The amulet: A novel

by Charles Egbert Craddock

“Will you be sure to come back?” Arabella asked, as they stood at the last moment near the table where the candles threw an upward glow on his red coat, his laughing eyes, his handsome, spirited face, and his powdered hair. He held his hat in his left hand and was extending his right hand toward her.

“Will you be sure to come back?”

“Oh, my dear, don’t be so solemn,—your tones might summon a man from the ends of the earth or a spirit from the confines of being!” cried Mrs. Annandale.

Once more Raymond’s joyous laughter rang through the room. “I shall come alive if I can conveniently, and all in one piece. If not I shall revisit the glimpses of the moon! I shall return—” and then in a more serious tone, seeing her seriousness, “I shall return, God willing.”

Mervyn himself entertained considerable doubt of this happy issue of the expedition. He thought Raymond far too young, too flighty, too inexperienced to be trusted at such a distance, unhampered by authority, subject to strange untried conditions which could not be foreseen and provided against. It was necessary that all the details should be confided to his own unaided judgment, and it would not have greatly astonished the captain-lieutenant if none of the party should ever be seen again alive. In the dense jungles of the mountain wilderness, in the power of an implacable, aggrieved, and savage people, the fate of this handful of soldiers might ever remain a mystery and unavenged. The thought softened his heart toward his quondam friend. Mervyn was of the temperament rarely consciously at fault; so little did he admit dereliction in his relations with the outside world that he was often self-deceived. But in this instance his conscience stirred. He realized that for his offended vanity, for an unspoken fleer in a man’s eyes which his own coxcombry had provoked, he had in revenge caught at an immaterial matter in the guard report and contrived to wreak his displeasure on Raymond in a sort most calculated to wound him, subjecting him to a reprimand, unwilling though it was, from the commandant. After that event ensued an alienation as complete as their friendship had formerly been close. At the time he winced to discover that Raymond had the magnanimity to refrain from retorting in kind, and had not held him up to ridicule in the commandant’s eyes by gossiping on the expedition to Tamotlee of his unlucky absence from the scene of the conflagration. To be sure, Raymond knew that fact would be elicited in the regular channels of the reports, but he had not gone out of his way to further his false friend’s mortification. Mervyn wished now that he had been less morose, less intractable. He had, he thought, no reason to be jealous of Raymond’s station in Arabella’s esteem. He was a dashing, attractive, handsome man, well calculated to entertain and amuse a young lady who was not used to spend her time in so dull a place as a frontier fort. Mervyn had no serious fault to find with the encouragement which she had vouchsafed his own suit. Therefore why should he let the breach yawn and widen between himself and his former friend. He did not linger in the commandant’s parlor after Raymond had made his adieus, but followed him to his quarters, where he found the ensign with his servant busily packing his effects for the march.

“Just as I expected,” said Mervyn, ignoring Raymond’s stare of surprise, and perching himself on one end of the table as of old in the scarcity of chairs; he carelessly eyed the confused medley of articles spread over the bed, the chairs, the floor. “Making ready for the march, are you? I came to see if you wouldn’t like to borrow my otter fur great coat and my heavy lynx rug for the trip. There is a change in the temperature impending,—freezing weather,—and you might need them.”

Raymond hesitated. He would not wish to churlishly refuse an overture for renewed friendship or, as he rightly interpreted this, a covert apology. But he had that fibre of sensitiveness which winced from a favor bestowed—not from one he loved; a month ago he would have welcomed the offer, but more because of the feeling indicated than the utility of the proffered gear, although doubtless the furs would have stood him in good stead. Now, however, his estimate of Mervyn had changed and his heart had waxed cold toward him. He said to himself that he would be willing to risk the chance of freezing, if his own provision were insufficient, rather than be beholden to Mervyn for aught under the circumstances.

“I am already taking as much weight as I can afford to carry,” he replied. “And besides your furs are too costly and delicate to drag through such a march as this,—thank you, just as much.”

After some words of fruitless insistence Mervyn’s talk digressed to details of ways and means. He was graciously disposed to supplement the younger officer’s presumably inferior knowledge by his more mature advice, a senior in rank, years, and experience. Unrestrained by any subtle considerations of feeling on such a theme, Raymond did not scruple to flout this unsolicited counsel with a frank abandon which bespoke a self-confidence expanded to a prideful jubilance by the importance of the mission with which he had been intrusted. But this cavalier reception of the suggestions tendered him did not impair Mervyn’s urbanity nor hinder the ostensible renewal of pleasant relations, or rather the ignoring of the fact that such relations had ever been interrupted. He offered his hand at parting with many good wishes, and Raymond, whose quickened intuition had come to comprehend his mental processes, was glad to see the door close upon his well-bred dissimulation.

“He does not want to feel at all uncomfortable in his conscience if I should be unlucky enough to be scalped, or frozen, or devoured by wolves, or lost in the wilderness,” he thought, with a bitter insight.