The Colonel's Dream Part 16

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 circ.u.mstance 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 pa.s.sed 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 ma.s.sive 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 gra.s.s 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 gra.s.s, 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 s.h.i.+ngles 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 gla.s.s had disappeared.

About the house, for a s.p.a.ce of several rods on each side of it, the ground was bare of gra.s.s 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 s.h.i.+ftlessness 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 ma.s.sive 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-a-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, n.o.ble-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, pa.s.sed 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?"

"She's a bright mulattah 'oman, suh, w'at use' ter b'long ter de family befo' de wah, an' has kep' house fer ole Mars' Ma'com ever sense. He 'lows dat she knows whar old Mars' Rafe Dudley, _his_ uncle, hid a million dollahs endyoin' de wah, an' huh tongue's paralyse' so she can't tell 'im--an' he's be'n tryin' ter fin' out fer de las'

twenty-five years. I wo'ked out hyuh one summer on plantation, an' I seen 'em gwine on like dat many 'n' many a time. Dey don' n.o.body roun'

hyuh pay no 'tention to 'em no mo', ev'ybody's so use' ter seein'

'em."

The conversation was interrupted by the appearance of Ben Dudley, who came around the house, and, advancing to the carriage, nodded to Peter, and greeted the colonel respectfully.

"Won't you 'light and come in?" he asked.

The colonel followed him into the house, to a plainly furnished parlour. There was a wide fireplace, with a fine old pair of bra.s.s andirons, and a few pieces of old mahogany furniture, incongruously a.s.sorted with half a dozen splint-bottomed chairs. The floor was bare, and on the walls half a dozen of the old Dudleys looked out from as many oil paintings, with the smooth glaze that marked the touch of the travelling artist, in the days before portrait painting was superseded by photography and crayon enlargements.

Ben returned in a few minutes with his uncle. Old Malcolm seemed to have shaken off his aberration, and greeted the colonel with grave politeness.

"I am glad, sir," he said, giving the visitor his hand, "to make your acquaintance. I have been working in the garden--the flower-garden--for the sake of the exercise. We have negroes enough, though they are very trifling nowadays, but the exercise is good for my health. I have trouble, at times, with my rheumatism, and with my--my memory." He pa.s.sed his hand over his brow as though brus.h.i.+ng away an imaginary cobweb.

"Ben tells me you have a business matter to present to me?"

The colonel, somewhat mystified, after what he had witnessed, by this sudden change of manner, but glad to find the old man seemingly rational, stated the situation in regard to the mill site. Old Malcolm seemed to understand perfectly, and accepted with willingness the colonel's proposition to give him a certain amount of stock in the new company for the release of such rights as he might possess under the old incorporation. The colonel had brought with him a contract, properly drawn, which was executed by old Malcolm, and witnessed by the colonel and Ben.

"I trust, sir," said Mr. Dudley, "that you will not ascribe it to any discourtesy that I have not called to see you. I knew your father and your grandfather. But the cares of my estate absorb me so completely that I never leave home. I shall send my regards to you now and then by my nephew. I expect, in a very short time, when certain matters are adjusted, to be able to give up, to a great extent, my arduous cares, and lead a life of greater leisure, which will enable me to travel and cultivate a wider acquaintance. When that time comes, sir, I shall hope to see more of you."

The old gentleman stood courteously on the steps while Ben accompanied the colonel to the carriage. It had scarcely turned into the lane when the colonel, looking back, saw the old man digging furiously. The condition of the yard was explained; he had been unjust in ascribing it to Ben's neglect.

"I reckon, suh," remarked Peter, "dat w'en he fin' dat million dollahs, Mistah Ben'll marry Miss Grac'ella an' take huh ter New Yo'k."

"Perhaps--and perhaps not," said the colonel. To himself he added, musingly, "Old Malcolm will start on a long journey before he finds the--million dollars. The watched pot never boils. Buried treasure is never found by those who seek it, but always accidentally, if at all."

On the way back they stopped at the Treadwells' for Phil. Phil was not ready to go home. He was intensely interested in a long-eared mechanical mule, constructed by Ben Dudley out of bits of wood and leather and controlled by certain springs made of rubber bands, by manipulating which the mule could be made to kick furiously. Since the colonel had affairs to engage his attention, and Phil seemed perfectly contented, he was allowed to remain, with the understanding that Peter should come for him in the afternoon.

_Sixteen_

Little Phil had grown very fond of old Peter, who seemed to lavish upon the child all of his love and devotion for the dead generations of the French family. The colonel had taught Phil to call the old man "Uncle Peter," after the kindly Southern fas.h.i.+on of slavery days, which, denying to negroes the forms of address applied to white people, found in the affectionate terms of relations.h.i.+p--Mammy, Auntie and Uncle--designations that recognised the respect due to age, and yet lost, when applied to slaves, their conventional significance.