*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 51941 ***

THE GILDED CHAIR, A NOVEL

By Melville Davisson Post

Illustrated By A. B. Wenzell And Arthur E. Becher

New York And London D. Appleton And Company

MCMX

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THE GILDED CHAIR




CHAPTER I--THE TRAVELER

When the train crept out of Euston into the wet night the Marchesa
Soderrelli sat for a considerable time quite motionless in the corner
of her compartment. The lights, straggling northward out of London,
presently vanished. The hum and banging of passing engines ceased. The
darkness, attended by a rain, descended.

Beside the Marchesa, on the compartment seat, as the one piece of
visible luggage, except the two rugs about her feet, was a square green
leather bag, with a flat top, on which were three gold letters under a
coronet. It was perhaps an hour before the Marchesa Soderrelli moved.
Then it was to open this bag, get out a cigarette case, select
a cigarette, light it, and resume her place in the corner of the
compartment. She was evidently engaged with some matter to be deeply
considered; her eyes widened and narrowed, and the muscles of her
forehead gathered and relaxed.

The woman was somewhere in that indefinite age past forty. Her figure,
straight and supple, was beginning at certain points to take on that
premonitory plumpness, realized usually in middle life; her hair, thick
and heavy, was her one unchanged heritage of youth; her complexion, once
tender and delicate, was depending now somewhat on the arts. The woman
was coming lingeringly to autumn. Her face, in repose, showed the
freshness of youth gone out; the mouth, straightened and somewhat
hardened; the chin firmer; there was a vague irregular line, common
to persons of determination, running from the inner angle of the eye
downward and outward to the corner of the mouth; the eyes were drawn
slightly at the outer corners, making there a drooping angle.

Her dress was evidently continental, a coat and skirt of gray cloth; a
hat of gray straw, from which fell a long gray veil; a string of pearls
around her neck, and drop pearl earrings.

As she smoked, the Marchesa continued with the matter that perplexed
her. For a time she carried the cigarette mechanically to her lips, then
the hand holding it dropped on the arm of the compartment seat beside
her. There the cigarette burned, sending up a thin wisp of smoke.

The train raced north, gliding in and out of wet blinking towns, where
one caught for a moment a dimly flashing picture of a wet platform a few
trucks, a smoldering lamp or two a weary cab horse plodding slowly up
a phantom street, a wooden guard, motionless as though posed before
a background of painted card board, or a little party of travelers,
grouped wretchedly together at a corner of the train shed, like poor
actors playing at conspirators in some first rehearsal.

Finally the fire of the cigarette touched her fingers. She ground the
end of it against the compartment window, sat up, took off her hat
and placed it in the rack above her head; then she lifted up the arm
dividing her side of the compartment into two seats, rolled one of her
rugs into a pillow, lay down, and covering herself closely with the
remaining rug, was almost immediately asleep.

The train arrived at Stirling about 7:30 the following morning. The
Marchesa Soderrelli got out there, walked across the dirty wooden
platform--preempted almost exclusively by a flaming book stall, where
the best English author finds-himself in the same sixpenny shirt
with the worst--out a narrow way by the booking office, and up a long
cobble-paved street to an inn that was doubtless sitting, as it now
sits, in the day of the Pretender.

A maid who emerged from some hidden quarter of this place at the
Marchesa's knocking on the window of the office led the way to a
little room in the second story of the inn, set the traveler's bag on
a convenient chair, and, as if her duties were then ended, inquired if
Madam wished any further attendance. The Marchesa Soderrelli wished
a much further attendance, in fact, a continual attendance, until her
breakfast should be served at nine o'clock. The tin bath tub, round like
a flat-bottomed porringer, was taken from its decorative place against
the wall and set on a blanket mat. The pots over the iron crane in
the kitchen of the inn were emptied of hot water. The maid was set to
brushing the traveler's wrinkled gown. The stable boy was sent to the
chemist to fetch spirits of wine for Madam's toilet lamp. The very
proprietor sat by the kitchen fire polishing the Marchesa Soderrelli's
boots. The whole inn, but the moment before a place abandoned, now
hummed and clattered under the various requirements of this traveler's
toilet.

The very details of this exacting service impressed the hostelry with
the importance of its guest. The usual custom of setting the casual
visitor down to a breakfast of tea, boiled eggs, finnan haddock, or some
indefinite dish with curry, in the common dining room with the flotsam
of lowland farmers, was at once abandoned. A white cloth was laid in
the long dining room of the second floor, open only from June until
September, while the tourist came to do Stirling Castle under the lines
of Ms Baedeker, a room salted for the tourist, as a Colorado mine is
salted for an Eastern investor. No matter in what direction one looked
he met instantly some picture of Queen Mary, some old print, some dingy
steel engraving. No two of these presented to the eye the same face
or figure of this unhappy woman, until the observer came presently to
realize that the Scottish engraver, when drawing the features of his
central figure, like the Madonna painters of Italy, availed himself of a
large and catholic collection.

To this room the innkeeper, having finished the Marchesa's boots, and
while the maid still clattered up and down to her door, brought now the
dishes of her breakfast. Porridge and a jug of cream, a dripping comb of
heather honey, hot scones, a light white roll, called locally a "bap,"
and got but a moment before from the nearest baker, a mutton cutlet,
a pot of tea, and a brown trout that but yesterday was swimming in the
Forth.

When the Marchesa came in at nine o'clock to this excellent breakfast,
every mark of fatigue had wholly vanished. Youth, vigor, freshness,
ladies, once in waiting to this woman, ravished from her train by the
savage days, were now for a period returned, as by some special, marked
concession. The maid following behind her, the obsequious innkeeper,
bowing by the door, saw and knew instantly that their estimate of the
traveler was not a whit excessive. This guest was doubtless a great
foreign lady come to visit the romantic castle on the hill, perhaps
crossed from France with no object other than this pilgrimage.

The innkeeper waited, loitering about the room, moving here a
candlestick and there a pot, until his prints, crowded on the walls,
should call forth some comment. But he waited to disappointment. The
great lady attended wholly to her breakfast. The "bap," the trout, the
cutlet shared no interest with the prints. This man, skilled in
divining the interests of the tourist, moved his pots without avail, his
candlesticks to no seeming purpose. The Marchesa Soderrelli was wholly
unaware of his designing presence.

Presently, when the Marchesa had finished with her breakfast, she took
up the silver case, which, in entering, she had put down by her plate,
and rolling a cigarette a moment between her thumb and finger, looked
about inquiringly for a means to light it. The innkeeper, marking now
the arrival of his moment, came forward with a burning match and held
it over the table--breaking on the instant, with no qualm, the fourth
of his printed rules, set out for warning on the corner of his mantel
shelf. He knew now that his guest would speak, and he sorted quickly his
details of Queen Mary for an impressive answer. The Marchesa did speak,
but not to that cherished point.

"Can you tell me," she said, "how near I am to Doune in Perthshire?"

The innkeeper, set firmly in his theory, concluded that his guest wished
to visit the neighboring castle after doing the one at Stirling, and
answered, out of the invidious distinctions of a local pride.

"Quite near, my Lady, twenty minutes by rail, but the castle there is
not to be compared with ours. When you have seen Stirling Castle, and
perhaps Edinburgh Castle, the others are not worth a visit. I have never
heard that any royal person was ever housed at Doune. Sir Walter, I
believe, gives it a bit of mention in 'Waverley,' but the great Bruce
was in our castle and Mary Queen of Scots."

He spoke the last sentence with uncommon gravity, and, swinging on his
heel, indicated his engravings with a gesture. Again these prints failed
him. The Marchesa's second query was a bewildering tangent.

"Have you learned," she said, "whether or not the Duke of Dorset is in
Perthshire?"

"The Duke of Dorset," he repeated, "the Duke of Dorset is dead, my
Lady."

"I do not mean the elder Duke of Dorset," replied the Marchesa, "I
am quite aware of his death within the year. I am speaking of the new
Duke."

The innkeeper came with difficulty from that subject with which his guns
were shotted, and, like all persons of his class, when turned abruptly
to the consideration of another, he went back to some familiar point,
from which to approach, in easy stages, the immediate inquiry.

"The estates of the Duke of Dorset," he began, "are on the south coast,
and are the largest in England. The old Duke was a great man, my Lady,
a great man. He wanted to make every foreigner who brought anything over
here, pay the government something for the right to sell it. I think
that was it; I heard him speak to the merchants of Glasgow about it.
It was a great speech, my Lady--I seemed to understand it then," and
he scratched his head. "He would have done it, too, everybody says, if
something hadn't broken in him one afternoon when he was with the King
down at Ascot. But he never married. You know, my Lady, every once in a
while, there is a Duke of Dorset who does not marry. They say that long
ago, one of them saw a heathen goddess in a bewitched city by the sea,
but something happened, and he never got her."

"That is very sad," said the Marehesa, "a fairy story should turn out
better."

"But that is not the end of the story, my Lady," continued the
innkeeper. "Right along after that, every other Duke has seen her, and
won't have any mortal woman for a wife." The Marehesa was amused. "So
fine a devotion," she said, "ought to receive some compensation from
heaven."

"And so it does, my Lady," cried the innkeeper, "and so it does. The
brother's son who comes into the title, is always exactly like the old
childless Duke--just as though he were reborn somehow." Then a light
came beaming into his face. "My Lady!" he cried, like one arrived
suddenly upon a splendid recollection. "I have a print of the old Duke
just over the fireplace in the kitchen; I will fetch it. Janet, the
cook, says that the new Duke is exactly like him."

The Marehesa stopped him. "No," she said, "I would not for the world
disturb the decorations of your kitchen."

The thwarted host returned, rubbing his chin. A moment or two he
puzzled, then he ventured another hesitating service.

"If it please your Ladyship, I will ask Janet, the cook, about the new
Duke of Dorset. Janet reads all about them every Sunday in the _Gentle
Lady_, and she sticks a pin in the map to remind her where the nicest
ones are."

Before the smiling guest could interfere with a further negative, the
obliging host had departed in search of that higher authority, presiding
thus learnedly among his pots. The Marchesa, left to her devices, looked
about for the first time at the innkeeper's precious prints. But she
looked leisurely, without an attaching interest, until she chanced upon
a little wood engraving of Prince Charles Edward Stuart, half hidden
behind a luster bowl on the sideboard. She arose, took up the print, and
returning to her chair, set it down on the cloth beside her. She was
in leisurely contemplation of this picture when the innkeeper returned,
sunning, from his interview with Janet. On the forty-three steps of his
stairway the good man unfortunately lost the details of Janet's diction,
but he came forth triumphant with the substance of her story.

The new Duke of Dorset was, at this hour, in Perthshire. He was not the
son of the old Duke, but an only nephew, brought forth from some distant
country to inherit his uncle's shoes. His father had married some
Austrian, or Russian, or Italian--Janet was a bit uncertain on this
trivial point. For the last half dozen years the young Duke had been
knocking about the far-off edges of Asia. There had been fuss about his
succession, and there might have been a kettle of trouble, but it came
out that he had been of a lot of service to the government in effecting
the Japanese alliance. He had somehow gotten at the inside of things in
the East. So the foreign office was at his back. He had given up, too,
some princely station in his mother's country; a station of which Janet
was not entirely clear, but, in her mind, somehow, equal to a kingdom.
But he gave it up to be a peer of England, as, in Janet's opinion, any
reasonable person would. My Lady was rightly on her way, if she wished
to see this new Duke.

The Doune Castle and the neighboring estate were shooting property of
his father. This property, added to the vast holdings of the old Duke,
made the new once perhaps the richest peer in England. He looked the
part, too; more splendidly fit than any of his class coming under
Janet's discriminating eye. She had gone with Christobel MacIntyre to
see him pass through Stirling some weeks earlier. And he was one of the
"nicest of them." Janet's pin had been sticking in Doune since August.

The Marchesa did not attempt to interrupt this pleasing flow of data.
The innkeeper delivered it with a variety of bows, certain decorative,
mincing steps, and illustrative gestures. It came forth, too, with that
modicum of pride natural to one who housed, thus opportunely, so nice an
observer as this Janet. He capped it at the end with a comment on this
Japanese alliance. It did not please him. They were not white, these
Japanese. And this alliance--it was against nature. His nephew, Donald
MacKensie, had been with the army in China, when the powers marched on
Pekin, and there the British Tommy had divided the nations of the earth
into three grand divisions, namely, niggers, white men, and dagoes.
There were two kinds of niggers--real niggers, and faded-out niggers;
there were four kinds of dagoes--vodka dagoes, beer-drinking dagoes,
frog-eating dagoes, and the macaroni dagoes; but there was only one kind
of white men--"Us," he said, "and the Americans."

The Marchesa laughed, and the innkeeper rounded off his speech with
a suggestion of convenient trains, in case my Lady was pleased to go
to-morrow or the following day to Doune. A good express left the station
here at ten o'clock, and one could return--he marked especially
the word--at one's pleasure. The schedule of returning trains was
beautifully appointed.

He had arranged, too, in the interval of absence, for the Marchesa's
comfort in the morning visit to Stirling Castle. A carriage would take
her up the long hill; a guide, whom he could unreservedly recommend,
would be there for any period at her service--a pensioned sergeant who
had gone into the Zulu rush at Rorke's Drift, and come out somewhat
fragmentary. Then he stepped back with a larger bow, like an orator come
finally to his closing sentence. Was my Lady pleased to go now?

The Marchesa was pleased to go, but not upon the way so delicately
smoothed for her. She arose, went at once to her room, got her hand bag
and coat, paid the good man his charges, and walked out of the door,
past the cab driver, to her train, leaving that expectant public
servant, like the young man who had great possessions, sorrowing.




CHAPTER II--THE HOUSE OF THE FIRST MEN

One, arriving over the Caledonian railway at Doune, will at once
notice how that station exceeds any other of this line in point of
nice construction. The framework of the building is of steel; the roof,
glass; the platform of broad cement blocks lying like clean gray bands
along the car tracks. There is here no dirt, no smoke, no creaky floor
boards, no obtrusive glaring bookstalls, and no approach given over to
the soiling usages of trade. One goes out from the spotless shed into
a gravel court, inclosed with a high brick wall, stone capped, planted
along its southern exposure with pear trees, trained flat after the
manner of the northern gardener.

The Marchesa Soderrelli, following the little street into the village,
stopped in the public square at the shop of a tobacconist for a word
of direction. This square is one of the old landmarks of Doune. In the
center of it is a stone pillar, capped at the top with a quaint stone
lion, the work of some ancient cutter, to whom a lion was a fairy beast,
sitting like a Skye dog on his haunches with his long tail jauntily in
the air, and his wizened face cocked impudently.

From this square she turned east along a line of shops and white
cottages, down a little hill, to an old stone bridge, crossing the
Ardoch with a single high, graceful span. South of it stood the restored
walls of Doune Castle, once a Lowland stronghold, protected by the swift
waters of the Teith, now merely the most curious and the best preserved
ruin in the North. East of the Ardoch the land rises into a park set
with ancient oaks, limes, planes, and gnarled beeches. Here the street
crossing the Ardoch ends as a public thoroughfare, and barred by the
park gates, continues up the hill as a private road between two rows of
plane trees.

The Marchesa opened the little foot gate, cut like a door in the wall of
the park beside the larger gate, and walked slowly up the hill, over
the dead plane leaves beginning now to fall. As she advanced the
quaint split stone roof and high round wall of Old Newton House came
prominently into view. This ancient house, one of the most picturesque
in Scotland, deserves a word of comment. It was built in 1500 a.d., as
a residence for the royal keepers of Doune Castle, and built like that
castle with an eye forward to a siege. The stone walls are at some
points five feet thick. The main wing of the house is flanked with a
semicircular tower, capped with a round crow-step coping. The windows
high up in the wall were originally barred with iron; the holes in the
stones are still plainly visible. Under the east wing of the house is an
arched dungeon with no ray of light; under the west wing, a well for the
besieged. A secret opening in the wall of the third story descends under
the Ardoch, it is said, to Doune Castle. To the left are the formal
gardens inclosed by a tall holly hedge, and to the right, the green
sward of the park. The road climbing the hill turns about into a gravel
court.

The place is incrusted with legends. Prince Charlie on his daring
march south with a handful of Highlanders to wrest a kingdom from the
Hanoverian, coming to this stone span by the Ardoch, was met at the park
gate by the daughters of the house with a stirrup cup. He drank, as the
story runs, and pulling off his glove put down his hand to kiss. But one
madcap of the daughters answered, "I would rather prie your mou," and
the Prince, kissing her like a sweetheart, rode over the Ardoch to his
fortunes.

This old stronghold had originally but one way of entrance cut in the
solid wall of the tower. An iron door, set against a wide groove of the
stone, held it--barring against steel and fire. The door so low that
one entering must stoop his head, making him thus ready for that other,
waiting on the stairway with his ax.

This stone stairway ascending in the semicircular tower is one of
the master conceptions of the old-time builder. Each step is a single
fan-shaped stone, five inches thick, with a round end like a vertebra.
These round ends of the stones are set one above the other, making thus
a solid column, of which the flat part of each stone is a single step
of a spiral stairway. The early man doubtless took here his plan direct
from nature, in contemplation of the backbone of a stag twisted about,
and going thus to the great Master for his lesson, his work, to this
day, has not been bettered. His stairway was as solid and enduring as
his wall, with no wood to burn and no cemented joint to crumble.

The Marchesa, having come now to the gravel court before the iron door,
found there the brass knob of a modern bell. At her ringing, a footman
crossed the court from the service quarter of the house, took her card
and disappeared. A moment later he opened the creaking door and led
the way up the stone stair into a little landing, a sort of miniature
_entresol_, to the first floor of the house. This cell, made now to do
service as a hall, was lighted by a square window, cut in modern days
through the solid masonry of the tower. In the corner of it was a rack
for walking sticks, and on the row of brass hooks set into the wall were
dog whips, waterproofs, a top riding coat, and several shooting capes,
made of that rough tweed, hand spun and hand woven, by the peasants of
the northern islands, dyed with erotal and heather tips, and holding yet
faintly the odor of the peat smoke in which it was laboriously spun.

The footman now opened the white door at the end of this narrow landing,
and announced the Marchesa Soderrelli. As the woman entered a man arose
from a chair by a library table in the middle of the room.

To the eye he was a tall, clean-limbed Englishman, perhaps five and
thirty; his fair hair, thick and close cropped, was sunburned; his eyes,
clear and hard, were dark-blue, shading into hazel; his nose, aquiline
in contour, was as straight and clean cut as the edges of a die; his
mouth was strong and wide; his face lean and tanned. Under the morning
sunlight falling through the high window, the man was a thing of bronze,
cast in some old Tuscan foundry, now long forgotten by the Amo.

The room was that distinctive chamber peculiar to the English country
house, a man's room. On the walls were innumerable trophies; elk from
the forests of Norway, red deer from the royal preserves of Prussia, the
great branching antlers of the Cashmire stag, and the curious ebon horns
of the Gaur, together with old hunting prints and pencil drawings of
big game. On the floor were skins. The buffalo, found only in the vast
woodlands of Lithuania; the brown bear of Russia, the Armenian tiger.
Along the east wall were three rows of white bookshelves, but newly
filled; on a table set before these cases were several large volumes
apparently but this day arrived, and as yet but casually examined. To
the left and to the right of the mantel were gun cases built into the
wall, old like the house, with worn brass keyholes, and small diagonal
windows of leaded glass, through which one could see black stocks and
dark-blue barrels.

Over the mantel in a smoke-stained frame was a painting of the old Duke
of Dorset, at the morning of his life, in the velvet cap and the long
red coat of a hunter. The face of the painting was, in every detail, the
face of the man standing now below it, and the Marchesa observed, with a
certain wonder, this striking verification of the innkeeper's fantastic
story.

On the table beside the leather chair from which the man had arisen
were the evidences of two conflicting interests. A volume of political
memoirs, closed, but marked at a certain page with the broad blade of
a paper cutter--shaped from a single ivory tusk, its big gray handle
pushing up the leaves of the book--and beside it, the bolt thrown open,
the flap of the back sight pulled up, was a rifle.

An observer entering could not say, on the instant, with which of these
two interests that one at the table had been latest taken. Had he gone,
however, to the books beyond him on the wall, he might have fixed in a
way the priority of those interests. The thick volumes on the table
were the political memoirs of the late Duke of Dorset. The newer books
standing in the shelves were exclusively political and historical,
having to do with the government of England, speeches, journals, essays,
memoirs, the first sources of this perplexing and varied knowledge;
while the older, worn volumes, found now and then among them, were
records of big-game shooting, expeditions into little known lands, works
rising to a scientific accuracy on wild beast stalking, the technic of
the rifle, the flight and effect of the bullet, and all the varied gear
of the hunter. It would seem that the master of this house, having for a
time but one consuming interest in his life, had come now upon a second.

The Duke of Dorset advanced and extended his hand to the woman standing
in the door.

"It is the Marchesa Soderrelli," he said; "I am delighted."

The words of the man were formal and courteous, but colored with no
visible emotion; a formula of greeting rather, suited equally to a
visitor from the blue or one coming, with a certain claim upon the
interest, from the nether darkness. The hospitality of the house was
presented, but the emotions of the host retained.

The Marchesa put her gloved fingers for a moment into the man's hand.

"I hope," she answered, "that I do not too greatly disturb you."

"On the contrary, Madam," replied the Duke, "you do me a distinction."
Then he led her to his chair, and took another at the far end of the
table. He indicated the book, the rifle, with a gesture.

"You find me," he said, "in council with these conflicting symbols.
Permit me to remove them."

"Pray do not," replied the Marchesa, smiling; "I attach, like Pompey, a
certain value to the flight of birds. Signs found waiting at the turn
of the road affect me. Those articles have to me a certain premonitory
value."

"They have to me," replied the Duke, "a highly symbolic value. They are
signposts, under which I have been standing, somewhat like a runaway
lad, now on one foot and now on the other." Then he added, as in formal
inquiry, "I hope, Madam, that the Marquis Soderrelli is quite well."

A cloud swept over the woman's face. "He is no longer in the world," she
said.

The man saw instantly that by bungling inadvertence he had put his
finger on a place that ached. This dissolute Italian Marquis was finally
dead then. And fragments of pictures flitted for a moment through the
background of his memory. A woman, young, beautiful, but like the spirit
of man--after the figure of Epictetus--chained invisibly to a corpse. He
saw the two, as in a certain twilight, entering the Hotel Dardanelle
in Venice; the two coming forth from some brilliant Viennese café, and
elsewhere in remote Asiatic capitols, always followed by a word, pitying
the tall, proud girl to whom a sardonic destiny had given such beauty
and such fortune. The very obsequious clerks of the Italian consulate,
to which this Marquis was attached, named him always with a deprecating
gesture.

The Duke's demeanor softened under the appealing misery of these
fragments. He blamed the thoughtless word that had called them up. Still
he was glad, as that abiding sense of justice in every man is glad, when
the oppressor, after long immunity, wears out at last the incredible
patience of heaven. The Marquis had got, then, the wage which he had
been so long earning.

The Duke sought refuge in a conversation winging to other matters. He
touched the steel muzzle of the rifle lying on the table.

"You will notice," he said, "that I do not abandon myself wholly to the
memoirs of my uncle. I am going out to Canada to look into the Japanese
difficulties that we seem to have on our hands there. And I hope to
get a bit of big-game shooting. I have been trying to select the proper
rifle. Usually, after tramping about for half a day, one gets a single
shot at his beast, and possibly, not another. He must, therefore, not
only hit the beast with that shot, but he must also bring him down with
it. The problem, then, seems to be to combine the shock, or killing
power, of the old, big, lead bullet with the high velocity and
extreme accuracy of the modern military rifle. With the Mauser and the
Lee-Enfield one can hit his man or his beast at a great distance, but
the shock of the bullet is much less than that of the old, round,
lead one. The military bullet simply drills a little clean hole which
disables the soldier, but does not bring down the beast, unless it
passes accurately through some vital spot. I have, therefore, selected
what I consider to be the best of these military rifles, the Mannlicher
of Austrian make, and by modifying the bullet, have a weapon with the
shock or killing power of the old 4:50 black powder Express."

The man, talking thus at length with a definite object, now paused,
took a cartridge out of the drawer of the table, and set it down by the
muzzle of the rifle.

"You will notice," he said, "that this is the usual military cartridge,
but if you look closer you will see that the nickel case of the bullet
has four slits cut near the end. Those simple slits in the case cause
the bullet, when it strikes, to expand. The scientific explanation is
that when the nose of the projectile meets with resistance, the base
of it, moving faster, pushes forward through this now weakened case and
expands the diameter of the bullet, and so long as this resistance to
the bullet continues, the expansion continues until there is a great
flattened mass of spinning lead."

The Marchesa Soderrelli, visualizing the terrible effect of such a
weapon, could not suppress a shudder.

"The thing is cruel," she said.

"On the contrary," replied the man, "it is humane. With such a bullet
the beast is brought down and killed. Nothing is more cruel than to
wound an animal and leave it to die slowly, or to be the lingering prey
of other beasts."

The Duke of Dorset spun the cartridge a moment on the table, then he
tossed it back into the drawer.

"I fear," he said, "that I cannot bring quite the same measure of
enthusiasm to the duties of this new life. The great mountains, the
vast wind-scoured Steppes allure me. I have lived there when I could. I
suppose it is this English blood." Again smiling, he indicated the
pile of volumes beyond him by the bookcase. "But I have, happily, the
assistance of my uncle."

The Marchesa took instant advantage of this opening.

"You are very fortunate," she said; "most of us are taken up suddenly by
the Genii of circumstance and set down in an unknown land without a hand
to help us."

The Duke's face returned to its serious outlines. "I do not believe
that," he said; "there is always aid."

"In theory, yes," replied the Marchesa, "there is always food, clothing,
shelter; but to that one who is hungry, ragged, cold, it is not always
available."

"The tongue is in one's head," answered the Duke; "one can always ask."

"No," said the woman, "one cannot always ask. It is sometimes easier to
starve than to ask for the loaf lying in the baker's window."

"I have tried starving," replied the Duke; "I went for two days hungry
in the Bjelowjesha forest; on the third day I begged a wood chopper for
his dinner and got it. I broke my leg once trying to follow a wounded
beast into one of those inaccessible peaks of the Pusiko. I crawled all
that night down the mountain to the hut of a Cossack, and there I begged
him, literally begged him for his horse. I had nothing; I was a dirty
mass of blood and caked earth; it was pure primal beggary. I got the
horse. The heart in every man, when one finally reaches to it, is right.
In his way, at the bottom of him, one is always pleased to help. The
pride, locking the tongue of the unfortunate, is false."

"Doubtless," replied the Marchesa, "in a state of nature, such a thing
is easy. But I do not mean that. I mean the humiliation, the distress,
of that one forced by circumstance to appeal to an equal or a superior
for aid--perhaps to a proud, arrogant, dominating person in authority."

"I have done that, too," replied the Duke, "and I still live. Once in
India I came upon a French explorer of a helpless, academic type. He had
come into the East to dig up a buried city, and the English Resident
of the native state would not permit him to go on. He had put his whole
fortune into the preparation for the work, and I found him in despair. I
went to the Resident, a person of no breeding, who endeavored, like all
those of that order, to make up for this deficiency with insolence. I
was ordered to wait on the person's leisure, to explain in detail
the explorer's plan, literally to petition the creature. It was not
pleasant, but in the end I got it; and I rather believe that this
Resident was not, at bottom, the worst sort, after one got to the real
man under his insolence."

The Marchesa recalled vaguely some mention of this incident in a
continental paper at the time.

"But," she said, "that was aid asked for another. That is easy. It is
aid asked for oneself that is crucifixion."

"If," replied the Duke, "any man had a thing which I desperately needed,
I should have the courage to ask him for it."

A tinge of color flowed up into the woman's face.

"I thought that, too," she said, "until I came into your house this
morning."

The Duke leaned forward and rested his elbows on the table.

"Have I acted then, so much like that English Resident?" he said. The
voice was low, but wholly open and sincere.

"Oh, no," replied the Marchesa, "no, it is not that."

"Then," he said, "you will tell me what it is that I can do."

The woman's color deepened. "It is so common, so sordid," she said,
"that I am ashamed to ask."

"And I," replied the Duke, "shall be always ashamed if you do not. I
shall feel that by some discourtesy I have closed the lips of one who
came trusting to a better memory of me. What is it?"

The woman's face took on a certain resolution under its color. "I have
come," she said, "to ask you for money."

The Duke's features cleared like water under a lifting fog. He arose,
went into an adjoining room, and returned with a heavy pigskin dispatch
case. He set the case on the table, opened it with, a little brass key,
took out a paper blank, wrote a moment on it and handed it with the pen
to the Marchesa. The woman divining that he had written a check did not
at first realize why he was giving her the pen. Then she saw that the
check was merely dated and signed and left blank for her to fill in any
sum she wished. She hesitated a moment with the pen in her fingers, then
wrote "five hundred pounds."

The Duke, without looking at the words that the Marchesa had written,
laid the check face downward on a blotter, and ran the tips of his
fingers over the back to dry the ink. Then he crossed to the mantel, and
pulled down the brass handle of the bell. When the footman entered, he
handed the check to him, with a direction to bring the money at once.
Then he came back, as to his chair, but pausing a moment at the back of
it, followed the footman out of the room.

A doubt of the man's striking courtesy flitted a moment into the woman's
mind. Had he gone, then, after this delicate unconcern, to see what sum
she had written into the body of the check? She arose quickly and looked
out of the high window. What she saw there set her blushing for the
doubt. The footman was already going down the road to the village.
She was hardly in her chair, smarting under the lesson, when the Duke
returned.

"I have taken the liberty to order a bit of luncheon," he said. "This
village is not celebrated for its inn."

The Marchesa wished to thank him for this new courtesy, but she felt
that she ought to begin with some word about the check, and yet she
knew, as by a subtle instinct, that she could not say too little about
it.

"You are very kind," she said, "I thank you for this money"; and
swiftly, with a deft movement of the fingers, she undid the strand of
pearls at her throat, and held it out across the table. "Until I can
repay it, please put this necklace in the corner of your box."

The Duke put her hand gently back. "No," he said, his mouth a bit drawn
at the corners, "you must not make a money lender of me."

"And you," replied the Marchesa, "must not make a beggar of me. I must
be permitted to return this money or I cannot take it."

"Certainly," replied the Duke, "you may repay me when you like, but I
will not take security like a Jew."

The butler, announcing luncheon, ended the controversy.




CHAPTER III--THE HERMIT'S CRUST

The Marchesa passed through the door held open by the butler, across a
little stone passage, into the dining room.

This room was in structure similar to the one she had just quitted,
except for the two long windows cut through the south wall--flood gates
for the sun. The table was laid with a white cloth almost to the
floor. In the center of it was a single silver bowl, as great as a peck
measure, filled with fruit, an old massive piece, shaped like the hull
of a huge acorn, the surface crudely cut to resemble the outside of that
first model for his cup, which the early man found under the oak tree.
The worn rim marked the extreme antiquity of this bowl. Somewhere in
the faint dawn of time, a smith, melting silver in a pot, had cast the
clumsy outline of the piece in a primitive sand mold on the floor of his
shop, and then sat down with his model--picked up in the forest--before
him on his bench, to cut and hammer the outside as like to nature as he
could get it with his tools--the labor of a long northern winter; and
then, when that prodigious toil was ended, to grind the inside smooth
with sand, rubbed laboriously over the rough surface. But his work
remained to glorify his deftness ages after his patient hands were dust.
It sat now on the center of the white cloth, the mottled spots, where
the early smith had followed so carefully his acorn, worn smooth with
the touching of innumerable fingers.

At the end of the room was a heavy rosewood sideboard, flanked at
either corner by tall silver cups--trophies, doubtless, of this Duke
of Dorset--bearing inscriptions not legible to the Marchesa at the
distance. The luncheon set hastily for the unexpected guest was
conspicuously simple. The butler, perhaps at the Duke's direction, did
not follow into the dining room. The host helped the guest to the food
set under covers on the sideboard. Cold grouse, a glass of claret, and
later, from the huge acorn, a bunch of those delicious white grapes
grown under glass in this north country.

The Duke, having helped the Marchesa to the grouse, sat down beyond her
at the table, taking out of courtesy a glass of wine and a biscuit.

"You will pardon this hunter's luncheon," he said; "I did not know how
much leisure you might have."

"I have quite an hour," replied the Marchesa; "I go on to Oban at twenty
minutes past one."

The answer set the man to speculating on the object of this trip to
Oban. He did not descend to the commonplace of such a query, but he
lifted the gate for the Marchesa to enter if she liked.

"The bay of Oban," he said, "is thought to be one of the most beautiful
in the world. I believe it is a meeting place for yachts at this
season."

The Marchesa Soderrelli returned a bit of general explanation. "I
believe that a great number of yachts come into the harbor for the Oban
Gathering," she answered; "it is considered rather smart for a day or
two then."

"I had forgotten the Oban Gathering for the moment," said the Duke.
"Does it not seem rather incongruous to attend land games with a fleet
of yachts? The Celt is not a person taking especially to water in any
form but rain." The Marchesa laughed. "It is the rich wanderer who comes
in with his yacht."

"I wonder why it is," replied the Duke, "that we take usually to the
road in the extremes of wealth and poverty. The instinct of vagrancy
seems to dominate a man when necessity emancipates him."

"I think it is because the great workshop is not fitted with a lounging
room," said the Marchesa, "and, so, when one is paid off at the window,
he can only go about and watch the fly wheels spin. If there is a little
flurry anywhere in the great shop he hurries to it." Then she added,
"Have you ever attended a Northern Gathering?"

"No," replied the Duke, "but I may possibly go to Oban for a day of it."

The answer seemed to bring some vital matter strikingly before the
Marchesa Soderrelli.

She put down her fork idly on the plate. She took up her glass of claret
and drank it slowly, her eyes fixed vacantly on the cloth. But she could
have arisen and clapped her hands. The gods, sitting in their spheres,
were with her. The moving object of her visit was to get this man to
Oban. And he was coming of himself! Surely Providence was pleased at
last to fill the slack sails of her fortune.

Then a sense of how little this man resembled the popular conception of
him, thrust itself upon her like a thing not until this moment thought
of. He was a stranger, almost wholly unknown in England, but the title
was known. Next to that of the reigning house it was the greatest in the
Empire. The story of its descent to this new Duke of Dorset was widely
known. The romance of it had reached even to that Janet, toasting scones
in the innkeeper's kitchen. The story, issuing from every press in
Europe, was colored like a tale of treasure. But it was vague as to
the personality of this incoming Duke. He had been drawn for the reader
wholly from the fancy. In the great hubbub he had been painted--like
that picture which she had examined in the innkeeper's dining
room--young, handsome, a sort of fairy prince. The man, while the
sensation ran its seven days, was hunting somewhere in the valley of the
Saagdan on the Great Laba, inaccessible for weeks. The romance passed,
turning many a pretty head with this new Prince Charlie, coming, as by
some Arabian enchantment, to be the richest and the greatest peer in
England. Other events succeeded to the public notice. The matter of the
succession adjusted itself slowly under the cover of state portfolios,
the steps of it coming out now and then in some brief notice. But the
portrait of the new Duke remained, as the dreamers had created him, a
swaggering, handsome, orphaned lad, moved back into an age of romance.

The reality sat now before the Marchesa Soderrelli in striking contrast
to this fancy. A man of five and thirty, hard as the deck of a whale
ship; his hair sunburned; the marks of the wilderness, the desert, the
great silent mountains stamped into his bronze face; his hands sinewy,
callous; his eyes steady, with the calm of solitudes--an expression,
common to the eye of every living thing dwelling in the waste places of
the earth.

"You will come to Oban?" she said, putting down her cup and lifting her
face, brightened with this pleasing news. "I am delighted. The Duke of
Dorset will be a great figure at this little durbar. Perhaps on some
afternoon there, when you are tired of bowing Highlanders, you will
permit me to carry you off to an American yacht." She paused a moment,
smiling. "Now, that you are a great personage in England, you should
give a bit of notice to great personages in other lands. The peace
of the world, and all that, depends, we are told, on such social
intermixing. I promise you a cup of tea with a most important person."
Then she laughed in a cheery note.

