CHAPTER XIX.

THE great sun that went down over the vast sweeps of the battle-field, and slipped into the dawning day lying in wait beyond the wide horizon, had a potent solemnity and majestic breadth of effect, which were lacking in the sunsets of the mountains, despite their melancholy. Here all nature besides was subordinate to the everlasting hills. The dark, mysterious, heavily-wooded Cumberland spurs cancelled the rest of the universe. They piled, one above another, their long, craggy, horizontal barriers against the clouds, and limited the infinite sky. The sun was dragged down beyond them before the day was done, leaving the afternoon valley dominated by their moody shadows. Diana and her hounds had an up-hill jog of it, till they could slip her silver leash on the purple heights, and course after the fleeing darkness through the wild world of ravine and cliff, roaring cataract and placid lick, tangled woods and scanty clearing.

For it was a wild world, so rugged and primeval of aspect that it might seem it was not made for man. The impression humanity left here was slight, discordant,--only an alien incongruity foisted upon the scene. The savage fastnesses were a wilderness still, although the gay, flimsy, many-galleried buildings of a summer hotel teetered on the verge of a frowning precipice. A cataract, that dashed headlong down the gorge, charged with some thunderous message to the forests, gave it voice, overwhelming with its sonorous periods the flippant chatter of bevies of young girls, who, attended by few and highly-prized cavaliers, drank of the chalybeate water bubbling out from the neighboring cliffs. The cicada sang deep into the night. Myriads of fire-flies quivered over the inaccessible heights of the looming black mountain opposite, whence one might hear the wildcat shriek, while the band in the ball-room was playing a waltz, and the throb of dancing feet kept time to the rhythmic strain. Nowhere had nature and art demonstrated an affinity save in the fresh, delicious fragrance of mint which lurked alike among the abysses and on the piazzas, and rooted in the mind a deep, immovable faith that somewhere there was a julep in the air.

It was an infinitely tame world to John Fortescue.

“This is the length of my tether,” he was in the habit of saying, with an air of resignation. He felt that there was a certain inappropriateness in the presence of a man of his stamp and pretension at an obscure little watering-place like Bandusia Springs, for its halcyon days preceded by ten years the present summer, when it was timorously entering upon its first season since the war. Only the fact of important litigation in Graftenburg, which might be favorably compromised at any time, and necessitate his return thither within twelve hours at a call from his counsel, might explain how he could reconcile himself to the flat and spiritless conditions of existence here.

The place seemed the paradise of connubiality. It was overrun with children, whose health was understood to be fostered by mountain air and mineral water. The rocks everywhere echoed their shrill clamor. Perambulators occupied the plank walks, to the confusion and exclusion of pedestrians. The society was largely composed of sober, unimaginative Benedicts, who could evolve no more original idea of life than the routine of talking politics in the morning, driving out in the afternoon, each with his own wife, and gracing the white-washed walls of the ball-room in the evening, solemnly watching the young people dance. Of these young people, the ladies were in their teens; their partners, callow collegians,--callow enough to be conscious of their fledgling state, and to entertain a self-immolating admiration of Mr. Fortescue, a man who had progressed so far up the scale of being, and who was so handsomely schooled by experience, as to care nothing for the eventful balls at Bandusia. He might hear only the vague swing of the waltz music in the distance, while he consoled his loneliness in the billiard-room by fancy shots that made even the thoroughly-seasoned attendant stare. For they were wonderful. Sometimes the youth of Bandusia stood around the table and looked on, feeling effaced the while, since Fortescue, although the centre of a crowd, skilfully preserved the manner of being alone, cognizant only of his own presence. He would have no opponent to quake before those marvellous runs and stand aghast at his “nursing,” so delicate and dextrous that it rivalled the zealous coddling of the infants at connubial Bandusia; for, somewhat contemptuously, it is true, he recognized the adolescence of his spectators.

“I should like to take a game with you, Mr. Fortescue,” said a young sprig, one day, rendered reckless by that potent elixir, chalybeate.

Fortescue glanced up quickly, his cue poised above the table, and the attitude displaying his fine, lithe figure to great advantage. “My good young friend,” he exclaimed presently, “you discredit my humanity.”

