CHAPTER XIII

Mrs. Faurie sprang up with white lips and a half scream. The old gentleman, who had sunk into a placid doze, was roused from slumber to vague but terrible fright.

Knock! knock! knock! again reiterated at the door. The three boys gazed in questioning suspense at the tutor’s face.

“It is not”—Reginald began—he had held the chain while Desmond locked the dog collar—“it is not—it could not be—”

“Oh, no! _Impossible!_” cried Desmond, bewildered nevertheless, and at a loss.

The strain of the events of the evening was telling on the tutor,—even the stress of the effort to sustain the equilibrium of the household was making its impression. Some moments elapsed before his mind could evolve a conjecture, a reasonable solution of the mystery, and all the time the heavy, dull knocking was renewed at ominous intervals.

“It must be—it is—a drift log!” he exclaimed at length. “No, you must stay here,” he insisted, as Mrs. Faurie started forward; “Reginald and I will see.”

He led her back to her chair, and was not sorry that he had done so when he opened the door into the hall and saw there all the negro watchmen, trembling and agitated, with a look of abject terror shown in the swinging chandelier.

“No, no! Nathan,—I am astonished at you. You know that a dead man cannot knock at the door! No, Bob! You can’t have the dugout. I have got it chained and padlocked. If you leave us here, you will have to swim. Seth—you, too! It _must_ be a drift log. I am going to see. I might have been afraid of that man alive, but I have got a cinch on him, sure, now that he is dead. Nobody in the house knows that he is there, but Reginald and me. You tell that fat old cook in the kitchen that the Mississippi River hasn’t swept him away from here, or that the other pirates didn’t take him with them, and she’ll die of fright. I should want no ghost of her size after me, if I were you. Keep quiet here and I’ll see.”

It proved to be a drift log, and with the aid of a stout cane Desmond leaned over the railing and pushed it clear of the entrance to the house. The body of the flatboat-man had not yet risen, and as the log was on the surface, it struck against the floor of the veranda. Unluckily, as it floated down a little farther on, it caught in the angle between the flooring and the projection of the steps, and there it swung on the oscillations of the current,—knock, knock, knock,—and there it was destined to hang and, as if it were the dead man clamoring for admittance, knock, knock, knock in a dull monotone at intervals all the livelong night.

Desmond could not rally his energies again for a show of cheerful spirits. He could no longer direct the trivial conversation and evolve ebullitions of satisfaction and pleasure. Despite his gratitude for the crowning mercy of his rescue of the household, he had a sentiment of infinite repugnance for the taking of life, necessary, justifiable, even laudable though it was. That dull knock, knock, knocking at the door where lay the man he had killed beat upon more sensitive nerves than he had yet known he possessed, and set them all a-quiver.

When Desmond induced the negroes to return to their posts, old Joel made a great show of self-ridicule and abasement that so little a matter should have shaken his equilibrium. “’Fore Gawd, boss, I done turned fool, fur a fack! _Drift log!_ Gawd A’mighty! I wuz cradled in a _drift log_! I been paddlin’ in dugout hollowed out’n _drift log_ dese six or seben hunderd years. I been loadin’ up an’ firin’ powder fur Chris’mus in de _drift log_—Lawd! eber sence Noah fust went a-wadin’ in de overflow. An’ now—done took a skeer ob a _drift log_! Ye-all will have ter hire somebody to wait on de table at Great Oaks besides a _dee_stracted ole nigger whut is afeard ob a _drift log_.”

Seth was retreating up the stairs, chuckling at the causeless fright, and Bob was mightily entertained to see the old butler at fault, who was so rich and ready in caustic reproof to the young and flighty. Desmond and Reginald turned from the servants and repaired to the parlor, where the tutor was able laughingly to explain the cause of the sound to the group waiting by the fireside, and to apologize for having awkwardly towed the log into the angle of the steps so that it could not shake free, and thus the melancholy iteration of its oscillations against the flooring would probably continue all night. “But I move that we pay as little attention to the sound as possible, and adjourn for the present,” Desmond continued, looking at his watch.

“I feel as if I could never sleep again,” said Mrs. Faurie, pressing her hands to her temples.