"You will pardon the way I run on. I do not really depend on the
argument I am making. I ought rather to be quite frank; in fact, to say,
simply, that an opportunity to present the Duke of Dorset to my friends
will help me to make good a little feminine boasting. I confess to the
weakness. When the romance of your succession to the greatest title in
England was being blown about the world, I could not resist a little
posing. I had seen you in various continental cities, now and then, and
I boasted it a bit. I added, perhaps, a little color to your imaginary
portrait. I stood out in the gay season at Biarritz as the only woman
who actually knew this fairy prince. King Edward was there, and with
him London and New York. You were the consuming topic, and this little
distinction pleased my feminine vanity."

The Marchesa smiled again. "It seems infinitely little, doesn't it? And
to a man it would be, but not so to a woman. A woman gets the pleasure
of her life out of just such little things. You must not measure us in
your big iron bushel. If you take away our little vanities, our flecks
of egotism, our bits of fiction, you leave us with nothing by which we
can manage to be happy. And so," she continued, lowering her eyes to the
cloth and tapping the rim of the plate with her fingers, "if the Duke
of Dorset appears in Oban and does not know me, I am conspicuously
pilloried."

It was not possible to determine from the man's face with what
internal comment he took this feminine confession. He arose, filled the
Marchesa's glass, set the decanter on the table, and returned to his
chair; then he answered.

"If I should attend this Gathering," he said, "I will certainly do
myself the honor of looking you up."

The words rang on the Marchesa Soderrelli like a rebuke descended from
the stars. She might have saved herself the doubtful effect of her
ingenuous confession.

The man's face gave no sign. He was still talking--words which the
Marchesa, engrossed with the various aspects of her error, did not
closely follow. He was going on to explain that he was just setting out
for Canada, but if he had a day or two he would likely come to Oban.
He was curious to see a Highland Gathering. And if he came he would be
charmed to know the Marchesa's friends--to see her again there, and so
forth.

The Marchesa Soderrelli murmured some courteous platitudes, some vague
apology, and arose from the table. The Duke held back the door for her
to pass and then followed her into the next room. There the Marchesa,
inquiring the hour, announced that she must go. She said the words
with a bit of brightened color, with visible confusion, and remained
standing, embarrassed, until the Duke should put into her hands the
money which he had sent for. But he did not do it. He bade her a
courteous adieu.

A certain sense of loss, of panic, enveloped her. This man had doubtless
forgotten, but she could not remind him. She felt that such words rising
now into her throat, would choke her. The butler stood there by the
door. She walked over to it, bowed to the Duke remaining now by his
table as he had been when she had first crossed the threshold; then she
went out and slowly down the stone stairway, empty handed as she had
come that morning up it. At every step, clicking under her foot, the
panic deepened. She had not two sovereigns remaining in her bag. She was
going down these steps to ruin.

As the butler, preceding her, threw open the iron door to the court,
she saw, in the flood of light thus admitted, a footman standing at the
bottom of the stairway, holding a silver tray, and lying on it a big
blue envelope sealed with a splash of red wax.




CHAPTER IV--THE MAIDEN OP THE WATERS

The whine of innumerable sea gulls awoke the Marchesa Soderrelli. She
arose and opened the white shutters of the window.

A flood of sun entered--the thin, brilliant, inspiring sun of the
sub-Arctic. A sun to illumine, to bring out fantastic colors, to dye
the sea, to paint the mountains, to lay forever on the human heart the
mysterious lure of the North. A sun reaching, it would seem, to its
farthest outpost. A faint sheet of the thinnest golden light, fading out
into distant colors, as though here, finally, one came to the last shore
of the world. Beyond the emerald rim of the distant water was utter
darkness, or one knew not what twilight sea, sinister and mystic,
undulating forever without the breaking of a wave crest, in eternal
silence. Or beyond that blue, smoky haze holding back the sun, were
to be found all those fabled countries for which the human heart has
desired unceasingly, where every man, landing from his black ship, finds
the thing for which he has longed, upward from the cradle; that one
bereaved, the dead glorified, and that one coming hard in avarice, red
and yellow gold.

The bay of Oban on such a morning, under such a sun, surpasses in
striking beauty the bay of Naples. The colors of the sea seem to come
from below upward. The Firth of Lorn is then the vat of some master
alchemist, wherein lies every color and every shade of color, varying
with the light, the angle of incidence, the traveling of clouds; and
yet, always, the waters of that vat are green, viscous, sinister. The
rocks, rising out of this sea, look old, wrinkled, drab. The mountains,
hemming it in, seem in the first lights of the morning covered loosely
with mantles of worn, gray velvet--soft, streaked with great splashes
of pink powder, as though some careless beauty had spilled her cosmetic
over the cover of her table.

To the Marchesa Soderrelli, on this morning, the beauties of this north
outpost of the world were wholly lost. The whining of the gulls, of all
sounds in the heaven above the most unutterably dreary, had brought
her to the window, and there a white yacht, lying in the bay, held
exclusively her attention. It was big, with two oval stacks; the burger
of the Royal Highland Yacht Club floated from its foremast and the
American flag from its jack staff. From its topmast was a variegated
line of fluttering signals. Beyond, crowding the bay, were yachts of
every prominent club in the world, from the airy, thin sailing craft
with its delicate lines to the steamer with its funnels.

The woman, looking from this window, studied the triangular bits of silk
descending from the topmast, like one turning about a puzzle which he
used to understand. For a time the signal eluded her, then suddenly, as
from some hidden angle, she caught the meaning. She laughed, closed
the window, and began hurriedly with those rites by which a woman is
transformed from the toilet of Godiva to one somewhat safer to the eye.
When that work was ended she went down to the clerk's window, gave a
direction about her luggage, and walked out of the hotel along the sea
wall to the beach. There the yacht's boat with two sailors lay beside
a little temporary wooden pier, merely a plank or two on wooden horses.
She returned the salute of the two men with a nod, stepped over the
side, and was taken, under the flocks of gulls maneuvering like an army,
to the yacht. But before they reached it the Mar-chesa Soderrelli put
her hand into the water and dropped the silver case, that had been,
heretofore, so great a consolation. It fled downward gleaming through
the green water. She was a resolute woman, who could throttle a habit
when there was need.

On the yacht deck a maid led the Marchesa down the stairway through a
tiny salon fitted exquisitely, opened a white door, and ushered her into
the adjoining apartment. This apartment consisted of two rooms and
a third for the bath. The first which the Marchesa now entered was a
dressing room, finished in white enamel, polished dull like ivory--old
faintly colored ivory--an effect to be got only by rubbing down
innumerable coats of paint laboriously. The floor was covered with a
silk oriental rug glistening like frost, lying as close to the planks as
a skin. A beautiful dressing table was set into the wall below a pivot
mirror; on this table were toilet articles in gold, carved with dryads,
fauns, cupids, and piping satyrs in relief. A second table stood in the
center of the room, covered with a cloth. Two mirrors, extending from
the ceiling to the floor, were set into the walls, one opposite to the
other. These walls were paneled in delicate rose-colored brocade.

The second room was a bedchamber, covered with a second of those rugs,
upon which innumerable human fingers had labored, under a tropic sun,
until age doubled them into their withered palms. The nap of this
rug was like the deepest yielding velvet, and the colors bright and
alluring. The first rug, with its shimmering surface, was evidently
woven for a temple, a thing to pray on; but this second had
been designed for domestic uses, under a sultan's eye, with nice
discrimination, for a cherished foot.

This room contained a bedstead of inlaid brass and hangings of exquisite
silk. The ripple and splash of the bath told how the occupant of this
dainty apartment was engaged--in green sea water like that Aphrodite
of imperishable legend. Water, warmed by the trackless currents of the
gulf, cooled by wandering ice floes; of mightier alchemy to preserve
the gloss of firm white shoulders, and the alluring hues of bright, red
blood glowing under a satin skin, than the milk of she asses, or the
scented tubbings of Egypt.

The Marchesa Soderrelli entering was greeted by a merry voice issuing
from the bath of splashing waters.

"Good morning," said the voice, "could you read my signal?"

"With some difficulty," replied the Marchesa; "one does not often see an
invitation to breakfast dangling from a topmast."

The voice laughed among the rippling waters.

"Old Martin was utterly scandalized when I ordered him to run it up,
but Uncle had gone ashore somewhere, and I remained First Lord of the
Admiralty, so he could not mutiny. It was obey or go to the yardarm. For
rigorous unyielding etiquette, give me an English butler or an American
yacht captain."

"It was rather unconventional," replied the Marchesa.

"Quite so," the voice assented, "but at the same time it was a most
practical way of getting you here promptly to breakfast with me. This
place is crowded with hotels. I did not know in which of them you were
housed, and it would have taken Martin half a day to present himself
formally to all the hall porters in Oban."

Then the voice added, "I am breaking every convention this morning. I
invite you to breakfast by signal, and I receive you in my bath."

"This latter is upon old and established authority, I think," replied
the Marchesa. "It was a custom of the ancient ladies of Versailles, only
you do not follow it quite to the letter. The bath door is closed."

"I am coming out," declared the voice.

"If you do," replied the Marchesa, "I shall not close my eyes, even if
they shrivel like those of that inquisitive burgher of poetic memory."
The voice laughed and the door opened.

It is quite as well perhaps that photography was unknown to the
ancients; that the fame of reputed beauties rests solely upon certain
descriptive generalities; words of indefinite and illusive meaning;
various large and comprehensive phrases, into which one's imagination
can fill such detail as it likes. If they stood before us uncovered to
the eye, youth, always beautiful, would in every decade shame them with
comparison. The historical detective, following his clew here and there
among forgotten manuscripts, has stripped them already of innumerable
illusions. We are told that Helen was forty when she eloped to Ilium,
and, one fears, rather fat into the bargain; that Cleopatra at her
heyday was a middle-aged mother; that Catherine of Russia was pitted
with the smallpox; and, upon the authority of a certain celebrated
Englishman, that every oriental beauty cooing in Bagdad was a load for a
camel.

It is then the idea of perennial youth, associated by legend with these
names, that so mightily affects us. As these beauties are called, it is
always the slim figure of Daphne, of Ariadne, of Nicolette, as under the
piping of Prospero, that rises to the eye--fresh color, slender limbs,
breasts like apples--daughters of immortal morning, coming forth at dawn
untouched as from the silver chamber of a chrysalis. It is youth that
the gods love!

And it was youth, fresh, incomparable youth, that came now through the
bath door. A girl packed yet into the bud; slender, a little tall,
a little of authority, perhaps in the carriage of the head, a bit of
hauteur maybe in the lifting of the chin--but gloriously young. Her
hair, long, heavy, in two wrist-thick plaits, fell on either side of her
face to her knees over a rose-colored bath robe of quilted satin. This
hair was black; blue against the exquisite whiteness of the skin; purple
against the dark-rose-colored quiltings. Her eyes, too, were black; but
they were wide apart, open, and thereby escaped any suggestion of that
shimmering, beady blackness of Castilian women. Their very size made
this feature perhaps too prominent in the girl's face. It is a thing
often to be noticed, as though the eye came first to its maturity, and
disturbed a little the harmony of features not yet wholly filled in.
But it is a beauty to be had only from the cradle, and for that reason
priceless.

"Oh, Caroline," cried the Marchesa, rising, "you are so splendidly, so
gloriously young!" The girl laughed. "It is a misfortune, Marchesa, from
which I am certain to recover."

"Oh," continued the woman, drinking in the girl from her dainty feet,
incased in quaint Japanese sandals, to the delicate contour of her
bosom, showing above the open collar of the robe. "If only one could be
always young, then one could, indeed, be always beautiful; but each year
is sold to us, as it goes out it takes with it some bit of our priceless
treasure, like evil fairies, stealing sovereigns from a chest, piece by
piece, until the treasure is wholly gone."

She paused, as though caught on the instant by some returning memory
of a day long vanished, when she saw, reflected from a glass, on such a
morning, a counterpart of this splendid picture, only that girl's hair
was gold, and her eyes gray, but she was slim, too, and brilliantly
colored and alluring.

Then she continued: "The bit taken seems a very little, a strand of
hair, a touch of color, the almost imperceptible lessening of a perfect
contour, but in the end we are hags."

"Then," replied the girl, smiling, "I beg that I may become, in the end,
such a hag as the Marchesa Soderrelli."

"Child," said the woman, still speaking as though moved by the
inspiration of that picture, "beg only for youth, in your prayers, as
the Apostle would say it, unceasingly. If you should be given a wish by
the fairies, or three wishes, let them all be youth. Women arriving
at middle life adhere to the Christian religion upon the promise of a
resurrection of the body. Were that promise wanting, we should be, to
the last one, pagans."

"But, Marchesa," replied the girl, "old, wise men tell us that the mind
is always young."

There was something adverse to this wisdom in the girl's soft voice; a
voice low, lingering, peculiar to the deliberate peoples of the South.

The Marchesa made a depreciating gesture. "My dear," she said, "what
man ever loved a woman for her mind! What Prince Charming ever rode down
from his enchanted palace to wed a learned prig, doing calculus behind
her spectacles! The sight would set the sides of every god in his sphere
shaking. It is always the lily lass, the dainty maiden of red blood and
dreams, the slim youngling of gloss and porcelain that the Prince takes
up, after adventures, into his saddle. Every man born into this world
is at heart a Greek. Learning, cleverness, and wisdom he may greatly, he
may extravagantly, admire, but it is beauty only that he loves. He may
deny this with a certain heat, with well-turned and tripping phrases,
with specious arguments to the ear sound, but, believe me for a wise old
woman, it is a seizure of unconscionable lying."

A soft hand put for a moment into that of the Marchesa, a wet cheek
touched a moment to her face, brought her lecture abruptly to a close.

"I refuse," replied the girl, laughing, "to do lessons before breakfast
even under so charming a teacher as the Marchesa Soderrelli."

Then she went into the bedchamber of the apartment, and sent a maid to
order breakfast laid on the Buhl table in the dressing room. The maid
returned, removed the cover, placed a felt pad over the exquisite face
of the table, and on that a linen cloth with a clock center, and borders
of Venetian point lace. Upon this the breakfast, brought in by a second
maid, was set under silver covers. While these preparations went swiftly
forward, the young woman, concerned with the details of her toilet,
maintained a running conversation with the Marchesa Soderrelli.

"Did you find that fairy person, the Duke of Dorset?"

"Yes," replied the Marchesa, "at Doune in Perthshire."

"Charming! Will he come to Oban?"

"He will come," answered the Marchesa.

"How lovely!" And then a volley of queries upon that alluring picture
which the press of Europe had drawn in fancy of this mysterious
Duke--queries which the inquisitive young woman herself interrupted by
coming, at that moment, through the door. She now wore slippers and
a dressing gown of silk, in hunters' pink, embroidered with Japanese
designs, but her hair in its two splendid plaits still hung on either
side of her face, over the red folds of the gown, as they had done over
the quiltings of the bath robe. She sat down opposite the Marchesa at
the table, in the subdued light of this sumptuous apartment.

The picture thus richly colored, set under a yacht's deck in the bay
of Oban, belonged rather behind a casement window, opening above a
blue sea, in some Arabian story. The beauty of the girl, the barbaric
richness of the dressing gown, her dark, level eyebrows, the hair in its
two plaits, were the distinctive properties of those first women of
the earth glorified by fable. But the girl responding visibly to these
ancient extravagances, was, in mental structure, aptly fitted to her
time. The wisdom of the débutante lay in her mouth.

"And now, Marchesa," she said, balancing her fork on the tips of her
fingers, "tell me all about him."




CHAPTER V--THE GATHERING

The Highland Gathering is a sort of northern durbar, and of an
antiquity equaling those of India.

The custom of the Scottish clans to meet for a day of games, piping and
parade, had its origin anterior to the running of the Gaelic memory. A
durbar it may be called, and yet a contrast in that word cannot be
laid here alongside the gorgeous pageant of Delhi. The word may stand,
albeit, in either case equally descriptive. Both are Gatherings. The
distinction lies not in the essential and moving motive of the function,
but in the diametric differences of the races. The Orient contrasted
against the North. The rajah in his cape of diamonds, attended by his
retinue, stripped of: his Eastern splendor, is but a chief accompanied
by his "tail." The roll of skin drums is a music of no greater mystery
to the stranger than the whine of pipes. The fakirs, the jugglers of
India, disclose the effeminate nature of the East, while the games of
the Highland disclose equally the hardy nature of the North.

Here under this cis-Arctic sun can be displayed no vestige of that
dazzling splendor, making the oriental gathering a saturnalia of gems
and color. But one will find in lieu of it hardy exhibitions of the
strength, the courage, the endurance, the indomitable unflagging spirit
that came finally to set an English Resident in every state of India.

The games of the Oban Gathering are in a way those to be seen at Fort
William, Inverness, and elsewhere in the North; the simple sturdy
contests of the first men, observed by Homer, and to be found in a
varying degree among all peoples not fallen to decadence. Wrestling as
it was done, doubtless, before Agamemnon; the long jump; the putting of
the stone; the tossing of the caber, a section of a fir tree, and to be
cast so mightily that it turns end over in the air, a feat of strength
possible only to fingers thick as the coupling pins of a cart and sinews
of iron; the high vault, not that theatrical feat of a college class
day, but a thing of tremendous daring, learned among the ice ledges of
Buachaill-Etive, when the man's life depended on the strength lying in
his tendons. Contests, also, of agility, unknown to any south country
of the world; the famous sword dance, demanding incredible swiftness
and precision; the Sean Triubhais; the Highland fling, a Gaelic
dance requiring limbs oiled with rangoon and strung with silk, a dance
resembling in no heavy detail its almost universal imitation; a thing,
light, fantastic, airy, learned from the elfin daughters dancing in the
haunted glens of the Garry, from the kelpie women shaking their white
limbs in the boiling pools of the Coe.

But it is not for these field sports that butterflies swarm into the bay
of Oban. A certain etiquette requires, however, that one should go for
half an hour to these games; an etiquette, doubtless, after that taking
the indolent noble, once upon a time, to the Circus Maximus; having its
origin in the custom of the feudal chiefs, to lend the splendor of
their presence to these animal contests. One finds, then, on such a day,
streams of fashionable persons strolling out to the field in which these
games are held, and returning leisurely along the road to Oban. Adequate
carriages cannot be had, and one goes afoot. The sun, the bright heaven,
the gala air of the bedecked city, the color and distinctive dresses of
the North, lend to the scene the fantastic charm of a masquerade.

At noon, on the second day of the Gathering, the Duke of Dorset came
through the turnstile of the field into this road, following, at some
paces, two persons everywhere conspicuously noticed. The two were of so
strikingly a relation that few eyes failed to notice that fitness. The
observers' interest arose at it wondering. In the fantastic gala mood
of such a day, one came easily to see, passing here, in life, under his
eye, that perfect sample of youth and age--that king and that king's
daughter--of which the legend has descended to us through the medium of
stories told in the corner by the fire. Those two running through every
tale of mystery, coming now, unknown, as if by some enchantment. The
girl, dark eyed, dark haired, smiling. Her white cloth gown fitting to
her figure; her drooping hat loaded with flowers of a delicate blossom.
The man, old, but unbent and unwithered, and walking beside her with a
step that remained firm and elastic. He was three inches less in
stature than the Duke of Dorset, but he looked quite as tall. He was
old--eighty! But his hair was only streaked with white, and his body was
unshrunken, save for the rising veins showing in his hands and throat.
He might have appeared obedient to some legend; his face fitted to the
requirements of such a fancy. Here was the bony, crooked nose of
the tyrant, the eyes of the dreamer--of one who imagines largely and
vastly--and under that face, like an iron plowshare, sat the jaw that
carries out the dream. And from the whole body of the man, moving here
in the twilight of his life, vitality radiated.

The two, mated thus picturesquely, caught and stimulated the fancy
of the crowds of natives thronging the road to Oban. Little children,
holding wisps of purple heather tied with bits of tartan ribbon, ran
beside them, and forgot, in their admiration, to offer the bouquets for
a sixpence; a dowager duchess, old and important, looked after the pair
through the jeweled rims of her lorgnette; she was gouty and stout now,
but once upon a time, slim like that girl, she had held a ribbon dancing
with the exquisite prince sitting now splendidly above the land, and
the picture recalled by this youth, this beauty, was a memory priceless.
Once a soldier of some northern regiment saluted, moved by a deference
which he gave himself no trouble to define; and once a Fort William
piper, touched somewhere in the region of his fancies, struck up one of
those haunting airs inspired by the Pretender--

               "Speed, bonnie boat, like a bird on the wing.

                   'Onward!' the sailors cry.

               Carry the lad that was born to be King

                   Over the sea to Skye---"

preserving forever in the memory the weird cry of gulls, the long
rhythmic wash of the sea, and the loneliness of Scotland.

But the impression that seized and dominated the Duke of Dorset was that
he knew these two persons. Not as living people--never in his life had
he seen either of them as living people. But in some other way, as, for
example, pictures out of some nursery story book come to life. And
yet, not quite that. The knowledge of them seemed to emerge from that
mysterious period of childhood, existing anterior to the running of the
human memory. And he tried to recall them as a child tries to recall
the language of the birds which he seems once to have understood, or
the meaning of the pictures which the frost etches on the window
pane--things he had once known, but had somehow forgotten.

The idea was bizarre and fantastic, but it was strangely compelling, and
he followed along the road, obsessed by the mood of it.

Presently, as the old man now and then looked about him, his bearing,
the contrasts in his face, the strange blend of big dominating
qualities, suggested something to the Duke of Dorset which he seemed
recently to have known--a relation--an illusive parallel, which, for a
time, he was unable definitely to fix. Then, as though the hidden idea
stepped abruptly from behind a curtain, he got it.

On certain ruins in Asia, one finds again and again, cut in stone, a
figure with a lion body, eagle wings, and a human face--that mysterious
symbol formulated by the ancients to represent the authority that
dominates the energies of the world.

But it was the other, this girl with the dark eyes, the dark hair, the
slender, supple body, that particularly disturbed him. He could not
analyze this feeling. But he knew that if he were a child, without
knowing why, without trying to know why, he would have gone to her and
said, "I am so glad you have come." And he would have been filled
with the wonder of it. So it would have been with him before the years
stripped him of that first wisdom; and yet, now at maturity, stripped of
it, the impulse and the wonder remained.

The Duke of Dorset continued to walk slowly, at a dozen paces,
behind these two persons. He wore the dress usual to a north-country
gentleman--a knickerbocker suit of homespun tweed, with woolen stockings
and the low Norwegian shoes, with thin double seam running around the
top of the foot. This costume set in relief the man's sinewy figure.
Among those contesting in the field, which they were now leaving, there
was hardly to be found, in physique, one the equal of this Duke. Thicker
shoulders and bigger muscles were to be seen there, but they belonged
to men slow and heavy like the Clydesdale draft horse. The height, the
symmetry, the even proportions of the Duke of Dorset were not to be
equaled. Moreover, the man was lean, compact and hard, like a hunter put
by grooms, with unending care, into condition.

This he had got from following the spoor of beasts into the desolation
of wood and desert; from the clean air of forests, drawn into lungs
sobbing with fatigue; from the sun hardening fiber into iron, leaching
out fat, binding muscles with sheathings of copper; from bread, often
black and dry; meat roasted over embers, and the crystal water of
springs. It was that gain above rubies, with which Nature rewards those
walking with her in the waste places of the earth.

Ordinarily, such a person would have claimed the attention of the crowds
along the road to Oban, but here, behind this old man and this girl, he
was unnoticed.

The day was perfect. From the sea came the thin, weird cry of gulls,
from the field behind him, the wail of pipes. Presently the two persons
whom he followed stopped to speak with some one in a shop, and he
overtook them on the road.

At this moment the Marchesa Soderrelli came through the shop door.




CHAPTER VI--THE MENACE

The Duke of Dorset had gone to tea on the American yacht. It was a
thing which he had not intended to do when he came to Oban. The general
conception of that nation current on the Continent of Europe had not
impressed him with the excellence of its people. The United States of
America was thought to be a sort of Spanish Main, full of adventurers,
where no one of the old, sure, established laws of civilization ran.
A sort of "house of refuge" for the revolutionary middle class of the
world--the valet who would be a gentleman, the maid who would he a lady.
It was a country of pretenders, posers, actors. Those who came out of
it with their vast, incredible fortunes were, after all, only rich
shopkeepers. They were clever, unusually clever, but they were
masqueraders.

But, somehow, he could not attach either the one or the other of these
two persons to this conception of the United States of America.

He did not stop to consider whether this curious old man, whose face,
whose body, whose big, dominant manner recalled in suggestion those
stone figures covered with vines forgotten in Asia, was a mere powerful
bourgeois, grown rich by some idiosyncrasy of chance, a mere trader
taking over with a large hand the avenues of commerce, a mere, big
tropical product of a country, in wealth-producing resources itself
big and tropical; or one of another order who had drawn this nation of
middle class exiles under him, as in romances some hardy marquis had
made himself the king of outlaws.

Nor did he stop to consider whether this girl was a new order of woman
evolved out of the exquisite blend of some choice alien bloods.

The thing that moved him was the dominion of that mood already on him
when the Marchesa Soderrelli came so opportunely through the shop door.

Let us explain that sensation as we like. One of those innumerable
hypnotic suggestions of Nature drawing us to her purpose, or a trick of
the mind, or some vagrant memory antedating the experiences of life. The
answer is to seek. The philosopher of Dantzic was of the first opinion,
our universities of the second, and the ancients of the third. One may
stand as he pleases in this distinguished company. Certain it is, that,
when human reason was in its clearest luster, old, wise men, desperately
set on getting at the truth, were of the opinion that some shadowy
memories entered with us through the door of life.

Caroline Childers poured the tea and the Duke of Dorset sat with his
eyes on her. He seemed to see before him in this girl two qualities
which he had not believed it possible to combine: The first delicate
sheen of things newly created, as, for instance, the first blossom
of the wild brier, that falls to pieces under the human hand, and
an experience of life. This young girl, who, at such an age in any
drawingroom of Europe, would be merely a white fragment in a corner, was
here easily and without concern taking the first place. The little party
was, in a sense, a thing of fragments.

Cyrus Childers was talking. The Duke was watching the young girl, and
replying when he must. The Marchesa Soderrelli sat with her hands
idly in her lap and her eyes narrowed, looking out at something in the
harbor.

It was an afternoon slipped somehow through the door of heaven. The sea
dimpled under a sheet of sun. The bay was covered with every manner of
craft, streaming with pennants, yachts from every country of Europe in
gala trimmings. It was as though the world had met here for a festival.
Crews from rival yacht clubs were rowing. The bay was full of music,
laughter, color, if one looked straight out toward Loch Lynne, but, if
off toward the open water, following the Marchesa's eyes, he saw on the
edge of all this music, these lights, this color, this swimming fête,
the gray looming bulk of a warship, with her long, lean steel back, and
her dingy turrets, lying low in the sea, as though she had this moment
emerged from the blue water--as though she were some deep-sea monster
come up unnoticed on the border of this festival.

The Marchesa interrupted the conversation.

"Do you know what that reminds me of?" she said, indicating the warship.
"It reminds me of the silent _Iroquois_ that used always to attend the
Puritan May Days."

Cyrus Childers replied in his big voice.

"Are you seeing the yellow peril, Marchesa?" he said.

"I don't like it," she replied. "It seems out of place. Every other
nation that we know is here, dancing in its ribbons around the May pole,
and there stands the silent _Iroquois_ in his war paint."

"Perhaps," said Caroline Childers, "the little brown man came in the
only clothes he had."

"I think Miss Childers has it right," said the Duke of Dorset. "I think
the brown man came in the only clothes he had, and he has possessed
these clothes only for a fortnight."

"Is it a new cruiser, then?" said Mr. Childers.

"It was built on the Clyde for Chile, I think," replied the Duke, "and
the Japanese Government bought it on the day it was launched."

"How like the Oriental," said the Marchesa, "to keep the purchase a
secret until the very day the warship went into the sea. Other nations
build their ships in the open; this one in the dark. She pretends to be
poor; she shows us her threadbare coat; she takes our ministers to look
into her empty treasury, but she buys a warship. How true it is that the
Anglo-Saxon never knows what is in the 'back' of the oriental mind."

"Perhaps," said Caroline Childers, "we are quite as puzzling to the
Oriental."

"That is the very point of it," replied the Marchesa. "They do not
understand each other and they never will. They are oil and water; they
will not mix. They can only be friends in make-believe, and therefore
they must be enemies in reality. Why do we deceive ourselves? In the end
the world must be either white, or it must be yellow."

"Such a conclusion," said the Duke of Dorset, "seems to me to be quite
wrong. Certain portions of the earth are adapted to certain races. Why
should not these races retain them, and when they have approached a
standard of civilization, why should they not be admitted into the
confederacy of nations?"

"I do not know a doctrine," replied the Mar-chesa, "more remote from the
colonial policy of England."

"Do you always quite understand England?" said the Duke. "Here, for
instance, is a new and enlightened nation, arising in the East. We do
not set ourselves to beat it down and possess its islands. We welcome
it; we open the door to it."

"And it will enter and possess the house," said the Marchesa. "What the
white man is now doing with his hand open, he must, later on, undo with
his hand closed. Look already how arrogant this oriental nation has
become since she has got England at her back. It was a master play, this
alliance. The white man had all but possessed the world when this wily
Oriental slipped in and divided the two great English-speaking people.
He was not misled by any such sophistry as a brotherhood of nations.
He knew that one or the other of the two races must dominate, must
exterminate the other. He could not attack the white man's camp unless
he could first divide it. Now, he has got it divided, and he is getting
ready to attack. Can one doubt the menace to the United States?"

Cyrus Childers laughed. "Oh," he said, "the United States is in no
danger. Japan is not going to try a war with us. It is all oriental
bravado."

"But he is creeping in on the Pacific Coast already," said the Marchesa.
"He is getting a footing; he is establishing a base; he is planting a
colony to rise when he requires it; so that when he makes his great move
to thrust the white man's frontier from the coast back into the desert,
there will already be Japanese colonies planted on the soil. You have,
yourself, told me that they are always arriving and spreading themselves
imperceptibly along the coast."

"My dear Marchesa," said Mr. Childers, "the little Japanese is only
looking for employment. He has none of your big designs. His instincts
are all those of the servant." He looked at the Duke of Dorset. "If
Japan," he continued, "wishes to extend her territory, she will wish to
extend it in that part of the world which the Oriental now inhabits. If
there is really any menace, my dear Marchesa, it is a menace to England,
and not to us. If Japan had a great design to dominate the world, would
she not undertake to weld all the oriental races into a nation of which
she would be the head? Would she not go about it as Bismarck went
about the creation of Germany? That, it seems to me, would be the only
feasible plan for such an enterprise."

"And do you think for a moment," said the Marchesa, "that she has not
this very plan?"

"I do not believe that Japan has any such plan," replied the Duke of
Dorset.

"And you," said the Marchesa, "who have lived in the East, who have
assisted England to make this alliance, do you, who know the Oriental,
believe that he does not dream of overrunning the world?"

"Dream!" replied the Duke of Dorset. "Perhaps he dreams. I was speaking
of a plan, and a plan means a policy that one may carry out. Japan
cannot move in India because there is England in India."

"Not yet," said the Marchesa, "but when she shall have made the
white men enemies; when she shall have grown stronger under English
friendship. She cannot yet depend on these oriental states. They are
still afraid of the white man. She has encouraged them by her victory
over Russia, but not enough. She must give them another proof that the
yellow race is not the inferior of the white one. If she can crush the
white man in North America, the yellow man will rise in Asia. Then the
dream becomes a plan; then the plan becomes a reality."

"My dear Marchesa," said Caroline, "you must not so berate the little
yellow brother in the house of his friends."

"Different races are never friends," replied the Marchesa. "I know
because I am a woman, and have lived among them. The Latin does not like
the Teuton, nor either of them the Saxon, and yet, all these are of the
Caucasian race. Add to this the inherent physical repugnance which
exists between the colored races and the white, and this natural dislike
becomes a racial hatred. It is no mere question of inclination; it is an
organic antipathy running in the blood. Ministers who draw treaties may
not know this, but every woman knows it."

"Then," said Caroline, "there can be no danger to us in England's treaty
with Japan."

"And why is there no danger?" said the Marchesa.

"Dear me," said the girl, "if I could only remember how Socrates managed
arguments." She took a pose of mock gravity. "I think he would begin
like this:

"You hold, Marchesa, that the hatred of one race for another increases
with the difference between them?"

"I do," replied the Marchesa.

"Then, Marchesa, you ought also to hold that the love between nations
increases as that difference disappears."

"I do hold that, too, Socrates," said the Marchesa.

"Also, Marchesa, it is your opinion that of all races the oriental is
least like us?"

"It is."

"And of all races, the Briton is most like us?"

"Yes."

"Then the Jap ought to hate us with all his heart?"

"He ought, Socrates," said the Marchesa. "And," continued the girl,
making a little courtesy to the Duke of Dorset, "the Briton ought to
love us with all his heart?"

The Marchesa laughed. "I leave the Duke of Dorset to answer for his
people."

The Duke put down his cup. "With all our heart," he said.

But the Marchesa was not to be diverted. "I think," she said, "you
are sounding deeper waters than you suspect. We know how General Ian
Hamilton said he felt when he saw the first white prisoners taken by the
Japanese in Manchuria; and we know that Canada has had the same trouble
on her Pacific Coast as the United States. This family feeling of the
white man for the white man may prove stronger than any state policy."
She turned to the Duke of Dorset. "The riots in Vancouver," she said,
"are the flying straws."

"Both nations," said the Duke of Dorset, "ought firmly to suppress these
outbreaks. Vancouver ought no more to be permitted to jeopardize the
policy of England than California or Oregon ought to be permitted to
involve the foreign policy of the United States. I am going out to
Canada to look a little into this question for myself."

"And you will find," said the Marchesa, "what any woman could tell you,
that these outbursts are only the manifestations of a deep-seated racial
antipathy; an instinctive resistance of all the English-speaking-people
alike to having the frontier of the white man's dominion thrust back by
the Asiatic."

Caroline Childers interrupted. "You are a hopeless Jingo, my dear
Marchesa," she said. "Let us go and see the regattas."




CHAPTER VII--THE COUNSEL OP WISDOM

The Marchesa Soderrelli and Cyrus Childers remained on the yacht. When
the small boat came alongside the Duke asked to be allowed to take the
oars, and so the two had gone alone to see the regattas.

The bay was full of crafts. The crews of rival yachts crowded along the
course. Small boats were packed together in an almost unbroken line; one
coming late could find no place.

Everywhere awnings, flags, gay parasols shut out the view of the
regattas. The Duke pulled out into the bay and north toward Loch Lynne.
He was rather glad of the pressing crowd. This young girl held his
interest; the enigma of her puzzled him; she was like no other woman.
Somehow this dark-eyed, dark-haired girl seemed to present to him the
alluring aspect of something newly come into the world; something which
he himself had found.

There seemed to lie about her, like a vague perfume, something of the
compelling lure of fairy women, called up by the fancy; of women dreamed
of; of women created by the mind to satisfy every hunger of the senses.
The Duke of Dorset could not regard this girl without this vague
illusion entering his body like the first faint subtle odors of a
garden. The illusion seemed constantly to attend her. The presence of
others, commonplace surroundings, did not remove it. Her conversation,
no matter how it ran, did not remove it. He seemed unable by any act of
his will to dispel it.

There seemed, somehow, from the first moment, a certain intimate
relation existing between himself and this girl whom he had found; as
though she had appeared, obedient to some call issuing unconsciously
from the mysterious instincts of his nature. The sense of it had entered
the man at once when he came before her, as the subtle, compelling
influence of some pictures enter and seize our attention when we
approach them. And he had wished to stop and receive it. He had gone
about under the vague spell of it. When he had been shown over the
yacht, he had felt a certain difficulty in giving the attention to
the details of that exquisite craft which a proper courtesy required.
Afterwards on the deck he had hardly followed the conversation. He
had wished to be left alone, to be undisturbed, as one wishes to be
undisturbed before the picture that moves him.

He pulled the little boat out into the sea. He drew beyond the yachts,
beyond the warship, off the great rock that rises out of the green water
north of the bay. He wished to be alone with this girl. He wished to
inquire of her, as one would inquire of a fairy woman found in some
sunlit hollow; to ask her intimate and personal questions. Without being
conscious of it, his conversation entered this avenue of inquiry. He
seized upon the Marchesa Soderrelli as one who might lead the way.

