Part 12 (1/2)
Colonel Demarion resolved to be true to his promise; and fired by a curiosity to investigate the extraordinary communication which had been revealed to him, urged on his horses, and reached the wharf at Charleston just as the steamer was being loosed from her moorings.
He hailed her. ”Stop her! Business with the captain! STOP HER!”
Her machinery was already in motion; her iron lungs were puffing forth dense clouds of smoke and steam; and as the Colonel shouted-the crowd around, from sheer delight in shouting, echoing his ”Stop her! stop her!”-the voices on land were confounded with the voices of the sailors, the rattling of chains, and the haulings of ropes.
Among the pa.s.sengers standing to wave farewells to their friends on the wharf were some who recognised Colonel Demarion, and drew the captain's attention toward him; and as he continued vehemently to gesticulate, that officer, from his post of observation, demanded the nature of the business which should require the s.h.i.+p's detention. Already the steamer was clear of the wharf. In another minute she might be beyond reach of the voice; therefore, failing by gestures and entreaties to convince the captain of the importance of his errand, Colonel Demarion, in desperation, cried at the top of his voice, ”A murderer on board! For G.o.d's sake, STOP!” He wished to have made this startling declaration in private, but not a moment was to be lost; and the excitement around him was intense.
In the midst of the confusion another cry of ”Man overboard!” might have been heard in a distant part of the s.h.i.+p, had not the attention of the crowd been fastened on the Colonel. Such a cry was, however, uttered, offering a still more urgent motive for stopping; and the steamer being again made fast, Colonel Demarion was received on board.
”Let not a soul leave the vessel!” was his first and prompt suggestion; and the order being issued he drew the captain aside, and concisely explained his grave commission. The captain thereupon conducted him to his private room, and summoned the steward, before whom the details were given, and the description of the murderer was read over. The steward, after considering attentively, seemed inclined to a.s.sociate the description with that of a pa.s.senger whose remarkably dejected appearance had already attracted his observation. In such a grave business it was, however, necessary to proceed with the utmost caution, and the ”pa.s.senger-book” was produced. Upon reference to its pages, the three gentlemen were totally dismayed by the discovery that the name of this same dejected individual was that under which, according to the apparition, the murderer had engaged his pa.s.sage.
”I am here to charge that man with murder,” said Colonel Demarion. ”He must be arrested.”
Horrified as the captain was at this astounding declaration, yet, on account of the singular and unusual mode by which the Colonel had become possessed of the facts, and the impossibility of proving the charge, he hesitated in consenting to the arrest of a pa.s.senger. The steward proposed that they should repair to the saloons and deck, and while conversing with one or another of the pa.s.sengers, mention-as it were casually-in the hearing of the suspected party his own proper name, and observe the effect produced on him. To this they agreed, and without loss of time joined the pa.s.sengers, a.s.signing some feasible cause for a short delay of the s.h.i.+p.
The saloon was nearly empty, and while the steward went below, the other two repaired to the deck, where they observed a crowd gathered seaward, apparently watching something over the s.h.i.+p's side.
During the few minutes which had detained the captain in this necessarily hurried business, a boat had been lowered, and some sailors had put off in her to rescue the person who was supposed to have fallen overboard; and it was only now, on joining the crowd, that the captain learned the particulars of the accident. ”Who was it?” ”What was he like?” they exclaimed simultaneously. That a man had fallen overboard was all that could be ascertained. Some one had seen him run across the deck, looking wildly about him. A splash in the water had soon afterward attracted attention to the spot, and a body had since been seen struggling on the surface. The waves were rough after the storm, and thick with seaweed, and the sailors had as yet missed the body. The two gentlemen took their post among the watchers, and kept their eyes intently upon the waves, and upon the sailors battling against them. Ere long they see the body rise again to the surface. Floated on a powerful wave, they can for the few moments breathlessly scrutinize it. The color of the dress is observed. A face of agony upturned displays a peculiar contour of forehead; the hair, the beard; and now he struggles-an arm is thrown up, and a remarkable ring catches the Colonel's eye. ”Great heavens! The whole description tallies!” The sailors pull hard for the spot, the next stroke and they will rescue--
A monster shark is quicker than they. The sea is tinged with blood. The man is no more!
