Part 6

These days passed eventlessly to him. Much of the time he strolled listlessly about, so evidently immersed in some absorbing mental perturbation that Tubal Sims marveled that its indicia should not attract the attention of the womenfolk, who esteemed themselves so keen of discernment in such matters. He still affected to angle at times, but his hook was hardly less efficient when it dangled bare and farcical in the deep dark pool than when the forlorn minnow it pierced stirred an eddy in the shadowy depths. He did not seem annoyed by his non-success. Mrs. Sims’s banter scarcely grated on his nerves or touched his pride. But indeed Mrs. Sims herself did not think ill of the unachieving; somehow the aggressive capability of Euphemia made her lenient. If there were more people like Euphemia, Mrs. Sims might have felt in conscience bound to move on herself. As to the daughter, her little world hastily conformed itself to its dictator, and she ruled it with an absolute sway. Triumphs of baking or butter-making ministered amply to her pride. Even the dumb creatures seemed ambitious to meet her expectations and avoid her censure. The dogs, who had sat so thick around the hearthstone in her absence as to edge away the human household, and had so independently tracked mud over the floors, now never ventured nearer than the threshold; yet there was much complimentary wagging of tails when she appeared on the porch. Sometimes the clatter of the treadle and the thumping of the batten told that the great loom in the shed-room was astir. Sometimes the spinning-wheel whirred. Occasionally she was busily carding cotton, and again she was hackling flax.

One afternoon he found her differently employed. She sat near the window and caught the waning light upon the newspaper which she held with both arms half outstretched as she read aloud. Mrs. Sims glanced up at the young man with a radiance of maternal pride that duplicated every crease and every dimple. Even Tubal Sims, who, as the juggler had fancied of late, was wont to look at his guest askance, lifted his eyes now with a smile distending his gruff, lined countenance, as he sat with his arms folded in his shirt-sleeves across his breast, his chair tilted back on its hind legs against the frame of the opposite window, his gaze reverting immediately to the young elocutionist. With a good-natured impulse to minister to the satisfaction of the old couple, the juggler silently took a chair hard by, and suppressed his rising sense of ridicule.

For, alack, Euphemia’s accomplishments were indeed of manual achievement. He listened with surprise that this should be the extent of her vaunted book-learning, knowing naught of how scanty were her opportunities, and what labor this poor proficiency had cost. Subjugation is possible only to superior force. In the instant his former attitude of mind toward her had returned, on this pitiful exhibition of incapacity which she herself and her prideful parents were totally incompetent to realize. She droned on in a painful sing-song, now floundering heavily among unaccustomed words, now spelling aloud one more difficult than the others, while he had much ado to keep the contemptuous laugh from his face, aware that now and again his countenance was anxiously yet triumphantly perused by the delighted old people, to lose no token of his appreciation and wonder.

To bear this scrutiny more successfully he sought to occupy his thoughts in other matters. His practiced eye noted even at the distance that the newspaper must be some county sheet,--published perhaps in the town of Colbury. He congratulated himself that the girl had evidently exhausted the columns of local news, and was now deep in the contents of what is known as the “patent outside.” Otherwise his polite martyrdom might have been of greater duration. He felt that neither her interest nor that of her audience would long sustain her in the wider range of subjects and the more varied and unaccustomed vocabulary of the articles, copied from many sources, which made up this portion of the journal.

The next moment he could have torn it from her hands. His heart gave a great bound and seemed to stand still. His eyes were fixed and shining. He half rose from his chair; then by an absolute effort resumed his seat and resolutely held himself still. In the throe of an inexpressible suspense every fibre of his being was stretched to its extremest tension as, slowly, laboriously, pausing often, the drawling voice read on anent “Young Lucien Royce. Details of his Terrible Death.” For so the head-lines ran.

IV.