"I wonder," he said, "why it is that the Marchesa Soderrelli bears so
great a distrust of the Oriental?"

"Perhaps from her experiences of life," replied the girl.

"Is she an old friend, then?" said the Duke.

"I have known her only for a month at Biarritz. But long ago, when she
was a little girl, my uncle knew her. She was born in a southern city
of the United States. She was very beautiful, my uncle says. I think he
must have been in love with her then, but he was a man of middle life,
and she was a mere girl. I think he loved her because he always talks of
her when one discusses women with him, and he never married. I only
know the shadow of the story. Her family wished her to make an amazing
marriage. My uncle was then only on his way up, so her family married
her to an Italian Marquis in the diplomatic service. I think he was in
some way near the reigning house, and if certain possible things were
to happen, he would go very high. The things never happened, and I think
the indolent Marquis merely dragged her about the world. But you ought
to know her better than I."

"I have occasionally seen her," replied the Duke. "Her husband was
always somewhere in the diplomatic service, usually in the East. He was
rarely anywhere for long. But I judge the position of his family always
found a place for him."

"Was he a very bad man, this Marquis?"

The Duke did not make a direct reply. He would have wished to evade this
question, but there seemed no way.

"He was a person one usually avoided," he said.

"One begins to understand," continued the girl, "why the Marchesa spoke
just now with so much heat. She has always met with these other races.
She has been behind the scenes with them. In the South, where she was
born, there was always the negro; and moving about the East, there was
always the Oriental, and, besides this, her husband was of another race,
not so widely different from ourselves as these, but still distinct from
us. She had a look in at the door."

"But we cannot take the Marchesa for a prophet."

"Why not? She is a woman."

"And how may a woman be better able to divine events?"

"She feels."

"Do not men also feel?"

"But feeling is the way a woman gets at the truth. Men go by another
road."

"But is not the other road a safer one?"

The girl laughed. "The English think it is. We are not so certain. I see
you trudge along it, and I know that you are safe--ever so safe--but,
are you happy?"

She put out her hands toward the land. "You have made everything in this
great, solid island safe. Even one's marriage is a thing to be managed
by the chief justice. Do you think one ought to go to the altar by this
other road?"

"But why should one follow one's reason in every other thing and abandon
it in this?"

The girl's face became thoughtful.

"I do not know," she said. "I wish I did." She trailed her fingers in
the water. "Perhaps it is a choice between being safe and being happy.
Perhaps, after all, older persons know best. Do you think they do?"

The Duke of Dorset was interested in the woman rather than these
speeches. The conversation was after a certain manner a thing apart. He
did not attach it to this exquisite girl. It seemed rather a portion of
some elaborate rite by which she was made to appear, to be, to remain.
He continued it as one new at magic continues his formula, in order to
hold in the world the vision he has called up. But the formula was not
of the essence of this vision. It was words following after a certain
fashion. He did not, then, go within for his replies, but without, to
the custom of his country, to the established belief rather than
his own. It was a moving of the man's mind along the lines of least
resistance; as though the magician made up his formula from anything
that he remembered, while the deeps of consciousness in him were
enjoying the appearance that he held by it.

"Older persons," he said, "are possessed of a greater experience of
life. They have gone a journey that youth is setting out on. They ought
to know."

"How to be safe? Yes, I believe that," she replied. "I believe they know
that. But how to be happy? I am not so certain. We have instincts that
we feel are superior to any reason, instincts that seem to warn us--I
mean a woman has. She has a sort of sense of happiness. I cannot make
it plain. It is like the sense of direction that leads an animal home
through an unfamiliar country. Put it down in a place it does not know,
and it will presently set out in the right direction. We are like that.
We feel that right direction. Older persons may insist that we take
another path, but we feel it wrong. We feel that our happiness does not
lie that way. Ought we to go against that instinct?"

The charm of the girl deepened as she spoke. She became more vital, more
serious, more moved. And the attention of the man drew nearer to her
and farther from what he said. He began to repeat arguments that he had
heard when families had gone about the making of a marriage.

It was too important a matter to be governed by a whim, an inclination,
a personal attachment. It was a great complex undertaking. Obligations
lapped over into it from both the past and the future. The rights of
one's people touched it. All the practical affairs of life touched it.
The standards of one's ancestors must not be lowered. The thing was a
human chain; every man must put in his link. The obligation on him was
to make that link as good as his fathers had made it. He must not debase
the metal, he must not alloy it. This was the great moving duty; against
this no personal inclination ought to stand. Moreover, who would leave
the sale of an estate or the investing of revenues to one having no
experience of life; and yet, the making of a marriage was more important
than the sale of any estate, or the placing of any revenues. It was the
administration for life of a great trust in perpetuity.

The man was merely reciting. He was like that one playing at magic,
merely feeding words into his formula one after another, as he could
find them, because thereby the appearance that he was drawing out of the
shadow was becoming more distinct.

The girl, leaning forward, was following every word with the greatest
interest; her eyes wide, her lips parted. She was like some kelpie woman
presented with the gift of life, inquiring of its conditions.

"You make me feel how great you English are," she said, "how big, and
sane, and practical. No wonder you go about setting the world in order;
but where does the poor little individual come in?"

"The house is greater than any member of it," replied the Duke.

"I see that," she said. "I see the big purpose. But must one give up all
one's little chance of happiness? Suppose one's feelings were against
the judgment of one's family?"

"We must believe," he said, "that many persons are wiser than one."

"But does one's instinct, one's personal inclination never count?"

"It often counts," he said. "It often wrecks in a generation all that
one's people have done."

"You make me afraid," said the girl. "Suppose in your big, sane island a
woman felt that she ought not to do as her people told her. Suppose
she felt it to be wrong. I do not mean that she loved some other man,
because if she did, I think she could not be made to obey. But suppose
she loved no one; suppose she only felt that this was not the thing to
do. Ought she to give up that poor little instinct?"

The Duke of Dorset recited the stock answer to that query: Suppose a
prince, called to rule for life a hereditary kingdom, were about
to select a minister, would he go into the street and pick a man by
instinct, or would he hear his parliament?

The girl made a helpless gesture.

"You convince me," she said, "and yet, one would like to believe that
one's instinct can be trusted, that it is somehow above everything else,
eternally right. One would like to believe that some little romance
remained in the world; that some place, somewhere, the one, the real
one, would find us if we only waited--if we only trusted to this
feeling--if we only held fast to it in a sort of blind, persisting
faith. But I suppose older people know."

The sun, slanting eastward, rippled on the sea. The boat lifted and
fell. The Duke pulled back to the yacht. Swarms of boats were detaching
themselves from the packed lines of the regattas. He took a sweep out in
the bay to escape this moving hive. A furrow of shining water followed
the boat. It widened and spread into a gilded track leading out into the
sea.

The girl no longer spoke. The atmosphere, as of something vague, unreal,
deepened around her. Again to the man there returned the impulse to know
things intimate and personal about this woman whom he had found. Was she
alone in the world with this curious old man? Had she no one nearer than
this uncle? He remembered in one of the salons of the yacht, on the old
man's table, a photograph in a big silver frame--the picture of a young
man. He remembered the vivid impression that this picture had given
him, an impression of a certain aggressive alertness that struck him as
almost insolent--as though the person bearing this face were accustomed
to thrust along toward what he wanted. He began to compare the face with
the girl before him. There ought to be some feature, some mark of blood,
some trick of expression common to the two of them, but he could not
find it. His mind was laboring with it when they reached the yacht, and
the old man came down the gangway to receive them.

The young girl stepped out of the boat. Her gay, sunny air returned.

"I have been taking a lesson in obedience, Uncle," she said. "The Duke
of Dorset has made me see how wise older people are, and how we ought
to follow the plan of life they make for us, and how we ought not to set
our whims against their reason."

A smile flitted over the old man's face like sunlight over gun metal.

"I am very much obliged to the Duke of Dorset," he said.




CHAPTER VIII--THE WOMAN ON THE WALL

Caroline was dressing. The Marchesa sat with her elbows on the Buhl
table; her chin in her palm; her eyes following the young girl, being
prepared, under the maid's hands, for the Oban ballroom. Evening had
descended. The curtains were drawn. The salon was softly lighted. The
Marchesa was seeking for the girl's impression of the Duke of Dorset.

"You are disappointed, then," said the Marchesa.

The girl laughed, her soft voice rippling like a brook.

"He is so unlike, so wholly unlike, everything I fancied him to be."

"And what did you fancy him?" said the Marchesa.

The girl sprang up, swept the long hair back from her face and took a
pose before the table.

"Like this," she said, "with big, dreamy eyes, a sad mouth, long
delicate hands, and lots of lace on his coat."

The naïve, mischievous, jesting air of the girl was adorable; but more
adorable was that slender figure, posing for the Marchesa Soder-relli
in the dishabille of her toilet with its white stuffs and lace. Her
slender, beautiful body was not unlike that of some perfect, immortal
youth, transported from sacred groves; some exquisite Adonis coming from
a classic myth; except for certain delicate contours that marked a woman
emerging from these slender outlines. Even to the Marchesa, seated with
her chin in her hands, there was, over the beautiful body of the girl, a
charm that thrilled her; the charm of something soft and white and warm
and caressing.

"But he isn't the least like this, Marchesa," she ran on. "Don't you
remember what everybody said of him at Biarritz--a sort of Prince
Charlie? And here he is, so big, and brown, and strong that I simply
cannot fix a single fancy to him."

Her eyes danced and her voice laughed.

"He hasn't a sad mouth at all. He has a big, firm mouth, and there isn't
the wisp of a shadow in his eyes. They are steady, like this--and level,
like this--and he looks at you--so."

She narrowed her eyelids, lifted her chin, and reproduced that profound,
detached expression with which the Duke of Dorset had continued to
regard her on this afternoon.

"Why, I have been simply fluttering all day. He has stalked through all
my little illusions of him and swept them away like cobwebs. There isn't
a delicate, pale, 'bonnie Charlie' thing about him. He is a big, hard,
ivory creature, colored with walnut stain. He looks like he could break
horseshoes and things. He drove that little boat through the sea with
a mere shrug of his elbows. If Prince Charlie had been like that the
capitol of England would be now in Edinburgh. I wish you could have seen
him out there in the hay."

The Marchesa had not removed her eyes from the girl.

"I wish rather," she said, "that he could see you now."

"Oh, Marchesa!" cried the girl, fleeing back to her chair and the
protection of her dressing gown. She huddled in it and drew it about
her. She looked around at the door, at the window, she caught her
breath. "How you frightened me!" she said.

"Forgive me, my dear child," said the Marchesa. "I did not mean to speak
that way. I meant only to regret that the Duke of Dorset can never know
how wonderful you are."

"Perhaps he doesn't care a fig how wonderful I am," said the girl, now
safely hidden in the exquisite silk gown.

The Marchesa did not reply. Instead she asked a question. "Tell me what
he said."

"Oh, Marchesa, I led him into terribly deep water. I made him tell me
how an English marriage is gone about. Dear me, what a fuss they make
over it, and what a solemn, ponderous, life-and-death thing it becomes
when the sturdy Briton gets at it."

She put out her hands with an immense gravity.

"'It is the administration for life of a great trust in perpetuity.'"

She rolled the words with a delicious intonation. "All the wiseacres in
the family eat and smoke over it. They hold councils on it. They trudge
around it, and they discuss it with a lawyer, just as one would do if
one were making his will. They brush every little vestige of romance out
of it. They make it safe."

For a moment her face became serious. "I wonder if they are right. I
wonder if older persons know."

Then she clasped her hands with a burst of laughter. "Why, if I were
English, I would be expected to huddle up against my Uncle's coat
and say, 'Far be it from me to doubt the wisdom of your opinion, dear
Uncle.' And I would be handed over, boots and baggage, to the fine young
man in the silver frame on my Uncle's table." Again for a moment the
laughter vanished and the grave air returned. "I wish I knew what the
poor little mite of a girl thought about it. I wish I knew if in the end
she was glad to have her life made so safe. I wish you could have
heard all the excellent reasons the Duke of Dorset repeated. He made me
afraid."

"I would rather have seen the Duke," said the Marchesa.

"You mean how he looked when he was talking?"

"Exactly that," replied the Marchesa.

"Well, he looked like a man who is thinking one thing and saying
something else. He looked like this." And again she contracted her
eyelids, and lifted her chin.

"Ah!" said the Marchesa.

The girl jerked her head, scattering the pins which the maid was putting
into her hair.

"Why did you say 'Ah' like that?"

"Because," replied the Marchesa, "it helps to confirm a theory I have
got."

"About the Duke's mind being far away?"

"Far away from what he has been saying all this afternoon," replied the
Marchesa, "but not far away."

"But that is not a theory. A theory would explain this phenomenon."

"I know. It is only an evidence upon which I base my theory."

"And what is the theory?"

"That the Duke of Dorset has found something."

"How interesting! What has he found?"

"A thing he has been looking for."

"Something he had lost?"

"No, nothing that he had lost."

"But how could he have found something that he was looking for if he had
not lost it?"

"He did not know that he was looking for it." The girl began to laugh.

                   "'Through a stone,

                   Through a reel,

                   Through a spinning wheel--'

What is it that the Duke of Dorset found that he did not lose, while he
was looking for it and did not know it? I can't answer that riddle."

"Unfortunately," said the Marchesa, "you are the only one who ever can
answer it."

"Wise woman," said the girl, "you speak in parables."

"I am going to speak in a parable now," replied the Marchesa. "Listen.
One day a woman on her way to the city of Dreams arrived before the city
of the Awakened, which is also called the city of Zeus, and there came
out to her the people of that city, and they said, 'Enter and dwell with
us, for there is no city of Dreams, and you go on a fool's errand.' And
one persuaded her, and she entered with him, and when the gates were
closed, they took her and bound her, and cut out her tongue, for they
said among themselves, 'She will perceive that we are liars, and she
will call down from the house top to others whom we go out to seek.
Moreover, if she be maimed, she cannot escape from us and flee away to
the city of Dreams, for one may in no wise enter that city who hath a
blemish.' And they put burdens upon her and she went about that city of
wrath and labor and bitterness, dumb. And years fled. And on a certain
day, when she was old, as she walked on the wall in the cool of the
evening, she saw another drawing near to the city of the Awakened, which
is also called the city of Zeus. And the other was young and fair as
she had been when she set out to go to the city of Dreams. And while she
looked, the people of the city went out to this traveler to beguile her
and to persuade her. And the woman walking on the wall would have called
down to warn her, but she could not, for she was dumb."

The girl leaned forward in her chair. Her voice was low and soft.

"Dear Marchesa," she said, "what do you mean?"

The Marchesa Soderrelli looked down at the table. She put up her hand
and flecked away particles of invisible dust.

"I do not mean anything," she answered. "I am merely a foolish old
woman."

But the girl went on speaking low and softly. "Do you mean that we ought
not to believe what older persons say? That one ought to follow what one
feels? That all the excellent reasons which the Duke of Dorset repeated
are to persuade us to accept the commonplace--to be contented with the
reality, to abandon our hopes, our aspirations, our dreams? Do you mean
to show me how it fares with the poor little mite of a girl, when she
is persuaded that happiness is an illusion, and is made to give up the
dream of it? How it would have gone with little Cinderella if she had
been persuaded to believe there was no fairy godmother, and no prince
coming to make her queen. And how, if she had believed it and married
the chimney sweep she would have missed it all?" Her voice sank. "My
dear Marchesa, is this the warning of the woman on the wall?"

"You forget the parable," replied the Marchesa. "The woman on the wall
was dumb." The girl arose, went over to the Marchesa and put her hand on
her shoulder.

"If I had been that other traveler," she said, "I would have gone into
the city of Zeus, I would have found the woman who was dumb, and I would
have taken her with me to the city of Dreams."

"My dear," replied the Marchesa, "you will not remember the story. That
other woman could never enter the blessed city; she was maimed."

"Then, Marchesa," said the girl, "do you think the traveler should have
gone on alone?"

The Marchesa took both of the girl's hands, and looked up into her face.

"I will tell you something else," she said. "In the city of the
Awakened, there was a maker of images, old and wise; and sometimes the
woman went into his shop, and because she was dumb she wrote in the
dust on the floor, with her finger, and she asked him about the city of
Dreams, and how one reached it. And he said: 'Not the travelers only
who pass by the city of Zeus win their way to the city of Dreams; our
fathers have gone there also, but not often, and very long ago, and the
direction and the distance and the landmarks of the way our fathers have
forgot, but this thing our fathers have remembered, that no man ever
found his way to the city of Dreams who set out on that quest alone.'"

"But if one could not go alone, how could one go at all?"

"He said there was always another chosen to go with us."

"And where is the other?"

"He said, 'In the world somewhere.'"

"And must one seek him?"

"He said that one was always seeking him, from the day that one was
born, only one knew it not."

"And what is there to lead us, did he say that?"

"The woman asked him that," replied the Marchesa, "and he said: 'What
is there to lead the little people of the sea when they travel with the
tides?'"

Caroline stooped over and put her arm close around the Marchesa
Soderrelli.

"No matter," she said, "I would stay with the poor dumb woman."

The Marchesa arose. She lifted the girl's chin and kissed her.

"No, dear," she said, "you must go on to the city of Dreams."




CHAPTER IX--THE USURPER

The Marchesa went up to the deck of the yacht. She had dressed early
and there was yet an hour to wait. A deep topaz twilight lay on the
world. There was no darkness. It was as though all the light remained,
but it came now through a colored window. At the door she stopped. Out
beyond her Cyrus Childers was walking backward and forward along the
deck. His step was quick and elastic; his back straight. Age sat lightly
on him. She watched him for a moment, and then she went over to him.

"Ah, Marchesa," he said, in his big voice; "what do you think of this
night?"

The Marchesa looked out at the bay flooded with its soft topaz color.

"It is wonderful," she said. "It makes me believe that somehow,
somewhere, our dreams shall come true by the will of God."

The old man's jaw tightened on his answer.

"Who makes the will of God?"

"It is the great moving impulse at the heart of things," said the
Marchesa.

"Nonsense," said the old man. "One makes the will of God for himself.
The moving impulse is here," and he struck his chest with his clenched
hand. "What we dream comes true if we make it come true. But it does not
if we sit on our doorstep or shut ourselves up to await a visitation."

He made a great sweeping gesture. "How can these elements that are dead
and an appearance resist the human mind that is alive and real?"

"But providence," said the Marchesa, "chance, luck, fortune,
circumstance, do these words mean nothing?"

The old man laughed.

"Marchesa," he said, "if a man had a double equipment of skull space he
could sweep these words out of the language."

"Then you do not believe they stand for anything?"

"They stand for ignorance."

"We are taught from the cradle," continued the Marchesa, "that there is
in the universe a guiding destiny that moves the lives of each one of us
to a certain fortune."

"It is the wildest fancy," replied the old man, "that the human mind
ever got hold of. The fact is, that man has hardly ceased to be an
animal, that he has just discovered his intelligence, and that the great
majority of the race have no more skill of it than an infant of its
hands. Anyone with a modicum of foresight can do anything he likes. If a
visitor from an older and more luminous planet were to observe how whole
nations of men are made to do precisely what a few slightly superior
persons wish, he would never cease to laugh. And all the time these
nations of men think they are doing what they please. They think they
are directing their own destinies. They think they are free."

The Marchesa came a little closer to him. "Have you made your destiny
what you wish it to be?" she said.

He raised his arms and spread out his fingers with a curious hovering
gesture. Then he answered.

"Yes," he said, "at last."

"Have you made every dream that you have dreamed come true?"

"Every dream," he said, "but one, and it is coming true."

"How do you know that?" she said.

"Because," he said, "I have the instinct of conquest. Don't you remember
what I told you when you were a little girl?"

"I remember," replied the Marchesa slowly, "but I was very young and I
did not understand."

"I was past fifty then," said the man. He put out his arms with his
hovering gesture. "I am eighty now, but I have done it all."

The purple light fell on his jaw like a plowshare, on his bony nose,
on his hard gray eyes, bringing them into relief against the lines and
furrows of his face.

"I have drawn the resources of a nation under me; I have got it in my
hand; it obeys me"; he laughed, "but I respect its illusions; I do not
offend its eye. I do not wear gewgaws and tinsel and I have hidden my
Versailles in a forest. Nations see no farther than the form of things.
A republic is as easy to govern as an empire if one only keeps his
gilded chair in the garret."

"And, tell me, have you gotten any pleasure out of life?"

The old man made a contemptuous gesture.

"Pleasure," he said, "is the happiness of little men; big men are after
something more than that. They are after the satisfaction that comes
from directing events. This is the only happiness; to refuse to
recognize any directing power in the universe but oneself; to crush
out every other authority; to be the one dominating authority; to make
events take the avenue one likes. That is the happiness of the god
of the universe, if there is any god of the universe. For my part I
recognize no authority higher than myself."

He moved about the deck, his arms out, his fingers extended, his face
lifted.

"I am willing for men to go about with their string of playthings and
to imagine they are getting pleasure out of life; but for my part, if I
could be the master behind the moving of events, I would not be content
to sit like a village idiot and watch a spinning top. I am willing for
little men, lacking courage, to endure life as they find it, and to
say it is the will of God; but as for me I will not be cowed into
submission. I will not be held back from laying hold of the lever of the
great engine merely because the rumble of the machinery fills other men
with terror. The fearful may obey all the vague deities they like, but
as for me, I wear no god's collar."

"Then," said the Marchesa, "you do not believe that we have any immortal
destiny?"

The old man raised his arms with that sudden swift upward sweep of a
vulture, seeking to rise from the ground.

"I am not concerned with vague imaginings," he replied. "I do not know
whether man is a spirit or a fungus. I only know that the human will is
the one power in the universe, so far as we can find out, that is able
to direct the moving of events. Nothing else that exists can make the
most trivial thing happen or cease to happen. No imagined god or demon,
in all the history of the race has ever influenced the order of events
as much as the feeblest human creature in an hour of life. Is it not,
then, the height of folly for the human mind, that exists and is
potent, to yield the direction of events to gods, that are fabled and
powerless?"

His arms were extended and he moved them with a powerful threshing
motion, like that vulture, now arisen, beating the air with its wings.

"The last clutch of the animal clinging to the intelligence of man,
as it emerges from the instinct of the beast, is fear. The first man
thought the monsters about him were gods. Our fathers thought the
elements were gods. We think that the impulse moving the machinery of
the world is the will of some divine authority. And always the only
thing in the universe that was superior to these things has been afraid
to assert itself. The human mind that can change things, that can do as
it likes, has been afraid of phantasms that never yet met with anything
that they could turn aside." The old man clenched his hands, contracted
his elbows, and brought them down with an abrupt decisive gesture.

"I do not understand," he said, "but I am not afraid. I will not
be beaten into submission by vague inherited terrors. I will not be
subservient to things that have a lesser power than I have. I will not
yield the control of events to elements that are dead, to laws that are
unthinking, or to an influence that cannot change. Not all the gods that
man has ever worshiped can make things happen to-morrow, but I can make
them happen. Therefore, I am a god above them. And how shall a god that
is greater than these gods give over the dominion of events into their
hands?"

He dropped his arms and with them his big dominant manner. He came over
to the rail of the yacht and leaned against it beside the Mar-chesa
Soderrelli.

"Marchesa," he said, "this is the only thing that I know better than
other men. It is the only advantage I have. It is the one thing that I
know which they do not seem to know. I have made good use of it. What
they have called unforeseen, I have tried to foresee. What they have
left to chance, I have tried to direct. And while they have been afraid
of the great engine and huddled before it, worshiping the steam, the
fire, the grinding of the wheels, imagining that some god sat within at
the levers, I have entered and, finding the place empty, have taken hold
of the levers for myself."

A certain vague fear possessed the Mar-chesa Soderrelli. The presumption
of this old man seemed to invite some awful judgment of God. Would
He permit this open, flaunting treason, this defiant swaggering _lèse
majesté?_ Surely He permitted it to flourish thus for a season that He
might all the more ruthlessly destroy it. The wan, eerie light lying
on the world, shadowing about this strange, defiant old man, seemed
in itself a sinister premonition. She felt afraid without knowing why,
afraid lest she be included in this impending visitation of God's wrath.

The old man, leaning against the rail, continued speaking softly: "Do
you think that I will get the other thing that I want?"

The Marchesa turned away her face and looked down into the sea to avoid
the man's direct dominating manner.

"I do not know," she murmured.

Already she was beginning to waver. She had come ashore from what she
considered the wreckage of her life. She had formed then at Biarritz a
resolution and a decided plan. She would take what this old man had to
offer, that would give her unlimited money. She would bring together
this new Duke of Dorset and this girl, and if that alliance could be
made, she would have through it, then, a position commensurate to the
wealth behind her. She had begun with courage to carry out this plan.
She had gone to Doune with a double object, to borrow money to pay debts
she must be rid of, and to bring about a meeting between the Duke of
Dorset and Caroline Childers. And these two things she had accomplished.
Until now the heart in her had been hardened. Until now she had been
cold, calculating and determined. Now, somehow, under this mood, a doubt
oppressed her.

The sudden, big, dominating laugh of the old man beside her aroused her
like a blow.

"I know," he said, "we are all of us alike. Once past the blossom of
youth, we, all of us, men and women alike, are after the same thing.
Until then we pursue illusions, will-o'-the-wisps, shining destinies
that do not, and cannot arrive; but when we have hardened into life
we understand that power is the only source of happiness. We desire
to rule, to dominate, to control. We wish to lay hold of the baton of
authority; and, look, I have it ready to your hand. I have everything
that the Fourteenth Louis had at Versailles, except the name, and
what woman past the foolish springtime of life would deny herself such
authority as that?"

The Marchesa drew herself up. The muscles in her body stiffened. Her
fingers tightened on the rail. With a stroke he had laid her ulterior
motives open to the bone. He had made plain what she was endeavoring to
conceal, and the bald frankness shocked her. He had stripped the thing
naked and it shamed her. But there it was, though naked, the greatest
shining lure in the world. Wealth past any European conception, outside
the revenues of a state, with the power that attended it. And how
poor she was! She had been forced to borrow five hundred pounds to pay
tradesmen at her heels. She had sent the money back this very morning in
order to loosen their fingers on her skirts that she might go forward
to this last adventure. What had she out of all the promise of her life?
What had she got ashore with from her sinking galleon but her naked
body? How could she, stripped, bruised, empty handed, stand out against
the offer of a kingdom?

For a little while the old man watched the tense figure of the woman,
then he added: "Do you think that I did not know how your life was
running? That I was overlooking this thing while I was getting the other
things that I was wanting? Do you think I came to Biarritz, over the
sea, here, merely to please Caroline? Look, how I came within the very
hour--on the tick of the clock!"

Again the Marchesa Soderrelli was astonished. She had believed herself
like one who sat in darkness, on the deck of a ship that drifted, and
now, as by the flash of a lantern, she saw another toiling at the
helm. She had believed this meeting at Biarritz to be the work of fate,
chance, fortune, and instead it was the hand of this old man, moving
what he called the levers of the great engine. The fear of him deepened.

"Look, Marchesa," he was saying, "I do not ask you to decide. Come first
and see the garden that I have made in a wilderness--the Versailles that
I have concealed in a forest."

He began once more to move, to extend his arms, to spread his hands.

"Remember, Marchesa, you decide nothing; you only say 'I will come,' and
when you say that, I will prove on the instant that my coming here was
for no whim of Caroline, for within the hour, day or night, that you say
it, this yacht will go to sea."

The Marchesa, disturbed, caught at the name and repeated it. "But what
of Caroline?" she said.

She pronounced the question without regarding the answer to it. Perhaps
it was because the old man did not reply directly and to the point.
Perhaps because another and more obtruding idea occupied her mind. At
any rate his words did not remain in her memory. From what he said, out
of the labyrinth of his indirections, the man's plan emerged--the plan
of Tiberius withdrawing to Capri, but holding to the empire through the
hand of another, a creature to be bound to him with the white body of
this girl.

The Marchesa Soderrelli, amazed, began to stammer. "But Caroline," she
said, "suppose, suppose, she does not will to obey you?"

The old man laughed. Again, by a tightening of the muscles, his
plowshare jaw protruded.

"A child's will," he said; "it is nothing."




CHAPTER X--THE RED BENCH

There is a raised bench of two broad steps, covered with red cloth,
running, like a great circular dais, around the curious old ballroom
of the Oban Gathering. The effect of it is strikingly to enthrone the
matron and the dowager, who hold that bench from eleven until five
o'clock in the morning. Impressive, important women, gowned in rich
stuffs, and of varying ages, from that one coming in beauty to the
meridian of life, to that one arriving in wisdom at its close.

The very word bench, applied to this raised seat, is apt and suggestive.
The significance of the term presents itself in a sense large and
catholic. The judges of the King's Bench do not deal in any greater
measure with the problems of human destinies than do the judges of this
one. That dowager, old and wise, her chin resting on her hand, her
eyes following some youth whirling a débutante down the long ballroom,
weighing carefully his lineage, his income, his social station, will
presently deliver an opinion affecting, more desperately, life and lives
than any legal one pronounced by my lord upon his woolsack. Here on this
bench, while music clashes and winged feet dance, are destinies made
and unmade by women who have sounded life and got its measure; who are
misled by no illusions; who know accurately into what grim realities the
path of every mortal presently descends. There is no tribunal on this
earth surpassing in varied and practical knowledge of life these judges
of the Red Bench.

This ball is the chiefest function of the Oban Gathering. Here one finds
the dazzling splendor which this northern durbar in every other
feature strikingly lacks; gowns of Redfera, Worth, Monsieur Paquin; the
picturesque uniform of Highland regiments. Every Scottish chief in the
dress tartan of his clan, with his sporran, his bright buckles, his
kilt; with his stockings turned down over the calf of the leg and his
knees bare. All moving in one saturnalia of color; in whirling dances,
foursomes, eight-somes, reels, quick as jig steps, deliberate and
stately as minuets, to the music of pipers, stepping daintily like cats
on opposite sides of the hall; as though on some night of license
all the brigands of opera bouffe danced at Versailles with the court
beauties of Louis, and around this moving, twining, sometimes shouting,
fantastic masquerade, the Red Bench.

[Illustration: 0147]

And yet there is here no masquerade. This dress of the Highland chief,
to the stranger fancy and theatric, has been observed in distant
quarters of the world, to attend thus fancy and thus theatric upon
the bitterness of death, in slaughter pens at night, under the rush of
Zulus, in butchered squares, at midday, sweltering in the Soudan; and
of an antiquity anterior to legend--worn by his father's father when he
charged, screaming, against Caesar.

At two o'clock on this night Caroline Childers came up out of the
crowded ballroom for a moment's breathing, and sat down on the Bed
Bench. She was accompanied by the Duke of Dorset, one of the few men to
be seen anywhere in plain evening clothes, except Cyrus Childers, who
had but now taken the Marchesa Soderrelli in to supper. The Duke sat
on the step below the girl, at her feet. On either side this bench
stretched the red arc of its circle. Below it innumerable dancers
whirled. This girl, her dark hair clouding her face, her wide dark eyes
distinguishing the delicate outlines of her mouth and chin, resembled
some idealized figure of legend.

One from a distant country, coming at this moment to the entrance of
the hall, would have stopped there, wondering, with his shoulder resting
against the posts of the doorway. Suppose him to have come ashore on
this night, lost, after shipwreck and strange wanderings, after the sea
had been over him, uncertain that he lived yet, he would have seen here
that fairy sister of Arthur, dark haired, dreamy, wonderful, like this
girl. Her council, old, wise, magnificent, sitting on this Red Bench,
and below a fantastic dancing company. He would have believed himself
come upon this hall through the deeps of green water, into that vanished
kingdom, situate by legend, between the Land's End and the isles of
Scilly.

The Duke of Dorset, his broad back to the girl, his bronze face looking
down on the crowded ballroom, was speaking, slowly, distinctly, like one
pronouncing a conclusion.

"I understand now," he said, "why it has become the fashion to attend
these Gatherings. It is the only place in the world where gentlemen wear
the dress and do the dances of the aborigines."

The girl replied with a question, "You have traveled in many countries,
then?"

"In most Eastern countries," said the Duke, "and I have seen nowhere
anything like this. These fantastic steps, these striking costumes, this
weird music is splendidly, is impressively barbaric."

But the girl was thinking of another matter. "Have you ever visited any
Western countries?" she said.

"Not the continent of North America," replied the Duke.

"Then," she said, "you must come to visit me."

These words startled the Duke of Dorset. He had heard not a little of
American disregard of conventions, but he was in no sense prepared for
this abrupt, remarkable invitation.

"Then you will come to visit me!" spoken quietly, surely, like one in
authority, by a girl under twenty, apparently but yesterday from the
gardens of a convent. He could not imagine a girl of Italy, of France,
of Austria, speaking words like those. A girl on the continent of Europe
giving such an invitation would be mad, or something infinitely worse.
Evidently all standards known to the people of the old world were
unfitted to these people of the new.

The Marchesa Soderrelli was right when she thought him to have found
here in the bay of Oban something which he had not believed to exist. He
was wholly unable to place and classify this girl. She was strange, new,
unbelievable. He felt himself as perplexed and astonished as if, on the
border of the Sahara, he had come upon a panther like that one imagined
by Balzac; or by accident, in some remote jungle of Hindustan, a leopard
with wings. Instinctively he swung around his great shoulders and looked
up into her face. There was nothing in that face to indicate that these
words were other than ordinary. The girl sat straight as a pine, her
chin lifted, her face shadowed by her dark hair, illumined by her dark
eyes, imperious, as though these men in spangled coats, in bare knees,
as though these women in rich colors, danced before her as before a
Sheba. Instantly, as under the medium of this picture, the Duke of
Dorset got a new light flashed onto those jarring words. Persons
accustomed to be obeyed spoke sometimes like that. He sat a moment,
silent, looking at the girl before he opened his mouth to reply; in that
moment his opportunity departed.

The young girl arose. "The heat is oppressive," she said; "let us go
out." And he followed her, skirting the crowds of dancers.

The door from the ballroom led first into a long scantily furnished
antechamber, hung in yellow, and then into the street. This chamber,
now deserted, is, during the early hours of the ball, packed with women.
Here, by a local custom, they remain until partners for their entire
card have been selected. This room has been called facetiously "The
Market." Because, here, in open competition, the debutante must win her
place, and the veteran hold that which she has already won.

The two went through this room out into the street. The night, like
those of this north country in summer, was in no sense dark. The sky was
brightened, as in other countries it appears at dawn or twilight; one
standing in the street could easily read the lines of a newspaper. The
street was not deserted; others, oppressed by the heat and fatigue of
the ballroom, had come out into the cool night. The pair walked slowly
down toward the sea. They passed, now and then, a couple returning,
and here and there, some girl and a Highlander seated on the step of a
silent house; the man's kilt spread out to protect his companion's gown
from the stone.

They came presently upon a bench under the wall of a garden, and sat
down there, looking out on the sea. The hay below the town blinked with
lights; every yacht was illumined; some were hung from their masts with
many colored lamps, others were etched in outline by strings of light,
following their contour. The sea, meeting the horizon, was broken here
and there with flecks of white, increasing with the distance; as though
sirens sported--timid, modest sirens, flashing but an arm or the tip of
a white shoulder where any human eye could see it, but in the security
of distance tumbling their bodies in abandon.

Within the ballroom the Duke of Dorset had been able to regard this girl
in a certain detached aspect, but here, now, on this bench before
the sea, that sense of something intimate and personal assailed his
faculties and possessed them. And there came with it a subtle illusion
of the unreal creeping over the world, a faint insidious something, like
the first effects of opium that one strives to drive away by dashing
the face with water. And the source of this vague compelling dream, the
thing from which it issued, or the thing toward which, from far-off,
mysterious sources, it approached, was this woman--this woman seated
here beside him, this slender, exquisite girl.

This sudden, dominating impulse the man strongly resisted, but while
he held it thus, he feared it. It was like those bizarre impulses which
sometimes seize on the human mind and which, while we know them to
be wild and fantastic, we feel that if we remain we shall presently
accomplish them. He was glad when the girl spoke.

