True and Other Stories Part 4

'Tain't nothin' to her that you hold us off from bein' married, by that foolishness and studyin' o' yourn. It's cl'ar as day she thinks a heap more on you than she does on me. An' I tell ye ye're the one that's to blame. Ye done it, and ye knowed it. Ye took her heart away from me."

A new perception broke upon Sylv. He contemplated Dennis with a sort of curiosity, and a smile stirred the loose dark beard about his lips. Any one but his angry brother might have seen that he regarded the idea of his being enamored of a woman with a disdain curbed only by a sense of the comic.

"So you stand up here and tell me that, do you?" he retorted. "Well, all I've got to say, Dennie, is that you're acting like a fool."

Dennis's hand clutched the stock of the gun, nervously, under the strain of the effort he made to control himself. "No, I ain't," he declared. "I been a fool afore, but I ain't one now. I see the whole thing, I tell ye. She's set her heart on you, and you've set yourn on her."

Sylv braced himself a little, and looked resolute. "Now I give you fair warning," he said. "I tell you square that I don't care about Adela Reefe more than as a sister--my sister and your wife that is to be. Are you going to deny my word?"

"Yes, I am," the other a.s.serted, doggedly.

"And you're going on, after that, to a.s.sert that I took her love away from you?"

"Yes, I am."

"Then I say, _you lie_!" Sylv returned, hotly. The same pa.s.sionateness that ruled Dennis was present in him, also, though well concealed under his habitual calm; but it had broken loose now.

In an instant Dennis lifted his gun to an aim. "No man can say that to me," he thundered.

His finger slid down to the trigger, and he drew the hammer back.

Sylv stood in the road, unmoved, the books under his arms. "It's too easy a shot," he said, quickly, but in a low voice. "Besides, I can't fire back."

"You won't have any call for that," Dennis a.s.sured him, grimly. He spoke coolly, but his rage completely mastered him.

"Stop!" cried Sylv, when the gun-mouth seemed about to burst into flame.

"Stop!"

The syllable was repeated from the woods close by them. Was it an echo?

No; that was impossible; there was no echo in that place, and both men knew it. Besides, there was a different tone in the voice which seemed to ring out from the shadow of the pines--an accent of alarm and agony, unlike the peremptory cry which Sylv had uttered.

Dennis brought down his gun, instantly. "What's that?" he exclaimed, thoroughly unnerved. He felt as if some supernatural warning had been given him.

"It sounded," said Sylv, "like--" Here he checked himself, and stared across the road, trying to make out something among the trees.

Dennis turned in the same direction, and in a moment they had both moved thither, and were straining their eyes to discover the source of the sound. But their scrutiny was in vain: nothing appeared. It is true, they fancied a noise as of some one stirring, some one making a hasty retreat; but that might have been only the wind that came with stealthy swiftness from the ocean side and set all the murmurous branches in movement. Was there a figure flying through the piny arcade? Of that, also, they could not be sure; for the twilight had increased more and more, and darkness seemed to ooze through the air like a palpable exudation from the gummy trees.

The brothers faced half around and exchanged a peculiar glance that was tinged with awe. But Dennis fell to trembling.

"Hyar! Take it!" he said, in a voice of horror. "Take the gun, Sylv. I was crazy. What was I a-doin' just now? Oh, take it away from me; don't let me touch it!"

Sylv, on the point of complying, paused and said slowly: "No, Dennie, I won't take it. You didn't think what you were doing. I trust you."

Still shaking, Dennis looked at him with a dumb, bewildered grat.i.tude.

"Come," said his brother, stepping again into the path.

Dennis followed him, but as they left the spot he said: "It war like Deely's voice, Sylv. She saved me, this time."

CHAPTER IV.

A VISION.

That which Adela had seen and overheard so startled and horrified her, it raised such a war of emotions, that she was unable to reflect upon what she ought to do. In coming through the woods, obedient to the vague need she felt of following Dennis, she had heard the rising voices of the disputants, and when she reached a spot where she could command a view, she beheld her lover with his gun raised, on the very verge of committing murder.

For a moment her every faculty was paralyzed. Had the weapon been levelled at herself, her dread would have been less freezing: she could have been brave and active on her own behalf. To see another person threatened with mortal danger, and he the brother of Dennis, was different. In the presence of impending crimes, human beings seem to yield to a painless lethargy like that which is said to overcome the victim of a tiger, even before the claws have made a single wound. The extreme of terror suspends the faculty of feeling, as of action; and this is what renders possible the enactment of the most dreadful deeds in broad day, before a crowd of witnesses.

To shriek would have been the easy resource of some women. Adela Reefe did not know how to shriek. She might have bounded forward, to stay Dennis's hand or divert his aim; but her muscles failed her as if they had been caught and webbed with invisible cords. Besides, any sudden movement might have resulted only in precipitating a tragic end.

