The whole thing was so unexpected that for one moment not a man in the room drew breath. Then the colonel sprang up with the bellow of an enraged bull, overturning the table in his rush, and a dozen club members were pulling him back from Eric.
"Eric Hamilton, are you mad?" I cried. "What do you mean?"
But Hamilton stood motionless as if he saw none of us. Except that his breath was labored, he wore precisely the same strange, distracted air he had on entering the club.
"Hold back!" I implored; for Adderly was striking right and left to get free from the men. "Hold back! There"s a mistake! Something"s wrong!"
"Reptile!" roared the colonel. "Cowardly reptile, you shall pay for this!"
"There"s a mistake," I shouted, above the clamor of exclamations.
"Glad the mistake landed where it did, all the same," whispered Uncle Jack MacKenzie in my ear, "but get him out of this. Drunk--or a scandal," says my uncle, who always expressed himself in explosives when excited. "Side room--here--lead him in--drunk--by Jove--drunk!"
"Never," I returned pa.s.sionately. I knew both Hamilton and his wife too well to tolerate either insinuation. But we led him like a dazed being into a side office, where Mr. Jack MacKenzie promptly turned the key and took up a posture with his back against the door.
"Now, Sir," he broke out sternly, "if it"s neither drink, nor a scandal----" There, he stopped; for Hamilton, utterly unconscious of us, moved, rather than walked, automatically across the room. Throwing his hat down, he bowed his head over both arms above the mantel-piece.
My uncle and I looked from the silent man to each other. Raising his brows in question, Mr. Jack MacKenzie touched his forehead and whispered across to me--"Mad?"
At that, though the word was spoken barely above a breath, Eric turned slowly round and faced us with blood-shot, gleaming eyes. He made as though he would speak, sank into the armchair before the grate and pressed both hands against his forehead.
"Mad," he repeated in a voice low as a moan, framing his words slowly and with great effort. "By Jove, men, you should know me better than to mouth such rot under your breath. To-night, I"d sell my soul, sell my soul to be mad, really mad, to know that all I think has happened, hadn"t happened at all--" and his speech was broken by a sharp intake of breath.
"Out with it, man, for the Lord"s sake," shouted my uncle, now convinced that Eric was not drunk and jumping to conclusions--as he was wont to do when excited--regarding a possible scandal.
"Out with it, man! We"ll stand by you! Has that blasted red-faced turkey----"
"Pray, spare your histrionics, for the present," Eric cut in with the icy self-possession bred by a lifetime"s danger, dispelling my uncle"s second suspicion with a quiet scorn that revealed nothing.
"What the----" began my kinsman, "what did you strike him for?"
"Did I strike somebody?" asked Hamilton absently.
Again my uncle flashed a questioning look at me, but this time his face showed his conviction so plainly no word was needed.
"Did I strike somebody? Wish you"d apologize----"
"Apologize!" thundered my uncle. "I"ll do nothing of the kind. Served him right. "Twas a pretty way, a pretty way, indeed, to speak of any man"s wife----" But the word "wife" had not been uttered before Eric threw out his hands in an imploring gesture.
"Don"t!" he cried out sharply in the suffering tone of a man under the operating knife. "Don"t! It all comes back! It is true! It is true! I can"t get away from it! It is no nightmare. My G.o.d, men, how can I tell you? There"s no way of saying it! It is impossible--preposterous--some monstrous joke--it"s quite impossible I tell you--it couldn"t have happened--such things don"t happen--couldn"t happen--to her--of all women! But she"s gone--she"s gone----"
"See here, Hamilton," cried my uncle, utterly beside himself with excitement, "are we to understand you are talking of your wife, or--or some other woman?"
"See here, Hamilton," I reiterated, quite heedless of the brutality of our questions and with a thousand wild suspicions flashing into my mind.
"Is it your wife, Miriam, and your boy?"
But he heard neither of us.
"They were there--they waved to me from the garden at the edge of the woods as I entered the forest. Only this morning, both waving to me as I rode away--and when I returned from the city at noon, they were gone! I looked to the window as I came back. The curtain moved and I thought my boy was hiding, but it was only the wind. We"ve searched every nook from cellar to attic. His toys were littered about and I fancied I heard his voice everywhere, but no! No--no--and we"ve been hunting house and garden for hours----"
"And the forest?" questioned Uncle Jack, the trapper instinct of former days suddenly re-awakening.
"The forest is waist-deep with snow! Besides we beat through the bush everywhere, and there wasn"t a track, nor broken twig, where they could have pa.s.sed." His torn clothes bore evidence to the thoroughness of that search.