"I love the sea," she said. Her face was lifted, the breath of the water
seemed to move the cloudy mass of her hair gently, as though it wished
to caress it. "It makes me feel that all the things which we are taught
are only old wives' tales, nevertheless, after all, are somehow true.
Before the sea, I believe that the witches and the goblins live. I
believe the genii dwell in their copper pots. I believe that somewhere,
in the out-of-the-way places of the world, they all remain--these fairy
people."

She turned slowly toward her companion.

"Tell me," she said, "when you have traveled through the waste places of
the earth, have you never come on a trail of them? Have you never found
a magician walking in the desert? Or have you never looked into the
open door of a hut, in some endless forest, and seen a big yellow-haired
witch weaving at a loom; or in the bed of some dried-up river, a hideous
dwarf, squatting on a rock, boiling a pot of water?"

"I have never found them," said the man.

"No," said the girl, "you would never find them. One never does find
them, I suppose. But, did you never _nearly_ find them? Did you never,
in some big, lonely land at night, when everything was still, did you
never catch some faint, eerie murmur, some wisp of music, some vague
sound?"

"I have heard," replied the man, "far out in the Sahara, in that unknown
country beyond the Zar'ez, which is simply an ocean of huge motionless
billows of sand, at night in the endless valleys of this dry sea, I have
heard the beating of a drum. No one understands this tiny, fantastic
drumming. It is said to be the echo of innumerable grains of sand blown
against the hard blades of desert grasses, but no one knows. The Arabs
say it is the dead. I suppose it is a sort of sound mirage."

"Oh, no," replied the girl, "it is not the dead; I know what it is. It
is the little drums of the fairy people traveling in the desert, hunting
a land where they may not be disturbed. We have driven them out of the
forest, and away from the rivers and the hills. Poor little people, how
they must hate the hot yellow sand, when they remember the cool wood,
and the bright water, and the green hills! I am sure that if you had
crept out toward that sound you would have seen the tiny drummers, in
their quaint scarlet caps, beating their little drums to awake the
fairy camp, and you would have seen the moon lying on this camp, and
the cobweb tents, and all the little carts filled with their household
things."

The fresh salt air seemed to vitalize her face; her eyes, big, vague,
dreamy, looked out on the sea; her hands were in her lap; her body
unmoving. She was like a child absorbed in the wonder of a story.

"But the others," she said, "the magicians and the witches and the
wicked kings and the beautiful princesses, they would live in cities.
Have you not nearly found these cities? Have you not seen the turrets
and the spires and the domes of them mirrored in the shimmering heat of
some far-off waste horizon? Or have you not looked up suddenly in some
barren country of great rocks and beheld a walled town with fantastic
towers and then, when you advanced, found it only a trick of vision?
That would be one of their cities."

All at once the man recalled a memory. A memory that suddenly presented
itself, as though it were a fragment of some big luminous conception
that he could not quite get hold of. A memory that was like a familiar
landmark come upon in some unknown country where one was lost. He leaned
forward.

"On the coast of Brittany," he said, "there is a great dreary pool of
the sea like dead water, and one looking into it can see faintly far
down walls of ancient masonry, barely visible. The peasants say that
this is a submerged city. The king of it was old and wicked, and
God sent a saint to say that He would destroy the city. And the king
replied, 'Am not I, whom you can see, greater than God, whom you cannot
see?' And he was tenfold more wicked. And God wearied of his insolence;
and one night the saint appeared before the king and said, 'God's wrath
approaches.' And he took the king's daughter by the hand and went to the
highest tower of the palace. And a stranger, who had entered the city
on this day, arose up and followed them, not because he feared God, but
because he loved the king's daughter. And suddenly the sea entered and
filled the city. And the saint and the king's daughter escaped walking
on the water. And the stranger tried to follow and he did follow,
staggering and sinking in the water to his knees.

"Well, one summer night my uncle slept at the little house of a curé on
this coast of Brittany, and in the night he arose and went out of the
house, and the curé heard the latch of the door move, and he got up and
followed. When he came to this pool he saw my uncle walking in the sea
and he was lurching like a man whose feet sank in the sand. The curé was
alarmed and he shouted, and when he shouted, my uncle went suddenly down
as though he had stepped off a ledge into deep water, but he came up and
swam to the shore. The curé asked him why he had left his bed and come
down to this dead pool. My uncle was confused. He hesitated, excused
himself, and finally answered that the night was hot and he wished to
bathe in the sea."

"And your uncle," said the girl, "was he--was he young then?"

"Yes," replied the man, "he was young. He was as young as I am."

"And was he like you?"

"I am very like him," replied the man. "The servants used to say that he
got himself reborn."

"And the woman," said the girl, "what was she like?"

The man leaned over toward the motionless figure of the girl.

"The story says," he replied, "that her hair was like spun darkness and
her eyes like the violet core of the night.'"

Suddenly, from the almost invisible warship etched in lights, with the
jarring scream of a projectile, a rocket arose and fled hissing into the
sky.

The man and the girl sprang up. The tense moment was shattered as by a
blow. They remained without a word, looking down at the sea. A second
rocket arose, and another as the warship added its bit of glitter to the
gala night.

They returned slowly, walking side by side, without speaking, toward the
Gathering hall. The salt air had wilted the girl's gown. It clung to
her slim figure, giving it that appealing sweetness that the damp night
gives to the body of a woman. The street was now empty. The reel of
Tullough had drawn in the kilted soldier and his sweetheart.

Presently the man spoke, "How little," he said, "your brother is like
you."

"I have no brother," replied the girl.

The man stopped. "No brother?" he said. "Then--then who was that
man--that man whose picture is in the yacht there?"

He looked down at the girl standing there in the gray dawn in the empty
street; her hair loosened and threatening to tumble down; her slender
face alluring like a flower, and for background, the weird, eerie
morning of the North lying on a deserted city.

"I think," she said, "there is a forgotten portion of your legend. I
think that saint of God saved the princess from something more than
death."




CHAPTER XI--THE CHART OP THE TREASURE

When the Duke of Dorset came into the hotel dining room at ten o'clock
for breakfast, he met a hall boy, calling his name and "letter please,"
after the manner of the English hostelry. He sat down at a table, thrust
a knife under the flap of the letter and ripped it open. He took out the
folded paper within and bent it back across his fingers. The paper
was an outline map of the Pacific Coast of the United States. Merely a
tracing like those maps used commonly on liners to indicate the day's
run. It was marked with a cross in ink, at a point off the coast of
Oregon, and signed across the bottom "Caroline Childers."

The Duke arose and went over to the window. The white yacht, lying last
night at anchor, was going now out of the bay of Oban, the smoke pouring
from her stacks. The gulls attended her, the sun danced on her painted
flanks, and the green water, boiling under lace, ran hissing in two
furrows, spreading like a V from her screw. The Duke remained standing
in the window, his shoulders thrown loosely forward, his hand clenched
and resting on the sill, the open map in his fingers. The yacht saluted
the warship, dipping her colors, and turned westward slowly into the
channel. Her proportions descended gradually into miniature. The
smoke crawled lazily in thinner whisps along the sky landward from her
funnels. The sea was a pot of molten glass, green as verdigris far down
under the light, and polished on the surface like a crystal. Over this
water, easily, without a sound, without the swinging of a davit, the
yacht moved out slowly to the sea like something crawling on a mirror.

The Duke of Dorset was not prepared for this sudden departure of the
yacht. Certain vague detached impressions had, during the night, got
themselves slowly into form. Certain incidents, apparently unrelated,
had moved one around the other into a sort of sequence. He was beginning
to see, he thought, to what end certain events were on the way.

For fully twenty minutes the Duke stood in the window watching the
departing yacht, his jaw thrust forward, the muscles of his face
hardening, his clinched fingers bearing heavily on the sill. Then, he
turned back slowly, deliberately, into the dining room, folded the map,
put it into his pocket, went out to the clerk's cage, paid his bill
with a five-pound note, ordered his luggage sent at once to the railway
station, and went down the steps of the hotel into the street.

The visitors overland to Oban were in exodus; lorries passed him piled
high with black leather trunks, boxes, bags, and traveling rugs; old
women passed, sallow, haggard from the nights' chaperoning; girls, worn
out and sleepy; men looking a stone thinner from seven hours of dancing;
Highlanders in kilts, pipers, sailors, crowded around the doors of
public houses, blinking in the sun. From behind these doors came oaths,
bits of ribald songs, the unsteady voices of the drunken.

Here and there a yacht lifting its anchor steamed slowly out of the bay
following that first one, now visible only as a picture etched on
the horizon. Stupid sea birds, their shoulders drawn up, their beaks
drooping, stood about the beach, or eyed leisurely the line of salvage
thrust up by the tide. At the dock the day boat for Fort William and
the north was taking on its cargo, and on mid deck, as a sort of lure,
a little thin man with a wizened receding face was picking out swinging
modern waltzes on a zither. His fingers moving nimbly as a monkey's, and
his face following in sympathy his fingers with little nods and jerks,
inconceivably grotesque.

The Duke went into the train shed, got a seat in a compartment and
returned to Doune. He was not, on this day, annoyed by the asperities of
travel, although the whole train south was packed, like a Brighton coach
with trippers. He sat crowded on either side by a loose-jointed baronet
and his equally masculine wife, who snapped at each other across him
like trapped timber wolves. An old lady of some country house, raw
with her long vigil, lectured her niece on the personal supervision of
luggage.

And by the door a betartaned female slept audibly, unconscious that she
rode south badged by two clans between which, after many hundred years,
lies still the bitterness of death; her cap Glencoe MacDonald, her skirt
a dress plaid of the Glen Lion Campbells; not since the massacre had one
person worn the two of them.

It was a hard, uncomfortable journey after a night on one's feet, but
the annoyance of it did not reach inward to the Duke of Dorset. He sat
oblivious to this environment. He was holding here a review of the last
two days and nights; as he visualized their incidents he seemed to come,
now and then, upon events indicating a certain order, as though directed
by some authority invisible behind the machinery of the world. The
coming of this girl to Oban seemed something cleaner to a purpose than
a mere whim of chance. And yet, looked at from another point of view, it
was a mere coincidence. This review was like work expended on a cipher,
or rather characters that might or might not be cipher. Characters set
thus by accident and meaning nothing, or by design, with a story to be
read.

The Duke of Dorset came on this evening to his house, with the problem
still turning in his mind. The mystery lying about the Marchesa
Soderrelli when she appeared at Old Newton was now clear enough. To
give herself a certain importance at Biarritz, she had boasted an
acquaintance with him. She had promised to produce him at Oban. She had
sought thus to attach herself to these wealthy Americans. It was a bit
of feminine strategy, but could he condemn it? An atmosphere of pity lay
about the Marchesa Soderrelli. The Marquis of Soderrelli, earning his
damnation, had been paid off at God's window--he was dead now--and she
was free. And she had come forth, like that Florentine, from hell,
her beauty fading, her youth required of her. She was no lay figure of
drama, plotting behind a domino. She was only a tired woman, whose youth
a profligate had squandered, making what she could, with courage, of the
fragments. Was it any wonder, then, that she kept fast hold of this new
hand, that she sought, with every little artifice, to bind this girl to
her?

In his heart he could find no criticism for her. He found rather a
certain admiration for this woman, who swam with such courage after her
galleon was sunk; who presented herself, not as wetting the ashes of her
life with tears, but as blowing on the embers of her courage.

When the Duke of Dorset reached his house every physical thing there
seemed to present an unfamiliar aspect. The form of nothing had
changed, but the essence of everything had changed. He seemed to arrive,
awakened, in a place which he had hitherto inhabited in a sort of
somnambulism. There lay about the house an atmosphere of loneliness--of
desolation. There was no physical reason for this change; it was as
though the peace of his house had been removed by some angered prophet's
curse. He seemed, somehow, to have come within the circle of an
invisible magic, wherein old, hidden, mysterious influences labored at
some great work. He had stepped out of the world into this circle at
Oban. What was there about this dark-haired, slender girl that effected
this sorcery? On the instant, as at a signal, he felt the pull of some
influence as old and resistless as that drawing the earth in its orbit.

He stood that night at the window looking out at the white fairy village
beyond the Ardoch, and suddenly he realized that all of his life he had
been comparing other women with this girl. He had not understood this.
He had not understood that he was comparing them with anyone, but he
was. When he had gauged the charming qualities of a woman, he had gauged
them against a standard. And now, he saw what that standard was.

But before he had seen, wherefrom had he the knowledge of this standard?
Wherefrom, indeed! For a moment the idea seemed like some new and
overpowering conception, then he remembered, that from this thing--this
very thing--the ancients had drawn the conclusion that the soul of
man had existed before he was born. And he recalled fragments of the
argument.

"A man sees something and thinks to himself, 'This thing that I see aims
at being like some other thing, but it comes short, and cannot be like
that other thing; it is inferior'; must not the man who thinks that have
known, at some previous time, that other thing, which he says that it
resembles and to which it is inferior?"

And the memory of that old legend, which had come so strikingly into his
mind, in the moment, with the girl before the sea, returned to him.
Was there truth shadowing in this fable? And there attended it the
recollection of that insolent, aggressive face which he had seen on the
yacht, and the girl's words as they returned along the deserted street.
But with it came the feeling that this man was in himself nothing, he
was only the creature, the receptive creature of that strange, powerful
old man's design. And he seemed to know an ancient enemy in this old
man, and to move again in some dim, forgotten struggle.

He determined to set out at once for Canada. A big, open, primeval land,
with its bright rivers, its mountains, its deserts, would cleanse him of
these fancies.




CHAPTER XII--THE SERVANTS OP YAHVEH

The Duke of Dorset was mistaken when he imagined that a new land would
rid him of these fancies. To remove a passion to the desert, a wise man
hath written, is but to raise it to its triumph.

He had gone directly to Quebec, and from there traveled swiftly across
Canada to the Pacific Coast. In Vancouver he was soon wearied, restless,
overcome with ennui. His rifle and its ammunition lay unpacked in an
ordinary traveling box. The lure of the mountains, the rivers, the
silent barren places, had somehow departed from before him.

In this mood he met the Captain of His Majesty's gunboat, the
_Cleavewaive_. He had known this man in the East; for a fortnight they
had stalked tigers in the mountainous country south of the Amur. The man
was by nature a hunter. The forest was in his blood. Life by rote and
the narrow discipline of the service irked him. His idea of paradise was
not unlike that of the Dakota.

Fourteen days in the wilderness bring men of any station to a certain
understanding for life. The talk ran on big game killed here and there,
in out-of-the-way places of the earth, and memories of that fortnight
in Manchuria. Such conversations are not apt to run for long without
touching a little on the future. It came out presently that the gunboat
was about to make its annual run, south along the coast of the United
States, in the general interest of British shipping, and to show the
flag.

The Captain of the _Cleavewaive_, finding the Duke bored and at leisure,
asked him to come on this cruise. He wished the Duke to accept for a
certain close and personal reason. A larger importance would attach to
the cruise from his presence, and this was to be thought of, but to do
the man justice, this was not primarily his object. He was one of those
men who, prevented by necessity from living the life that he longed for,
sought constantly his experiences of it at second hand. Since he must
needs thus follow the sea, he craved, with a consuming hunger, the
taste of conversation running on the forest, the plain, the trackless
mountain. The Duke of Dorset had lived in all of its richness, the very
life which this man, had his destiny been open, would have chosen for
himself.

For the hope then of talk running on these delectable experiences, he
labored to win over the Duke to this voyage. He was not hopeful that he
would succeed, and so he was surprised when the Duke finally accepted
his invitation.

The Captain of the _Cleaveivaive_, having got his guest aboard, at
first, took nothing from this fortune. The Duke of Dorset was now,
strangely, no longer that mighty hunter with whom he had talked at
Vancouver. On the gunboat he was a silent, reserved, impenetrable
Englishman, hedged about by distances which no inferior could
cross, meeting every advance with courtesy and silence. He talked
conventionally, he looked over the gunboat at the Captain's invitation,
noticed the structure of it, and made a word or two of comment when it
seemed to be expected.

On the first evening of the voyage the Captain labored to draw him into
conversation, but the manner of the Duke was now polite and formal, and
the Captain, seeking a way inward to the man, was always turned deftly
aside, until presently he gave over the effort.

The gunboat was delayed by heavy seas. The second day passed like the
evening of the first, to the discomfiture of this ship's Captain. The
Duke of Dorset was silent, courteous, and interested only in the sea. He
sat in his deck chair watching through the afternoon the long polished
swells--black, smooth as ebony, and rhythmic--in the hollows of which
the sea birds rode. And at night, watching the uncanny mystery of this
iron shell wrestling its way through the sea, shouldered from one side
to the other, heaved up and pitched forward, assailed with every trick,
and artifice, and cunning, with steady lifting and savage desperate
rushes; the sea always failing to throw this black invader fairly on
his shoulders, but never for one instant, never for one fraction of
an instant, ceasing to assail him. And always, as it failed, growling,
snarling, sputtering with a rage immeasurable and hideous. Then, when
the moon opened like a red door, skyward out of the world, the sea
changed as under some enchantment; a golden river welled up on the
horizon and ran down toward that one looking seaward from his chair. On
the instant he was in a kingdom of the fairy, and illusions, fantastic,
unreal, took on under this magic the very flesh and blood of life.

On this second night of the run the Duke of Dorset, sitting alone on
the deck, put his hand into his pocket, took out the map that Caroline
Childers had sent to him at Oban, tore off the strip at the bottom on
which her name was written, pulled that strip deliberately to bits,
and tossed the scraps of paper over into the sea. Then he arose, walked
across the deck into the cabin of the navigating officer, and put the
map down on the table before that officer.

"Lieutenant," he said, "how near is this point, marked here in ink, to
the ship's course?"

The officer got out his charts, located the point, and made roughly an
estimate of the distance.

"We pass this point, sir."

"On what day?" inquired the Duke.

"On to-morrow morning, sir," replied the officer.

"I thank you," replied the Duke of Dorset. "I wish to be put ashore
there." Then he went out.

It is a theory that good fortune travels usually close on the heels
of despair. The Captain of the _Cleavewaive_, as his boat ran south,
verified that theory. The Duke of Dorset sat with him for the remainder
of this night in his cabin, and in the smoke of it, the talk ran
constantly on the wilderness. He was again, as under the sprinkling of
some magic water, that primordial man of the wild, whom the Captain so
extravagantly envied.

In the cabin, while the moon walked on the water, and the great swells
slipped one over the other silently, and that sinister desperate
wrestling went endlessly on, the Duke of Dorset charmed and thrilled
this sailor with the soul of a Dakota. He led him, panting with fatigue,
through the vast, silent forests of Lithuania, day after day, in a path
cut down like a ditch by the hoofs of a hundred beasts, one following
the other--beasts, that the hunter, now himself a beast, running with
the rifle in his hand, his hair caked with dirt, his body streaming with
sweat, his heart lusting to kill, could never gain on.

He led him, shriveling with thirst, down the beds of lost rivers, where
there was no green thing, no thing with a drop of moisture, only the
dull red earth baking eternally under a sun that stood always above it
like a disk of copper.

He led him, chattering with cold, across bleak steppes where the wind
blew like a curse of God, set there to see that no man passed that way
and lived; blew and blew, until it became a thing hideous and maddening,
a thing damnable and accursed, coming out of a hell that froze; and the
hunter, driven mad, his face raw, his hands bleeding, his bones aching
to the marrow, no longer able to go forward, sat on the earth with his
head between his knees and howled.

The Captain of the _Cleavewaive_, set thus living the life he longed
for, forgot to be astonished at the strange course which the Duke of
Dorset had elected to follow. When the navigating officer had carried to
him the Duke's direction, he had been greatly puzzled. There was better
hunting in British Columbia than here, some deer and a bear now and
then, but nothing to tempt a man over seas with his gun cases. But the
mystery of it was a thing inconsequential beside the pleasing fortune
which this changed plan carried individually to him, and he easily
left it. He was living, through the medium of this man's adventures,
vicariously, that big, open, alluring life of the first man running with
the wolf in the morning of the world. He was harking back with joy to
those elements, primal and savage, by virtue of which all things fight
desperately to live. These things were not to be found in books, they
were not to be invented, they were known only to those haunting the
waste places of the earth.

The Captain of the Cleavewaive was, then, pleased to carry out any plan
of his guest. He was quite willing to go into the coast at the point
selected by the Duke of Dorset, or at any point within a reasonable run.

At sunrise, the gunboat, turning due east out of her course, anchored
off a little bay on the Oregon coast of the United States. The mountains
came, at this point, down to the sea; a great chain rising landward and
covered with firs, standing a primeval forest. The bay was a perfect
miniature harbor protected by a crooked finger of the mountain; the
inner border of this finger was a sea wall with steps coming down to the
water. A small, gray-stone house, not unlike a gamekeeper's lodge, stood
behind this wall on the summit of the finger, flanked by two giant firs,
lifting their brown, naked bodies, without a limb, two hundred feet into
the sky.

The Captain of the _Cleavewaive_ hesitated to put the Duke ashore in a
place so evidently deserted. He pointed out that the bay was merely a
private yacht harbor, used doubtless in summer, but now in the autumn
abandoned for the winter. There was no boat of any kind to be seen in
the bay, and no evidence that the place was inhabited. But the Duke was
unmoved in his determination to go ashore at this point; and his boxes
were got up from his cabin. While these preparations went forward, the
Captain, searching the coast with his glass, saw a man come out from
behind the stone house on the summit of the promontory. The man stopped
when he observed the gunboat, looked at it a moment under the palm of
his hand, and came down with long swinging strides to the point on the
sea wall where the stone steps descended into the water.

When the Duke came ashore at this point, the man swinging along the sea
wall was already there. He stood back some twenty feet from the landing,
waiting until the sailors should bring the Duke's boxes up the stone:
stairway, and return to the gunboat. Then he spoke, nodding his head to
the Duke: "Good mornin', stranger," he said, in a big deliberate voice
that drew out each word as though it were elastic, stretching from his
throat over his tongue to his teeth.

The Duke, standing on the sea wall among his boxes, regarded the man
with an interest, every moment visibly increasing. He had never until
this day, in any country, come upon this type of peasant. The man was
past sixty, but indefinitely past it; one could not say how old he was.
He might have been five or ten, or only a year or two beyond it. He was
big-boned, slouchy, and powerful; his eyes, mild and blue; his face,
sinewy and weather-beaten; he wore a shirt without a collar, and
fastened at the throat with a big white button; suspenders, hand knitted
of blue wool; and trousers tucked into the tops of enormous cowhide
boots. His head was covered with a big felt hat, rain-stained,
sweat-stained, and mould-stained, until it was a color that no maker
ever dreamed of.

The Duke returned the salutation and inquired if he were on the estate
of Mr. Cyrus Childers.

"He calls it his'n," replied the native, "but to my notion no man owns
the mountains."

The Duke's interest increased. "Are you a servant of Mr. Childers?" he
asked.

The man's mouth drew down into a long firm slit.

"Well, no, stranger," he answered, "I don't use that air word 'servant,'
except when I pray to God Almighty."

"Ah!" said the Duke, and he remembered that he was in the United States
of America.

The native went on with the conversation, "I reckon," he said, "you're
on your way over to the big house."

The Duke divined the man's meaning, and explained that he had come
ashore from the departing gunboat, under the impression that there was
a village here, and some means of transportation to the residence of Mr.
Childers. In reply the mountaineer talked deliberately for perhaps
five minutes. Much of the idiom was to the Duke unintelligible, but he
understood from it that this bay was a private yacht harbor, that
the yacht was on the Atlantic Coast, that the keeper's lodge here was
closed, and that Mr. Childers's residence was not near to this point, as
he expected, but farther inland. The Duke inquired the distance from the
coast.

The native screwed up the muscles on one side of his face, "Hit's a
right smart step," he said.

The Duke was reassured, "You mean," he ventured, "three or four miles?"

The mountaineer seemed to ponder the thing a moment seriously, then he
answered, "Well," he said, "I reckon hit's furder than three or four
mile. I reckon hit's purty nigh on to forty-eight mile."

The Duke of Dorset laughed over his own astonishment. He was beginning
to like this new type of peasant, who spoke of forty-eight miles as
"a right smart step," who thought no man owned the mountains, and who
reserved the word "servant" exclusively for his prayers.

The man looked seriously at the smiling face of the Duke and repeated
the substance of his first query. "I reckon," he said, "you're a-wantin'
to git over to the big house."

"I should like it," replied the Duke, "but the prospect does not seem
favorable."

"I might give you a lift," the man replied hesitatingly, a bit timidly,
as though he asked rather than offered a favor.

The words attached themselves to no exact meaning in the Duke's mind,
but he understood the intent of them.

"Have you a cart here?" he said.

"No," replied the man, shaking his head; "I hain't got no cyart, but
I've got a mewel." Then he pointed to the Duke's boxes. "If you leave
them air contraptions," he went on, "you kin ride the mewel an' I'll
walk; but if them air contraptions has got to go, we'll load'em on the
mewel, and both of us walk." Then, he added, jerking his head over his
shoulder, "She's back there in the bushes."

The Duke, following the line indicated by this gesture and expecting to
see there a donkey, saw such a domestic animal as he had never before
this day observed in the service of the human family. It was a mule at
least seventeen hands high, big-boned and gaunt like its owner; the hair
worn off bare to the skin in great patches on the beast's flanks and
withers--marks of the plow. The mule seemed to the Duke to have fallen
into the same listless slovenly attitude as that which marked so
strikingly the carriage of its master. The resemblance between the two
seemed a thing come slowly by intimate association through a lifetime, a
thing brought forth by common environment. The beast's trappings were no
less distinctive; the bridle was made of rope, smaller than one's little
finger, without brow-band or throat-latch, merely a head loop fastened
to a bit; the saddle was a skeleton wood frame covered with rawhide;
across this saddle hung a gunny sack with something in either end of it.

The Duke looked at the lank beast and then down at his articles of
luggage. "Do you think your animal can carry these boxes?" he said.

The mountaineer made a contemptuous gesture. "Jezebel will tote them
traps an' not turn a hair," he answered; "hit's the hoofin' hit I'm
apesterin' about."

The latter part of this remark the Duke did not wholly follow. While
he hesitated to embarrass this good-natured person by inquiring what
he meant, the man came over and lifted the various boxes, one after the
other, in his big sun-tanned hands. Then he stepped hack, and rested
these big hands on his hips. "Yes," he drawled, "if you git wore out, I
kin pack 'em an' you kin ride a spell."

The Duke understood now, and he was utterly astonished. This curious
person actually thought of carrying these boxes, in order that he might
ride the mule. He realized also within the last five minutes, that the
usual manner of speech to a servant was conspicuously out of place
here. That this man, big and elemental, required a relation direct and
likewise elemental. The Duke stepped down at once into that primitive
relation. He walked over directly in front of the mountaineer. "Look at
me closely," he said, "do I look like a man who would ride while another
man walked and carried his luggage?"

The mountaineer ran his mild-blue eyes over the Duke's big sinewy
shoulders, then he moved over his woolen braces a trifle with his thumb.

"You mightn't be toughened to it," he said, apologetically.

The Duke doubled his right arm up in its good tweed sleeve, and
presented it to the mountaineer's fingers. The muscles under that sleeve
sat together, compact and hard as bunches of ivory. Doubt and anxiety
departed slowly from the man's face. He made no comment. He removed his
hand from the Duke's arm and set off to bring his mule. In a few minutes
he returned with that animal and a piece of tarred rope which he had got
from some boathouse back of the keeper's lodge.

He lifted the sack from the saddle and set it carefully down. "I'll pack
that," he said, by way of explanation, "hit'll jist balance me." And he
began to tie pieces of the luggage to the saddle; but the Duke of Dorset
instantly took over this part of the preparation for the journey. He had
adjusted loads to cavalry horses in India, to donkeys in' the Caucasian
Mountains, to hairy vicious ponies in Russia, and he knew how to lay the
pack so it would sit snug and firm to the beast. It was fortunate that
he stood on this morning an expert in this craft, for the boxes made a
difficult pack to manage with the primitive saddle.

When it was done the mountaineer tested it with his big forefinger
hooked between the beast's belly and the rope. He arose from the test
with an approving nod, glanced at the sun, standing over bay, and spoke
his word of comment.

"Hit's a purty job," he said, "an' we better be a-hoofin' it." And this
time the Duke of Dorset understood that expressive idiom.

The man lifted his sack tenderly onto his shoulder, slipped the rope
bridle over his arm, and set out along the sea wall eastward toward the
mountain.




CHAPTER XIII--THE JOURNEYING

The road into which they presently came astonished the Duke of Dorset.
It was sixty feet wide, smooth as a boulevard and drained with tile. It
was supported below by a stone wall, surmounted by a balustrade, and
was protected from the slipping of the mountain, at certain points, by a
parallel stone wall equally massive. It was covered brown and soft
with a carpet of fir needles, and arose in an easy grade above the sea,
turning northeastward into the mountains. Strewn with the foliage of
autumn, the fir needles, wisps of yellow fern, hits of branches swept
together against the stone wall by the wind, it seemed a thing toned and
softened into harmony with the wilderness through which it ran.

The stone balustrade set there, naked and jarring, by the builder, had
been planted along its border with vines. Vines massed the whole of it;
vines patched, laced, and streaked with crimson, with yellow, with green
of a thousand shades, moving from one color imperceptibly into another.
The wall, too, set against the face of the mountain was thus screened
and latticed. The vines fed with dampness from the earth behind the
wall were almost wholly green, while those banking the balustrade were
largely crimson, a mass of scarlet, flecked with dead leaves, falling
now and then, with a faint crackling like tiny twigs snapping in a fire.

The scene was a thing fantastic and tropical. Below was the sea, to the
eye oiled and polished, bedded with opal, shifting in the light; and
above were the gigantic firs, their brown bodies standing close in
a sort of twilight, cast by the verdigris branches crowded together,
shutting out the sky; and between, the road crept upward, winding across
ravines into the mountains, banked with green and scarlet, and carpeted
soft to the foot with brown.

Hurriedly--with a haste incomparable--the wilderness had adopted this
intruder; within five years it had covered from sight every trace of
human fingers; the work had been swiftly done, and yet carried the
effect of years leisurely expended. Nature returning with all things
slowly to the wilderness centuries after man was dead. The Duke of
Dorset was not a person easily swung skyward by a bit of sun and color.
He was accustomed to that brooding mood, lying over solitary lands; to
the dignity, to the majestic silence, obtaining in the courts of Nature;
to the gorgeous pageantry of that fantastic empress; to the strange,
almost human hurry with which she strove to obliterate any trace of man
encroaching on her kingdom. And yet, he could not recall anything on the
continent of Europe equal to this scene, unless the mountain behind
the great road leading to Amalfi, above the Mediterranean, were again
clothed with that primeval forest marked by the Phoenician.

The Duke followed behind the big swinging mountaineer and his gaunt,
gigantic mule, all moving without a sound, over the bed of soft fir
needles, along this road thus clothed and colored as though infinitely
old. They might have been traveling on some highway of that mighty
fabled empire for which Fernando de Soto hunted the wilderness, with men
in armor.

It was a day of autumn, soft in this Western country. A time of Indian
summer, the sky deep blue, with here and there a cloud island, unmoving
as though painted on a canvas. The mountain chain running northward
along the coast faded imperceptibly into haze. Above and within the
immediate sweep of the eye the day was bright, but when the eye lifted
to a distance the haze deepened, as with smoke coming somewhere from
behind the world.

The Duke of Dorest lengthened his stride and came up to the mountaineer.
He wished to know something about this remarkable estate, having the sea
and wilderness for boundary. He wondered how old it was, how long this
road had been built--the work looked like the labor of centuries.

"How long has Mr. Childers owned this estate?" inquired the Duke.

"About ten year, I reckon," replied the man.

"And before that," said the Duke, "who owned it?"

The mountaineer, lifting his chin, took a deep breath and exhaled it
slowly between his lips.

"Well, stranger," he drawled, "I reckon God Almighty owned hit before
that."

"You mean," said the Duke, "that this whole estate was then wilderness
as I see it here?"

"Jist as the blessed God made hit," replied the man, "before He rested
on the seventh day."

The Duke understood now something of the plan of this American Childers.
He had secured, here on the coast, a great tract of wild, primeval
forest, and was making of it an estate suited to his fancy. He smiled at
the assurance of one assuming a labor so gigantic. Either the man was
a dreamer, forgetting the brevity of life, or he was Pharaoh, or more
likely yet, a fool. It took three hundred years to make a garden;
and yet here was a great wilderness cleaned of its fallen timber and
climbing through the mountain was this road--the work surely of no
little man steeped in fancies. The Duke, pricked to wonder, strove to
draw from the mountaineer some idea of this man, but he got in answer a
jumble of extravagance and prophecy, drawled out in a medley of idiom,
imagery, and scrappy biblical excerpts.

Childers was like those seditious persons who had builded the Tower of
Tongues, like that one who had embellished Babylon; he had come into the
West, got this great tract of virgin country, "an' set up shop agin',
God Almighty!" The man made a great sweeping gesture, covering the
mountains to the east. Who was Childers to change what God was pleased
with? This night, or on some night desperately near, his soul would be
required of him. He was over eighty. Did he hope to live forever? He had
finished the term allotted man to live, and by reason of strength, had
made it fourscore years. Did he think that Death, riding his pale
horse, had forgotten the road leading to his door? Pride goeth before
destruction! But this was something more than pride. It was a sort of
sedition--a sedition that Jehovah would put down with the weapon of iron
and the steel bow.

The declamation amused and puzzled the Duke of Dorset. He attributed
the motive of it to the universal dislike of the peasant for the landed
proprietor, to the distress with which the aborigine sees his forest
felled and his rivers bridged. But the speech of it; the biblical
words with which it was clothed; the intimate knowledge of the
Hebrew Scripture which it indicated, was a thing, in this illiterate
mountaineer, wholly incredible.

The man was swinging forward with long strides; the gunny sack across
his shoulder; the mule's bridle over the crook of his arm; his tanned
face stolid as leather. The Duke, walking beside him, put the question
moving in his mind.

"My friend," he said, "what trade is it that you follow?"

The man walked on a moment, as though uncertain in what catalogue of
trades he should be listed. He put up his hand and loosed the white
button on his shirt, leaving his broad-corded throat, tanned like his
face, open to the air. He thrust his thumb under his woolen brace,
lifted it slowly, and moved his thumb down from the shoulder to the
trousers button. Finally he spoke, coupling his vocations, since he was
not able to say that either occupied exclusively his talents.

"Well, stranger," he said, "I crap some, an' I preach the Word."

The Duke did not understand this answer, and he probed for a further
explanation. He learned that the man was not a native, that he had come
here from the great range of mountains running along the western border
of Virginia. He had come, as he believed, by a Divine direction. The
angel of the Lord had appeared to him and said: "Arise and get thee
across the desert into the wilderness, for God hath there a work for
thee to do." And he had obeyed, as Philip before him had obeyed, when
that angel had directed him to go toward the south unto the way that
goeth down from Jerusalem unto Gaza, which is a desert.

The Duke of Dorset vaguely understood then that the man was some sort
of little farmer and some sort of priest, come hither on some imagined
mission. But he had no idea of the circuit rider, that primitive,
sturdy, religious enthusiast who believed in a God of vengeance and a
hell of fire, as the Scriptures said it; who took his theology from no
school of cardinals, from no articles of faith; who recognized no
man standing between himself and God; who read the Bible and no other
book--moving his broad finger slowly along under the line--and took
that Book to mean literally what it said. A servant of God, but of no
authority below Him. And yet a mountaineer, illiterate and narrow,
poor as the peasants of Russia, tilling a bit of land for the barest
necessities of life, and traveling incredible distances to the cabin
church for no pay save that promise to him beyond the reach of rust.

The Duke of Dorset got his answer, and he got something more than that,
he got his question back. He had opened the door, and he could not
immediately close it.

"An' you, stranger," the man had added, "what might you do?"

The Duke smiled to find this question as difficult for him as it had
been for his companion. He walked as far and he took as long a time
to answer as the mountaineer. He was greatly amused, but he was also
somewhat puzzled. He found himself fingering his chin, thumbing his
waistcoat, like this farmer priest. Then he laughed. "I believe I could
get a living with the rifle," he said, "if I had to do it."

The man took the answer in all seriousness and with composure.

"Well," he said, drawling the words as though they were a reminiscence,
"this were a great huntin' country, I reckon, before Childers set up fur
God Almighty."

