CHAPTER XVIII

It was not yet a late hour when Desmond quitted the parlor, Mrs. Faurie having flitted away, joyously protesting that the consideration of such nonsense as his discourse was undermining to the reason. The evening had resulted in so signal a failure to entertain the guest acceptably that an earlier dispersal than usual had supervened. Nevertheless, as Desmond made his way down the veranda toward the library, intending to smoke and linger an hour or so in his chosen haunt, for with this tumult of joy and expectation and triumph in his brain and heart he knew that he could not soon compose himself to rest, he was surprised in turning the corner to see a light upon the waters at a little distance, in the midst of the dark, rippling expanse that surrounded the mansion.

The night wind blew dank and chill across the damp purlieus of the veranda, the flooring of which was always splashed and reeking from the tossing waves of the recent landing of some dugout at various points, but it brought no other sound than the monotonous voices of the night, so accustomed that they scarcely impinged upon the consciousness: the stir of the foliage of the great oaks, the effect of their stately avenues “queered” by their diluvian surroundings; the iterative batrachian chorus from some insular “high ground” far away; the sudden bellow of a bull alligator; and always the murmur of the widespread shallows of the overflow under the influence of the breeze.

The light was stationary, and though it was now the dark of the moon and Desmond had only the vague illumination of the myriad stars of the clear spring night, he made out behind it the dull outline of a small boat. A lantern was evidently carried at the prow, and despite the fact that the light annulled the suggestion of secrecy, Desmond fancied that the motionless pause bespoke observation. Suddenly he heard the impact of a paddle upon the water, and became aware that the craft was about to turn. The spy, if spy he were, intended to retrace his course;—not until he should have given an account of himself, Desmond resolved, and of his mission, scouting about on the dark waters of the overflow, making his secret observations of Great Oaks mansion when asleep and off its guard.

“Hello, the boat!” Desmond’s strong young voice carried like a clarion across the flooded distance.

The answer came, hearty and reassuring: “Hello, the house!”

The dugout swung around once more, and as its prow was presented to Desmond’s eye as it advanced in a direct line, its bulk was obliterated, and this gave the man who stood erect plying his paddle in the Indian fashion the weird effect of walking on the water as he approached the house in the clare-obscure.

“God! What _is_ that?” exclaimed Mr. Hartagous, looking out from the dark window close at hand. He had been roused by the tutor’s ringing call to the boatman, and, apprehending some disturbance, had in the instant’s time secured his trousers and his pistol, the two essentials to dignified midnight combat. The light from the lantern of the dugout, which now began to head for a landing at the veranda, was flung far out on the watery gloom, and sent a ray to the long window, illumining a tousled mass of gray hair and whiskers, and a puckered face of most discordant and disconcerted petulance.

“Nare light do you show, Mr. Desmond,” said the voice of Bainbridge, the manager, from the dugout. “You are such owels up here at the big house that I made sure o’ findin’ you up, anyhow. Why, ’tain’t quite eleven o’clock.”

“And what in hell do you mean by sidling up to Great Oaks mansion in the middle of the night in this enigmatic way without warning?” demanded the lawyer, testily,—he evidently considered Desmond a mere attaché of the household and with no prerogative to speak with authority. Therefore he took bold precedence. “And who are you?—and what mischief are you bent upon?”

“Ah-h-h! It’s _you_ bent on mischief, Mr. Hartagous! Mischief is the trade of all your tribe!” tartly retorted the manager, none of whose interests could be imperiled by the lawyer, and whose nerves were already exacerbated by the jeopardy of all his prospects in the impending changes.

“Oh, is it Mr. Bainbridge, the manager? Beg pardon, my good man. I didn’t recognize you in the darkness,—but you should really let people sleep in peace”; then with an accession of acerbity,—“buccaneering around in the overflow at this time of night!”

It hardly affected Desmond that Mr. Hartagous should take the pas, the air of control in these matters appertaining to Great Oaks Plantation, as if the power of its possessor and her staff were already a thing of the past; but Mr. Bainbridge was not used to such reversals of spiteful fortune. Wind and weather had worked him much woe in his agricultural experience; desperate calamities, such as the overflow, had visited him more than once; but these mischances supervened in his professional conflict with natural forces, and were the dispensations of established authority, the “hand of God,” to use the pious commercial phraseology, and he submitted to them with such broadening of his back to the burden and such patience as he could muster. The disaster, however, which menaced the tenure of Great Oaks Plantation, this flagrant injustice, this legalized mischief, was the artifice of man, the deflection of the will of the testator rather than its execution, and he entertained scant toleration of the operations of law that permitted it and the person of its representative. It threw Mr. Bainbridge out of an employment in which he was well satisfied and had given satisfaction these many years, for he had a ghastly prevision of the overthrow of all the existing status which would ensue under a new owner.

