Ondell and Dolee; a story of mysticism

Front matter

A STORY OF MYSTICISM

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Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. Wherein Doctor Tanton Torquay and Miss Doleah Antieth have a quarrel and incidentally discuss Ondell Urmoden 7

II. Doleah and Philleo vent their ideas of fickle

Chapter I

WHEREIN DOCTOR TANTON TORQUAY AND MISS DOLEAH ANTIETH HAVE A QUARREL AND INCIDENTALLY DISCUSS ONDELL URMODEN.

In the shadow of fragrant trees, a forest of cupressus, of pellate cones and deep-hued leaf, by the massive oaks that joined the hickory in the deepening of the shade, rode Doleah Antieth, the belle of a modern Gascony. A ripple of song came from her lips, the scenes of evening, the orange tints of a dying sun, all as beautiful as some rarely tinted aquarelle, rested in the western sky, the shadows reached across the highway of deep red iron permeated soil and the pe'ace of a coming sleep had thrown its spell over the country.

Hard behind, though hitherto unobserved by her, rode Tanton Torquay, the country doctor, a man not unpleasant to the senses, a man seemingly passionhearted, though in a mild degree deep and peculiar in his manner. His was such a personality as appealed to the physical sense, his fascinations were several and his mind and his body seemed alike powerful and stealthily rapid in action and while one deeply skilled in character might fancy that he saw therein something sinister, yet to the average person he displayed a flattering geni-

Ondell and Dolee.

ality and a winsomeness rare to the male twin of humanity.

“Good evening, Miss Dolee, my dear little friend, your voice is like the honey dew of morning. As you sang so plaintively and so sadly you turned my heart to other days.”

Quite surprised from her reverie, Dolee turned, partly in anger, to meet his unflinching eyes, as blue and as tender as the midday sky.

“You are quite at home in the art of interruption, Doctor, the road is wide and I prefer this side of it to myself.”

“Indeed! Then I shall be well content with the other side. May I ride in your vicinity-, — in your circumjacency ?”

To this she gave him no answer, but he smiled and maintained the farther side of the road.

“Dolee, my dear friend,” he began after a while and with less of a taunt in his voice, “since my earliest recollection, since fawning boyhood, I have known you but to admire you. And in other years I was foolish enough to believe that you cared for me a little, — that was in the days of nevermore. You will at least oblige me if you will put off that look of scorn and let an old-time warmth kindle your heart. Even though you have ceased to love me, — I love you, — I love you.”

“You are the personification of conceited impudence. Ride on and do not speak to me. We have of love and friendship taken leave and not again, by any working of your subtle arts, can you weave again your web of flattery around my trustful heart.”

Tanton and Dolee Quarrel.

“Oh, my, — is it that bad?” he asked with a slight accent of disdain.

'‘Yes, — you are well known here and your qualifications have ceased to commend themselves to me, so let that be the end of it.”

“Good! Then I am not needed in your business. You are a bright girl, Dolee, and as sweet as a peach! Oh, my, yes!” And Tanton smirked with satisfaction at his sally.

“Leave me, Doctor Tanton !”

“With regret. With regret. But why may we not talk, since we ride the same road ? It will be company for both, assuredly for me.”

“We shall inevitably quarrel, Doctor Tanton, so ride on and let me see how swift a steed you support.”

“Rather no. I am not interested in having you care for me in that way. Let us quarrel then in the good old-fashioned way, I want to tell you something about your latest amatory acquisition, our mutual horror, Ondell Urmoden.”

“I will not hear it.”

“Yes, you will,” he replied, impudently stubborn, for he was not easily put down and his serene composure was by this time more or less ruffled. It was a fault with Tanton, that he soon became, in every bout, what is popularly known as “rattled.”

“Dolee !” he commanded in a tone so fierce that she was for a moment startled, since she was easily subjective to the art of awakening tragic emotion. “You shall carry in your heart to the end of your days, the image of my face. I have known the bondage of your

IO

Ondell and Dolee.

love and not all of its sunshine has departed from me. Once, — in the frosts of an autumn there came a sad deflection in our souls, and ”

'‘Your dear soul, — how it worries you. Bah, Tanton Torquay of Gascony, how humorously you put it.”

