CHAPTER IX
THE TRAGEDY IN THE STORM
Edward returned to Ilexhurst that evening conscious of a mental uneasiness. He could not account for it except upon the hypothesis of unusual excitement. His mind had simply failed to react. And yet to his sensitive nature there was something more. Was it the conversation with Eldridge and the sudden dissipation of his error concerning Gerald, or did it date to the meeting in the club? There was a discord somewhere. He became conscious after awhile that he had failed to harmonize with his new acquaintances and that among these was Col. Montjoy. He seemed to feel an ache as though a cold wind blew upon his heart. If he had not made that unfortunate remark about the negro! He acquitted himself very readily, but he could not forget that terrible silence. "I have great sympathy for the negro," he had said. What he meant was that, secure in her power and intelligence, her courage and advancement, the south could safely concede much to the lower class. That is what he felt and believed, but he had not said it that way. He would say it to-morrow to Col. Montjoy and explain. Relief followed the resolution.
And then, sitting in the little room, which began to exert a strange power over him, he reviewed in mind the strange history of the people whose lives had begun to touch his. The man downstairs, sleeping off the effects of the drug, taken to dull a feverish brain that had all day struggled with new problems; what a life his was! Educated beyond the scope of any single university, Eldridge had said, and yet a child, less than a child! What romance, what tragedies behind those restless eyes! And sleeping down yonder by the river in that eternal silence of the city of the dead, the old lawyer, a mystery living, a mystery dead! What a depth of love must have stirred the bosom of the man to endure in silence for so many years for the sake of a fickle girl! What forgiveness! Or was it revenge? This idea flashed upon Edward with the suddenness of an inspiration. Revenge! What a revenge! And the woman, was she living or dead? And if living, were her eyes to watch him, Edward Morgan, and his conduct? Where was the father and why was the grandfather ignorant or silent? Then he turned to his own problem. That was an old story. As he sat dreaming over these things his eyes fell upon the fragmentary manuscripts, and almost idly he began to read the briefs upon them.
One was inscribed, "The Storm," and it seemed to be the bulkiest. Opening it he began to read; before he knew it he was interested. The chapter read:
"Not a zephyr stirred the expectant elms. They lifted their arms against the starlit sky in shadowy tracery, and motionless as a forest of coral in the tideless depths of a southern sea.
"The cloud still rose.
"It was a cloud indeed. It stretched across the west, far into north and south, its base lost in the shadow, its upper line defined and advancing swiftly, surely, flanking the city and shutting out the stars with its mighty wings. Far down the west the lightning began to tear the mass, but still the spell of silence remained. When this strange hush is combined with terrific action, when the vast forces are so swift as to outrun sound, then, indeed, does the chill of fear leap forth.
"So came on the cloud. Now the city was half surrounded, its walls scaled. Half the stars were gone. Some of the flying battalions had even rushed past!
"But the elms stood changeless, immovable, asleep!
"Suddenly one vivid, crackling, tearing, defending flash of intensest light split the gloom and the thunder leaped into the city! It awoke then! Every foundation trembled! Every tree dipped furiously. The winds burst in. What a tumult! They rushed down the parallel streets and alleys, these barbarians; they came by the intersecting ways! They fought each other frantically for the spoils of the city, struggling upward in equal conflict, carrying dust and leaves and debris. They were sucked down by the hollow squares, they wept and mourned, they sobbed about doorways, they sung and cheered among the chimneys and the trembling vanes. They twisted away great tree limbs and hurled them far out into the spaces which the lightning hollowed in the night! They drove every inhabitant indoors and tugged frantically at the city's defenses! They tore off shutters and lashed the housetops with the poor trees!
"The focus of the battle was the cathedral! It was the citadel! Here was wrath and frenzy and despair! The winds swept around and upward, with measureless force, and at times seemed to lift the great pile from its foundations. But it was the lashing trees that deceived the eye; it stood immovable, proud, strong, while the evil ones hurled their maledictions and screamed defiance at the very door of God's own heart.
"In vain. In a far up niche stood a weather-beaten saint – the warden. The hand of God upheld him and kept the citadel while unseen forces swung the great bell to voice his faith and trust amid the gloom!
"Then came the deluge, huge drops, bullets almost, in fierceness, shivering each other until the street-lamps seemed set in driving fog through which the silvered missiles flashed horizontally – a storm traveling within a storm.
"But when the tempest weeps, its heart is gone. Hark! 'Tis the voice of the great organ; how grand, how noble, how triumphant! One burst of melody louder than the rest breaks through the storm and mingles with the thunder's roar.
