof-room, an it's about time ter bar up the doors. Waal, joy go with ye, he, he, he! Come off, Tige, ye Bose, hyar! Cur'ous I can't l'arn them dogs no manners."
A dreary morrow ensued on the splendid night. The world was full of mists; the clouds were resolved into drizzling rain; every perspective of expectation was restricted by the limited purlieus of the present. The treasure-seekers digging here and there throughout the forest in every nook in low ground, wherever a drift of the snowy blossoms might glimmer, began to lose hope and faith. Now and again some iconoclastic soul sought to stigmatize the whole rumor as a fable. More than one visited the Byars cabin in the desperate hope that some chance word might fall from the girl, giving a clue to the mystery.
By daylight the dreary little hut had no longer poetic or picturesque suggestion. Bereft of the sheen and shimmer of the moonlight its aspect had collapsed like a dream into the dullest realities. The door-yard was muddy and littered; here the razor-back hogs rooted unrebuked; the rail fence had fallen on one side, and it would seem that only their attachment to home prevented them from wandering forth to be lost in the wilderness; the clap-boards of the shiny roof were oozing and steaming with dampness, and showed all awry and uneven; the clay and stick chimney, hopelessly out of plumb, leaned far from the wall.
Within it was not more cheerful; the fire smoked gustily into the dim little room, illumined only by the flicker of the blaze and the discouraged daylight from the open door, for the batten shutters of the unglazed window were closed. The puncheon floor was grimy—the feet that curiosity had led hither brought much red clay mire upon them. The poultry, all wet and dispirited, ventured within and stood about the door, now scuttling in sudden panic and with peevish squawks upon the unexpected approach of a heavy foot. Loralinda, sitting at her spinning wheel, was paler than ever, all her dearest illusions dashed into hopeless fragments, and a promise which she did not value to one whom she did not love quite perfect and intact.
The venerable grandmother sat propped with pillows in her arm-chair, and now and again adjured the girl to "show some manners an' tell the neighbors what they so honed to know." With the vehemence of her insistence her small wizened face would suddenly contract; the tortures of the rheumatism, particularly rife in such weather, would seize upon her, and she would cry aloud with anguish, and clutch her stick and smite her granddaughter to expedite the search for the primitive remedies of dried "yarbs" on which her comfort depended.
"Oh, Lord!" she would wail as she fell back among the pillows. "I'm a-losin' all my religion amongst these hyar rheumatics. I wish I war a man jes' ter say 'damn 'em' once! An' come good weather I'll sca'cely be able ter look Loralindy in the face, considerin' how I hector her whilst I be in the grip o' this misery."
"Jes' pound away, Granny, ef it makes ye feel ennywise better," cried Loralinda, furtively rubbing the weales on her arm. "It don't hurt me wuth talkin' 'bout. Ye jes' pound away, an' welcome!"
Perhaps it was her slender, elastic strength and erect grace, with her shining hair and ethereal calm pallor in the midst of the storm that evoked the comparison, for Ozias Crann was suddenly reminded of the happy similitude suggested by the letter that he had heard read and had repeated yesterday to his cronies as he stood in the road. The place was before him for one illumined moment—the niche in the cliff, with its ferns and vines, the delicate stately dignity of the lilies outlined against the intense blue of the sky.
The reminiscence struck him like a discovery. Where else could the flower have been so naturally noticed by this man, a stranger, and remembered as a mark in the expectation of finding it once more when the bulb should flower again—as beside the county road? He would have been hopelessly lost a furlong from the path.
Crann stood for a moment irresolute, then silently grasped his pickaxe and slunk out among the mists on the porch.
He berated his slow mind as he hurried invisible through the vast clouds in which the world seemed lost. Why should the laggard inspiration come so late if it had come at all? Why should he, with the clue lying half developed in his own mental impressions, have lost all the vacant hours of the long, bright night, have given the rumor time to pervade the mountains, and set all the idlers astir before he should strike the decisive blow?