“I declare, yes. But, — no matter. Divinest Dolee, — I have never been made acquainted with the wherefore of your actions. Would you be gracious enough, — in your natural kindness of heart, — to enlighten me, so that my heart as well as my honor may be satisfied?”

Dolee laughed as she looked at him across the road. Then she was silent and then laughed again.

“Laughing at my honor, I suppose? I can read your thoughts- because I know your style. You think men have no honor, — not natural to them. Come now and enlighten my heart, — honor or no honor.”

“Your honor has never been burnt at the stake, Tanton Torquay, and you need not ask me why I have no regard for you. You know.”

“Really, — I am at your service. Since you insist that I know, I cannot question the assertion of a lady. But, — but, — of course, that particular cell colony has gone to the bottom of the heap and while, of course, I know, I am not conscious of all that I do know,, just at this moment. Would you mind refreshing me, — let me see, — just precisely how did it all happen?”

“You are absolutely unique in your impudence. One must admire that at least. Could you possibly awaken to the memory, — after an intervening year, — that once upon a day I gave you a promise of marriage?” Dolee laughed bitterly as she said this.

Tanton and Dolee Quarrel. u

“Ah, yes, — yes. An inimitable bit of coquetry, no doubt.”

“Indeed not. I was younger then and I was sincere. I was foolish enough to be sincere. It gives me headache to think of it now.”

“Yes, it must be distressing. And so much your own fault too. I was as honest with you as I could be. I was never in my life so honest about anything.”

“A severe spasmodic symptom, as doctors will say, I must confess to an admiration of your wit.”

“Please don’t mention it, — though I adore the keen penetration of your genial humor, my little lady, — and as you are a lady, I cannot question, — I was honest with you.”

“Yes, you were an idle boy then, a country swain blessed with a shock head, an empty brain and several Reuben-like attributes. I was an innocent girl and in my innocence I gave you my heart and lived to regret it.”

“We are not so, — how was that? Oh, yes, — Reuben like and innocent now, are we?”

“No, thank God, we are riper now. I gave you a pearl fairer than adorned any lace, that you shall ever again behold and you threw it, like a worthless pebble into the Bourbese. Then you wandered into the courtyards of the great cities and filled your head with learning and with sin. You fell into the ways of women and passed your tiny heart around. You loved them all and when fate was good enough to put one of your soilings into my way, — indeed, — it was truly from Eloine Terren that I learned of the ways of my hitherto adorable Tanton. Bah, — it is a tiresome business.”

Ondell and Dolee.

“Yes, he turned out badly, — poor fellow// sighed the doctor with one of his matchless bits of irony that was yet devoid of offense. It was not easy to get away from one as insinuating as Doctor Torquay; he stuck to you as with tendrils and usually not unpleasantly. But he could be like the fish that empties its ink into the sea, making all his surroundings black and sending the other denizens coughing and scurrying off to a clearer aquasphere, — it all depended when and where the mood took him.

“Then you came home to empty out the glitter of your brain, for heart and soul you had none. I remember that your love letters were well edited, — I read in them words of intense, sacred foolery, — in fact, — as I remember, — there were two of a kind, as intense as a hypocrite could make them, — they might have been letter press copies, one for me and the other for Eloine, — that was the level upon which you had the impudence to put me. You might, at least, have had the consideration or taken the time and trouble to have written two distinct letters/’ and she laughed bitterly, for indeed, of all her memories, this was the most unpalatable of alb

“Then I am to infer, that yours was merely a case of wounded vanity because you did not get an wholly original piece of literature from me. Had I only known that !”

Dolee was stung by this and for a moment lost her equipose, which was ordinarily above the average.

Note. — Aquasphere. The water sphere in which a fish lives.

