“I may consider myself dismissed from the presence?” she asked saucily. “Then, I will permit myself a cup of chocolate and a roll, and be ready for any further commands.”
She frisked out of the door, and, frowning heavily, he sat down to the table and opened the top-drawer, which yielded instantly to the first key that he selected.
The first paper, too, on which he laid his hand was the will, signed and witnessed, regularly executed, all its provisions seeming, as he glanced through it, reasonable and feasible. As he laid it aside, he experienced the business man's satisfaction with a document duly capable of the ends desired. Then he opened with a sudden flicker of curiosity a bulky envelope placed with the will and addressed to himself. He read it through, the natural interest on his face succeeded by amazement, increasing gradually to fear, the chill drops starting from every pore. He had grown ghastly white before he had concluded the perusal, and for a long time he sat as motionless as if turned to stone.
The September day glowed outside in sumptuous splendor. A glad wind sprang up and sped afield. Geraldine, her breakfast finished, a broad hat canted down over her eyes, rushed through the hall as noisily as a boy, prodded up the old hound, and ran him a race around the semicircle of the drive. A trained hound he had been in his youth, and he was wont to conceal and deny certain ancient accomplishments. But even he realized that it was waste of breath to say nay to the persistent Geraldine. He resigned himself to go through all his repertoire,—was a dead dog, begged, leaped a stick back and forth, went lame, and in his newly awakened interest performed several tricks of which she had been unaware. Her joyful cries of commendation—“Played an encore! an encore! He did, he did! Cutest old dog in the United States!” caught Mrs. Keene's attention.
“Geraldine,” she screamed from an upper window, “come in out of the sun! You will have a sun-stroke—and ruin your complexion besides! You know you ought to be helping that man with those papers,—he won't be able to do anything without you!” Her voice quavered on the last words, as if she suddenly realized “that man” might overhear her,—as indeed he did. But he made no sign. He sat still, stultified and stony, silently gazing at the paper in his hands.
When luncheon was announced, Gordon asked to have something light sent in to him, as he wished not to be disturbed in his investigation of the documents. He had scant need to apprehend interruption, however, while the long afternoon wore gradually away. The universal Southern siesta was on, and the somnolent mansion was like the castle of Sleeping Beauty. The ladies had sought their apartments and the downy couches; the cook, on a shady bench under the trellis, nodded as she seeded the raisins for the frozen pudding of the six-o'clock dinner; the waiter had succumbed in clearing the lunch-table and made mesmeric passes with the dish-rag in a fantasy of washing the plates; the stable-boy slumbered in the hay, high in the loft, while the fat old coachman, with a chamois-skin in his hand, dozed as he sat on the step of the surrey, between the fenders; the old dog snored on the veranda floor, and Mrs. Keene's special attendant, who was really more a seamstress than a ladies' maid, dreamed that for some mysterious reason she could not thread a needle to fashion in a vast hurry the second mourning of her employer, who she imagined would call for it within a week!
Outside the charmed precincts of this Castle Indolence, the busy cotton-pickers knew no pause nor stay. The steam-engine at the gin panted throughout all the long hot hours, the baler squealed and rasped and groaned, as it bound up the product into marketable compass, but there was no one waking near enough to note how the guest of the mansion was pacing the floor in a stress of nervous excitement, and to comment on the fact.
Toward sunset, a sudden commotion roused the slumbrous place. There had been an accident at the gin,—a boy had been caught in the machinery and variously mangled. Dr. George Eigdon had been called and had promptly sewed up the wounds. A runner had been sent to the mansion for bandages, brandy, fresh clothing, and sundry other collateral necessities of the surgery, and the news had thrown the house into unwonted excitement.
“The boy won't die, then?” Geraldine asked of a second messenger, as he stood by the steps of the veranda, waiting for the desired commodities.
“Lawdy,—no, ma'am! He is as good as new! Doc' George, he fix him up.”