“Pshaw!” exclaimed Ducie. “If this keeps up I’ll split some fool’s head open.”
He threw off his coat, seized the axe, heaved it up and struck a blow that splintered a plank in the middle. Floyd-Rosney, his coat also on the floor, inserted the blade of a hatchet edgewise beneath it and pried it up, then began to chop vigorously while Ducie prepared to rive another plank.
The two negroes looked on with sulky indifference.
Suddenly the Major’s servant grinned genially, without rhyme or reason. “You two gemmen git out of yere. Make yerselfs skeerce. You think I’m gwine to stand yere an’ let you chop wood. I know de quality. I have always worked for de quality. I’m gwine to l’arn dis yere little coon, dat dunno nuthin’ but runnin’ de river, how to behave hisself before de quality. Take up dat hatchet, boy, an’ mind yer manners.”
Floyd-Rosney surrendered the implement readily and with all the grace of good-will, but Ducie continued to deal the stanch old floor some tremendous blows and at last laid the axe down as if he did not half care.
“We had best run as few fires as possible,” Ducie commented as they left the room, “change of heart might not last.”
Thus it was that only two of the many spacious apartments were put into commission. One, the walls of which betokened in the scheme of their decoration its former uses as a music-room, was filled with the effects of the ladies of the party, while the gentlemen were glad to pull off their shoes and exchange for dry hose and slippers before the fire of an old-time smoking-room, that must have been a cozy den in its day. The house had long ago been stripped of all portables in decoration as well as furnishing. A few mirrors still hung on the walls, too heavy or too fragile to be safely removed, wantonly shattered by the vandal hands of its occasional and itinerant inmates. Several of these had been a portion of the original construction, built into the walls, and in lieu of frames were surrounded by heavy mouldings of stucco-work, and this, too, had given opportunity to the propensity of destruction rife throughout the piteous wreck of a palace. In the smoking-room, the haunt of good-fellowship and joviality, Bacchus seemed doubly drunk, riding a goat of three legs and one horn, at the summit of the mirror, and really, but that the figure in half relief was too high to be conveniently reached all semblance of the design might have been shattered. Only here and there was it possible to follow the rest of the rout of satyrs and fauns, the tracery of bowls and beakers and gourds, and bunches of grapes, the redundant festoons of tobacco leaves and replicas of many varieties of pipes, all environed with the fantastic wreathing of smoke, and the ingenious symbolism in which the interior decorator had expended a wealth of sub-suggestion.
There was only a “shake-down” on the floor for the men, and two or three were already disposed upon it at length, since this was a restful position and there were no chairs available. Floyd-Rosney stood with his back to the fire, his hands behind him, his head a trifle bent, his eyes dull and ruminative. He had much of which to think. Adrian Ducie sat sidewise on the sill of a window and looked out through the grimy panes at the ceaseless fall of the rain amidst the glossy leaves of the magnolias which his grandmother,—or was it his great-grandmother?—had planted here in the years agone. Was that the site of her flower-garden, he wondered, seeing at a distance the flaunting of a yellow chrysanthemum. How odd it was that he should sit here in his great-grandfather’s den, smoking a cigar, practically a stranger, a guest, an intruder in the home of his ancestors. He and his brother, the lawful heirs of all this shattered magnificence, these baronial tracts of fertile lands, were constrained to work sedulously for a bare living. He, himself, was an exile, doomed to wander the earth over, with never a home of his own, never a perch for his world-weary wings. His brother’s fate was to juggle with all those vicissitudes that curse the man who strives to wrest a subsistence from the soil, to pay a price of purchase for the rich products of the land which his forbears had owned since the extinction of the tribal titles of the Indians. A yellow chrysanthemum,—a chrysanthemum swaying in the wind!
There had begun to be strong hopes of dinner astir in this masculine coterie, and when the door opened every head was turned toward it. But melancholy reigned on the face of the cook, and it was a dispirited cadence of his falsetto voice that made known his lack.
“Mr. Floyd-Rosney,” he plained, “I can’t dress canned lobster salad without tarragon vinegar. This yere cruet has got nuthin’ in it in dis world but apple vinegar. The Cap’n nuver done me right.”