The account which the newspaper made shift to give was but a bald, disjointed recital of the superficial aspect of events to one whose memory could so nearly reproduce the vivid fact; and where memory and experience failed him, his imagination, conversant with the status depicted, could paint the scene with all the tints of actuality. A recent steamboat accident on the great Mississippi River had resulted in much loss of life. The words, as Euphemia droned them, still holding the newspaper with both arms outstretched, brought back to one of her listeners the sensation of forging tremulously along in midstream at nightfall, the shimmer of the shaking chandeliers of the great flimsy floating palace, the white interior of the ladies’ cabin, with the “china finish” of the painted and paneled walls, its velvet carpet and furniture, its grand piano. He heard anew the throb of the engines, and the rush of water from the great revolving wheels; he had the sense, too, of the immensity of the vast river, gleaming with twinkling points of light close at hand, where the waves caught the glitter from the illuminated craft, and tossed it from one to another as the surges of the displaced water broke about the hull; further away could be seen the swift current hurrying on, a different dusky tint from the darkness; and still further, where the limits of vision were reached, one had even yet some subtle realization of that unceasing irresistible flow, although unseen and unheard. He remembered leaning over the guards and idly watching a number of mules on the deck below, crowded so thickly that they seemed only a dark restlessly stirring mass, until at some landing, when they were excited by the clamors of the roustabouts loading on more cotton, the pallid glare of the electric light rendered distinguishable the tossing snorting heads and wild dilated eyes. An ill-starred cargo! The frantic struggles of this animated mass caused much loss of human life; many a bold swimmer might have gained the land but for the uncontrolled plunging of those heavy hoofs. And there was no lack of light to reveal the full horrors of the fate: those huge piles of bales of blazing cotton illumined the river for twenty miles. How unprescient, how strangely stolid, the human organism, the phlegmatic mind, the insensate soul, that no nerve, no faint tremor of fear or forecast, no vague presentiment, heralded the moment when every condition of life was reversed!

Up in the pilot-house he was now, with the captain and the pilot and the great shadowy wheel. The ladies had all vanished, leaving the cabin below deserted and a trifle forlorn. Once he had taken his way through those sacred precincts, affecting to be searching for some one; and so he was,--to discover if any one there was worth looking at twice: and this he esteemed a justifiable if not a laudable enterprise, for were the ladies not welcome to look at him? His trim business suit he felt was quite the correct thing. He had entire confidence in his tailor, and he swore by his barber! His proper thankfulness to his Creator, too, was not impaired by any morbid self-depreciation. With his strong, alert, handsome figure, his dark red-brown hair, his eyes of the same tint, only kindled into fire, his long dark lashes, his drooping mustache, and the features with which nature had taken some very particular pains,--the ladies were quite welcome not to turn their heads away, if they chose.

However, his vanity was not insatiable. He had made his triumphal progress through the circle earlier in the evening, and now he was relishing the captain’s surprised laughter at sundry feats that he was exhibiting with a silver dollar and a goblet which did not always hold water. One moment the silver dollar was under it, glimmering affably through the thin glass; then, with no human approach to it, the goblet was empty. It seemed the problem of life to the jolly captain to discover how this was done, and being an ambitious wight, he assured his passenger, with a wild wager of ten dollars to nothing, that, after the boat should leave the bank again, he would be able to do the trick himself before they could make another landing. Before they made another landing he was initiated into deeper mysteries.

The boat was heading slowly for the shore. For the whistle, in loud husky amplitudes of sound, overpowering when heard so close at hand, had broken abruptly on the air, and the echoes of all the wild moss-draped cypress woods on either hand were answering the accustomed sound through the dark aisles of the swamp. To many a far cabin up lonely bayous they carried the note of the progress of “de big boat up de ribber.” The great tremulous craft was swinging majestically round in midstream. Now and again sounded the sharp jangling of the pilot’s bell. Then the boat paused with a quivering shock, backed, veered to one side, approached the shore, paused again, and then smoothly glided forward, trembled anew, and was still.

He had gone out on the hurricane deck. The wind blew fresh from the opposite shore; he was sensible of a certain attraction in the aspect of the gloom which was as above a darkling sea, for the further bank was hardly visible by day, and utterly effaced by night. The stars were in the water as well as in the sky. He looked up at them above the two dusky columns of the boat’s chimneys, which were bejeweled now with swinging lights. The sudden stillness of the machinery gave one to hear the sounds from the land. A crane clanged out a wild woodsy cry from somewhere in the darkness. An owl, hooting from the bank, sent its voice of ill omen far along the currents of the great deep silent river. The clamor from the landing caught his attention, and he turned back to look down at the cluster of twinkling lights,--for the place was a mere hamlet. And but for the shifting of his attitude,--oh, could he but have contented his gaze with the sad spring night by the riverside, the lonely woods, the waste of waters, the reflection of the stars in the depths and the stars themselves in the infinite heights of the dark sky,--could this have sufficed, he said to himself as the girl read aloud the story of his fate, he might be living now.

For alive as the man looked, he was dead!

And the end of Lucien Royce--for this was his real name--came to pass in this way.