"Look! A woman! She has come, whence God alone may know! She totters toward the cathedral; a step more and she is safe, but it is never taken! One other frightened life has sought the sanctuary. In the grasp of the tempest it has traveled with wide-spread wings; a great white sea bird, like a soul astray in the depths of passion. It falls into the eddy, struggles wearily toward the lights, whirls about the woman's head and sinks, gasping, dying at her feet. The God-pity rises within her, triumphing over fear and mortal anguish. She stands motionless a moment; she does not take the wanderer to her bosom, she cannot! The winds have stripped the cover from the burden in her arms! It is a child's coffin, pressed against her bosom. The moment of safety is gone! In the next a man, the seeming incarnation of the storm itself, springs upon her, tears the burden from her and disappears like a shadow within a shadow!
"Within the cathedral they are celebrating the birth of Christ, without, the elements repeat the scene when the veil of the temple was rended.
"The storm had passed. The lightning still blazed vividly, but silently now, and at each flash the scene stood forth an instant as though some mighty artist was making pictures with magnesium. A tall woman, who had crouched, as one under the influence of an overpowering terror near the inner door, now crept to the outer, beneath the arch, and looked fearfully about. She went down the few steps to the pavement. Suddenly in the transient light a face looked up into hers, from her feet; a face that seemed not human. The features were convulsed, the eyes set. With a low cry the woman slipped her arms under the figure on the pavement, lifted it as though it were that of a child and disappeared in the night. The face that had looked up was as white as the lily at noon; the face bent in pity above it was dark as the leaves of that lily scattered upon the sod."
Edward read this and smiled, as he laid it aside, and continued with the other papers. They were brief sketches and memoranda of chapters; sometimes a single sentence upon a page, just as his friend De Maupassant used to jot them down one memorable summer when they had lingered together along the Riviera, but they had no connection with "The Storm" and the characters therein suggested. If they belonged to the same narrative the connections were gone.
Wearied at last he took up his violin and began to play. It is said that improvisers cannot but run back to the music they have written. "Calvary" was his masterpiece and soon he found himself lost in its harmonies. Then by easy steps there rose in memory, as he played, the storm and Gerald's sketch. He paused abruptly and sat with his bow idle upon the strings, for in his mind a link had formed between that sketch and the chapter he had just read. He had felt the story was true when he read it. The lawyer had said John Morgan wrote from life. Here was the first act of a drama in the life of a child, and the last, perhaps, in the life of a woman.
And that child under the influence of music had felt the storm scene flash upon his memory and had drawn it. The child was Gerald Morgan.
Edward laid aside the violin for a moment, went into the front room, threw open the shutters and loosened his cravat. Something seemed to suffocate him, as he struggled against the admission of this irresistible conclusion. Overwhelmed with the significance of the discovery, he exclaimed aloud: "It was an inherited memory."
But if the boy had been born under the circumstances set forth in the sketch, who was the man, and why should he have assaulted the woman who bore the child's coffin? And what was she doing abroad under such circumstances? The man and the woman's object was hidden perhaps forever. But not so the woman; the artist had given her features, and as for the other woman, the author had said she was dark. There was in Gerald's mind picture no dark woman; only the girl with the coffin, the arch above and the faint outlines of bending trees!
CHAPTER X
"GOD PITY ME! GOD PITY ME!"
Edward was sitting thus lost in the contemplation of the circumstances surrounding him, when by that subtle sense as yet not analyzed he felt the presence of another person in the room, and looked over his shoulder. Gerald was advancing toward him smiling mysteriously. Edward noticed his burning eyes and saw intense mental excitement gleaming beyond. The man's mood was different from any he had before revealed.
"So you have been out among the friends of your family," he said, with his queer smile. "How did you like them?" Edward was distinctly offended by the supercilious manner and impertinent question, but he remembered his ward's condition and resentment passed from him.
"Pleasant people, Gerald, but I am not gifted with the faculty of making friends easily. How come on your experiments?"
The visitor's expression changed. He looked about him guardedly. "They advance," he replied, in a whisper; "they advance!"
Whatever his motive for entering that room – a room unfamiliar to him, for his restless eyes had searched it over and over in the few minutes he had been in it – was forgotten in the enthusiasm of the scientist. "I have mapped out a course and am working toward it," he said; and then presently: "You remember that pictures can now be transmitted by electricity across great stretches of space and flashed upon a disc? So goes the scene from the convex surface of the eye along a thread-like nerve, so flashed the picture in the brain. But somewhere there it remains. How to prove it, to prove it, that is the question! Oh, for a brain, a brain to dissect!" He glared at Edward, who shuddered under the wildness of the eyes bent upon him. "But time enough for that; I must first ascertain if a picture can be imprinted upon any living substance by light, and remain. This I can do in another way."