“What a pity that you sent your maid down to the quarter. She could have a cot in your dressing-room and be company for you so close at hand,” suggested Reginald.

“Yes, she is afraid to come back. She made all sorts of excuses, but _that_ is the truth,” said Mrs. Faurie. “I sent her to help her people save their things; their household furniture and bedclothes are so important to them,—hard to come by and difficult for them to replace,—the accumulations of many years.”

“Suppose you let Chub have a cot in your room,” suggested Desmond.

“I won’t,” said Chubby, stoutly. “I won’t sleep in a room with a lady!”

The collapse of the two elder boys over this demonstration of Chub’s delicate modesty was shared in less degree by the others, while Chub sat gravely on the edge of the sofa and ejaculated—“The _idea_!”

“He’d be no good, anyhow. He is a perfect dormouse,” said Reginald.

“Leave him alone in his propriety,” added Horace.

“Let things be as usual,” said Mrs. Faurie. “Anything different might get on my nerves and make me wakeful.”

Desmond was rummaging in a drawer. “There is a hammer here. Will you let me nail up the window-shutters so that the room can be entered only from the hall?”

That idea of a coerced order on her banker operated on his mind like an obsession. Should the pirates return, in view of their peril by state’s evidence, to attempt the rescue of their comrade, they would have the opportunity for a renewed effort to secure the paper with its rich guerdon in case of success.

“Nail up the windows!” exclaimed Mrs. Faurie. “Heavens! I feel like a pampered lunatic.”

“It would do no harm except to the shutters, and would mightily set my mind at rest,” urged Desmond.

“Work your will on the shutters, then, and peace to your mind!” she said, laughing a little at his impetuous haste, as Reginald caught up a lamp to light him and the two made off together.

When they were through with the windows, it would have been as easy to tear down a section of the house as to effect an entrance there.

As the group stood together in the hall for the last few words, the knock, knock, knocking was renewed, as of solemn clamors for admittance. None of them mentioned the sound, and presently they were all gone except Desmond and Reginald, who seemed to linger, but really intended to wait and watch all night.

“The lights are better out,” said Desmond, reaching up and extinguishing the swinging lamp in the hall chandelier. “If they should come, which God forbid, they could not so easily get about the house in darkness, and we could fire at better advantage from the shadow than in the full glare of the veranda lights.”

They closed the window-shutters of all the house as they patrolled the verandas. The width of these was great enough to limit the light sent across the rooms, but thence through the slats one could look out almost as with the distinctness of daylight on the great brown welter of water palpitating with the rainfall and undulating with the current.

“You had better lie down for a while in the parlor,” Desmond said to Reginald. “No—you will play out long before day, if you have no rest at all. You will be well within call here, with your gun beside you, and you can watch through the slats for any approach from the front of the house.”

They had arranged that one or the other should remain in the hall outside Mrs. Faurie’s door—unknown to her, however, lest this precaution excite her alarm anew—throughout the night. Reginald was in a tremor of terror to perceive that it was she against whom the schemes of the marauders were most directed. He had earlier thought of the family silver and the scattered valuables about the house, and had fancied that these had allured them hither, but that most appalling suggestion of a coerced order on her New Orleans bankers and the extremest measures to insure its being honored was of far more sinister import. The silver in its present form was easily identified; melted down, it would be mulcted of half its value in the loss of the rich chasing of the ornamentation and the fine workmanship. Moreover, the water-rats might well fear their own discrimination between what was real and what might be a heavy plate and for their purposes worthless. But there could be no possible doubt as to her order on her bankers. Without question they were in communication with fences and graduated rogues in New Orleans of such a quality as to be able to present such an order without fear that it would not be honored. Truly, the possibility invested the menace that hung over the house with a terror which he could scarcely contemplate without a complete collapse of all his faculties, and which drove every impulse of sleep from his heavy eyelids. He sank down obediently on the sofa, however, and sought to compose his mind, his eyes staring into the gloomy waters, his gun on the floor beside him within arm’s reach, his ears acutely discerning every sound within the house, and the splashing of the water against the foundations as the rain fell and the currents of the overflow rose ever higher and higher, and now and again the sombre vibrations of the knock, knock, knocking at the door before which the dead man lay.