“Oh,” he said with jaunty bravado, as he ran the nose of the dugout close to the veranda and sprang heavily upon the flooring, securing the trace chain that served as painter around one of the columns, “me and Mr. Desmond go on a ‘high old lonesome’ most any time o’ night. We don’t keep reg’lar hours in the swamp, you see, like you cits do in Memphis,—early to bed and early to rise makes you-all so all-fired healthy, wealthy, and wise.”

Mr. Hartagous sputtered, but no immediate answer occurred to him, though presently he found cause to admonish Mr. Bainbridge of his heavy footfall. “You’ll wake up the whole house,—you tramp like a grenadier.”

“And what sort o’ animal might that be,—fourfooted?” queried Mr. Bainbridge, affecting deep ignorance.

Mr. Hartagous disdained to reply, but the admonition touching his resonant swinging gait had not been altogether lost on Bainbridge, and to avoid passing on the veranda, thus noisily, the vicinity of Mrs. Faurie’s room, he entered unceremoniously at the long French window at which Mr. Hartagous stood, intending to traverse the guest’s apartment and thus reach the cross-hall in order to take his way thence to the library, where he could discuss his errand with the tutor. Desmond followed, meditating some lubricating word of apology. But Bainbridge continued in sarcastic ill-humor: “I never _did_ pretend to be one of your soft-steppin’, Slip-Slinksy sort o’ fellows. I could understand your objections to having him slying around the house of a night, but—” He paused abruptly as he opened the door leading into the cross-hall; the stoppage was a sort of galvanic shudder, such as might befit a cessation of steam propulsion. He turned toward the others, over his big brawny shoulders, a face visibly paling beneath its sunburn in the gleam of the candle which the saturnine Hartagous had just lighted.

“Hist,” he said, and silence fell. For outside in the distance and the darkness, so soft that one might wonder that it should be so distinct, was that vague sense of an unseen progression,—a step, or rather the impact of a foot with the pile of the velvet carpet of the padded stair, a silken sibilance, then silence, and again a footfall ascending the flight.

It was audible to Mr. Hartagous as he stood half dressed beside the table. A dismayed, protesting question was in the wrinkles and corrugations of his face as he turned it toward the door; a keen, excited gleam shone in his eyes, for he, too, had heard of the furtive spectre of Great Oaks. The blazing match in his hand burned unheeded to the tips of his fingers. When the flame touched the flesh he dropped the match, but without a word or sound. It seemed to have tangibly kindled his intention, his resolution. It was hardly possible to imagine a man of his age and so portly, who was now so light of movement. He had noiselessly thrust his bare feet into his bedroom slippers, great yawning foot-gear, placed his revolver in the pistol pocket of his trousers, while he held in his hand a thing that to the rustic Mr. Bainbridge seemed a pocketbook, but which Desmond recognized as one of the tiny electric lamps that have this semblance. He dropped the conical extinguisher over the newly lighted flame of the candle, and in a moment all was darkness and silence.

