“And how ridiculous for people of their limited means,” cried Mrs. Floyd-Rosney. Her late husband himself could hardly have seemed more scornful of moderate circumstances.
“Except that the necklace is an heirloom,” said Colonel Kenwynton.
“A man in love thinks nothing is too fine,” suggested one of the ladies.
“Randal Ducie is not and never was in love with Hildegarde,” said Mrs. Floyd-Rosney with an air of much discernment. “She is not of the type that would appeal to him; but she was very instant in bringing herself to his notice and diverting his mind, and taking him out of himself after his bereavement and so became a sort of consolatory habit.”
“That is a beautiful idea,” said Colonel Kenwynton warmly,—“to add to the blessed relation of a wife the sacred mission of a ministering angel.”
This was not in the least what Mrs. Floyd-Rosney had intended to intimate, as was abundantly manifest by the thinly veiled anger and repugnance on her face, which was now beginning to have need of all the suavity and grace she could command. It was growing perceptibly hard in these days, and its incipient angularities were more definitely asserted. There was a recurrent expression of bitter antagonism in her eyes that gave added emphasis to the satiric fleer in the occasional upward lift of her chin. People were already commenting on the strange deterioration in her beauty of late, and although Colonel Kenwynton was in no degree aware of the reason for her state of mind, he felt vaguely depressed by her look and manner.
He rose presently and strolled away from the group on the deck, smoking his cigar and scanning the weather signs of the coming evening. The stress of the subject of Randal Ducie’s bereavement weighed heavily on his nerves in this vicinity. If, under all the circumstances, it could be so easily and openly mentioned here he was not sure of his ability to listen with discretion. The world was growing strange to him,—he felt himself indeed a survival. He did not understand such views as seemed to possess this woman, such standards of right, such induration of sensibilities. Man and soldier though he was, he could look only with glooming and averse eyes at the wreck of the Cherokee Rose, where a dread deed was wrought, lying white and stark, skeleton-wise, like bleaching bones on the sand-bar in that immaterial region between the pallid mists of the evening and the gray sheen of the river. Very melancholy the aspect of the forlorn craft, he thought in passing, and he scarcely wondered at the prevalence of the riverside legend that strange presences were wont to revisit the glimpses of the moon on this grim, storied wreck of the Mississippi.
He could not imagine how Mrs. Floyd-Rosney in pursuit of pleasure could endure to pass this poignantly ghastly reminder, and still further down the stream to approach the site of Duciehurst under its swirling depths,—the packets now made a landing called by the name a mile to the rearward of the spot where the old mansion had stood. But presently the graceful yacht was steaming swiftly down this glamourous reach of the river, and beneath its gliding shadow in inconceivable depths lay this epitome of the past,—the demolished home altar, with its spent incense of domestic affection, the lost hopes, with their lure of tenuous illusions; the futile turmoils of grief; the transient elation of joy; the final climax of death,—all the constituent elements of human experience. Now they were naught, nullified, while the world swept on uncaring, typified by the swift yacht, leaving astern the site of oblivion.