The Phantoms of the Foot-Bridge, and Other Stories. Mary Noailles Murfree

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СКАЧАТЬ as if he were a child, and returned it with a smile very radiant and sufficient at close range. She then addressed herself to her own meal. The young dogs under the table ceased to beg, and gambolled and gnawed and tugged at her stout little shoes, the sound of their callow mirthful growls rising occasionally above the talk. Sometimes she rose again to wait on the table, when they came leaping out after her, jumping and catching at her skirts, now and then casting themselves on the ground prone before her feet, and rolling over and over in the sheer joy of existence.

      The stranger took little part in the talk at the table. Never a question was asked him as to his mission in the mountains, or the length of his stay, his vocation, or his home. That extreme courtesy of the mountaineers, exemplified in their singular abstinence from any expressions of curiosity, accepted such account of himself as he had volunteered, and asked for no more. In the face of this standard of manners any inquisitiveness on his part, such as might have elicited points of interest for his merely momentary entertainment, was tabooed. Nevertheless, silent though he was for the most part, the relish with which he listened, his half-covert interest in the girl, his quick observation of the others, the sudden very apparent enlivening of his mental atmosphere, betokened that his quarters were not displeasing to him. It seemed only a short time before the meal was ended and the circle all, save Millicent, with pipes alight before the fire again. The dogs, well fed, had ranged themselves on the glowing hearth, lying prone on the hot stones; one old hound, however, who conserved the air of listening to the conversation, sat upright and nodded from time to time, now and again losing his balance and tipping forward in a truly human fashion, then gazing round on the circle with an open luminous eye, as who should say he had not slept.

      It was all very cheerful within, but outside the wind still blared mournfully. Once more Dundas was sorry that he had declined the invitation to remain, and it was with a somewhat tentative intention that he made a motion to return to the hotel. But his host seemed to regard his resolution as final, and rose with a regret, not an insistence. The two women stared in silent amazement at the mere idea of his camping out, as it were, in the old hotel. The ascendency of masculine government here, notwithstanding Roxby's assertion that Eve was made of Adam's backbone, was very apparent in their mute acquiescence and the alacrity with which they began to collect various articles, according to his directions, to make the stranger's stay more comfortable.

      "Em'ry kin go along an' holp," he said, heartlessly; for poor Emory's joy in perceiving that the guest was not a fixture, and that his presence was not to be an embargo on any word between himself and Millicent during the entire evening, was pitiably manifest. But the situation was still not without its comforts, since Dundas was to go too. Hence he was not poor company when once in the saddle, and was civil to a degree of which his former dismayed surliness had given no promise.

      Night had become a definite element. The twilight had fled. Above their heads, as they galloped through the dank woods, the bare boughs of the trees clashed together—so high above their heads that to the town man, unaccustomed to these great growths, the sound seemed not of the vicinage, but unfamiliar, uncanny, and more than once he checked his horse to listen. As they approached the mountain's verge and overlooked the valley and beheld the sky, the sense of the predominance of darkness was redoubled. The ranges gloomed against the clearer spaces, but a cloud, deep gray with curling white edges, was coming up from the west, with an invisible convoy of vague films, beneath which the stars, glimmering white points, disappeared one by one. The swift motion of this aerial fleet sailing with the wind might be inferred from the seemingly hurried pace of the moon making hard for the west. Still bright was the illumined segment, but despite its glitter the shadowy space of the full disk was distinctly visible, its dusky field spangled with myriads of minute, dully golden points. Down, down it took its way in haste—in disordered fright, it seemed, as if it had no heart to witness the storm which the wind and the clouds foreboded—to fairer skies somewhere behind those western mountains. Soon even its vague light would encroach no more upon the darkness. The great hotel would be invisible, annihilated as it were in the gloom, and not even thus dimly exist, glimmering, alone, forlorn, so incongruous to the wilderness that it seemed even now some mere figment of the brain, as the two horsemen came with a freshened burst of speed along the deserted avenue and reined up beside a small gate at the side.

      "No use ter ride all the way around," observed Emory Keenan. "Mought jes ez well 'light an' hitch hyar."

      The moon gave him the escort of a great grotesque shadow as he threw himself from his horse and passed the reins over a decrepit hitching-post near at hand. Then he essayed the latch of the small gate. He glanced up at Dundas, the moonlight in his dark eyes, with a smile as it resisted his strength.

      He was a fairly good-looking fellow when rid of the self-consciousness of jealousy. His eyes, mouth, chin, and nose, acquired from reliable and recognizable sources, were good features, and statuesque in their immobility beneath the drooping curves of his broad soft hat. He was tall, with the slenderness of youth, despite his evident weight and strength. He was long-waisted and lithe and small of girth, with broad square shoulders, whose play of muscles as he strove with the gate was not altogether concealed by the butternut jeans coat belted in with his pistols by a broad leathern belt. His boots reached high on his long legs, and jingled with a pair of huge cavalry spurs. His stalwart strength seemed as if it must break the obdurate gate rather than open it, but finally, with a rasping creak, dismally loud in the silence, it swung slowly back.

      The young mountaineer stood gazing for a moment at the red rust on the hinges. "How long sence this gate must hev been opened afore?" he said, again looking up at Dundas with a smile.

      Somehow the words struck a chill to the stranger's heart. The sense of the loneliness of the place, of isolation, filled him with a sort of awe. The night-bound wilderness itself was not more daunting than these solitary tiers of piazzas, these vacant series of rooms and corridors, all instinct with vanished human presence, all alert with echoes of human voices. A step, a laugh, a rustle of garments—he could have sworn he heard them at any open doorway as he followed his guide along the dim moonlit piazza, with its pillars duplicated at regular intervals by the shadows on the floor. How their tread echoed down these lonely ways! From the opposite side of the house he heard Keenan's spurs jangling, his soldierly stride sounding back as if their entrance had roused barracks. He winced once to see his own shadow with its stealthier movement. It seemed painfully furtive. For the first time during the evening his jaded mind, that had instinctively sought the solace of contemplating trifles, reverted to its own tormented processes. "Am I not hiding?" he said to himself, in a sort of sarcastic pity of his plight.

      The idea seemed never to enter the mind of the transparent Keenan. He laughed out gayly as they turned into the weed-grown quadrangle, and the red fox that Dundas had earlier observed slipped past him with affrighted speed and dashed among the shadows of the dense shrubbery of the old lawn without. Again and again the sound rang back from wall to wall, first with the jollity of seeming imitation, then with an appalled effect sinking to silence, and suddenly rising again in a grewsome staccato that suggested some terrible unearthly laughter, and bore but scant resemblance to the hearty mirth which had evoked it. Keenan paused and looked back with friendly gleaming eyes. "Oughter been a leetle handier with these hyar consarns," he said, touching the pistols in his belt.

      It vaguely occurred to Dundas that the young man went strangely heavily armed for an evening visit at a neighbor's house. But it was a lawless country and lawless times, and the sub-current of suggestion did not definitely fix itself in his mind until he remembered it later. He was looking into each vacant open doorway, seeing the still moonlight starkly white upon the floor; the cobwebbed and broken window-panes, through which a section of leafless trees beyond was visible; bits of furniture here and there, broken by the vandalism of the guerillas. Now and then a scurrying movement told of a gopher, hiding too, and on one mantel-piece, the black fireplace yawning below, sat a tiny tawny-tinted owl, whose motionless bead-like eyes met his with a stare of stolid surprise. After he had passed, its sudden ill-omened cry set the silence to shuddering.

      Keenan, leading the СКАЧАТЬ