There, at last, was the cliff, beetling far over the mist-filled valley below. A slant of sunshine fell on the surging vapor, and it gleamed opalescent. There was the niche, with the lilies all a-bloom. He came panting up the slope under the dripping trees, with a dash of wind in his face and the odor of damp leafage and mold on the freshening air.
He struck the decisive blow with a will. The lilies shivered and fell apart. The echoes multiplied the stroke with a ringing metallic iteration.
The loiterers were indeed abroad. The sound lured them from their own devious points of search, and a half dozen of the treasure-seekers burst from the invisibilities of the mists as Ozias Crann's pickaxe cleaving the mold struck upon the edge of a small japanned box hidden securely between the rocks, a scant foot below the surface. A dangerous spot for a struggle, the verge of a precipice, but the greed for gain is a passion that blunts the sense of peril. The wrestling figures, heedless of the abyss, swayed hither and thither, the precious box among them; now it was captured by a stronger grasp, now secured anew by sheer sleight-of-hand. More than once it dropped to the ground, and at last in falling the lock gave way, and scattered to the wind were numberless orderly vouchers for money already paid, inventories of fixtures, bills for repairs, reports of departments—various details of value in settling the accounts of the mine, and therefore to be transmitted to the main office of the mining company at Glaston.
"Ef I hed tole ye ez the money warn't thar, ye wouldn't hev believed me," Loralinda Byars said drearily, when certain disappointed wights, who had sought elsewhere and far afield, repaired to the cabin laughing at their own plight and upbraiding her with the paucity of the cache. "I knowed all the time what war in that box. The man lef' it thar in the niche arter he war shot, it bein' heavy ter tote an' not wuth much. But he brung the money with him, an' tuk it off, bein', he said, without orders from the owners, the miners hevin' burnt down the offices, an' bruk open the safe an' destroyed all the papers, ceptin' that leetle box. I sewed up the man's money myself in them feather beds what he lay on whenst he war wagined down 'ter Colb'ry ter take the kyars. He 'lowed the compn'y mought want them papers whenst they went into liquidation, ez he called it, an' tole me how he hed hid 'em."
Rufe Kinnicutt wondered that she should have been so unyielding. She did not speculate on the significance of her promise. She did not appraise its relative value with other interests, and seek to qualify it. Once given she simply kept it. She held herself no free agent. It was not hers.
The discovery that the lure was gold revealed the incentive of her lover's jealous demand to share the custody of the secret. His intention was substituted for the deed in her rigid interpretation of integrity. It cost her many tears. But she seemed thereafter to him still more unyielding, as erect, fragile, ethereally pure and pale she noted his passing no more than the lily might. He often thought of the cheap lure of the sophisms that had so deluded him, the simple obvious significance of the letter, and the phrase, "Good-bye, Chilhowee Lily," had also an echo of finality for him.
Gordon never forgot the sensation he experienced on first beholding it. There was no mist in the midnight. The moon was large and low. The darkness of the dense, towering forests on either hand impinged in no wise on the melancholy realm of wan light in which the Mississippi lay, unshadowed, solitary, silent as always, its channel here a mile or more in breadth.
He had been observing how the mighty water-course was sending out its currents into a bayou, called Bogue Holauba, as if the larger stream were a tributary of the lesser. This peculiarity of the river in the deltaic region, to throw off volume instead of continually receiving affluents, was unaccustomed to him, being a stranger to the locality, and for a moment it focussed his interest. The next, his every faculty was concentrated on a singular phenomenon on the bank of the bogue.
He caught his breath with a gasp; then, without conscious volition, he sought to explain it to his own shocked senses, to realize it as some illusion, some combination of natural causes, the hour, the pallor pervading the air, the distance, for his boat was near the middle of the stream,—but the definiteness of the vision annulled his efforts.
There on the broad, low margin, distinct, yet with a coercive conviction of unreality, the figure of a man drawn in lines of vague light paced slowly to and fro; an old man, he would have said, bent and wizened, swaying back and forth, in expressive contortions, a very pantomime of woe, wringing gaunt hands and arms above his head, and now and again bowing low in recurrent paroxysms of despair. The wind held its breath, and the river, mute as ever, made no sign, and the encompassing alluvial wilderness stood for a type of solitude. Only the splashing of the paddle of the "dug-out" gave token of the presence of life in all the land.