That night, as he shifted his position on the hurricane deck, a young fellow coming up the broad landing-stage amongst the neighborhood loafers bound to take a drink at the bar of every passing steamboat, caught sight of him in the steady pervasive radiance of the electric search-light now aflare on the boat, and lifted his voice in a friendly hail. This young fellow was very visible in the warm spring afternoon in the far-away mountains, where he had never been. The juggler inadvertently glanced down at the russet shoes on his feet, for this man had then stood in them. It was he who wore, that night, the long blue hose, the blue flannel shirt, the black-and-red blazer, the knickerbockers, and the tan-colored belt, which was drawn an eyelet or so tighter now, for the juggler was slighter of build. Notified by the whistle of the boat of its approach, he had come down to the landing on his bicycle, merely for the break in the monotony of a long visit at a relative’s plantation. Royce remembered how this other fellow had looked in this toggery, grown so familiar, as they stood together at the bar, and he asked of the newcomer more than once what he would take. Very jolly they were together at the bar. It was hard to part. Lucien Royce could scarcely resist the pressing insistence to return at an early day and visit this friend at his sister’s place, a few miles back from the river, where he himself was a guest. But John Grayson was the prodigal son in an otherwise irreproachable family, and Royce preferred more responsible introduction to make his welcome good. With this hampering thought in mind he was not apt at excuses. John Grayson, noting that he was ill at ease, instantly attributed it to commercial anxiety, and asked, with rude curiosity, how his firm was weathering the flurry. For this was a time of extreme financial stress. A general panic was in progress. Assignments were announced by the dozen daily. The banks were going down one upon another, like a row of falling bricks. With business much extended, with heavy margins to cover and notes for large amounts about to fall due, the cotton commission firm, Greenhalge, Gould & Fife, of St. Louis, of which his late father had been a partner, and of which he was an employee, had made great efforts to collect all the money due them in the lower country, and Lucien Royce had been sent south on this mission. He had succeeded beyond their expectations. Owing to the prevalent total lack of confidence in the banks, he had been instructed to transmit a considerable sum by express. This, however, was promptly attached in the express office at St. Louis to satisfy a claim against the firm; and although they were advised it could not be sustained in court, the proceeding greatly embarrassed them, being, in fact, designed at this crisis to force a compromise in order to release the surplus funds. To furnish security proved impossible under the circumstances; and the firm being thus balked, Royce telegraphed in cipher to them for authority to bring the remainder home on his person, that it might be in readiness to take up their paper. Although he was rarely troubled by the weight of the money-belt which he thus wore, containing a large sum in bills and specie, he was very conscious of it now when Grayson, who with all the rest of St. Louis had heard of the attachment suit, abruptly demanded, with a knitting of his brow, “How in the world do you get your collections to them, if you can’t send the money by express or draft?”

Royce controlled his face, and replied evasively, “Oh, the financial situation is on the mend now. As to the firm, it will pull through all right, without a doubt.”

John Grayson listened, his auburn head cocked to one side. He winked a roguish dark eye. Then, with a sudden jocose lunge at his friend, he slipped his arm around his waist, feeling there the heavy roll of the belt, and burst into rollicking laughter. The scuffling demonstration--for Royce had violently resisted--was eyed with stately disapproval by an elderly planter of the old régime, who possessed now more manners than means; evidently contrasting the public “horse-play,” as he doubtless considered it, of these representatives of the present day with the superior deportment of the youth of the punctilious past.

Lucien Royce remembered that he had been secretly perturbed after this, for he knew that Grayson drank to excess and talked wildly in his cups; and although, in view of his own safety, he would hardly have cared to make public the character of his charge, he realized with positive dismay that it might be fatal to the interests of the firm should he encounter some legal process at the wharf in St. Louis, the result of this discovery.

But he was simple-hearted, after all. He did not suspect John Grayson of aught dishonorable. To the world at large he seemed a fine young fellow, of excellent forbears, merely sowing his wild oats,--a crop which many men have harvested in early years with scant profit, it is true, but without derogation to common honesty and repute.

Royce subsequently sought to urge in compassion for his friend that the turpitude of the crime was insomuch the less that it was not deliberate and premeditated. Certain it was that Grayson’s cry of amazement and his plunge toward the guards were very like the precipitancy of dismay when he found that the huge boat was sheering off; she was turning as he dashed down the stair, and was headed once more on her course when he realized that in their conviviality he and his friend had failed to hear the sonorous panting of the engines again astir, the jangling of the bell, the heavy plashing of the buckets striking the water as the wheels revolved anew, and that the landing was now a mile down the river.

The captain showed much polite concern when the two young men resorted hastily to the “texas” and found him seated at a table, eying, with an air of great cunning and a robust intention to solve the mystery forthwith, a silver dollar which was securely invested under an inverted glass goblet, and which, so far as his powers were capable of extricating it thence, save by the rule of thumb, as it were, was the safest silver dollar ever known.

He desisted from this occupation for the moment to master the new perplexity that confronted him, and to express his most affable and ceremonious regret; for his boat carried all the cotton shipped from the rich sister’s plantation, and the dictates of policy aided his constitutionally kindly disposition.

