The Colonel's Dream

"You are the cynosure of all eyes," he declared. "I suppose I'm an object of envy to every young fellow in town."

Graciella blushed and bridled with pleasure. "I am not interested in the young men of Clarendon," she replied loftily; "they are not worth the trouble."

"Not even—Ben?" asked the colonel slyly.

"Oh," she replied, with studied indifference, "Mr. Dudley is really a cousin, and only a friend. He comes to see the family."

The colonel's attentions could have but one meaning, and it was important to disabuse his mind concerning Ben. Nor was she the only one in the family who entertained that thought. Of late her grandmother had often addressed her in an unusual way, more as a woman than as a child; and, only the night before, had retold the old story of her own sister Mary, who, many years before, had married a man of fifty. He had worshipped her, and had died, after a decent interval, leaving her a large fortune. From which the old lady had deduced that, on the whole, it was better to be an old man's darling than a young man's slave. She had made no application of the story, but Graciella was astute enough to draw her own conclusions.

Her Aunt Laura, too, had been unusually kind; she had done up the white gown twice a week, had trimmed her hat for her, and had worn old gloves that she might buy her niece a new pair. And her aunt had looked at her wistfully and remarked, with a sigh, that youth was a glorious season and beauty a great responsibility. Poor dear, good old Aunt Laura! When the expected happened, she would be very kind to Aunt Laura, and repay her, so far as possible, for all her care and sacrifice.

Fifteen

It was only a short time after his visit to the Excelsior Mills that Colonel French noticed a falling off in the progress made by his lawyer, Judge Bullard, in procuring the signatures of those interested in the old mill site, and after the passing of several weeks he began to suspect that some adverse influence was at work. This suspicion was confirmed when Judge Bullard told him one day, with some embarrassment, that he could no longer act for him in the matter.

"I'm right sorry, Colonel," he said. "I should like to help you put the thing through, but I simply can't afford it. Other clients, whose business I have transacted for years, and to whom I am under heavy obligations, have intimated that they would consider any further activity of mine in your interest unfriendly to theirs."

"I suppose," said the colonel, "your clients wish to secure the mill site for themselves. Nothing imparts so much value to a thing as the notion that somebody else wants it. Of course, I can't ask you to act for me further, and if you'll make out your bill, I'll hand you a check."

"I hope," said Judge Bullard, "there'll be no ill-feeling about our separation."

"Oh, no," responded the colonel, politely, "not at all. Business is business, and a man's own interests are his first concern."

"I'm glad you feel that way," replied the lawyer, much relieved. He had feared that the colonel might view the matter differently.

"Some men, you know," he said, "might have kept on, and worked against you, while accepting your retainer; there are such skunks at the bar."

"There are black sheep in every fold," returned the colonel with a cold smile. "It would be unprofessional, I suppose, to name your client, so I'll not ask you."

The judge did not volunteer the information, but the colonel knew instinctively whence came opposition to his plan, and investigation confirmed his intuition. Judge Bullard was counsel for Fetters in all matters where skill and knowledge were important, and Fetters held his note, secured by mortgage, for money loaned. For dirty work Fetters used tools of baser metal, but, like a wise man, he knew when these were useless, and was shrewd enough to keep the best lawyers under his control.

The colonel, after careful inquiry, engaged to take Judge Bullard's place, one Albert Caxton, a member of a good old family, a young man, and a capable lawyer, who had no ascertainable connection with Fetters, and who, in common with a small fraction of the best people, regarded Fetters with distrust, and ascribed his wealth to usury and to what, in more recent years, has come to be known as "graft."

To a man of Colonel French's business training, opposition was merely a spur to effort. He had not run a race of twenty years in the commercial field, to be worsted in the first heat by the petty boss of a Southern backwoods county. Why Fetters opposed him he did not know. Perhaps he wished to defeat a possible rival, or merely to keep out principles and ideals which would conflict with his own methods and injure his prestige. But if Fetters wanted a fight, Fetters should have a fight.

Colonel French spent much of his time at young Caxton's office, instructing the new lawyer in the details of the mill affair. Caxton proved intelligent, zealous, and singularly sympathetic with his client's views and plans. They had not been together a week before the colonel realised that he had gained immensely by the change.