Gordon could not restrain his wonder. "What—what—is—that Thing—over there on the bank of the bogue?" he called out to the negro servant who was paddling the canoe.
He was all unprepared for the effect of his words. Indeed, he was fain to hold hard to the gunwales. For the negro, with a sudden galvanic start, let slip the paddle from his hand, recovering it only by a mighty lunge in a mechanical impulse of self-preservation. The dug-out, the most tricksy craft afloat, rocked violently in the commotion and threatened to capsize. Then, as it finally righted, its course was hastily changed, and under the impetus of panic terror it went shooting down the river at a tremendous speed.
"Why, what does all this mean?" demanded Gordon.
"Don't ye talk ter me, boss!" the boatman, with chattering teeth, adjured his passenger. "Don't ye talk ter me, boss! Don't tell me ye seed somepin over dar on Bogue Holauba—'kase ef ye do I'se gwine ter turn dis dug-out upside down an' swim out ter de Arkansas side. I ain't gwine ter paddle dis boat fur no ghost-seer, sure's ye are born. I ain't gwine ter have no traffickin' wid ghosts nur ghost-seers nuther. I'd die 'fore de year's out, sure!"
The sincerity of the servant's fright was attested by the change in his manner. He had been hitherto all cheerful, though respectful, affability, evidently bidding high for a tip. Now he crouched disconsolate and sullen in his place, wielding the paddle with all his might, and sedulously holding down his head, avoiding the stranger's eye.
Gordon felt the whole situation in some sort an affront to his dignity, and the apparition being withdrawn from view by the changed direction, he was in better case to take account of this,—to revolt at the uncouth character of the craft and guide sent for him; the absence of any member of his entertainer's family to welcome the visitor, here at their instance and invitation; the hour of the night; the uncanny incident of the inexplicable apparition,—but when that thought recurred to him he sheered off precipitately from the recollection.
It had the salutary effect of predisposing him to make the best of the situation. Being to a degree a man of the world and of a somewhat large experience, he began to argue within himself that he could scarcely have expected a different reception in these conditions. The great river being at the stage known as "dead low water," steamboat travel was practically suspended for the season, or he could have reached his destination more directly than by rail. An accident had delayed the train some seven hours, and although the gasoline launch sent to meet him at the nearest way-station had been withdrawn at nightfall, since he did not arrive, as his sable attendant informed him, the dug-out had been substituted, with instructions to wait all night, on the remote chance that he might come, after all.
Nevertheless, it was with an averse, disaffected gaze that he silently watched the summit-line of foliage on either bank of the river glide slowly along the sky, responsive to the motion of the boat. It seemed a long monotony of this experience, as he sat listless in the canoe, before a dim whiteness began to appear in a great, unbroken expanse in the gradually enlarging riparian view—the glister of the moon on the open cotton-bolls in the fields. The forests were giving way, the region of swamp and bayou. The habitations of man were at hand, and when at last the dug-out was run into a plantation landing, and Kenneth Gordon was released from his cramped posture in that plebeian craft, he felt so averse to his mission, such a frivolous, reluctant distaste that he marvelled how he was to go through with it at all, as he took his way along the serpentine curves of the "dirt road," preceded by his guide, still with eyes averted and sullen mien, silently bearing his suit-case.
A few turns, and suddenly a large house came into view, rearing its white facade to the moonlight in the midst of a grove of magnolia trees, immense of growth, the glossy leaves seeming a-drip with lustre as with dew. The flight of steps and the wide veranda were here cumbered with potted ferns and foliage plants as elsewhere, and gave the first suggestion of conformity to the ways of the world that the adventure had yet borne. The long, broad, silent hall into which he was ushered, lighted only by a kerosene hand-lamp which the servant carried as he led the way, the stairs which the guest ascended in a mansion of unconscious strangers, all had eerie intimations, and the comfort and seclusion of the room assigned to Gordon was welcome indeed to him; for, argue as he might, he was conscious of a continuous and acute nervous strain. He had had a shock, he was irritably aware, and he would be glad of rest and quiet.