Each of the others recognized the lawyer’s determination to see the thing out. Bainbridge, for all his bold initiative in matters cognate to daylight, fell behind him as Mr. Hartagous briskly flung the door wide and shuffled noiselessly along the hall. For one moment Desmond felt an agony of indecision. He had an unreasoning instinct to call out and give the forlorn old spectre some warning of the fell forces of flesh and blood that were even now upon his elusive track, that he might craftily compass his disappearance as more than once heretofore. Then he hesitated. He had shrunk from such knowledge as had come to him as to the details in the concealment of the codicil of the will, and he had found its only extenuation in the doubt of Mr. Stanlett’s sanity and responsibility. It was impossible to judge how this might have stood in the beginning, but now, when it was so obviously futile and the ghostly step was once more wandering through the midnight quiet of Great Oaks mansion, he became afraid of interference,—discovery could only prove the mental unsoundness that was at last poor Slip-Slinksy’s protection. Moreover, Mr. Hartagous was now halfway up the stairs; Bainbridge, sitting on the bottom step, had pulled off his high boots and followed in his stocking feet as noiseless as a cat. Nevertheless, the crafty old spectre had become aware of their approach. Not a sound, not a stir, issued from above. He was still up there somewhere in the darkness. Surely he could scarcely have drawn a breath as the two below stood on the stairs, motionless also, watching, waiting. Desmond, lingering in the hall beneath, one hand on the newel-post, felt a rush of indignation, knowing what he did. The two spies, stalwart, alert, both more than a score of years younger, could easily wear out the endurance of the poor, patient, disappointed ghost, whose lawless mission had always been instinct with beneficent intention. Yet not so easily, perhaps; for presently, when a timber of the stair creaked, Desmond knew that Bainbridge, his muscles stiff and cramping, had been forced to shift his weight.

The house within was absolutely noiseless. The half-moon of glass above the doors at the front showed its presence in a dim gray contour, but shed no light. The splashing of the water of the overflow under the buffets of the wind was distinct in the pause. Once a gust went skirling with a wild, chill voice among the score of chimneys, and passed into the distance, and silence ensued. Suddenly a light cut the gloom like a knife. There, standing on the landing, was the spectre of the tradition, the cocked hat upon its white hair, powdered, alas! only by time, its cloak falling almost to its heels, its eyes blazing with that fierce yet consciously helpless anger of the aged, and its lips drawn close and thin to keep the secret that battered against their reticence.

Mr. Hartagous had crept up the stairs like a panther in his eagerness for his prey, yet at the instant of discovery he slunk back amazed and disconcerted. “Mr. Stanlett,” he exclaimed, his finger failing for a moment in the pressure on the button, and the whole scene vanishing into darkness with a leaping suddenness, then as suddenly leaping into view, “I am astonished at you!”

“And I cannot express _my_ surprise,” the old gentleman said, with a crisp sarcasm that had an unexpected edge. His eyes ran deliberately over the details of the unconventional aspect and attire of Mr. Hartagous: his bushy, tousled gray hair and whiskers; his burly, much wrinkled throat, left bare without collar or cravat; his suspenders, all unadjusted, still hanging from the waistband of his trousers and dangling sashwise almost to his heels; his bare feet and ankles revealed nearly in their entirety by his loose, yawning bedroom slippers. And he had not the wit to take his thumb from the button of the lamp. “I cannot express my surprise to detect you skulking, noiseless, in this unshod condition, about a house in which you are a guest. Fie! Fie! Mr. Hartagous. If you have taken a fancy to any valuables of ours, why, speak out, man, and we will _give_ them to you! We have lost too much lately not to realize the vanity of earthly hoardings.”

Mr. Hartagous might have seemed of the porpoise family, so resonant were the deep and gusty breaths he drew. “Before God, old man, I have a mind to throw you down these stairs,” he cried, in fury and amaze that such an imputation, though forced and satiric as it was, could be cast on his conduct. “I have a mind to throw you down these stairs!”

“Have a care, have a care of your fellow burglar, then,” cried Mr. Stanlett, secure in the immunity of his age and his weakness. “Stand from under, my good Mr. Bainbridge.”

Mr. Hartagous had never dreamed how much of his acumen as a lawyer, his dignity as a man, his force as an individual, appertained to his usual smart metropolitan costume. He made a desperate effort to lay hold on his wonted identity.

“But you have your own conduct to explain, Mr. Stanlett,” he said severely.

“Explain?—to whom?—to you?” the old man flouted contemptuously.

And Mr. Hartagous was aware that this was not the noted cross-examiner whom he had hitherto recognized in himself.

“You surely know, Mr. Stanlett,” he began anew, “that your mysterious midnight rovings about this house have given rise to misinterpretations—”

“Strange,—strange that you should think so, and yet go roving too!” said Mr. Stanlett, his eyes burning.

