War Drums (Sass)/Chapter 16
EVEN to-day they tell some strange stories of Stanwicke Hall. There is no truth in most of them. Yet, if you will visit Stanwicke Hall to-day, following the moss-curtained roads some twenty miles from Charleston (which is the modern spelling of old Charles Town), you will half believe the tales that are told.
The place is not beautiful like most of the old plantation manors of lowland Carolina that have come down from Colonial times. It is grim and forbidding and lonely. Its brick walls are still solid, having survived hurricane, earthquake and war. But its panelled rooms are a wreck; its lawns and gardens have vanished; there are great gaps in its noble avenue of live-oaks; of the secret underground passage which once, according to tradition, extended from the mansion to the river and through which smugglers and pirates are reputed to have passed, only a trace remains.
You cannot make your way through that mysterious tunnel now, for its walls have caved in and the falling earth has closed it. But there is a straight, narrow path, hedged in by trees and shrubbery, leading from the house to the river; and strolling along that path, you will find, here and there under foot, ancient bricks which came—if you can believe the negroes who live near by—from the roof of the secret tunnel. And there is another thing that you are likely to see as you walk that abandoned promenade above the old underground passage on a late afternoon in summer when the nighthawks are already flying and perhaps the big swamp owls are hooting dismally in the distant woods. You may see, ahead of you, spanning the path and shimmering like a golden disc in the late light, the huge, wheel-like silken web of the great golden spider.
In all that country there is no other creature so horrible to look upon. It is as large as the palm of a man's hand—a golden-speckled, hairy monster, barred and spotted with black and dark brown, as hideous as its silken house is beautiful. It inhabits the forests of lowland Carolina within a few miles of the sea, but it is very rare except in certain localities, so that many have never seen it, and consider it a myth.
It is no myth, however, as you are likely to discover if you will search the tangled shrubbery around the ruins of Stanwicke Hall. There the golden spider still spins its glistening golden webs, three feet or more in diameter, and the negroes know it well and fear it as they fear the rattlesnake. But if you ask them to tell you the story of the man who once lived in Stanwicke Hall and whose black slaves called him (behind his back) the Golden Spider, because of his passion for gold—the man about whom a grim prophecy was spoken—they will gaze at you stupidly, for, though other legends of the place survive, this tale has been forgotten.
That man was Edward Stanwicke, Jolie Stanwicke's father. Dusk of the day on which they had conferred at Marshall's inn found Lachlan and Almayne in the deep woods about a mile from Stanwicke Hall. There they left their horses and a third horse, which they had led from Charles Town, and pushed on through the forest on foot.
They wore buckskins and moccasins and each carried, besides knife and steel tomahawk, a long rifle. At the edge of the woods they waited until no more lanterns or torches moved about the plantation yard. Then they crossed the open stealthily, two dim, almost invisible shapes in the faint moonlight. Lights burned in the great central room on the first floor of the house. Presently Lachlan and Almayne stood in the deep shadow on the front porch or piazza close to the lofty double door opening into the room.
It was a large room, handsomely furnished, and lighted with tall candles, its wide deep windows open to admit the sweet-scented April breeze. In a high-backed chair beside a long table sat Edward Stanwicke, a tall, stooped, gray man of some sixty years, whose craggy face would have been both handsome and strong but for the loose under-lip. He was richly dressed, as became his station in the Province, for the Master of Stanwicke held himself second to none in the New World. In front of him, wearing white with a green silken shawl about—her shoulders, stood Jolie Stanwicke, his daughter.
A liveried negro servant had just placed a decanter and glasses upon the table and had withdrawn.
Lachlan, watching from the darkness without, saw that Stanwicke sat in a strangely hunched position in his chair, his head lolling forward on his chest. For some moments he sat thus without moving, his eyes apparently half-closed. Then he roused suddenly and with shaking hands filled a glass. As he lifted it from the table, the lace of his sleeve brushed against the other glass, overturning it so that it smashed to atoms on the floor. Instantly he broke out in a high-pitched, tremulous wail.
"See," he cried, his voice as shrill as a woman's. "See what all this has done to me. I am a wreck, a shell. I cannot pour wine for the shaking of my hands. And you stand there and there's no pity in you."
The girl moved a step nearer, resting her hand upon the table.
"Pity!" she said slowly in a low voice. "There is no room for pity."
He seemed not to hear her. At a gulp he drained his glass, filled another and drank that also. He cleared his throat and opened his lips to speak, but she cut him short.
"I have something to tell you," she said quickly, "and I must ask you to listen to me now. I do not know whether this illness which affects you like palsy is real or feigned, but I know that you give way to it only when you wish to work upon my sympathy. I think you have begun to realize that there is in me no particle of pity for you and that, therefore, you will try some other way if I remain longer in this place. I shall return to Charles Town to-morrow."
Stanwicke smiled. Seeing that smile, Lachlan realized that his first surmise was mistaken. The man was not drunk. When he spoke his voice was deeper and steadier and his hands no longer trembled.