It was a large, square, comfortable room in one of the wings, overlooking a garden, which sent up a delectable blend of fragrance and dew through the white muslin curtains at the long, broad windows, standing open to the night. On a table, draped with the inevitable "drawn-work" of civilization, stood a lamp of finer fashion, but no better illuminating facilities, than the one carried off by the darky, who had made great haste to leave the room, and who had not lifted his eyes toward the ill-omened "ghost-seer" nor spoken a word since Gordon had blurted out his vision on Bogue Holauba. This table also bore a tray with crackers and sandwiches and a decanter of sherry, which genially intimated hospitable forethought. The bed was a big four-poster, which no bedizenment could bring within the fashion of the day. Gordon had a moment's poignant recoil from the darkness, the strangeness, the recollection of the inexplicable apparition he had witnessed, as his head sank on the pillow, embroidered after the latest fads.
He could see through the open window that the moon was down at last and the world abandoned to gloom. He heard from out some neighboring swamp the wild lamenting cry of the crane; and then, listen as he might, the night had lapsed to silence, and the human hearts in this house, all unknown to him, were as unimagined, as unrelated, as unresponsive, as if instead of a living, breathing home he lay in some mute city of the dead.
The next moment, as it seemed, a sky as richly azure as the boasted heavens of Italy filled his vision as he lifted himself on his elbow. A splendid, creamy, magnolia bloom was swaying in the breeze, almost touching the window-sill. There was a subdued, respectful knocking at the door, which Gordon had a vague idea that he had heard before this morning, preceding the announcement that breakfast was waiting. Tardily mindful of his obligations as guest, he made all the speed possible in his toilet, and soon issued into the hall, following the sound of voices through the open doors, which led him presently to the threshold of the breakfast-room.
There were two ladies at the table, one of venerable aspect, with short, white curls, held from her face by side-combs, a modish breakfast-cap, and a morning-gown of thin gray silk. The other was young enough to be her daughter, as indeed she was, dressed in deep mourning. Rising instantly from her place as hostess behind the silver service, she extended her hand to the stranger.
"Mr. Gordon, is it not? I was afraid you would arrive during the night. Mercy! So uncomfortable! How good of you to come—yes, indeed."
She sank into her chair again, pressing her black-bordered handkerchief to her dark eyes, which seemed to Gordon singularly dry, round, and glossy—suggestive of chestnuts, in fact. "So good of you to come," she repeated, "to the house of mourning! Very few people have any talent for woe, Mr. Gordon. These rooms have housed many guests, but not to weep with us. The stricken deer must weep alone."
She fell to hysterical sobbing, which her mother interrupted by a remonstrant "My dear, my dear!" A blond young man with a florid cheek and a laughing blue eye, who sat in an easy posture at the foot of the table, aided the diversion of interest. "Won't you introduce me, Mrs. Keene?—or must I take the opportunity to tell Mr. Gordon that I am Dr. Rigdon, very much at his service."
"Mercy! yes, yes, indeed!" Mrs. Keene acceded as the two young men shook hands; then, evidently perturbed by her lack of ceremony, she exclaimed pettishly, "Where is Geraldine? She always sees to it that everybody knows everybody, and that everybody is served at a reception or a tea. I never have to think of such things if she is in the house."
The allusions seemed to Gordon a bit incongruous with the recent heavy affliction of the household. The accuracy with which the waves of red hair, of a rich tint that suggested chemicals, undulated about the brow of the widow, the art with which the mourning-gown brought out all the best points and subdued the defects of a somewhat clumsy figure, the suspicion of a cosmetic's aid in a dark line, scarcely perceptible yet amply effective, under the prominent eyes, all contributed to the determination of a lady of forty-five years of age to look thirty.