"How?" Edward was fascinated.
"It is a great idea. The fish's eye will not do; it is itself a camera and the protecting film is impression-proof. It lacks the gelatine surface, but over some fish is spread the real gelatine – in fact, the very stuff that sensitive plates rely upon. In our lake is a great bass, that swims deep. I have caught them weighing ten and twelve pounds. They are pale, greenish white until exposed to the light, when they darken. If the combined action of the light and air did not actually destroy this gelatine, they would turn black. The back, which daily receives the downward ray direct, is as are the backs of most fishes, dark; it is a spoiled plate. But not so the sides. It is upon this fish I am preparing to make pictures."
"But how?" Gerald smiled and shook his head.
"Wait. It is too important to talk about in advance."
Edward regarded him long and thoughtfully and felt rising within him a greater sympathy. It was pitiful that such a mind should die in the embrace of a mere drug, dragged down to destruction by a habit. "Beyond the scope of any single university," but not beyond the slavery of a weed.
"I have been thinking, Gerald," he said, finally, fixing a steady gaze upon the restless eyes of his visitor, "that the day is near at hand when you must bring to your rescue the power of a great will."
Gerald listened, grew pale and remained silent. Presently he turned to the speaker.
"You know, then. Tell me what to do."
"You must cease the use of morphine and opium."
Gerald drew a deep breath and smiled good-naturedly.
"Oh, that is it," he said; "some one has told you that I am a victim of morphine and opium. Well, what would you think if I should tell you he is simply mistaken?"
His face was frank and unclouded. Edward gazed upon him, incredulous. After a moment's pause, during which Gerald enjoyed his astonishment, he continued:
"I was once a victim; there is no doubt of that; but now I am cured. It was a frightful struggle. A man who has not experienced it or witnessed it can form no conception of what it means to break away from habitual use of opium. Some day you may need it and my experience will help you. I began by cutting my customary allowance for a day in half, and day after day, week after week, I kept cutting it in half until the time came when I could not divide it with a razor. Would you believe it, the habit was as strong in the end as the beginning? I lay awake and thought of that little speck by the hours; I tossed and cried myself to sleep over it! I slept and wept myself awake. The only remedy for this and all habits is a mental victory. I made the fight – I won!
"I can never forget that day," and he smiled as he said it; "the day I found it impossible to divide the speck of opium; a breath would have blown it away, but I would have murdered the man who breathed upon it. I swallowed it; the touch of that atom is yet upon my tongue; I swallowed it and slept like a child; and then came the waking! For days I was a maniac – but it passed.
"I grew into a new life – a beautiful, peaceful world. It had been around me all the time but I had forgotten how it looked; a blissful world! I was cured.
"Years have passed since that day, and no taste of the hateful drug has ever been upon my tongue. Not for all the gold in the universe, not for any secrets of science, not for a look back into the face of my mother," he cried, hoarsely, rising to his feet; "not for a smile from heaven would I lay hands upon that fiend again!"
He closed abruptly, his hand trembling, the perspiration beading his brow. His eyes fell and the woman Rita stood before them, a look of ineffable sadness and tenderness upon her face.
"Will you retire now, Master Gerald?" she said, gently. Without a word he turned and left the room. She was about to follow when Edward, excited and touched by the scene he had witnessed and full of discoveries, stopped her with an imperious gesture.
For a moment he paced the room. Rita was motionless, awaiting with evident nervousness his pleasure. He came and stood before her, and, looking her steadily in the face, said, abruptly:
"Woman, what is the name of that young man, and what is mine?"
She drew back quickly and her lips parted in a gasp.
"My God!" he heard her whisper.
"I demand an answer! You carry the secret of one of us – probably both. Which is the son of Marion Evans?"
She sank upon her knees and hid her face in her apron.
It was all true, then. Edward felt as though he himself would sink down beside her if the silence continued.
"Say it," he said, hoarsely; "say it!"
"As God is my judge," she answered, faintly, "I do not know."
"One is?"
"One is."
"And the other – who is he?"
"Mine." The answer was like a whisper from the pines wafted in through the open window. It was loud enough. Edward caught the chair for support. The world reeled about him. He suffocated.
Rita still knelt with covered head, but her trembling form betrayed the presence of the long-restrained emotions. He walked unsteadily to the mantel, and, drawing the cover from the little picture, went to the mirror and placed it again by his face. At length he said in despair:
"God pity me! God pity me!"