The colonel took a personal part in the effort to procure signatures, among others that of old Malcolm Dudley and on the morning following the drive with Graciella, he drove out to Mink Run to see the old gentleman in person and discover whether or not he was in a condition to transact business.

Before setting out, he went to his desk—his father's desk, which Miss Laura had sent to him—to get certain papers for old Mr. Dudley's signature, if the latter should prove capable of a legal act. He had laid the papers on top of some others which had nearly filled one of the numerous small drawers in the desk. Upon opening the drawer he found that one of the papers was missing.

The colonel knew quite well that he had placed the paper in the drawer the night before; he remembered the circumstance very distinctly, for the event was so near that it scarcely required an exercise, not to say an effort, of memory. An examination of the drawer disclosed that the piece forming the back of it was a little lower than the sides. Possibly, thought the colonel, the paper had slipped off and fallen behind the drawer.

He drew the drawer entirely out, and slipped his hand into the cavity. At the back of it he felt the corner of a piece of paper projecting upward from below. The paper had evidently slipped off the top of the others and fallen into a crevice, due to the shrinkage of the wood or some defect of construction.

The opening for the drawer was so shallow that though he could feel the end of the paper, he was unable to get such a grasp of it as would permit him to secure it easily. But it was imperative that he have the paper; and since it bore already several signatures obtained with some difficulty, he did not wish to run the risk of tearing it.

He examined the compartment below to see if perchance the paper could be reached from there, but found that it could not. There was evidently a lining to the desk, and the paper had doubtless slipped down between this and the finished panels forming the back of the desk. To reach it, the colonel procured a screw driver, and turning the desk around, loosened, with some difficulty, the screws that fastened the proper panel, and soon recovered the paper. With it, however, he found a couple of yellow, time-stained envelopes, addressed on the outside to Major John Treadwell.

The envelopes were unsealed. He glanced into one of them, and seeing that it contained a sheet, folded small, presumably a letter, he thrust the two of them into the breast pocket of his coat, intending to hand them to Miss Laura at their next meeting. They were probably old letters and of no consequence, but they should of course be returned to the owners.

In putting the desk back in its place, after returning the panel and closing the crevice against future accidents, the colonel caught his coat on a projecting point and tore a long rent in the sleeve. It was an old coat, and worn only about the house; and when he changed it before leaving to pay his call upon old Malcolm Dudley, he hung it in a back corner in his clothes closet, and did not put it on again for a long time. Since he was very busily occupied in the meantime, the two old letters to which he had attached no importance, escaped his memory altogether.

The colonel's coachman, a young coloured man by the name of Tom, had complained of illness early in the morning, and the colonel took Peter along to drive him to Mink Run, as well as to keep him company. On their way through the town they stopped at Mrs. Treadwell's, where they left Phil, who had, he declared, some important engagement with Graciella.

The distance was not long, scarcely more than five miles. Ben Dudley was in the habit of traversing it on horseback, twice a day. When they had passed the last straggling cabin of the town, their way lay along a sandy road, flanked by fields green with corn and cotton, broken by stretches of scraggy pine and oak, growing upon land once under cultivation, but impoverished by the wasteful methods of slavery; land that had never been regenerated, and was now no longer tilled. Negroes were working in the fields, birds were singing in the trees. Buzzards circled lazily against the distant sky. Although it was only early summer, a languor in the air possessed the colonel's senses, and suggested a certain charity toward those of his neighbours—and they were most of them—who showed no marked zeal for labour.

"Work," he murmured, "is best for happiness, but in this climate idleness has its compensations. What, in the end, do we get for all our labour?"

"Fifty cents a day, an' fin' yo'se'f, suh," said Peter, supposing the soliloquy addressed to himself. "Dat's w'at dey pays roun' hyuh."

When they reached a large clearing, which Peter pointed out as their destination, the old man dismounted with considerable agility, and opened a rickety gate that was held in place by loops of rope. Evidently the entrance had once possessed some pretensions to elegance, for the huge hewn posts had originally been faced with dressed lumber and finished with ornamental capitals, some fragments of which remained; and the one massive hinge, hanging by a slender rust-eaten nail, had been wrought into a fantastic shape. As they drove through the gateway, a green lizard scampered down from the top of one of the posts, where he had been sunning himself, and a rattlesnake lying in the path lazily uncoiled his motley brown length, and sounding his rattle, wriggled slowly off into the rank grass and weeds that bordered the carriage track.

