It was a stupendous moment in a man’s life when Randal Ducie stood in the shattered old pilot-house and looked down into his own dead face, as it were, ghastly pale and silent, under the moon’s desolate light. The tie between the brothers had been more than the love of women, and the heart of the whole countryside bled for Randal’s grief. The extraordinary resemblance of the two, their fraternal devotion, their exile from the home of their fathers, and its wrongful detention in the possession of others, the destruction of the property by the caving bank, the greatest disaster the country had known for a half century, when its restoration to its rightful heirs seemed imminent, all appealed with tender commiseration to the heart of the world, albeit not easily touched, and a flood of condolence poured in unregarded upon Randal where he sat in his solitary home with bowed head and bated pulses, scarcely living himself, admitting no business, seeing no friend, opening no letter.
The knife that Floyd-Rosney had left piercing the dead man’s throat had fixed the crime upon him, together with the testimony at the inquest of the old negro boatman, who had seen him take his way to the derelict, and that of the skipper who had watched him through the binocle of the Aglaia descend the steps, unloose both the boats that swung on the tide, secured to a post, and set one adrift while he rowed the other, the appurtenance of the Aglaia.
It was well, Randal felt, taking in these proceedings the only interest he could scourge his mind to entertain, that he was not called upon to prosecute on circumstantial evidence some forlorn water rat, or some friendless negro for the millionaire’s crime, as doubtless Floyd-Rosney had contemplated. Though the death of the gentle and genial Adrian went unavenged, save by the heavy hand of Heaven itself, it wrought no calamity to others, except in his incomparable loss.
CHAPTER XXVI
One evening, late in the summer, the melancholy recluse, who might have forgotten, so seldom did he speak, the sound of his own voice, strolled out to evade the intensity of the heat in the hope of a breath of air from the river. But no, it lay like a sheet of glass, blank of incident—no breeze, no cloud, a pallid monotony of twilight. He had passed through the lawn and came out upon the levee which in the dead levels of that country seems of considerable elevation. He loitered along the summit, finding in the higher ground some amelioration of the motionless atmosphere, for it ceased to harass him, and with his heavy brooding thoughts for company he walked on and on, till at length he was aroused by the perception that in his absorption he had passed the limits of his own domain, and was trespassing on the precincts of a neighboring plantation. This fact was brought to his notice by seeing a bench on the levee which he had not caused to be placed there, and behind it was a mass of Cherokee rose hedge, the growth of which he did not approve on these protective embankments. On it were many waxy white blooms, closing with the waning day, amidst the glossy, deeply green foliage, and seated on the bench was a lady gowned in fleecy white.
He scarcely gave her a glance, and with a sense of intrusion he gravely lifted his hat as he was turning away. But she sprang up precipitately and came toward him.
“Oh, Randal, Randal,” she exclaimed in a voice of poignant sympathy, and said no more. She had burst into a tempest of sobs and cries, and as he came toward her and held out his hand, he felt her tears raining down on it as she pressed it between both her soft palms.
“Oh, I know you don’t—you can’t—care for my sympathy,” Hildegarde sobbed out brokenly. “It is nothing to you or to him, but Randal, he was not a man for one friend, one mourner. Everybody loved him that knew him.”
She had collapsed in her former place on the bench, her arm over its back, her head bent upon it, her slender figure shaken by her sobs.
“But he would care for your sympathy, he would value your tears, shed for his sake,” Randal said, suddenly. He walked to the bench and sat down beside her. “Only a few hours before—before—he was speaking to me of you. How lovely——”