“Dear Sir:“Enclosed please find, with title-deed, a memorandum opened in your name by the late John Valiant some years before his death. It was his desire that the services indicated in connection with this estate should continue till this date. We handyou herewith our check for $236.20 (two hundred and thirty-six dollars and twenty cents), the balance in your favor, for which please send receipt,“And oblige,“Yours very truly,“Emerson and Ball.“(Enclosure)”
“Dear Sir:
“Enclosed please find, with title-deed, a memorandum opened in your name by the late John Valiant some years before his death. It was his desire that the services indicated in connection with this estate should continue till this date. We handyou herewith our check for $236.20 (two hundred and thirty-six dollars and twenty cents), the balance in your favor, for which please send receipt,
“And oblige,“Yours very truly,“Emerson and Ball.
“(Enclosure)”
He turned to the memorandum. It showed a sizable initial deposit against which was entered a series of annual tax payments with minor disbursements credited to “Inspection and care.” The tax receipts were pinned to the account.
The larger wrapper contained an unsealed envelope, across which was written in faded ink and in an unfamiliar dashing, slanting handwriting, his own name. The envelope contained a creased yellow parchment, from between whose folds there clumped and fluttered down upon the floor a long flattish object wrapped in a paper, a newspaper clipping and a letter.
Puzzledly he unfolded the crackling thing in his hands. “Why,” he said half aloud, “it’s—it’s a deed made over to me.” He overran it swiftly. “Part of an old Colony grant ... a plantation in Virginia, twelve hundred odd acres, given under the hand of a vice-regal governor in the sixteenth century. I had no idea titles in the United States went back so far as that!” His eye fled to the end. “It was my father’s! What could he have wanted of an estate in Virginia? It musthave come into his hands in the course of business.”
He fairly groaned. “Ye gods! If it were only Long Island, or even Pike County! The sorriest, out-at-elbow, boulder-ridden, mosquito-stung old rock-farm there would bring a decent sum. But Virginia! The place where the dialect stories grow. The paradise of the Jim-crow car and the hook-worm, where land-poor, clay-colored colonels with goatees sit in green wicker lawn-chairs and watch their shadows go round the house, while they guzzle mint-juleps and cuss at lazy ‘cullud pussons.’ Where everybody is an F. F. V. and everybody’s grandfather was a patroon, or whatever they call ’em, and had a thousand slaves ‘befo de wah’!”
Who ever heard of Virginia nowadays, except as a place people camefrom? The principal event in the history of the state since the Civil War had been the discovery of New York. Its men had moved upon the latter en masse, coming with the halo about them of old Southern names and legends of planter hospitality—and had married Northern women, till the announcement in the marriage column that the fathers of bride and bridegroom had fought in opposing armies at the battle of Manassas had grown as hackneyed as the stereotyped “Whither are we drifting?” editorial. But was Virginia herself anything more, in this twentiethcentury, than a hot-blooded, high-handed, prodigal legend, kept alive in the North by the banquets of “Southern Societies” and annual poems on “The Lost Cause”?
He picked up the newspaper clipping. It was worn and broken in the folds as if it had been carried for months in a pocketbook.
“It will interest readers of this section of Virginia (the paragraph began) to learn, from a recent transfer received for record at the County Clerk’s Office, that Damory Court has passed to Mr. John Valiant, minor—”
“It will interest readers of this section of Virginia (the paragraph began) to learn, from a recent transfer received for record at the County Clerk’s Office, that Damory Court has passed to Mr. John Valiant, minor—”
He turned the paper over and found a date; it had been printed in the year of the transfer to himself, when he was six years old—the year his father had died.
“—John Valiant, minor, the son of the former owner.“There are few indeed who do not recall the tragedy with which in the public mind the estate is connected. The fact, moreover, that this old homestead has been left in its present state (for, as is well known, the house has remained with all its contents and furnishings untouched) to rest during so long a term of years unoccupied, could not, of course, fail to be commented on, and this circumstance alone has perhaps tended to keep alive a melancholy story which may well be forgotten.”
“—John Valiant, minor, the son of the former owner.
“There are few indeed who do not recall the tragedy with which in the public mind the estate is connected. The fact, moreover, that this old homestead has been left in its present state (for, as is well known, the house has remained with all its contents and furnishings untouched) to rest during so long a term of years unoccupied, could not, of course, fail to be commented on, and this circumstance alone has perhaps tended to keep alive a melancholy story which may well be forgotten.”
He read the elaborate, rather stilted phraseology in the twenty-year-old paper with a wondering interest. “An old house,” he mused, “with a bad name. Probably he couldn’t sell it, and maybe nobody would even live in it. That would explain why it remained so long unoccupied—why there are no records of rentals. Probably the land was starved and run down. At any rate, in twenty years it would be overgrown with stubble.”