But there came a day when Fortescue’s humanity was lightly esteemed at Bandusia. That exuberance of notoriety in which he had flourished in New Orleans, and which had so vexed the sensitive soul of Maurice Brennett, had been checked by the narrow restrictions of life here. He seemed to the casual observer only a quiet gentleman, who, by reason of a long absence abroad, had become unacclimated to his native New Orleans, and, pending the adjustment of business affairs, sojourned in these salubrious mountains. Now and then accident threw him into the heavy company of the other quiet gentlemen of the place. Under the stress of his exile from his own accustomed sphere he was for a time as lethargic as he deemed them. But the singular fascination which he was wont to exert upon other men began, even in this trance-like existence, to unconsciously assert its power. His interest was half dormant, and he did not notice, until it grew very marked, the preference for his conversation which had been developed by one of the party, a man of considerable prominence in business and social circles, of some mental and colloquial activity, but a heavy weight physically. They became familiar associates after Fortescue’s discovery of this predilection. They talked away long, idle hours, as they lay at length on some fern-covered slope, and watched the distant mountains changing in the sunset from purest azure to an illusory, amethystine tint that was itself a poem. They smoked many a meditative cigar in the observatory, a mere skeleton of a building, perched on the verge of a sheer precipice. In company they visited the stables, where, however, Mr. Fortescue exhibited more zeal and knowledge concerning horse-flesh in general than interest in his new acquaintance’s sober, fat, sleek family trotters; they cemented their friendship in the domestic circle, and he decorously accepted the position of a friend of the family. Often the two were together until late at night in Fortescue’s room. It was at some little distance from the fair and flaunting hotel, and situated in a dark, unlovely, unpainted building, which was consigned to the use of the bachelor fraternity, and grimly called “St. Paul’s.” But, although still vulnerable to malice, the bachelors were out of earshot of the babies.

Strange rumors concerning these vigils got afloat somehow. Certain cabalistic words drifted through the open windows to belated strollers in the woods below. But the suspicions which seemed too grotesque for fact were merged in certainty when a couple of the callow youngsters, going out betimes on some mountain excursion, chanced to encounter this elderly wight as he emerged from Mr. Fortescue’s room. The first sad, pale glimmer of dawn was straggling through the high, unwashed window of the narrow hall and fell upon his puffy, red face, that, despite its superabundant flesh, had a rigidity of aspect. His eyes were bloodshot; his gait a trifle unsteady; he recoiled from the stare of the bewildered boys as if he had received a blow in the face. Through the open door streamed the soft lamplight, and in its midst was Fortescue, fresh, flushed, triumphant, a pack of cards in his hands, a decanter and a couple of glasses on the table by which he stood, a bottle or two rolling empty on the floor beneath it, and a tense vibration of elation in his voice.

“Your revenge, Colonel, whenever you like,” he was saying. “I can’t sympathize, you know. Good morning, gentlemen;” and _his_ eye fell unabashed on the passers-by. “But I offer you all the comfort in revenge--that you can get.”

And so it came about that the “Colonel,” instead of paying his board-bills, was obliged to borrow the money of another Colonel who kept the hotel, to take his family and himself home in the dog-days.

And all Bandusia was agog.

Although Fortescue thus contributed much to the entertainment and excitement of the place, his own idiosyncrasies had not with himself the force of novelty, and proved less edifying. Bereft of the diversion of this new friendship, his days grew dull. One afternoon he was so far reduced as to share a petty interest that swayed all Bandusia at this hour: when the cliffs began to echo the mellow resonance of the stage-horn from the foot of the mountain, and the arrival of the coach, the great event of the day, was expected. With his cue in his hand, he leaned out of the window of the billiard-room and gazed far down the bosky recesses of the precipitous slopes where, now and then, a gap in the foliage gave glimpses of the winding road. The purple splendor of the sunset glorified the distant mountain-summits; they glowed transfigured, like the heights of heaven. Below, all along the coves and ravines, and in the heavily-timbered valley, skulked the dusky shadows of the coming night, like troglodytes emerging from the cavernous earth. A mist sifted through the chasms. Among the wild tangles of “the laurel,” a cow-bell jangled faintly. The cicada’s song grew loud. The pungent fragrance of the humble herbs, nestling by the waterside, drifted by on the air that throbbed responsive to every eloquent apostrophe of the declamatory cataract. Human voices rose thence after a time, for the rocks below the fall had been made by immemorial custom a resting-place for those able-bodied passengers who were constrained, either by the tyranny of the stage-driver or motives of compassion for his horses, to walk up the mountain. Something in one of these voices struck John Fortescue as singularly familiar--something _ore rotundo_, something indicative of a benignity of patronage, as it descanted on the sublimity of the scenery; it convinced him that Colonel Walter Percy had, for the present, forsworn condescending to his fellow-men, and had come to pat Nature on the back for a while. Thus the sight of the old man, pompously trudging along in advance of the vehicle, the dust of his journey thick on his hot red face, his linen duster, his big Panama hat, and dimming the lustre of his silver hair and beard, was no surprise to the sybarite who, cool and clean, looked down from the giddy heights of the billiard-room on the summit of the crags, waved his hand, and shouted out a welcome.

