The Story of Duciehurst: A Tale of the Mississippi

by Charles Egbert Craddock

“They did not understand the meaning of his sleeping words,” Paula persisted. “He spoke of pillar and base and pilaster and capital——”

“Oh, oh,” exclaimed Floyd-Rosney, in derision.

Paula had the concentrated look of seeking to shake off this embarrassment of her mental progress and to keep straight upon a definite trend. “They spoke, indeed, as if they had Captain Treherne in reach somewhere,—I wish I had remembered to mention this earlier,—as if he were to be forced to further disclosures if they should fail to find the treasure.”

“Oh, this is too preposterous,” cried Floyd-Rosney, rising. He threw away the stump of his cigar into the old and broken fireplace. “I must beg of you, Paula, for my credit if not your own, to desist from making a spectacle of yourself.”

Colonel Kenwynton lifted a wrinkled and trembling hand in protest. “I ask your pardon; Mrs. Floyd-Rosney will do no one discredit. I must hear what she has to say of this. The gentleman is my dear, dear friend. I had lost sight of him for years.” Then turning toward Paula: “Did I understand you to say, madam, that they spoke as if he were in their power?”

The old man was gasping and his agitation frightened Paula. Her face had grown ghastly pale. Her eyes were wide and startled. “I wonder that I did not think of it earlier,” she said, contritely. “But it did not impress me as real, as the actual fact, I was so excited and alarmed. I remember now that they said they had gagged him,—I don’t know where he was, but they spoke as if he were near and they could produce him and force him to point out the spot. They had ‘brought him down,’—that was their expression,—for this purpose. Did they mean,—do you suppose,—he could have been near, in this house?”

Colonel Kenwynton rose, the picture of despair.

“Oh, my God!” he exclaimed, holding up his hands and wringing them hard. “That man saved my life at the risk of his own. And if, by blindness and folly, I have failed him at his utmost need, may God do as much to me and more when I call from out of the deep. The lamp! The lamp! Bring the lamp! Search the house—the grounds!”

Captain Treherne had endured many hours of duress, of the torture of bonds and constraint, of dread, of cold, of hunger, but the terror of ultimate doom filled his heart when he heard the approach of roving footsteps, the sound of voices unnaturally loud and resonant, echoing through the bare rooms, when he saw a flickering glimmer of yellow light wavering on the ceiling but lost presently in gloom as the party wandered hither and thither through the vacant place. The miscreants who had overpowered and bound him were returning, he thought. In the impaired mental condition from which he had so long suffered, one of his great sorrows lay in his incapacity at times to differentiate the fact from hallucination. He could not be sure that the whole scene of ghastly violence through which he had passed was not one of the pitiable illusions of his mania, and he lay here bound and gagged and famished as treatment designed to mend his mental health. He sought to recall the aspect of the men who, as perhaps he fancied had brought him here,—his flesh crept with repulsion at the thought of them. One had the rolling walk of a sailor. Another was garbed like a jockey,—some brain-cell had perchance retained this image from the old half-forgotten associations of the race course. So much of the jargon of pathology he had picked up in his melancholy immurement in the sanatorium. But these impressions were so definite, so lifelike that if they should prove illusory and this experience another seizure of his malady it was worse than those that had beset him hitherto, when he had often had a lurking doubt of their reality, even while he had acted as if they were demonstrable fact. It was a terrible thing to harbor such strange discordant fancies. He remembered that during the day, he could not be sure of the time, he awoke from a sleep or swoon to find himself here (or, perchance, he had dreamed), bound and gagged, and the great rough figure of a gigantic negro standing in the doorway of the room gazing upon him with an expression of stupid dismay, and then of horrified fright. The negro disappeared suddenly,—many of the images present to the diseased brain of Captain Treherne were subject to these abrupt withdrawals. Afterward he saw, or, as he stipulated within himself, he thought he saw, through an open door, this swart apparition again, chasing and beating with a boat-hook a large white owl. Now and then, throughout the afternoon, he imagined he heard sounds, faint, distant; footsteps, voices and again silence. Deep into the weary night the hapless prisoner watched the moonlight trace the outline of the leafless vines outside upon the ceiling and wall. This was the only impression of which he was certain. He could not be sure what this seeming approach might mean; whether a fact, direful and dangerous, to which the helpless must needs submit; or whether a fantasy of merely seeming menace.

Suddenly a voice—resonant, yet with a falling cadence; hearty and whole-souled, yet quavering with trouble. “Hugh Treherne! Hugh Treherne!” it was calling, and a thousand echoes in the bare and ruinous building duplicated the sound.