CHAPTER XL.
“Where is Mr. Smith?” asked Mrs. Carter, as she helped the company to soup.
“Yes, where is he?” repeated Mr. Whacker, looking up in surprise. “Perhaps he does not know that we are at dinner.”
“After conducting me to the parlor,” explained Mrs. Poythress, “he excused himself and went to his room. I fancied he was not very well.”
“Indeed!” said Mr. Whacker. “Zip, you go—”
Charley made a motion to Moses,—Zip for short,—and rising from the table and bowing his excuses, he left the room.
“I am a little afraid,” continued Mrs. Poythress, turning to me, who chanced to be her nearest neighbor at table, “that your friend over-strained himself in that tremendous leap he made to save me from falling. I am sure I felt his arm tremble as we walked towards the house. Then he was so very silent. Is he always so?”
“Generally; though I do not think it is altogether natural to him. He seems to constrain himself to silence from some motive or other; but every now and then he loses control of himself, it would seem, and breaks forth into a real torrent of brilliant talk,—no, brilliant is not the word—though torrent is. When he bursts forth in this impassioned way, he carries everything before him. By the way, his leaping is of the same character. Do you know I had to change my shoes? For when he sprang to catch you, he actually knocked me into the water.”
“What eyes he has! Such a concentrated look! And no one,” she added after a pause, “has any idea who he is?”
“Not the slightest.”
“Is it possible? What a number of strange people your dear old grandfather has contrived to bring to Elmington from time to time! Where he has found them all, or how they have found him, has always been a mystery to me.”
“Yes, but the Don is not one of grandfather’s captures. Charley must have the credit of bringing him in.”
“Then he is a good man,” replied she, with decision. “Charley never makes any mistakes. But here comes Master Charles.”
Every one looked up on Charley’s entrance. As for that young man, he looked neither to the right nor to the left. “Mr. Smith will be down presently,” said he to Mrs. Carter. As he strode around the room to take his chair, his firm-set lips wore a rather dogged expression, as though he would warn us all that, so far as he was concerned, the conversation was ended; and, hastily taking his seat, he began a vigorous attack on his soup, as if to overtake the rest of the company. Somehow every one was silent, and the isolated and rather rapid click of Charley’s spoon was distinctly audible. Alice smiled, and conversation beginning to spring up around the table, “I fear your soup is cold,” she began.
“The soup was cold?” asked he, looking up. “I am very sorry.”
“I didn’t say that,” replied she, quickly. “I remarked that I was afraid yours was cold.”
“Mine?” asked he, looking puzzled. “Why?”
“You were detained so long up-stairs.”
“Oh!” said he, renewing the assault upon the soup. “You are right,” he added; “it is ratherish cool.”
Alice was foiled. “I believe Mrs. Poythress called you.”
Charley leaned forward.
“Nothing serious, I hope?” asked Mrs. Poythress.
All eyes were fixed on Charley, every ear intent to hear his answer to this question, which Mrs. Poythress alone had ventured to ask. For a moment this master of fence and parry stood confounded; but only for a moment. “Nothing to speak of,” replied he, with careless simplicity, and, leaning back in his chair, he glanced at Uncle Dick. Richard, briskly, though with averted face, came to remove the soup-plate, and then hurried out of the room to have a quiet chuckle.
“Tain’t no use, Polly; dey jess as well let Marse Charles alone. He is a keener, he is, umgh—umgh! Dey ain’t gwine to git nothin’ out o’ him, ef you b’lieve Dick, dey ain’t, mun.” And the old worthy’s sides shook with laughter. “Dey has been tetchin’ her up pretty lively dis mornin’, dat’s a fac’, and dey wet Dick’s whistle for him, dey did, ef you b’lieve me, and more’n once, too. Well,
‘Christmas comes but once a year,
Den every nigger git his shear.’
“Hurry up, gal! hurry up!”
“Don’t come round me, boy, wid your ‘hurry up, hurry up.’ Don’t you see I’se hurryin’ up all I kin hurry up already? I b’lieve you is drunk, anyhow!”
“Pretty close to it, thank de Lord.
‘Christmas comes but once a year,
Every nigger—’”
“I tell you git out o’ dis kitchen, and mind you don’t fall and break dat dish, wid your ‘Christmas comes but once a year.’ Go ’long, boy. Dat ham’s seven years old, and you jess let it fall!”
“Hi!” thought Uncle Dick, as he entered the dining-room. “What’s he doin’ at de table?”