"Nonsense," my uncle burst out, beginning to bl.u.s.ter. "They"ve been driven to town without leaving word!"
"No sleigh was at Chateau Bigot this morning," returned Hamilton.
"But the road, Eric?" I questioned, recalling how the old manor-house stood well back in the center of a cleared plateau in the forest.
"Couldn"t they have gone down the road to those Indian encampments?"
"The road is impa.s.sable for sleighs, let alone walking, and their winter wraps are all in the house. For Heaven"s sake, men, suggest something!
Don"t madden me with these useless questions!"
But in spite of Eric"s entreaty my excitable kinsman subjected the frenzied man to such a fire of questions as might have sublimated pre-natal knowledge. And I stood back listening and pieced the distracted, broken answers into some sort of coherency till the whole tragic scene at the Chateau on that spring day of the year 1815, became ineffaceably stamped on my memory.
Causeless, with neither warning nor the slightest premonition of danger, the greatest curse which can befall a man came upon my friend Eric Hamilton. However fond a husband may be, there are things worse for his wife than death which he may well dread, and it was one of these tragedies which almost drove poor Hamilton out of his reason and changed the whole course of my own life. In broad daylight, his young wife and infant son disappeared as suddenly and completely as if blotted out of existence.
That morning, Eric light-heartedly kissed wife and child good-by and waved them a farewell that was to be the last. He rode down the winding forest path to Quebec and they stood where the Chateau garden merged into the forest of Charlesbourg Mountain. At noon, when he returned, for him there existed neither wife nor child. For any trace of them that could be found, both might have been supernaturally spirited away. The great house, that had re-echoed to the boy"s prattle, was deathly still; and neither wife, nor child, answered his call. The nurse was summoned.
She was positive _Madame_ was amusing the boy across the hall, and rea.s.suringly bustled off to find mother and son in the next room, and the next, and yet the next; to discover each in succession empty.
Alarm spread to the Chateau servants. The simple _habitant_ maids were questioned, but their only response was white-faced, blank amazement.
_Madame_ not returned!
_Madame_ not back!
Mon Dieu! What had happened? And all the superst.i.tion of hillside lore added to the fear on each anxious face. Shortly after Monsieur went to the city, _Madame_ had taken her little son out as usual for a morning airing, and had been seen walking up and down the paths tracked through the garden snow. Had _Monsieur_ examined the clearing between the house and the forest? _Monsieur_ could see for himself the snow was too deep and crusty among the trees for _Madame_ to go twenty paces into the woods. Besides, foot-marks could be traced from the garden to the bush.
He need not fear wild animals. They were receding into the mountains as spring advanced. Let him take another look about the open; and Hamilton tore out-doors, followed by the whole household; but from the Chateau in the center of the glade to the encircling border of snow-laden evergreens there was no trace of wife or child.
Then Eric laughed at his own growing fears. Miriam must be in the house.
So the search of the old hall, that had once resounded to the drunken tread of gay French grandees, began again. From hidden chamber in the vaulted cellar to attic rooms above, not a corner of the Chateau was left unexplored. Had any one come and driven her to the city? But that was impossible. The roads were drifted the height of a horse and there were no marks of sleigh runners on either side of the riding path. Could she possibly have ventured a few yards down the main road to an encampment of Indians, whose squaws after Indian custom made much of the white baby? Neither did that suggestion bring relief; for the Indians had broken camp early in the morning and there was only a dirty patch of littered snow, where the wigwams had been.
The alarm now became a panic. Hamilton, half-crazed and unable to believe his own senses, began wondering whether he had nightmare. He thought he might waken up presently and find the dead weight smothering his chest had been the boy snuggling close. He was vaguely conscious it was strange of him to continue sleeping with that noise of shouting men and whining hounds and snapping branches going on in the forest. The child"s lightest cry generally broke the spell of a nightmare; but the din of terrified searchers rushing through the woods and of echoes rolling eerily back from the white hills convinced him this was no dream-land. Then, the distinct crackle of trampled brushwood and the scratch of spines across his face called him back to an unendurable reality.
"The thing is utterly impossible, Hamilton," I cried, when in short jerky sentences, as if afraid to give thought rein, he had answered my uncle"s questioning. "Impossible! Utterly impossible!"
"I would to G.o.d it were!" he moaned.
"It was daylight, Eric?" asked Mr. Jack MacKenzie.
He nodded moodily.
"And she couldn"t be lost in Charlesbourg forest?" I added, taking up the interrogations where my uncle left off.
"No trace--not a footprint!"