The Storm Centre Part 17

"Ought to be--cost me six hundred dollars!" said Julius.

"Lo!--my Heabenly Friend!" exclaimed Uncle Ephraim, falling back aghast, unaccustomed to the inflations of the currency of the Confederacy.

When the transformation was complete, he looked up from his knees, in which lowly posture he had a.s.sisted in drawing down the trousers over the boots, and smiled broadly in satisfaction.

"Dar now!" he exclaimed. "'Fore de Lawd, ye look plumb beau-some in dem comical cloes. Dey becomes ye! Dat they does--dough I ain't never see no such color as they got, 'dout 'twuz on a cow!"

He made up a bundle of the Confederate uniform and stowed it away on one of the ledges. "I don't want dem Yankees ter ever git no closer ter dis yere shed snake-skin dan dey is now."

But after the old man had been a.s.sisted to clamber out of "the vestibule of h.e.l.l" by the stalwart arm of his young master and had disappeared among the firs, Julius made up the uniform into a compact bundle, packed it into the portmanteau, and, putting out the candle, sat down in the obscurities of the subterranean pa.s.sage to await the enhanced opportunity for escape that the dark clouds, now gathering about the moon, might bring to the fortuitous collocation of circ.u.mstance.

When the sentries next heard any suggestion of Uncle Ephraim's presence, he was still singing on his return,--now and then humming and whistling as he came. He was approaching the house from the driveway, having indeed been to the river; he was bringing home a goodly mess of fish.

CHAPTER XI

An hour later there was a more significant landfall than the fate of these finny trophies. Few of the river craft kept their dates of arrival with certainty, and this was especially the case with the general packets. Though the water was high, the operations of the Confederates rendered the pa.s.sage sometimes unsafe, sometimes impracticable. Now and again the Federal authorities pressed a boat into government service for a time and released it to its owners and its old traffic when the emergency was past. Therefore on this dull night, when no sign or news was received of the _Calypso_, overdue some ten hours, the wharf became deserted. Hardly a light showed on the river banks or along the spread of the stream, save indistinct gleams in the misty gloom where the picket boats kept up a ceaseless vigilant patrol. The gunboats, with a vaguely saurian suggestion lay with their noses in the mud. Here and there in allotted berths were the ordinary steamboats with their curiously flimsy aspect, as if constructed of white cardboard, silent, disgorged, asleep. The rafts, the coal-barges, the humble skiffs, and flatboats were all tied up for the night. The town had lapsed to silence and slumber as the hour waxed late. The great pale stream seemed as vacant as the great pale sky.

Suddenly far down the river two lights, close together, high in the air, red and green, shimmering through the mist, struck the attention of a wanderer along the high bluffs near Judge Roscoe's house, even before a hoa.r.s.e, remonstrant, outspreading sound, the clamor of the whistle three times repeated, hailing the landing, invaded the murky air. It was a spell to rouse all the precincts of the river bank. Lights flickered here and there. Hack drivers, who had given up the expectation of the boat's arrival at any hour that would admit of the transfer of the pa.s.sengers to the hotel, heard the sound from afar, harnessed their teams in haste, and the carriages came rattling turbulently down the stony declivity to the wharf. Baggage vans, empty and curiously noisy, recklessly jolted along, careening ill-poised and light without their wonted burdens. The omnibuses, with the glow of their dim little front windows to distinguish their approach, were soon on the scene; the driver of one was vociferating with a hackman, because of the lack of lighted carriage lamps, which had caused a collision and the wrenching away of the door and the cover of the step of the "bus," swaying open for want of a cautionary pull on the cord. Loud and turbulent did this wrangle grow, and presently it was punctuated by blows. The crowd that the mere sound of a fight summons from invisibility was almost instantly swaying about the scene and hindering the efforts of the police, who found it necessary to interfere, and while both partic.i.p.ants were arrested and hurried off to the station in the clutches of the law, they left their respective vehicles like white elephants in the hands of the remainder of the force, two of whom must needs mount the boxes to restrain the "cattle," as the hack driver mournfully called his beasts in commending them to police protection. The horses plunged and reared, terrified at the apparition of the _Calypso_, now manoeuvring and turning in the river, the paddles beating upon the water with a splashing impact as the side-wheels slowly revolved. The ripples were all aglow with the reflection of her red furnace fires, and her cabin lights sent long avenues of white evanescent radiance into the vague riparian glooms. The jangle of the pilot bells and the sound of the exhaust pipes came alternately on the air. And presently the great white structure was motionless, towering up into the gray uncertainties of the night, the black chimneys seeming to fairly touch the clouds, the lacelike guards filled with flitting figures all in wild commotion pressing toward the stairway.