Mr. Bainbridge, a good deal perturbed by the unexpected falling out of the event, yet nevertheless reassured too to find the familiar figure of the old gentleman in lieu of the unimagined spectre, in anticipation of which his stout heart had quailed, suddenly broke out in his burly voice: “Well, I ain’t faultin’ Mr. Stanlett, anyhows he chooses to do.” He had known him since his own early youth, and his veneration had the strength of long habit. “He can have his own way at Great Oaks. If he has a mind to sit up late of a night and loaf about the house, it is his own affair. No curfew here! If I had ha’ known that Slip-Slinksy was _you_, sir, I’d ha’ been in my dugout and a mile away by now.” The tone of respect, of consideration, to which the old gentleman was accustomed, broke down his reserve. He could meet defiance with taunts, and reproaches with sarcasm, but he melted before kindness.

“Oh, Jerry, Jerry Bainbridge,” he wailed, holding out both hands and shaking his old gray head, so fantastic in its cocked hat, dismally to and fro, “I was just hunting for a will,—a better will than that poisonous paper that is to destroy us all. Faurie never intended that such a will should hold. Night after night, year after year, I laid it away and hunted for a better one. And I’m hunting for it yet, and I’ll hunt for it till I die,—and maybe I’ll find it yet.” Then breaking off suddenly, with a look of proud and deep offense, “Slip-Slinksy,—that’s what they call me! Slip-Slinksy!” He repeated the distasteful word, while a vivid flush mounted to the roots of his silver hair.

“But nobody knowed ’twas you, Mr. Stanlett,” Bainbridge urged caressingly, yet with deep respect. “You are more looked up to than anybody in Deepwater Bend.”

In view of the tone of this interlocutor, it seemed to Mr. Stanlett not derogatory to his dignity to defend himself. “It was my duty, Bainbridge, my duty. I had promised Faurie. My word was out.”

Mr. Hartagous cocked up his head to listen and bent his brows. “What promise was this which you gave to Mr. Faurie, if I may ask?” he demanded, puzzled.

“I recognize no obligation to inform you, Mr. Hartagous, and no coercion in your question,” replied Mr. Stanlett, with dignity. “But I would not willingly seem churlish and reticent. I have no objection to answer, now that that unfortunate codicil has been produced—none whatever. Mr. Faurie urged me to search for another will till I found it,—I say a ‘will,’ but ‘paper-writing’ was the word he used.”

A pause ensued, while his fantastic figure on the landing, with the divergent rays of the lamp full upon him, stood silent and stiff, as he looked down at the brilliant focus of the electric wire in the case, which dulled the dim group about it on the stairs.

“When did Mr. Faurie tell you that?” asked the wondering lawyer.

“Just about four years after he died,” the old man replied, quite simply.

A thrill of astonished comprehension quivered through the group on the stairs. Hartagous, accustomed to a sedulous facial control, did not change countenance or speak; his thumb, however, trembled on the button of the lamp, and the scene fluttered back and forth, ghostly-wise, through the darkness. But both the other listeners exclaimed, each after the fashion of his wonted phraseology, though neither could have remembered his own words a moment later. Mr. Stanlett apprehended the amazement in the tones, and his interest, which had seemed but a jaded familiarity with an old experience, pricked up suddenly.

“Very remarkable, wasn’t it?” he said. “I remember that it surprised me extremely at the time, though really I don’t know that it should. Faurie was always different from anybody else. I was in the blue room up there, where after his death we had packed away all of his papers which he had seemed to consider of no particular account, till _you_ sent here, as executor, for those cursed levee bonds.” He paused to glare down with sudden wolfish rancor at Hartagous, then resumed abruptly: “I was ransacking the papers again, for in searching for the levee bonds I had found that codicil to the will,—which I wish to God I had never seen or had burnt on the spot. I knew the havoc that four years of Honoria’s expenditures would make in her provision if they were chargeable against her portion in the partition of the estate. Four years’ income,—one hundred and twenty thousand dollars. It seemed immense then! And _now_ it is nearly seven years’ income derived from the general estate that she must refund, and in addition all the yield of the crops of Great Oaks Plantation.”