Richard was surprised.
For, as I am pained to have to say, the Virginians had in those days the very irrational habit of drinking before dinner; and it was to this fact that Uncle Dick alluded in the somewhat figurative language recorded above. If the truth must be told, our venerable serving-man never doubted but that the Don stayed up-stairs simply because he was too drunk to come down. The facts were far otherwise.
“Charley,” said I that night, as we were smoking our last pipe, “what was the matter with the Don to-day? Why was he not with us when we sat down to dinner?”
“Because,” said Charley, lazily lolling back in his rocking-chair, and sighting with one eye through a ring of smoke that he had just projected from his mouth,—“because he was in his room.”
“Another word, and Solomon’s fame perishes.”
“It is a well-known physical law” (Charley used to avenge himself on me in private for his silence in general company),—“it is a well-known physical law,” said he, inserting his forefinger with great precision into the centre of the whirling ring, “that a body cannot occupy two—”
“To be continued in our next. But why was he not punctual, as usual?”
“Nothing simpler,—because he was behind time.”
“Solon, Solon!”
“Yes, Sir William Hamilton has well observed that it is positively unthinkable that the temporal limitations of two events occurring at different times should be identical. Let’s have another pipe.”
Charley had forced me to change the subject; but I contrived to make the change not very satisfactory to him. “By the way,” I began, “what were you and the charming Alice saying to one another on your way from the landing to-day?”
Charley laid his halt-filled pipe on the table and gave a frightful yawn. “Let’s go to bed,” said he, and immediately began to doff his clothes with surprising swiftness.
“Two bodies,” said I, striking a match, “cannot”—Charley kicked off one boot—“occupy the same space”—off flew the other; “but, as Sir William hath well put it,—or was it some other fellow?”—and leaning against the end of the mantel-piece, and poising myself on my elbow, I assumed a thoughtful attitude,—“two bodies are sometimes fond of being very close together. Why this sudden and uncontrollable somnolency? Were we not to have another pipe?” But not another word could I get out of Charley; and nearly four years passed by before he gave me the account (which I will now lay before the reader) of what he saw that day.
The Don, as we know, had escorted Mrs. Poythress from the landing at the foot of the lawn to the house, and had gone immediately to his room. As she leaned upon his arm, he had seemed to her to be tremulous; and a certain disorder in his features as he left the parlor had led her to fear that he was not well; having, as she surmised, given himself an undue wrench in his efforts to arrest her fall. Then, when the Don had failed to put in an appearance at dinner, Charley had gone in person to his room. To a gentle tap there was no reply, and successively louder knocks eliciting no response, a vague sense of dread crept over him, and his hand shook as he turned the knob and entered the room. “Great God!” cried Charley, stopping short, as he saw the Don stretched diagonally across the bed, his face buried in a pillow. There he lay, still as death. Was he dead? Charley hurried to the bedside with agitated strides, and leaning over the prostrate figure, with lips apart, intently watched and listened for signs of life. “Thank God!” breathed Charley. For reply the Don, with a sudden movement, threw back his right arm obliquely across his motionless body, and held out his open hand. The released pillow fell. It was wetted with tears. Charley clasped the offered hand with a sympathetic pressure that seemed quite to unnerve the Don; for the iron grasp of his moist hand was tempered by a grateful tenderness, and convulsive undulations again and again shook his stalwart frame. For a while neither spoke.
“You will be down to dinner presently, I hope?”
The Don nodded, and Charley crossed the room and poured out some water and moved some towels in an aimless sort of way.
“I’ll go down now; come as soon as you can.”
Another nod.
Charley moved, half on tiptoe, to the door, and placing his hand on the knob, turned and looked at the Don. A sudden impulse seized him as he saw the strong man lying there on his face, his arm still extended along his back; and hurrying to the bedside, he bent over him, and taking the open hand in both his, with one fervent squeeze released it and hastened out of the room. But he had not reached the door before there broke upon his ear a sound that made him shiver.
It was a sob.
One!—No more! It was a sound such as we do not often hear and can never forget,—the sob of a strong man, bursting, hoarse, guttural, discordant, from an over-wrought heart,—a stern, proud heart that would stifle the cry of its bitterness, but may not. A look,—a word,—the touch of a friendly hand,—has sufficed to unprison the floods.
So, once, the dimpled finger of childhood pressed the electric key; and the primeval rocks of Hell-Gate bounded into the air.