A Dead Man’s Vengeance.

Fair Play, Volume I, Issue 14, 3 February 1894, Page 22

A Dead Man’s Vengeance.

By EDGAR FAWCETT.

[Copyright. All rights reserved.] CHAPTER L

As boys Gerald Ravelow and Louis Bond used to play together. They would perhaps never have sought one another’s company had not circumstances caused them to spend many boyish summers on their parents’ neighboring estates, not far from the picturesque shores of New Rochelle, for Gerald was a robust, merry, pink cheeked lad, and Louis, with his sallow face and great, mystic black eyes, differed from him as an ivy leaf differs from the dandelion. Having once met and become friends, however, a genuine fondness grew and throve between their two widely opposite natures. Gerald Ravelow’s mother was a meek faced widow, who adored her only child, and lived in a perpetual state of weak chested and neuralgic regret that his late father had not left him a millionaire. But Gerald’s cheerful mind could see nothing really calamitous in the snug little fortune that had survived his father’s commercial collapse. They spent four or five months in New York each year, and their Westchester home was pleasant if not palatial “After all," said Gerald one day, “I begin to think, mamma, that money can’t always buy us happiness.” He looked so jocundly ignorant of his own platitude that his mother forgot how threadbare a one it was. “There are the Bonds,” he went on; “Louis is a nice little chap when you know him, but then he gets fits of the blues, as he calls ’em, and he doesn’t begin to have half as good a time of it as I do. And just look at .their great, big house, and their stables, and their servants, and everything like that! And then, Louis’ fatherl I always • think of a crow when I see Mr. Bond: he’s so awfully dark and glum.”

“He never recovered from his wife’s loss,” said Mrs. Ravelow, a little reprovingly. “I never saw her; they bought Shadyshore after her death. But I’ve heard that little Brenda looks a good deal like her dead mother, and if that is the case Mrs. Bond must have been very beautiful.” “Do you think Brenda Bond pretty?” asked Gerald. The idea of her being so had never occurred to him before. “She’s like a little angel!” declared his mother. “Such hair as hers will always Btay golden; it isn’t the kind that changes to nut brown, as that of so many children do. And then her pure little wild rose of a face! Oh, Gerald, I should think you’d be ever so fond of her already!” That “already” piqued Gerald by its ambiguity. He did not know exactly whether it referred to his own youth or that of Brenda, who was two good years younger than himself. But pride kept him from inquiries as to his mother’s actual meaning, while at the same time he reflected that he was privately very fond indeed of little Brenda, and-that in more than one gallant way he had contrived to tell her so. The thought of her son marrying Brenda Bond at some future day filled Mrs. Ravelow with ambitious thrills. The Bond fortune was well known to be $6,000,000 if a dime, and though Louis would perhaps receive the great bulk of the property on his father’s death still his sister’s share would doubtless prove a handsome one. But Mrs. Ravelow was of too hypochondriac a turn to allow hope the least altitude of flight. Her semi-invalid eyes forever gazed on the dark sides of things, and she saw slight prospect of a mere boy and girl preference ever resulting seriously in after life. At 16 Gerald went to Harvard, while Louis, owing to the enfeebled health of his melancholy father, remained at home under the care of tutors. During Gerald’s vacations he saw a great deal of both Louis and his sister. This had proved one of the few childish friendships not fated to be shattered or dispelled by time. Gerald took no high stand in his class, and Louis, studying and reading amid comparative solitude, would sometimes assail him with gentle ironies. “I dare say you’d beat us all out of imr boots if you were at Cambridge,” laughed Gerald one day in his junior year. “Oh, how 1 do wish he had gone!” said Brenda, who chanced to be present, and who had now become a damsel with hair like threaded sunshine, figure of arrowy straightness and cheeks to rival rose petals. Her brother looked at her with a little start. They scarcely seemed as if blood really allied them; he was so dark and' grave beside this blonde, buoyant sister. “Why do you say that, Brenda?” he queried. “Do you mean that you could spare me so easily if I were off in Massachusetts with Gerald?” “Ah. no, indeed]” pried Brenda. “But

I think you grow gloomy, Louis, from living in such complete seclusion.” ‘Tm gloomy by nature," said Louis, with one of his sad little smiles.

“Heaven only knows why you should be!” exclaimed with a glance at the richly appointed room wherxn they sat. “You’ve everything to make you jolly as a cricket,” he went on; and now there came a mellowness into his hazel eyes as he fixed them on Brenda’s face and softly added, “including the loveliest sister on the face of the earth.”

