The Gilded Chair: A Novel

by Melville Davisson Post

Usage, training, the rigor of discipline long followed toughen and strengthen the human body to an excellence past belief. This man carried the woman, hour after hour, up the mountain, through the fir forest, and he traveled quite as fast with his unwieldy burden as the girl behind him was able to do with no weight except that of the rifle. The night lengthened and darkened. The morning began to approach. Still black tree trunk followed black tree trunk, and the brown moss carpet under their feet stretched upward. The air, instead of cooling with the dawn, became warmer. A thin mist of rain began to fall. Presently the contour of the ground changed; the carpet became level; more light entered among the trees, and they came out into a bit of open.

It was now morning. They came into an ancient clearing; a patch once cut out by some pioneer's ax; the scar of an old wound, that the wilderness had taken from the invader. The blackened stumps still stood about, fragments of charred tree tops remained; and in the center of the clearing stood a log cabin, roofed with clapboards, its door fallen from its wooden hinges, its chimney, built of crossed sticks, daubed between with clay, tumbled down, but the hewn logs and the clapboards, split with the grain of the wood, remained.

The Duke crossed the bit of open and entered the cabin. It was dry, and covered with leaves carried in through the door by the wind. The three persons were scarcely under the protection of this shelter, when the threatening rain began to fall. It was one of those rains common to the coast line. There was no wind; the atmosphere seemed to form itself into a drenching mist that descended through the trees.

The Marchesa Soderrelli complained of pain in the injured knee, and the two women determined to improvise a bandage. The Duke arose and went out into the clearing. The forest was beginning to steam, and he wished, if possible, to get the lie of the mountain range before they were hemmed in with mist. The two women improvised a bandage from a petticoat ruffle, and bound the knee as tightly as they could. They did not talk; both were greatly fatigued, and both realized the desperate situation. They did not discuss it, but each prepared to meet it, in her own manner, with resolution.

When the Duke had got the points of the compass, he was not disturbed about what ought to be done. He knew that as soon as the two women were a bit rested, they should at once go on. It would be a day of fatigue and hunger; but no one of them would die of hunger in a day, and by night he hoped to come in sight of the coast. Then they could stop and meet the problem of food.

He was going back into the cabin to explain the necessities of this plan, when the Marchesa Soderrelli called him. He entered. Caroline Childers was standing, leaning against the logs by the tumbled-in fireplace; the Marchesa Soderrelli sat on the ground among the leaves; both, in physical aspect, had paid their tribute to the wilderness. The girl's hair and eyes seemed to dominate her face; the soft indiscriminate things, common to youth, were gone; she had become, in the eight hours departed, a woman, acquainted with the bitterness of fife, and facing its renunciations. The Marchesa Soderrelli, sitting on the floor of the abandoned cabin, was an old woman, her face flabby, her body fallen into baggy lines. But the spirit in her was unshaken, and her voice was compact and decisive.

"I wish to speak to you, my friend," she said; "won't you please sit down?"

The man looked from one woman to the other and sat down on the corner of a log, jutting out from the door wall. For the last half of this night, he had been, upon one point, content. He was like one who, desiring a thing above all others, and despairing of his ability to obtain it, finds that thing seized upon by a horde of brutal and hideous events and thrust into his arms. He stood now, past the outposts of uncertainty, with the possession in his hand.

Those under the oldest superstition in the world warn us that such a moment is above all others perilous. That it is the habit of Destiny to wait with fatal patience until one's life swims over this mark, and then, rising, like a whaler to drive in the iron.

The Marchesa Soderrelli continued, like one who has a final and difficult thing to say.