Yet, whatever their condition, acres of land were, after all, a tangible thing. This lawyer’s firm might, instead, have sent him a bundle of beautifully engraved certificates of stock in some zinc-mine whose imaginary bottom had dropped out ten years ago. Here was real property, in size, at least, a gentleman’s domain, on which real taxes had been paid during a long term—a sort of hilarious consolation prize, hurtling to him out of the void like the magic gift of the traditional fairy god-mother.
“It’s an off-set to the hall-bedroom idea, at any rate,” he said to himself humorously. “It holds out an escape from the noble army of rent-payers. When my twenty-eight hundred is gone, I could live down there a landed proprietor, and by the same mark an honorary colonel, and raise the cabbages I was talking about—eh, Chum?—while you stalk rabbits. How does that strike you?”
He laughed whimsically. He, John Valiant, ofNew York, first-nighter at its theaters, hail-fellow-well-met in its club corridors and welcome diner at any one of a hundred brilliant glass-and-silver-twinkling supper-tables, entombed on the wreck of a Virginia plantation, a would-be country gentleman, on an automobile and next to nothing a year!
He bethought himself of the fallen letter and possessed himself of it quickly. It lay with the superscription side down. On it was written, in the same hand which had addressed the other envelope:
For my son, John Valiant,When he reaches the age of twenty-five.
That, then, had been written by his father—and he had died nearly twenty years ago! He broke the seal with a strange feeling as if, walking in some familiar thoroughfare, he had stumbled on a lichened and sunken tombstone.
“When you read this, my son, you will have come to man’s estate. It is curious to think that this black, black ink may be faded to gray and this white, white paper yellowed, just from lying waiting so long. But strangest of all is to think that you yourself whose brown head hardly tops this desk, will be as tall (I hope) as I! How I wonder what you will look like then! And shall I—the real, real I, I mean—be peering over your strong broad shoulder as you read? Who knows? Wise menhave dreamed such a thing possible—and I am not a bit wise.“John, you will not have forgotten that you are a Valiant. But you are also a Virginian. Will you have discovered this for yourself? Here is the deed to the land where I and my father, and his father, and many, many more Valiants before them were born. Sometime, perhaps, you will know why you are John Valiant of New York instead of John Valiant of Damory Court. I can not tell you myself, because it is too true a story, and I have forgotten how to tell any but fairy tales, where everything happens right, where the Prince marries the beautiful Princess and they live happily together ever after.“You may never care to live at Damory Court. Maybe the life you will know so well by the time you read this will have welded you to itself. If so, well and good. Then leave the old place to your son. But there is such a thing as racial habit, and the call of blood. And I know there is such a thing, too, as fate. ‘Every man carries his fate on a riband about his neck’; so the Moslem put it. It was my fate to go away, and I know now—since distance is not made by miles alone—that I myself shall never see Damory Court again. But life is a strange wheel that goes round and round and comes back to the same point again and again. And it may be your fate to go back. Then perhaps you will cry (but, oh, not on the old white bear’s-skin rug—never again with me holding your small, small hand!)—“‘Wishing-House! Wishing-House! Where are you?’“And this old parchment deed will answer answer—“‘Here I am, Master; here I am!’“Ah, we are only children, after all, playing out our plays. I have had many toys, but O John, John! The ones I treasure most are all in the Never-Never Land!”
“When you read this, my son, you will have come to man’s estate. It is curious to think that this black, black ink may be faded to gray and this white, white paper yellowed, just from lying waiting so long. But strangest of all is to think that you yourself whose brown head hardly tops this desk, will be as tall (I hope) as I! How I wonder what you will look like then! And shall I—the real, real I, I mean—be peering over your strong broad shoulder as you read? Who knows? Wise menhave dreamed such a thing possible—and I am not a bit wise.
“John, you will not have forgotten that you are a Valiant. But you are also a Virginian. Will you have discovered this for yourself? Here is the deed to the land where I and my father, and his father, and many, many more Valiants before them were born. Sometime, perhaps, you will know why you are John Valiant of New York instead of John Valiant of Damory Court. I can not tell you myself, because it is too true a story, and I have forgotten how to tell any but fairy tales, where everything happens right, where the Prince marries the beautiful Princess and they live happily together ever after.
“You may never care to live at Damory Court. Maybe the life you will know so well by the time you read this will have welded you to itself. If so, well and good. Then leave the old place to your son. But there is such a thing as racial habit, and the call of blood. And I know there is such a thing, too, as fate. ‘Every man carries his fate on a riband about his neck’; so the Moslem put it. It was my fate to go away, and I know now—since distance is not made by miles alone—that I myself shall never see Damory Court again. But life is a strange wheel that goes round and round and comes back to the same point again and again. And it may be your fate to go back. Then perhaps you will cry (but, oh, not on the old white bear’s-skin rug—never again with me holding your small, small hand!)—
“‘Wishing-House! Wishing-House! Where are you?’