Colonel Percy glanced up and bowed in response with as much dignity as it is in human anatomy to bow upward vertically. Then the clustering leaves enveloped him and hid him from sight. Presently a heavy tread on the steps of the billiard-room announced that he had taken the short cut thither. “I knew you were at Bandusia,” he said, as he held out his hand. “I heard something to that effect; yes, I heard so when I was in Graftenburg--the city.”

Fortescue supplemented the fact of his presence with the story of his involved interests, and the tyranny of his counsel in reeling out so little line. “I find it dull as the grave here. But for the fear of yellow fever I should as soon be in New Orleans, deserted though it is.”

“Why,--my--dear--sir!” exclaimed the old man, with a supreme ridicule that might well become a medical authority, striving to dispel the vaporings of an ignorant superstition, “believe me, you can have the yellow fever but once. It is not in human nature to do that thing _twice_. Not in human nature. No, sir!”

Fortescue’s face changed suddenly. He stared blankly at his interlocutor, as if some strong surprise or doubt lurked within him. It was only thus suggested. In a moment he turned lightly to the table, bent down, and with an airy stroke of the cue sent a red ball glowing across the green cloth.

“And you think once isn’t enough, eh?” said the elderly joker, continuing to twinkle upon him with the affable superiority of rallying laughter. “Let me see--that was in ’39--terrible epidemic! I was going down, by invitation, to your father’s place for safety--Paturin--yes, the plantation--met a runner to stop me--the fever had appeared in the family--yes--you, and your sister Estelle, and your mother, and--let me see--no--no--your father had it before--years before. They had my sympathy--my dearest sympathy. I wrote to them. I did write. But I pledge you my honor I accepted no more invitations to Paturin for a season. Cure means future exemption. _You_ need never shun New Orleans.”

But Fortescue, still knocking the balls about on the table, said that nevertheless he _was_ afraid. And when he lifted his face he looked afraid.

The old gentleman, however, was now absorbed in a budget of envelopes, which he drew slowly and magisterially from his pocket, closely scanning the superscription of each. “I had the pleasure, sir,” he said, detaching his attention with difficulty from the papers, “of meeting--before I quitted Graftenburg--a gentleman--ah, is this it?--no--a gentleman who has some connection with you in business matters. He sought an introduction to me through the kind offices of--of--what have I here?--of Mr. Maurice Brennett.”

Once more Fortescue’s manner and attitude changed. That strong, fully vitalized look was in his eyes again. Its spirit was expressed in every gesture. “Is Mr. Brennett in Graftenburg?” he asked eagerly, disregardful of the vague gentleman who had business with him, and who had apparently sent him some token which Colonel Percy was striving to separate from the chaos of his own correspondence.

“He was there only for a day,” Colonel Percy answered, still dexterously shuffling his letters as if he were stocking cards; “let me see,--the day of his encounter with Mr. Travis.”

“An encounter with Travis!” Fortescue exclaimed sharply.

The old man’s hands were still, and he looked up, laughing with a sort of cumbrous slyness.

“Aha! you see, when you tell the world good-by, and say, ‘I have done with you,--you baking, broiling planet,--I go for my good pleasure to the cool retreat of sylvan shades,’--the first whiff of a mundane sensation makes you quite ready to get back into the frying-pan and stand the temperature for the sake of the company,--take a hand, as it were, in this little sublunary game, which we call life. Chip along,--yes, chip along.”

Somehow the propinquity of Mr. Fortescue suggested this wicked phrasing, and the old man repeated it with the relish of feeling in a degree up to snuff. “Chip along--yes. Well, sir; well, they contrived to keep this altercation out of the papers,--the public prints. Still it was notorious. Deeply regretted by the friends of both gentlemen--although Mr. Brennett was popularly held blameless in the matter. Blameless. But, in fact, he is a blameless man.”

“Emphatically,” assented Fortescue; there was, however, so strong an expression of irony in his curving upper lip that perhaps he himself became conscious of this lapse of facial control, for he drew down the long ends of his auburn mustache as he continued with his gracious air. “Let me remind you that you have not yet told me the story.”