"Geraldine is always late for breakfast, but surely she ought to be down by this time," Mrs. Brinn said, with as much acrimony as a mild old lady could well compass.
"Oh, Geraldine reads half the night," explained Mrs. Keene. "Such an injurious habit! Don't you think so, Mr. Gordon?"
"Oh, she is all right," expostulated the young physician.
"Geraldine has a constitution of iron, I know," Mrs. Keene admitted. "But, mercy!—to live in books, Mr. Gordon. Now, I always wanted to live in life,—in the world! I used to tell Mr. Keene"—even she stumbled a trifle in naming the so recent dead. "I used to tell him that he had buried the best years of my life down here in the swamp on the plantation."
"Pleasant for Mr. Keene," Gordon thought.
"I wanted to live in life," reiterated Mrs. Keene. "What is a glimpse of New Orleans or the White Sulphur Springs once in a great while!"
"'This world is but a fleeting show,'" quoted Rigdon, with a palpable effort to laugh off the inappropriate subject.
"Oh, that is what people always tell the restricted, especially when they are themselves drinking the wine-cup to the bottom."
"And finding the lees bitter," said Rigdon.
The widow gave an off-hand gesture. "You learned that argument from Geraldine—he is nothing but an echo of Geraldine, Mr. Gordon—now, isn't he, Mamma?" she appealed directly to Mrs. Brinn.
"He seems to have a great respect for Geraldine's opinion," said Mrs. Brinn primly.
"If I may ask, who is this lady who seems to give the law to the community?" inquired Gordon, thinking it appropriate to show, and really beginning to feel, an interest in the personnel of the entourage. "Am I related to her, as well as to Mr. Keene?"
"No; Geraldine is one of the Norris family—intimate friends of ours, but not relatives. She often visits here, and in my affliction and loneliness I begged her to come and stay for several weeks."
Not to be related to the all-powerful Geraldine was something of a disappointment, for although Gordon had little sentiment or ideality in his mental and moral system, one of his few emotional susceptibilities lay in his family pride and clannish spirit. He felt for his own, and he was touched in his chief altruistic possibility in the appeal that had brought him hither. To his amazement, Mr. Keene, a second cousin whom he had seldom even seen, had named him executor of his will, without bond, and in a letter written in the last illness, reaching its destination indeed after the writer's death, had besought that Gordon would be gracious enough to act, striking a crafty note in urging the ties of consanguinity.
But for this plea Gordon would have doubtless declined on the score of pressure of business of his own. There were no nearer relatives, however, and with a sense of obligation at war with a restive indisposition, Gordon had come in person to this remote region to offer the will for probate, and to take charge of the important papers and personal property of the deceased. A simple matter it would prove, he fancied. There was no great estate, and probably but few business complications.
"Going home, Dr. George?" his hostess asked as the young physician made his excuses for quitting the table before the conclusion of the meal.
"Dr. Rigdon is not staying in the house, then?" Gordon queried as the door closed upon him, addressing the remark to the old lady by way of politely including her in the conversation.
"No, he is a neighbor of ours—a close and constant friend to us." Mrs. Brinn spoke as with grateful appreciation.
Mrs. Keene took a different view. "He just hangs about here on Geraldine's account," she said. "He happens to be here to-day because last night she took a notion that he must go all the way to Bogue Holauba to meet you, if the train should stop at the station above; but he was called off to attend a severe case of ptomaine poisoning."
"And did the man die?" Mrs. Brinn asked, with a sort of soft awe.
"Mercy! I declare I forgot to ask him if the man died or not," exclaimed Mrs. Keene. "But that was the reason that only a servant was sent to meet you, Mr. Gordon. The doctor looked in this morning to learn if you had arrived safely, and we made him stay to breakfast with us."
Gordon was regretting that he had let him depart so suddenly.
"I thought perhaps, as he seems so familiar with the place he might show me where Mr. Keene kept his papers. I ought to have them in hand at once." Mrs. Keene remembered to press her handkerchief to her eyes, and Gordon hastily added, "Since Dr. Rigdon is gone, perhaps this lady—what is her name?—Geraldine—could save you the trouble."