Albeit the discharge of the freight would not take place till morning, the scene was one of great confusion. In accordance with the regulation which the military occupation of the country required, the pa.s.sengers rendered up their pa.s.ses on deck to the officer who had boarded the vessel for the purpose of receiving them, permitting the travellers to depart one by one through a guarded gate, but it was impossible to identify them after they were once on the wharf. Hence there was naught to distinguish from the other pa.s.sengers a gentleman carrying a portmanteau, who entered an omnibus, save that the wharf lamps might have shown that he was handsome, taller than common, with a fine presence and gait, and clad in garments of unmistakably English cut and make. The night clerk of the hotel evidently saw nothing else unusual in the stranger as he stood under the gas-jet to register at the desk in the office, almost deserted at this hour--not even in the momentary hesitation when he had the pen in hand. He wrote "John Wray, Junior, Manchester, England," had a room a.s.signed to him, and pa.s.sed on to the late supper, for which Uncle Ephraim's negligence had prepared him to do ample justice.

Julius did not appear next morning at the usual breakfast hour. The terrors of the Chinese gong, that was wont to rouse the laggards as it howled about the hotel under the belaborings of a stalwart waiter, failed to stimulate his activity or break his slumber. The fatigues and dangers Julius had encountered had prostrated him. He was unconsciously recuperating, gathering strength for the rebound. He did not wake, indeed, till near noon. He turned once or twice luxuriously in the comfortably sheeted bed--at his home they had not dared to purloin linen from the household store to furnish his couch in the attic--and then, with his hands clasped under his head, he lay with a mind almost vacant of any conscious process, mechanically, quietly, taking in the details of the place. The sun sifted in at a crevice of the green shutters of the window that opened to the floor and gave upon a wide gallery without--now and again he heard at considerable intervals the pa.s.sing of a footstep on this gallery. He noticed the wind stir and the flicker of the shadow of foliage on the blinds. The room was in the second story, and he knew that there were trees in a s.p.a.ce at the rear of the old-fashioned little hotel. The furniture was of a highly varnished, cleanly, straw-colored aspect, of some cheap wood that refreshingly made no pretentions to be aught but what it was, for on the bureau drawers, the head and foot-boards of the bed, and on the rocking-chair was painted a gay little bouquet of flowers in natural but intense tints. A fresh Chinese matting was on the floor, and muslin curtains hung from poles supported on pins that had a great bra.s.s rosette or boss at the extremity. The building enclosed a quadrangle, bounded by the river at the lower end. On each of the other three sides the wide galleries of the three-story brick edifice overlooked the gra.s.sy s.p.a.ce. He had learned that the hotel had gone into the hands of a new proprietor, but even were it otherwise he hardly feared recognition, although he had been born and reared in the immediate vicinity. At his time of life a few years work great changes. The boy of nineteen was hardly to be identified in the man of twenty-two, with his mustached lips, his broadened shoulders, his three inches of added height, and the composure, confidence, and capability conferred by those years of activity and emergency and responsibility working at high pressure. Some old resident might recognize the Roscoe eye, but he knew he could trust the kindly a.s.sociations of "auld lang syne" to avoid the sifting of a casual recollection. Besides, this was hardly likely to befall, for the town was an ever shifting kaleidoscope of confused humanity. It was full of strangers,--Federal officers, on service and unattached, on leave of absence, wounded, and their families; special correspondents; hospital nurses; emissaries of the Sanitary Commission; enterprising promoters of all manner of jobs, and the horde of nondescript non-combatants that hangs on the rear of every army, seeking the many methods of securing a windfall from the vast expenditures of money and goods necessary to maintain a great force on a war footing. He was hardly likely to meet any one who had ever known him, or even his father, in his stay at the hotel, which he must contrive by some method to make as short as practicable. Then suddenly a great dismay fell upon him. He lifted his head and gasped as he looked about him for something that was gone! His treacherous memory!--in the prostration of his mental faculties by excitement and fatigue, in the lull of his long slumber, he had forgotten the alias he had registered as his own name on his entrance to the hotel. He thought of half a dozen of the most usual nomenclature, striving to goad his mind to a recognition of each in turn as the one he had selected. He was in desperation. True, he might have an opportunity to study the register and could recognize his own handwriting. But something--anything might occur in the interval in which it might be necessary to give the name he had a.s.sumed, and any incongruity with the registered alias would be fatal. Every casual step along the hall on one side, or the gallery on the other, threw him into a sudden tremor as he prefigured a stoppage, a knock, an inquiry--"Are you Mr. Alfred Jones?--here's a note for you. Messenger waits for an answer."

