CHAPTER VII.

IT chanced that Maurice Brennett’s varied cotton ventures took him to New Orleans in February. He found the city ablaze with illuminations and wild with excitement, for it was the evening of Mardi Gras and the Mystick Krewe procession was on the march.

In the enchantment suddenly turned loose in the streets, the past and the present were fantastically blended. The Pickwick Club-house lent the radiance of a thousand gas jets to the triumphal pageant of the “Faërie Queene.” A salute of artillery thundered from Lafayette Square, and made the hero of those mystic weapons, “Caliburn” and “Ron,” acquainted with the realistic magic of modern warfare. In front of the City Hall the procession halted, and Prince Arthure dismounted to exchange the compliments of the season with his honor the Mayor of New Orleans.

It seemed as if all the nations of the earth had gathered here between the Mississippi and the Swamp. From among the banners fluttering from every balcony and open window, and house-top, looked out creole eyes, potent enough to have laid their languorous spell upon the splendid, glittering swarm, and held it there motionless for all time to come. These southern beauties had a pretty contrast in the fairer faces from the north. And below, jostling along the sidewalks, sternly repressed by the police, was a motley throng of every grade of swarthiness, from the broadly grinning African, the mulatto, the Indian, the cream-tinted Chinaman--gazing with oblique smiles at the wild vagaries of the “Melican man”--to the Sicilian, and the dark-browed Spanish vagrant, wearing his tattered garb with the dignity of a hidalgo.

And beneath the inspiring melodies, and the cheers of the enthusiastic populace, and those louder iron-throated plaudits of the guns, were all the echoes of Babel. One heard here a resonant German “ach!” and there the nimble Gallic tongue demanding of a just Heaven if this were not _too_ magnificent, and the neat, precise Yankee pronunciation, and the languid, Southern drawl, and the Englishman’s broad “a,” of which the swelling proportions overlapped all the other letters of the alphabet. The mirthful guttural negro dialect rose too, mingled with unique clippings known as pigeon-English, and that _vox populi_, slang, which, like “don’t care,” has no home, was loud upon the air.

Orion looked over the western house-tops at this strange red constellation wheeling through the streets so far below. Cassiopeia sat in her splendid chair, and Berenice’s shining hair streamed athwart the moonless heavens. But the stellular display of the _ignis fatuus_ of the Swamp was soon over; the Opera House was reached, the ruthless door shut the rabble from “faërie land,” and it hung hungrily about outside, reluctantly making way for the richly-attired freight of carriages privileged to behold the tableaux within.

Among those thus favored was one who had less greedy an appetite than the untutored mob for the gracious and splendid. Only a very short time elapsed before Maurice Brennett emerged and walked up Toulouse Street--slowly, meditatively, as if he had less an object in view than a desire of the motion and the fresh air. Little affinity had he with this night of enchantment, these beautiful presentations and responsive enthusiasms. The dominant instinct of his nature was the instinct of prey. He pursued it in his varied speculations with as little conscience as his cousin, the “feathered hawk,” pursues his own peculiar line of business.

Now, as he walked on listlessly, his mind was filled with complex calculations, with rigidly severe retrospections as to whether he might not have been more adroit even than he was, with careful reconnoitering of tortuous alternatives of future policy. They all led him to the wall. This realization roused him. He raised his head and looked tentatively about him in the darkness as if he sought an inspiration. Slowly a purpose began to shape itself in his thoughts. He paused irresolute for a moment. Then he slipped on his overcoat and took his way briskly toward the levee.

A silence had fallen with the night upon the great embankment that lies like a guardian dragon along the sinuous borders of the city. Numbers of steamboats--dark and silent--lurked at the wharves, their smokeless chimneys rising high, high into the mists that hovered about the great river. One felt the presence rather than saw that leafless forest of masts where the sea-going craft was lying. The monotony of the interval, while he waited, was broken only by the measured tread of watchmen echoing along the planks, and once by the swift sibilant rushing of a locomotive upon the branch line of a railway close at hand, the glare of its cyclopic eye rending the darkness.

He was about to turn away in disappointment, when suddenly from up the river sounded three husky, remonstrant whistles. They conjured up a hundred twinkling lights among the glooms by the water side, and soon the levee was swarming with the dusky figures of roustabouts, running hither and thither with clattering steps and an uncouth chatter. Presently the white mists up the river were gemmed, first with a ruby, then with an emerald gleam; both appeared close together, and from that moment until he could see all the side-lights of the great illuminated floating palace; until he could hear the water surging in the darkness about her wheels, and the throb of her machinery; until she was swinging, with a slow, easy grace, to the sharp jangling of her pilot’s bells, into her allotted berth by the levee, the man who watched her landing was in the grip of a strong emotion. It brought a quiver to the hard lines of his parted lips; it shook his hand; a faint flush sprang into his cheek; his eyes were eager--so eager and so fierce. He accosted the first man ashore--one of the deck hands, who was making the boat fast.

