The amulet: A novel

by Charles Egbert Craddock

Those with whom life deals liberally are often less grateful than exacting. Any failure of the largess of fate is like withheld deserts or a wanton injury. It is as if they had an inalienable right to expect better usage. It never seems to occur to these favorites of fortune that others have as fair a claim upon the munificence of circumstance, and that but for a cloaked mystery of dispensation they would share equally with their fellows. Thus a disconcerting chance or a temporary obstacle rouses no disposition to measure strength with adversity, or to cope with untoward combinations, but an angry amazement, an indignant displeasure, a sense of trespass upon one’s lawful domain of success and happiness that result in blundering egotistic self-assertion, which often fails in the clearance of the obstruction to the paths of bland and self-satisfied progress.

Mervyn, chancing to glance down from the block-house tower whither he had repaired shortly before sunset on his rounds, to see that the sentinels were properly posted and that they had the countersign correctly, was not only dismayed but affronted to perceive walking briskly up the slope from the river-bank Captain Howard, the quarter-master, the fort-adjutant, and following them at a leisurely pace Ensign Raymond, with Miss Howard on his arm. They were conversing earnestly; her face was full of interest as he spoke. Now and then she glanced up at him, as if with a question; the glow of the west rested in a transfiguring halo about her head, her golden hair showing beneath the dark green calash. In the setting of the bleak, cold day her face was as illumined as a saint’s. A band of dull red was about the horizon above the sombre wooded mountains, promising fairer skies for the morrow, and now and then, through some translucence of the clouds a chill white sheen spread over the landscape less like sunlight than moonbeams. Still gazing at the two Mervyn marked that Arabella noted this aspect, and called her companion’s attention to the abnormal quality of its glister.

“That is like ‘the sleeping sun,’” she said. “How quaint is that idea of the Indians—how poetic, that the moon is but the sun asleep!”

“This, though, is ‘the sun awake in the day.’ Nu-da-ige-hi!” he explained.

She repeated the phrase after him. “And ‘the sleeping sun’?”

“Nu-da-su-na-ye-hi,” he replied.

She paused to repeat both phrases anew, smiling like a docile child, learning a lesson.

At the distance, of course, Mervyn could not hear the words, but the responsive smiles, the obvious mutual interest, the graceful attitudes of the two as she once more took Raymond’s arm and they walked slowly on toward the gate—each phase of the scene was charged with a signal irritation to his pride, his nerves, his intense self-consciousness. He was angry with her; why should she seek solace for his absence in jaunting abroad? He was angry with her father for granting her this opportunity. He could not imagine why her aunt had not been more insistent in duty—he would have thought it well that she should be penned up in the commandant’s parlor sewing her sampler until such time as it was practicable for him to rejoice the dulness by his endless talk of himself—which, indeed, those who loved him would find no burden. He was angry more than all and beyond expression with Raymond, who profited by his enforced absence, and whom he had feared from the beginning as a rival. He knew well the character of the comments of the mess upon his course in pushing the immaterial omission in the matter of the guard report to an extreme limit, and his own reticence afterward concerning his absence from the scene of the fire till it was no longer possible to conceal the circumstance. Captain Howard, himself, had opened his stubborn, reluctant eyes to the repute among his brother officers that this had inflicted upon him. He feared Raymond would acquaint Arabella with their estimate of his part in the incident. He was wild when he thought of the duration of his tour of duty. Till to-morrow he was caught fast, laid by the heels, held to all the observances of the regulations as strictly as if the little frontier mud fort were a fortress of value, garrisoned by thousands of troops. He knew, nevertheless, the special utility of routine here, where the garrison was so weak,—scant a hundred men. The enemy—conquered, indeed, but only by the extraneous aid of a special expeditionary force—was still strong and rancorous, able to throw two thousand warriors against the ramparts in a few hours, but he argued it was farcical to detail the officers to this frequent recurrent duty, albeit appropriate to their rank, when sergeants, corporals, even intelligent privates might be trusted in their stead.

He had been a good soldier, and ordinarily his pulse would have quickened to the partial solution of the feed problem, evidenced shortly by the issuance of the quarter-master’s contingent to the unloading of the pettiaugre at the river-bank. The stable men were riding down the horses, harnessed to slides in default of wagons, to bring in the provender; some of them carried great baskets like those of the Indians, but disposed upon the beasts pannier-wise. The loud, gay voices made the dull still dusk ring again. Raymond avoided the great gate whence now and then a horseman, thus cumbrously accoutred, issued as suddenly as if flung from a catapult and went clattering boisterously down to the river-bank. An abrupt encounter under the arch with these plunging wights might not discommode Captain Howard and the quarter-master, but with his fair charge Raymond sought the quieter precincts of the sally-port. There he was detained for the lack of the countersign, and while the sentinel called the corporal the two young people stood, apparently quite content, still softly talking, now and then a rising inflection of their suave tones coming to Mervyn’s ear as he lingered in the block-house tower and watched them. They were taking their way presently across the parade to the commandant’s quarters, and as Mervyn’s eyes followed them thither, he perceived the face of Mrs. Annandale at the window. She looked as Mervyn felt, and as he noted it he winced from the idea that perhaps the chaperon cared for him only for his worldly advantages. He had no mind to be married for these values, he said to himself, indignantly. Then he had a candid monition that he was not in great danger of being married at all—whatever Mrs. Annandale’s convictions might be, the young lady had stipulated that nothing was to be considered settled till she knew her own mind—she was yet, she had protested, so little acquainted with him. He had one natural humble impulse, like a lover, to hope that she might never know him better to like him less. The thought cleared the atmosphere of storm. Mrs. Annandale naturally preferred him—why should she not?—and if she had wished to stimulate his devotion she would have set up Raymond, and encouraged him as a rival. He could not imagine that she considered Raymond too formidable for a fictitious lover. A fascinating semblance might merge into a stubborn fact.

Mrs. Annandale met the two excursionists at the door with a most severe countenance of disfavor.