In all her formulations of the possible result of this letter she never anticipated the event. She had been prepared for delay. Some little time he must have to decide upon his course, his phrases, complicated as the whole incident was with the memory of the murderous Floyd-Rosney. When by return mail she noted the large white missive, with her name in his well-remembered, decided, dashing chirography, her heart plunged, and for a moment she almost thought it had ceased to beat. Her hands trembled violently as she tore open the envelope. Within was her own letter and on the reverse side of the last sheet were penned these words:
“This letter should be in your own possession. The story to which you allude I read to the last page, and the book is closed.”
CHAPTER XXVII
As the months wore on into winter Randal Ducie, in the pursuance of the effort to rehabilitate his broken and maimed life, was often in Memphis. His old associates had an eager welcome for him, for his candid and genial nature was supplemented by a tireless energy and some special acumen and active experience in the line in which these endowments were now needed. The levee crisis was acute, and the planters were eager to formulate an adequate and practical defense against the encroachments of the river, with State or Federal aid, rather than have the Delta serve, as they claimed, as an experiment station for the Government. Cotton was their objective,—not science.
Sometimes a poignant pang smote the heart of the lonely man as some absorbed and eager acquaintance greeted him, from force of habit, with the old look of inquiry as to his identity, one of those who used formerly to ask inadvertently, “Is this you, or your brother?” eliciting in those happy days the delighted response “Of course, it is my brother.”
Alas, how Randal wished now that it was his brother,—to be himself lying in that quiet grave to which he was sure their ill-fated resemblance had consigned Adrian in the flower of his youth, and that it was he who was here among these streets of busy men with many a long year of life before him.
“But you should thank God that you are privileged to suffer in his stead,” Hildegarde would argue with him. “He would have had all this torture to endure if you had been the one called away.”
Shortly after his arrival in Memphis he had gravitated to her father’s house, where he often sat for hours in the library in the quiet atmosphere of the books, her face pensive, illumined by the flash and sparkle of the fire as she worked with dainty, deft fingers on a bit of embroidery. Informal visits these, and often other members of the family gathered around the hearth,—her father, talking levee-board, and the stage of the river, the price of cotton and the dangers of overproduction; her college-boy brother, a football expert, a famous halfback with the latest sensations of the gridiron on Thanksgiving-day; her mother, soft and sweet, with that frank look of Hildegarde in her duller eyes, for which Randal loved her. He found the only comfort he knew in this group. Once, however, the young girl’s unthinking candor almost stunned him.
“Such an odd thing,” she said one day when all were present; she was evidently coming from far reaches of her reverie; she had been carefully matching the skeins for the embroidered gentian blooming under the benison of her touch, and he had a fleeting thought that she might have rivaled nature had she compared them to the tint of her eyes. “I met Mrs. Floyd-Rosney yesterday at the Jennison reception, and she asked me such a strange question.”
She paused, but he would not inquire, and the others, realizing the malapropos subject, could not sufficiently command their embarrassment. But the transparent Hildegarde needed no urgency.