Desmond had thrown himself at full length on the long, old-fashioned, mahogany hall sofa, that he, too, might find some repose for his exhausted limbs,—now beginning to ache and stiffen from the stress of the day’s exertion,—if not solace for his racked and anxious mind.

The dark house had grown still—so still that the silence seemed sinister, as if some portentous crash must break this unnatural hush. The lapping of the water had become monotonous, the ear so accustomed to it that it scarcely impinged upon the sense of silence. The ghostly knock, knock, knocking had its sombre echo, and the interval relapsed into muteness. There was no stir of whatever sort from the bedrooms; the inmates were all lost in slumber. The house might have seemed tenantless, when suddenly Desmond became conscious of a sense of motion. He raised himself on his elbow and stared about him.

The hall was absolutely dark. The glass half-moon above the solid panels of the double front door, and the panes in the long side-lights on either hand, were covered with some quilled stuff that tempered the light to gloom by day, and utterly excluded the glimmer of night. He could not have said how or when it came, but something was astir, he knew, even before he heard that lisping sibilance of the ghost of a step on the padded velvet carpet of the stair. Again and again it sounded, sometimes regular for several steps; then silence; once more the sibilant tread, sliding on the silky pile of the velvet. Farther and farther it receded, unmolested; he thought it was gone! And once more—the impact! And now all was silence; he listened in vain. As he laid himself back on the sofa, the cold touch of the haircloth with which it was covered caused him to withdraw his hand with a jerk and start violently. Then he composed himself anew and sought the rest his fagged-out system so needed.

At another moment he would have sprung up to challenge the presence, but in this juncture he remembered the alarm a sudden commotion in the hall would rouse. Mrs. Faurie was aware of the peculiar jeopardy in which she stood. The demand for the emeralds, for the order on her bankers, had apprised her that she was the special mark for the enterprise of the marauders. So extreme a terror as a sudden awakening to more turmoil and suspense might prove too much for her nerves, for her overstrained heart,—might, indeed, be fatal. This demonstration marked no intrusion, no new menace; it was only the old unexplained, inexplicable spectral mystery which he had encountered when he first reached Great Oaks Plantation,—almost forgotten until this afternoon when he had sprung into the window and rushed downstairs, hearing a sibilant descent and passing an unseen presence.

In the midst of the lull induced by the uncanny associations, he felt a rush of impatience that this fantastic demonstration should be forced upon his attention now,—at this time, when any slight lapse of vigilance on his part, any failure of judgment under circumstances so strange to all his training and experience, might cost the life of every one in the house. He believed that there must be some natural explanation for the manifestation; but since it baffled reason and conjecture, it mattered little to the fact that he did not fully accept it. He had as distinct a thrill quivering icily along his spine as if he had no philosophy whatever, and as he placed his hand on his brow, he felt that cold drops were standing there.

Suddenly he sprang to his feet. There was a commotion upstairs, not so much a tread or a movement, but a husky, half-smothered voice crying out. In the tremendous crisis that the moment was to him, he remembered to open the front parlor door, and with a whisper he motioned Reginald to take his post on the hall sofa while he bounded noiselessly up the stairs, three steps at a time. He burst into the room where the wounded man lay—expecting he hardly knew what. It was the only chamber alight in the house, yet full of distorted shadows. The kerosene lamp had been extinguished, and the dim illumination came from that primitive contrivance known as a button lamp,—a bit of cloth tied over a button, the end lighted and set afloat in a saucer of lard, giving a clear, tiny flame peculiarly adapted to a sick-room. Seth had placed this on the fireless hearth, and thus shining upward, all the furnishings cast gloomy shadows on the wall. They seemed curiously out of proportion,—out of drawing, so to speak, because of the slant of the walls of the half-story structure and the deep recesses of the dormer windows.

In the middle of the room Seth stood staring, evidently just roused from slumber; his starting eyes were on the wounded man, who had struggled into a sitting posture, wildly gesticulating toward the door, every fresh exertion sending the blood spurting over the bosom of the white night-shirt furnished him, and trickling down the white coverings of the bed.

“Who is that thar guy?” he exclaimed huskily. “An’ what’s he comin’ after me fur?”

