The Courage of Captain Plum - James Oliver Curwood (the best novels to read .TXT) 📗

would take Marion away with him if it was only her dead body that he carried in his arms. To do these things he needed strength. He advanced more slowly and drew deeper and deeper drafts of air into his exhausted lungs. At the edge of the grove surrounding the castle he paused to listen. For the first time it occurred to Nathaniel that the prophet might have assembled some of his fighters to the defense of his harem, which he knew would be one of the first places to feel the vengeance of the outraged men of the mainland. But he heard no voices ahead of him. There were no fires to betray the approach of the enemy. Not even the barking of a dog gave warning of his stealthy advance. Soon he could make out a light in the king's house. A few steps more and he saw that the door was open, as it had been on his first visit to the castle. He dodged swiftly from bush to bush, darted under the window through which he had seen Marion, leaped lightly up the broad steps and sprang into the great room, his pistol cocked in his hand.
The room was empty. He listened, but not a sound came to his ears except the rustling of a curtain in the breeze. The huge lamp over the table was burning dimly. The five doors leading from the room were tightly closed. Nathaniel held his breath, tried to still the tumultuous pounding of his heart as he waited for a sound of life--a step beyond those doors, a woman's voice, a child's cry. But none came. The stillness of desertion hovered about him. He went to one of the five doors. It was not locked. He opened it silently, with the caution of a thief, and there loomed before him a chaos of gloom.
"Hello!" he called gently. "Hello--Hello--"
There was no answer. He struck a match and advanced step by step, holding the yellow bit of flame above his head. It disclosed the narrow walls of a hall and an open door leading into another room. The match sputtered and went out and he lighted another. On a little table just outside the door was a half burned candle and he replaced his match with this. Then he went in.
At a glance he knew that he had entered a woman's room, redolent with the perfume of flowers. On one side was a bed and close beside it a cradle with a child's toys scattered about it. The tumbled coverlets showed that both had been recently used. About the room were thrown articles of wearing apparel; a trunk had been dragged from a closet and was half packed; everywhere was the disorder of hurried flight. For a few moments the depth of his despair held Nathaniel motionless. The castle was deserted--Marion was gone! He ran back into the great room, no longer trying to still the sound of his footsteps, and opened a second door. The same silence greeted him, the same disorder, the same evidence that the wives and children of the Mormon king had fled. He went into a third room--and then a fourth.
For an instant he paused at the threshold of this fourth chamber. A light was burning in the room at the end of the hall. The door was closed with the exception of an inch or two.
"Marion!" he called softly, and listened intently.
He went on when there was no reply, and pushed open the door.
A candle was burning on a stand in front of a mirror. The room was as empty as the others. But there was no disorder here. The bed was unused, the garments in the open closet had not been disarranged. On the floor beside the bed was a pair of shoes and as Nathaniel saw them his heart seemed to leap to his throat and stifled the cry that was on his lips. He took one of them in his hand, his whole being throbbing with excitement. It was Marion's shoe--encrusted with mud and torn as he had seen it in the forest. With her name falling from his lips in a pleading cry he now searched the room and on the stand in front of the mirror he found a lilac colored ribbon, soiled and crumpled. It was Marion's ribbon--the one he had seen last in her hair, and he crushed it to his lips as he ran back into the great room, calling out her name again and again in the torture of helplessness that now possessed him.
Mechanically, rather than with reason, he went to the fifth and last door. His candle had become extinguished in his haste and after he had opened the door he stopped at the threshold of the black hall to light it again. There was a moment's pause as he searched his pockets for a match, a silence in which he listened as he searched, and suddenly as he was about to strike the sulphur tipped splint there came to his ears a sound that held him chained to the spot. It was the sobbing of a woman; or was it a child? In a moment he knew that it was a woman; and then the sobbing ceased.
There was nothing but darkness ahead of him; no ray of light shone under the door; the chamber itself was in utter gloom. As quietly as possible he relighted his candle. A glance assured him that this hall was different from the others; it was deeper, and there were two doors at the end of it instead of one. Through which of these doors had come the sound of sobbing he had heard?