The mountaineer lifted his sack from one shoulder carefully to the
other, glanced up at the sun, standing above the mountain, and clucked
to his mule. The Duke of Dorset, walking beside the man, studied him
through the corner of his eye. The bulk and sinew of the man contrasted
strangely with his gentle manner.

His words of withering invective contrasted still more conspicuously
with the drawling gentle tone in which they were spoken. The Duke of
Dorset was acquainted with the mad priest, the passionate fanatic,
furious, lashing, but here was one who said these things softly, with no
trace of feeling, like one speaking a doom as gently as he could.

The Duke began to regard the man with a newer interest. He wondered on
what errand the man was going when he found him, and what it was that he
carried so tenderly in his sack, as though it were a thing fragile and
delicate. He had seen a Scottish gillie carry jugs of whisky carefully
like that in the ends of a bag swung over a pony. With the thought he
gave the sack a little closer notice. He observed that the mountaineer
attended thus carefully to but one end of the sack, the end which he
carried over his shoulder on his chest, the other end he left to pound
and swing as it liked.

At noon the great road, winding in a gentle grade around the mountain,
spanning its gullies with stone arches, reached the summit, and
the mountaineer turned out, following a trail along the ridge to a
knoll--covered, as the road was, with a carpet of brown fir needles, and
bordered with a few old trees, huge and wind shaken. Below this knoll,
welling out over the roots of trees, was a spring of water, running into
a bowl, deep as a bucket, cut out of the rock. The men drank and then
the mule thrust her nose up to the eye pits into the crystal water and
gulped it down in great swallows, that ran like a chain of lumps, one
after the other, under the skin of her gullet. The mountaineer removed
the sack carefully from his shoulder, and opened the end which had
been swinging all the morning against his back. This end of the sack
contained oats, and clearing a place on the ground with his foot, he
poured the oats down for the mule's dinner; then, he got out a strip
of raw bacon, wrapped in a greasy paper, some boiled potatoes, a baked
grouse, and what the Duke took to be a sort of scone, very thick and
very yellow.

"I reckon we wont stop to do no cookin' jist now," the mountaineer
observed apologetically, and returned the bacon to its greasy wrapper.
Then he opened his hands over the frugal luncheon.

"Strengthen us with this heah food, O God Almighty! so our hands kin be
strong to war, an' our fingers to fight agin the Devil an' his angels."

And the two men ate, as men eat together in the wilderness, without
apology and without comment. When he had finished, the Duke of Dorset
stretched himself out on the warm fir needles with a cigarette in his
fingers.

The mountaineer took a pipe out of his trousers pocket, the bowl, a
fragment of Indian corncob, the stem cut from an elder sprout, and with
it some tobacco. He looked at the Duke a moment hesitating, with the
articles in his hand, then he said: "Stranger, air you in a right smart
hurry?"

The Duke opened his eyes; above him was the sky, deep, blue, fathomless,
latticed out by the crossing fir tops; under him the bed was soft and
warm, the pungent air of the forest crept into his lungs like opium.

"No," he answered, "why hurry out of a paradise like this." Then he
dropped the cigarette from his fingers and lay motionless, looking out
over the world of forest. The mountaineer filled his pipe, crumbling the
tobacco in his hard palm, lighted it with a sputtering sulphur match
and smoked, leaning back against the giant tree trunk--a figure of
incomparable peace.

Presently the Duke of Dorset, looking landward across the mountains,
dreamy, soft, rising into a sky of haze, caught a bit of deepened color,
a patch of some darker haze lying above the distant sky line--lifting
a wisp of black, and spreading faintly, like a blot against that
shimmering nimbus in which the world was swimming. The thing caught
and held the Duke's wayward attention. He sat up and pointed his finger
eastward.

"Is that a forest fire?" he said.

The mountaineer took his pipe out of his mouth, regarded the distant
horizon for a time in silence, then he replied slowly. "No," he said,
"hit air not a forest fire."

"What is it, then?" said the Duke.

"Well, stranger," replied the mountaineer, "I call that air thing, 'The
Sign.'"

Then he arose abruptly, like one who had said more than he intended,
took up his rope bridle from the ground, forced the bit into the mule's
mouth, and stood caressing the beast's nose, and drawing her great ears
softly through his hand.




CHAPTER XIV--THE PLACE OP PROPHECY

The Duke of Dorset got up slowly and stood looking out over the
mountains, with his hands clasped behind him. Below the dark-green
canopy of fir tops descended to a gleam of water; through the brown tree
trunks the great road wound in and out; beyond that thin gleam another
mountain shouldered into the one on which he stood, and the brown carpet
and the verdigris canopy went again upward fantastically to the sky.
When the Duke turned the mountaineer was tying up the mouth of his sack.

"My friend," said the Duke, "this road seems to wind around the
mountain. As the crow flies this distance should be less than half. Is
there no short trail from the coast?"

"Yes, stranger," replied the man, "there's a trail laid out by the deer
that hain't so ladylike." He made a circular gesture with his arm. "Hit
runs acrost the backbone from the sea. The deer didn't have no compass,
but he had a purty notion of short cuts."

"Could we not take this trail down the mountain?" inquired the Duke.

The mountaineer stroked his chin, "I reckon we'd better mosey along
the road to the bottom," he answered, "the trail's some botherin' to a
mewel."

Something in the man's manner told the Duke that he, rather than the
mule, was the object of this consideration. The man's eyes rested on his
light tweeds, doubtless thought unfitted to the thicket. The Duke was
taken with the fancy to push his suggestion a little.

"If you were alone," he said, "would you not follow this trail?"

The mountaineer was embarrassed. The courtesy at his heart was right,
but the trick of phrasing it was crude. He was a man accustomed to move,
like the forces of Nature, on a line, and he could not easily diverge
from it.

"Well," he said, "if I was in a powerful hurry, I reckon I'd let Jezebel
take her chance on this air trail." Then a memory seized him and his
face lightened, "But, I axed you, stranger, an' you said you warn't in
no sich powerful hurry."

The Duke's impression was established, but his objection was also
conclusively met. He returned smiling with the clumsy diplomat and
Jezebel to the great road.

All the long, hazy afternoon they descended the mountain, on the brown,
noiseless carpet, stretched between its walls of green dashed with
scarlet. For the most part the men traveled steadily in silence, as the
pioneer and the Indian travel always in the wilderness. Now and then,
the mountaineer pointed out something of interest; an eagle rising in
circles from some green abyss. He named the eagle with a certain scorn;
he was a robber like Barabbas. The fishhawk that he plundered was a
better man, for he got his bread in toil fairly, as the _Good Book_ said
it. What a man earned by his own labor he had a right to, but
beyond that there was God to settle with. The Duke sought to turn the
conversation on this sentence, as on a hinge, to Childers. He felt,
that behind the first expressions of this man concerning the American,
something definite and threatening moved, but he got little. It was not
that Childers had great possessions, it was a sort of Divine treason
that he was guilty of. He had "set up shop agin God Almighty!" Childers
was old, almost alone--all of his kin had gone before him through the
door of death. No one of his blood remained, except an orphaned niece,
to sit after him in his place. Jehovah had held back his hand many
years, But His wrath would only he the more terrible when that hand
descended.

The man spoke gently, softly and in pity, like one who foresaw, but
could not prevent a doom already on its way. Had there been passion or
any touch of bitterness in the man's speech it would have passed over
the Duke of Dorset, but coming thus it moved strangely with the impulse
bringing him westward over four thousand miles of sea. That impulse
lifted into a premonition. Something, then, threatened this girl whose
face remained in his memory. He had come at some call! He was seized
with a strange query. Did he know this danger, and the man walking
beside him, have only the premonition of it; or did this man know it,
and he have that premonition?

The Duke became curious to know if any fact underlay this man's shadowy
forebodings. He sounded for it through the long afternoon, but he could
touch nothing. The mountaineer seemed curiously timid, hesitating like
a child that could not be brought to say what was turning in his mind,
lest he should not be able to explain it. The man and everything moving
about him deeply puzzled the Duke of Dorset. Hour after hour he studied
him as they swung down the mountain, always on that noiseless carpet.
The man seemed like an old, gentle child, and yet, a certain dignity,
and a certain matrix of elements, strong, primal, savage, sat like a
shadow behind that child. The Duke felt that the expression of the man's
face was not permanent, that the child might on occasion fade out and
another occupy the foreground. But not easily; that expression sat
bedded in a great peace, as though fixed in plaster. If this thing was
the result of struggle it surpassed, indeed, the taking of a city.

Related, somehow, to this fancy, one slight detail of the man's dress
caught the Duke's attention. It was a thick, conical, lead bullet strung
through the middle on a buckskin string that was looped around the
woolen brace above the trousers button. The bullet was as big as that of
the old English Snyder, and would easily weigh five hundred grains. It
was snubbed off at the end and ridged at the base with concentric rings
cut into the lead. The Duke's interest lifted into a query.

"What sort of bullet is that?" he said.

The mountaineer ran his big thumb over the deep ridges. "Hit's a Minie
ball," he answered.

The Duke was certain that some history attached to this piece of lead.
"May I inquire," he said, "where you got it?"

The man's face relaxed into a smile. "Well, stranger," he answered, "I
shot that air ball into a man onct when I was a young feller, an' then I
cut it out of him."

The smile, the gentle, drawling tone, clashed with the brutal inference.
The Duke probed for the story, and with difficulty he got it, in
fragments, in detached detail, in its own barbaric color. Not because
the man wished to tell it, but because, under the Duke's skillful
handling, he was somehow not able to prevent it. It was a Homeric
fragment, with the great, bloody, smoking war between the American
States for a background. A story, big with passion, savage, virile, hot
with life.

A Northern general was marching desperately across the South. With money
he had hired a native out of the mountains to conduct him. The man was a
neighbor to this circuit rider, one who knew the wilderness as the bear
knew it. In terror, the authorities of the State had sent a messenger to
this youthful hermit priest, bidding him stop the renegade before he
got down from his cabin to the Federal camp, and, without a word, the
circuit rider had taken down his rifle from the wooden pegs, and gone
out into the wilderness. From that morning, gray, chill, three hours
before the dawn, the story was a thing savage and hideous. At daybreak
the circuit rider, leaning on his rifle, two hundred yards from the
other's cabin, called him to the door, explained what he had come to do,
and gave him an hour of grace. Within that hour, the renegade--a man,
too, courageous and desperate--fired his cabin, and walked with his
rifle over his shoulder, across his little clearing, into the opposite
border of the forest. Then for three endless days and nights, they
hunted each other through this wilderness, now one, and now the other,
escaping death by some incredible instinct, or some narrow, thrilling
margin that left the breath of the bullet on his face. Below the
Northern general waited with his army, and the militia of the State
waited, too, hanging on his flanks.

Then, finally, on the morning of the fourth day at sunrise, the circuit
rider, trailing his man all night, stopping behind a ledge of stone, by
chance, as the sun struck down the face of the mountain, saw the other
seated in the fork of a great pine, watching back over his trail for his
enemy that followed. With deliberate and deadly care the circuit rider
shot him. The man fell hanging across the limb, and his enemy climbed
the tree and descended with the body in his arms. The bullet had struck
the bone near the point of the jaw, ripped up the cheek and followed the
bone around the head, under the skin to the spine. Sitting on the earth
the mountaineer cut the bullet out, bandaged the wound with the rags of
his shirt, and taking the man in his arms walked down the mountain into
his enemies' camp; walked through it unmolested, carrying his bloody
burden to the commanding officer's tent door. There he laid the man down
on the ground, hideously wounded, looked the officer steadily in the
face, and spoke his word of comment.

"General," he said, "heah's your renegade. He hain't as purty as he
was."

The Duke of Dorset looked up at the mountain, from which they had
descended. The story of that tragedy, pieced together out of these
fragments, thrilled him like a Saga. He could see the army waiting
below, idle in its camp, while this death struggle went silently on, in
the great, smoky wilderness above it. He followed, with every detail,
vividly, these two desperate men, stalking one another with every
trick, every cunning, every artifice. With unending patience, their eyes
narrowed to slits, their ears straining, noiseless, tireless, ghastly
with fatigue; eating as they crept, sleeping as they crept, mad,
desperate, hideous, moving with the lust of death!

And then on some morning when the sun dozed against the mountain, when
the air was soft, when the world lay silent, as under a benediction,
there came down out of this wilderness, this haze, this mystery, a
creature streaked with sweat, gaunt, naked, lurching as it walked,
carrying a thing doubled together, that dripped blood.

At sunset they came to the bottom of the mountain, and camped there in a
little forest of spruce trees, beside a river, wider and deeper than the
Teith. Its bed colored dark, like the Scottish rivers, not with peat,
but with a stronger pigment, leeched out of roots. The great road
continued along this river, but the guide explained that he would ford
it here in the morning, cross the shoulder of the abutting mountain on
a trail, and thus save half a day of travel. They would stop here at
sundown for the night if the Duke were still agreeable to such leisure.
The Duke was pleased to stop. He unpacked the mule and washed her
shoulders in the river, while his companion lighted a fire and prepared
the supper. The mule was fed and turned loose to crop what green things
she could find. The mountaineer cooked his strips of bacon on a forked
twig, held over the smoldering fire, and laid out the supper on the top
of one of the Duke's good leather boxes. To men who had walked all day
through the forest, in the clear air, under a sun that crept, like a
tonic, subtly into the blood, the odor of this dinner, mingling with
the deep pungent smells of the river and the forest, was a thing
incomparably delicious.

Night swiftly descended. Pigeons winged into the tree tops. The stars
came out. The pirates of the river crept through the yellow bracken, and
swam boldly out on their robbing raid, their quaint inky faces lifted
above the shimmering water. The Duke of Dorset smoked a pipe with his
companion, seated on a packing case upturned by the fire. He smoked in
silence, his face relaxed and thoughtful. Long after the pipe had gone
out, after the smoke had vanished, after the bowl had cooled, he sat
there, unmoving, the firelight flickering on his face. Then he
arose slowly, unstrapped a roll of traveling rugs, handed one to his
companion, and, wrapping himself in the other, lay down by the fire.

The mountaineer carried in a heavy limb, wrenched off by the wind,
thrust the ragged end of it into the fire, and sat down again to his
pipe. Presently the Duke of Dorset, wrapped in his rug, seemed to sleep,
breathing deeply and slowly. The mountaineer came to the end of his
pipe, knocked out the ashes, returned it to his pocket, and regarded the
Duke carefully for a moment. Then, he thrust his arm into the sack that
lay beside him on the ground, and took out the thing that he had carried
all the day with so great a care.

The Duke, awakened by the crackling of the spruce limb on the fire,
watched the man through his half-closed eyelids. It was a bulky packet,
wrapped in a piece of deerskin. The mountaineer laid it on his knees
and unrolled it carefully. Within was a huge leather-bound Bible with
a great brass clasp three inches in diameter. The man spread out the
deerskin on his knees so the book might not be soiled, unhooked the
clasp, and, turning to a page, began to read.

His lips moved, forming the words, and his big finger traveled along the
page slowly under the line. But he read silently, stopping now and then,
with his face lifted as though in deep contemplation of the passage. The
Duke of Dorset, dozing into sleep, wondered vaguely what portion of the
Hebrew Scriptures this strange, gentle person read.

The man, as he read, as his attention passed to the subject,
began unconsciously to murmur. His lips, forming the words, began
unconsciously to speak them, in a voice low, drawling, almost inaudible.
The Duke, straining his ear, caught, now and then, a fragment.

_I will also make it a possession for the bittern, and pools of water:
and I will sweep it with the besom of destruction, said the Lord of
hosts.... The cormorant and the bittern shall possess it; the owl also
and the raven shall dwell in it: and he shall stretch out upon it the
line of confusion, and the stones of emptiness.... And the wild beasts
of the islands shall cry in their desolate houses, and dragons their
pleasant palaces: and her time is near to come, and her days shall not
be prolonged.... And owls shall dwell there, and satyrs shall dance
there._

The Duke of Dorset fell asleep with that picture fading into his dreams;
the man's massive gentle face banked in shadow; the light, pouring blood
red over the brass clasp of the book; the big bronzed finger moving
slowly on the page; and the man's voice droning in cadence with the
river.

The night deepened. Soft footsteps passed closer in the forest. The
pirates of the river returned stained with murder, swimming like
shadows, without a sound, as under some gift of silence. The great limb
became an ember. The man's voice ceased. He closed the book and returned
it to its place in the bottom of the sack, arose, took up the extra rug,
shook it out, and spread it carefully over the Duke of Dorset.

Then he lay down, at full length by the fire, with the wooden saddle
under his head.




CHAPTER XV--THE VULNERABLE SPOT

The sun was in the sky when the Duke awoke. He had slept eight hours
under the narcotics of the forest. He arose and stretched his limbs. The
packing cases were set in order; the fire was kindled; the mule stood
close beside him, eating her breakfast. The food seemed to be bits of
the yellow scone which the mountaineer had offered yesterday to the
Duke. The circuit rider sat smoking by the fire; he got up uneasily,
stood a moment, kneading his fingers, and moving the broken fern leaves
into a heap with the edge of his boot sole. Then he spoke, hesitating
and with apology:

"I guess there hain't no breakfast. There war some yaller biscuits, but
I give'em to Jezebel."

The Duke instantly remembered that sign laid down in the Hebrew
Scriptures, by which one, observing the righteous man, traveling with
his beast, should know him. He laughed and nodded to the mule.

"The lady, by all means," he said. Then he threw back his shoulders,
filled his lungs with the good pungent air, and looked up at the tree
tops. He was not intending to go hungry if the forest could provide a
breakfast. But the wood pigeon had departed while the Duke lay below,
sleeping on his back. Only the dapper woodpecker remained, hopping about
on a dead fir tree, mottled with the sun, his head cocked, looking for a
place to drill.

The Duke turned from the forest to the river. The sun lay upon it; the
amber water slipped by, gurgling among the reeds, in long wrinkles, over
the wide shallow, to a pool studded with huge stones, where it lay for
a moment sunning, in a gentle eddy. The Duke followed along the bank
to the pool. Out in the dark water beyond him, under the shelter of the
great bowlders, fish were moving or lay in vague outline like shadows
thrown into the water. Safe here, idling in their house, acquainted with
no peril save that of the otter swimming in the night, or the fishhawk
descending in the sun. The Duke stood for some moments looking out into
the pool, then he returned to the mountaineer who sat smoking by the
fire.

"Have you a stout knife?" he said.

The man arose, took a clasp knife out of his pocket, handed it to the
Duke, and returned to his place against the spruce tree, and his cob
pipe, glowing with a coal. The Duke went out into the forest, cut a
sapling, some eight feet long, trimmed it, and pared it even at the
butt. Then he cut a square trench along the sapling, from the butt
upward, three inches long and a quarter inch in depth. He cut also
narrow rings in the bark around the sapling over the trench. Then he
went back to the mountaineer, returned the knife, and put his second
query.

"Have you a bit of string!"

The man put out his hand, without a word, drew the gunny sack over to
him, unraveled the coarse threads around the top of it, wet them in his
mouth, rolled them between his fingers, and handed them to the Duke.
Then he flipped a hot ember deftly into his cooling pipe, and leaned
back again, silently, into his place against the spruce tree.

The Duke took a little knife out of his waistcoat pocket, opened its
larger blade, and set the handle of it into the trench which he had cut
into the sapling, forced it firmly in, and bound it tightly with the
bits of hemp. Then he went with the pole in his hand, down the bank of
the river to the pool. He laid it here on the bracken and stripped to
the skin. The mountaineer, pulling slowly at his pipe, bareheaded, the
long gray hair straggling over his face, watched every movement of the
Duke with deep and consuming interest.

When the Duke stood naked, as the first man in the Garden, he took the
sapling in his teeth, lowered himself into the water, and swam with long
noiseless strokes out to a great rock standing in the middle waters of
the pool--a rock, flat, smooth as a table, and covered with gray lichen,
as with a frost of silver. He drew himself noiselessly up out of the
water, crawled along the level surface of the rock, and stretched
himself at full length, with his face peering over the lower border of
it. Then he put his right arm slowly out with the pole grasped above
the middle. The lichen, heated by the sun, was warm. The light descended
into the dark pool as into a vat of amber. The Duke lay stretched out
in the sun, his lithe, powerful body glistening with drops of water,
his left arm doubled under his chest, his right, bronzed, sinewy, the
muscles set like steel, raised above the dark water.

The mountaineer watched from his place against the spruce tree, his chin
lifted, his pipe, turned over on its elder stem, going out. The mule
behind him, nosing the bracken for lost fragments of bread, made the
only sound rising in the forest. Suddenly the Duke's arm descended; the
eddy below the great rock boiled; something floundered across the deep
water of the pool, a faint stain of crimson rising to the amber surface.
The Duke arose, took his weapon by the end, and threw it, like a
harpoon, across the pool to the bank, where it stood fixed upright in
the bracken, quivering, the knife blade glittering in the sun. Then he
disappeared head first into the pool, and a moment later came ashore
with a three-pound trout, gaping with a wound, two inches deep,
descending behind the gills downward through the spine.

Thus the Duke got his breakfast as the savage of the Yukon gets it; as
the snub-nosed oriental-eyed Indian of the Pacific Coast to this day,
on occasion, gets it. And he cooked it, as the Indian cooks his salmon,
grilled on a flat stone before a heap of embers.

When the feast was ended, the Duke of Dorset roped the pack to the
mule, and they forded the river, wading through the black water to
their middle. They pushed through a huckleberry thicket and climbed the
shoulder of the mountain on an old trail, hardly to be followed; made,
doubtless, by the deer and the red Indian. For two hours they climbed
the mountain, laboriously, on this lost trail, and then, abruptly
passing around the huge, gnarled trunk of a gigantic fir, they came out
on the summit; and the Duke of Dorset stopped motionless, in his tracks,
like a man come suddenly by some enchantment into a land of wonders.

Below him, rimmed in by mountains, rising one above the other into haze,
threaded by a river, lay the work surely of those palace builders
of Arabia, imprisoned in copper pots under the stamp of Solomon.
Two hundred feet below him on a vast terrace stood a château of
cream-colored stone, roofed with red tile; carved beautifully around the
doors and windows; stretching across the whole terrace, with a huge door
under an arch set in a square tower. It was faced with delicate spires,
and to the left a second tower arose, circular, huge, with a flat roof,
and long windows rising unevenly as on the turn of some vast stairway;
then it stretched away on either side, with arches, balustrades, sweeps
of bare wall, great windows set in carving and mounted with fretwork, to
low square towers, flanking massively the ends.

The whole of it, in spite of its walls, its massive arches, its
towers--by some touch of architectural harmony, by some trick of
grouping, by some genius moving in the hand that traced the outline of
it thus fantastically against the sky--seemed a thing airy and illusive,
as though raised here on the instant by some fairy magic. From the
château, stretching level as a floor to the foot of the bluff on which
the Duke stood, lay a square of velvet turf, framed rigidly in a white
road. To the east of this court, behind the château, a park descended,
sloping to the river; to the south, rigid and formal against a wall
of yellow stone, long terraces lay, one below the other, each a formal
garden perfect in detail to the slightest fragment of color. The first
lying against the wall was severe in outline, white as though paved with
quartz, flanked at either end with a square of that exquisite velvet
turf and lying between were three pools floating with water flowers.
Against the wall, at regular intervals, was, here and there, a marble
figure standing in a niche, separated by a green sheared hedge, banking
the wall to its yellow coping. The second terrace was a formal Italian
garden after the ancient villas of the Campagna. The third, an Egyptian
garden, walled with pale-green tile. And thus, varied and beautiful,
the terraces descended to the valley. Whatever garden any people,
laboriously, through long generations, had made in form and color
beautiful to the eye, was here reproduced with minute and endless
patience.

Beyond, stretching westward and to the south, were green fields,
meadows, pastures, reaching to the shoulders of the mountains. Far down
the valley out of these mountains the great road leading from the sea
emerged, wound through the meadow land, ascended west of the terraces,
from which it was separated by a wall, and entered the court through
bronze gates swinging to stone pillars. These pillars were surmounted
by a figure having the face and bust of a woman and the body of a
monster--such a figure as the Latin sculptors have sometimes called "La
Chimera."

Eastward, the lands were forests; north, the rising lands were orchards,
vineyards, formal trees, shrubs, vines. And the whole of it rimmed in
by the far-off hazy, mysterious mountains fading into the sky line, like
some blue wall of the world. It was such a thing as that jinn--slave of
the lamp--might have lifted out of the baked earth of Arabia.

The mountaineer, standing beside the Duke of Dorset, broke the first
silence.

"Hit air Childers agin God Almighty," he said, "hit air all made," and
he pointed with his big finger directly down the ridge on which they
stood.

The Duke, following the finger, realized that the whole thing was indeed
made. The entire shoulder of the mountain, on which they now stood, had
been cut down, leveled and formed into these great terraces. The face of
this vast cut fell sheer below him. It was walled up almost to his feet
with that yellow stone--a vast perpendicular wall festooned with vines.

The mountaineer, having spoken this word of explanation, turned back to
his mule, cut the rope, and began to take down the leather boxes. The
Duke remained striving to comprehend the magnitude of this labor--a
labor colossal and appalling. A mountain pared down, a wilderness
parked, graded, landscaped, and no mark of it visible to the eye. Human
cleverness, patient, tireless, bad obscured here every trace of this
vast labor as beautifully, as subtly, as the wilderness back yonder bad
adorned and bidden the road cut through her dominions to the sea. The
whole estate lay before him, unreal, like the work of a magician--made
by no stroke of the pick, no clatter of the hammer. Those two strange,
impressive, sinister figures, mounted on the stone posts, where the road
entered the court, looking out over this enchantment, were mysteriously
suggestive. This scene, lying before him in the sun, was some illusion
of the fancy, some mirage, some chimera.

The Duke of Dorset was awakened from this reverie by the mountaineer
speaking behind him.

"I guess I'll be a-movin' along," he said, "you'll find somebody down
there to pack in your traps."

The Duke turned, thrusting his hand into his pocket, but the band
remained there when his eyes rested on the circuit rider's face.
The man's big stooping body was straight now, his features firm and
composed, his head set with a certain dignity on his shoulders.

"No, stranger," he said, "me an' Jezebel works fur God Almighty, an' we
don't take pay."

The Duke of Dorset did then what he would have done on the continent of
Europe, in the presence of such a priest; he offered money to adorn his
church, to aid his poor; but the circuit rider put back the hand.

"No," he said, "as I read hit in the Good Book, God Almighty don't ker
fur gewgaws, an' the poor man hain't helped much by a dollar that he
don't work fur." Then he put out his hand like one parting with an
equal.

The Duke of Dorset dropped the money into his pocket, and took the big
callous hand firmly in his own.

"My friend," he said, "you have guided me across the mountains from the
sea, transported my luggage, and provided me with food. I am, therefore,
in your debt. Is it quite fair to leave me under this obligation?"

The mountaineer was visibly embarrassed, his feet shifted uneasily, his
face grew thoughtful.

"Well," he said, "if you feel that away about this air little lift, that
me an' Jezebel give you, why, jist pass it on to the next man that you
find a settin' by the road, with more'n he kin pack."

Then he shook the Duke's hand as a bear might have done, slipped the
rope bridle again into the crook of his arm, and set out northward along
the ridge, with the mule following at his heels and the sack swaying on
his shoulder.

The Duke stood motionless watching the man until he disappeared in among
the boles of the fir trees, then he turned toward the château. At the
brink of the sheer wall he found a flight of steps descending, and
leaving his luggage where the mountaineer had piled it, he went slowly
down, hidden among the vines.




CHAPTER XVI--THE LESSON IN MAGIC

At the door of the château the Duke found a Japanese servant. This
servant led him into a court paved with mosaic, set with palms and
marbles about a fountain in which nymphs, sporting in abandon, splashed
a god with water. From this court they ascended a stairway, rising in
the circular tower which the Duke of Dorset had already noticed. The
baluster of the stair, under the rail was a bronze frieze winding
upward, of naiads, fauns, satyrs, dancing in a wood, group following
group, like pictures in some story.

They stopped at the first landing and crossed a second corridor to
a suite of rooms, finished in the style of Louis Quinze. The servant
inquired about the Duke's luggage, got his direction and went out. The
Duke walked idly through the suite; he might have been, at this hour,
in Versailles. Every article about him belonged there in France. The
bed was surely that of some departed Louis, standing on a dais,
brocade curtains, drawn together at the top under a gilt crown. In this
bedchamber he crossed unconsciously to the window, and remained looking
out at the park descending to the river, and the mountains dreamy and
beautiful beyond.

He wondered vaguely what it was that had led him over four thousand
miles of sea, across a continent to this place. Did he come following
the will-o'-the-wisp of a fabled legend? Did he come obeying some
prenatal instinct? Did he come moved by an impulse long ago predestined?

The query, now that he stood before it, was fantastic. These, surely,
were not the things that moved him. They were things merely that clouded
and obscured the real impulse hiding within him. Some huge controlling
emotion, dominating him, moved behind the pretense of this extravaganza;
an emotion primal and common to all men born since Adam; a thing skilled
in disguises, taking on the form of other and lesser motives, so that
men clearheaded and practical, men hardened with a certain age, men
dealing only with the realities of life, sat down with it unaware, as
the patriarch sat down with angels. The wisdom of Nature moving with
every trick, every lure, every artifice, to the end that life may not
perish from the earth!

The Duke of Dorset turned from the window. He did not realize what this
emotion was, but he felt its presence, and for the first time in his
life the man had a sense of panic, like one who suddenly finds his
senses tricked and his judgment unreliable. He walked across the
bedchamber into the dressing room.

He found his luggage already in the room. The servant asked for the
keys, the Duke gave him all but the key to the box containing the rifle
that he had now no need to open. To a query, the servant answered that
Mr. Childers would receive him as soon as he was pleased to come down
into the library. The Duke of Dorset bathed, changed his dress, and
descended.

The library was octagon in shape, carpeted with an Eastern rug, set with
a great table, lined with books, and lighted with long casement windows.

Cyrus Childers was standing at one of the windows. He came forward and
welcomed the Duke of Dorset.

"I am sorry," he said, "that Caroline is not here. She and the Marchesa
Soderrelli are in the East yet, but they will arrive in a day or two."

He stepped over to a table and fumbled with a pile of letters. But his
eyes did not follow his hands. They traveled over his guest, over his
tanned face, over his broad shoulders, and as he looked, he spoke on: he
regretted the Duke's long tramp across the mountains; the closed
lodge at the harbor; the negligence of Caroline. He deplored the great
inconveniences which the Duke had undergone.

"The Marchesa Soderrelli said that you were coming to Canada," he
continued, "and I endeavored to locate you there, but I fear that I did
not sufficiently persist in my effort, because the Marchesa assured rue
that you would certainly let us know when you arrived on the Pacific
Coast. You see, I trusted to the wisdom of the Marchesa."

Then he laughed in his big voice. "Ah," he said, "there is a woman!
A remarkable woman. Did you know her before your coming to the bay of
Oban?"

"I had that honor," replied the Duke.

"She said in Biarritz that you would likely be there. Your fame was
going about just then in Biarritz."

"Rumor," the Duke answered, "has, I believe, dealt kindly with me."

The old man laughed again.

"With me," he said, "it is always the other way about."

He followed the remark with a few words of explanation. The Duke must
manage to amuse himself until the others arrived. He would find books,
horses, if he cared to ride, and excellent shooting in the river
bottoms.

After luncheon Cyrus Childers rode with his guest over the cultivated
portion of the estate, through the meadows, the pasture fields, the
orchards, and everywhere the duke found only Japanese at work. He
remarked on this:

"How do these men get on with other workmen?" he said.

The old man stopped his horse. "I solved that difficulty before it
reached me," he answered. "I have no race problem, because I have only
one race. I wanted a homogeneous servant body that would remain on the
estate, work in harmony, and adjust its own difficulties. The Japanese
met these requirements, so I took the Japanese. But I made no mistake.
I did not take them to supplement white labor. I took them wholly. There
is not a servant nor a workman anywhere on the entire estate who is not
of this race."

"You have, then, a Japanese colony?" said the Duke.

The old man extended his arm. "It is Japan," he replied, "except for the
topography of the country."

"I have been told," said the Duke, "that the instinct of the Japanese
to found a colony constitutes the heart of the objection to him on the
Pacific Coast. Other Orientals plan to return to their country; but this
one, it is said, brings his country with him. I am told that they have
already practically colonized certain portions of California."

"The Vaca Valley and sections of the Santa Clara Valley," replied Cyrus
Childers, "contain Japanese settlements."

"And I am told," continued the Duke, "that with respect to such
settlements, it is the plan of the Japanese first to drive out the other
laborers, and then deliberately to ruin the orchards and vineyards,
after which they more easily procure them."

"I have no trouble of that sort," said the old man, "since I pay in
money for the service which I receive."

"It is strange," said the Duke, "how this sentiment against the Japanese
extends with equal intensity along this coast through the American
states and northward into the Dominion of Canada. One would say that
these were the same people, since they are moved by the same influences.
The riots in Vancouver seem to be facsimiles of the riots in San
Francisco. When it comes to this oriental question the boundary between
the two countries disappears. Our government has exerted its influence
to check this sentiment, but we do not seem able to control it. Can you
tell me why it is that we are unable to control it?"

"Yes," he said, "I can tell you. It is for two reasons: first, because
the North American laborer wishes to suspend a law of Nature--that the
one who can live on the least shall survive. The Japanese laborer can
underbid him for the requirements of existence, and consequently he must
supplant him. And why should he not, he is the better servant? This
is the first reason. The second reason is, that the peoples of the
English-speaking nations are in one of their periodic seizures of revolt
against authority." And he laughed.

"The conditions maintaining a difference in men follow laws as immutable
as those turning the world on its axis. Efforts at equalization are
like devices to cheat gravity. Thus, the theory of rule by a universal
electorate is a chimera. Men require a master as little boys in school
require one. When the master goes down, terror follows until a second
master emerges from the confusion. There is always back of order
some one in authority. There is no distinction between the empire
and republic except in a certain matter of disguises. The seizure
of so-called liberty, attacking peoples, now and then, is a curious
madness; a revolt against the school-master, ending always in the same
fashion--disorder, riot, and a new master back at the desk. When this
seizure passes, your government will again be able to control its
subjects."

"But," said the Duke, "is there not an obligation on a government to see
that its people are not underbid in the struggle for life!"

The old man's voice arose. "What is a government!" he said.

"It is the organized authority of a whole people," replied the Duke.

The old man laughed. "It is the pleasure of one or two powerful
persons," he said.




CHAPTER XVII--THE STAIR OF VISIONS

That fantastic illusion, as of one come, after adventures, to the
kingdom of some Magus, was preserved to the Duke of Dorset by the days
that followed. He was for the most part wholly alone. He arose early,
and lived the long day in the open; in the evening he dined with his
host, and sat with him in the great library until midnight. At no other
time did he see this curious old man.

He was distinctly conscious of two moods, contrary and opposite,
changing with the day and night, like one going alternately into and
out of the illusions of an opiate. Under the sun, in the dreamy haze of
Indian summer, this beautiful château of yellow stone, set about with
exquisite gardens, rimmed in the smoky distance with an amphitheater of
mountains, was the handiwork of fairies, reset by enchantment from an
Arabian tale. But at night, in the presence of Cyrus Childers, that mood
vanished, as when one passing behind the staged scenery of a play meets
there the carpenter.

The days, one following like the other, were not wholly lacking in
interest. The Duke of Dorset tramped about the estate, but more usually
he shot quail over dogs in the river bottoms; he found this game bird
smaller than the English quail, but hardy, strong winged, wild, getting
up swiftly and sailing over long distances into the forest when alarmed.
When the tramping tired him, he sat down under some tree by the river
and watched the panting setters swim, their red coats spreading out
like a golden fleece in the amber water. The servant at the château had
provided him with a gun for this shooting, since he had brought with him
only a rifle, and this remained in his dressing room, unopened, locked
in the ordinary luggage box.

On one of these long tramps, he solved the riddle of the vague smoke
pillar, rising above the mountains east of the château. He presently
observed that the great road, leading from the coast over the wilderness
to this country place, continued through the park, eastward from the
turf court, crossed the river, and ascended the mountain. He followed
the road for an entire morning to the summit; there the mystery of the
dark wisp of cloud was revealed to him. Far inland, beyond the crest of
this mountain, that smoke arose from great mills for the manufacture of
lumber. From huge stacks, dimly to be seen, a line of thin smoke
climbed skyward, twining into that faint blot--that sign, marked by the
superstitious mountaineer.