He fixed wild eyes on Desmond, who marveled whether it was yet time for the delirium and fever attendant upon a gunshot wound to set in.

As he spoke in a soothing voice, the incongruity of the situation could but strike him. He had sought to kill this man and had nearly compassed his object; but now he was laying the gentlest hands on the marauder’s shoulder, and trying to place him back in his recumbent posture. The danger was all gone out of him, but the semblance of kindness seemed strange.

“Nobody is going to disturb you. Take your night’s rest. Lie down and be quiet.”

The marauder grasped Desmond’s arm with a sunburned hand garnished with broken nails. “But—say—_who_ was he? Oh, my! he looked comical! What’s he want o’ me?”

“There’s nobody here,” protested Desmond. “Lie down.”

“Can’t stuff me! Ain’t slep’ a wink ter-night.” A shadow crossed his face, which was young and broad, and with a “bang” of straight sandy hair, a square jaw, and a long, thin mouth. “I got too much to study ’bout.”

“Don’t do it now,” Desmond kindly admonished him. “You have started that wound to bleeding. Lie down.”

“That man looked comical; he didn’t look like folks hereabout! He had on a three-cornered hat.”

Desmond gave so palpable a start that the wounded marauder noticed it. “Ai-yi! _You_ know him,” he said with significance. “Is he after me?”

“Did he have powdered hair?” Desmond asked, surprised at his own temporizing, and remembering Reginald’s description of the nurse’s vision.

“Gunpowder on his hair!” the man said wonderingly. “Naw, ’twuz white! An’ Lord! he didn’t expect to see me lookin’ at him. He flipped in—an’ when his eyes met mine, he flipped out. Say—I be ’feard o’ him,—he looked so comical! Say—is he _alive_!”

Desmond turned to the attendant. “Seth, who is this man?”

“Gawd A’mighty, boss, I dunno!” Seth gasped, the whites of his eyes distended and their pupils wildly rolling. “Ter tell de trufe, boss, an’ shame de debbil, I jes’ batted my eye one minit, an’ dar war dis man shyin’ an’ plungin’ an’ ’lowin’ dat he done seen—I reckon ’twuz dat ar Slip-Slinksy what de chillern talks about wunst in awhile. Lawe-a-massy, Mist’ Desmond, lemme go home! ’Fore Gawd, I can’t stay here no mo’! Lemme go’—leastways, down ter de kitchen, whar _he_ ain’t neber been seen nor hearn. I can’t stay whar Slip-Slinksy—oh, yi! hi-i!”

He was looking in affright over his shoulder at a sudden movement of Desmond’s shadow across the slanting wall. It was clearly demonstrated that the utility of Seth in the offices of sick nurse and lookout was at an end. So charging him to say naught to his fellows downstairs, on pain of being ordered to return to the sick-room, Desmond assigned him to a post on the back piazza within call of the others, and within exchange of cheerful conversation with the corpulent old cook, always a fixture, half a-doze in the kitchen window.

The clumsy descent of the stairs by Seth, used only to the one-story dwelling so common in the region, Desmond thought was sure to advertise his withdrawal to all the house. But when the back hall door had closed upon him, absolute quiet succeeded. All the inmates were asleep,—a much needed rest, obviously. But the continued hush demonstrated how essential was the strict watch, since so turbulent and erratic a transit had failed to rouse the domicile. He reflected that the cautious methods of burglars could never have permitted so much noise. He began to doubt the vigilance of his sentinels. He had no blame for Seth, who had slept at his post. It had been a strenuous day of excitement and labor for the hostler, and indeed for all the household retainers. The exposure to rain and wind is always of a peculiar exhaustion to the physical energies. He began to fear that, thus absorbed by the strange manifestation of the troublous peripatetic spirit of Great Oaks Plantation, worse dangers might have been allowed to approach.

He went swiftly to one of the dormer windows, and looked out upon the great flood as upon an inland sea. Still the rain fell; the drops stood in bubbles, and again coursed lazily along the panes of the glass, and through their corrugations he could see the rippling waters in the wan light of the illuminated veranda; the vague boles of the trees in the shifting mist; the floating débris,—here and there uprooted bushes, logs, fence-rails, timbers of buildings; but never a boat, never a human suggestion. The ark could not have seemed more lonely, more aloof from all humanity in the floods that drowned the earth, than did Great Oaks mansion in that deep and memorable overflow in Deepwater Bend from the crevasse in the Faurie cross levee.