The house stood well back from the road, amid great oaks and elms and unpruned evergreens. The lane by which it was approached was partly overgrown with weeds and grass, from which the mare's fetlocks swept the dew, yet undried by the morning sun.

The old Dudley "mansion," as it was called, was a large two-story frame house, built in the colonial style, with a low-pitched roof, and a broad piazza along the front, running the full length of both stories and supported by thick round columns, each a solid piece of pine timber, gray with age and lack of paint, seamed with fissures by the sun and rain of many years. The roof swayed downward on one side; the shingles were old and cracked and moss-grown; several of the second story windows were boarded up, and others filled with sashes from which most of the glass had disappeared.

About the house, for a space of several rods on each side of it, the ground was bare of grass and shrubbery, rough and uneven, lying in little hillocks and hollows, as though recently dug over at haphazard, or explored by some vagrant drove of hogs. At one side, beyond this barren area, lay a kitchen garden, enclosed by a paling fence. The colonel had never thought of young Dudley as being at all energetic, but so ill-kept a place argued shiftlessness in a marked degree.

When the carriage had drawn up in front of the house, the colonel became aware of two figures on the long piazza. At one end, in a massive oaken armchair, sat an old man—seemingly a very old man, for he was bent and wrinkled, with thin white hair hanging down upon his shoulders. His face, of a highbred and strongly marked type, emphasised by age, had the hawk-like contour, that is supposed to betoken extreme acquisitiveness. His faded eyes were turned toward a woman, dressed in a homespun frock and a muslin cap, who sat bolt upright, in a straight-backed chair, at the other end of the piazza, with her hands folded on her lap, looking fixedly toward her vis-à-vis. Neither of them paid the slightest attention to the colonel, and when the old man rose, it was not to step forward and welcome his visitor, but to approach and halt in front of the woman.

"Viney," he said, sharply, "I am tired of this nonsense. I insist upon knowing, immediately, where my uncle left the money."

The woman made no reply, but her faded eyes glowed for a moment, like the ashes of a dying fire, and her figure stiffened perceptibly as she leaned slightly toward him.

"Show me at once, you hussy," he said, shaking his fist, "or you'll have reason to regret it. I'll have you whipped." His cracked voice rose to a shrill shriek as he uttered the threat.

The slumbrous fire in the woman's eyes flamed up for a moment. She rose, and drawing herself up to her full height, which was greater than the old man's, made some incoherent sounds, and bent upon him a look beneath which he quailed.

"Yes, Viney, good Viney," he said, soothingly, "I know it was wrong, and I've always regretted it, always, from the very moment. But you shouldn't bear malice. Servants, the Bible says, should obey their masters, and you should bless them that curse you, and do good to them that despitefully use you. But I was good to you before, Viney, and I was kind to you afterwards, and I know you've forgiven me, good Viney, noble-hearted Viney, and you're going to tell me, aren't you?" he pleaded, laying his hand caressingly upon her arm.

She drew herself away, but, seemingly mollified, moved her lips as though in speech. The old man put his hand to his ear and listened with an air of strained eagerness, well-nigh breathless in its intensity.

"Try again, Viney," he said, "that's a good girl. Your old master thinks a great deal of you, Viney. He is your best friend!"

Again she made an inarticulate response, which he nevertheless seemed to comprehend, for, brightening up immediately, he turned from her, came down the steps with tremulous haste, muttering to himself meanwhile, seized a spade that stood leaning against the steps, passed by the carriage without a glance, and began digging furiously at one side of the yard. The old woman watched him for a while, with a self-absorption that was entirely oblivious of the visitors, and then entered the house.

The colonel had been completely absorbed in this curious drama. There was an air of weirdness and unreality about it all. Old Peter was as silent as if he had been turned into stone. Something in the atmosphere conduced to somnolence, for even the horses stood still, with no signs of restlessness. The colonel was the first to break the spell.

"What's the matter with them, Peter? Do you know?"

"Dey's bofe plumb 'stracted, suh—clean out'n dey min's—dey be'n dat way fer yeahs an' yeahs an' yeahs."

"That's Mr. Dudley, I suppose?"

"Yas, suh, dat's ole Mars Ma'com Dudley, de uncle er young Mistah Ben Dudley w'at hangs 'roun Miss Grac'ella so much."

"And who is the woman?"