That night after dinner the Duke of Dorset brought the conversation
to this wisp of smoke, and diverging from the query, he got a flood
of light on the career of Childers. The sinister vapor was commercial
incense. Great mills for the manufacturing of the forests into lumber
were gathered into that valley. It was one example of this man's policy
of consolidation, his rooting up of competition everywhere in trade, a
detail of his plan for gathering the varied sources of wealth compactly
together. The ambition of the man presented itself as he warmed to the
discussion. The motive, moving him here in this republic, was merely
that moving Alexander in Asia--moving the Corsican in France. But the
times had changed and the ancient plan was no longer adapted to the
purpose; the seizure of authority by force was out of fashion; one must
not provoke a revolt of the eye.

The Duke of Dorset, as he listened, was struck with an inconsistency. If
the secret of this man's dominion lay in covering it from the eye,
was not that secret out here? No Eastern despot was more magnificently
housed. His host, for explanation, again pointed out that there was no
native laborer on this whole estate. Every man, every woman to be seen
was Japanese, brought directly over sea here to service. The whole
estate inland was sentineled with keepers. Cut off thus from the
republic, as though it were a foreign province, into which no man
went without a passport, except, now and then, a mountaineer traveling
through the forest, and, to add thus more to this isolation, the labor
employed in the group of industries lying east of this estate were
wholly Japanese--the jetsam of the Orient.

The old man, moving on this topic, spoke with a certain hesitation, and
the Duke of Dorset understood why it was; after all, like every other
despot, this man craved his gilded chair; pride clamored for authority
made manifest, for the pomp of sovereignty, and he had yielded to that
weakness, as the Corsican, in the end, had yielded to it, magnificently,
in a riot of purple. But he saw clearer than the Corsican; he was not
convinced, as that other of the Titans was; he sought cover--the deeps
of the wilderness for the staging of his sovereignty.

Then, as this old man sketched in detail the first big conception of his
estate, the care, the mammoth labor, the incredible sums expended, pride
moved him; whatever thing of beauty any people in any land had made,
he had made here; whatever thing of beauty they had treasured, he
had bought with money. He had commanded, like that one looking up at
Babylon, myriad human fingers, backs that strained, faces that sweated.
And he told the story of it, striding through his library under its
mellow light, in pride, like that barbarian king might have told the
story of his city.

And in this library, beautiful as deft human fingers could make it,
lighted softly from above, on its floor a treasure of India, where in
colored threads an Eastern weaver had laboriously told the tale of a
religion, occult and mystic, its domed ceiling covered with a canvas,
painted by a Florentine, wherein the martyred dead winged upward at the
last day; here--between mysteries, between, as it were, the oldest and
the newest religion of the world, both disregarded, the sacred cloths of
both, a spoil to profane decorative uses--the Duke of Dorset listened
to this story. And, strangely, as he listened, the words of that curious
priest, reading in the blood light, painfully by his fire, returned
striding through his memory.

_I will also make it a possession for the bittern, and pools of water:
and I will sweep it with the besom of destruction, saith the Lord of
hosts.... And owls shall dwell there, and satyrs shall dance there._

And on his way up to his bedchamber at midnight, as though that ancient
prophecy moved here to some sinister fulfillment, as though the sign
of it fantastically preceded, the naiads, the fauns, and those bronze
figures with their leering human faces and their goat loins, forming the
exquisite frieze under the rail of the great stairway, seemed to follow,
trooping at his heels.

But on every night, at the bend of this stairway, as he ascended,
any mood, any fancy coming with him was exorcised out of his mind
and replaced by another. Here, as he turned, by a trick of the canvas
cunningly hung, by a trick of obscured lights cunningly descending, a
woman seemed to meet him passing on this stair, going down like one
who hurried. A woman, perhaps thirty, in the fantastic costume of some
princess out of an ancient story, without a jewel on her body, as though
the delicate pink skin, the exquisite full throat, the purple dark hair,
despised a lesser glory.

It was not merely the beauty of this woman that stopped the Duke of
Dorset coming up this stair at night, it was two fancies attending her
that seized him. One that she wished to pass him swiftly, thus with her
head bowed; because from some emotion held down within her, going to the
very roots of life, she did not dare, she did not trust herself to look
into his face. And the other that she was passing, going at this moment
down the steps on which he stood, passing there at his elbow, now
swiftly, out of the influence under which he held her--escaping for this
life, for all time, forever. And, strangely, there attended on these two
fancies a conviction, a truth established, that this woman, ten years
older, was yet, somehow, Caroline Childers.

Every night as he came up the great turning staircase, he met her thus
going down; and every night as he came, as his feet moved on the stair,
the huge emotion, skulking within him, behind disguises, seized him and
pointed to what he already desperately saw; that he could put out his
hands ever so gently and she would stop; that he could speak her name
ever so softly and she would come with a cry into his arms.

The impelling, moving, overwhelming power of this illusion lay in the
conviction that this moment, here on the stair, now, was final--that
for this moment only, the opportunity was in his hand. The next second,
ticked off by the clock, she would be gone, and something like the door
of death would swing to, clicking in its lock.

Every night, when he passed on up the stairway, when his foot came to
the step which followed, a sense of loss, complete and utter, like the
darkness of the pit, descended on him. Loss is a word too feeble. The
thing was a sense of death. Somehow the one thing, the one only thing
for which he was born and suckled and ate bread and became a man--a
thing, hidden until now--had, in that moment, gone, stepped out into the
light, and beckoned, and he had failed it. 'And so, now, the reason for
his being here was ended; all the care, the patience, the endless labor
of Nature, bringing him in strength to the fullness of his life, was
barren; all the agony that he had given to his mother, the milk that he
had drunk, the fruits of the earth that he had eaten, were wasted; he
was now a thing of no account, useless to the great plan--a thing, to be
broken up by the forces of Nature in disgust. The thing was more than a
sense of death. It was a sense of extermination, merited by failure.

And further, his fathers, sleeping in the earth, seemed to approach and
condemn him. The gift of life handed down to him must be passed on
to another; it was a chain which, for great, mysterious, unknowable
reasons, must continue, lest somehow the destiny of all was periled.
Did he break it, then the labor of all was lost, the immortality of all
endangered. Some doom, reaching equally to the farthest ancestor, some
doom, not clear, not possible to get at, but sinister and threatening,
attended the breaking of that chain. The emotion, clouding his blood,
was an agent in the service of these dead men. These illusions, these
fancies, were from them, doing what they could to move him. They had
found one pleasing to them, one suited, one fit; they had led him by
invisible influences to that one; they had prevailed in argument against
him; they had colored and obscured his reason; they had lured him over
four thousand miles of sea to that one whom they, wise with the wisdom
of the dead, had chosen. And he had failed them! They pressed around
him, their faces ghastly.

The man, do what he liked, could not escape from the dominion of this
mood. He stopped every night on the stair; he came every night with a
quicker pulse, and he passed on with that sense of desolation. The Duke
of Dorset called reason and common sense to his aid, but neither could
exorcise this fancy. That emotion, cunning past belief, in the service
of the principle of life, had got him under its hypnotic fingers! He
spoke calmly with himself; he made observations, verbally correct,
arguments, to the ear sound, conclusions that no logic could assail;
this was only a picture, as he had been told, of Caroline's mother
painted in a fancy costume; and he a sentimentalist, but they availed
him nothing.

In the morning, when he descended, there was only the full-length
portrait of a beautiful woman hanging in its frame. The illusion
attending it was gone, but not wholly gone; like some fairy influence,
coming to men's houses in the night, and departing to solitudes at
cock-crow, it awaited him outside--in the deep places of the forest, in
the high grasses by the river, in the gardens when he sat alone on the
benches in the sun.

If, after three hours of shooting, he sat down at the foot of a great
tree to rest, some one came and stood behind it. If, desperately,
he followed some lost trail of the red Indian, twining through the
mountain, at every turn of it, some one barely escaped him, and the
conviction grew upon him, like a madness, that at the next turn of
the trail, if he went softly forward, he would find that one. Not the
serious, beautiful woman of the picture, but truant hair, whipped by
the wind, eyes that danced, a mouth, sweet and young, that laughed. And
drugged with the oldest opiate, the Duke of Dorset stalked the oldest
illusion in the world.

So ridden was he by this mood that the significance of an incident,
which he otherwise would have marked, escaped him. In the last few days
he had met, more than once, a Japanese who did not seem to be engaged in
any particular labor. He met this man always in the mountains, east of
the château, coming down toward it or returning; twice the Duke had seen
him late in the evening, and once at midday, lying under a tree watching
the château below him.

The man cringed when the Duke called to him, and replied, in excellent
English, that he was a forester engaged on the estate.




CHAPTER XVIII--THE SIGN BY THE WAY

At noon on a certain Thursday, seven days after his arrival, the
Duke of Dorset set out to shoot quail in the river bottom south of the
château. A shower of rain had fallen in the morning. The air was clear
and bright. The mountains gleamed as in a mirror, the haze, by some
optical illusion, banked behind them. The vigor of spring, by some trick
of Nature, seemed to have crept back into the earth; to swim in the dark
waters of the river; to lie at the root of the grasses; to swell under
the bark of the fir tree, waiting for a day or two of sun. The great
principle of life, waning in the autumn, seemed moving, potent, on the
point of recovering its vitality, as under some April shower. Birds
fluttered in the thickets, as though seized with a nesting instinct; the
cattle wandered in their pasture; new blades started green at the
roots of the brown turf; and, now and then, as though misled, as though
tricked, a little flower opened to the sun.

The man, walking through the fields, the meadows, over the moist leaves,
received, like every other thing, his share of this subtle influence.
The clean air whipped his blood; that virility, warming in the grasses,
in the green stem of the flower, under the bark of the fir tree, warmed,
too, in every fiber of his body.

He walked on, following the high bank of the river, forgetting the red
setter at his heels, the gun tucked under his arm. Quail got up and
whirred to distant thickets, the woodcock arose from some corner of the
swamp, but the gun remained under the cover of his arm. He felt somehow,
on this afternoon, a certain sympathy with these little people of the
fields--with the robin and his brown lady. Under what principle of
selection had they mated? What trick of manner had favored this dapper
gallant? What thing of special beauty had set this thicket belle, in his
eye, above her rivals? The riddle, as he turned it, lifted to a broader
application.

Was not that mystery a thing hidden as no other mystery moving in this
world is hidden? When the King Cophetua caught up the beggar maid for
queen, could he give a reason for it? Was it the blue eye that did it,
or the red mouth? Other eyes were blue, other mouths, in his court, were
red. Did he know any better what it was than this brown fellow in his
tree top? Did one ever know? Did any living thing, since the world began
its spinning, know?

Imperceptibly, creeping like some opiate, the mystery of it occupied the
Duke's fancy. He returned to the picture on the stair; to the girl in
Oban. What was it that his blood had caught? What thing was it that
set this woman above every other in the world? Why was it that the mere
memory of her voice set the nerves under his skin to tingling? Why was
it that a hunger for her spread through him, as though every fiber had a
mouth that starved? Had he stood up to be shot against a wall, there, in
the sun, he could not have answered.

He traveled for miles south along the river, in this autumn afternoon,
idly, his gun under his arm, until the trail ended at the bend of the
river, where the black waters swing about a moment, before plunging over
a mile of rapids seaward through the mountains. Here the red Indian,
whose trail he followed, used once to cross, swimming with a long
stroke of his right arm, and holding his weapon over his head that the
bowstring might be dry. A fir, uprooted by the winds, lay with its top
buried in the pool, its brown body warm, mottled with the sun.

The Duke of Dorset sat down on this tree, his back against a limb.
And Nature, that great enchantress, that subtle guardian of life, that
divine fakir, squatting on her carpet in the sun, tempted him with
pictures of vivid, intoxicating detail; whispered and suggested,
stretching her lures, cunning as a spider, across the door posts of
every sense. The leaves, falling on his face, were soft hands that
touched him, the birds, laughing in the thickets, were a human voice
that laughed, the rustle of their wings were skirts trailing on a
carpet.

The day waned. The sun grew thinner northward on the fields. The blue
haze gathered in the pockets of the mountains, as though, like smoke, it
seeped upward through the earth. A cooler air attended. An owl, sleeping
in the green top of a fir tree across the river, troubled by some dream,
lurched forward, lost his footing on the brown limb, awoke, and flapped,
without a sound, eastward to a thicker tree top. The Duke of Dorset,
sitting with the gun across his knees, caught the shadow traveling on
the water, turned where he sat, and brought the gun up to his shoulder.
A moment the blue barrels followed the outlaw, then his finger pressed
the trigger, and that pirate had gone out no more on his robbing raids,
but fate, moving to another purpose, saved him; the gun snapped; the
Duke's finger instantly caught the second trigger, but that snapped,
like the first, with a faint click. He brought the gun down, threw open
the breech, and replaced the cartridges, but the outlaw was housed now
safely in his distant tree top. The Duke of Dorset got down from his
place, and turned the gun on a patch of lichen, set like a silver target
against a black rock emerging from the river, but the triggers clicked
again.

He broke the gun and looked carefully at the shells. There was no dent
on the caps, one was wholly untouched, the other scratched faintly. He
opened and closed the breech slowly to observe if the cocking mechanism
were defective. The resistance, the sobbing cluck of it, showed no
difficulty there. Then he drew out the shells and raised the gun butt
so the strikers would fall forward, but they did not fall into sight.
He struck the butt with his hand to loosen these pins, if they were
sticking, but they remained even with the face of the breech action. He
sprung the hammers on the strikers and still they came no farther into
the breech. The difficulty was obscure, the strikers were loose in their
beds, the hammers working, the gun had been perfect until to-day. He
began to examine the nose of the strikers, and the explanation showed
on the hard steel; both had been filed off smooth with the face of the
breech action. The ends of the strikers were blunt and square. He
could easily see the mark of the file on each one of them. The gun was
useless. The discovery was so extraordinary that the man did not seek a
theory to fit it. It was useless to speculate. He would inquire of the
servant on his return.

The Duke followed the river to the park east of the château. Here the
road crossed on a single stone span rising gracefully over the black
water. A low wall, no higher than a man's knee, inclosed the road over
the long arch. Beyond was the forest, changing under the descending
light from blue to purple, from purple into blackness--all forest, from
the bridge end to the distant tree-laced sky line. Westward the park
lifted to the château--a park like those to be found in England; forest
trees standing in no order, the undergrowth removed, and the earth
carpeted with grass. At the summit, to be seen in among the gray tree
tops, the dull yellow walls of the château loomed. The river, caught
here in a narrow channel, boiled and roared, as though maddened by the
insolence of that arch lifted over it for the human foot.

As the Duke approached he saw two men standing in the border of the
forest beyond this bridge, talking together; a moment later one crossed
the bridge and climbed the park to the château. The Duke, coming up the
trail, observed that this man was a footman, in the livery of the house.
The other, who remained by the roadside, looking after him, was the idle
Japanese. He watched the footman until he disappeared among the trees,
then he turned into the forest, a moment before the Duke of Dorset came
up by the corner of the bridge into the park.

The incident recalled to the Duke his previous knowledge of this
Japanese and with it an explanation. The man was, doubtless, a relative
of some servant in the house; the father, perhaps the uncle, of this
footman, and he came here for the flotsam about a country house which
the footman could dispose of. It was a custom old as the oriental
servant; there was always the family to benefit by the servant's
fortune, and one going between surreptitiously with his basket. The
incident and the explanation of it passed through the man's mind like
any casual observation--as one notes and sees the reason of a hundred
trivial matters, without comment, in a day.

The Duke crossed the road and turned up the hill through the park.
The sun was gone now, and a hundred lights peeped through the trees,
blinking from the windows of the house, as though all of its apartments
were in use. At the door, as he was about to speak of the disabled
gun, a valet attending brought him a message that swept so trivial
an incident wholly out of his mind. Miss Childers and the party had
returned. Would His Grace dress a little earlier for dinner.

The Duke of Dorset had been waiting for these words, endless day after
day, and yet, now that they were spoken, he felt like one taken wholly
by surprise; like one called out of his bed to face some difficult
emergency, for which he needed time.




CHAPTER XIX--THE CHAMBER OP LIGHT


Caroline Childers came forward to welcome the Duke when he entered the
drawing-room.

"I am so glad to see you," she said; "how did you ever find the way?"

"I had a very accurate map of the coast," replied the Duke.

"But how did you cross the mountains? The keeper's lodge was closed;
there was no one to meet you. I am so sorry."

"On the contrary," answered the Duke, "there was a most delightful
person to meet me."

"I am glad," said the girl, "but I am puzzled. Was it one of our
servants?"

"I asked him that," replied the Duke, "and he said that he used the word
'servant' only in his prayers."

"Oh," said the girl, "I understand. It was a native. Then you were
surely entertained."

"I have not been so entertained in half a lifetime," replied the Duke.

This dialogue, running before so charged a situation, seemed to the
man like some sort of prelude to a drama. The moment became, for him,
a vivid, luminous period. In it impressions flashed on him with the
rapidity of light; details of the great drawing-room richly fitted, its
Venetian mirrors, treasures of a Doge. But, more than any other thing,
he saw the beauty of the girl who came up the drawingroom to meet him,
who stood beside him, who spoke to him in the soft, deliberate accents
of the South. He noted every detail of her, her hair, her long lashes,
her exquisite mouth, her slim body, and the man's senses panted, as with
a physical thirst.

But it was not these visible things, however potent, that so wholly
overcame him. It was a thing for which we have no word, of which there
is no material evidence, that moved from the girl, subtly, into every
fiber of his body. A thing as actual and as potent as the forces moving
the earth in its orbit--the wild, urgent, overpowering cry of elements,
tom asunder at the beginning of things, to be rejoined. The most
mysterious and the most hidden impulse in the world. And it seemed to
the man that in some other incarnation this woman had been a part of
him, a part of every nerve, every blood drop, every fragment of his
flesh; and, at the door of life, by some divine surgery, she had been
dissected out of his body; and, thus, from the day that he was born, he
had been looking for her; and now that she was found, every element in
him cried for that lost union.

These impressions, this sudden luminous conviction, flashed on the man,
while he was speaking, while he was turning with the girl toward the
others; and his mind, extraordinarily clear, seemed to observe these
things as somehow detached from himself. The girl was speaking, and he
walked beside her, presenting a conventional aspect. They went thus,
in conversation, down the long drawing-room. The Marchesa Soderrelli
advanced to meet them.

"I am delighted," she said, "to see the Duke of Dorset," then she put
out her hands with a charming gesture.

At this moment the Duke saw, on a table, in its oval silver frame, a
picture like that one which he had seen in the yacht at Oban--that face
with its insolent, aggressive look. And fear took him by the throat. The
dread, the terror, which used to seize him when he passed, each night,
the picture on the stairway, descended on him. This man would strike out
for what he wanted while he sat here mooning in a garden. How far had
the man's suit been favored? The Duke turned the query backward and
forward, like a hot coal in his hand, blowing on it while it burned him.

He trembled internally with panic. Without he was composed, he spoke
calmly, he lifted his face, unmoved, like one indifferent to fortune,
but every mouth in him, hungry for this woman, wailed. And that emotion
in the service of the principle of life, its hands hot on him, turned
his eyes constantly to what his destiny was losing.

The Duke of Dorset, like every lover with the taste of lotus in his
mouth, saw this girl moving in a nimbus. He could not, for his life, fix
her with things real. She came forth from haze, from shadow, like
those fairy women drawn by painters to represent what the flesh of man
eternally longs for. There clung about her that freshness, that mystery,
beyond belief, alluring to the egoistic senses of a man. Evidenced
by the immortality of that Arabian tale, wherein a Prince of Bagdad,
cracking a roc's egg, found a woman sleeping within it, her elbow on her
knee, her chin dimpling in her silk palm.

Moreover, he had found her traveling the highway of adventures. The
perennial charm of romance attended her. He had gone, like fabled
persons, desperately on a quest, seeking a dream woman, and had
found her, a woman of this world, at the quest's end, against every
probability of life. And, therefore, some authority, moving to a
design inscrutable, had brought him to this woman; and therefore, by
permission, by direction of that authority, she belonged to him.

The Duke thrilled under the proprietary word. His veins stretched with
heat. Who was this man, or any man, to take what the gods, sitting
in their spheres, had designed for him? All passion is essentially
barbaric. Under the voices of it a man will do as his fathers did in
the morning of the world, half naked in Asia. The customs, the forms
of civilization may restrain him, but the impulse within him is as
unchanged, after six thousand years of discipline, as fire burning in a
dry tree.

That dinner the Duke of Dorset was never able to remember. The details
of it passed one another into a blur. He sat down to a table beside
Caroline Childers. He talked as one does conventionally at dinner. He
observed the wit, the spirit of the Marchesa Soderrelli. How the host
hung over her, like one charmed, how the woman had, somehow, for
this night, got her beauty out of pawn! She wore a gown elaborately
embroidered, her hair brightened by a jewel set here and there
effectively in it, her face freshened as by a sheer determination to
have back for a night's uses what the years had filched from her.

*****

They went from dinner out into the garden. The night, like that other
night in the bay of Oban, was rather a sort of fairy day, except that
here the world was illumined by a great yellow moon beginning to emerge
from the distant tree tops, while there the sun seemed merely to have
gone behind a colored window.

[Illustration: 0271]

The Marchesa Soderrelli and Cyrus Childers remained on the first terrace
beside those exquisite pools rimmed with marble. The Duke and Caroline
walked on, moved by that vague wanderlust with which this mysterious
dead world seems to inspire every living creature when it moves naked
and golden above the earth. They descended slowly from one terrace to
another along the paths of the Italian garden to the green tile wall
of the Egyptian garden. The soft white light, the broad stretches of
delicate shadow, and these perfect gardens, lying one below the other,
enveloped the world with an atmosphere of sorcery.

To the man this was no real land. This was some delicate, vague kingdom
of illusion. It would presently vanish. There could be only an hour of
it, and the value of that hour he could not measure.

It seemed to the man, walking slowly beside the girl, that he had
purchased this hour at some staggering hideous cost. He must go when the
hour struck, hack as he had come, through the door in the hill. There
was no time, no time! The object, the sole moving object of every
day that he had lived, of every day that he would yet live, seemed to
converge into these moments that escaped with the sound of his feet
moving in this garden. How they sped away, these moments, and how big
with fate they were!

Suddenly the man spoke. "Do you know," he said, "why I have come?"

"Yes," replied the girl, "I know. You came to see if the shadow of Asia
were lying on a British possession."

"No," he said, "I did not come for that. The thing that made me come was
the thing that made my uncle go down to that dead pool on the coast of
Brittany. I have done better than my uncle."

The girl replied softly, like one dealing with a memory.

"But have you done better than the stranger in the legend? Do not the
peasants say that he, too, followed, sinking in the water to his knees?"

"I think," continued the man, "that he was one of us; that the thing
has been always in our blood. But I think all the others failed. I think
that first one of us finally went down as the second one of us went
down. I think, I alone have been able to stagger across the sea."

"And to what have you come?" said the girl.

"That is the strange part of it," replied the man. "After all that
hideous journey, after all that staggering through the sea, I seem to
have come again, like that first one of us, to that ancient city, and,
like him, to have entered into the king's palace and sat down."

The girl drew back against the green tile wall of the Egyptian garden.

"You make me afraid," she said.

She spread out her arms against the wall. Her eyes grew wide. Her
lips trembled. She stared out over the beautiful estate, made doubly
exquisite in the fantastic light.

"I have always been afraid. But how could the sea enter over this? And
there is no king, and no saint."

"But there is a woman," said the Duke of Dorset, "'with hair like spun
darkness, and eyes like the violet core of the night.'"

The girl gave a little cry.

The man flung up his head like one suddenly awakened. He strode across
the bit of turf to where the girl stood. He caught up her hand, lying on
the low cornice of the wall, and carried it to his mouth.

"Forgive me," he said, "I did not mean to frighten you--I would not for
the world frighten you. I love you!"

Words old as the world; old as the first man, the first woman--old
as that garden in Asia; inevitably the same since the world began its
swinging, poured out over this kissed hand.

"I love you! I love you!" What do the expressions, the sentences, the
other words that make a vehicle for these three words matter? They are
nothing. These three words are the naked body. All the others are but
the garments, the ornaments, the tinsel. These are the only words a
woman ever hears. The others, all the others, running before them,
following behind them, signifieth nothing. Whether there be wisdom
in all the other words, it shall vanish away. Only "I love you" never
faileth.

"I love you!" These words are of the divine logos. They are the words
into whose keeping the Great Mother has confided the principle of
life. They are the words at which the children of men are accustomed to
surrender themselves to the will of Nature, which is the will of God.
They are words, so old, so potent, so mysterious, that, like certain
ancient, fabled formulas, they cannot be uttered without presenting
something of their virtue. If a man say these words a woman will listen.
Though he say them in jest, in mockery, yet will she listen. Though she
do not believe them, though she do not love him, yet will she listen, so
great a virtue hath this formula of the oldest magic--this rune of the
oldest sorcery.

The girl standing here against the wall of the garden listened. Her body
seemed to relax and cling to the wall. For a moment she did not move.
For a moment, expanded into the duration of a life, she listened to
these words--these old, potent, mysterious words! These words, charged
with all the ecstasy of all the men and women who have ever loved, with
the destiny of future generations, with the "joy that lieth at the root
of life," poured out over her kissed hand.

For this long, potent, delirious moment the girl was merely a wisp of
blossom, clinging to these tiles. Her consciousness, her will, her very
identity had gone out from her. For this moment she was under the one
tremendous dominating impulse of the world. For this moment she was only
the eternal woman yielding herself to the eternal call.

Her eyes were wide. Her lips parted, her body relaxed, soft, plastic.
Then suddenly, as though they had but stood aside for the passage of
some authority above them, her consciousness, her will, her identity
poured back into her body. She sprang up. She escaped. She drew back
into the angle of the wall. She put her hands to her face, to her hair.
Then almost fiercely she thrust them out before her.

"No, no, no," she cried. "You must not say it. I must not hear it. I
have decided; and you helped me. You convinced me. Don't you remember
that afternoon in the bay of Oban? I did not know what to do. I was
undecided then, and I asked you.... No, no; you did not understand that
I was asking you--you did not understand; but I was; I was asking you
and you told me. Oh, I could say every word of what you told me. You
told me that older persons knew, that one's own impulses were nothing;
that one ought to obey--to obey--one's family. Well, I have promised to
obey, and I will obey. While he lives, while my uncle lives, I will obey
him."

She withdrew her hands and pressed them on her face, and on her hair.
The man took a step toward her, and again, with that fierce gesture, she
thrust her hands out.

"Don't," she cried. "Don't, don't come to undo what you have done."

And like a flash she was gone.

She fled past him, through the garden, from one terrace to another,
swiftly toward the château.

The man turned, walked along the terrace, through a little gate, and
returned by the great road, across the turf court, to the library. And
he walked firmly like one who has finally laid his hands on a thing that
eluded him, like one who has finally found, standing defiant in some
cranny of the rocks, an enemy that, until now, he could never overtake.

In her mad flight, on the highest terrace in the exquisite Italian
garden, Caroline Childers came on the Marchesa Soderrelli. She was
standing erect, unmoving, like one of the figures in the niches along
the wall. Her face was lifted, her arms lay stiffly extended along her
body. Her eyes looked out over this sea of moonlight washing a shore of
tree tops. There lay about her the atmosphere of some resolution that
cast down the plans of life.

Behind her, as though they had put the riddle which she had answered, as
though they had presented to her that eternal question, which they had
presented to all the daughters of the world since that ball began its
turning, those figures surmounting the stone pillars of the bronze
gates, those figures having the face and bust of a woman and the body of
a monster, those inscrutable chimeras, seemed in the soft light to lie
content in the attitude of life.

The girl stopped when she saw the Marchesa Soderrelli. Then, with a
cry, she flew to her and flung her arms around her and crushed her
face against her bosom. The impulsive act awakened the woman. Her face
softened; her body relaxed. She put her arm around the girl and drew her
gently up against her heart.

"What is it, dear?" she said.

"Oh, Marchesa," the girl sobbed, "I have refused--I have refused to go
to the city of Dreams."

The woman leaned over and kissed the girl's hair.

"My child," she said, "your uncle has just asked me to be his wife, and
I have said that I would not."

*****

When the Duke of Dorset entered the library he found it empty; but a
casement window leading down to a terrace lying along the side of the
château was open. He crossed to the window and looked out. There below
him Cyrus Childers moved along this terrace; he was alone, and he walked
with his curious, hovering motion; his arms and his hands moved; his
plowshare jaw protruded. All the energy of the man seemed to have got
into action. Something had prodded this energy into a deadly vigor.

The Duke of Dorset, having found the man for whom he was seeking, went
back to the library table, got a cigar, lighted it, and sat down at the
window. The potent characteristic of his race was strong on him. Now
that a definite struggle for the thing he wanted was visible before him,
he could wait. What it was needful to say, he would presently say when
this man was finally ready to hear him.

The old man continued to walk from one end of the terrace to the other,
passing below the window. And above him the Duke of Dorset waited. An
hour passed and he continued to walk. A black shadow, creeping out from
his feet, skulked behind him, changing, as he moved, into fantastic
shapes; now a cross when he thrust out his arms; now a creature with
wings when his elbows were lifted; now a formless thing that jerked
itself along. Finally, the man passing the steps by the casement window,
turned and entered the library. He went over to the great table, stopped
and began to select a cigar. The Duke of Dorset arose. At this moment a
voice spoke to Cyrus Childers from the door.

"Uncle," it said, "I cannot find a servant in the house."




CHAPTER XX--THE MOVING SHADOW

The presence of Caroline Childers in the door brought the Duke of
Dorset forward into the room. He alone had some understanding of the
incident; but for the moment he said nothing. Cyrus Childers put his
hand on a bell. "Nonsense, Caroline," he said.

But the bell brought no response. He tried another. Then he turned to
the Duke.

"Pardon me a moment," he said, "these bells are evidently broken." He
crossed to the door, spoke to Caroline, and went with her out into the
corridor.

A moment later the Marchesa entered. The Duke had remained on his feet,
where he had arisen, a thin wisp of smoke clinging to the end of his
cigar, as it went slowly out.

The Marchesa Soderrelli crossed straight to him.

"There is something wrong here," she said; "the place is deserted."

The Duke of Dorset laid the cigar down gently on an ash tray, then he
smiled.

"My dear Marchesa," he said, "something has gone wrong with the bells;
that is all."

"That is not all," replied the woman; "I have been through the house to
my room; there is no servant anywhere."

The Duke continued to smile. "I would wager a hunter," he said, "that
every man and maid of them is at this moment in the servant's hall." He
advanced a step. "Look again, my dear Marchesa," he said, "I think
you will find the maids scurrying up at the end of the corridor." The
Marchesa Soderrelli looked steadily at him for a moment.

"My friend," she said, "there is evidently trouble here. Let us look
this situation in the face. We are in the center of an isolated Japanese
colony, and these Orientals have made some concerted, premeditated move.
Do you understand what it is?"

The calm, resolute bearing of the woman caused the Duke of Dorset to
change his plan. He determined to take her into his confidence.

"I would be glad if I knew that," he said; "I have only a conjecture."

The Marchesa continued to regard him with undisturbed composure.

"May I inquire," she said, "what your conjecture is!"

The Duke told her then of the idle Oriental, and what he had observed on
this evening at the foot of the park. He feared that the servants had,
in fact, gone; that the thing was a concerted act, planned and carried
out by the whole corps of servants. The Oriental would sometimes
slip away like that, leaving the very kettles on the fire. They were
doubtless displeased at something, and had determined to abandon the
château. This, the Duke feared, was the situation here--an awkward
one, but not a thing to be alarmed over. Still, among so many servants
setting off in a body, some one of them might attempt mischief; theft,
fire, anything that should suggest itself. However, the very concert of
their act indicated a certain order, and that of itself discouraged any
fear of violence. The Duke pointed out that this was merely a theory, a
conjecture, which he hoped would presently prove unfounded.

The big voice of Cyrus Childers now came to them from the corridor, and,
a moment later, he entered with Caroline. The muscles of the man's
face were distended with rage, he controlled that passion only with the
greatest effort. When he spoke, his voice came out slowly, as though
held and measured.

"We seem to be abandoned by the servants," he said; "I do not understand
it."

Then abruptly, as though the question had been for sometime considered,
Caroline Childers spoke to the Duke of Dorset.

"Have you noticed any indication of this thing?" she said; "any warning
incident?" The Duke saw instantly that he must say here what he had just
said to the Marchesa, and he told again of the Oriental, and especially
of what he had seen this evening at the bridge. But he forgot again
another more pointed incident of the same afternoon. He spoke with a
studied unconcern; he minimized the significance of the thing; it was
like Eastern servants to leave in a body; it meant no more than a going
without permission; the annoyance of it was the only feature to be
thought of; any alarm was obviously unfounded. But his manner and his
comment carried no visible effect. Caroline was evidently alarmed. Cyrus
Childers added now a word in support of the Duke's conclusion--his face
fallen into composure, or rather into control; there was no reason for
alarm; they could all get on somehow for tonight; to-morrow he would
adjust the thing. His massive jaw clamped on that closing sentence.

The Marchesa added also a further word. "They are both quite right," she
said; "we shall get on very well to-night."

Caroline Childers did not at once reply. She remained looking from one
person to the other.

"I wonder," she said, "why it is that we do not say what we are all
thinking. It is extraordinary that the servants should all suddenly
leave the house; it is more extraordinary that they should leave it at
the direction of this person who has been hanging about the grounds."

Then she turned to the Marchesa.

"Neither my uncle nor the Duke of Dorset are in the least misled,
neither are you, nor am I. Let us not pretend to one another; we do not
know what may happen. Nothing, or the very worst thing."

The Marchesa did not reply, and in the meantime Cyrus Childers answered
for her.

"Nonsense, Caroline," he said, "you are unduly excited."

"I am not excited at all," replied the girl.

Her eyes came back to the Duke of Dorset.

"Do you agree with my uncle--shall we wait until morning?"

The Duke met this situation with something approaching genius.

"By no means," he said; "the ground ought to be at once reconnoitered. I
will follow the deserters a little."

He was smiling, and his voice under the words laughed. But within, the
man did not smile, and he did not laugh. He was oppressed by certain
foreboding memories.

The host at once protested. The thing was absurd, unnecessary.

But the Duke continued to smile.

"I beg you to permit it," he said. "Here is a beautiful adventure. I
would not miss it for the world."

The old man understood then, and he laughed. "Very well," he said, "will
you have a horse and weapons?"

"I will take the horse," replied the Duke, "but not the weapons, thank
you. In the meantime, I must dress for the part."

He went swiftly out of the library and up to his room. Here he got into
his riding clothes.

At the foot of the stairway, as he came down, he found Caroline Childers
waiting for him. The two walked from the château door along the turf
court to the stable. The place was lighted as the Duke had first
observed it on this evening, but it was now wholly deserted and silent.
Caroline Childers pointed out the way and the Duke found a horse, led
him out, and girted on a saddle. The horse was a big red sorrel, smooth
as silk, sixteen hands high, and supple as a leopard. The Duke measured
the stirrup leather on his arm, and let it out to the last buckle hole.
Then he turned to the girl beside him, his voice running on that amused,
mock-dramatic note.

"If I do not return in half an hour," he said, "you will know that I am
taken."

Then he gathered up the reins, swung into the saddle, and rode out of
the court eastward into the park.

Caroline Childers returned slowly across the court to the terrace above
the gardens. The night was soft and warm. From the gardens, one lying
below the other, came the trickling of water.

*****

Meanwhile the Duke of Dorset rode slowly among the trees down toward
the stone bridge over the river. But the facetious mood, which he had
assumed to cover the wisdom of this scouting, had departed from him, and
something of the sense of loss that used to await him at night, passing
the picture on the stairway, replaced it. This consuming mood entered
in and possessed the man, and signs which he should have seen, marking
events on the way, escaped him.