The tiny light of the primitive button lamp burned whitely on the hearth; the fire was dead some hours since, and no coal gleamed through the ash. The room had a comfortable aspect, though the blue and white curtains were still undrawn as when he had sprung through the window there. It was at the opposite side, and without shifting his posture, where he sat in the recess of the other window, he could see through it the sloping roof of the veranda, on which lay the boughs of the live-oak tree towering high above. A table at the foot of the bed held a glass from which restoratives had been administered, a bowl which had been filled with the soup in which the old cook excelled, some lint and home-made bandages from an old linen sheet, ready for use in case they might be needed for stanching the further flow of blood. The floor was covered with a blue and white matting; the woodwork was of the old china-white paint, as smooth as enamel. The white wall-paper bloomed with blue corn-flowers,—it was the blue room! There were presses in the jambs beside the fireplace, and these, too, were of the spotless white of the door and chair-rail and wainscot. The bed was dressed in white, but from the half canopy long blue curtains depended, mottled with some indeterminate design in white. He rather wondered at the freshness of it all, considering its disuse; but there was little dust afloat amidst the densities of the woods and along the expanse of the river, and the traditions of Great Oaks were of famous housekeepers. A single sign of disorder the room showed!—one of the presses was open, and within was glimpsed a congeries of old account-books, bundles of papers, japanned boxes, all in a degree of confusion that implied long neglect or great haste.

When he glanced again at the pillow, he was relieved to see that the wounded man had fallen asleep, doubtless from the exhaustion attendant upon the excitements of the last hour. The breath came with a queer whistling sound from his torn lung, and this gave Desmond a keen pang, notwithstanding the knowledge that the miscreant deserved far worse punishment than the wound he had received. His sunburned face was yet younger of aspect as he slept, and softer; his unkempt yellow hair, his stubbly, unshaven chin and upper lip, and his dirty face on the fine white linen of the pillow-case spoke the limitations of his low station; and the tutor, who had pinned his faith to training, had a reservation in his condemnation,—holding that this man might not have been what he was but for what his circumstances had made him.

Desmond, in the deep, shadowy recess of the dormer window, thus meditating, looked out keenly at every shifting change of the watery expanse, listening acutely to every semblance of sound within the house, hearing even the recoil of the springs of the sofa in the hall below as Reginald altered his position; hearing the water rush futilely against the foundations and turn splashing aside; hearing every iteration of the knock, knock, knocking of the drift log caught at the veranda steps, and he was instantly aware when once more that scarcely to be discriminated impact of a sibilant footfall, so stealthy it was, sounded anew on the stairway of the hall. He could hardly control his impatience,—the inexplicable incident so jeopardized the fidelity of his watchmen, the composure of the rest of the household. He remembered that it was Reginald who had first told him the story of the strange step on the stair. He wondered if the boy heard it now, as he lay obediently waiting on the sofa in the hall below. He wondered that Reginald could hold himself motionless, for not a sound came save that lisping tread, soft, sibilant,—now still, now distinct once more, ascending the stairs.

Desmond had an impulse almost uncontrollable to rush out into the hall, only checked by the fear that he would find nothing. Then, with an effort at self-control, he held himself quiet in the deep, curtained recess of the dormer window. Since the figure had entered this room before the unwilling vision of the wounded robber, perhaps the lure it then followed might again bring it hither. Desmond caught his breath as he heard the step approach nearer and yet nearer. When the footfall was just without, it paused, and Desmond fearfully heard the sombre knock, knock, knocking at the door below stairs before which the dead man lay. The next moment his heart was thumping so loudly that he thought the sound might betray his presence. For there entered slowly, cautiously, with a quick, nervous glance at the bed where the wounded robber slept, the apparition he had described hardly an hour ago,—the figure that patrolled the stairs in the wan moonlight in the tradition of the nurse’s vision.