Brenda blushed and gave her golden head a little mutinous toss. She had reached the feminine age that often resents broad compliments as tiresome, and a trifle vulgar besides. But if Gerald could have seen, by some clairvoyant wizardry, how her heart was fluttering at the thought of such high praise from his lips he might perhaps have failed to regret the rather intimate boldness of what he had just said. Sometimes he told himself that he rebelled ungraciously against Brenda’s assumption of the grown up young lady, and again he would feel indignant flushes that she should find it in her heart to alter their old, careless relations by a distance and ceremony which depressed and chilled.

“Confound it,” he once said to Louis, “Brenda acts as if we’d never sat in the same swing together, and made voyages with our heels up among the birds’ nests, not to speak of letting the old cat die with our arms quite unnecessarily about one another’s waists.” Louis smiled. “Oh, don’t be annoyed at Brenda’s airs,” he returned. “I dare say all young girls put them on in abundance. Besides, if she now and then seems distrait, Gerald, it’s no doubt because she’s worried at the way our poor father goes on failing worse and worse from week to week.” The Bonds were now back in their charming country place, and a short j time after they had quitted town to i come thither Crawford Bond rapidly $ sank and died. . The funeral was held in a quiet country church not far from Shadyshore, though many prominent New Yorkers came up by train to attend it. Afterward the body was interred in a family vault on the Bond estate —a massive granite mausoleum which the late proprietor had caused to be built soon after purchasing Shadyshore, and to which the remains of his wife had ‘ long ago been consigned.

The funeral threw a terrible gloom over Louis. He had loved his father dearly, and yet Gerald soon saw that the young man’s torpor and sadness were not solely a product of bereave- ( ment. It was plain that Louis hardly j had enough will power to concern himself ' with those immediate tasks which the administration of his father’s affairs demanded. Gerald assisted his flagging energies as much as proved possible, and finally induced him to take'a short sum-'; mer trip among the northern lakes.! Brenda was deeply gratified by this plan,| aave Gerald certain thankful words,

and looks because of it that divinely repaid him for all annoyances at her past hauteur.

For a time the spirits of Louis underwent a change. The weather in Montreal, on the St. Lawrence and on Lake Superior chanced to be delicious, and there were hours, if not actual days, when his companion felt hopeful that the somber cloud had permanently lifted from his soul. - Then the old indifference and dreariness would take hold of him once more, and at last, by the time of their return to Shadyshore, it became evident that he was really no better than he had been when they started. “I am haunted with an idea,” he suddenly announced to Gerald one evening, as the two friends were seated together in a monastic, high wainscoted, booklined room, which was the perfection of a library. “It never leaves me. I have not told it to you or to any one. And yet you are, of all people, the one whom it would seem most closely to concern.” Gerald felt a sort of light shiver pass through his frame. He had long dreaded lest some insanity might be at the root of his friend’s peculiar behavior, and there now seemed in Louis’ tone and demeanor not positive confirmation of such fears, but at least the delicate and mysterious prophecy of it. “Haunting ideas should be treated with extrema rudeness,” he now said, in a voice gayer than were his furtive feelings. “When they’re morbid, Lou, they should be insulted up and down, and given the most inhospitable notice to quit.”

Louis shook his head with a low, deep sigh. Through the open window near which he sat glimmered the placid level of Long Island sound, blue in the slant afternoon sunshine as though it had been one monstrous slab of polished turquois, and fringed at its rocky shore with dark bosks of cedar, large leaved hickories and small, yet stalwart, oaks. Louis let his eyes traverse the rolling lawn and then rest on the exquisite sea view beyond. Presently, in a musing voice, he said:

“You have never told me, once and for all, Gerald, whether or no you believe in the immortality of the soul. Do you?”

Gerald looked puzzled for an instant. “You know it isn’t much in my line, Lou, to think at all on these questions,” he at length said. “I’m sure,” he went on, “it’s my most earnest hope that we’re immortal after death. As for my belief, however”

“You’re like me there,” broke in Louis, turning his black eyes upon Gerald with sudden intentness. “I don’t believe; I only hope. But I'd like to believe; I’d like it above all other things.” “Is that the haunting idea you spoke of?” asked Gerald.

“Oh, 1 suppose that’s what makes me so forlornly blue.” [ “At last you admit there is something] Louis. Well, all the more reason for you to make a stout effort and crus'J 4own the devilish nuisance. It hasn’l

real existence, anyhow; it’s born only of an unhealthy fancy. Good heavens! we’ve all got to die, and none of us, no, not one, really knows what life, if life at all, waits beyond the grave.” “I’d like to know—if I could,” murmured Louis in a low, stubborn voice.