Just then it was that Sylv called out; and Adela echoed him, half-unconsciously, but with a wilder earnestness. The two exclamations dissolved the spell that had held her. The crisis was over, and the catastrophe had been warded off. What was she to do next? If she appeared, the effect of her sharp outcry might be lost; Dennis might be maddened to some fresh outbreak worse than the first, by the knowledge that she had seen him in that awful situation. The difficulties, the quarrel that might ensue, were she to confront the brothers then, would be full of peril. There was nothing for it but to hide; and, gliding from tree to tree, she made her escape.

It was a long time before she finally reached her father's house at Hunting Quarters that night; for, driven by the agitation which followed the episode in the woods, and troubled by a cloud of doubts, wonders, and anxieties that rose upon her mind, she wandered restlessly along the sh.o.r.e, as homeless and unfettered as the marsh-ponies that were tossing their manes above the dim, low line of that outer strip of land which, across the Sound, ran out thirty or forty miles under the evening sky toward Ocrac.o.ke and Hatteras.

Now it happened that Mr. Edward Lance, the guest at Colonel Floyd's, had been out on a solitary excursion of scientific inquiry, diversified by fishing, along that same sandy barrier. He stayed later than he expected; and, boating over to the main in the nightfall, he came walking along the uneven and indented sh.o.r.e, on his way to Fairleigh Park, while Adela was still abroad.

Lance was sorry to be so late, but he had abundant material for agreeable revery with which to occupy himself until he should get back to the society of Miss Jessie and her father. Some three weeks had pa.s.sed since he had come to the hospitable shelter of the colonel's roof, and he had had time to become much interested in other things than the errand which had originally brought him hither.

The young man, it should be explained, was a New Yorker, whose tastes were cultivated and progressive; fortunately for him, he likewise had money enough to admit of following his bent.

"He is the son of my agent's former partner in business," Colonel Floyd had told his daughter, when he received the letter which led to his sending Lance an invitation to visit them. "You don't know his name, my dear, and indeed it is unfamiliar to me. Mr. Lance senior died some years since, before my relations with Mr. Hedson, who was in business with him, began. But I understand that he is an accomplished young gentleman, who wishes to inquire into the resources of our State--more especially the coast-belt."

"That's where _we_ live, isn't it, pa?" Miss Jessie inquired.

"Yes, my child," said the colonel, impressively. "He desires to study our fisheries and other industries--with a view, perhaps, to establishing some manufacturing or agricultural enterprise. It would not be at all strange, Jessie, if he were to put capital into something in our neighborhood. I think he may invest. Yes; he is probably seeking a field for his capital."

Colonel Floyd said all this as if he were reading a letter or quoting from a cyclopaedia. That was his habitual way of saying things. I should hardly call it an affectation, but he seldom spoke at any length without producing the effect of his being a standard work of reference, which would always tell you exactly what you wanted to know, and would state it in the best language.

He was a slender man, with a small but well-shaped head encased in closely cut hair that had begun to silver; the gray and the black intermingled, and shone with a glimmering changefulness, like the sheen of mica. He wore spectacles, and had that precise, tactical expression noticeable in Confederate veterans of the war and so wholly at variance with our conventional idea of the romantic Southern type. As the colonel held the lease of a turpentine plantation which he was working, near his own modest estate, he was naturally interested in the development of the "coast-belt," and was disposed to welcome the young Northern capitalist of whom his agent, Hedson, spoke so highly.

"What do you say, my daughter?" he asked Jessie, after a pause. "Would it be agreeable to you to have a visitor? Shall we invite Mr. Lance to stay with us?"

He inspected her kindly through his gla.s.ses, as if she had been some harmless little prisoner of war.

"It shall be just as you like, pa dear," said Jessie, artlessly. "And if Mr. Lance is coming--why, there's no other place for him to stay. Is there?"

The unsuspicious would have been forced to suppose, from the forlorn manner in which Miss Jessie cast her eyes around, that she regretted the absence of any convenient hostelry for the stranger's harborage.

The veteran, however, saw through her, or fancied that he did. At all events, he knew that the solitude of the Park, with only a few liberated slaves and the old housekeeper for company, could not be much more desirable for his daughter than the presence of a promising young man like Lance.

Accordingly, it was settled that Lance should come. Here he was, then, fully established, and--thanks to the perfect hospitality of the old officer--rejoicing in an unexpected sense of being thoroughly at home in those warm lat.i.tudes. It was now the end of July--a hot time to be so far South--but Lance's satisfaction with his new surroundings was so great, that he had decided to remain through the summer, and already began to think that that period would seem all too short.

While his scientific eye had been riveted upon the processes of turpentine manufacture, on the number and kinds of food-fish inhabiting the shallows of the sea, and on the feasibility of turning Elbow Crook Swamp into a luxuriant market-garden, a finer vision--which he possessed in common with some others of us who belong to the masculine side of our species--had been occupied with the dainty yet commanding outline of Jessie Floyd's face; the saucy charm of her dark hair parted on one side; her novel, half-childish, yet imperious ways.

He was thinking of her, now, as he traversed the bit of open, marsh-bordered land alongside the pines, where Dennis and Adela had taken their unpropitious walk, that day.