A tall man it was, and spare. He was muffled in a cloak to the chin. He had upon his head a hat, cocked as if accessory to a fancy costume; his hair was white, not powdered; he held in his hand a scroll of paper; his face was one that Desmond recognized instantly, despite the anxious, secret, blazing eye, the tension of excitement in every drawn feature. Mr. Stanlett, with that careful, soft tread, noiseless save for an occasional slipping shuffle incident to the step of age, crossed the room and stood for a moment scanning the face of the sleeping man. Desmond, invisible in the deep shadows of the curtained recessed window, trembled for him lest that peculiar mesmeric influence, responsive to an intent regard, rouse the sleeper to a moment of frenzied fright. But the man still slumbered, the breath still whistling in labored respiration from his torn lung. Mr. Stanlett evidently harbored no suspicion of the shadowed window recess. He was very old, and his age was telling on him in the draughts that this strange secret made upon his powers of endurance. He tottered as he approached the press, its door ajar, and as he paused and gazed at its disorder, he shook his head to and fro in dismay. He pulled the door back, and leaning within, he opened a drawer which Desmond fancied was a secret receptacle. He laid the scroll in this, and then with a cheering face and a brisk satisfaction of manner, his lips set firmly together, he began to push the bundles of papers and japanned boxes back into their places, his nervous, veinous old hands moving here and there with great diligence in his eager haste to be gone. As he forced the door to shut on the crowded shelves, he did not observe what the keen young eyes in the recess perceived, that the corner of one of these bundles so protruded that the door did not compactly close. He shot the bolt and turned the key, unaware that neither had gone home, whirled about with a jaunty air of capability, looked keenly at the sleeping face on the pillow, and went briskly but softly shuffling out of the door, leaving Desmond at once relieved, amazed, and dismayed.

He could not for a time collect his faculties to ponder on this strange chance. He sat silently listening to the stealthy footsteps that had so long baffled inquiry at Great Oaks Plantation. He was remembering that on the occasion when the spectre was declared to have been seen, Mr. Stanlett was one of those first present in the hall below, and could not recognize, it was said, the features of the apparition through looking upward at the landing. The steps retreated farther and farther, and at last their sibilance sounded no more.

In the silence Desmond took counsel with himself. There was something of mystery here, of an importance to justify some risk, of a continuance to warrant years of concealment. What it was, whom it might affect, he could not imagine. He had the sentiment that whatever is secret is wrong. And certainly this was in a keeping neither wise, nor consistent, nor competent. His nettling discovery, for he wished now he knew naught, entailed a certain responsibility. The old man imagined that the scroll was in a secret receptacle, locked and double locked. And, in fact, one man, perhaps indeed two—for Desmond could not feel sure of those half-closed eyes and whistling breath—knew that it was within reach of any deft and groping hand. He revolted at the assumption of responsibility with which he had no concern. Nevertheless, this had been thrust upon him, and in view of the personnel of all concerned, he could not shirk it.

He rose abruptly, crossed the room, and opened the door of the press. He, too, gazed doubtfully at the sleeping man in the bed, who did not stir. Presently Desmond’s deft hands were fingering the outline of the secret drawer. It was constructed after an old and ordinary type, and with one or two efforts his thumb pressed a spring and the drawer shook loose. Taking the scroll, for there were no other contents, Desmond slipped it without examination or a glance of scrutiny into his breast pocket.

As he descended the stairs, Reginald rose from the sofa to meet him. “Such a night,” he whispered. “As if we have not enough to bear already, I heard—I could almost swear it—old Slip-Slinksy going up and coming down the stairs!”

Desmond passed his arm around him and gave him a jocose hug. “And this is the fellow I have been calling a man. Afraid of nursery ghosts!”

He was going into the library. The rain had ceased; the mist was lifting. A pale gray light was sifting through the slats of the shuttered windows. The veranda lamps burned queerly out of countenance before its definite, pervasive distinctness. As Reginald threw open the blinds, Desmond was lighting a wax candle that stood on his desk, and sealing in a large envelope a paper at which he scrupulously forbore to look; and as he lifted his head, he saw that the sun was striking long, red, shifting gleams across the great inland sea of the Mississippi overflow.