“And this old parchment deed will answer answer—
“‘Here I am, Master; here I am!’
“Ah, we are only children, after all, playing out our plays. I have had many toys, but O John, John! The ones I treasure most are all in the Never-Never Land!”
For a long time John Valiant sat motionless, the opened letter in his hand, staring at nothing. He had the sensation, spiritually, of a traveler awakened with a rude shock amid wholly unfamiliar surroundings. He had passed through so many conflicting states of emotion that afternoon and evening that he felt numb.
He was trying to remember—to put two and two together. His father had been Southern-born; yes, he had known that. But he had known nothing whatever of his father’s early days, or of his forebears; since he had been old enough to wonder about such things, he had had no one to ask questions of. There had been no private papers or letters left for his adult perusal. It had been borne upon him very early that his father’s life had not been a happy one. He had seldom laughed, and his hair had been streaked with gray, yet when he died he had been but ten years older than the son was now.
Phrases of the letter ran through his mind:“Sometime, perhaps, you will know why you are John Valiant of New York instead of John Valiant of Damory Court.... I can not tell you myself.” There was some tragedy, then, that had blighted the place, some “melancholy story,” as the clipping put it.
He bent over the deed spread out upon the table, following with his finger the long line of transfers: “‘To John Valyante,’” he muttered; “what odd spelling! ‘Robert Valyant’—without the ‘e.’ Here, in 1730, the ‘y’ begins to be ‘i.’” There was something strenuous and appealing in the long line of dates. “Valiant. Always a Valiant. How they held on to it! There’s never a break.”
A curious pride, new-born and self-conscious, was dawning in him. He was descended from ancestors who had been no weaklings. A Valiant had settled on those acres under a royal governor, before the old frontier fighting was over and the Indians had sullenly retired to the westward. The sons of those who had braved sea and savages had bowed their strong bodies and their stronger hearts to raze the forests and turn the primeval jungles into golden plantations. Except as regarded his father, Valiant had never known ancestral pride before. He had been proud of his strong and healthy frame, of his ability to ride like a dragoon, unconsciously, perhaps, a little proud of his wealth. But pride in the larger sense, reverence for the pastbased upon a respect for ancient lineage, he had never known until this moment.
Where was his facetious concept of Virginia now? He remembered his characterization of it with a wincing half-humorous mortification—a slender needle-prick of shame. The empty pretensions, subsisting on the vanished glories of the past, had suddenly acquired character and meaning. He himself was a Virginian.
There below him stretched the great cañoned city, its avenues roaring with nightly gaiety, its roadways bright with the beams of shuttling motors, its theaters and cafés brilliant with women in throbbing hues and men in black and white, and its “Great White Way” blazing with incandescents, interminable and alluring—an apotheosis of fevered movement and hectic color. He knew suddenly that he was sick of it all: its jostle and glitter, its mad race after bubbles, its hideous under-surface contrasts of wealth and squalor, its lukewarm friendships and false standards which he had been so bitterly unlearning. He knew that, for all his self-pity, he was at heart full of a tired longing for wide uncrowded nature, for green breezy interludes and a sky of untainted sunlight or peaceful stars.
There stole into his mood an eery suggestion of intention. Why should the date assigned for that deed’s delivery have been the very day on whichhe had elected poverty? Here was a foreordination as pointed as the index-finger of a guide-post. “‘Every man carries his fate,’” he repeated, “‘on a riband about his neck.’ Chum, do you believe in fate?”
For answer the bulldog, cocking an alert eye on his master, discontinued his occupation—a conscientious if unsuccessful mastication of the flattish packet that had fallen from the folded deed—and with much solicitous tail-wagging, brought the sodden thing in his mouth and put it into the outstretched hand.
His master unrolled the pulpy wad and extricated the object it had enclosed—an old-fashioned iron door-key.
After a time Valiant thrust the key into his pocket, and rising, went to a trunk that lay against the wall. Searching in a portfolio, he took out a small old-fashioned photograph, much battered and soiled. It had been cut from a larger group and the name of the photographer had been erased from the back. He set it upright on the desk, and bending forward, looked long at the face it disclosed. It was the only picture he had ever possessed of his father.
He turned and looked into the glass above the dresser. The features were the same, eyes, brow, lips, and strong waving hair. But for its time-stainsthe photograph might have been one of himself, taken yesterday.
For an hour he sat in the bright light thinking, the pictured face propped on the desk before him, the dog snuggled against his knee.
