The Gilded Chair: A Novel

by Melville Davisson Post

CHAPTER XI—THE CHART OP THE TREASURE

When the Duke of Dorset came into the hotel dining room at ten o'clock for breakfast, he met a hall boy, calling his name and "letter please," after the manner of the English hostelry. He sat down at a table, thrust a knife under the flap of the letter and ripped it open. He took out the folded paper within and bent it back across his fingers. The paper was an outline map of the Pacific Coast of the United States. Merely a tracing like those maps used commonly on liners to indicate the day's run. It was marked with a cross in ink, at a point off the coast of Oregon, and signed across the bottom "Caroline Childers."

The Duke arose and went over to the window. The white yacht, lying last night at anchor, was going now out of the bay of Oban, the smoke pouring from her stacks. The gulls attended her, the sun danced on her painted flanks, and the green water, boiling under lace, ran hissing in two furrows, spreading like a V from her screw. The Duke remained standing in the window, his shoulders thrown loosely forward, his hand clenched and resting on the sill, the open map in his fingers. The yacht saluted the warship, dipping her colors, and turned westward slowly into the channel. Her proportions descended gradually into miniature. The smoke crawled lazily in thinner whisps along the sky landward from her funnels. The sea was a pot of molten glass, green as verdigris far down under the light, and polished on the surface like a crystal. Over this water, easily, without a sound, without the swinging of a davit, the yacht moved out slowly to the sea like something crawling on a mirror.

The Duke of Dorset was not prepared for this sudden departure of the yacht. Certain vague detached impressions had, during the night, got themselves slowly into form. Certain incidents, apparently unrelated, had moved one around the other into a sort of sequence. He was beginning to see, he thought, to what end certain events were on the way.

For fully twenty minutes the Duke stood in the window watching the departing yacht, his jaw thrust forward, the muscles of his face hardening, his clinched fingers bearing heavily on the sill. Then, he turned back slowly, deliberately, into the dining room, folded the map, put it into his pocket, went out to the clerk's cage, paid his bill with a five-pound note, ordered his luggage sent at once to the railway station, and went down the steps of the hotel into the street.

The visitors overland to Oban were in exodus; lorries passed him piled high with black leather trunks, boxes, bags, and traveling rugs; old women passed, sallow, haggard from the nights' chaperoning; girls, worn out and sleepy; men looking a stone thinner from seven hours of dancing; Highlanders in kilts, pipers, sailors, crowded around the doors of public houses, blinking in the sun. From behind these doors came oaths, bits of ribald songs, the unsteady voices of the drunken.

Here and there a yacht lifting its anchor steamed slowly out of the bay following that first one, now visible only as a picture etched on the horizon. Stupid sea birds, their shoulders drawn up, their beaks drooping, stood about the beach, or eyed leisurely the line of salvage thrust up by the tide. At the dock the day boat for Fort William and the north was taking on its cargo, and on mid deck, as a sort of lure, a little thin man with a wizened receding face was picking out swinging modern waltzes on a zither. His fingers moving nimbly as a monkey's, and his face following in sympathy his fingers with little nods and jerks, inconceivably grotesque.

The Duke went into the train shed, got a seat in a compartment and returned to Doune. He was not, on this day, annoyed by the asperities of travel, although the whole train south was packed, like a Brighton coach with trippers. He sat crowded on either side by a loose-jointed baronet and his equally masculine wife, who snapped at each other across him like trapped timber wolves. An old lady of some country house, raw with her long vigil, lectured her niece on the personal supervision of luggage.

And by the door a betartaned female slept audibly, unconscious that she rode south badged by two clans between which, after many hundred years, lies still the bitterness of death; her cap Glencoe MacDonald, her skirt a dress plaid of the Glen Lion Campbells; not since the massacre had one person worn the two of them.

It was a hard, uncomfortable journey after a night on one's feet, but the annoyance of it did not reach inward to the Duke of Dorset. He sat oblivious to this environment. He was holding here a review of the last two days and nights; as he visualized their incidents he seemed to come, now and then, upon events indicating a certain order, as though directed by some authority invisible behind the machinery of the world. The coming of this girl to Oban seemed something cleaner to a purpose than a mere whim of chance. And yet, looked at from another point of view, it was a mere coincidence. This review was like work expended on a cipher, or rather characters that might or might not be cipher. Characters set thus by accident and meaning nothing, or by design, with a story to be read.