The phantoms of the foot-bridge: 1895Craddock, Charles Egbert
General
The phantoms of the foot-bridge: 1895
Craddock, Charles Egbert
Fiction
And he sauntered away from the little pavilion, followed by Dundas, who
had not accepted his suggestion of a room on the first floor as being
less liable to leakage, but finally made choice of an inner apartment in
the second story. He looked hard at Keenan, when he stood in the doorway
surveying the selection. The room opened into a cross-hall which gave
upon a broad piazza that was latticed; tiny squares of moonlight were
all sharply drawn on the floor, and, seen through a vista of gray
shadow, seemed truly of a gilded lustre. From the windows of this room
on a court-yard no light Could be visible to any passer-by without.
Another door gave on an inner gallery, and through its floor a staircase
came up from the quadrangle close to the threshold. Dundas wondered if
these features were of possible significance in Keenan’s estimation. The
young mountaineer turned suddenly, and snatching up a handful of slats
broken from the shutters, remarked:
“Let’s see how the chimbly draws--that’s the main p’int.”
There was no defect in the chimney’s constitution. It drew admirably,
and with the white and red flames dancing in the fireplace, two or
three chairs, more or less disabled, a table, and an upholstered lounge
gathered at random from the rooms near at hand, the possibility of
sojourning comfortably for a few days in the deserted hostelry seemed
amply assured.
Once more Dundas gazed fixedly at the face of the young mountaineer,
who still bent on one knee on the hearth, watching with smiling eyes
the triumphs of his fire-making. It seemed to him afterwards that his
judgment was strangely at fault; he perceived naught of import in the
shallow brightness of the young man’s eyes, like the polished surface of
jet; in the instability of his jealousy, his anger; in his hap-hazard,
mercurial temperament. Once he might have noted how flat were the
spaces beneath the eyes, how few were the lines that defined the lid,
the socket, the curve of the cheekbone, the bridge of the nose, and how
expressionless. It was doubtless the warmth and glow of the fire,
the clinging desire of companionship, the earnest determination to be
content, pathetic in one who had but little reason for optimism, that
caused him to ignore the vacillating glancing moods that successively
swayed Keenan, strong while they lasted, but with scanty augury because
of their evanescence. He was like some newly discovered property in
physics of untried potentialities, of which nothing is ascertained but
its uncertainties.
And yet he seemed to Dundas a simple country fellow, good-natured in the
main, unsuspicious, and helpful. So, giving a long sigh of relief and
fatigue, Dundas sank down in one of the large arm-chairs that had once
done duty for the summer loungers on the piazza.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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