The green, mid May Virginian afternoon was arched with a sky as blue as the tiles of the Temple of Heaven and steeped in a wash of sunlight as yellow as gold: smoke-hazy peaks piling up in the distance, billowy verdure like clumps of trembling jade between, shaded with masses of blue-black shadow, and lazying up and down, by gashed ravine and rounded knoll a road like red lacquer, fringed with stone wall and sturdy shrub and splashed here and there with the purple stain of the Judas-tree and the snow of dogwood blooms. Nothing in all the springy landscape but looked warm and opalescent and inviting—except a tawny bull that from across a barred fence-corner switched a truculent tail in silence and glowered sullenly at the big motor halted motionless at the side of the twisting road.
Curled worm-like in the driver’s seat, with his chin on his knees, John Valiant sat with his eyes upon the distance. For an hour he had whirred through that wondrous shimmer of color with a flippant loitering breeze in his face, sweet from the crimson clover that poured and rioted over theroadside: past nests of meditative farm-buildings, fields of baby-green corn, occasional ramshackle dirt-daubed cabins with doorways hung with yellow honeysuckle and flagrant trumpet-vines, and here and there a quiet old church, Gothic and ivied and gray whose leaded windows watched benignantly over myrtled graveyards. A great soothing suspiration of peace seemed to swell from it all to lap the traveler like the moist balminess of a semi-tropical sea.
“Chum old man,” said Valiant, with his arm about the bulldog’s neck, “if those color-photograph chaps had shown us this, we simply wouldn’t have believed it, would we? Such scenery beats the roads we’re used to, what? If it were all like this—but of course it isn’t. We’ll get to our own bailiwick presently, and wake up. Never mind; we’re country gentlemen, Chummy, en route to our estate! No silly snuffle, now! Out with it! That’s right,”—as a sharp bark rewarded him—“that’s the proper enthusiasm.” He wound his strong fingers in a choking grip in the scruff of the white neck, as a chipmunk chattered by on the low stone wall. “No, you don’t, you cannibal! He’s a jolly little beggar, and he doesn’t deserve being eaten!”
He filled his brier-wood pipe and drew in great breaths of the fragrant incense. “What a pity you don’t smoke, Chum; you miss such a lot! Isaw a poodle once in a circus that did. But he’d been to college. Think how you could think if you only smoked! We may have to do a lot of thinking, where we’re bound to. Wonder what we’ll find? Oh, that’s right, leave it all to me, of course, and wash your paws of the whole blooming business!”
After a time he shook himself and knocked the red core from the pipe-bowl against his boot-heel. “I hate to start,” he confessed, half to the dog and half to himself. “To leave anything so sheerly beautiful as this! However, on with the dance! By the road map the village can’t be far now. So long, Mr. Bull!”
He clutched the self-starter. But there was only a protestant wheeze; the car declined to budge. Climbing down, he cranked vigorously. The motor turned over with a surly grunt of remonstrance and after a tentativethrob-throb, coughed and stopped dead. Something was wrong. With a sigh he flung off his tweed jacket, donned a smudgy “jumper,” opened his tool-box, and, with a glance at his wrist-watch which told him it was three o’clock, threw up the monster’s hood and went bitterly to work.
At half past three the investigation had got as far as the lubricator. At four o’clock the bulldog had given it up and gone nosing afield. At half past four John Valiant lay flat on his backlike some disreputable stevadore, alternately tinkering with refractory valves and cursing the obdurate mechanism. Over his right eye an ooze of orange-colored oil glowered and glistened and indefatigably drip-dripped into his shrinking collar. A sharp stone gnawed frenziedly into the small of his back and just as he made a final vicious lunge, something gave way and a prickling red-hot stab of pain shot zigzagging from his smitten crazy-bone through every tortured crevice of his impatient frame. Like steel from flint it struck out a crisp oath that brought an answering bovine snort from the fence-corner.
Worming like a lizard to freedom, his eyes puckered shut with the wretched pang, John Valiant sat up and shook his grimy fist in the air. “You silly loafing idiot!” he cried. “Thump your own crazy-bone and see how you like it! You—oh, lord!”
His arm dropped, and a flush spread over his face to the brow. For his eyes had opened. He was gesturing not at the bull but at a girl, who fronted him beside the road, haughtiness in the very hue of her gray-blue linen walking suit and, in the clear-cut cameo face under her felt cavalry hat, myrtle-blue eyes, that held a smolder of mingled astonishment and indignation. The long ragged stems of two crimson roses were thrust through her belt, a splash of blood-red against the pallid weave. An instant he gazed, all the muscles of his face tightened with chagrin.
“I—I beg your pardon,” he stammered. “I didn’t see you. I really didn’t. I was—I was talking to the bull.”
The girl had been glancing from the flushed face to the thistly fence-corner, while the startled dignity of her features warred with an unmistakable tendency to mirth. He could see the little rebellious twitch of the vivid lips, the tell-tale flutter of the eyelids, and the tremor of the gauntleted hand as it drew the hat firmly down over her curling masses of red-bronze. “What hair!” he was saying to himself. “It’s red, butwhata red! It has the burnish of hot copper! I neversawsuch hair!”
