The Story of Duciehurst: A Tale of the Mississippi

by Charles Egbert Craddock

He looked down at his hand. The wound that had so perversely bled showed only pallid lips, but no sign of red. He could not remember if he had thoroughly wiped the gory knife and began apprehensively to search his pockets. Not here—not there. He grew ghastly pale. His breath came quick in suffocating gasps as he realized the truth. He had failed to repossess himself of the knife at that supreme moment of tragedy. He had an illuminating recollection, as if he beheld the scene anew, that the blade had caught on some strong ligament or cartilage in the man’s throat and as the victim swayed and fell heavily he had not sought to secure it.

“Fool! Fool!” the empty building rang with the sound, and a score of frantic echoes shouted opprobrium upon him. He clasped his quivering hands above his head and sought to command his thoughts. He had been too drunk at the time to realize the fact, but the knife was a witness which would indubitably fix the crime upon him. Like all his personal accessories it was the handsomest thing of the kind that could be bought, and on the silver plate on the handle was engraved, according to his wont, his monogram. He started violently toward the hall. He must go back,—but he could never row the distance, exhausted, as he was, against the current. He would have the Aglaia to steam up on some pretext, and in company with the skipper they would discover the body, when unperceived he could repossess himself of the knife. He was terrified at the prospect of the attempt. He felt himself already in toils. He tossed his hands above his head and wrung them wildly. A hoarse cry of agony burst from his lips, suddenly dying in his throat, for—was that an echo in the resounding vacancy? A strange sound, a great pervasive sound was filling all the air, as if the old house quavered, and groaned, and cried out in long endured anguish. There was a rush upon the staircase; he saw through the open doors of the drawing-rooms shadowy, flitting figures descending in crowds as if the ancient ghosts that had found harbor here were fleeing their refuge.

Nay, only coils on coils of dust. As he rushed forth into the hall he perceived at the end of the long perspective the great Mississippi River, as in some strange dislocation of the angle of vision, reaching—illuminated and splendid—to the flaunting evening sky.

And from the Mississippi River the lenses of the steam yacht Aglaia, focused on the old mansion of Duciehurst, saw it at one moment still and silent, majestic even, in its melancholy ruin, the sun lingering on its massive cornice and columnated portico. The next it slid as softly from vision as an immaterial mirage. The caving bank had gone down into the unimaginable depths of the river, carrying on its floods a thousand acres of disintegrating land and the turbulent waters of the liberated Mississippi were flowing deep over the cotton fields of Duciehurst plantation, two miles inland.

In the widespread commotion of the flood it was fortunate for the Aglaia, even though so far up stream—distant in the bight of the bend—that steam was already up in the boilers. Forging up the river, against the current, at her maximum speed, the yacht in the seething turmoil found no safe anchorage till near the bar where the derelict lay. Here she swung round and the officers sought to inaugurate measures to recover if it were possible the body of Floyd-Rosney, who had indubitably perished in the submergence of the mansion. The whole region was aroused and aghast at the magnitude of the disaster. From the deck of the yacht were visible hurrying groups as the population pressed toward the ill-fated scene. The skipper’s megaphone was in constant requisition as being an eye-witness of the calamity he alone could give authentic information. Randal Ducie, hastening down to his levee, was met on the summit by the information that his ancestral estate had ceased to exist, swept from the face of the earth as completely as if it had never been. Its restoration had long been the object nearest his heart, its sequestration in alien possession was the hardship of his life. But he showed scant emotion. Some subtle, inexplicable premonition of catastrophe infinitely heart-rending annulled the sense of loss.

“Where’s my brother?” he demanded irrelevantly, and despite the remonstrances of the by-standers he threw himself into a skiff at the landing and pulled out on the tossing, turbulent tide. As the rage of the river subsided the search was joined by others, and a wild rumor of some disaster to Adrian Ducie quickly pervaded the vicinity. The finding of his rowboat on the Arkansas shore did not prove his landing, according to Floyd-Rosney’s forecast, for the craft was caught in a tangle of saw-grass in a marshy swamp where footing was impracticable. The old negro to whom Floyd-Rosney had spoken in the afternoon was now returning from his errand down the river, which was gray with a slowly gathering mist, and melancholy with a cast of the silent and pallid moon. He hove near the little fleet of rowboats that roved the shadows and asked a question concerning the appearance of the missing man, with whom he thought it possible he had had some conversation an hour or so ago.

“He looks like me,” said Randal Ducie, throwing his face into high relief with an electric flashlight, and turning with poignant hope toward the boatman.

“Oh, no, sah! No, sah!” disconsolately admitted the old darkey, blinking in the glare. “Nebber saw two folks more onsimilar. Mr. Ran Ducie, I knowed you, Sah, from way back. Knowed yer daddy. Dis man looked like he thunk I war de wum o’ de yearth, an’ de yearth war built fur him, though I never p’sumed ter talk ter him. ’Twar him fust p’sumed ter talk ter me. He war dressed beautified, too, with white flannel suit, an’ a white cap, an’ handsome ter kill.”

“Floyd-Rosney,” Randal muttered through his set teeth. “And where did he go?”

“Ter de ole Cher’kee Rose, sah,” the negro pointed at the derelict, lying on the bar, visible amidst the shadows thronging the river in the ghostly gleams of the moon that was wont to patrol the deck, and seek out the dark recesses of the cabin where the rise and subsidence of the water registered its fluctuations, and to look through the windows of the pilot-house where the steersman at the wheel once took his bearings.