Lords of the North | Page 7

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 God, 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 passed." His torn clothes bore evidence to the thoroughness of that search.
"Nonsense," my uncle burst out, beginning to bluster. "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 impassable 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 reassuringly bustled off to find mother and son in the next room, and the next, and yet the next;