He came presently to the stone bridge over the river. The horse refused,
for a moment, to go on it. He struck it over the withers with his crop,
and forced it to go on. The horse swerved, plunged, and half over the
arch, tried to turn back. The Duke swung it around with a powerful
wrench of the bit. The horse went instantly on his hind legs into the
air, striking out with his fore feet.

That rearing saved the man's life. As the horse arose, some one fired
from the cover of the woods beyond the bridge--a dull heavy report like
that of an old-time musket. The horse, struck in the chest between the
shoulders, hung a moment in the air, then it fell forward stumbling to
its knees in the road. The Duke slipped out of the saddle and rolled to
the side of the bridge where the low wall hid him. The horse got slowly
up, and stood with its head down and its legs far apart, trembling, wet
with sweat; the blood poured out of the wound in its chest, in a stream
that flowed slowly into a big, claret-colored pool, and then broke and
trickled across the road in a thin line to where the Duke lay, soaking
his coat. The horse stood for some minutes unsteadily, thus, on its
feet; then it began to stagger, the breath whistling through its
distended nostrils. In this staggering it nearly trod on the man, and,
to escape that danger, he began to crawl along the bridge close to the
wall.

Presently he reached the abutment and slipped from the shelter of the
wall into the wood of the park. Here he ascended the long hill to the
château, keeping in the shadow of the trees, moving slowly and with
caution. When he came to the last tree, at the summit of the park, he
stopped and looked back.

No one followed that he could see. The horse still staggered, bleeding,
over the white floor of the bridge, now to one side of it and now to the
other; then, as he looked, the beast's knees struck violently against
the low wall where he had just been lying, it lurched forward, lost its
balance, toppled and fell with a scream, crashing through a tree top
into the river below.

The word is not accurate. A horse in the extremity of terror utters a
cry like no other sound heard upon this earth. It is a great, hideous
shudder, made vocal. Then, as though that cry had called them into
life, the Duke saw figures emerging from the wood beyond the bridge. He
stepped out into the light, walked swiftly along the court and into the
door of the château.

There, in the library out of which he had just gone, a strange scene
awaited him. The curtains had been pulled over the windows and the
lights were all out except a single one above the big table in the
center of the room. On this table lay a dozen different weapons, hunting
and target rifles, duck and bird guns, and a variety of pistols. The
Marchesa Soderrelli stood over this table, piles of cartridges in little
heaps before her on the polished mahogany board. The others were not
anywhere to be seen.

The Marchesa started when the door opened. "Thank God!" she said; "they
missed you. I heard the shot. I thought you were killed."

"They got the horse," said the Duke.

Then a memory seized him and he crossed to the table, took up one of
the rifles, threw open the breech, and passed his finger over the firing
pin. He tossed the weapon back onto the table and tried another, and
still another.

The Marchesa explained: "I have every gun in the house; two or three of
the rifles will do, and the pistols are all good."

The Duke took up one of the pistols, sprung the hammer, broke it and
felt the breech plate with his thumb. Then he laid it on the table.

"These weapons," he said, "are all quite useless."

The Marchesa Soderrelli did not understand.

"They may not be of the best," she said, "but they will shoot."

"I fear not," replied the Duke.

Then he told swiftly, in a few words, of his experience with the shotgun
on this afternoon; threw open the breech of the rifles and pointed out
the filed-off firing pin in each. Every weapon, to the last one, had
been made thus wholly useless.

The woman's face became the color of plaster, but it remained unmoving,
as though every nerve in it were cut.

"I could bear it," she said, "if we had any chance; if we could make a
fight of it."

"I think we can do that," replied the Duke; "I have a hunting rifle
among my luggage, packed with its ammunition in an ordinary box. That
box has not been opened, and I think its contents not suspected. I will
see."

And he went swiftly out of the room.




CHAPTER XXI--THE IMPOTENT SPELL


The Duke of Dorset hurried through the deserted corridor and ascended
the great stair.

From the moon, sheets of light, entering through the long windows, lay
here and there, white, across the steps, and red across that bronze
frieze wherein satyrs danced. Although the man hurried, habit for an
instant stopped him in the arc of light at the turn of the stair.
He lifted his eyes to see that woman, in her costume of old time,
descending, but the illusion of it was gone. The thing was now only a
lifeless picture hanging in its frame--a sheet of painted canvas from
which no disturbing influences emerged. For the fraction of a second
surprise held him, then the sound of some one moving in the corridor
above caught his ear. Some one walked there, was come now to the
stairway, was descending. And the next moment Caroline Childers, coming
hurriedly down, saw the Duke of Dorset standing on the step by the
window. She stopped instantly, and, like one in terror, put up her hands
to her face, her fingers wandering into her hair.

"Oh!" she said, "you are hurt! There is blood!"

The man was standing in the light; his sleeve, soaked from the wounded
horse, was visibly red.

The girl came slowly to another step, her fingers still moving in her
hair; her speech fragments.

"They shot you... I heard it... I knew they would.... Are you killed!"

The Duke remembered now this blood on his coat and hurried to explain
it.

"I am not hurt," he said. "They killed the horse. I am not in the least
hurt."

The girl thrust back her hair with a curious deliberate gesture. Her
head moved a little forward. Her bosom lifted. She came down slowly from
one step to another. The moment of stress seemed to have matured her
face. She was now not unlike the woman whom he had met every night on
the turn of the stair.

The Duke saw this, and all that had been illusion, fancy, a state of the
mind, emerged into reality. Not on the instant, but in gradual sequence,
like one coming in broad day upon events approaching as he had seen
them in a dream. It is a moment rare in the experience of life, when
the situation dreamed of begins to arrive, in order, in the sun. And
especially when these foreseen events appear to demand a decision which
one must on the instant hazard. Here was the opportunity, coming in
life, which had presented itself so many times to this man in fancy.
Then the foreseen march of events, as is usual in life, wholly altered.

The long sheet of glass in the window by the Duke's elbow broke with
a sharp sound, shivered to fragments, rattled on the step, and a stone
struck the rail of the stairway.

The Duke sprang to the window and looked out. A little group of figures
was gathering along the northern border of the court; one, who had come
closer to the château, was now running back to them. The Duke turned to
find Caroline Childers looking, with him, through the window. He did not
stop to explain what she could see; he gave her a brief direction, and
vanished up the stairway.

"Find your uncle. Have all wait for me in the library. I will come in a
moment."

He ran down the corridor to his room, dragged a leather box out into
the floor, unlocked it and took out the gun and ammunition which he had
packed there at Doune. He examined the breech of the gun a moment with
suffocating interest. It had not been touched, doubtless because the box
seemed an ordinary piece of luggage, and he had kept the key to it.
He put the gun barrel swiftly into its stock, filled his pockets with
cartridges, and returned, running, to the library.

There he found a certain order which he had not hoped for. Cyrus
Childers, who had gone to look at the situation for himself, had
returned. He had restored the lights, thrown a rug over the useless
weapons on the table, and was talking calmly to the others when the Duke
entered. He looked up, saw what the Duke carried, and shook his head.

"We must put away these guns," he said, "there is no need of them. We
must be careful not to provoke violence. I am going out to talk to these
people. Let us not lose our heads."

It was certain that the man's quiet, masterful seizure of the situation
had cleared the air. The Duke saw this and hesitated to make an issue.

"I agree with you," he said, "shooting is the last thing to be done, but
one ought to take every precaution."

The old man frowned, lifting the muscles of his mouth. "If a man has a
gun ready," he said, "he is apt to use it."

The Duke smiled. "I think you can trust me there."

The old man was not convinced, but he formally agreed.

"Very well," he said, "keep the gun out of sight. I am going out now."

Cyrus Childers went over to another table, got a cigar, deliberately bit
off the end, lighted it, pulled a soft hat over his head and went out.

The Duke followed behind him, but at the door, under the light, he
stopped a moment, and put a clip of cartridges into the Mannlicher. The
Marchesa Soderrelli and Caroline Childers remained in the library. In
the corridor confused sounds, coming from outside, were audible, and
another window in the stairway broke. The old man gave these things no
visible attention; he neither lagged nor hurried. A few minutes before
he had closed the door of the château; he stopped now, drew the bolts,
and threw it open. Then he stepped up into the full light of the door,
and stood looking calmly out. The Duke, bare-headed, stepped up beside
him, holding the rifle with one hand behind his back.

Outside a crowd of figures, scattered over the court, drew together and
advanced toward the door. It was possible, under so bright a moon,
to observe these persons distinctly, and the Duke of Dorset was not
reassured by what he saw. They were the scum of Japan; a mob such as
the devil, selecting at his leisure, might have put together--dirty,
uncouth, a considerable mob, reinforced every moment by others entering
the northern border of the court in little groups of perhaps half a
dozen. The ones nearest to the château were servants, but foresters were
beginning to arrive, equally sinister, equally repulsive to the eye. The
mob, drawing together by a common instinct, stopped about fifty paces
from the door, hesitated and chattered. At the distance the Duke could
not catch the words, but he recognized the language in which they were
uttered.

Cyrus Childers spoke then to the Duke beside him.

"I am going out to talk to these people," he said. "Please remain here."

He spoke without turning his face. Then he stepped down into the court
and walked as he had walked through the corridor, deliberately, with
unconcern, out to the mob waiting in the middle of the court. The voices
died down and ceased as he approached. The moving figures stopped on
their feet. The old man walked on until he came up close to the mob;
then he took the cigar out of his mouth and began to speak. At the
distance the Duke could not hear what he said; he seemed to address
certain individuals and, now and then, to put a question.

The Duke stood gripping the stock of his rifle, expecting the man to be
attacked. But instead the mob seemed brought to reason; it was wholly
silent and, the Duke thought, wholly motionless. The old man talked for
perhaps five minutes. Then he put his cigar back into his mouth, made a
gesture with his hand like a speaker dismissing an audience, turned and
began to walk back leisurely to the château. He had covered perhaps half
the distance, when a single voice crashed out of this mob, loud, harsh,
grating.

At the cry the mob surged forward as at a signal. The Duke of Dorset
brought the rifle from behind him, like a flash, to his shoulder. He saw
the mob hang a moment on its toes. He heard in several dialects shouted
assurance that the gun was harmless. Then, hoping to drive the mob back
by the exposure of its error, he fired close over it, so the whistle of
the bullets could be heard. But the whole mass was already on the way.
It rushed, hurling a shower of missiles. The Duke, struck violently, was
thrown back against the door; he heard a scattering popping, as of twigs
snapping in a fire, and a clattering of stones against the wall.

Then he got on his feet and understood what had happened. The mob had
charged, believing the gun useless; had discovered the error on the way,
and was now running for cover to the stables. A stake, thrown by
some gigantic arm, had struck across the gun barrel, which he had
involuntarily raised to protect his body, and the violent impact of the
blow had carried him against the door. His fire had failed to check the
rush of the mob in time. It had passed over the old man before it broke.
He lay out there on the trampled turf, one arm doubled under him.

The Duke thrust a clip of cartridges into the Mannlicher and stepped
out into the court. But no man, in the crowd scurrying to cover, turned.
They vanished like rats into a wall. The Duke crossed the court, reached
the body of the old man, took it up, and began to return with it to the
house. Then, from somewhere about the stables, that irregular popping
began. The Duke saw, or thought he saw, a hand holding a pistol thrust
out from the partly open door of a horse stall. He stopped, put down
the body, swung the muzzle of the Mannlicher on the spot and fired; a
fragment of the door as big as a man's hand detached itself and flew
into splinters. The popping instantly ceased, and the Duke went on into
the château, unmolested, with his burden.

He laid the body down on the floor, closed and bolted the doors of the
château, then he stooped down to examine the body. The old man seemed
quite dead, but he could not at once locate the injury. He felt over the
body; he looked for blood; then he put his hand under the head and the
whole of the occipital bone, at the base of the skull, was soft to the
touch. The man had been killed instantly by a stone or the blow of a
club.

When he looked up from this examination, both Caroline Childers and the
Marchesa So-derrelli were standing beside him. The girl was pressing her
hands together, and jerking them in and out against her bosom. But she
was not speaking a word. The face of the Mar-chesa retained its unmoving
aspect of plaster. The Duke arose and spoke to the Marchesa.

"Why did you not keep her in the library? I feared this might happen."

"They are coming that way, too," she answered, "up the hill from the
river."

"How many?"

"I don't know. Hundreds! I don't know." The Duke stepped swiftly to the
door and looked out through one of the side windows. Groups of figures
were hurrying into the service portion of the house. He turned quickly
from the window and started down the corridor toward that end of the
château. He had not gone a dozen steps when he stopped. Smoke met him!

It had been presently clear to the Duke of Dorset that the little party
ought somehow to get out of the château. He could not hold it against
this rising, especially when led by servants familiar with every door
and window. He might hold a detached tower of it, or a certain passage.
But to make such a stand was to put all into a corner, with every way
out presently cut off. Against mere assault, such a plan was to be
considered, but now, against fire, it was wholly out of the question.
Moreover, no time was to be lost. The service portion of the house had
already been entered and the park leading to the river occupied. The
only directions offering a safe exit were on the road south, leading
down through the meadow land, westward to the coast, or directly across
the court, up the stone steps into the mountain. This latter seemed
the better way out. But to cross the court from the door was not to be
thought of; the little party would be instantly seen, and an open target
over every step of the way.

The Duke returned to the window by the door. Caroline Childers was on
her knees by the body of the old man, the tears were streaming down her
face. The Marchesa Soderrelli walked up and down with a short nervous
stride. When the Duke looked through the window, he saw instantly a way
out. The wall bordering the formal gardens ran from the south wing of
the château along the court; they could cross, behind the cover of that,
to where the road entered. There the distance to the stone steps was
short, and once on these steps the vines would screen them, and they
might go unobserved into the mountain.

But this way remained only for that moment open. The vines moved and the
Duke saw, indistinctly, a man standing at the bottom of these steps. He
watched a moment to see if others came that way, but no others followed.
The man remained alone, watching the château through the heavy border
of vines. This evidently was a sentinel, and a plan, on the instant,
suggested itself to the Duke of Dorset. He broke a corner out of the
window with the muzzle of the rifle, thrust the barrel through, and
brought the gun to his shoulder. Then a thing happened, by chance, and
to the eye trivial. A black beetle, sleeping there against the sash,
aroused by the breaking glass, crept over from its place onto the gun
barrel; the Duke put out his hand to brush the creature out of the line
of sight, but the beetle ran along the barrel to the muzzle. The Duke
slipped the gun back under his arm and brushed the insect off. But he
had no longer time to remain at the window.

A crashing sound, as of a door rammed with a heavy timber, echoed
through the corridor.




CHAPTER XXII--THE IRON POT

The Duke turned instantly.

"This way," he said, "through the house to the garden."

At the word the Marchesa caught Caroline Childers by the arm, and
hurried with her through the corridor; the Duke followed. They crossed
the south wing of the château; through picture galleries; through
corridors, beautified by innumerable human fingers, hung with paintings
worth the taxes of a province, decked with bits of wood, bits of ivory,
cut curiously by masters who sat over that one work for a lifetime.

Finally they came to a last drawing-room, opening from the south tower
of the château into the Italian garden. Its west windows, hung with
curtains, looked out over the turf court. They hurried through this
chamber out onto the terrace, and from there halfway along the wall of
the Italian garden, running here beside the south border of the court.

The situation south of the château was curiously puzzling. The gardens,
lying in terraces, one below the other, had not been entered; the road,
too, running south was clear. But beyond the gardens, in the meadow land
to which the road descended, tiny groups of figures moved out from
the river as though stretching a cordon that way, westward toward
the mom-tains. But no group advanced, from this direction, toward the
château. The situation gave a minute's respite.

The Duke of Dorset, in that respite, again considered the avenues of
escape, and that way up the mountain, under cover of the vines, seemed
the only one remaining. The mob was evidently advancing wholly from the
east; spreading from the stone bridge on the north, through the park,
and on the south, through the meadows. The mountain, due west, was
perhaps clear, except for the one man whom the Duke had just discovered
among the vines. If that man were out of the way, then, doubtless, the
whole of the steps to the top would be open. The man could not be seen
from the garden, but he could be seen from the west windows of the
drawing-room through which they had just passed. Moreover, the shot
would better be fired from there so that the report of the rifle would
indicate that they were still in the château. The Duke explained the
plan in a dozen words. The Marchesa Soderrelli understood at once and
assented.

The Duke knew that little time remained to him. At any moment those
entering the house on the north might come out into this garden. He ran
to the drawing-room, entered it, and crossed quickly to a window looking
out over the turf court. He drew aside the curtain, and stepped in
behind it with his rifle. But he came now on the heels of chance. The
heavy vines at the foot of the stairway moved. The lighter tendrils
above were shaking. The man, whom he had come to kill, was going up the
stone steps hidden by the leaves.

There was no moment to be lost, and the Duke immediately returned to the
garden.

The situation east of the château had changed. Not only was that curious
cordon, stretching from the river southwest to the meadows, drawing
nearer, but a body of several hundred was coming up the great road,
leading to the court west of the gardens.

He stood for a moment on the terrace before the door; his body rigid,
the rifle in his hand. He knew what this advance meant. The end of this
business was approaching. The play hurried to its last act--a single
moment of desperate fighting in some corner of the wall. He saw with
what patience, with what order, events had gathered to this end. The
time wasted in that fatal parley before the door; the moment lost at the
window; the escape of that one among the vines; this advance now on the
south road. Events, all moving to a single, deadly purpose, as under the
direction of some intelligence, infinite and malicious.

The thing looked like a sentence of death deliberately ordered; and
the man took it for such a sentence, but he took it in no spirit of
submission. He took it as a desperate challenge; before he died he would
kill every man that he could kill, and he would do it with care, with
patience, with caution.

Caroline Childers, and the Marchesa Soder-relli remained where they had
been standing by the wall. The Duke, on the terrace before the door, saw
that the steps up the face of the mountain was the only route not now
visibly hopeless. He had seen but one man there; doubtless there were
others, but there was a chance against it, and he determined to take
that chance.

At this moment a crowd of figures poured out into the road from the
shelter of the wall running parallel with the gardens. They swarmed onto
the open road before the stone pillars. Then they saw the two women, and
they swept with a babel of cries across the garden. The Duke was about
an equal distance away from the Marchesa and Caroline Childers when
he saw the rush start. He was strong; hard as oak. Every nerve,
every muscle in him lifted instantly to its highest tension. It was a
breathless race, but the man whose body had been trained, disciplined,
made fit by the perils of the wilderness, won it. He was on the gravel
beside them, with the mob forty paces to come. He had perhaps thirty
seconds remaining to him, and each one of them was worth a life, but he
took the time to say: "Don't move."

Then a thing happened that would convince any student of warfare of
the utter futility of the bayonet as against the modern rifle at close
range. Within twenty seconds the Duke emptied the magazine of the
Mannlicher four times into the mob--a shot for every second. And yet the
man did not fire with a mere convulsive working of the trigger. He shot
with a precise, deadly, catlike swiftness, choosing and killing his
man like one driving the point of a knife with accuracy into a dozen
different spots on a table before him. The momentum of the massed rush
carried the mob almost to his feet before it fell back and scattered
into the garden, and yet the Duke never clubbed his rifle. The one man
who almost reached him, who fell against his feet, was shot through the
head, or rather the whole top of his head was removed by the expanding
bullet of the Mannlicher.

The conduct of women in the presence of violent death has usually been
imagined, and they stand thus charged with a coma, a hysteria, that
observation does not justify. The testimony of those who observed the
English women during the Mutiny, who marked the carts passing through
the streets of Paris under the Terror, is to the contrary. When the Duke
swung around with the rifle in his hand the two women were close beside
him; they had neither moved nor uttered a sound. He indicated the
mountain with a gesture, and the three of them ran along the wall,
beside the dead bodies, across the road, and over the dozen yards of
green turf to the stone steps.

He saw that no minute was to be wasted. The crowd advancing on the road
was now running, and the mob, scattered by the fire, would remain only
for a moment in confusion. He ran with the rifle held ready in his hand,
his finger on the trigger guard. But the precaution was unnecessarily
taken. The stone stairway at its foot was wholly clear. They began to
ascend it, the Duke going first, with the muzzle of the rifle presented
before him.

It is doubtful if any man ever accurately anticipated a coming event,
even when that event was beginning to appear on the sky line. The man
whom the Duke had seen was not on these steps; the way was clear to the
top. Here was a change of status as complete and swift as any related
of the fairy. The three persons, come now to the top of this stairway,
stood above and outside the zone of death, within the shelter of the
forest. Below, the scene was wholly unreal and fantastic. It was not
possible to believe that all the savage, bestial, primitive passions
of the Oriental swarmed here to a work of ruin; that the beast was
in control of this place of exquisite beauty; that the cordon of
civilization had been forced here at its most perfect quarter.

For a moment the scene held the Duke as a thing staged under his eye in
some elaborate drama. Then groups of figures began to emerge from the
doors of the château and a thin line of scarlet crept along the whole
face of the north wing under the roof--flames licking the wooden
cornice. He realized, then, that he and the two women had not escaped;
that they would be hunted through these mountains; that the struggle
would be one of extermination; that he faced a condition as primitive as
any obtaining in the morning of the world.

He stepped back, tucked the rifle under his arm, and looked about for
the trail leading down to the river and the great road. He found it in
a moment and began to descend, followed by the two women. The three
figures hurried, a curious moving picture in the moonlit forest. The
Duke of Dorset, bare-headed, forcing his way through the brush of the
mountain, a rifle in his hand; the Marchesa Soderrelli in a trailing,
elaborately embroidered evening dress, the skirt of it tearing at every
step; Caroline Childers with bare arms, bare shoulders, her white gown
fouled by the leaves--all on their way to the wilderness. So swiftly had
conditions been reversed.

Finally they came to the river at the point where the Duke had crossed
on his way to the château. Here not only was the current swift, but the
water was up to a man's waist. That meant to the shoulders of the
women, and consequently too deep to ford. He did not stop to discuss the
crossing, but set out along the bank of the river in the hope of
finding a shallow. This bank, unlike the opposite one, was dense with
underbrush. The two women followed close behind the man's shoulders in
order to escape the bushes that he thrust aside. Sometimes they touched
him, crowded against him, stumbled against him. Caroline Childers was
more fortunate than the Marchesa Soder-relli. Her dinner dress had
no train. The older woman's long, heavy skirt caught in every bush,
sometimes she was thrown down by it, sometimes it tore. Finally she
stopped, reached back to the skirt band, gave it a jerk that wrenched
off the delicate hooks, and when the garment fell about her feet,
stepped out of it. Under it was a black-satin petticoat. She went on,
leaving the skirt lying in the trail.

It was the first toll taken of civilization by the wild.

The bank continued for several hundred yards, thus, through thickets,
then it became a forest, clear of undergrowth, but close set with trees,
and dark. A forest that grew thicker and consequently darker as they
advanced. There was now scarcely any light. Here and there a vagrant ray
descended through some opening in the tree tops, or a patch lay, like a
detached fragment, on the boles of the trees.

The Duke watched the river as they advanced, but for perhaps half a
mile he found no favorable change in the swift current. Finally the
bank ascended to a heavily wooded knoll; below it the river pounded over
bowlders. But above, there was evidently a shallow, where the sheet of
water glided at no great depth over a rock bed. They stopped on this
knoll, among the trees in the dark; the bank was clear of any brush, and
dry, covered with a rug of moss, browned by the autumn sun, and yielding
like velvet to the foot. The river glistened in the white moonlight,
black, viscous, sinister, slipping through the forest. The road, lying
beyond it, was also in the light, while the mountains, stretching off
westward from this road, lay under a vast inky shadow.

The Duke of Dorset took off his coat, laid it at the foot of a tree, set
the rifle beside it, bade the women await his return, and went down the
bank into the river. He found the water not deeper than he had judged
it, but the current was rather stronger, and the rock bed uneven and
seamed with cracks. He crossed to the opposite bank and was returning,
when something dropped into the river beside him with a slight splash.
He looked up and behind him.

The road, white here under the moon, stretched up the river gradually
into shadow. From the direction of the chateau, a man was advancing,
running in a long, slouching trot. The Duke remembered that the river,
like the road, was in light. He stooped, hooked his fingers into a crack
of the rock bed, and lowered himself into the water. He remained thus
with the water pouring over him until a second splash advised him that
the man had gone on. He got slowly to one knee, and in a moment to his
feet. The road was now clear. The Duke hurriedly waded to the bank and
came to the shelter of the trees. It was dark under the trees, but he
could make out the figure of a woman sitting by the tree where he had
placed the rifle, and a second figure, vaguely white, standing at the
edge of the bank against a fir trunk. He spoke to this standing figure.

"Where did the man go?" he said. "I could not see from the river."

"He followed the road," replied the figure; "can we cross?"

The Duke looked out at the moon. It stood high in the heavens, bright
and clear, a disk of silver. Behind it the sky was clean and swept,
but to the eastward, traveling slowly up, were a company of clouds, one
flying like a wild goose behind the other.

"We can cross," he answered, "but not until the moon is hidden. There
may be others on the road."

Then he sat down on the dry moss.

Immediately the figure by the tree moved toward him. He noticed that it
was but half white, as it stood, and now, as it drew nearer, it became
wholly white. The explanation followed, his coat was put around his
shoulders. He got up at once.

"No, no," he said, "please keep it on; I am not cold."

"But you are wet," replied Caroline Childers, "and you will be cold."
Then she added, as though to settle the discussion, "I put the coat on
because the cartridges were in the pocket. I have the rifle."

And she held out the Mannlicher.

The Duke hesitated. Then he put the coat on and took the gun out of her
hand. The girl remained where she was standing.

A question came into the man's mouth, but he closed his lips on it,
and dropped the butt of the rifle on the moss beside him. A swift
comprehensive understanding came to him. A picture arose strikingly
before him: the mob arriving on the road, he in the river there, and
this white figure, wearing his coat, fighting with a rifle from behind
a fir tree, like the first resolute women of this republic, holding the
log house against the savage. She had flung the bits of stone into the
river to warn him, and had taken up the rifle to defend him.

"Sit down," he said; "we shall doubtless have a long distance to walk."

The girl sat down where she stood. The man remained a moment leaning on
the muzzle of the rifle, then he, too, sat down, placing the gun across
his knees.

It was that hour when the wilderness is silent; before the creatures
that hunt at daybreak have gone out; before the temperature of the night
changes; when the solitary places of the world seem to wait as with a
reverential stillness for the descending of some presence--the hour when
the discipline of life is lax, and the human mind will turn from every
plan, every need of life, however urgent, to any emotion that may enter.

The Duke of Dorset did not move. The desperate and crying difficulties
that beset him became gradually remote. He could not take the road to
the coast as he had hoped; he dared not cross the river under this moon.
And every moment here was one of almost immediate peril. They had been
quickly followed on the road. They would be as quickly followed down the
mountain. These things were impending and real, but they seemed, in this
silence, remote and unreal. The man sat in contentment, like one drawing
at a pipe of opium; a peace, a serenity like that of the night entered
into him; a thing for which we have no word; something strange,
mysterious, wonderful, drew near--was at hand--a thing that was,
somehow, the moving impulse of life, the object of it, the focus into
which drew every act running back to the day that he was born.

A certain vast importance seemed now to attend him. The horror and
turbulence of this night had been benefits to him. Events, ruthless to
others, kind to him. Some god, bloody and old, savage and cruel, but
somehow loving him, had stamped out the world for his benefit, and left
him sitting among the wreck of it, with the one thing he wanted. It
could not escape from him; he had only to put out his hand.

An hour passed. The world still lay silent. The very dead fringe
clinging to the fir limbs were motionless; the dull, monotonous sound of
the river, rolling in its bed, was a sort of silence. Brief periods
of darkness now covered the river and the road as the moon entered the
company of clouds. No one of the three persons moved. The white figure
so near to the Duke of Dorset might have been wholly an illusion of the
sense. The wet clothes on the man's body dried. Another hour passed.
Then faint cries, hardly to be distinguished, descended from the
mountain behind them. The man arose and listened, he now heard the
sounds distinctly; he heard also a second sound carrying through the
forest.

Some one was coming along the river bank, through the undergrowth, a
mile away.




CHAPTER XIII--THE GREAT PERIL

The remote sounds, caught by the man's trained ear, were now audible to
the women. They arose. The Marchesa Soderrelli moved over to where the
Duke stood looking up at the sky.

"They are coming," she said.

The man did not answer, and he did not move. The sounds, carried down to
them on the night air, grew louder. The Marchesa became impatient.

"We must go on," she said.

The words, the tone of the woman's voice, were urgent. But the Duke
remained with his face lifted to the tree tops. Presently, he turned
swiftly and handed the rifle to Caroline Childers.

"We must try it now," he said, "while the moon is under that cloud. Each
of you give me your hand."

The two women instantly obeyed, and the three persons went hurriedly
down the bank into the river. The whole world was now dark. The man thus
entered the water, between the two women; he held each by the wrist, his
arms extended. It was the only way to cross the river swiftly, and to
be certain that neither woman was carried away by the current. Caroline
Childers was above with the rifle. The Marchesa Soderrelli was below.
The wisdom of the Duke's plan was at once apparent. Neither of the women
could have kept her footing without his aid; thus held, they managed to
reach the middle of the river, and would doubtless have crossed without
accident had the rock bed continued smooth. But there is to be found
in the beds of rivers, especially when seamed with cracks, a species of
green slimy fungus, clinging to these cracks, and streaming out below,
slippery, like wisps of coarse hair boiled in soap.

As they approached the opposite shore, the Marchesa trod on one of these
bits of fungus and fell. The current, at that point, was swift, but the
water was shallow. Her knee struck heavily on the rock. The Duke held
her, but she seemed unable to get again to her feet; her body swung
out with the current; the river was intensely dark. Fortunately, in
the shallow water, Caroline Childers managed to get ashore without the
Duke's assistance; and having now his other arm free, he was able to
lift the Marchesa, and carry her out of the river. He did not stop on
the bank; he went on across the road, and into the wood beyond, still
carrying the Marchesa Soderrelli. Caroline Childers followed with the
rifle.

The wood, skirting the foot of the mountains, was here less densely
packed than on the other side of the river. The Duke wished to cross
it into the deeps of the forest before the moon emerged. He walked with
tremendous strides in spite of his burden and in spite of the darkness.
The ground under foot was open, and he was able to cross the strip of
wood to the foot of the mountain before the moon came out. He stopped
and put the woman down. There was a little light entering among the
trees, although neither the road nor the river could be seen.

The Marchesa was not able to determine the extent of her injuries. The
blow had been on the left knee; she did not think that any bone was
broken, nevertheless, the joint gave way when she tried to get up. The
three persons fully realized the alarming extent of this misfortune.
Still no one spoke of it. Caroline Childers wanted to stop here, but the
Duke insisted that they go on. He put his arm around the Marchesa, and
she tried to walk. But she presently gave it up and sat down. Caroline
Childers now insisted that they should stop; perhaps the Marchesa might
be able to walk when the knee was rested. The Duke refused. He pointed
out that the leg, if not broken, would presently be stiff, and more
painful than it now was; that they were still so close to the road that
beaters would easily find them; that the rising clouds indicated rain;
and that the mountain would be infinitely harder to climb if the moss
and leaves were wet. Moreover, he could not determine the lie of the
mountains from this valley, and he wished to be high enough to locate
directions when the dawn arrived.

He announced his intention to carry the disabled woman. The Marchesa
protested. The Duke simply paid no attention. He took her up, and set
out through the mountains. The forest grew more dense; the ascent
became more difficult; still the man went on without slacking his pace.
Sometimes he paused to rest, holding the woman on his knee; sometimes he
put her down while he tried to discover the lie of the mountain. But he
refused to stop, and always he continued to advance.

Usage, training, the rigor of discipline long followed toughen and
strengthen the human body to an excellence past belief. This man carried
the woman, hour after hour, up the mountain, through the fir forest, and
he traveled quite as fast with his unwieldy burden as the girl behind
him was able to do with no weight except that of the rifle. The night
lengthened and darkened. The morning began to approach. Still black tree
trunk followed black tree trunk, and the brown moss carpet under their
feet stretched upward. The air, instead of cooling with the dawn, became
warmer. A thin mist of rain began to fall. Presently the contour of the
ground changed; the carpet became level; more light entered among the
trees, and they came out into a bit of open.

It was now morning. They came into an ancient clearing; a patch once cut
out by some pioneer's ax; the scar of an old wound, that the wilderness
had taken from the invader. The blackened stumps still stood about,
fragments of charred tree tops remained; and in the center of the
clearing stood a log cabin, roofed with clapboards, its door fallen from
its wooden hinges, its chimney, built of crossed sticks, daubed between
with clay, tumbled down, but the hewn logs and the clapboards, split
with the grain of the wood, remained.

The Duke crossed the bit of open and entered the cabin. It was dry, and
covered with leaves carried in through the door by the wind. The three
persons were scarcely under the protection of this shelter, when the
threatening rain began to fall. It was one of those rains common to the
coast line. There was no wind; the atmosphere seemed to form itself into
a drenching mist that descended through the trees.

The Marchesa Soderrelli complained of pain in the injured knee, and the
two women determined to improvise a bandage. The Duke arose and went out
into the clearing. The forest was beginning to steam, and he wished, if
possible, to get the lie of the mountain range before they were hemmed
in with mist. The two women improvised a bandage from a petticoat
ruffle, and bound the knee as tightly as they could. They did not talk;
both were greatly fatigued, and both realized the desperate situation.
They did not discuss it, but each prepared to meet it, in her own
manner, with resolution.

When the Duke had got the points of the compass, he was not disturbed
about what ought to be done. He knew that as soon as the two women were
a bit rested, they should at once go on. It would be a day of fatigue
and hunger; but no one of them would die of hunger in a day, and by
night he hoped to come in sight of the coast. Then they could stop and
meet the problem of food.

He was going back into the cabin to explain the necessities of this
plan, when the Marchesa Soderrelli called him. He entered. Caroline
Childers was standing, leaning against the logs by the tumbled-in
fireplace; the Marchesa Soderrelli sat on the ground among the leaves;
both, in physical aspect, had paid their tribute to the wilderness.
The girl's hair and eyes seemed to dominate her face; the soft
indiscriminate things, common to youth, were gone; she had become, in
the eight hours departed, a woman, acquainted with the bitterness of
fife, and facing its renunciations. The Marchesa Soderrelli, sitting on
the floor of the abandoned cabin, was an old woman, her face flabby, her
body fallen into baggy lines. But the spirit in her was unshaken, and
her voice was compact and decisive.

"I wish to speak to you, my friend," she said; "won't you please sit
down?"

The man looked from one woman to the other and sat down on the corner of
a log, jutting out from the door wall. For the last half of this night,
he had been, upon one point, content. He was like one who, desiring
a thing above all others, and despairing of his ability to obtain it,
finds that thing seized upon by a horde of brutal and hideous events and
thrust into his arms. He stood now, past the outposts of uncertainty,
with the possession in his hand.

Those under the oldest superstition in the world warn us that such a
moment is above all others perilous. That it is the habit of Destiny
to wait with fatal patience until one's life swims over this mark, and
then, rising, like a whaler to drive in the iron.

The Marchesa Soderrelli continued, like one who has a final and
difficult thing to say.

"My friend," she began, "I am a woman, and consequently you must expect
me to go round about in what I have to say, and you must forgive me when
I seem unreasonable."

She lifted her hands and put back her hair.

"I have no religion, as that word is generally defined, but I have a
theory of life. I got it out of a book when I was little. In that book
the disciples of a wise man came to him and said: 'Master, we can
endure no longer being bound to this body, giving it food and drink,
and resting it and cleansing it, and going about to court one man after
another for its sake. Is not death no evil? Let us depart to whence we
came.' And he answered them: 'Doth it smoke in the chamber? If it is
not very much I will stay. If too much, I will go out; for remember this
always, and hold fast to it that the door is open.' Well, the smoke has
come to be intolerable."

She moved in the leaves.

"I have tested my fortune again and again as that wise man said one
ought to do. There can be no longer any doubt. It is time for me to go."

The woman looked from the man to the girl standing by the chimney. Her
eyes were appealing.

"You must forgive me," she said, "but you must believe me, and you must
try to understand me. I want you and Caroline to go on."

She put up her hand.

"No, please hear me to the end of it. I know how the proposal looks to
you. It seems cruel. But is it? I am come to the door, and I am going
out through it. Is it not more cruel to force me to put my own hand to
the latch?"