He had struggled to his feet, nursing his bruised elbow, irritably conscious of his resemblance to an emerging chimney-sweep. “I don’t habitually swear,” he said, “but I’d got to the point when somethinghadto explode.”
“Oh,” she said, “don’t mind me!” Then mirth conquered and she broke forth suddenly into a laugh that seemed to set the whole place aquiver with a musical contagion. They both laughed in concert, while the bull pawed the ground and sent forth a rumbling bellow of affront and challenge.
She was the first to recover. “Youdidlook so funny!” she gasped.
“I can believe it,” he agreed, making a vicious dab at his smudged brow. “The possibilities of a motor for comedy are simply stupendous.”
She came closer and looked curiously at the quiescent monster—at the steamer-trunk strapped on the carrier and the bulging portmanteau peeping over the side of the tonneau. “Is it broken?”
“Merely on strike, I imagine. I think it resents the quality of the gasoline I got at Charlottesville. I can’t decide whether it needs a monkey-wrench or a mustard-plaster. To tell the truth, it has been out of commission and I’m not much of an expert, though I can study it out in time. Are we far from the village?”
“About a mile and a half.”
“I’ll have to have it towed after me. The immediate point is my traps. I wonder if there is likely to be a team passing.”
“I’m afraid it’s not too certain,” answered the girl, and now he noted the liquid modulation, with its slightly questioning accent, charmingly Southern. “There is no livery, but there is a negro who meets the train sometimes. I can send him if you like.”
“You’re very good,” said Valiant, as she turned away, “and I’ll be enormously obliged. Oh—and if you see a white dog, don’t be frightened if he tries to follow you. He’s perfectly kind.”
She looked back momentarily.
“He—he always follows people he likes, you see—”
“Thank you,” she said. The tone had now ahint—small, yet perceptible—of aloofness. “I’m not in the least afraid of dogs.” And with a little nod, she swung briskly on up the Red Road.
John Valiant stood staring after her till she had passed from view around a curve. “Oh, glory!” he muttered. “To begin by shaking your fist at her and end by making her wonder if you aren’t trying to be fresh! You poor, profane, floundering dolt!”
After a time he discarded his “jumper” and contrived a make-shift toilet. “What a type!” he said to himself. “Corn-flower eyes and a blowse of coppery hair.” A fragment of verse ran through his mind:
“Tawny-flecked, russet-brown, in a tangle of gold,The billowy sweep of her flame-washed hair,Like amber lace, laid fold on fold,Or beaten metal beyond compare.”
“Tawny-flecked, russet-brown, in a tangle of gold,The billowy sweep of her flame-washed hair,Like amber lace, laid fold on fold,Or beaten metal beyond compare.”
“Delicacy and strength!” he muttered, as he climbed again to the leather seat. “The steel blade in the silk scabbard. With that face in repose she might have been a maid of honor of the Stuarts’ time! Yet when she laughed—”
The girl walked on up the highway with a lilting stride, now and then laughing to herself, or running a few steps, occasionally stopping by some hedge to pull a leaf which she rubbed against hercheek, smelling its keen new scent, or stopping to gaze out across the orange-green belts of sunny wind-dimpled fields, one hand pushing back her mutinous hair from her brow, the other shielding her eyes. When she had passed beyond the ken of the stranded motor, she began to sing a snatch of a cabin song, her vivid red lips framing themselves about the absurd words with a humorous exaggeration of the soft darky pronunciation. Beneath its fun her voice held a haunting dreamy quality, as she sang, sometimes in the blaze of sun, sometimes with leaf-shadows above her through which the light spurted down in green-gilt splashes. Once she stopped suddenly, and crouching down by a thorn-hedge, whistled—a low mellow tentative pipe—and in a moment a brown-flecked covey of baby partridges rushed out of the grass to dart instantly back again. She laughed, and springing up, threw back her head and began a bird song, her slender throat pulsing to the shake and reedy trill. It was marvelously done, from the clear, long opening note to the soaring rapture that seemed to bubble and break all at once into its final crescendo.
Farther on the highroad looped around a strip of young forest, and she struck into this for a short cut. Here the trees stirred faintly in the breeze, filling the place with leafy rustlings and whisperings; yet it was so still that when a saffron-barred hornet darted through with an intolerant high-keyedhum, it made the air for an instant angrily vocal, and a woodpecker’s tattoo at some distance sounded with startling loudness, like a crackling series of pistol-shots.