Tanton and Dolee Quarrel. 13

“You are a serpent and I heed you as I would a serpent !”

He looked at her with well-feigned surprise. “My dear Dolee ”

“Don’t dare to repeat it !” she retorted fiercely, and for the succeeding moment or two, he was impassively silent.

“Ah, well,” he said finally, with a sigh, that for perfect acting was cast upon far too narrow a stage. “Then it is beyond our words. Since what I say cannot avail to clear away the deep set doubts that fill your troubled hours, neither can what I hear from you ease the pain I feel. Of course, I have my faults and I have made mistakes, but you will hardly expect me to be an angel until sometime after my death, — will you ?” From the sigh of an apparently utter despair, this facile man had through the mirror of a few words looked into the merry world of mirth, — laughing softly as if to further exasperate his unwilling companion.

“I do not relish this trifling, and unless you see fit to ride on, I shall turn back. You are taking advantage of me to insult me and Mr. Urmoden will call you to account for this.”

“That cowardly shrimp! I beg your pardon. That I retract, — that, I did not mean to say. But let me tell you, — since you speak of him and though, after a fashion, I respect him, — this man Urmoden is a strange set man for one of his years. His nature is too cold and deep for you, Miss Dolee.”

“Yes, perhaps. But he is not like you, — cold, vindictive and desperate. There is a difference.”

H

Ondell and Dolee.

“Oh, yes, decidedly so. I am frank, open hearted, self contained if you will, but this man has a scowling face like an Indian, he is taciturn, gloomy, savage, — a mental cannibal, — that is his nature. He is as dumpy as his gloomy vaults, where they say the ghosts of ancient men keep house. His jaws set hard, as though his teeth have need of the strengthening, such as hard pressure gives. But I mean no disparagement upon all that. I mean that his mind is curved, that is, that his thoughts are not straight out, — crooked, dishonest, if you will, — I notice that you were about to put the question, so I answer it. You see, my intuition is in prime condition. I know him long and well, — better than you can ever know him, — I meet him on the same level, — though I confess that it is difficult for one to know these alchemists, who fancy that they dabble into magic of all colors. Pshaw ! here is a man who dreams by day and in the stretches of the night woos up, by incantations of harmony, the shades of the silent world, — a dabbler into devachan, — a glorious husband that !”

To this strange speech, Doleah Antieth had given attention, for it was rife in the neighborhood that Ondell was more than mysterious in his habits. He lived alone and in so queer a habitation and he was so unduly mirthful over the whole of their gentle accusations that the country folk were sure that if there was witchcraft anywhere that it was at the Mansion of a Thousand Stairs.

“You believe that he loves you,” continued the irrepressible Tanton, determined to empty out his spleen despite the drawback of an unwilling and unsympa-

Tanton and Dolee Quarrel. 15

thetic listener, “pshaw, that man has other loves, — loves that chain the imagination and have enduring charms, — they never fade as you may fade/’ and Tanton looked at her so hard that even across the road in the shades of bright evening she fancied that he looked through her and pointed out each charm that would in time fade and named the hour when he would rejoice at the fleeting wantonness of all things that are, her cheeks tingled under his searching eye, — his cold, beefy, blue eye that had a knowledge of sensual things beyond the ordinary.

“You are wasting precious forces, you are a dupe to your fond hopes ”

“As once before? Why not have added that?” she asked tauntingly, and the word flew into the heart of a guilty conscience. Tanton was ready for more, after a moment's pause.

“Let me warn you, — beware, — there is a devil lurking there.”

“Begone, you idle hypocrite. I hate you for your double dealing. You stab men and women in the dense groves, in the hour when the cloud hangs before the moon ; you are too cowardly to go to Ondell and tell him that,— there is a man for you !”

“Oh, yes, you may boast of him, but he is not dangerous; not in the least. When I get through with him, he will be like the kite that has wound up its career in a tree top.”