"Mercy, yes!" she declared emphatically. "For I really do not know where to begin to look. Geraldine will know or guess. I'll go straight and rouse Geraldine out of bed."
She preceded Gordon into the hall, and, flinging over her shoulder the admonition, "Make yourself at home, I beg," ran lightly up the stairs.
Meantime Gordon strolled to the broad front door that stood open from morning to night, winter and summer, and paused there to light his cigar. All his characteristics were accented in the lustre of the vivid day, albeit for the most part they were of a null, negative tendency, for he had an inexpressive, impersonal manner and a sort of aloof, reserved dignity. His outward aspect seemed rather the affair of his up-to-date metropolitan tailor and barber than any exponent of his character and mind. He was not much beyond thirty years of age, and his straight, fine, dark hair was worn at the temples more by the fluctuations of stocks than the ravages of time. He was pale, of medium height, and slight of build; he listened with a grave, deliberate attention and an inscrutable gray eye, very steady, coolly observant, an appreciable asset in the brokerage business. He was all unaccustomed to the waste of time, and it was with no slight degree of impatience that he looked about him.
The magnolia grove filled the space to the half-seen gate in front of the house, but away on either side were long vistas. To the right the river was visible, and, being one of the great bends of the stream, it seemed to run directly to the west, the prospect only limited by the horizon line. On the other side, a glare, dazzlingly white in the sun, proclaimed the cotton-fields. Afar the gin-house showed, with its smoke-stack, like an obeliscal column, from which issued heavy coils of vapor, and occasionally came the raucous grating of a screw, telling that the baler was at work. Interspersed throughout the fields were the busy cotton-pickers, and now and again rose snatches of song as they heaped the great baskets in the turn-rows.
Within the purlieus of the inclosure about the mansion there was no stir of industry, no sign of life, save indeed an old hound lying on the veranda steps, looking up with great, liquid, sherry-tinted eyes at the stranger, and, though wheezing a wish to lick his hand, unable to muster the energy to rise.
After an interval of a few moments Gordon turned within. He felt that he must forthwith get at the papers and set this little matter in order. He paused baffled at the door of the parlor, where satin damask and rosewood furniture, lace curtains and drawn shades, held out no promise of repositories of business papers. On the opposite side of the hall was a sitting-room that bore evidence of constant use. Here was a desk of the old-fashioned kind, with a bookcase as a superstructure, and a writing-table stood in the centre of the floor, equipped with a number of drawers which were all locked, as a tentative touch soon told. He had not concluded its examination when a step and rustle behind him betokened a sudden entrance.
"Miss Geraldine Norris!" a voice broke upon the air,—a voice that he had not before heard, and he turned abruptly to greet the lady as she formally introduced herself.
A veritable Titania she seemed as she swayed in the doorway. She was a little thing, delicately built, slender yet not thin, with lustrous golden hair, large, well-opened, dark blue eyes, a complexion daintily white and roseate,—a fairy-like presence indeed, but with a prosaic, matter-of-fact manner and a dogmatic pose of laying down the law.
Gordon could never have imagined himself so disconcerted as when she advanced upon him with the caustic query, "Why did you not ask Mrs. Keene for her husband's keys? Surely that is simple enough!" She flung a bunch of keys on a steel ring down upon the table. "Heavens! to be roused from my well-earned slumbers at day-break to solve this problem! 'Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!'" She mimicked Mrs. Keene's urgency, then broke out laughing.
"Now," she demanded, all unaffected by his mien of surprised and offended dignity, "do you think yourself equal to the task of fitting these keys,—or shall I lend you my strong right arm?"
It is to be doubted if Gordon had ever experienced such open ridicule as when she came smiling up to the table, drawing back the sleeve of her gown from her delicate dimpled wrist. She wore a white dress, such as one never sees save in that Southern country, so softly sheer, falling in such graceful, floating lines, with a deep, plain hem and no touch of garniture save, perhaps, an edge of old lace on the surplice neck. The cut of the dress showed a triangular section of her soft white chest and all the firm modelling of her throat and chin. It was evidently not a new gown, for a rent in one of the sleeves had been sewed up somewhat too obviously, and there was a darn on the shoulder where a rose-bush had snagged the fabric. A belt of black velvet, with long, floating sash-ends, was about her waist, and a band of black velvet held in place her shining hair.