In the depth of this wood she sat down to rest on the sun-splashed roots of a tree. Leaning back against the seamed trunk, her felt hat fallen to the ground, she looked like some sea-woman emerging from an earth-hued pool to comb her hair against a dappled rock. The ground was sparsely covered with gray-blue bushes whose fronds at a little distance blended into a haze till they seemed like billows of smoke suddenly solidified, and here and there a darting red or yellow flower gave the illusion of an under-tongue of flame. Her eyes, passionately eager, peered about her, drinking in each note of color as her quick ear caught each twig-fall, each sound of bird and insect.
She drew back against the tree and caught her breath as a bulldog frisked over a mossy boulder just in front of her.
A moment more and she had thrown herself on her knees with both arms outstretched. “Oh, you splendid creature!” she cried, “you big, lovely white darling!”
The dog seemed in no way averse to this sensational proceeding. He responded instantly not merely with tail-wagging; but with ecstatic grunts and growls. “Where did you come from?” shequestioned, as his pink tongue struggled desperately to find a cheek through the whorl of coppery hair. “Why, you must be the one I was told not to be afraid of.”
She petted and fondled the smooth intelligent muzzle. “As if any one could be afraid ofyou! We’ll set your master right on that point.” Smiling to herself, she pulled one of the roses from her belt, and twisting a wisp of long grass, wound it round and round the dog’s neck and thrust the ragged rose-stem firmly through it. “Now,” she said, and pushed him gently from her, “go back, sir!”
He whined and licked her hand, but when she repeated the command, he turned obediently and left her. A little way from her he halted, with a sudden perception of mysterious punishment, shrugged, sat down, and tried to reach the irksome grass-wisp with his teeth. This failing, he rolled laboriously in the dirt.
Then he rose, cast a reproachful glance behind him, and trotted off.
Beyond the selvage of the sleepy leaf-sheltered village a cherry bordered lane met the Red Road. On its one side was a clovered pasture and beyond this an orchard, bounded by a tall hedge of close-clipped box which separated it from a broad yard where the gray-weathered roof of Rosewood showed above a group of tulip and catalpa trees. Viewed nearer, the low stone house, with its huge overhanging eaves, would have looked like a small boy with his father’s hat on but for the trellises of climbing roses that covered two sides and overflowed here and there on long arbors, flecking the dull brown stone with a glorious crimson, like a warrior’s blood. On the sunny steps a lop-eared hound puppy was playing with a mottled cat.
The front door was open, showing a hall where stood a grandfather’s clock and a spindle-legged table holding a bowl of potpourri. The timepiece had landed from a sailing vessel at Jamestown wharf with the household goods of that English Garland who had adopted the old Middle Plantationwhen Dunmore was royal governor under George III. Framed portraits and engravings lent tints of tarnished silver, old-rose and sunset-golds—colors time-toned and reminiscent, carrying a charming sense of peaceful content, of gentleness and long tradition. The dark polished stairway had at its turn a square dormer-window which looked out upon one of the rose-arbors.
Down this stair, somewhat later that afternoon, came Shirley Dandridge, booted and spurred, the rebellious whorls of her russet hair now as closely filleted as a Greek boy’s, in a short divided skirt of yew-green and a cool white blouse and swinging by its ribbon a green hat whose rolling brim was caught up at one side by a crisp blue-black hawk’s feather. She stopped to peer out of the dormer-window to where, under the latticed weave of bloom, beside a round iron table holding a hoop of embroidery and a book or two, a lady sat reading.
The lady’s hair was silver, but not with age. It had been so for many years, refuted by the transparent skin and a color as soft as the cheek of an apricot. It was solely in her dark eyes, deep and strangely luminous, that one might see lurking the somber spirit of passion and of pain. But they were eager and brilliant withal, giving the lie to the cane whose crook one pale delicate hand held with a clasp that somehow conveyed a sense of exasperate if semi-humorous rebellion. She worenun’s gray; soft old lace was at her wrists and throat, and she was knitting a scarlet silk stocking.
She looked up at Shirley’s voice, and smiled brightly. “Off for your ride, dear?”
“Yes. I’m going with the Chalmers.”
“Oh, of course. Betty Page is visiting them, isn’t she?”
Shirley nodded. “She came yesterday. I’ll have to hurry, for I saw them from my window turning into the Red Road.” She waved her hand and ran lightly down the stair and across the lawn to the orchard.
She pulled a green apple from a bough that hung over a stone wall and with this in her hand she came close to the pasture fence and whistled a peculiar call. It was answered by a low whinny and a soft thud of hoofs, and a golden-chestnut hunter thrust a long nose over the bars, flaring flame-lined nostrils to the touch of her hand. She laid her cheek against the white thoroughbred forehead and held the apple to the eager reaching lip, with several teasing withdrawings before she gave it to its juicy crunching.
“No, Selim,” she said as the wide nostrils snuffled over her shoulder, the begging breath blowing warm against her neck. “No more—and no sugar to-day. Sugar has gone up two cents a pound.”
