"There is Capua, who was major-domo. We can inquire," said Mr. Raleigh, with a smile, rising and ringing for that functionary.
On Capua's appearance, the question was asked, if he had ever secretly detained letter or paper of any kind.
"Lors, massa! I alwes knew 'twould come to dis!" he replied. "No, massa, neber!" shaking his head with repeated emphasis.
"I thought you might have met with some accident, Capua," said his master.
"Axerden be , beg massa's parden; but such s'picions poison any family's peace, and make a feller done forgit hisself."
"Very well," said Mr. Raleigh, who was made to believe by this vehemence in what at first had seemed a mere fantasy. "Only remember, that, if you could assure me that any papers had been destroyed, the assurance would be of value."
"'Deed, Mass Roger? Dat alters de case," said Capua, grinning. "Dere's been a good many papers 'stroyed in dis yer house firs' an' last."
"Which in particular?"
"Don' rekerlek, massa, it's so long ago."
"But make an effort."
"Well, Massa Raleigh,'pears to me I do remember suthin',I do b'lieveyes, dis's jist how 'twas. Spect I might as well make a crean breast ob it. I's alwes had it hangin' roun' my conscious; do'no' but I's done grad to git rid ob it. Alwes spected massa 'd be 'xcusin' Cap o' turnin' tief."
"That is the last accusation I should make against you, Capua."
"But dar I stan's convicted."
"Out with it, Capua!" said Mr. Laudersdale, laughing.
"Lord! Massa Lausdel! how you do scare a chile! Didn' know mass'r was dar. See, Mass Roger, dis's jist how 'twas. Spec you mind dat time when all dese yer folks lib'd acrost de lake dat summer, an' massa was possessed to 'most lib dar too? Well, one day, massa mind Ol' Cap's runnin' acrost in de rain an' in great state ob excitement to tell him his house done burnt up?"
"Yes. What then?"
"Dat day, massa, de letters had come from Massa Reuben out in Indy, an' massa's pipe kinder 'tracted Cap's 'tention, an' so he jist set down in massa's chair an' took a smoke. Bimeby Cap thought,'Ef massa come an' ketch him!'an' put down de pipe an' went to work, and bimeby I smelt mighty queer smell, massa, 'bout de house, made him tink Ol' Nick was come hissef for Ol' Cap, an' I come back into dis yer room an' Massa Reuben's letters from Indy was jist most done burnt up, he cotched 'em in dese yer ol' brack han's, Mass Roger, an' jist whipt 'em up in dat high croset."
And having arrived at this confusion in his personal pronouns, Capua mounted nimbly on pieces of furniture, thrust his pocket-knife through a crack of the wainscot, opened the door of a small unseen closet, and, after groping about and inserting his head as Van Amburgh did in the lion's mouth, scrambled down again with his hand full of charred and blackened papers, talking glibly all the while.
"Ef massa'd jist listen to reason," he said, "'stead o' flyin' into one ob his tantrums, I might sprain de matter. You see, I knew Mass Roger'd feel so oncomforble and remorseful to find his ol' uncle's letters done 'stroyed, an 'twas all by axerden, an' couldn' help it noways, massa, an' been done sorry eber since, an' wished dar warn't no letters dis side de Atlantic nor torrer, ebery day I woke."
After which plea, Capua awaited his sentence.
"That will do,it's over now, old boy," said Mr. Raleigh, with his usual smile.
"Now, massa, you a'n't gwine"
"No, Capua, I'm going to do nothing but look at the papers."
"But massa's"
"You need not be troubled,I said, I was not."
"But, massa,s'pose I deserve a thrashing?"
"There's no danger of your getting it, you blameless Ethiop!"
Upon which pacific assurance, Capua departed.
The two gentlemen now proceeded to the examination of these fragments. Of the letters nothing whatever was to be made. From one of them dropped a little yellow folded paper that fell apart in its creases. Put together, it formed a sufficiently legible document, and they read the undoubted marriage-certificate of Susanne Le Blanc and Reuben Raleigh.
"I am sorry," said Mr. Laudersdale, after a moment. "I am sorry, instead of a fortune, to give them a bar-sinister."
"Your daughter is ignorant?your wife?"
"Entirely. Will you allow me to invite them in here? They should see this paper."
"You do not anticipate any unpleasant effect?"
"Not the slightest Marguerite has no notion of want or of pride.
Her first and only thought will besa cousine Hélène." And Mr.
Laudersdale went out.
Some light feet were to be heard pattering down the stairs, a mingling of voices, then Mr. Laudersdale passed on, and Marguerite tapped, entered, and closed the door.
"My father has told me something I but half understand," said she, with her hand on the door. "Unless I marry Mr. Heath, I lose my wealth? What does that signify? Would all the mines of Peru tempt me?"