“On the contrary, my braggart, you will bait the minnows at the bottom of the Bourbese, and if you i6

Ondell and Dolee.

value the entirety of your anatomy, I advise you to keep your delicate hands from Ondell,”

“Oh, thank you ever so much. But, in truth, I have had so much advice in my time, and that which has cost me so much cash, and which I valued at the time more than I do this, that I shall follow my own ideas about that.”

“You are a coward and a cur! Thank God, here comes my boy, — just crazy enough to kill you some time.”

“Hah! You may chide me and call me cur and hypocrite, and make valentines of my hopes, — I am not the man to loose my tempering. But I will oblige you to the extent of parting from you now. I love you for your charming disdain, and I shall not fail to be around handily at the altar of my adoration. Inform your friend, Sir Ondell, that I am his rival.” With a merry laugh, he cantered on leisurely, apparently not caring to bid the time with Philleo, the man servant of Dolee, and, possibly, he was of the opinion that three would be a crowd. For some reason Tanton did not like the rough-hewn Philleo, though in truth, the latter was, most of the time, as harmless a man as lived. He was not given to intellectual perspicacity, but there was neither mildew nor molasses on his wit. He was a rough-and-tumble sort of a fellow, good at a knockdown and dragout, and at the country dances played the fiddle all night execrably. But his fellows took care not to comment upon his musical vagaries in his hearing for fear that a paling might fly off the fence and rap them on the pate.

Chapter II

DOLEAH AND PHILLEO VENT THEIR IDEAS OF FICKLE MEN, AND GERAND INTRODUCES A NOVELTY IN FIREWORKS.

“I am glad you came. Tanton is so tiresome these days,” said Dolee, “he has been abusing Ondell shamefully.”

“Why, blarst his hide, shall I ride him down for you ?”

“Oh, no; Pm glad to be rid of him.”

“He showed heel dust when I come round.”

“Was that it?” Dolee laughed, as she always did at Philleo.

“Pm prophet enough to feel round me, sometimes, what’s er goin’ to happen, — like them thar dogs do what live in the earthquake countries, — that’s a bad man; he isn’t fur from the bad place right now, — Pm here to tell you, — and Mister Ondell best to keep his light blazin’ round him.”

“You’re a fool forever strutting on the earth. You need to be squelched.”

“Gee whizzus ! Here’s whar I git it in the carbuncle neighborhood. Say, you’re not mad, are you ?” he asked, after a moment, when the rebuke had passed from his evanescent nature.

i8

Ondell and Dolee.

“Yes, I am cross with all the world this evening. I declare I do believe that all men are hypocrites.”

“Yessem, all hypocrites are men, jest as you said they was.”

Dolee smiled in despite of her moodiness and for several moments Philleo rode along in profound meditation.

“No, I didn’t git that out right, Miss Dolee ; let me see, I know I’m no hypocrite and I’m a man.”

“And a poor excuse, too.”

“Wall, that’s better’n bein’ a wommern. No, no, no, I didn’t mean that; I mean it’s better to be a nobody-man than to be a man’s nobody.”

“By which you might mean me?” she laughed.

“Oh, no, no, I didn’t git it out right that time, nuther. I mean it’s better to be a nobody’s nobody than to be somebody’s man ; no, that might mean me. I think I mean that it’s better to be a nobody’s somebody ”

“Of course that would mean you,” she said merrily.

“Oh, yes, that must mean me,” but Philleo was not out of the puzzle garden, — he had an idea of some kind which had tangled itself hopelessly in his mental lariat.