She let down the top bar of the fence and vaulting over, ran to a stable and presently emerging witha saddle on her arm, whistled the horse to her and saddled him. Then opening the gate, she mounted and cantered down the lane to meet the oncoming riders—a kindly-faced, middle-aged man, a younger one with dark features and coal-black hair, and two girls.
Chisholm Lusk spurred in advance and lifted his hat. “I held up the judge, Shirley,” he said, “and made him bring me along. He tells me there’s a fox-hunt on to-morrow; may I come?”
“Pshaw! Chilly,” said the judge. “I don’t believe you ever got up at five o’clock in your born days. You’ve learned bad habits abroad.”
“You’ll see,” he answered. “If my man Friday doesn’t rout me out to-morrow, I’ll be up for murder.”
They rode an hour, along stretches of sunny highways or on shaded bridle-paths where the horses’ hoofs fell muffled in brown pine-needles and drooping branches flicked their faces. Then, by a murky way gouged with brusk gullies, across shelving fields and “turn-rows” in a long détour around Powhattan Mountain, a rough spur in the shape of an Indian’s head that wedged itself forbiddingly between the fields of springing corn and tobacco. They approached the Red Road again by a crazy bridge whose adze-hewn flooring was held in place by wild grape-vines and weighted down against cloudburst and freshet by heavy boulders till itdipped its middle like an overloaded buckboard in the yellow waters of the sluggish stream beneath. On the farther side they pulled down to breathe their horses. Here the road was like a narrow ruler dividing a desert from a promised land. On one hand a guttered slope of marl and pebbles covered with a tatterdemalion forest—on the other acre upon acre of burnished grain.
“Ah never saw such a frowsley-looking thing in mah life,” said Betty Page, in her soft South Carolinian drawl that was all vowels and liquids, “as that wild hill beside those fields. For all the world like a disgraceful tramp leering across the wall at a dandy.”
Shirley applauded the simile, and the judge said, “This is a boundary. That hobo-landscape is part of the deserted Valiant estate. The hill hides the house.”
She nodded. “Damory Court. It’s still vacant, Ah suppose.”
“Yes, and likely to be. Valiant is dead long ago, but apparently there’s never been any attempt to let it. I suppose his son is so rich that one estate more or less doesn’t figure much to him.”
“I got a letter this morning from Dorothy Randolph,” said Shirley. “The Valiant Corporation is being investigated, you know, and her uncle had taken her to one of the hearings, when John Valiant was in the chair. From her description, they aremaking it sufficiently hot for that silver-spooned young man.”
“I don’t reckonhecares,” said Lusk satirically. “Nothing matters with his set if you have enough money.”
The judge pointed with his crop. “That narrow wagon-track,” he said, “goes to Hell’s-Half-Acre.”
“Oh, yes,” said Betty. “That’s that weird settlement on the Dome where Shirley’s little protégée Rickey Snyder came from.” It was all she said, but her glance at the girl beside her was one of open admiration. For, as all in the party knew, the lonely road had been connected with an act of sheer impulsive daring in Shirley’s girlhood that she would never hear spoken of.
Judge Chalmers flicked his horse’s ears gently with his rein and they moved slowly on, presently coming in sight of a humble patch of ground, enclosed in a worm-fence and holding a whitewashed cabin with a well shaded by varicolored hollyhocks. Under the eaves clambered a gourd-vine, beneath which dangled strings of onions and bright red peppers. “Do let us get a drink!” said Chilly Lusk. “I’m as thirsty as a cotton-batting camel.”
“All right, we’ll stop,” agreed the judge, “and you’ll have a chance to see another local lion, Betty. This is where Mad Anthony lives. You musthave heard of him when you were here before. He’s almost as celebrated as the Reverend John Jasper of Richmond.”
Betty tapped her temple. “Where have Ah heard of John Jasper?”
“He was the author of the famous sermon onThe Sun do Move. He used to prove it by a bucket of water that he set beside his pulpit Saturday night. As it hadn’t spilled in the morning he knew it was the earth that stood still.”
Betty nodded laughingly. “Ah remember now. He’s the one who said there were only four great races: the Huguenots, the Hottentots, the Abyssinians and the Virginians. Is Mad Anthony really mad?”
“Only harmlessly,” said Shirley. “He’s stone blind. The negroes all believe he conjures—that’s voodoo, you know. They put a lot of stock in his ‘prophecisms.’ He tells fortunes, too. S-sh!” she warned. “He’s sitting on the door-step. He’s heard us.”
