Our voices sounded as though we had yelled down a well. No answer! My eye fastened on the door with No. 13 over it. All of us have some superstitions, and anyone brought up by a colored mammy is certain to have many.
"No. 13 is sure to be right," I thought, and pushed open the door.
A strange sight met my gaze: Dee, with her arms thrown around a youth who crouched on the floor, his face buried in his hands while his whole frame was shaken with sobs! From the chandelier hung a rope with a noose tied in the dangling end, and under it a pile of bricks carefully placed as though some child had been building a house of blocks. The bricks had evidently been taken from among others that were scattered over the hearth near a chimney that had fallen in.
Our relief at finding Dee and finding her unharmed was so great that nothing mattered to us. Dee put her finger on her lips and we stopped stock-still. The slender figure of the young man was still convulsed with sobs, and Dee held him and soothed him as though he had been a baby and she some grandmother. Finally he spoke, with his face still covered:
"Claire must never know!" Claire? Then this was Louis Gaillard! Dee had said several times she would like to know him, but she had had no idea of her idle wish being granted so quickly and in such a manner. When the boy said "Claire must never know," Dee arose to the occasion as only Dee could and said in a perfectly matter-of-fact tone: "No, Louis, I promise you that Claire shall never know from me." This calling him by name at the time did not seem strange to him. He was under such stress of emotion that the use of his Christian name by an unknown young girl seemed perfectly natural to the stricken youth.
It seems that when Dee went on ahead of us while I was so grandiloquently spouting poetry, she had flitted from room to room. The doors had been open all along the corridor except in No. 13. She had had a fancy to close them after each exploration until she had come to 13. On opening that door she had met a sight to freeze her young blood, but instead of freezing her young blood she had simply let out a most normal and healthy yell. Louis Gaillard was standing on the pile of bricks that he had placed with great precision under the chandelier, and as Dee entered he was in the act of fitting the noose around his poor young neck. His plan of course had been to slip the noose and then kick the pile of bricks from under him and there to hang until he should die.
The realization of what had occurred came to Dum and me without an explanation, which Dee gave us later when we could be alone with her. Dee, in the meantime, continued to pat the boy's shoulder and hold him tight in her courageous arms until the sobs ceased and he finally looked up. Then he slowly rose to his feet. He was a tall, slender youth, every inch of him the aristocrat. His countenance was not weak, just despondent. I could well fancy him to be very handsome, but now his sombre eyes were red with weeping and his mouth trembling with emotion.
"I don't know what made me be so wicked," he finally stammered.
"I know. You are very despondent over your life. You are tired of idleness and see no way to be occupied because your father opposes the kind of thing you feel yourself fitted to do," and Dee, ordinarily the kind of girl who hated lollapalusing, as she called it, took the boy's nerveless hand in both of hers. She said afterwards she knew by instinct that he needed flesh and blood to hang to, something tangible to keep his reason from leaving him. He looked at her wonderingly and she continued: "Claire has been away on a trip and while she was gone your father has nagged you. He thinks working in flowers is not the work for a Gaillard and wants you to be a lawyer or preacher. You have no money to go to college, and he seems to think you can be a preacher without the education necessary to be a lawyer—which is news to me. You have offers to plant gardens right here in Charleston, but your father will not permit you to do it. You have become despondent and have lost appetite and are now suffering from a nervousness that makes you not quite yourself."
"But you—how do you know all this?"