He paused, his dreary, sunken eyes lifted suddenly to the upper story opposite the landing, and Bainbridge began to quake so perceptibly for the thought of what might be leaning lightly over the balustrade, a graceful manly figure, which he could see well enough though he would not look toward it, that the stout stair-rail shook responsive to the quiver of his brawny hand laid upon it. He kept instead his attention fixed resolutely on Mr. Stanlett’s lean, pallid face, with its fantastic headgear and its fiery eyes. There seemed naught more definite than mere memory before them, for he went on as if he had been only arranging the sequence of the events in his mind. “It surprised me then considerably, but now it seems no great matter. Faurie came in suddenly, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, and he said,—you know that way he had of demanding impossibilities of people and getting them too,—‘Keep back that codicil, Mr. Stanlett,—there is another paper-writing; find it and present them both together.’ He was pale and eager. He seemed desperately in earnest. He was dressed for riding,—he had come from far. I wonder which horse he had! He held a riding-crop in his hand, and he struck the codicil contemptuously with it,—you remember his tempestuous ways when he was angered, and he had that fine air of scorn that used to become him so well,—he struck the codicil as the paper lay open on the table. And you can see the welt of his riding-crop across it now.” Mr. Hartagous was conscious of a vague icy touch that seemed to delineate the course of his spinal column in successive shivers, for he was remembering that he had noticed an unaccountable diagonal indentation athwart the paper when it had been recently produced in court.

The recital had been to Mr. Stanlett a tremendous nervous strain; the old face began to quiver and the voice broke into whimpers, and the thin hands were aimlessly fluttering. “And ’twas just like Faurie to set me to search and never tell me for what nor where. ‘_Paper-writing!_’ have looked—and looked—for the paper-writing,—and I have looked for _him_, too, but I have never seen him since,—though—sometimes”—Mr. Stanlett glanced furtively over his shoulder at the ascending flight of stairs—“I have heard his step behind me as I went hunting—hunting—for the ‘paper-writing.’ If I had met him once on these dark stairs, I’d have held on to him, dead or alive, till I got some data as to what and where.”

As the tall, thin figure wavered to and fro and seemed about to fall, Bainbridge pushed hastily past Mr. Hartagous on the stair and offered a supporting arm to the old gentleman. “Such tiresome times, Jerry Bainbridge, that I have, to be sure. I need my sleep,—I need my night’s rest,” he plained, looking out of the deep, pathetic, sunken eyesockets of the aged: “to watch, and wait, and listen, and slip, and search,—’twas mighty hard! And then to be heard, after all. To be followed and spied out by this lawyer, and Desmond, and you,—_Slip-Slinksy_!” he repeated with a repugnant mutter.

Suddenly the light went out, leaving the whole in darkness. Mr. Hartagous pressed the button in vain. “The battery is exhausted. It will have to be recharged,” he remarked impersonally, as he turned on the stair.

Desmond was suddenly sensible of his position as quasi-host, and he felt the Great Oaks traditions of hospitality had hardly been maintained in the treatment that Mr. Hartagous had received on the stairs. “I will get a candle immediately. There is a fire in the library still, Mr. Hartagous; it has grown quite chilly. Perhaps you might care to have a cigar there.”

He addressed the unresponsive darkness apparently, in which, however, the queer figure of Mr. Hartagous was scarcely invisible, so definitely had it impressed itself upon the memory; but it was shuffling along very systematically, for his voice came from out the gloom, far down the hall and near his own door: “Thanks, thanks, very much; I will put on something extra—I feel the change of the temperature—and join you presently.”

Mr. Stanlett was not altogether self-absorbed. “Why, Desmond, why don’t you offer him a nightcap?” he called out genially, from the darkness of the landing. “Make him mix you a toddy in the library, Hartagous. He hasn’t got so little sense as you might think! He knows how to do that, at any rate!” Then with a distressful quaver: “Take something, Hartagous. You ain’t used to the Slip-Slinksy business like me. _Slip-Slinksy_,—the very boys call me that!” And now again jocund, though ever and anon his voice broke, “Do a little rummaging around in the dining-room, Desmond, and see if you can’t put two and two together,—a sandwich and a decanter.”

“But won’t you join us, Mr. Stanlett,” demanded Desmond, cheerily, for he judged from the diminishing distance of his voice that the old gentleman was approaching on the arm of Bainbridge; but Mr. Stanlett fell anew to whimpering, and said that he wanted to be in his bed, and indeed in his grave, that ought to have been made long ago with him laid at peace within it, for the days had come in which he could take no pleasure and the nights in which he could take no rest. Then he broke off, smartly to reprimand Bainbridge for stumbling, and pathetically averred, “But I have had more practice in walking in the dark. My conscience! I am familiar with the face of the night. Some terrible features it has, too. It is made up of grimaces!”