"I am sorry to have been the occasion of disturbing you," he said with stiff formality, "and I am very much obliged, certainly," he added, as he took up the keys.
"I may consider myself dismissed from the presence?" she asked saucily. "Then, I will permit myself a cup of chocolate and a roll, and be ready for any further commands."
She frisked out of the door, and, frowning heavily, he sat down to the table and opened the top-drawer, which yielded instantly to the first key that he selected.
The first paper, too, on which he laid his hand was the will, signed and witnessed, regularly executed, all its provisions seeming, as he glanced through it, reasonable and feasible. As he laid it aside, he experienced the business man's satisfaction with a document duly capable of the ends desired. Then he opened with a sudden flicker of curiosity a bulky envelope placed with the will and addressed to himself. He read it through, the natural interest on his face succeeded by amazement, increasing gradually to fear, the chill drops starting from every pore. He had grown ghastly white before he had concluded the perusal, and for a long time he sat as motionless as if turned to stone.
The September day glowed outside in sumptuous splendor. A glad wind sprang up and sped afield. Geraldine, her breakfast finished, a broad hat canted down over her eyes, rushed through the hall as noisily as a boy, prodded up the old hound, and ran him a race around the semicircle of the drive. A trained hound he had been in his youth, and he was wont to conceal and deny certain ancient accomplishments. But even he realized that it was waste of breath to say nay to the persistent Geraldine. He resigned himself to go through all his repertoire,—was a dead dog, begged, leaped a stick back and forth, went lame, and in his newly awakened interest performed several tricks of which she had been unaware. Her joyful cries of commendation—"Played an encore! an encore! He did, he did! Cutest old dog in the United States!" caught Mrs. Keene's attention.
"Geraldine," she screamed from an upper window, "come in out of the sun! You will have a sun-stroke—and ruin your complexion besides! You know you ought to be helping that man with those papers,—he won't be able to do anything without you!" Her voice quavered on the last words, as if she suddenly realized "that man" might overhear her,—as indeed he did. But he made no sign. He sat still, stultified and stony, silently gazing at the paper in his hands.
When luncheon was announced, Gordon asked to have something light sent in to him, as he wished not to be disturbed in his investigation of the documents. He had scant need to apprehend interruption, however, while the long afternoon wore gradually away. The universal Southern siesta was on, and the somnolent mansion was like the castle of Sleeping Beauty. The ladies had sought their apartments and the downy couches; the cook, on a shady bench under the trellis, nodded as she seeded the raisins for the frozen pudding of the six-o'clock dinner; the waiter had succumbed in clearing the lunch-table and made mesmeric passes with the dish-rag in a fantasy of washing the plates; the stable-boy slumbered in the hay, high in the loft, while the fat old coachman, with a chamois-skin in his hand, dozed as he sat on the step of the surrey, between the fenders; the old dog snored on the veranda floor, and Mrs. Keene's special attendant, who was really more a seamstress than a ladies' maid, dreamed that for some mysterious reason she could not thread a needle to fashion in a vast hurry the second mourning of her employer, who she imagined would call for it within a week!
Outside the charmed precincts of this Castle Indolence, the busy cotton-pickers knew no pause nor stay. The steam-engine at the gin panted throughout all the long hot hours, the baler squealed and rasped and groaned, as it bound up the product into marketable compass, but there was no one waking near enough to note how the guest of the mansion was pacing the floor in a stress of nervous excitement, and to comment on the fact.
Toward sunset, a sudden commotion roused the slumbrous place. There had been an accident at the gin,—a boy had been caught in the machinery and variously mangled. Dr. George Rigdon had been called and had promptly sewed up the wounds. A runner had been sent to the mansion for bandages, brandy, fresh clothing, and sundry other collateral necessities of the surgery, and the news had thrown the house into unwonted excitement.
