John Bloundelle-Burton - A Bitter Heritage

Then, suddenly, while he was telling Julian so, they emerged from one more glade, leaving behind them all the chattering members of the animal and feathered world, and came out into a small open plain which was in a full state of cultivation, while Julian observed a house, large, spacious and low before them.

"There is Desolada-the House of Desolation as my poor father used to call it, for some reason of his own-there is my property, to which you will always be welcome."

His property! Julian thought, even as he gazed upon the mansion (for such it was); his property! And he had left England, had travelled thousands of miles to reach it, thinking that, instead, it was his . That he would find it awaiting an owner-perhaps in charge of some Government official, but still awaiting an owner-himself. Yet, now, how different all was from what he had imagined-how different! In England, on the voyage, the journey from New York to New Orleans, nay! until four hours ago, he thought that he would have but to tell his story after taking a hasty view of Desolada and its surroundings to prove that he was the son who had suddenly disappeared a day or so after his birth: to show that he was the missing, kidnapped child. He would have but to proclaim himself and be acknowledged.

But, lo! how changed all appeared now. There was no missing, kidnapped heir-there could not be if the man by his side had spoken the truth-and how could he have spoken untruthfully here, in this country, in this district, where a falsehood such as that statement would have been (if not capable of immediate and universal corroboration), was open to instant denial? There must be hundreds of people in the colony who had known Sebastian Ritherdon from his infancy; every one in the colony would have been acquainted with such a fact as the kidnapping of the wealthy Mr. Ritherdon's heir if it had ever taken place, and, in such circumstances, there could have been no Sebastian. Yet here he was by Julian's side escorting him to his own house, proclaiming himself the owner of that house and property. Surely it was impossible that the statement could be untrue!

Yet, if true, who was he himself? What! What could he be but a man who had been used by his dying father as one who, by an imposture, might be made the instrument of a long-conceived desire for vengeance-a vengeance to be worked out by fraud? A man who would at once have been branded as an impostor had he but made the claim he had quitted England with the intention of making.

Under the palms-which grew in groves and were used as shade-trees-beneath the umbrageous figs, through a garden in which the oleanders flowered luxuriously, and the plants and mignonette-trees perfumed deliciously the evening air, while flamboyants-bearing masses of scarlet, bloodlike flowers-allamandas, and temple-plants gave a brilliant colouring to the scene, they rode up to the steps of the house, around the whole of which there was a wooden balcony. Standing upon that balcony, which was made to traverse the vast mansion so that, no matter where the sun happened to be, it could be avoided, was a woman, smiling and waving her hand to Sebastian, although it seemed that, in the salutation, the newcomer was included. A woman who, in the shadow which enveloped her, since now the sun had sunk away to the back, appeared so dark of complexion as to suggest that in her veins there ran the dark blood of Africa.

Yet, a moment later, as Sebastian Ritherdon presented Julian to her, terming him "a new-found cousin," the latter was able to perceive that the shadows of the coming tropical night had played tricks with him. In this woman's veins there ran no drop of black blood; instead, she was only a dark, handsome Creole-one who, in her day, must have been even more than handsome-must have possessed superb beauty.

But that day had passed now, she evidently being near her fiftieth year, though the clear ivory complexion, the black curling hair, in which scarcely a grey streak was visible, the soft rounded features and the dark eyes, still full of lustre, proclaimed distinctly what her beauty must have been in long past days. Also, Julian noticed, as she held out a white slim hand and murmured some words of cordial welcome to him, that her figure, lithe and sinuous, was one that might have become a woman young enough to have been her daughter. Only-he thought-it was almost too lithe and sinuous: it reminded him too much of a tiger he had once stalked in India, and of how he had seen the striped body creeping in and out of the jungle.

"This is Madame Carmaux," Sebastian said to Julian, as the latter bowed before her, "a relation of my late mother. She has been here many years-even before that mother died. And-she has been one to me as well as fulfilling all the duties of the lady of the house both for my father and, now, for myself."

Then, after Julian had muttered some suitable words and had once more received a gracious smile from the owner of those dark eyes, Sebastian said, "Now, you would like to make some kind of toilette, I suppose, before the evening meal. Come, I will show you your room." And he led the way up the vast campeachy-wood staircase to the floor above.

Tropical nights fall swiftly directly the sun has disappeared, as it had now done behind the still gilded crests of the Cockscomb range, and Julian, standing on his balcony after the other had left him and gazing out on all around, wondered what was to be the outcome of this visit to Honduras. He pondered, too, as he had pondered before, whether George Ritherdon had in truth been a madman or one who had plotted a strange scheme of revenge against his brother; a scheme which now could never be perfected. Or-for he mused on this also-had George Ritherdon spoken the truth, had Sebastian-

The current of his thoughts was broken, even as he arrived at this point, by hearing beneath him on the under balcony the voice of Sebastian speaking in tones low but clear and distinct-by hearing that voice say, as though in answer to another's question:

"Know-of course he must know! But knowledge is not always proof."

On that night when Sebastian Ritherdon escorted Julian once more up the great campeachy-wood staircase to the room allotted to him, he had extorted a promise from his guest that he would stay at least one day before breaking his visit by another to Sprangers.

"For," he had said before, down in the vast dining-room-which would almost have served for a modern Continental hotel-and now said again ere he bid his cousin "good-night," "for what does one day matter? And, you know, you can return to Belize twice as fast as you came here."

"How so?" asked Julian, while, as he spoke, his eyes were roaming round the great desolate corridors of the first floor, and he was, almost unknowingly to himself, peering down those corridors amid the shadows which the lamp that Sebastian carried scarcely served to illuminate. "How so?"

"Why, first, you know your road now. Then, next, I can mount you on a good swift trotting horse that will do the journey in a third of the time that mustang took to get you along. How ever did you become possessed of such a creature? We rarely see them here."

"I hired it from the man who kept the hotel. He said it was the proper thing to do the journey with."

"Proper thing, indeed! More proper to assist the bullocks and mules in transporting the mahogany and campeachy, or the fruits, from the interior to the coast. However, you shall have a good trotting Spanish horse to take you into Belize, and I'll send your creature back later."

Then, after wishing each other good-night, Julian entered the room, Sebastian handing him the lamp he had carried upstairs to light the way.

"I can find my own way down again in the dark very well," the latter said. "I ought to be able to do so in the house I was born in and have lived in all my life. Good-night."