Dolee pursued her own thoughts. “Can it be possible? It seems of late that my lover has much preoccupation; he thinks of things far off and not of me. How well I remember his former gaiety, especially that day when he fell out of the mulberry tree and almost hit me in his coming. How he lay on the green sward, half ashamed, and how keenly handsome he

Dolee Has Doubts.

appeared to be then. He has become morose and regretful, it seems. He wants interest and enthusiasm. He is like a ship that has gotten into a still wind in the middle of the sea. As for the tale told me by that serpent, such as this was heard once in Paradise; that is, if ancient stories are not ancient, — well, no matter, he is but a sorry tempter. Yet for myself, I feel dissatisfaction, my feelings bring me pain and anxiety. Am I doomed to love in vain? Shall I have a repetition of a former sorrow? Am I not fair? Not true? Who is this man that would make a fool of me?” She had painful memories and her jerky thoughts were cross-grained, — for she had felt bitterness, — and doubt was not without its reasons for being. Her knowledge of human nature was limited too, by a few tokens she tried to interpret many mysteries, and consequently she fell into much error. “Pshaw,” she said, half laughing aloud, “one would think that my father kept a notice on the gate that he had a marriageable daughter in the house, and that all are welcome.” Yet without having an unchaste imagination, she had doubts, and she exercised a natural right in studying the problem so important to all women.

“It’s gettin’ dark, Miss Dolee,” said Philleo.

“Well, what then?”

“I don’t like it to get dark ’round me; this wild country is full of ghosts, and people has been robbed ’long this road.”

“You are a coward, Philleo.”

“In some things, yes.”

Ondell and Dolee.

"We’re going up to Thousand Stair to-night, Philleo.”

Her servant gave the characteristic low whistle of surprise. "Don’t scare a fellow like that. My face is gettin’ wrinkly, ennyhow. You’re not shore enough in earnest?”

"Yes, indeed. I* am in much doubt of heart, and cannot brook the idle hours that pass along so slumb^ r ously. Tanton told me something that I cannot get away from.”

"Oh, you mustn’t mind him, Miss Dolee.”

"I cannot help it. He told me that Ondell was making a fool of me, and I have a fancy to see him to-night and read his mind. If he loves me not ”

"Oh, he loves you, — don’t worry, don’t fret, — who wouldn’t love you?”

"I will know that. I have been close to the fire, and before I get into another ”

"Yes, I do declare, you was shorely burnt at the stake by that feller Tanton.”

"And you are quite imprudent, — quite so. It’s none of your business.”

"Well, all right, it’s none of my business. But them ghosts up there is a whole lot of my business. If they gets me, you’re not comm’ to my infair. I’m glad I got my gun, annyway.”

"You’d forget it if you ever got where you’d really need it. You boys who carry guns to picnics, to rear around with and pretend that you are bad men, are not dangerous.”

"Well, now, don’t never gamble on that thar proper-

Dolee Has Doubts.

sition. I tell you, Miss Dolee, if you ever get into a hoss trade of that kind, you’ll find the world full of deceit. I may be harmless, but Til bear watchin’ sometimes.”

“You are afraid to go with me because it is dark. I suppose that if you really saw a ghost, we’d bury you the next day.”

“Well, all right; if I must, then I go. An’ if you’ll take the lead a goin’, I’ll be shore to take it a cornin’ back.”

Dolee was delicately sensitive to her surroundings and ever a prey to her imaginings and vague emotions. Almost a tear drop stood in each eye, but she resolutely held them back. She was not indifferent to the charm of the great passion, and some innate vanity made her spirit rebel at the possible thought that she was not sufficiently beautiful and fascinating to win the heart of man into abject adoration. Perhaps she asked too much. Yet there was no denying her wealth of attraction, that she knew. And many another one thought, too, that there was a deep, hallowed soul beneath those attractions, and the commonplace seemed to stand in awe before her, so that many a countryman sighed and dismissed the possibility as something too rich for his blood. Dolee meant to be honest in every feeling; circumstances only, and apparently those over which she had no control, had made her doubtful, — indifferent and at times unapproachable. Her experience with Tanton had been greatly unpleasant ; she had, in youthful ardor, admired this man, and built upon his promises the castles that all maidens will rear, — and

Ondell and Dolee.

she imagined herself as mistress therein, a loved wife and the heart's fond desire, — alas, how rudely the entrancement had, like a falling frame, broken into bits before her.