“Is that the Marchesa?”

“Yes, sah.”

“Why is she so long behind time?”

“Well, sah, disher boat jis’ run aground ob a sand-bar up dere in Choctaw Bend--stayed dere twenty hours. Den we kem a-bustin’ down de ribber, makin’ de fastes’ time eber seed on de Mis’sippi. Didn’t do no good, dough. An’ dese yere passygers, wot’s gwine ter be landed too late fur de Moddy-Graw is a-tearin’ deir shirts ’bout it. Sich cussin’!”

As Brennett scanned the passengers crowding down the stage-plank, he stepped forward with a sudden look of recognition.

“Have you heard from _her_?” he exclaimed, with quick impulsiveness, as he mechanically grasped Travis’s outstretched hand.

His manner was so pronounced that a lady who was passing at the moment, and who caught his words, glanced at him with covert sympathy. This was surely a phase of some delicate and tender heart-drama, which is forever on the human stage, but which shirks an audience, who may only catch a glimpse of a scene, now and then, by some chance lifting of the curtain, such as this. And so she went her way, speculating futilely about this important “her.”

“Got a letter just as I started,” said Travis, slowly separating an envelope from a dozen missives which he had drawn from his pocket, and handing it to Brennett, who hastily slipped out the inclosure, and read it by the lamps of a carriage near which they stood. Miss St. Pierre’s letter was in response to the one which her step-brother had written immediately after his visit, urging still further the proposed exchange of property. The reply was a marvel of non-committal temporizing. To reconcile its cool and formal tone with the sanguine expectation which Travis had deduced from her delight in receiving the cross was difficult. He had believed, when they parted, that she was far more kindly disposed toward him than ever before, and that, thus propitiated, she could be readily influenced.

But now her feeling, as expressed in this letter, had changed to distant reserve. There was even, indefinably suggested, an undercurrent of distrust. She had come to no decision; not a word foreshadowed her ultimate course; she might have written chiefly with a view of gaining time.

“She will or she won’t, Brennett,” drawled Travis. “It’s like her to want to eat her cake and have it too.”

As he stood in the light of the carriage lamps, listlessly twirling his gloves in one hand, and glancing about him with that disparaging superficial interest characteristic of the professional loafer, there was nothing in the contemplative placidity of his manner to suggest disappointment or irritation. In fact, he had given with the letter all anxiety for the future into Brennett’s hands. For he was an expert in the matter of shifting responsibility and “taking it easy.”

But Brennett’s was a face on which every emotion and thought had left its mark. He read and re-read the letter without speaking, but with a perplexity, and a baffled avidity, and a doubt, which nearly approached dismay, vividly expressed on his sharp features. At length he carefully folded and returned the delicate sheets, with a significant glance, and a smile that was curiously related to a sneer.

“Well,” said Travis, “I’m afraid our getting hold of that property is a thing that will never come to pass.”

“Travis,” said Brennett, laying his hand lightly upon his friend’s arm, which was swinging the gloves, and thus arresting the motion, “other men expect events to come to pass. _I make_ things happen.”

Travis’s contemplative eyes, staring intently for a moment from under his hat-brim, held a sharp touch of surprise, and he laid his hand meditatively on his silky, straw-colored whiskers, which the lamplight seemed to burnish to a deeper yellow.

“Stick to that!” he exclaimed, gradually taking in his friend’s meaning. Then, as Brennett’s grasp relaxed upon his arm, he fell once more to twirling his gloves, and glancing casually up and down the levee.

“Well!” he presently exclaimed, with a cheerful intonation, as he turned toward the door of the carriage, “I have to go and dress.”

“What for?” demanded Brennett, rousing himself with difficulty.

“For the ball. I might as well see what is left of the poor little show.”

And when they were rolling along the street toward the hotel, he had no graver absorption than swearing at the bar in Choctaw Bend, and asking questions, that were hardly answered, concerning the relative splendors of the procession and tableaux to-night and those of former years.

Travis was like a cork. The surface was his element. He knew nothing below. Perhaps, however, he might not have been able to maintain his constitutional buoyancy had he divined that, behind Brennett’s boast, was an absolute chaos, in which not even an indefinite plan of action was vaguely shaping itself.

With secret wonder at his own poverty of resource, Brennett only suggested, after a day or so, that Travis should write to her again.

“If this produces no appreciable result,” he said to himself, “I must try heavier artillery.”

As the time went by no more letters were received from Miss St. Pierre.

And for the nonce Maurice Brennett was at a loss for his ordnance.