Shocked and silent, Colonel Demarion and the captain quitted the deck and resummoned the steward, who had, but without success, visited the berths and various parts of the s.h.i.+p for the individual in question.
Every hole and corner was now, by the captain's order carefully searched, but in vain; and as no further information concerning the missing party could be obtained, and the steward persisted in his statement regarding his general appearance, they proceeded to examine his effects. In these he was identified beyond a doubt. Papers and relics proved not only his guilt but his remorse; remorse which, as the apparition had said, permitted him no peace in his wanderings.
Those startling words, ”A murderer on board!” had doubtless struck fresh terror to his heart and, unable to face the accusation, he had thus terminated his wretched existence.
Colonel Demarion revisited the little tavern, and on several occasions occupied the haunted chamber; but never again had he the honor of receiving a midnight commission from a ghostly visitor, and never again had the landlord to bemoan the flight of a non-paying customer.
PICHON & SONS, OF THE CROIX ROUSSE.
Giraudier, _pharmacien, premiere cla.s.se_, is the legend, recorded in huge, ill-proportioned letters, which directs the attention of the stranger to the most prosperous-looking shop in the grand _place_ of La Croix Rousse, a well-known suburb of the beautiful city of Lyons, which has its share of the shabby gentility and poor pretence common to the suburban commerce of great towns.
Giraudier is not only _pharmacien_ but _proprietaire_, though not by inheritance; his possession of one of the prettiest and most prolific of the small vineyards in the beautiful suburb, and a charming inconvenient house, with low ceilings, liliputian bedrooms, and a profusion of _persiennes_, _jalousies_, and _contrevents_, comes by purchase. This enviable little _terre_ was sold by the Nation, when that terrible abstraction transacted the public business of France; and it was bought very cheaply by the strong-minded father of the Giraudier of the present, who was not disturbed by the evil reputation which the place had gained, at a time the peasants of France, having been bullied into a renunciation of religion, eagerly cherished superst.i.tion. The Giraudier of the present cherishes the particular superst.i.tion in question affectionately; it reminds him of an uncommonly good bargain made in his favor, which is always a pleasant a.s.sociation of ideas, especially to a Frenchman, still more especially to a Lyonnais; and it attracts strangers to his _pharmacie_, and leads to transactions in _Grand Chartreuse_ and _Creme de Roses_, ensuing naturally on the narration of the history of Pichon & Sons. Giraudier is not of aristocratic principles and sympathies; on the contrary, he has decided republican leanings, and considers _Le Progres_ a masterpiece of journalistic literature; but, as he says simply and strongly, ”it is not because a man is a marquis that one is not to keep faith with him; a bad action is not good because it harms a good-for-nothing of a n.o.ble; the more when that good-for-nothing is no longer a n.o.ble, but _pour rire_.” At the easy price of acquiescence in these sentiments, the stranger hears one of the most authentic, best-remembered, most popular of the many traditions of the bad old times ”before General Bonaparte,” as Giraudier, who has no sympathy with any later designation of _le grand homme_, calls the Emperor, whose statue one can perceive-a speck in the distance-from the threshold of the _pharmacie_.
The Marquis de Senanges, in the days of the triumph of the great Revolution, was fortunate enough to be out of France, and wise enough to remain away from that country, though he persisted, long after the old _regime_ was as dead as the Ptolemies, in believing it merely suspended, and the Revolution a lamentable accident of vulgar complexion, but happily temporary duration. The Marquis de Senanges, who affected the _style regence_, and was the politest of infidels and the most refined of voluptuaries, got on indifferently in inappreciative foreign parts; but the members of his family-his brother and sisters, two of whom were guillotined, while the third escaped to Savoy and found refuge there in a convent of her order-got on exceedingly ill in France. If the _ci-devant_ Marquis had had plenty of money to expend in such feeble imitations of his accustomed pleasures as were to be had out of Paris, he would not have been much affected by the fate of his relatives. But money became exceedingly scarce; the Marquis had actually beheld many of his peers reduced to the necessity of earning the despicable but indispensable article after many ludicrous fas.h.i.+ons. And the duration of this absurd upsetting of law, order, privilege, and property began to a.s.sume unexpected and very unpleasant proportions.
