The Gilded Chair: A Novel

by Melville Davisson Post

The man arose, took a clasp knife out of his pocket, handed it to the Duke, and returned to his place against the spruce tree, and his cob pipe, glowing with a coal. The Duke went out into the forest, cut a sapling, some eight feet long, trimmed it, and pared it even at the butt. Then he cut a square trench along the sapling, from the butt upward, three inches long and a quarter inch in depth. He cut also narrow rings in the bark around the sapling over the trench. Then he went back to the mountaineer, returned the knife, and put his second query.

"Have you a bit of string!"

The man put out his hand, without a word, drew the gunny sack over to him, unraveled the coarse threads around the top of it, wet them in his mouth, rolled them between his fingers, and handed them to the Duke. Then he flipped a hot ember deftly into his cooling pipe, and leaned back again, silently, into his place against the spruce tree.

The Duke took a little knife out of his waistcoat pocket, opened its larger blade, and set the handle of it into the trench which he had cut into the sapling, forced it firmly in, and bound it tightly with the bits of hemp. Then he went with the pole in his hand, down the bank of the river to the pool. He laid it here on the bracken and stripped to the skin. The mountaineer, pulling slowly at his pipe, bareheaded, the long gray hair straggling over his face, watched every movement of the Duke with deep and consuming interest.

When the Duke stood naked, as the first man in the Garden, he took the sapling in his teeth, lowered himself into the water, and swam with long noiseless strokes out to a great rock standing in the middle waters of the pool—a rock, flat, smooth as a table, and covered with gray lichen, as with a frost of silver. He drew himself noiselessly up out of the water, crawled along the level surface of the rock, and stretched himself at full length, with his face peering over the lower border of it. Then he put his right arm slowly out with the pole grasped above the middle. The lichen, heated by the sun, was warm. The light descended into the dark pool as into a vat of amber. The Duke lay stretched out in the sun, his lithe, powerful body glistening with drops of water, his left arm doubled under his chest, his right, bronzed, sinewy, the muscles set like steel, raised above the dark water.

The mountaineer watched from his place against the spruce tree, his chin lifted, his pipe, turned over on its elder stem, going out. The mule behind him, nosing the bracken for lost fragments of bread, made the only sound rising in the forest. Suddenly the Duke's arm descended; the eddy below the great rock boiled; something floundered across the deep water of the pool, a faint stain of crimson rising to the amber surface. The Duke arose, took his weapon by the end, and threw it, like a harpoon, across the pool to the bank, where it stood fixed upright in the bracken, quivering, the knife blade glittering in the sun. Then he disappeared head first into the pool, and a moment later came ashore with a three-pound trout, gaping with a wound, two inches deep, descending behind the gills downward through the spine.

Thus the Duke got his breakfast as the savage of the Yukon gets it; as the snub-nosed oriental-eyed Indian of the Pacific Coast to this day, on occasion, gets it. And he cooked it, as the Indian cooks his salmon, grilled on a flat stone before a heap of embers.

When the feast was ended, the Duke of Dorset roped the pack to the mule, and they forded the river, wading through the black water to their middle. They pushed through a huckleberry thicket and climbed the shoulder of the mountain on an old trail, hardly to be followed; made, doubtless, by the deer and the red Indian. For two hours they climbed the mountain, laboriously, on this lost trail, and then, abruptly passing around the huge, gnarled trunk of a gigantic fir, they came out on the summit; and the Duke of Dorset stopped motionless, in his tracks, like a man come suddenly by some enchantment into a land of wonders.

Below him, rimmed in by mountains, rising one above the other into haze, threaded by a river, lay the work surely of those palace builders of Arabia, imprisoned in copper pots under the stamp of Solomon. Two hundred feet below him on a vast terrace stood a château of cream-colored stone, roofed with red tile; carved beautifully around the doors and windows; stretching across the whole terrace, with a huge door under an arch set in a square tower. It was faced with delicate spires, and to the left a second tower arose, circular, huge, with a flat roof, and long windows rising unevenly as on the turn of some vast stairway; then it stretched away on either side, with arches, balustrades, sweeps of bare wall, great windows set in carving and mounted with fretwork, to low square towers, flanking massively the ends.

The whole of it, in spite of its walls, its massive arches, its towers—by some touch of architectural harmony, by some trick of grouping, by some genius moving in the hand that traced the outline of it thus fantastically against the sky—seemed a thing airy and illusive, as though raised here on the instant by some fairy magic. From the château, stretching level as a floor to the foot of the bluff on which the Duke stood, lay a square of velvet turf, framed rigidly in a white road. To the east of this court, behind the château, a park descended, sloping to the river; to the south, rigid and formal against a wall of yellow stone, long terraces lay, one below the other, each a formal garden perfect in detail to the slightest fragment of color. The first lying against the wall was severe in outline, white as though paved with quartz, flanked at either end with a square of that exquisite velvet turf and lying between were three pools floating with water flowers. Against the wall, at regular intervals, was, here and there, a marble figure standing in a niche, separated by a green sheared hedge, banking the wall to its yellow coping. The second terrace was a formal Italian garden after the ancient villas of the Campagna. The third, an Egyptian garden, walled with pale-green tile. And thus, varied and beautiful, the terraces descended to the valley. Whatever garden any people, laboriously, through long generations, had made in form and color beautiful to the eye, was here reproduced with minute and endless patience.