"And _I_ don't know whether to answer as Mr. Jones or not!" he said to himself in a panic. He might turn away a note of warning from his father, who possibly had recognized his handwriting on the register, of greeting from Leonora in whose face he had seen an appalled commiseration as he sped past her yesterday in his father's hall; or it might be that some Confederate agent within the lines would hear of his plight and contrive this way to communicate with him. No matter how cautiously worded, his was not a correspondence at this juncture to decline to receive, and to turn lightly over to the investigating scrutiny of all the A. Joneses to whom it might be presented. On the other hand he might "throw all the fat in the fire," should he meddle with the large correspondence of the Jones family by opening sealed missives bearing their name, obviously not intended for him, if he had registered as Abner Smith.

Julius was about to spring up, throw on his clothes, and rush to the register, when the name struck him with the force of conviction. _John Wray_--That was it! _Manchester, England!_ The address had been selected to take advantage of the typically English clothes. He meditated upon it as he sat upright in bed. He had added the "Junior," for the sake of verisimilitude. He smiled with satisfaction to have regained it.

Then--"I must have something to fix that in my memory," he said.

He looked fruitlessly about. He had no paper, save the map in the lining of his boot, no pencil, no pen and ink, naught for a memorandum. Then with his gay youthful inconsequence--"Constant repet.i.tion will settle it--Mr. John Wray--Mr. John Wray; Mr. John Wray. How do you do to-day?"

He threw himself back on his pillow, laughing at the unintentional rhyme.

"I'm a poet--if I did but know it!"

His irrepressible youthful mirth found its account in the most untoward trifles.

"There it is again!" he said to himself, "I have destroyed the sequence of my ideas. I am just as likely now to say, 'I am Mr. Poet'--or perhaps with the notion that I have got to b.u.t.t out of this somehow--'I am Mr.

Goat!'"

He laughed again, yawned lazily, stretched his arms upward, and fell back luxuriously on the bed, resting his tired muscles.

He lay staring at the design of the wall-paper, which was in scrolls of brown that, as they whorled over clear enamelled s.p.a.ces of creamy white, enclosed an outline in fainter browns and yellow,--a scene of waves breaking on rocks and surmounted by a lighthouse; a far and foreign suggestion to this deeply inland nook, and refreshing, for there was more than vernal warmth in the air. And presently, still repeating--"Mr.

John Wray, how do you do to-day?" he slipped off into a half-conscious doze from which he was roused only by a knock at the door.

CHAPTER XII

Downstairs in the hotel there had been the usual stir of the morning.

Till a late hour the punkahs had swung back and forth above the long tables in the dining room, each furnished with one of those primitive contrivances for the banishment of flies. The swaying of the pendent fringes of paper rivalled the rustling of the trees in the quadrangle outside, on which the broad, long windows looked, as each punkah-cord was pulled by a specimen of the cheerful and alert pickaninny of that day, keenly interested in all that occurred. Others ran in and out of the kitchen, bearing to the waiters, to be dispensed among the guests, interminable relays of the waffles of those times, golden brown, delicately rich, soft, yet crisp, of a peculiar lightness,--a kind that will be seen no more, despite the food inventions and dietetic improvements, for the artists of that choice cookery are all dead and their receipts only serve to mark the decadence of proficiency.

Strangers of all sorts, officers of the army, civilians from every quarter of the north, filled the public apartments, aimlessly chatting, discussing the news from the front, smoking matutinal cigars, buying papers from the omnipresent newsboys, or reading them in the big arm-chairs within or on the benches under the trees in the quadrangle, glimpsed in attractive verdure through the open doors of the office.

There was continual pa.s.sing through the halls, and groups filled the verandas and stood about on the sidewalk in front of the hotel, for the great brick pillars that supported the roof of the arcade at the height of the third story were anch.o.r.ed at the curb of the pavement, and this colonnade ill.u.s.trated the forgotten architect's idea of impressiveness.

In the gay sunshine, the streets, with substantial two and three storied buildings on either side, with much effect of big airy windows and now and again a high, iron-railed balcony, were congested with traffic. The pavements were crowded with pedestrians of varying aspect,--freedmen in rags, idle, exhaustlessly zealous of sensation, grotesquely slouching along, eying the shop windows, seeing all that there was to be seen; soldiers in uniform on furlough; citizens of a new migration, having almost superseded the old townsmen, so limited were the latter in number in comparison with the present population of the gorged town; ladies, many the wives and daughters of Federal officers, with an unfamiliar accent and walk, and with toilettes of a more recent style than characterized the native exponents of fashion. Now and again some pa.s.sing body of troops filled the avenue,--cavalry, with guidon and trumpet, or a jaunty progress of infantry, to the fife and drum and the tune of "The girl I left behind me!"