Mr. Raleigh remained leaning against the corner of the bookcase. She advanced and stood at the foot of the table, nearly opposite him. Her lips were glowing as if the fire of her excitement were fanned by every breath; her eyes, half hidden by the veiling lids, seemed to throw a light out beneath them and down her cheek. She wore a mantle of swan's down closely wrapped round her, for she had complained ceaselessly of the chilly summer.
"Mr. Raleigh," she said, "I am poorer than you are, now. I am no longer an heiress."
At this moment, the door opened again and Mrs. Laudersdale entered. At a step she stood in the one sunbeam; at another, the shutters blew together, and the room was left in semi-darkness, with her figure gleaming through it, outlined and starred in tremulous evanescent light. For an instant both Marguerite and Mr. Raleigh seemed to be half awe-struck by the radiant creature shining out of the dark; but directly, Marguerite sprang back and stripped away the torrid nasturtium-vine which her mother had perhaps been winding in her hair when her husband spoke with her, and whose other end, long and laden with fragrant flame, still hung in her hand and along her dress. Laughing, Marguerite in turn wound it about herself, and the flowers, so lately plucked from the bath of hot air, where they had lain steeping in sun, flashed through the air a second, and then played all their faint spirit-like luminosity about their new wearer. She seemed sphered in beauty, like the Soul of Morning in some painter's fantasy, with all great stars blossoming out in floral life about her, colorless, yet brilliant in shape and light. It was too much; Mr. Raleigh opened the window and let in the daylight again, and a fresh air that lent the place a gayer life. As he did so, Mr. Laudersdale entered, and with him Mr. Heath and his mother. Mr. Laudersdale briefly recapitulated the facts, and added,
"Communicating my doubts to Mr. Raleigh, he has kindly furnished me with the marriage-certificate of his uncle and Mademoiselle Le Blanc. And as Mr. Reuben Raleigh was living within thirteen years, you perceive that your claims are invalidated."
There was a brief silence while the paper was inspected.
"I am still of opinion that my grandmother's second marriage was legal," replied Mr. Heath; "yet I should be loath to drag up her name and subject ourselves to a possibility of disgrace. So, though the estate is ours, we can do without it!"
Meanwhile, Marguerite had approached her father, and was patching together the important scraps.
"What has this to do with it?" said she. "You admitted before this discoverydid you not?that the property was no longer mine. These people are Aunt Susanne's heirs still, if not legally, yet justly. I will not retain a sous of it! My father shall instruct my lawyer, Mrs. Heath, to make all necessary transfers to yourself. Let us wish you good-morning!" And she opened the door for them to pass.
"Marguerite! are you mad?" asked her father, as the door closed.
"No, father,but honest,which is the same thing," she responded, still standing near it.
"True," he said, in a low tone like a groan. "But we are ruined."
"Ruined? Oh, no! You are well and strong. So am I. I can work. I shall get much embroidery to do, for I can do it perfectly; the nuns taught me. I have a thousand resources. And there is something my mother can do; it is her great secret; she has played at it summer after summer. She has moulded leaves and flowers and twined them round beautiful faces in clay, long enough; now she shall carve them in stone, and you will be rich again!"
Mrs. Laudersdale sat in a low chair while Marguerite spoke, the nasturtium-vine dinging round her feet like a gorgeous snake, her hands lying listlessly in her lap, and her attitude that of some queen who has lost her crown, and is totally bewildered by this strange conduct on the part of circumstances. All the strength and energy that had been the deceits of manner were utterly fallen away, and it was plain, that, whatever the endowment was which Marguerite had mentioned, she could only play at it. She was but a woman, sheer woman, with the woman's one capability, and the exercise of that denied her.
Mr. Laudersdale remained with his eyes fixed on her, and lost, it seemed, to the presence of others.
"The disgrace is bitter," he murmured. "I have kept my name so proudly and so long! But that is little. It is for you I fear. I have stood in your sunshine and shadowed your life, dear!At least," he continued, after a pause, "I can place you beyond the reach of suffering. I must finish my lonely way."
Mrs. Laudersdale looked up slowly and met his earnest glance.
"Must I leave you?" she exclaimed, with a wild terror in her tone. "Do you mean that I shall go away? Oh, you need not care for me,you need never love me,you may always be cold,but I must serve you, live with you, die with you!" And she sprang forward with outstretched arms.
He caught her before her foot became entangled in the long folds of her skirt, drew her to himself, and held her. What he murmured was inaudible to the others; but a tint redder than roses are swam to her cheek, and a smile broke over her face like a reflection in rippling water. She held his arm tightly in her hand, and erect and proud, as it were with a new life, bent toward Roger Raleigh.
"You see!" said she. "My husband loves me. And I,it seems at this moment that I have never loved any other than him!"