“Aha! the frying-pan is pretty interesting, eh?--you would like to hear a little more of the sizzle and sputter? Well, sir,--well,--let me see.” Colonel Percy hesitated, looking meditatively upward, his sheaves of papers in either hand, and slightly balancing himself alternately on the heels and toes of his boots, which creaked pleasantly with the motion. “They met in the office of some hotel in Graftenburg,--the city, you know. Travis made an effort to strike Brennett in the face, without a moment’s warning. In the face, sir, in the face. Brennett caught his arm, tried to quiet him, demanded an explanation. Travis stated that he wished to strike him for the purpose of forcing a challenge, when he would take the utmost pleasure in shooting Mr. Brennett.”

This suggestion seemed to please Fortescue. He laughed out buoyantly, gayly, irrepressibly, boyishly. Then he leaned forward, half supporting himself on his cue, so eager a listener that Colonel Percy felt all the stimulus of oratory and an audience.

“Well, sir,--well, the altercation came about from this cause:--Travis accused Brennett of having, with interested motives, set his creditors on him,--the usurers, you know. Usurious money-lenders. It seems that Travis’s affairs here in Tennessee were much involved, aside from his mining interests in the West, which I understand were hopelessly embarrassed. Nevertheless, Mr. Brennett bought out these interests, assuming of course their liabilities, and with the money thus furnished Travis was enabled to make a satisfactory compromise with his creditors here, and retain a handsome surplus. Generous of Brennett, eh? Generous?”

“Characteristically generous,” Fortescue agreed.

“But Travis, although he was reconciled personally, and apologized for his violence, was not satisfied. He declared openly that Brennett had ‘skinned’ him. That was the expression he used. Skinned. Still he sailed for Liverpool,--without his cuticle, I presume,--last Monday.”

He glanced at his companion, expectant of a bravo for this jest, but Fortescue’s attention had failed mid-way. He had fallen suddenly into deep, absorbed thought. He understood all this in a sense of which Colonel Percy, wise as he was, did not dream. So Brennett, at some comparatively trifling outlay, had contrived to double his stake. The future profits and prospects of the mine were secured for himself alone, in case the compromise with Miss St. Pierre should be effected and the debt cleared away with the funds thus secured, for Fortescue could easily divine that Travis had sold, too, all the interest in the Graftenburg property which he had bought of the claimant. No doubt, deceived as to the probability of a compromise, and heavily harassed by Brennett’s clever manoeuvres with his creditors, Travis was easily pacified with a little ready money, and content to make off with his meagre pickings in lieu of the full feast he had expected. Brennett was a wonderful fellow! No hint of all this to his coadjutor, no word, no letter. The compromise was imminent, and doubtless Brennett feared that because of this he would be bled as he was wont to bleed others.

The darkness had come at last. The mountain in the distance, sad and sombre of aspect, doubly bereaved as one dropped again to earth from the ecstasies of a vision, touched with its jagged purple summit the last faint greenish line of light in the sky. The lamps were glimmering in their places against the unplastered, unpainted walls, and the soft yellow radiance brought out the rich tints of the maple and the cedar and the walnut and the oak, which in their rude, undressed state made this building so primitive, so sylvan, that it seemed still nearly allied to the trees of its kindred standing in the forest without. The pallid mist pressed close to the broad windows; sometimes it shifted through in a ghostly, elusive fashion.

As Fortescue leaned against the window-frame, he was laughing a little; it was a low laugh of elation.

Colonel Percy suddenly faced round upon him.

“John Fortescue,” he said impressively, “you lost something on the battlefield of Chattalla.”

The man received the words with a palpable shock. It quivered through every fibre, and blanched his face, and shook his laugh to a husky mutter. He turned with a stony stare.

“My life!” he cried out shrilly. “I lost my life!”

A tiny package that Colonel Percy had drawn from his vest-pocket fell from his nerveless clasp and rolled away on the floor, while he stood as one petrified.

The moon was dim and the wind came up the gorge. The sudden gust tore away the fantastic white mists from the window, and the uncertain light fell through the shivering rifts and traced upon the floor a dusky outline of the serrated leaves and acorns of the chestnut-oaks without. Perhaps it was well for John Fortescue at that moment that the convulsive motion of the boughs dashed into his face their wealth of dew, cold and fragrant, and with all the freshness and strength of the woods distilled into it. When he drew out his handkerchief and brushed it away, he brushed away other drops, colder and clammy, which had started from within, and his long sigh of physical relief was blended with a groan as of mental anguish.

The commonplace gesture restored Colonel Percy’s normal self-possession. He stooped with difficulty, regained the package, and, as his fingers curled around it, he felt that he had mastered the situation.

“The lady’s letter to the lawyer suggested as much,” he said, with the stiff pomposity of a conscious appreciation of delicate matters.

