The Gilded Chair: A Novel

by Melville Davisson Post

"Could we not take this trail down the mountain?" inquired the Duke.

The mountaineer stroked his chin, "I reckon we'd better mosey along the road to the bottom," he answered, "the trail's some botherin' to a mewel."

Something in the man's manner told the Duke that he, rather than the mule, was the object of this consideration. The man's eyes rested on his light tweeds, doubtless thought unfitted to the thicket. The Duke was taken with the fancy to push his suggestion a little.

"If you were alone," he said, "would you not follow this trail?"

The mountaineer was embarrassed. The courtesy at his heart was right, but the trick of phrasing it was crude. He was a man accustomed to move, like the forces of Nature, on a line, and he could not easily diverge from it.

"Well," he said, "if I was in a powerful hurry, I reckon I'd let Jezebel take her chance on this air trail." Then a memory seized him and his face lightened, "But, I axed you, stranger, an' you said you warn't in no sich powerful hurry."

The Duke's impression was established, but his objection was also conclusively met. He returned smiling with the clumsy diplomat and Jezebel to the great road.

All the long, hazy afternoon they descended the mountain, on the brown, noiseless carpet, stretched between its walls of green dashed with scarlet. For the most part the men traveled steadily in silence, as the pioneer and the Indian travel always in the wilderness. Now and then, the mountaineer pointed out something of interest; an eagle rising in circles from some green abyss. He named the eagle with a certain scorn; he was a robber like Barabbas. The fishhawk that he plundered was a better man, for he got his bread in toil fairly, as the Good Book said it. What a man earned by his own labor he had a right to, but beyond that there was God to settle with. The Duke sought to turn the conversation on this sentence, as on a hinge, to Childers. He felt, that behind the first expressions of this man concerning the American, something definite and threatening moved, but he got little. It was not that Childers had great possessions, it was a sort of Divine treason that he was guilty of. He had "set up shop agin God Almighty!" Childers was old, almost alone—all of his kin had gone before him through the door of death. No one of his blood remained, except an orphaned niece, to sit after him in his place. Jehovah had held back his hand many years, But His wrath would only he the more terrible when that hand descended.

The man spoke gently, softly and in pity, like one who foresaw, but could not prevent a doom already on its way. Had there been passion or any touch of bitterness in the man's speech it would have passed over the Duke of Dorset, but coming thus it moved strangely with the impulse bringing him westward over four thousand miles of sea. That impulse lifted into a premonition. Something, then, threatened this girl whose face remained in his memory. He had come at some call! He was seized with a strange query. Did he know this danger, and the man walking beside him, have only the premonition of it; or did this man know it, and he have that premonition?

The Duke became curious to know if any fact underlay this man's shadowy forebodings. He sounded for it through the long afternoon, but he could touch nothing. The mountaineer seemed curiously timid, hesitating like a child that could not be brought to say what was turning in his mind, lest he should not be able to explain it. The man and everything moving about him deeply puzzled the Duke of Dorset. Hour after hour he studied him as they swung down the mountain, always on that noiseless carpet. The man seemed like an old, gentle child, and yet, a certain dignity, and a certain matrix of elements, strong, primal, savage, sat like a shadow behind that child. The Duke felt that the expression of the man's face was not permanent, that the child might on occasion fade out and another occupy the foreground. But not easily; that expression sat bedded in a great peace, as though fixed in plaster. If this thing was the result of struggle it surpassed, indeed, the taking of a city.