"The boy won't die, then?" Geraldine asked of a second messenger, as he stood by the steps of the veranda, waiting for the desired commodities.
"Lawdy,—no, ma'am! He is as good as new! Doc' George, he fix him up."
Gordon, whom the tumult had summoned forth from his absorptions, noted Geraldine's triumphant laugh as she received this report, the toss of her spirited little head, the light in her dark blue eyes, deepening to sapphire richness, her obvious pride in the skill, the humanitarian achievement, of her lover. Dr. George must be due here this evening, he fancied. For she was all freshly bedight; her gown was embellished with delicate laces, and its faint green hue gave her the aspect of some water-sprite, posed against that broad expanse of the Mississippi River, that was itself of a jade tint reflected from a green and amber sky; at the low horizon line the vermilion sun was sinking into its swirling depths.
Gordon perceived a personal opportunity in the prospect of this guest for the evening. He must have counsel, he was thinking. He could not act on his own responsibility in this emergency that had suddenly confronted him. He was still too overwhelmed by the strange experience he had encountered, too shaken. This physician was a man of intelligence, of skill in his chosen profession, necessarily a man worth while in many ways. He was an intimate friend of the Keene family, and might the more heartily lend a helping hand. The thought, the hope, cleared Gordon's brow, but still the impress of the stress of the afternoon was so marked that the girl was moved to comment in her brusque way as they stood together on the cool, fern-embowered veranda.
"Why, Mr. Gordon," she exclaimed in surprise, "you have no idea how strange you look! You must have overworked awfully this afternoon. Why, you look as if you had seen a ghost!"
To her amazement, he recoiled abruptly. Involuntarily, he passed his hand over his face, as if seeking to obliterate the traces she had deciphered. Then, with an obvious effort, he recovered a show of equanimity; he declared that it was only because he was so tousled in contrast with her fresh finery that she thought he looked supernaturally horrible! He would go upstairs forthwith and array himself anew.
Gordon proved himself a true prophet, for Rigdon came to dine. With the postprandial cigars, the two gentlemen, at Gordon's suggestion, repaired to the sitting-room to smoke, instead of joining their hostess on the veranda, where tobacco was never interdicted. Indeed, they did not come forth thence for nearly two hours, and were palpably embarrassed when Geraldine declared in bewilderment, gazing at them in the lamplight that fell from within, through one of the great windows, that now both looked as if they had seen a ghost!
Despite their efforts to sustain the interest of the conversation, they were obviously distrait, and had a proclivity to fall into sudden silences, and Mrs. Keene found them amazingly unresponsive and dull. Thus it was that she rose as if to retire for the night while the hour was still early. In fact, she intended to utilize the opportunity to have some dresses of the first mourning outfit tried on, for which the patient maid was now awaiting her.
"I leave you a charming substitute," she said in making her excuses. "Geraldine need not come in yet—it is not late."
Her withdrawal seemed to give a fresh impetus to some impulse with which Rigdon had been temporizing. He recurred to it at once. "You contemplate giving it to the public," he said to Gordon; "why not try its effect on a disinterested listener first, and judge from that?"
Gordon assented with an extreme gravity that surprised Geraldine; then Rigdon hesitated, evidently scarcely knowing how to begin. He looked vaguely at the moon riding high in the heavens above the long, broad expanse of the Mississippi and the darkling forests on either hand. Sometimes a shaft of light, a sudden luminous glister, betokened the motion of the currents gliding in the sheen. "Last night," he said in a tense, bated voice—"last night Mr. Gordon saw the phantom of Bogue Holauba. Stop! Hush!"—for the girl had sprung half screaming from her chair. "This is important." He laid his hand on her arm to detain her. "We want you to help us!"
"Help you! Why, you scare me to death!" She had paused, but stood trembling from head to foot.
"There is something explained in one of Mr. Keene's papers,—addressed to Mr. Gordon; and we have been much startled by the coincidence of his—his vision."