He approached and listened. Each moment added to his excitement, his fears, his hopes, but at last he opened the door on the left. The room was empty; there was the same disorder as before; the same signs of hurried flight. It was the room on the right! His heart almost stopped its beating as he placed his hand on the latch, lifted it, and pushed the door in. Kneeling beside the bed he saw a woman. She had turned toward the light and in the dim illumination of the room Nathaniel recognized the beautiful face he had seen at the king's castle the preceding day--the face of the woman who had sent him to find the prophet, who had placed her gentle hand on Marion's head as he had looked through the window. There was no fear in her eyes as she saw Nathaniel. Something more terrible than that shone in their glorious depths as she rose to her feet and stood before him, her face lined with grief, her mouth twitching in agony. She stood with clenched hands, her bosom rising and falling in the passion of the storm within her; and she sobbed even as Nathaniel paused there, unmanned in this sudden presence of a distress greater than his own; sobbed in a choking, tearless way, waiting for him to speak.
"Forgive me," he spoke gently. "I have come--for--Marion." He felt that he had no reason to lie to this woman. His face betrayed his own anguish as he came nearer to her. "I want Marion," he repeated. "My God, won't you tell me--?"
She struggled to calm herself as he spoke the girl's name.
"Marion is not here," she said. She crushed his hands against her bosom and a softer look came into her eyes; her voice was low and sweet, as it had been the morning he asked for Strang. As she saw the despair deepening in the man's face a great pity swept over her and she stretched out her arms to him with an aching cry, "Marion is gone--gone--gone," she moaned, "and you must go, too! O, I know you love her--she told me that you loved her, as I love Strang, my king! We have both lost--lost--and you must go--as--I--shall--go!" She turned away from him with a cry so heart-breaking in its pain that Nathaniel felt himself trembling to the soul. In another instant she had faced him again, fighting back a strange calm into her face.
"I love Marion," she breathed softly. "I would help you--I would help her--if I could." For a moment her pale beautiful face was filled with a light that might have shone from the face of an angel, "Don't you understand?" she continued, scarcely above a whisper. "I have been Strang's one great love--his life--until Marion came into his heart. I have lost--you have lost--but mine is the more bitter because Marion loves you, and Strang--"
With a cry Nathaniel sprang to her side. The candle fell from his hand, sputtered on the floor, and left them in darkness.
"Marion loves me! You say that Marion loves me?"
The woman's voice came to him in a whisper filled with the sweetness of sympathy.
"She said so to-night--in this room. She told me that she loved you as she never thought that she could love a man in this world. O, my God, is that not a balm for your heart, if it is broken? And Strang--my Strang--has forgotten his love for me!"
Nathaniel reached out his arms. They found the woman and for a time he held her hands in his, while a great silence fell upon them. He could hear the sobbing of her breath and as her fingers tightened about his own his heart seemed bursting with its hatred of this man who called himself a prophet of God; a hatred that burned furiously even as his being throbbed with the wild joy of the words he had just heard.
"Where is Marion?" he pleaded.
"I don't know," replied the woman. "They took her away alone. The others have gone to the temple."
"Do you think she is at the temple?" he inquired insistently.
"No. One of the others came back a little while ago. She said that Marion was not there."
"Where is Strang?"
This time he felt the woman tremble.
"Strang--"
She drew her hands away from him. There was a strange quiver in her voice.
"Yes--where is Strang?"
There came no reply.
"Tell me--where is he?"
"I don't know."
"Is he at the temple?"
"I don't know."
He could hear her stifled breath; he could almost feel her trembling, an arm's reach out there in the darkness. What a woman was this whose heart the Mormon king had broken for a new love!
"Listen," he said gently. "I am going to find Marion. I am going to take her away. To-morrow you shall have Strang again--if he is alive!"
There was no answer and he moved slowly back to the door. He closed it after him as he entered the hall. Once in the big room he paused for a moment under the hanging lamp to examine his pistol and then went outside. The grove in which the castle stood was absolutely deserted. So far as he could see not even a guard watched over the property of the king. Nathaniel had become too accustomed to the surprises of Beaver Island to wonder at this. He could see by the lights flaring along the harbor that the castle was in an isolated position and easy of attack. From what Strang's wife had told him and the evidences of panic in the chambers of the harem he believed that the Mormon king had abandoned the castle to its fate and that the approaching conflict would center about the temple.
Was Marion at the temple? If so he realized that she was beyond his reach. But the woman had said that she was not there. Where could she have gone? Why had not Strang taken her with his wives? In a flash Nathaniel thought of Arbor Croche and Obadiah--the two men who always knew what the king was doing.