“The lady’s letter to the lawyer?” Fortescue echoed tremulously.

The old man nodded gravely. “She spoke properly--the lady did--quite properly, in fact. She said that in finding this trinket on the battle-field she was aware that it must be of great worth to its owner from association--its character being that of some loved one’s gift. A gift,--yes. Therefore she was willing to retain it no longer, although she was as yet unable to decide as to the matters of business touching which your counsel had approached her. She states,” he continued, drawing from an envelope some flimsy sheets, which fluttered in the breeze, “that she intends to write again soon to her legal adviser who, for some reason, did not reply to her former communication, and she hopes then to--to--ah yes,--this is the lady’s letter to the lawyer.”

He adjusted his spectacles and strove to read. “Ah well, sir--well--your eyes are younger than mine--you see she fails to say anything whatever touching the intrinsic value of this gift--this trinket--which she sends by express to you, in care of your lawyers, as she is ignorant of your address. It is in a sealed packet. Sealed--hermetically sealed. And your lawyers are cautious fellows. Very prudent. They say a ‘trinket’ may be diamonds and may be oroide. They decline the responsibility of forwarding it by mail. There is no express to Bandusia. No express. None. So they beg of Brennett to introduce them to me. ‘As you are going, my dear Colonel, will you be so very good’--And I am always very good--So, you see, I have the pleasure--pleasure, I am sure--”

He paused expectant. But Fortescue had forgotten the elaborate courtesy that so well graced his splendid presence. He did not even thank Colonel Percy, who felt that for his friend’s behoof he had done much in waiving his dignity and fetching parcels like a common carrier. As Fortescue hastily tore the papers enveloping the package, his breath was quick, his hand unsteady, and when the locket, that the girl had found in the empty grave on the battle-field, lay exposed to view, encrusted with clay, tarnished, stained too by some dark current, and jangling from the bit of watch-chain cut smoothly off by the bullet, which had gone close to the heart of the man who had worn it there, he winced with a shocked recognition so unmistakable, so simple in its expression that it touched Colonel Percy into momentary forgetfulness of his own importance.

This was what he had lost, and, so strangely, he called it his life! Once more in dwelling upon it the old man was bewildered, mystified. But after all, he thought, with a not unkindly accession of sentiment, are not the feelings we cherish for others, for even the inanimate things they have hallowed, the most vital principle of life, the essence of existence--worthier of the name than the involuntary functions of the lungs or the merely animal mechanism of the heart?

He was satisfied with his own explanation. He could not understand, and he did not stay to ponder on, the change that usurped this look when the spring of the lid gave way suddenly in Fortescue’s hand--as it had given way in Antoinette’s hand when she stood by that yawning empty grave in the haunted thicket.

Fortescue glanced hastily at the hair beneath the shattered crystal; then he held up the burnished lid to the light, and read the words engraved within,--

JOHN DOANE FORTESCUE _from_ “ADELAIDE.”

The intent curiosity in his gesture and eyes immolated every other suggestion of his face and figure. After a moment it was supplemented by surprise, by a vague doubt, even by a grave and gathering fear.

But the old man was turning away. Fortescue, observing the motion, silently offered his hand, which was silently accepted. Then, thrusting his hat upon his head, he went out from the flickering flare of the lamps into the dark encompassing wilderness.

The wind was laid. The silvery impalpable mists contended with the silvery impalpable moonbeams. Together in a splendid sheen they hung about the little observatory that quivered over the dark chasms below. It quaked even more beneath Fortescue’s weight as he strode within it and threw himself, panting and exhausted, on one of the benches.

“And who the devil was ‘Adelaide’?” he muttered.

Then he fell silent again, and for a long time he did not move.

He might have heard, yet he did not hear, the music in the ball-room that told of the tide of enjoyment, rising gradually from sober lancers to waltz, to the culminating gayety of the wild Virginia reel, then ebbing away at last in the sentimental measures of “Home, Sweet Home.” He might have seen, yet he did not see, the orange-tinted points of light as they disappeared one by one from the rows of windows till the wilderness knew no gleam but that of the pallid moon which had waxed and waned here when the savage fastnesses first rose from the sea.

More than once he turned his eyes toward the west, where the sombre summit of the distant mountain, rising above the illusory vapors, was sharply outlined against the midnight sky. Beyond that mountain lay the nearest railroad.

The moon went down behind it. The mists closed more densely about him. The night grew chill, and because of this, perhaps, when he chanced to slip his hand in his pocket and it suddenly touched the locket, which he had thrust away there, he shivered.