“Why, I wouldn’t have kidnapped you this way for”--his eye fell on the bit of silver shining through the goblet--“for a dollar,” he concluded modestly. “I’ll put you ashore in the yawl, if you like. I would turn down-stream and land again, but”--he faced half round from the table, with the lightness characteristic of some portly men, and sat with one hand on the back of the chair, and the other on the goblet--“but the truth is I’m running pretty much on one wheel; there was an accident to the other before we were a hundred miles from New Orleans, and with this wind blowing straight across the river it’s mighty difficult getting out from the left bank; she can hardly climb against the current.”

John Grayson appeared for a moment to contemplate the suggestion of going ashore in the yawl. The wind came in a great gust through the towering chimneys, the lights flickered, the texas seemed to rock upon the superstructure of the hurricane deck. “I don’t believe I care to be on the river in a yawl in this wind, this dark night,” he said, evidently debating the matter within himself.

“Then go to St. Louis and back with us!” exclaimed the hospitable captain. “Shan’t cost you a cent, of course. We’ll make our next landing a little after midnight, I reckon, and I’ll telegraph Mrs. Halliday from there.”

The jovial evening seemed to the juggler, as he listened to the girl reading aloud, and stared at her with eyes blank of expression and that introverted look which follows mental processes rather than material objects, like an experience in another planet, so far away it was, as if so long ago. He remembered that he scarcely dared to touch a glass, with the consciousness of the treasure he carried in the belt he wore and all its interdependent interests, but John Grayson drank blithely enough, and the generous liquor relaxed beyond all precedent his loosely hinged tongue. Lucien Royce kept close by his side as he wandered about the boat, having developed a fear that he would tell the secret that had come so unwarrantably into his possession; and when the captain asked as a favor that, on account of the crowded condition of the boat, Royce would share his stateroom with the guest, he acceded at once, preferring to have Grayson able to talk only to him until such time as he should be once more duly sober.

He consigned the guest to the upper berth, thinking that thus Grayson could not leave the stateroom without his knowledge. He lay awake by a great effort until he was sure from the snores of his jovial friend that Grayson was asleep; and when he dropped into slumber himself, as he was young and tired, having been much in the open air that day, to which he was unaccustomed in his clerical vocation, he slept like a log.

His consciousness was renewed, after a blank interval, with the sense of being awakened in his berth by a violent jar, and of striving to rouse himself, and of falling asleep again. Another interval of blankness, and he remembered definitely the grasp of John Grayson’s hand on his shoulder, roughly shaking him, with the terrified announcement that there was something the matter. He experienced a sort of surprise that John Grayson was in the stateroom; then--it was strange that his mind should have thus taken cognizance of trifles--he recalled the crowded condition of the boat, and realized that his friend was leaping down from the upper berth. He stated, with drowsy dignity, that he did not care a damn what was the matter; that he had paid for his stateroom, which was more than _some_ people could say, and that if he were not allowed to sleep in it, he would give bond that he would know the reason why.

The next thing of which he was aware was a flash of light in the room. The door had opened from the saloon, and a clerk had put in his head to say that there was no danger. The boat had struck a snag, it was true, but the damage was slight. Somehow Royce slept but lightly after this. The unreasoning sense of impending misfortune had come to him at last. Presently he was awake and conscious that he was alone. He lifted himself on his elbow and listened. What was that low roar? The wind? That sound of banging timbers must be the flapping of shutters or doors as the gust rushed across the river. He heard a clamor on the boiler deck. Voices?--or was it the wind, screaming wildly as it went? And why did they run the engines at that furious rate? He could feel the strain of the machinery in the very floor under his feet.

As he slipped out of the lower berth he perceived that the gray dawn was in the contracted little room; he could see through the glass of the door opening on the guards the tawny-tinted stretches of water, the sad-hued cypress woods on a distant bank, draped with fog as well as with hanging moss, and down the stream the whiter tints of an island of sand covered with sparse vegetation, locally known as a “tow-head,” for which the disabled boat was running with every pound of pressure which the engines could carry. There was, in truth, something the matter, for the tow-head would have been given a wide berth in a normal state of affairs; getting aground, when the lesser of two evils, showed a crisis indeed.

He looked about hastily for his clothes. They were gone, and in their place John Grayson’s toggery lay in a heap. In his panic and the darkness Grayson had probably caught the garments nearest to his hand. His deserted friend hastily invested himself in the suit of clothes that John Grayson had left. As he was drawing on the blazer, suddenly a hoarse cry smote his ear. “No bottom!” sang out the leadsman. They were taking soundings. “No-o bottom!” And he felt the vibrations of the tone in the very fibres of his quaking heart.