One lingering sunshiny morning it chanced that he and Travis were in the reading-room of the St. ---- Hotel. The murmur of the streets below rose drowsily, and within it was very still. The other occupants of the room had dropped out gradually one by one, and only the rustle of the journal in Travis’s hand broke the quietude as he hastily turned the sheet. Brennett was not reading. There was a folded newspaper on his knee, his eyes were fixed absently on the floor, and his thoughts were busy with that baffling perplexity never in these days far from them.

“The Tichborne case!” exclaimed Travis as he glanced at the head-lines. “I’m devilish tired of the Tichborne case. What do you think of it, Brennett? Is the claimant an impostor?”

It was as if he had touched a match to a fuse. The air was full of strange forces hitherto latent.

Brennett sat silent, motionless, looking at his companion with an expression in his brilliant eyes difficult of analysis.

“Eh! What do you think of the Tichborne case?” reiterated Travis.

And still on Brennett’s face was a fixed expression of introversion--as of one who ponders deeply, who is carefully evolving an intricate train of sequences. A new idea had been projected on his mental horizon--vague, diffuse, but soon to be focussed in action. Even Travis, unobservant though he was, felt that his friend’s mind was coming back through wide spaces as Brennett replied, absently, “The Tichborne case?--why, I hardly know what to think about it.”

And then he was silent again.

And so Travis left him.

He remained there for an hour or two, sunk in this new absorption, uninterrupted by friend or acquaintance. Then he wrote and mailed a letter, and by four o’clock that afternoon it was on its way to New York.

Travis’s ruminant moods--the mental process could scarcely be dignified as reflection--were rare. One of the most memorable of his life was superinduced within the next week by a casual meeting with Brennett in the lobby of the Opera House. The performance was over, and Travis was in the midst of the surging crowd near the door when he first caught sight of his friend in the jam on the stairs. Brennett made a slight gesture with the opera glass in his hand, which Travis interpreted as a request to wait for him without. He went on, experiencing at the moment a faint and fleeting amusement that a man like Brennett, who seemed, however illogically, harder and sharper than the hardest and sharpest, whose whole heart and soul were in his eager haste to be rich, should nevertheless affect a sentimental interest in music, and to enjoy the gentle illusions of the lyric stage. There recurred to him, too, a vague perception, of which he had often before been conscious, that men of Brennett’s stamp usually care little for externals, and that there was a sort of incongruity in the glitter of diamonds on his shirt-front when he moved beneath the gas-jets, and in the fact that he was always so carefully plumed.

As Travis lounged in the gloom without, beside the posters which announced in gigantic letters the resplendent attractions of “L’Etoile du Nord,” billed for Monday the 6th of March, he watched carelessly the erratic orbits of the carriage lamps far up the instarred perspective of the street. Presently Brennett came out, and slipping his arm through Travis’s they took their way along the thoroughfare together.

“I have something to say to you,” Brennett began.

“Say it, my dear fellow,” rejoined Travis, lightly.

The next instant he was struck with a sudden surprise that Brennett’s arm should be trembling within his own. The circumstance was significant. He grew abruptly grave, and turned an expectant face upon his friend.

Brennett seemed to hesitate. It was only after they had traversed the broad belt of moonlight falling athwart the crossing, and reached the deep shadow of the opposite block of buildings that he spoke.

“I have heard from Fortescue,” he said.

Travis stopped short in the street.

“Not John Doane Fortescue?” he asked, with a sharp intonation of dismay.

“He is the man,” Brennett assented.

Travis stared hard at him for a moment. He was only a black shadow sharply outlined upon the dim, gray background of the street. Even the light in his eyes was eclipsed. But somehow it seemed a keenly vigilant shadow. Its attitude was intent.

Travis’s observation was the mere embryo of a faculty. But he had an instinctive aversion to being watched, and, although hardly realizing that he stood in the moonlight and the other in the gloomy obscurity, the instinct prevailed. The words and the gesture were almost mechanical as he said, “Come, let’s get out of this,” and passing his arm once more through his friend’s they walked on together.

“I thought that man was surely dead by this time,” he said, desperately. “He has not been heard of for years.”

“He is in New York now,” said Brennett.

“How did _you_ hear of him, Brennett? How did it come about?”

“I remembered that a friend of mine in New York speaks of him occasionally. I wrote and ascertained that Fortescue has just arrived there after a prolonged residence abroad. He expects, so my correspondent says, to come to New Orleans very soon.”

“Of course, then, he will get scent of his right to that Tennessee property before long. But, Brennett, now I think of it, I don’t see how that can affect our chance of securing it. His remedy is barred by the statute,” said Travis, striving to fling off the anxieties that had so suddenly beset him.

“He will rely on the disability of continuous absence,” said Brennett, eagerly, showing a strange insight into the intentions of a man whom he had never seen, and who was as yet presumably in ignorance of the vested remainder in these houses in Graftenburg. After he had spoken he recoiled slightly, and was savagely biting his lip.