At this period the war had focussed a sort of superficial prosperity here. The counters were covered with Northern goods to supply the needs and excite the extravagance of this medley of congregated humanity.

Street venders howled their wares in raucous voices that added to the unintelligible clamors of the old highways that were wont to be so dull and quiet and decorous.

The paving stones roared with the reverberation of wheels. Sometimes endless trains of white-hooded army wagons defiled by; again heavy open transfers; sometimes an ambulance anguish-laden pa.s.sed slowly, taking the crown of the causeway. Occasionally a light-wheeled buggy whisked about with the unmistakable effect of display and with a military charioteer handling the ribbons, who found the Tennessee blooded roadsters much to his mind. And forever the dray, laden with cotton bales sometimes, and sometimes with boxes, or barrels, or hogsheads, took its drag-tailed way to the depots or to the wharf. All was dominated by the presence of the mule--in force, driven loose in hundreds through the town to some remote scene of usefulness, now drawing the great transfers and drays, now giving an exhibition of the peculiar pertinacity of mule nature by planted hoofs and ears laid back and a resolution of immovableness, bringing the whole tumultuous noisy rout to a blockade of such intricacy and c.u.mbrous obstructiveness that one might wonder by what magic the interlocked wheels, the twisted harness, the crowded beasts, the whistling, long-thonged whips and shouting, swearing men were ever disentangled.

These incidents impeded progress, and the pa.s.sengers from the noon railroad train were disposed to complain and comment, and seemed fit subjects for sympathy, as they interchanged petulant accounts of experiences at the hotel desk, waiting to register. One was apparently not unknown to the clerk now in charge, an affable functionary to the deserving few, altogether stiff and unapproachable to the general public. He was the day clerk, and a far more magnificent individual than the forlorn night bird that languished behind the desk with no company but the wee sma' hours of the clock, and the somnolent bell-boys on their bench, and the watchman, walking hither and thither like a ghost as if his only mission were to be about, and the incoming traveller. The day clerk's courtesy had the grace of a personal compliment as he hurried the book away from the last signer and pa.s.sed it on to another in the line,--a somewhat portly, red-faced, middle-aged gentleman, with short side-whiskers, of the hairbrush effect and a pale hue, not definitely gray, for he seemed hardly old enough for such tokens of years, and yet the flaxen tint had lost its earlier l.u.s.tre. His hair was of the same shade, and he wore a stiff hat, a suit of "pepper-and-salt,"

and a dark overcoat of light weight.

"Glad to see you, Mr. Wray," said the clerk, handing him the pen. "I am sorry I can't give you a room to yourself, but I can put you a bed in your son's room."

The pen was poised uncertainly--the gentleman with the side-whiskers stared.

"Your son got in last night," explained the clerk.

The gentleman still silently stared. He had a close, compact mouth, a cautious mouth, and the lips were now compressed with an expression of waiting incommunicativeness. He evidently had not expected to be confronted with a ready-made family.

The clerk surprised in turn cast on him a glance of keen intentness. In these strenuous times every stranger in the town was liable to suspicion as a Confederate emissary. "I was not on duty, myself, but I thought I saw--ah--here it is," turning the page of the register, "John Wray, Junior, Manchester, England."

For one moment the portly gentleman gazed at the signature as if dumfounded. Then with an air of ready recognition he justified his previous manifestations of extreme surprise by explaining the mistake of the clerk as to the matter of ident.i.ty.

"Oh, aw, a distant relative," he said, at last. "Ah, aw,--he is the son of a cousin of the same name as mine, 'John Wray.' The younger man is to be a.s.sociated with me in business. What room? Number ninety?"

And as he was a.s.signed to that haven he took the pen and wrote, "John Wray, Manchester, England."

Thus it was that, awakened by the brisk tap at the door, Julius, leaning out of bed, turned the key, and reached out for the pitcher of ice water for which, being warm and thirsty, he had a drowsy impression that he had rung the bell. Perceiving his mistake, and lifting himself on his elbow, Julius beheld entering this blond and robust stranger, an inexplicable apparition, too solid for a spectre, too prosaic for a fancy.

The visitor stood, when the door had closed, gazing silently down at the rec.u.mbent figure, while Julius, amazed at the form which his Nemesis had taken, gazed up silently and lugubriously at the intruder.

All the methods of Mr. John Wray were in conformity with his portly rotundity, his slow respectability, his unimaginative commercialism.

The young man found speech first. "Why this unexpected pleasure?" he asked ceremoniously, but with a satiric inflection.

"Sorry to intrude, I'm sure," said the elder. "But my name is John Wray of Manchester, England."

The skies had fallen on Julius. He strove to recover himself.

"And do you like it?" he asked vacuously.