Drifting clouds, like errant ghosts into infinity, passed slowly downward with the fading of the vernal sun, into an oppressive silence. The hard stepping of the fiery horses seemed to be the only thing that saved her from the depths of reverie. Darkness now brooded over the distant hills, where slept the daisy and the clover, that had come, earliest of all, to welcome the tardy spring, — a brook flowed evermore down hill and dale, — here, she had often rode alone in other years, in the days, when, even as unto herself, an invisible hand touched every living thing and spurned it to brood and bloom into beauty, — here, she had watched the spring steal on the summer unaware, — here, passed before her, green spring, golden summer, red autumn and ghastly winter, for twenty and two years and it was now time that she turn from bloom and growth and hopes and longings, into a life of reality and of life’s fruition. Ondell, — he must not be permitted to deceive her, if he but presumed, however slightly, upon such a thing, she would, at once, cast him from her, — for indeed, there were others. She need not worry with doubtful, distant men, others demanded her, — though, perhaps, they appeared not to be so high born and noble limbed, yet, possibly, as good and in the sum total as desirable as their more pretentious fellows. Such were her thoughts as she rode along the woodland, on the red highway, by the brook that flowed

Dolee Has Doubts.

evermore down hill and dale. They were secret thoughts, such as never, by any hint, beheld the light of day, — had any one, in tenderest intimacy, asked her if she ever had such thoughts as these, she would have tossed off the query as an impertinence.

Thousand Stair Mansion was silhouetted in the distance, its beacon lamp shone out upon the valley from the high hill whereon the house stood, a curious pile of masonry and a scene of silence and of desolation. Not even the contiguity of cultivated fields or the window lights of far off neighboring houses added animation to the scene, with evidences of civilization on every hand, the place yet seeme4 to stand in the desolation of the forests of a primeval age, such was the peculiar effect of the ensemble of hills, valleys and streams of the country, a likely place for the haunts of wild men of the forests in the days of the aborigine. It was lonely there and the mansion of a Thousand Stairs was a veritable temple of silence. Deeper the crimson suffused the skies and now the forests were hung with draperies of twilight. There was a shadow on the high hill where the forbidding mansion stood and Philleo instinctively shrunk from the gloomy places. He had rather face anything than this mansion. His mind had been, since his earliest childhood instilled with superstition, uncanny things occurred there, — it was reputed that strange forms hovered about and cast stones at the hill where the mansion stood, — stones that seemed to appear mysteriously in the sky, having 1 come from, — nobody knew where, and the Methodist minister who had gone there, once upon an

Ondell and Dolee.

evening, to pray with the devil, had, while kneeling upon a rock and in the full moonlight, where it was possible to see any one that might have been lurking about, been soundly laid out with so unholy a thing as a wooden shoe, which reached him in the small of the back.

The hoot of the owl was heard there, when the singers of the wood were hushed and the flowers had folded from the dew. The air of the Quiogozon was ever there. And it was a curious story that they told. This hill, they said, — who loved to gather by the fireside and spin yarns, — was hollowed out by a vast cavern and that in the days of long ago, the Indians or the Mound Builders, used it as a temple or a charnel house and some even declared that a wandering rebellious branch of the sun worshipping Natchez had maintained here their perpetual fires and that, in imitation of them, Doctor Urmoden kept his light burning also.

Herein reposed the partial excications of this former race. The opening of this cave was directly to the top of the hill, an aperture, some thirty feet in diameter, descending obliquely into the earth and opening into a vast cave as if it were the cone of a volcano. But such it was not. The opening to the top of the hill had probably been formed by a cave-in of a weak part of the cavern's dome and when Urmoden the elder discovered the place, he became fascinated with it, because it so well represented his insanely gloomy nature.

Note. — Quiogozon. Indian term for burial vault.

Dolee Has Doubts.

He had built over this aperture, with solid foundations, the mansion of a Thousand Stairs, built it of the white limestone with which the country abounded and his house had the appearance of beauty and majesty. But time yellowed the whiteness of the stone and the moss grew and the vine hung around and so it was that the sombreness of the tomb had come over it all.