The Story of Duciehurst: A Tale of the Mississippi

by Charles Egbert Craddock

Restraining himself with difficulty from pursuing this attractive subject, Colonel Kenwynton explained that while Randal Ducie was an old acquaintance of Mrs. Floyd-Rosney’s, Adrian Ducie was a stranger to her, and had met her only on one previous occasion. The undersigned and Adrian Ducie had accompanied the poor lady so far as the first station, and taking farewell of her they had returned to town in the interurban electric. He furthermore informed the public that in view of some possible unforeseen emergency he had taken the liberty of pressing upon this poor lady, absolutely unprovided with money for her necessities, a twenty dollar bill, to be returned at her pleasure, and had since received a letter from her uncle, inclosing that sum, and thanking him for his consideration. At the home of this uncle—the home of her girlhood—she was now domiciled with him and her aunt, who was formerly the charming Miss Azalia Thornton, whom many elder members of society would well remember.

The Colonel was enjoying himself famously, and now and again Hugh Treherne looked anxiously over the top of the newspaper at him as he tossed the multiplying pages across his left hand, and took a fresh sheet.

The Colonel, with keen gusto, then entered on the subject of Floyd-Rosney, whom he handled without gloves. There ought to be some adequate criminal procedure, he argued, for a man who had offered such an indignity to the wife of his bosom as this. If an equivalent insult could have been tendered to a man Mr. Floyd-Rosney would have been shot down in his tracks—or, at the least, have been made to pay roundly for his brutality. But the wife, whom he has sworn to love, honor, and cherish, is defenseless against his hasty, groundless conclusions. She can only meekly prove her innocence of a guilt that it is like the torments of hell-fire to name in connection with her. Colonel Kenwynton solemnly commended to our lawmakers the consideration of this subject of a penalty of unfounded marital charges. The converse of the proposition never occurred to him. In his philosophy the women were welcome to say what they liked about the men.

If, he maintained, the gentleman accompanying Mrs. Floyd-Rosney had been Randal Ducie instead of his brother, the circumstance would have signified naught with a lady of Mrs. Floyd-Rosney’s character, which the good people of this city would uphold against her husband even backed by all his filthy lucre. But Randal Ducie was in New Orleans making an address on levee conditions, on which subject his brother Adrian was peculiarly uninformed, and it did seem to Colonel Kenwynton that almost any man would have learned more from sheer observation, even though he had been absent from the country for the past six years. He was now in Memphis, where, being singularly like his twin brother, he was mistaken for Randal Ducie, well known here, and his arrival thus chronicled in the papers. Adrian Ducie was not widely acquainted in Memphis, having spent the last six years in the south of France, where he was interested in silk manufacture.

If Mr. Floyd-Rosney’s course, declared the Colonel, pursuing the subject, in forcing a ghastly round of pleasure on his wife, sighing for her absent child, was typical of his domestic methods, his wife was a martyr. When she would insist on having her child restored to her arms one could imagine his saying—“Go to, woman, where is your pug!” Colonel Kenwynton ardently hoped that the pressure of public opinion would force Mr. Floyd-Rosney to disregard no longer the holy claims of motherhood, and give back this child to the aching arms of his wife. The heart of every man that ever had a mother was fired in revolt against him, despite his wealth, that cannot buy sycophancy, and abject acquiescence and pusillanimous silence from us.

The Colonel admired the rolling periods of his production so much that he read aloud with relish the whole effort from the beginning.

“What do you think of it, Hugh?” he demanded.

“I think the paper won’t publish it,” said Hugh Treherne.

The paper, however, did publish it. The position of Floyd-Rosney in the affair, as the incontestable facts began to be elicited, took on so sorry an aspect that he was hardly in case to bring an action for libel, and the Colonel’s letter was good for the sale of a double edition. People read it with raised eyebrows and deprecation, and several said the Colonel was a dangerous man and ought to have his hands tied behind him. But the plain truth, so plainly set forth, the old traditions which he had invoked, which they had all imbibed more or less, went far to reinstating Mrs. Floyd-Rosney’s position, and to exhibit her husband’s character in a most damaged and disastrous disparagement. He was advised by his counsel, who were disconcerted in the last extreme by being connected in so disreputable a proceeding, that the only course open to policy and prudence and the prospect of conserving any place in public esteem, was to retract absolutely and immediately, frankly confessing a mistake of identity, and to restore the child to the custody of his mother.

“Even that won’t mend the matter,” said Mr. Stacey—his face corrugated with lines unknown to his placid sharpness when he and his firm had no personal concern. He had nerves for his own interest, though not an altruistic quiver for his client.