The woman arose then and took the picture and gazed long and earnestly upon it. A sob burst from her lips. Lifting it again to the level of the man's face, she looked from one to the other.
"Enough!" he said, reading it aright.
Despair had settled over his own face. She handed back the little likeness, and, clasping her hands, stood in simple dignity awaiting his will. He noticed then, as he studied her countenance closely, the lines of suffering there; the infallible record that some faces carry, which, whether it stands for remorse, for patience, for pure, unbroken sorrow, is always a consecration.
"Master, it must have come some time," she said, at length, "but I have hoped it would not be through me." Her voice was just audible.
"Be seated," said Morgan. "If your story is true, and it may be so, you should not stand." He turned away from her and walked to the window; she was seeking for an opening to begin her story. He began for her:
"You crouched in a church door to avoid the storm; a woman seeking shelter there appeared just outside. She was attacked by a man and fell to the ground unconscious; you carried her off in your arms; her child was born soon after, and what then?"
Amazed she stared at him a moment in silence.
"And mine was born! The fright, the horror, the sickness! It was a terrible dream; a terrible dream! But a month afterward, I was here alone with two babies at my breast and the mother was gone. God help me, and help her! But in that time Master John says I lost the memory of my child! Master Gerald I claimed, but his face was the face of Miss Marion, and he was white and delicate like her. And you, sir, were dark. And then I had never been a slave; John Morgan's father gave me my liberty when I was born. I lived with him until my marriage, then after my husband's death, which was just before this storm, they brought me here and I waited. She never came back. Master Gerald was sickly always and we kept him, but they sent you away. Master John thought it was best. And the years have passed quickly."
"And General Evan – did he never know?"
"No, sir; I would not let them take Master Gerald, because I believed he was my child; and Master John, I suppose, would not believe in you. The families are proud; we let things rest as they were, thinking Miss Marion would come back some day. But she will not come now; she will not come!"
The miserable secret was out. After a long silence Edward lifted his head and said with deep emotion: "Then, in your opinion, I am your son?" She looked at him sadly and nodded.
"And in the opinion of John Morgan, Gerald is the son of Marion Evans?" She bowed.
"We have let it stand that way. But you should never have known! I do not think you were ever to have known." The painful silence that followed was broken by his question:
"Gerald's real name?"
"I do not know! I do not know! All that I do know I have told you!"
"And the child's coffin?" She pressed her hand to her forehead.
"It was a dream; I do not know!"
He gazed upon her with profound emotion and pity.
"You must be tired," he said, gently. "Think no more of these troubles to-night."
She turned and went away. He followed to the head of the stairs and waited until he heard her step in the hall below.
"Good-night," he had said, gravely. And from the shadowy depths below came back a faint, mournful echo of the word.
When Edward returned to the room he sat by the window and buried his face upon his arm. Hour after hour passed; the outer world slept. Had he been of the south, reared there and a sharer in its traditions, the secret would have died with him that night and its passing would have been signaled by a single pistol shot. But he was not of the south, in experience, association or education.
It was in the hush of midnight that he rose from his seat, took the picture and descended the steps. The wing-room was never locked; he entered. Through the drawn curtains of the glass-room he saw the form of Gerald lying in the moonlight upon his narrow bed. Placing the picture beside the still, white face of the sleeper, he was shocked by the likeness. One glance was enough. He went back to his window again.
One, two, three, four o'clock from the distant church steeple.
How the solemn numbers have tolled above the sorrow-folds of the human heart and echoed in the dewless valleys of the mind, the depths to which we sink when hope is gone!
But with the dawn what shadows flee!
So came the dawn at last; the pale, tremulous glimmer on the eastern hills, the white light, the rosy flush and then in the splendor of fading mists the giant sun rolled up the sky.
A man stood pale and weary before the open window at Ilexhurst. "The odds are against me," he said, grimly, "but I feel a power within me stronger than evidence. I will match it against the word of this woman, though every circumstance strengthened that word. The voice of the Caucasian, not the voice of Ethiopia, speaks within me! The woman does not believe herself; the mother's instinct has been baffled, but not destroyed!"
And yet again, the patrician bearing, the aristocrat! Such was Gerald.
"We shall see," he said, between his teeth. "Wait until Virdow comes!"
Nevertheless, when, not having slept, he arose late in the day, he was almost overwhelmed with the memory of the revelation made to him, and the effect it must have upon his future.
At that moment there came into his mind the face of Mary.