The Chateau de Senanges, with its surrounding lands, was confiscated to the Nation, during the third year of the ”emigration” of the Marquis de Senanges; and the greater part of the estate was purchased by a thrifty, industrious, and rich _avocat_, named Prosper Alix, a widower with an only daughter. Prosper Alix enjoyed the esteem of the entire neighborhood. First, he was rich; secondly, he was of a taciturn disposition, and of a neutral tint in politics. He had done well under the old _regime_ and, he was doing well under the new-thank G.o.d, or the Supreme Being, or the First Cause, or the G.o.ddess Reason herself, for all;-he would have invoked Dagon, Moloch, or Kali, quite as readily as the Saints and the Madonna, who has gone so utterly out of fas.h.i.+on of late. n.o.body was afraid to speak out before Prosper Alix; he was not a spy; and though a cold-hearted man, except in the instance of his only daughter, he never harmed anybody.
Very likely it was because he was the last person in the vicinity whom anybody would have suspected of being applied to by the dispossessed family, that the son of the Marquis' brother, a young man of promise, of courage, of intellect, and of morals of decidedly a higher calibre than those actually and traditionally imputed to the family, sought the aid of the new possessor of the Chateau de Senanges, which had changed its old t.i.tle for that of the Maison Alix. The father of M. Paul de Senanges had perished in the September ma.s.sacres; his mother had been guillotined at Lyons; and he-who had been saved by the interposition of a young comrade, whose father had, in the wonderful rotations of the wheel of Fate, acquired authority in the place where he had once esteemed the notice of the nephew of the Marquis a crowning honor for his son-had pa.s.sed through the common vicissitudes of that dreadful time, which would take a volume for their recital in each individual instance.
Paul de Senanges was a handsome young fellow, frank, high-spirited, and of a brisk and happy temperament; which, however, modified by the many misfortunes he had undergone, was not permanently changed. He had plenty of capacity for enjoyment in him still; and as his position was very isolated, and his mind had become enlightened on social and political matters to an extent in which the men of his family would have discovered utter degradation and the women diabolical possession, he would not have been very unhappy if, under the new condition of things, he could have lived in his native country and gained an honest livelihood. But he could not do that, he was too thoroughly ”suspect;”
the antecedents of his family were too powerful against him: his only chance would have been to have gone into the popular camp as an extreme, violent partisan, to have out-Heroded the revolutionary Herods; and that Paul de Senanges was too honest to do. So he was reduced to being thankful that he had escaped with his life, and to watching for an opportunity of leaving France and gaining some country where the reign of liberty, fraternity, and equality was not quite so oppressive.
The long-looked-for opportunity at length offered itself, and Paul de Senanges was instructed by his uncle the Marquis that he must contrive to reach Ma.r.s.eilles, whence he should be transported to Spain-in which country the ill.u.s.trious emigrant was then residing-by a certain named date. His uncle's communication arrived safely, and the plan proposed seemed a secure and eligible one. Only in two respects was it calculated to make Paul de Senanges thoughtful. The first was, that his uncle should take any interest in the matter of his safety; the second, what could be the nature of a certain deposit which the Marquis's letter directed him to procure, if possible, from the Chateau de Senanges. The fact of this injunction explained, in some measure, the first of the two difficulties. It was plain that whatever were the contents of this packet which he was to seek for, according to the indications marked on a ground-plan drawn by his uncle and enclosed in the letter, the Marquis wanted them, and could not procure them except by the agency of his nephew. That the Marquis should venture to direct Paul de Senanges to put himself in communication with Prosper Alix, would have been surprising to any one acquainted only with the external and generally understood features of the character of the new proprietor of the Chateau de Senanges. But a few people knew Prosper Alix thoroughly, and the Marquis was one of the number; he was keen enough to know in theory that, in the case of a man with only one weakness, that is likely to be a very weak weakness indeed, and to apply the theory to the _avocat_.