The woman paused. She sat huddled together in the leaves; there was
something old, fated, irrevocable in the pose of her figure.

"I beg of you," she added, "as my friends, to spare me that."

The mist streaming up from the soaked forest lay in the cabin. It
gathered about the woman on the floor. Presently she went on:

"I am afraid that I cannot make you see how completely I am done with
life, but I will try. So long as one has a thing to love, or a thing
to do in this world, the desire to remain here is a strong and moving
impulse in him. But when these two things go, that desire also goes. And
the loss of it is the sign--the beck to the door. That old wise man made
it very clear, I think. He said: 'Another hath made the play, and
not thee, and hath given thee thy lines to speak, and thou art not
concerned, except to speak them well, and at the end of them to go....
And why shouldst thou wish to remain after that, until He, who conducts
the play, shall come and thrust thee off?'"

"Now," she continued, "I have come to the end of my lines. They have not
always been very pleasant lines. But I have contrived to speak them with
a sort of courage. And I would not now be shamed before the Manager."

She peered through the thickening mist, as through a smoke, straining
her eyes to see the face of the man by the door, the girl by the
chimney; but she could not, and she tried a further argument.

"You must be fair to me," she said, "look at the situation. I cannot
go on, that is certain, and for the two of you to remain here, on my
account, is to charge me with your death. Dear me! I have enough on the
debit side of the ledger without that."

The woman's head oscillated on her shoulders. Her right hand wrung the
fingers of her left. She considered for a moment, her chin fallen on
her bosom. Then she sat up, like one under the impulse of some final and
desperate hazard.

"I am going to ask each of you a question," she said, "and I entreat
you, as one in the presence of death, to answer the truth. And let it be
a test between us."

Then she leaned forward, straining through the mist, to the Duke of
Dorset.

"My friend," she said, "can you think of any interest in this life that
you would like to follow; any plan that you would like to carry out; any
hope that you would like to realize? because I cannot, and if you can,
it is I, and not you who should remain here."

There was absolute silence. The wet mist continued to enter, to obscure,
to separate each of the three persons. The man did not reply, and the
Marchesa swung around toward the dim figure of the girl, standing by the
ruined chimney. The leaves crackled under the woman's body. She rested
on her hand.

"Caroline," she said, "a man may have many interests in life, but we
do not. With us all roads lead through the heart. Now, if you have any
affection for any living man, you must go on. I make it the test before
God. If you have, you must go. If you have not, you may remain. But I
have the right to the truth--the right of one about to decide who shall
live and who shall not live."

The man at the door arose slowly to his feet, as under the pressure of
a knife, breaking the skin between his shoulders. Every fiber in him
trembled. Every muscle in his body stood out. Every pore sweated. The
shadow of the descending iron was black on him.

But if this question disturbed Caroline Childers, there was now
no evidence of it. She replied at once, without pause, without
equivocation.

"I shall remain with you," she said.

The Marchesa Soderrelli, sitting on the floor among the leaves, bit her
lip, until the blood flowed under her teeth.

The man, standing by the door, did not move. The mist mercifully hid
him; it packed itself into the cabin. The three persons changed into
gray indefinite figures, into mere outlines, into nothing. The mist
became a sort of darkness. It became also a dense, tangible thing, like
cotton-wool, that obscured and deadened sound.

Something presently entered the clearing from the forest, tramped about
in it, and finally approached the door.




CHAPTER XXIV--THE TASTE OF DEATH

There is no phenomenon of weather so swiftly variable as that of mist.
It may lie at a given moment on the sea or on the mountain--a clinging,
opaque mass, as dense and impenetrable as darkness; darkness, in
fact, leeched of its pigment, a strange, hideous, unnatural, pale
darkness--and the next moment it may be swept clean away by the wind.
This is especially true on high altitudes; the ridges of hills; the
exposed shoulders of mountains, where the fog lies clear in the path of
the wind. On Western mountain ranges, adjacent to the sea, this protean
virtue of the weather is sometimes a thing as instantaneous as sorcery.
The soft rain is often followed by a stiff, heady breeze, sucked in
landward from the ocean. This breeze travels like a broom sweeping its
track. Thus, the Marchesa Soderrelli, wrapped in this mist, like a toy
in wool, sitting on the floor of the cabin, believed herself present at
some enchantment, when suddenly the mist departed, a cool wind blew in
on her, and the sun entered.

She uttered a cry of astonishment, and pointed to the door. A huge,
gaunt mule stood directly before the cabin, and almost instantly the
tall figure of a man, equally gaunt, loomed in the door.

"Good mornin'," he said, with an awkward, shy bob of the chin. His eyes
were gentle; his craggy, rugged feature placid like those of some old
child. "I had a right smart trouble to find you."

The tragic nature of a situation is an intangible essence purely mental.
It does not lie in any physical aspect; it is a state of the mind. Let
that state of the mind change, and the whole atmosphere of the situation
changes. The scene may stand in every detail precisely as it was, the
actors in it remain the same, Nature and every phase of Nature the
same, and yet everything is changed. It is a state of the mind! On the
instant, the scene of breaking tension staged in this mountain cabin
descended into commonplace. Life, and the promise of life travel always
in one zone; death, and the threat of death in another--but shifting
imperceptibly, and on the tick of the clock.

One arriving now at this cabin would have marked only signs of fatigue
in the aspect of the three persons in it. Of this fatigue, the girl and
the older woman gave much less evidence than the man. He seemed wholly
exhausted. The vitality of the two women arose with the advent of the
mountaineer. They gave interest and aid to his efforts to provide a
meager breakfast. He produced from a sack across the mule's saddle a
piece of raw bacon, flour and a frying pan.

The Duke of Dorset, after his first welcome to the mountaineer, and his
brief explanation to the others, had returned to his seat on the log by
the door. He seemed too tired even to follow events. The mountaineer had
produced sulphur matches from the inside of his hat--the only dry spot
about him--wrapped in a piece of red oilcloth, cut doubtless from the
cover of some cabin table. He was now on his knees by the tumbled-in
chimney, lighting a fire. Caroline Childers, with the knife, which the
Duke had once borrowed, was cutting the bacon into strips. The Marchesa
Soderrelli, still seated on the floor, was in conversation with the
mountaineer, her strong, resolute nature recovering its poise.

The contrast between the degrees of fatigue manifest in the two women
and the man by the door was striking. He looked like a human body from
which all the energies of life had been removed. In the case of the two
women, Nature was beginning to recover. But, in the aspect of the man,
there was no indication that she ever intended to make the effort.

Now, as the effect of mere exertion, this result was excessive. The
man was hardy and powerful; he was young; he was accustomed to fatigue.
Eight hours of stress would not have brought such a frame to exhaustion.
Eight days would hardly have done it. Moreover, within the last hour,
the man had entered the clearing with no marked evidence of fatigue. The
transformation carried the aspect of sorcery, or that of some obscure
and hideous plague, traveling in the mist.

Occult and unknowable, swift and potent are the states of the mind. The
blasting liquors, fabled of the Borgia, were not more toxic than certain
ones brewed, on occasion, in the vats of the brain.

The Marchesa Soderrelli took over the conduct of affairs. She brought
now to the promise of life that same resolution and directness which she
had summoned to confront the advent of death. She spoke from her
place on the floor, her voice compact and decisive. She estimated with
accurate perspective the difficulties at hand, and those likely to
arise. Now as determined to go on as she had been a little earlier
determined to remain. Her conversation, almost wholly to the
mountaineer, was concise, deliberate and to the point. But while she
talked directly to him, she looked almost continually at the Duke
of Dorset. She seemed to carry on, side by side, two distinct mental
processes--one meeting the exigencies of the situation, and the other
involving a study of the man seated by the door--and to handle each
separately as a thing apart from the other.

The coast could be reached by trails known to the mountaineer in eight
or nine hours, perhaps in less time. If they set out at once they would
arrive in the afternoon. Nevertheless, the Marchesa Soderrelli, coming
to a decision on the two problems before her, declared that they should
remain where they were until midday. It is possible that she considered
the Duke of Dorset too fatigued to go on; but she gave no reason.

This careful scrutiny of the changed aspect of the man by the door was
not confined to the Marchesa Soderrelli. The circuit rider observed it,
considered the man's physical needs, and agreed to the delay. Caroline
Childers, behind the Marchesa Soderrelli, sitting by the bit of fire,
her hands around her knees, also studied the man; but she did not regard
him steadily. She sat for the most part, looking into the fire at the
cooling embers, at the white ash gathering on the twigs. Now and then,
fitfully, at intervals, her eyes turned toward him. The expression of
the girl's face changed at such a time. It lifted always with concern
and a certain distress, and it fell again, above the fire, into a cast
of vague, apparently idle speculation; but, unlike the scrutiny of the
other woman, it continued.

The Marchesa having reached a conclusion turned about and began to probe
the mountaineer with queries. She wished to know where he had been, how
he had come to follow, and by what means he had found them.

The old man was not easily drawn into a story. The history of the night
came up under the Marchesa's searching hand in detached fragments.
Fragments that amazed and fixed her interest. This story failed to hold
the girl's exclusive interest, although absorbing that of the Marchesa.
Her eyes traveled continually to the Duke of Dorset while she listened
to it as though placing each incident in its proper relation to him.
As though each incident, so coupled up, entered in and became a part
of some big and overpowering conception that her mind again and again
attempted to take hold of. She seemed, unlike the older woman, not able
to carry the two things side by side in her mind. She swung from the one
abruptly to the other.

The mountaineer, under the searching queries of the Marchesa, was
disturbed and apologetic. He had been slow to find the party, he
thought; and, as preface to the story, meekly issued his excuse,
including a word for the mule.

"Jezebel's a-gittin' on, an' I hain't as spry as I was."

Not as spry as he was! The traveling of this man for the last half of
the night would have appalled a timber wolf. He had beat the mountains,
on both sides of the river, for four hours, running through the forest.
He had gone along the face of the mountains for at least five miles,
backward and forward, parallel with the great road, traveling faster
than that wolf. He was desolated, too, because "God Almighty" had sent
him in haste, like that man of God out of Judah, and he had stopped "to
eat bread and to drink water."

Stopped to eat bread and to drink water!

For eight hours the man had not stopped except to feed the mule. For
ten hours he had not eaten a mouthful, and had drank only when he waded
through a river. Why, since he carried food, he had not eaten, the
Marchesa So-derrelli, with all her dredging, could not get at. The man
seemed to have had some vague idea that the food would be needed, and
an accounting of it required of him. He was distressed for what the mule
had eaten, but one must be merciful to his beast, for the Bible said it.

Moreover, he had been "afeard."

Afeard! The man had been all night in the immediate presence of death.
He had stood unmoved and observing under the very loom of it. He had
crossed again and again under its extended arm, under its descending
hand; within a twinkling of the eye, a ticking of the clock of death.

It ought to be remembered that the Marchesa Soderrelli was an
experienced and educated woman, skilled in the subtleties of speech, and
in deft probing. And yet, with all the arts and tricks of it, she was
not clearly able to discover wherein the mountaineer accused himself of
fear.

It seemed that the man, following a definite impulse which he believed
to be a direction of God, had arrived on the spur of the mountain above
the château before the revolt was on. But here in the deeps of the
forest he had stopped to consider what he ought to do, and in this he
had been "afeard," not for his life, but to trust God. He should have
gone on into the château, then he might have brought all safely away.
But he had "taken thought."

When he heard the cracking of the rifle, he had tied the mule to a tree,
and descended the stone steps. But he arrived there after the attack was
ended. Concealed by the vines, he had concluded that the occupants of
the château were already gone out on the road to the coast.

He had returned for the mule, made a detour around to the road, and
advanced toward the château. But he found no one. The château was in
flames. He now thought that if any of its occupants had escaped, they
would be in the mountain from which he had descended, and would come
down the trail to the river. He had, therefore, traveled with the mule
as fast as he could to that place on the road. But no one had come over
the river there. He could tell that, because one, coming up out of the
water, would have made wet tracks on the dry moss of the bank, and the
dry carpet of the road.

Now, extremely puzzled, he had hidden the mule in the forest, and set
out to see if the escaping persons had crossed the road farther on. He
had traveled for several miles, but had found no wet track on the dry
road. Then he had crossed the river and followed up on the opposite
bank. He had hunted that face of the mountain before the pursuing mob.
Finally ascending the bank of the river, he had come by chance on the
Marchesa's skirt. This had given him a clew to the direction taken by
the party, and following it he had finally located, by the trodden
moss, the place where the river had been crossed. He had waded the river
there, hoping to follow the wet tracks, but the rain had now begun to
descend, and he could not tell what direction they had taken. He had
returned for the mule, and followed the road to the summit of the
mountain. Here he again tied the mule in the woods and began that long,
tireless searching, backward and forward along the whole face of the
mountain.

Finally, in despair, he returned to the mule, and as he put it,
"left the thing to Jezebel an' God Almighty." And the mule, doubtless
remembering, in the uncomfortable rain, the shelter of the abandoned
cabin, had gone along the backbone of the mountain into the clearing.
And so he had found them.

But to the circuit rider it was God's work; the angel of the Lord in the
night, in the impenetrable mist, walking by the beast's bridle. He was
depressed and penitent. He had been one of little faith, one of that
perverse and headstrong generation; afraid, like the Assyrian, to trust
God. And so, in spite of him, they had been found.

The man was so evidently distressed that the Marchesa Soderrelli
hastened to reassure him. She told him how the Duke of Dorset had gone
twice to a window to kill him. She thought the deep religious nature of
the man would see here a providential intervention--the hand of Yahveh
thrust out for the preservation of His servant. But in this she was
mistaken. He had been in the presence, not of God's mercy, but of His
anger. The hand had been reached out, not to preserve, but to dash him
into pieces. He believed in the austere God of the ancient Scriptures,
who visited the wavering servant with punishments immediate and
ruthless; the arrow drawn at a venture and the edge of the sword.

The astonishment of the Marchesa Soderrelli at the man did not equal his
astonishment at her. He sat looking at the woman in wonder. How could
she doubt a thing so clear? Was not the Bible crowded with the lesson?
Presently he arose and went out into the clearing. The gaunt mule was
cropping vines in the open before the door. He paused to caress her
lovingly with his hands. Then he crossed the clearing and disappeared
into the forest. The Marchesa concluded that the man had gone to post
himself somewhere as a sentinel, and she composed herself to wait.

The morning was drawing on to midday. The sun lay warm on the forest.
The soft haze stretched a blue mist through the hollows of the
mountains. The peace, the stillness, the serenity of autumn lay through
the cabin. The air was soft. No one in the cabin moved. Caroline
Childers sat where she had been, fallen apparently into some vague and
listless dreaming. Her hands wandered idly among the leaves, breaking
a twig to bits, making now and then a foolish, irrelevant gesture. The
Duke sat with his elbow on his knee, and his chin resting in the hollow
of his hand. The girl, now and then, looked up at him and then back
again to her aimless fingers crumbling the leaves.

A droning as of bees outside arose. It seemed in the intense stillness,
to increase, to take on volume. The sound deepened. It became like the
far-off humming of a wheel under the foot of a spinner. It drew the
attention of the Mar-chesa Soderrelli. She began to listen intently.

"Do you hear that sound, Caroline?" she said, "what is it?"

The girl arose and listened. She went noiselessly to the door, and out
into the clearing. She came to the mule, stopped, and began, like
the old mountaineer, to stroke its big, kindly face. A breath of wind
carried the sound to her from the forest. It was a human voice, rising
and falling in a deep muttering cadence.

_"I've been in the presence of Thy wrath, O God Almighty, an' the j'ints
of my knees are loosened. I hain't like David, the son of Jesse. Uit's
Thy hand, O Lord, that skeers me. Preserve me from Thy sword, an' I'll
take my chancet with the sword of mine enemies. Fur I'm afeard of Thee,
but I hain't afeard of them."_

The girl stood a moment, her hand under the mule's muzzle, then she
walked slowly back to the cabin. At the door she stopped and answered
the Marchesa's question.

"It's the wind," she said, "in the tops of the fir trees."




CHAPTER XXV--THE WANDERING

At noon they set out through the mountains, the Marchesa Soderrelli
riding the mule, the old man leading with the rope bridle over his arm,
and the sack swinging on his shoulder. Caroline Childers walked beside
the mountaineer. The Duke followed with the rifle. The world had
changed; it was now a land of sun, of peace, of vast unending stillness.
The carpet of the wilderness was dry; the dark-green tops of the fir
trees brightened as with acid; the far-off stretch of forest, fresh, as
though wiped with a cloth; the air like lotus.

The old man traveled along the backbone of the mountain, not as the crow
flies, to the coast, but in the great arc of a circle swinging to
the west. He thus avoided abrupt and perilous descents and the dense
undergrowth of the hollows. The forest along these summits was open.
Cyrus Childers had cleaned them of their fallen timber. They were now
great groves of fir trees, shooting up their brown bodies into the
sky, and stretching there a green, unending trellis through which the
sunlight filtered.

[Illustration: 0359]

The little party, traveling in these silent places, through this
ancient wilderness, would have fitted into the morning of the world. The
gigantic old man, the lank, huge mule, and the woman riding on the pack
saddle might have come up in some patriarchal decade out of Asia. The
girl, straight, slim, lithe and beautiful as a naiad, her cloudy black
hair banked around her face, belonged in sacred groves--in ancient
sequestered places--one of those alluring, mysterious, fairy women of
which the fable in every tongue remains. Called by innumerable sounds
in the mouths of men, but seen thus always in the eye of the mind when
those sounds are uttered. The Marchesa Soderrelli was right, on that day
in Oban, when she set youth first among the gifts of the gods. It is the
beautiful physical mystery that allures the senses of men. And youth, be
it said, is the essence of that sorcery.

The Duke of Dorset came, too, with fitness into the picture; he was the
moving, desolate figure of that canvas. Man arriving at his estate
in pride, in strength, in glory, and fallen there into the clutch of
destiny. In his visible aspect he had recovered in a degree; he no
longer bore the evidences of extreme fatigue, he walked with the rifle
under his arm, and with a casual notice of events.

There is a certain provision of Nature wholly blessed. When one is
called to follow that which is dearest to him, nailed up in a coffin,
to the grave; when the bitterness of death has wracked the soul to the
extreme of physical endurance; then, when under the turn of the screw
blood no longer comes, there exudes, instead of it, a divine liquor
that numbs the sensibilities like an anæsthetic, and one is able to
walk behind the coffin in the road, to approach the grave, to watch the
shovelful of earth thrown in, and to come away like other men, speaking
of the sun, the harvest, the prospects of the to-morrow; it is not this
day that is the deadliest; it is the day to follow--the months, the
years to follow, when the broken soul has no longer an opiate.

The Duke of Dorset was in the door of life, in that golden age of it
when the youth has hardened into the man, when the body has got its
glory, and the mind its stature. And he moved here in this forest behind
the others, a weapon in his hand, a figure belonging to the picture. He
was the leader of the tribe, and its defense against its enemies; but a
leader who had lost a kingdom, and whose followers had been put to the
sword.

They followed the mountain ridges through the long afternoon, through
this ancient, primeval forest. Below, the tops of the fir trees
descended into an amphitheater of green, broken by shoulders of the
mountain, and farther on into hollows that widened in perspective and
filled themselves in the remote distances with haze.

About four o'clock they came out onto the ridge where the two men had
first stopped in their journey from the coast. Here was the knoll,
rising above them like a hump on the ridge, and set about with ancient
fir trees; and here below it was the spring of water gushing into its
stone bowl. The mountaineer stopped and lifted the Marchesa down from
the mule, then he handed the rope bridle to the girl and indicated the
spring with a gesture.

"You'll have to hold Jezebel or she'll poke her nose in hit first
feller," he said; "I guess I'll look around some." Then he went up onto
the crest of the knoll.

The Marchesa Soderrelli drank, scooping up the water with her hands;
Caroline Childers drank, kneeling, wisps of hair falling beside her
slim face into the pool. The Duke of Dorset approached, and remained
standing, the butt of the rifle on the ground, his hands resting on the
muzzle, watching, in his misery, this sylvan creature come out of the
deep places of the wood to drink.

In a few minutes the old circuit rider appeared, and beckoned to the
Duke of Dorset. Then he came down a few steps and spoke to the two
women.

"Don't be skeered," he said, "we're agoin' to try how the gun shoots."

Then he went with the Duke up onto the high ground of the ridge. This
summit commanded a view of the road ascending the mountain in a long,
easy sweep--a beautiful brown ribbon stretched along a bank of scarlet.
On this road two figures were advancing, a mile away, like tiny
mechanical toys moving up the middle of the ribbon. The old man pointed
them out with his finger.

"Them'll be scouts," he said. "How fur will your gun carry?"

The Duke of Dorset estimated the distance with his eye.

"One cannot be certain," he answered; "above six hundred yards."

"That air purty long shootin'; air you certain the bullet'll carry up?"

"Quite certain," replied the Duke.

The old man bobbed his chin, and pointed his finger down the mountain to
a dead tree, standing like a mile post on the road.

"When they come up to that air fir," he said, "draw a bead on'em."

The Duke of Dorset elevated the sights for five hundred yards, and the
two men waited without a word for the tiny toy figures on the velvet
ribbon to approach. The knoll on which they stood was elevated above
the surrounding wilderness of tree tops. Below, these deep green tops
sloped, as though clipped beautifully with some gigantic shears. It was
like looking downward over a green cloth with an indolent sun, softened
by haze, lying on its surface. The Duke of Dorset stood with one foot
advanced, the weight of his body resting on the foot that was behind
the other, in the common attitude of one oppressed by fatigue. The old
circuit rider stood beside him, bare-headed, his hat on the ground, a
faint breeze stirring his gray hair.

The brooding, lonely silence of the afternoon lay on the world. A
vagrant breath of wind moved on the ridge, idly through the tops of the
ancient firs, but it did not descend into the forest. There, under the
blue nimbus, nothing moved but the quaint figures traveling on the long
brown band. When these two figures began to come up the last sweep of
the road toward the dead fir, the Duke of Dorset raised the rifle to his
shoulder. The old circuit rider watched him; he observed that the man's
hand was unsteady, and that the muzzle of the gun wavered.

"Stranger," he said, "air you one of them shots that wobbles onto your
mark?"

Now, there was among the frontiersmen, in the day of the hair trigger,
a school of wilderness hunters, to be found at every shooting match, who
maintained that no man could hold steadily on an object. They asserted
that the muzzle of the rifle should be allowed to move, either in a
straight line up or down onto the target, or across it in the arc of a
circle. The trigger to be pulled when the line of sight touched on the
target. The first disciples of this school were called the "line shots,"
and the second the "wobblers." Almost every pioneer followed one of
these methods, and no more deadly marksmen at short range ever sighted
along a gun barrel. They could drive a nail in with a bullet; they could
split the bullet, at a dozen paces, on the edge of an ax; they could
pick the gray squirrel out of the tallest hickory at eighty, at a
hundred yards, when, lying flat to the limb, it presented a target not
higher than an inch.

The Duke took down the rifle. He understood the delicate reference to
his nerves.

"Perhaps I would better lie down," he said. Then his eye caught the
bullet swinging to its leather string at the old man's middle, and he
remembered the history of it. He handed the rifle to the mountaineer.
"I am not fit to-day," he said; "will you try?" And he explained the
mechanism of the rifle.

The old man took the gun, weighed it in his hands, tried the pull-of the
trigger, and examined the sights.

"Hit air about the weight of the ole Minie rifle," he said, "an' the
sights air fine. Do hit shoot where you hold it?"

"I think it may be depended on at this range," replied the Duke.

"Well," said the old man, "I hain't shot for a purty long spell, but
I'll jist try it a whet."

He lifted the gun to his shoulder, pressed his bronzed cheek to the
stock, and slipped his left hand out to the full length of the arm under
the barrel. The two figures were within a dozen paces of the dead fir
tree. The Duke thought one of them was the Japanese whom he had seen
watching the château, and the other a forester, but he could not be
certain at the distance. For perhaps thirty seconds the mountaineer
stood like a figure cast in plaster, then the muzzle of the rifle began
slowly to descend, and the report crashed out over the tree tops.

The forester, a little in advance of the other, fell in the road, his
head and shoulders doubled up under him. The other, at the report,
jumped as high as he could into the air, turned entirely around before
he touched the earth, and began to run down the road. He ran, evidently
in terror, his legs moving grotesquely on the center of the brown
ribbon. The old mountaineer remained unmoving; his left hand far out
under the barrel of the rifle, his face set to the stock. He moved the
bolt and returned his finger to the trigger. Then the rigid muzzle of
the rifle began once more to descend, in a dead straight line, and the
report followed. The quaint figure, its legs twinkling on the ribbon,
shot up into the air, and then fell spraddled out in the road, its arms
and legs extended.

The Duke of Dorset turned to the mountaineer.

"My friend," he said, "that is the best shooting I ever saw--a moving
target at more than five hundred yards."

The old man removed the gun from his shoulder and handed it to the Duke,
stopped, picked up his hat and put it on his head. Then he replied to
the Duke's compliment.

"Stranger," he said, "hit air the Almighty that kills."

It must be remembered that this man's God was the God of the Tishbite,
who numbered his followers by the companies who drew the sword.

The two men returned at once to the spring, and the little party again
set out through the mountains. The plan of travel was now changed. The
circuit rider took a trail down the mountain in a direct line to the
coast, and he hurried; the trail was at places rough and steep; the
injured woman with difficulty kept her place on the pack saddle. They
reached the low-lying foot hills, crossed the long broken hollow, dense
with thickets, and ascended the next mountain, going due west. The old
man traveled as fast as he could; he urged the mule, speaking to it as
one might to a careless, lagging child, "Come along, Jezebel; mind where
you're walkin'"; and when the mule stumbled, a gentle, scolding note
came into his voice, "Pshaw! Jezebel, air your eyes in the back of your
head?"

But in spite of the direct route and every effort of the old man they
traveled slowly. The sun had gone down when they began the ascent of the
second mountain. They stopped for a few minutes, and ate what remained
of the food, then they pushed on, climbing toward the summit.

Meanwhile, night descended. A deep-blue twilight emerged from the
hollows, the remote valleys, the hidden nooks and corners of the
wilderness, crept in among the brown trunks of the fir trees, and
climbed to the ridges. Then, imperceptibly, as though pigment flowed in,
the twilight deepened, the stars came out, and it was night.

They crossed the summit of the second mountain, descended for perhaps
three hundred yards, then turned due north and came out abruptly into
the great road. The moon was beginning to come up, its hidden disk
preceded by a golden haze that feebly lighted the world. The road lay
outlined in shadow, running in a long sweep around a shoulder of the
mountain on its way to the sea. The four persons continued down this
road to the coast. The mountaineer leading the mule, on which the
Marchesa Soderrelli rode, and the two others following behind them.

Caroline Childers, walking beside the Duke of Dorset, lagged as though
worn out with fatigue. The space between the four persons widened and
drew out into a considerable distance. Presently, when the mule turned
the shoulder of the mountain, the girl stopped. At the same time, as
upon some signal, the moon arose, pouring its silver light into the
wilderness over the green tops of the fir trees and down into the road,
etching delicate fantastic shadows on the bed of brown fir needles,
filtering in among the vines massed on the wall, and turning the dark
earth as by some magic into a soft, shimmering, illumined fairy world.
The whole wilderness of tree tops rising to the sky was bathed in light.
A mist, silvered at its edges, lay on the sea, hiding it, as under an
opaque film.

When the girl spoke, her voice hurried as with an explanation.

"You did not understand the Marchesa Soderrelli. She merely wanted us
to go on; to save ourselves."

"And you," said the man, "was that your reason, too?"

The girl hesitated. Then she answered, adding one sentence out of
sequence to another. "She could not go on. I thought... I mean, you
could get away alone--but not with us. You had done enough. It was not
fair... any more. You had a right to your chance... to... your life."

"To my life!" the man echoed.

"Yes," replied the girl, "I mean your life is worth something. But
she... but I... I have lost so much last night. I have lost... I have
lost everything. But you... everything remains to you. You have lost
nothing."

The man made an abrupt gesture with both hands.

"Lost nothing!" he repeated. Then he said the words over slowly, like
one stating an absurd, incredible accusation before he answers it, each
word distinctly, softly, as though it stood apart from its fellow.

"Lost nothing!"

He took a step or two nearer to the girl. The moon fell on his tall
athletic body, projecting a black, distorted shadow on the road. The
half of his face was in the light, and it was contracted with despair.
The tendons in his hands were visible, moving the doubled fingers. His
voice was low, distinct, compact.

"I have lost," he said, "everything, beginning from the day I was born.
All the care and labor that my mother took when I was little is lost;
all the bread that I have eaten, all the water that I have drunk, all
the sun that has warmed me is lost. And the loss does not stop with
that. I have lost whatever things the days, arriving one after the
other, were bringing to me, except the blessed gift that the last one
will bring. I am utterly and wholly ruined."

The man's words followed, one after the other, as though they were
material things, having dimensions and weight.

"Death is nothing. It is life now, that is awful. I shall have to go on
when it is no use to go on. I shall have to go on seeing you, hearing
your voice, remembering every word you have said, the tone and
expression with which you have said it, and every little unimportant
gesture you have made. Every day that I live, I shall see and understand
more vividly all that I have lost. And it will not get better. It will
get worse. Every day I shall see you a little more clearly than I did
the day before; I shall remember your words a little more distinctly; I
shall understand a little more completely all that you would have been
to me. And all of this time I shall be alone. So utterly alone that my
mind staggers at the thought of it. I love you! I love you! Don't you
see, don't you understand how I love you?"

The girl had not moved while the man was speaking.

"Do you love me like that?" she said.

"Yes," he answered.

"And have you loved me all along like that?"

"All along," he said.

"And will you always love me like that?"

"Like that," he said, "although I have lost you."

The girl stood with her arms hanging, her lips parted, her slender face
gleaming like a flower, her hair spun darkness. The silence, the vast
unending silence, the mystery of a newly minted world, lay about her, as
they lay about that first woman, created by Divine enchantment, in the
wilderness of Asia.

When she spoke again, her voice was so low that the man could hardly
hear it. It was like a voice carried by the night over a great distance.

"But you have not lost me," she said.

*****

Meanwhile, out of the mist, out of that opaque film lying on the sea,
a rocket arose, described a great arc, and fell hissing among the tree
tops.




CHAPTER XXVI--THE CITY OF DREAMS

But for the fire burning in the grate, nothing had changed in the
dining room at Old Newton. The table was laid with a white cloth to the
floor; the same massive howl, filled with the white grapes of the
North, stood in the center of it. Nothing had changed since the Marchesa
lunched there, on her way to Oban, except that the light of the morning
rather than the midday entered through the big windows cut in the
south wall. And except that another woman sat there, beyond the Duke of
Dorset, at the table--a dark-haired, beautiful woman, in a rose-colored
morning gown. Some letters lay beside her plate, and she opened one of
them, while the butler moved about, putting breakfast on the sideboard.
A fragment of newspaper clipping fluttered out on the cloth. She put her
finger on it, but, for the moment, did not take it up. She read the note
and then looked across the table smiling.

"The Marchesa is frightfully anxious about our home-coming to Dorset.
She says that a real dowager may slur over the details of an ancient
custom, but that an adopted dowager must have everything to the letter."

Then she took up the fragment of newspaper clipping.

"Oh," she said, "here is something about you," and she read it aloud.

"'The speech of the Duke of Dorset, in the House of Lords, a few days
ago, in which he urged a dissolution of the Japanese alliance, and, in
its stead, a closer relation of all the English-speaking people, was a
significant utterance. It is the direct expression of an opinion that
has been slowly gathering strength, both here and in the United States
of America. It will be recalled that the Duke was on the Pacific Coast
at the time of the recent Japanese rising, and was rescued, with his
party, by His Majesty's gunboat _Cleavewaive_. The gunboat had put the
Duke ashore on the coast of Oregon, on its annual cruise south, in the
interest of British shipping and to show the flag, and it returned to
pick him up when the Captain learned of the opening of hostilities.

"'It is doubtless true, as the Duke said, that the rising was a first
move of Japan in its long-threatened conflict with the United States,
and was only rendered abortive by the fact that all the white men of
the Pacific Coast, both American and Canadian alike, moved as one people
against the Japanese; thereby forcing Great Britain to notify Japan
that, in the event of the matter taking on the aspect of a national
conflict, she would support her colony.

"'It, perhaps, ought to be added that the personal American alliance
which the Duke has recently made may account in some degree for his
ardor.'"

When she came to the last paragraph of this editorial, the tone of her
voice underwent a perceptible change.

"I should have imagined," she said, "that a 'personal alliance' would be
more seriously regarded in England. I have been told that a marriage
is considered in this island to be 'a great hereditary trust in
perpetuity.' Do I quote accurately?"

The bronzed man, in his gray tweeds, watching her over the table, gave
no sign.

"To the letter," he said. "It is so considered."

"And is it not considered," she continued, "that against the great
duties of this trust no mere 'personal inclination' ought to stand?"

"Well," said the Duke, "I should not hold that rule to be always without
an exception."

"Really!" she said. "But I suppose it is always the case in England
that, when a marriage is being arranged, one ought to follow the
direction of one's family, as, for instance, a prince, called to rule a
hereditary kingdom, ought to hear his parliament."

"That," said the Duke, "is always the case."

"Always?" There was now another note in her voice.

"Always," replied the Duke. "There should never be an exception to that
rule; one ought to marry the woman selected by one's family."

"I thought," said the Duchess, "that I knew of an exception to the rule.
I thought I knew of a man who found a wife for himself."

"I know the case quite well," said the Duke, "and you are mistaken."

"Mistaken!" she said.

"Yes," he said, "there was never in this world a woman more definitely
selected by a family than the one you have in mind; there was never
in this world a woman that a family made more desperate, unending,
persistent efforts to obtain. From the day that the first ancestor saw
her in that doomed city, down through generations to the day that the
last one saw her on the coast of Brittany, to the day that the living
one of this house found her in the bay of Oban, this family has been mad
to possess her."

The butler, having placed the breakfast on the sideboard, had gone out.
Caroline sat with her fingers linked under her chin.

"But was he sure," she said, "was he sure that this was the woman?"

The Duke leaned over and rested his arm on the table.

"How could he doubt it!" he said. "He found her by the sea, and he
found, too, the wicked king and the saint of God, and the doomed palace;
and, besides that, the longing, the accumulated longing of all those
dead men who had seen her, and loved her, and been mad to possess her,
was in him, and by this sign he knew her."

"And the others," she said, "all the others, they have received
nothing!"

"Nothing," he said.

"And is there one of them here, in this house, that I could see him!"

"The portrait," he said, "of the last one, the one who saw her on the
coast of Brittany, is above the mantel in the other room."

"Let us go in and see him," she said.

They arose, leaving the breakfast untasted on the sideboard, and went
out along the stone passage, into the other room. It, too, remained the
same as on the day that the Marchesa entered it. The high window looking
out over the fairy village, with the blue-haired ghost dog on his white
stone doorstep; and, between, the Ardoch and the road leading to the
iron door; and, within, the skins on the floor, the books in their
cases, the guns behind the diagonal panes of leaded glass.

They stopped by the fire, under the smoke-stained portrait. For a little
while they were silent there, before this ancestor looking down from his
canvas. Then the man spoke.

"I think, Caroline," he said, "that all the love with which these dead
men have loved you has been passed on to me.... And I think, Caroline,
that you are somehow the answer to their longings.... I think that
with a single consuming passion, one after the other, with an endless
longing, these dead men have finally loved you into life--by the power
of kisses that touched nothing, longings that availed nothing, loving
that returned nothing.... And, with all this accumulated inheritance, is
it any wonder that every nerve, every fiber, every blood drop of me is
steeped in the love of you?"

The woman had remained unmoving, looking at the portrait above the
mantel in its smoke-stained frame, now she turned slowly.

"Lift me up," she said.

He took her up and lifted her from the floor. But the long-withheld
reward of that ancestor was denied him. When she came to the level of
the man's shoulders, he suddenly gathered her into his arms. Her eyes
closed, her lips trembled, the long sleeves of the morning gown fell
away, her bare arms went warm and close around his neck.

And his mouth possessed her.


THE END







End of Project Gutenberg's The Gilded Chair, by Melville Davisson Post

*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 51941 ***