But Travis’s sense of the artistic was too blunt to recognize this lapse from veri-similitude. “Ah, the game is up!” he cried, despairingly. Then with a bitter gesture of renunciation he flung the stump of his cigar into the street, feeling as if he had put from him in the moment every cherished prospect of the future.

The air was soft and full of vernal suggestions. The moon hung low in the western sky. The elongated shadows of the two men dogged their progress down the deserted streets, and for a time the silence was unbroken save by the rhythmic beat of their footsteps, and once when the multitudinous brilliant notes of a mocking-bird’s nocturnal melody burst forth suddenly.

“In thinking it over,” said Brennett at last, “I doubt whether we are so much damaged by this new development after all. The project of exchanging property was beginning to seem very hopeless.”

Travis made no reply. He was wondering whether Brennett’s apparent astuteness, hitherto so prominent in the invariable success of his enterprises, might not have been instead only the heavy backing of circumstance--luck rather than brains. And now, if luck should fail him, and the man who relied upon him--what would remain?

Brennett presently resumed. “It seems to me that, if we are adroit, we might make the appearance of the claimant serve our interests. Perhaps we can manage her all the better for it--through him, as it were.”

Travis hardly recognized the caution which, even at midnight and in the empty streets, used a personal pronoun for a proper name, but under the magnetic influence which Brennett exerted he unconsciously followed the example.

“But he, himself! his title is superior to hers.”

“Still he is not in possession, and the law is proverbially uncertain. We can manage him through her.”

Travis shook his head.

“I don’t altogether make you out, Brennett,” he said.

“Why, see here. When the claimant appears she will stand in immediate danger of losing the whole property. Perhaps she would be willing to compromise. Now view the matter from _his_ standpoint. It is doubtful whether he can dispossess her or secure any concession. It might be that for a pecuniary consideration he would let us get the advantage of the compromise if it can be effected. One half of that property would give us the money we need.”

“You mean buy his claim?”

Brennett assented.

Again Travis shook his head. “It would be a cut-throat sacrifice on his part for anything we could afford to pay.”

“You lose sight of the uncertainty, Travis,” said Brennett, eagerly. He seemed anxious that his friend should regard the scheme as practicable. “It is very possible that Fortescue would get nothing at the end of a long suit, and have all the costs to pay. And it is possible, too, that she will not compromise at all. Don’t you see that a substantial sum, planked down at once, is rather an enticing alternative--especially as the man is a gambler, so my correspondent intimates, and given over to riotous living. Men of that stamp prefer ready money to anything in the way of distant possibilities.”

“It may work,” said Travis. “But it will surprise me. And, Brennett, we haven’t time to prosecute the suit. You know that.”

“If she will not compromise that is the end of it--at least so far as the mine is concerned.”

“Well, if I understand you,” said Travis, in great dissatisfaction of spirit, “the proposal is this--He takes the ready money. And if she can’t be induced to compromise she takes the houses. And we are left with the bag to hold.”

“The money we pay him is only a stake. We take the risk. But I am confident she will compromise. Otherwise she jeopardizes her whole estate. She has nothing else, you said?”

“Nothing else.”

A pause ensued.

“Look here, Brennett,” said Travis, presently. “This arrangement with Fortescue is what the lawyers call, in their confounded jargon, ‘champerty.’ It is against the rules of the game, as I understand it.”

“That amounts to nothing. We must keep the affair a secret between ourselves and him--that is all. The proposal for a compromise will have to be made in his name, and through his lawyers. And it is much better that this is the case. It strikes me that, after all, his coming is rather opportune, though it will bleed us a little. She distrusts you, and she is predisposed to oppose you. It is very well that you will be obliged to lie low and seem to have nothing to do with it.”

“But this thing of champerty,” said Travis, dubiously, “it is no offence, is it? There is no fine, nor penalty, nor”----

“Practically none. That has all fallen into desuetude. But, of course, we shall take care to keep it quiet.”

“I ask,” said Travis, “because I never had the grit to run against the law. I am a very Jonah for being found out. It’s my policy to be above board--else I’m overboard in about a minute and a quarter.”

He laughed a little, in a low-spirited way, at his hobbling witticism. Then he said, gravely, “Make the thing straight, Brennett, and keep it straight. I depend on you.”

“I’ll take care of that,” said Brennett.

Then they both fell silent.

The moon was slipping slowly behind the western roofs. The melancholy tones of a bell close at hand clanged out the hour. Others far away sounded like its echo. The world was lost in the immensity of the night--even their shadows seemed to have deserted them, only recalled now and then by the sudden glare of a gas-lamp as they passed beneath.

And presently, still silent, they turned into the familiar hotel where they always sojourned during their stay in New Orleans, and which seemed to them as much like home as any other place.

Shortly after this interview the races began and Travis’s anxieties and forebodings lost their hold upon him.