“Be quiet! Make another motion, and there will be one king less in the world. Do you understand—now?”
CHAPTER VII.
Surrounded by trees and haughtily succumbing to decay, an ancient mansion, colonial in style, stands half-way between the shore of Long Island Sound and the old post-road to Boston, not many miles from Harlem Bridge. On the most brilliant day it is a gloomy, ghostly-looking structure, and the weed-choked grounds surrounding the house add to the unattractiveness of a spot that was once pleasing to the eye and noted for the elegance of the hospitality dispensed by those who made the old brick homestead a cheery place to visit. The house is built on a generous plan. A wide piazza, supporting white Corinthian columns, faces the lawn. At the back of the house, jutting out from the second story, is a large balcony commanding a magnificent view of the Sound. Inside the structure wide halls, enormous drawing-rooms, a stately dining-apartment, and, upstairs, a labyrinth of airy sleeping-rooms, prove that their former occupants were fond of luxury. The furniture has fallen to pieces, the hangings are worn and dusty, and the partially dismantled house seems to breathe a protest in every nook and corner against the negligence that has allowed its former glories to lose their lustre beneath the iconoclastic hand of time.
It was an especially dreary place at the moment at which it demands our attention. Surrounded by a high wall, nothing can be seen of the house from the main road but its sloping roof and the gable windows beneath it. At the side of the large gateway that makes an entrance for the carriage-path leading up to the mansion is a small cottage that serves as a modest lodging for the Rexanian, Rudolph Smolenski, in whose charge the Strongs’ homestead had been placed some years previous to the opening of this story.
It is one o’clock in the morning. The day has made a tempestuous entrance. Lightning flashes across the waters of the Sound, and deep peals of thunder make the ground tremble with their force. The rain, after long delay, has come at last, and beats down upon the mansion and the lodge as though it would wash them clean of all relics of the past. It leaks through cracks that time has made, and adds to the moist discomfort of rooms that are never wholly dry. But there are unwonted signs of cheer in the mansion and at the lodge. There are gleams of moving lights that meet the storm as it beats against the shuttered windows of the old house, and a steady ray defeats the darkness in front of the decaying lodge.
Let us enter the smaller structure first. Two men are seated at a table in the front room on the ground floor. An oil lamp dimly illuminates the barely furnished apartment and casts weird shadows across the uncarpeted floor. One of these men we have met before. It is the impetuous little Ludovics, whose patriotism is as indiscreet as it is enthusiastic. His bright beady eyes gleam in the half light: his thin face is flushed, partially from excitement, but in a larger degree from the brandy he has drunk.
His companion is Rudolph, the lodge-keeper, a flabby-faced, thickset man, with heavy features and the look of one who enjoys soft places and hard liquor. They are bending forward, listening.
“It’s queer they don’t come,” Rudolph remarked, musingly. “I hear no sound of wheels. Here, man, have another drop to keep you awake.” He filled Ludovics’ glass from the bottle, and then replenished his own. Rudolph drank like one who needs renewed vigor, Ludovics like a man trying to quench the fires of impatience.