There came a quick step along the matting, the handle of the door turned in Marguerite's resisting grasp, and Mrs. Purcell's light muslins swept through. Mr. Raleigh advanced to meet her,a singular light upon his face, a strange accent of happiness in his voice.
"Since you seem to be a part of the affair," she said in a low tone, while her lip quivered with anger and scorn, "concerning which I have this moment been informed, pray, take to Mr. Lauderdale my brother's request to enter the house of Day, Knight, and Company, from this day."
"Has he made such a request?" asked Mr. Raleigh.
"He shall make it!" she murmured swiftly, and was gone.
That night a telegram flashed over the wires, and thenceforth, on the great financial tide, the ship Day, Knight, and Company lowered its peak to none.
The day crept through until evening, deepening into genuine heat, and Marguerite sat waiting for Mr. Raleigh to come and bid her farewell. It seemed that his plans were altered, or possibly he was gone, and at sunset she went out alone. The cardinals that here and there showed their red caps above the bank, the wild roses that still lined the way, the grapes that blossomed and reddened and ripened year after year ungathered, did not once lift her eyes. She sat down, at last, on an old fallen trunk cushioned with moss, half of it forever wet in the brook that babbled to the lake, and waited for the day to quench itself in coolness and darkness.
"Ah!" said Mr. Raleigh, leaping from the other side of the brook to the mossy trunk, "is it you? I have been seeking you, and what sprite sends you to me?"
"I thought you were going away," she said, abruptly.
"That is a broken paving-stone," he answered, seating himself beside her, and throwing his hat on the grass.
"You asked me, yesterday, if I confessed to being a myth," she said, after a time. "If I should go back to Martinique, I should become one in your remembrance,should I not? You would think of me just as you would have thought of the Dryad yesterday, if she had stepped from the tree and stepped back again?"
"Are you going to Martinique?" he asked, with a total change of face and manner.
"I don't know. I am tired of this; and I cannot live on an ice-field. I had such life at the South! It is 'as if a rose should shut and be a bud again.' I need my native weather, heat and sea."
"How can you go to Martinique?"
"Oh, I forgot!"
Mr. Raleigh did not reply, and they both sat listening to the faint night-side noises of the world.
"You are very quiet," he said at last, ceasing to fling waifs upon the stream.
"And you could be very gay, I believe."
"Yes. I am full of exuberant spirits. Do you know what day it is?"
"It is my birthday."
"It is my birthday!"
"How strange! The Jews would tell you that this sweet first of August was the birthday of the world.
"''Tis like the birthday of the world,
When earth was born in bloom,'"
she sang, but paused before her voice should become hoarse in tears.
"Do you know what you promised me on my birthday? I am going to claim it."
"The present. You shall have a cast which I had made from one of my mother's fancies or bas-reliefs,she only does the front of anything,a group of fleurs-de-lis whose outlines make a child's face, my face."
"It is more than any likeness in stone or pencil that I shall ask of you."
"What then?"
"You cannot imagine?"
"Monsieur" she whispered, turning toward him, and blushing in the twilight, "est ce que c'est moi?"
There came out the low west-wind singing to itself through the leaves, the drone of a late-carousing honey-bee, the lapping of the water on the shore, the song of the wood-thrush replete with the sweetness of its half-melody; and ever and anon the pensive cry of the whippoorwill fluted across the deepening silence that summoned all these murmurs into hearing. A rustle like the breeze in the birches passed, and Mrs. Purcell retarded her rapid step to survey the woods-people who rose out of the shade and now went on together with her. It seemed as if the loons and whippoorwills grew wild with sorrow that night, and after a while Mrs. Purcell ceased her lively soliloquy, and as they walked they listened. Suddenly Mr. Raleigh turned. Mrs. Purcell was not beside him. They had been walking on the brook-edge; the path was full of gaps and cuts. With a fierce shudder and misgiving, he hurriedly retraced his steps, and searched and called; then, with the same haste, rejoining Marguerite, gained the house, for lanterns and assistance. Mrs. Purcell sat at the drawing-room window.
"Comment?" cried Marguerite, breathlessly.
"Oh, I had no idea of walking in fog up to my chin," said Mrs. Purcell; "so I took the short cut."
"You give me credit for the tragic element," she continued, under her breath, as Mr. Raleigh quietly passed her. "That is old style. To be sure, I might as well die there as in the swamps of Florida. Purcell is ordered to Florida. Of course, I am ordered too!" And she whirled him the letter which she held.
Other letters had been received with the evening-mail, and one that made Mr. Raleigh's return in September imperative occasioned some discussion in the House of Laudersdale. The result that that gentleman secured one more than he had intended in the spring; and if you ever watch the shipping-list, the arrival of the Spray-Plough at Calcutta, with Mr. and Mrs. Raleigh among the passengers, will be seen by you as soon as me.