The old man thought himself a strategist of deep, elusive craft. For the sake of his friend, Captain Treherne, and his plaintive disability; for the sake of the implied trust accepted in the fact that he had received this confidence, he must seek to know the truth while he screened the motive. “Well, since these old world clavers are mighty interesting to an ancient fossil such as I am—I must look backward having, you know, no future in view,—wasn’t there some talk of a lost document, a deed of trust missing, mislaid,—what was it about—a Duciehurst mortgage?”
“A release of a mortgage,” replied Ducie, his words coming with the impetus and fury of hot shot. “The lost paper was a release of a mortgage, a quit-claim, signed and witnessed, but not registered. There were no facilities at the time to record legal papers, not a court nor a clerk’s office open in the country, which was filled with contending armies.”
Mr. Floyd-Rosney had finished his breakfast and seemed about to rise. The vexation of this discussion was beyond endurance to a proud and pompous man. But it was not his temperament to give back one inch. He stood his ground and presently he began to affect indifference to the situation, placing an elbow on the table and looking with his imperious composure first at one speaker and then at the other. He was not so absorbed, however, that he did not note how his wife loitered over the waffles before her, spinning out the details of the meal that no point of the conversation might escape her.
“I remember now, I remember,” said Colonel Kenwynton, nodding his white head. “It was claimed that the mortgage was lifted, the debt being paid in gold, and that a formal release was executed here in Mississippi and delivered with the original paper, though not noted in the instrument of registration.”
“There being no courts in operation,” interpolated Ducie, obviously as restive as a fiery horse.
“And by reason of the intervention of the Federal lines and the sudden deaths of the two principals to the transaction the promissory notes, thus secured on the plantation, were not returned to the maker, but remained in Tennessee, where Mr. Carroll Carriton had deposited them in a bank for safekeeping.”
“Is this a fairy-story, Colonel Kenwynton?” sneered Floyd-Rosney, his patience wearing thin under the strain upon it, and beginning to deprecate and doubt the effect on his wife.
“No, it is a story of the evil genii,” said Ducie, significantly.
“You mean War and Confusion, and Loss,” said Floyd-Rosney, in bland interpretation, and apparently in excellent temper. “They are, indeed, the evil genii. But you will please to observe, Colonel Kenwynton, that the executors of the mortgagee, Mr. Carroll Carriton, could not accept this unsupported representation of an executed release of the mortgage. The executors had the registered mortgage, with no marginal notation of its satisfaction, and they had the promissory notes. They sued the estate of George Blewitt Ducie on the promissory notes and foreclosed on Duciehurst.”
“I remember, I remember,” said Colonel Kenwynton, “and although at the period when the mortgage was made it was for a sum inconsiderable in comparison with the value of the property Duciehurst went under the hammer in the collapsed financial conditions subsequent to the war for less than the amount of the original indebtedness, plantations being a drug on the market, and the executors of the mortgagee bought it in for the Carriton estate.”