“If you could! So would everybody—if he could.”

Louis seemed to take no heed to this rather sarcastic response. “In a certain way,” he pursued, “you and I, Gerald, are peculiarly placed. We both own estates which we shall probably never part with during our lifetimes. On either of these there is a family vault. The chances of one of us being buried in each of those vaults must be excessively Btrong.” “In the name of everything unearthly,” said Gerald, as his friend paused, “what can you be driving at?” “Simply this,” replied Louis, whose manner and tones were now as calm as if he had been passing judgment on some Very ordinary and prosaic question; “it Would give me great satisfaction if you Would make a compact with me, and the compact to which I allude has been one whose most minute detail I have carefully thought out.” He went on Bpeaking for some little time after this, and, as he finally paused, Gerald gave an exclamation of acute surprise. “Will lagree?” rang his words. “Why, Lou, it’s altogether too crazy a kind of scheme! Just imagine my going alone at midnight into the vault where you’re lying dead!”

“I somehow haven’t been imagining that,” returned Louis, with a quaint little motion of the head. “I’ve the fancy, Gerald, that I shall survive you—and perhaps by a number of years. You see, I’m not especially strong of constitution, yet I live a quiet life and put no tax upon my forces of endurance. You, however, who are- aq strong as an ox, pay very little heed to your physical powers. You’re like a man who draws thoughtlessly on a large bank account, and who may wake up some morning to find his check politely returned by the paying teller. I, on the other hand, am like a man with a small deposit, yet who treats it in a most economic spirit, and hence makes no mistake about the surplus that he might rely upon in case of any sudden embarrassment.” Gerald gave one of his loud, joyous laughs, and got up from his chair, going to a window and staring out of it, with both hands thrust into his pockets. “I see, Lou,” he said, “you calculate confidently on my dying before you do.” “Oh, not confidently. But” “Yes, I understand. Well, this compact could be carried out by the survivor, of course, and in absolute solitude, as you say. You could receive from me a key to our vault. I from you a key to yours. Say that I died before you did. On the first night following my death you could steal to the vault, unlock it and wait inside with a lighted candle for the space of three hours, after having removed the Jid of my coffin, 99 as

to make my face and part of my form dearly visible. Then you could endeavor by every possible effort of will to receive some sign from me that 1 was aware of your vigil. All this, ns you propose it, my boy, might be perfectly practicable—that is, provided I were not lost at sea, buried abroad, hanged for murder and afterward claimed by.the physicians or" “Oh, now you’re laughing at me,” struck in Louis, with a hurt intonation. “No, I’m not," protested Gerald. “I merely want to remind you that, although such extravagances as these can be played in real life, discovery subjeots those concerned in them to a good deal of severe ridicule.”

But he soon saw that any attempt at arguing Louis out of his “fad” would be wholly futile. As far as feeling terror or dread of carrying out such a ghastly compact, Gerald could regard the prospect of doing so with entire calmness. Indeed, as an act that would supposably involve nerve and pluck, its possible undertaking rather amused him than otherwise. Still, he would perhaps have discountenanced the entire project as both frivolous and sensational but for a thought that now came to him, bom of his loyal friendship. What if he should humor this whim of Louis, in the hope that by so doing the persistent mood of melancholy might be dissipated? It was a matter of mortification to him, several hours later, when he reflected upon what he had done. The terms of the compact into which he had now entered with Louis pledged him to absolute secrecy, otherwise he might have informed his mother of the strangely acquiescent part that he had played. To obtain a duplicate key of the family vault was a more difficult task for him than for Louis, since in one case the master of Shadyshore needed but to employ a locksmith, and in the other it was necessary for Gerald to hunt through closets and odd comers, and always with a sense of ultimate failure. But suddenly one morning he found the object of his search, and to make the desired exchange with Louis was thenceforth easy enough.

There were now but a few days left Gerald before his return to college, and during that time he failed to notice much change in his friend. Perhaps, however, the attention which he paid Louis was in a manner molested and thwarted by semi-farewell meetings and talks with Brenda. Gerald found himself perpetually quarreling with the girl he had now grown to adore. It sometimes seemed to him that Brenda, in the imperious arrogance of her maidenly beauty, would like him to get down on his knees and Mss her slender little foot. He told her something of the sort one day, and she answered him, with an insolent quiver of her long golden eyelashes, that on the contrary phe would 1 ibe afraid to forbid his even doing anyLijfhingso silly,v for fear that obstinacy torpidly ; (To be conUmed.)