The beautiful, pious, and aristocratic mother of Paul de Senanges-a lady to whose superiority the Marquis had rendered the distinguished testimony of his dislike, not hesitating to avow that she was ”much too good for _his_ taste”-had been very fond of, and very kind to, the motherless daughter of Prosper Alix, and he held her memory in reverence which he accorded to nothing beside, human or divine, and taught his daughter the matchless worth of the friend she had lost. The Marquis knew this, and though he had little sympathy with the sentiment, he believed he might use it in the present instance to his own profit, with safety. The event proved that he was right. Private negotiations, with the manner of whose transaction we are not concerned, pa.s.sed between the _avocat_ and the _ci-devant_ Marquis; and the young man, then leading a life in which skulking had a large share, in the vicinity of Dijon, was instructed to present himself at the Maison Alix, under the designation of Henri Glaire, and in the character of an artist in house-decoration.
The circ.u.mstances of his life in childhood and boyhood had led to his being almost safe from recognition as a man at Lyons; and, indeed, all the people on the _ci-devant_ visiting-list of the chateau had been pretty nearly killed off, in the n.o.ble and patriotic ardor of the revolutionary times.
The ancient Chateau de Senanges was proudly placed near the summit of the ”Holy Hill,” and had suffered terrible depredations when the church at Fourvieres was sacked, and the shrine desecrated with that ingenious impiety which is characteristic of the French; but it still retained somewhat of its former heavy grandeur. The chateau was much too large for the needs, tastes, or ambition of its present owner, who was too wise, if even he had been of an ostentatious disposition, not to have sedulously resisted its promptings. The jealousy of the nation of brothers was easily excited, and departure from simplicity and frugality was apt to be commented upon by domiciliary visits, and the eager imposition of fanciful fines. That portion of the vast building occupied by Prosper Alix and the _citoyenne_ Berthe, his daughter, presented an appearance of well-to-do comfort and modest ease, which contrasted with the grandiose proportions and the elaborate decorations of the wide corridors, huge flat staircases, and lofty panelled apartments. The _avocat_ and his daughter lived quietly in the old place, hoping, after a general fas.h.i.+on, for better times, but not finding the present very bad; the father becoming day by day more pleasant with his bargain, the daughter growing fonder of the great house, and the n.o.ble _bocages_, of the sc.r.a.ppy little vineyards, struggling for existence on the sunny hill-side, and the place where the famous shrine had been. They had done it much damage; they had parted its riches among them; the once ever-open doors were shut, and the worn flags were untrodden; but nothing could degrade it, nothing could destroy what had been, in the mind of Berthe Alix, who was as devout as her father was unconcernedly unbelieving. Berthe was wonderfully well educated for a Frenchwoman of that period, and surprisingly handsome for a Frenchwoman of any. Not too tall to offend the taste of her compatriots, and not too short to be dignified and graceful, she had a symmetrical figure, and a small, well-poised head, whose profuse, s.h.i.+ning, silken dark-brown hair she wore as nature intended, in a shower of curls, never touched by the hand of the coiffeur,-curls which cl.u.s.tered over her brow, and fell far down on her shapely neck. Her features were fine; the eyes very dark, and the mouth very red; the complexion clear and rather pale, and the style of the face and its expression lofty. When Berthe Alix was a child, people were accustomed to say she was pretty and refined enough to belong to the aristocracy; n.o.body would have dared to say so now, prettiness and refinement, together with all the other virtues admitted to a place on the patriotic roll, having become national property.