"My dear daughter," he said, "and how shall you return to Charles Town if I do not choose to send you there?"
She started and stepped back a pace. "You would not dare keep me!" she exclaimed.
"You are my daughter," he replied suavely. "You are still my daughter although you have not chosen to honour my poor house with your presence. Now that you have come to me at last, it is both my duty and my privilege to take care of you, to protect you, to compel you, if need be, to do what is necessary for your well-being. You have been away from me so long that you do not remember a father's authority. You might appeal to other authority, I suppose, but I think the Governor of Carolina, who is my very good friend, would not deny my right to the custody of my child."
Suddenly his gray face flamed red. He brought his hand down upon the table with a crash.
"Listen, my pretty," he said, and it was passion which now shook his voice. "I am done with soft words. You are not in England now. You are not even in Charles Town. You are at Stanwicke Hall, and here my word is law. You did not know when you came to me what manner of man I am. Well, you are learning now; and you will learn that I will be obeyed."
He paused for breath, for the words had been pouring from him in a torrent. Something in the girl's face added fuel to his rage. He spat out an oath, and the flush in his cheeks darkened.
"You can be obstinate—you have shown me that," he cried hoarsely. "You have no love and no pity for me, your father, and you care nothing for the honour of my name and yours. I have asked little. I have asked only that you treat the man with ordinary civility, that you refrain from angering him, that you grant him the privileges of a friend. You have refused. Well, I am not to be ruined by your damned obstinacy. If it were left to me, I would know how to deal with you, but he does not desire that—yet."
Again he paused for breath. Jolie Stanwicke, eyes bright with anger, bosom heaving, opened her lips, but he cried her down.
"I owe you nothing," he screamed, leaning far forward in his chair, his voice again shrill and tremulous. "You are my daughter, but all your life you have kept away from me, preferring England and your mother's kinsfolk there. God knows I did not ask you to come, but now that you have come, you will lie in the bed I make for you. Who are you to thwart me? Why should I let Falcon destroy me because of your mad infatuation for this Barradell who, I tell you, is dead in the wilderness? You will stay here, here at Stanwicke Hall. And when Captain Falcon comes"
His words ran suddenly together, became an unintelligible jumble of low sounds. The colour drained from his face; his eyes widened, stared fixedly past the girl. Slowly, very slowly, as though the arm were made of lead, he raised his right hand and pointed.
"Good God!" he whispered hoarsely. "The black hag's prophecy!"
Jolie Stanwicke turned quickly, uttered a low cry, and jumped away from the table. Lachlan saw that Stanwicke was pointing at something on the table, but the girl intercepted his view. He moved noiselessly through the darkness of the porch to the other side of the doorway.
He saw then that the thing at which Stanwicke pointed was a huge yellow and black spider moving along the table straight towards the pallid staring man who sat slumped in his chair, his trembling arm still raised.
Slowly that arm sank until it rested on the table; and slowly, steadily the monstrous spider came on. Jolie Stanwicke stood as though turned to stone. Over Lachlan, also, there swept a sudden surge of horror. He knew the golden spider well, had admired a hundred times the shining golden discs that it spun in the woods. Despite its great size and its ugliness, he had never feared it before; but fear and loathing held him rigid now.
The thing never swerved, never paused. Slowly it moved along the table straight towards Stanwicke's hand resting on the table's edge. The hand did not move. Lachlan, staring in new horror at Stanwicke's colourless face, saw that the man was past movement, past consciousness.
The creature's hairy legs touched the fingers, the swollen, mottled body mounted upon the wrist. Slowly it moved up Stanwicke's arm to his shoulder, along his shoulder to his chest. From his chest it passed to the death-like mask of his upturned face, and there it halted, its long, hairy legs spread wide. So huge was it that the legs stretched from cheek to cheek; and as it sat there, hiding half the face of the man, its great bloated, spotted body moved up and down, up and down, as though the creature were sucking blood.
It was Almayne who broke the spell of horror that had been cast upon them all. With a low cry, he sprang through the doorway into the room and, snatching off his cap, swept it across Stanwicke's face. The huge spider fell to the floor. Almayne crushed it with his heel, then bent over the man in the chair. Meanwhile Lachlan had leaped to Jolie Stanwicke's side and had grasped her arm, for she stood swaying perilously.
She seemed scarcely aware of his presence; yet it was to him that she spoke.
"The prophecy!" she whispered dully. "It has come true. An old black slave woman told him once that he would die of the bite of the golden spider."
"He is not dead," said Almayne, his voice shaking. "It is a swoon, I think. Quick, some wine."
Jolie, freeing her arm from Lachlan's grip, filled the glass and handed it to the hunter. In silence they stood and watched the life come back to the man they had thought gone forever. The eyes opened, stared vacantly; the lips moved. Suddenly Jolie turned to Lachlan.
"Thank God, you have come!" she said in a low, steady voice. "Take me away."