The Gilded Chair: A Novel

by Melville Davisson Post

For a moment the scene held the Duke as a thing staged under his eye in some elaborate drama. Then groups of figures began to emerge from the doors of the château and a thin line of scarlet crept along the whole face of the north wing under the roof—flames licking the wooden cornice. He realized, then, that he and the two women had not escaped; that they would be hunted through these mountains; that the struggle would be one of extermination; that he faced a condition as primitive as any obtaining in the morning of the world.

He stepped back, tucked the rifle under his arm, and looked about for the trail leading down to the river and the great road. He found it in a moment and began to descend, followed by the two women. The three figures hurried, a curious moving picture in the moonlit forest. The Duke of Dorset, bare-headed, forcing his way through the brush of the mountain, a rifle in his hand; the Marchesa Soderrelli in a trailing, elaborately embroidered evening dress, the skirt of it tearing at every step; Caroline Childers with bare arms, bare shoulders, her white gown fouled by the leaves—all on their way to the wilderness. So swiftly had conditions been reversed.

Finally they came to the river at the point where the Duke had crossed on his way to the château. Here not only was the current swift, but the water was up to a man's waist. That meant to the shoulders of the women, and consequently too deep to ford. He did not stop to discuss the crossing, but set out along the bank of the river in the hope of finding a shallow. This bank, unlike the opposite one, was dense with underbrush. The two women followed close behind the man's shoulders in order to escape the bushes that he thrust aside. Sometimes they touched him, crowded against him, stumbled against him. Caroline Childers was more fortunate than the Marchesa Soder-relli. Her dinner dress had no train. The older woman's long, heavy skirt caught in every bush, sometimes she was thrown down by it, sometimes it tore. Finally she stopped, reached back to the skirt band, gave it a jerk that wrenched off the delicate hooks, and when the garment fell about her feet, stepped out of it. Under it was a black-satin petticoat. She went on, leaving the skirt lying in the trail.

It was the first toll taken of civilization by the wild.

The bank continued for several hundred yards, thus, through thickets, then it became a forest, clear of undergrowth, but close set with trees, and dark. A forest that grew thicker and consequently darker as they advanced. There was now scarcely any light. Here and there a vagrant ray descended through some opening in the tree tops, or a patch lay, like a detached fragment, on the boles of the trees.

The Duke watched the river as they advanced, but for perhaps half a mile he found no favorable change in the swift current. Finally the bank ascended to a heavily wooded knoll; below it the river pounded over bowlders. But above, there was evidently a shallow, where the sheet of water glided at no great depth over a rock bed. They stopped on this knoll, among the trees in the dark; the bank was clear of any brush, and dry, covered with a rug of moss, browned by the autumn sun, and yielding like velvet to the foot. The river glistened in the white moonlight, black, viscous, sinister, slipping through the forest. The road, lying beyond it, was also in the light, while the mountains, stretching off westward from this road, lay under a vast inky shadow.

The Duke of Dorset took off his coat, laid it at the foot of a tree, set the rifle beside it, bade the women await his return, and went down the bank into the river. He found the water not deeper than he had judged it, but the current was rather stronger, and the rock bed uneven and seamed with cracks. He crossed to the opposite bank and was returning, when something dropped into the river beside him with a slight splash. He looked up and behind him.

The road, white here under the moon, stretched up the river gradually into shadow. From the direction of the chateau, a man was advancing, running in a long, slouching trot. The Duke remembered that the river, like the road, was in light. He stooped, hooked his fingers into a crack of the rock bed, and lowered himself into the water. He remained thus with the water pouring over him until a second splash advised him that the man had gone on. He got slowly to one knee, and in a moment to his feet. The road was now clear. The Duke hurriedly waded to the bank and came to the shelter of the trees. It was dark under the trees, but he could make out the figure of a woman sitting by the tree where he had placed the rifle, and a second figure, vaguely white, standing at the edge of the bank against a fir trunk. He spoke to this standing figure.

"Where did the man go?" he said. "I could not see from the river."

"He followed the road," replied the figure; "can we cross?"