The Gilded Chair: A Novel

by Melville Davisson Post

CHAPTER XXIV—THE TASTE OF DEATH

There is no phenomenon of weather so swiftly variable as that of mist. It may lie at a given moment on the sea or on the mountain—a clinging, opaque mass, as dense and impenetrable as darkness; darkness, in fact, leeched of its pigment, a strange, hideous, unnatural, pale darkness—and the next moment it may be swept clean away by the wind. This is especially true on high altitudes; the ridges of hills; the exposed shoulders of mountains, where the fog lies clear in the path of the wind. On Western mountain ranges, adjacent to the sea, this protean virtue of the weather is sometimes a thing as instantaneous as sorcery. The soft rain is often followed by a stiff, heady breeze, sucked in landward from the ocean. This breeze travels like a broom sweeping its track. Thus, the Marchesa Soderrelli, wrapped in this mist, like a toy in wool, sitting on the floor of the cabin, believed herself present at some enchantment, when suddenly the mist departed, a cool wind blew in on her, and the sun entered.

She uttered a cry of astonishment, and pointed to the door. A huge, gaunt mule stood directly before the cabin, and almost instantly the tall figure of a man, equally gaunt, loomed in the door.

"Good mornin'," he said, with an awkward, shy bob of the chin. His eyes were gentle; his craggy, rugged feature placid like those of some old child. "I had a right smart trouble to find you."

The tragic nature of a situation is an intangible essence purely mental. It does not lie in any physical aspect; it is a state of the mind. Let that state of the mind change, and the whole atmosphere of the situation changes. The scene may stand in every detail precisely as it was, the actors in it remain the same, Nature and every phase of Nature the same, and yet everything is changed. It is a state of the mind! On the instant, the scene of breaking tension staged in this mountain cabin descended into commonplace. Life, and the promise of life travel always in one zone; death, and the threat of death in another—but shifting imperceptibly, and on the tick of the clock.

One arriving now at this cabin would have marked only signs of fatigue in the aspect of the three persons in it. Of this fatigue, the girl and the older woman gave much less evidence than the man. He seemed wholly exhausted. The vitality of the two women arose with the advent of the mountaineer. They gave interest and aid to his efforts to provide a meager breakfast. He produced from a sack across the mule's saddle a piece of raw bacon, flour and a frying pan.

The Duke of Dorset, after his first welcome to the mountaineer, and his brief explanation to the others, had returned to his seat on the log by the door. He seemed too tired even to follow events. The mountaineer had produced sulphur matches from the inside of his hat—the only dry spot about him—wrapped in a piece of red oilcloth, cut doubtless from the cover of some cabin table. He was now on his knees by the tumbled-in chimney, lighting a fire. Caroline Childers, with the knife, which the Duke had once borrowed, was cutting the bacon into strips. The Marchesa Soderrelli, still seated on the floor, was in conversation with the mountaineer, her strong, resolute nature recovering its poise.

The contrast between the degrees of fatigue manifest in the two women and the man by the door was striking. He looked like a human body from which all the energies of life had been removed. In the case of the two women, Nature was beginning to recover. But, in the aspect of the man, there was no indication that she ever intended to make the effort.

Now, as the effect of mere exertion, this result was excessive. The man was hardy and powerful; he was young; he was accustomed to fatigue. Eight hours of stress would not have brought such a frame to exhaustion. Eight days would hardly have done it. Moreover, within the last hour, the man had entered the clearing with no marked evidence of fatigue. The transformation carried the aspect of sorcery, or that of some obscure and hideous plague, traveling in the mist.

Occult and unknowable, swift and potent are the states of the mind. The blasting liquors, fabled of the Borgia, were not more toxic than certain ones brewed, on occasion, in the vats of the brain.