The old negro had the torso of a black patriarch. He sat bolt upright with long straight arms resting on his knees, and his face had that peculiar expressionless immobility seen in Egyptian carvings. He had slightly turned his head in their direction, his brow, under its shock of perfectly white crinkly hair, twitching with a peculiar expression of inquiry. His age might have been anythingjudging from his face which was so seamed and creviced with innumerable tiny wrinkles that it most resembled the tortured glaze of some ancient bitumen pottery unearthed from a tomb of Kôr. Under their heavy lids his sightless eyeballs, whitely opaque and lusterless, turned mutely toward the sound of the horse hoofs.
The judge dismounted, and tossing his bridle over a fence-picket, took from his pocket a collapsible drinking cup. “Howdy do, Anthony,” he said. “We just stopped for a drink of your good water.”
The old negro nodded his head. “Good watah,” he said in the gentle quavering tones of extreme age. “Yas, Mars’. He’p yo’se’f. Come f’om de centah ob de yerf, dat watah. En dah’s folks say de centah of de yerf is all fiah. Yo’ reck’n dey’s right, Mars’ Chalmahs?”
“Now, how the devil do you know who I am, Anthony?” The judge set down his cup on the well-curb. “I haven’t been by here for a year.”
The ebony head moved slowly from side to side. “Ol’ Ant’ny don’ need no eyes,” he said, touching his hand to his brow. “He see ev’ything heah.”
The judge beckoned to the others and they trooped inside the paling. “I’ve brought some other folks with me, Anthony; can you tell who they are?”
The sightless look wavered over them and thewhite head shook slowly. “Don’ know young mars,’,” said the gentle voice. “How many yuddahs wid yo’? One, two? No, don’ know young mistis, eidah.”
“I reckon youdon’tneed any eyes,” Judge Chalmers laughed, as he passed the sweet cold water to the rest. “One of these young ladies wants you to tell her fortune.”
The old negro dropped his head, waving his gaunt hands restlessly. Then his gaze lifted and the whitened eyeballs roved painfully about as if in search of something elusive. The judge beckoned to Betty Page, but she shook her head with a little grimace and drew back.
“You go, Shirley,” she whispered, and with a laughing glance at the others, Shirley came and sat down on the lowest step.
Mad Anthony put out a wavering hand and touched the young body. His fingers strayed over the habit and went up to the curling bronze under the hat-brim. “Dis de li’l mistis,” he muttered, “ain’ afeahd ob ol’ Ant’ny. Dah’s fiah en she ain’ afeahd, en dah’s watah en she ain’ afeahd. Wondah whut Ah gwine tell huh? Whut de coloh ob yo’ haih, honey?”
“Black,” put in Chilly Lusk, with a wink at the others. “Black as a crow.”
Old Anthony’s hand fell back to his knee. “Young mars’ laugh at de ol’ man,” he said, “buthedon’ know. Dat de coloh dat buhn mah han’s—de coloh ob gol’, en eyes blue like er cat-bird’s aig. Dah’s er man gwine look in dem eyes, honey, en gwine make ’em cry en cry.” He raised his head sharply, his lids shut tight, and swung his arm toward the North. “Dah’s whah he come f’om,” he said, “en heah”—his arm veered and he pointed straight toward the ragged hill behind them—“he stay.”
Lusk laughed noiselessly. “He’s pointing to Damory Court,” he whispered to Nancy Chalmers, “the only uninhabited place within ten miles. That’s as near as he often hits it, I fancy.”
“Heah’s whah he stay,” repeated the old man. “Heap ob trouble wait heah fo’ him too, honey,—heap ob trouble, heah whah li’l mistis fin’ him.” His voice dropped to a monotone, and he began to rock gently to and fro as if he were crooning a lullaby. “Li’l trouble en gr’et trouble! Fo’ dah’s fiah en she ain’ afeahd, en dah’s watah en she ain’ afeahd. It’s de thing whut eat de ha’at outen de breas’—dat whut she afeahd of!”
“Come, Anthony,” said Judge Chalmers, laying his hand on the old man’s shoulder. “That’s much too mournful! Give her something nice to top off with, at least!”
But Anthony paid no heed, continuing his rocking and his muttering. “Gr’et trouble. Dah’s fiah en she ain’ afeahd, en dah’s watah en she ain’afeahd. En Ah sees yo’ gwine ter him, honey. Ah heah’s de co’ot-house clock a-strikin’ in de night—en yo’ gwine. Don’ wait, don’ wait, li’l mistis, er de trouble-cloud gwine kyah him erway f’om yo’.... When de clock strike thuhteen—when de clock strike thuhteen—”
The droning voice ceased. The gaunt form became rigid. Then he started and turned his eyes slowly about him, a vague look of anxiety on his face. For a moment no one moved. When he spoke again it was once more in his gentle quavering voice:
“Watah? Yas, Mars’, good watah. He’p yo’se’f.”
The judge set a dollar bill on the step and weighted it with a stone, as the rest remounted. “Well, good-by, Anthony,” he said. “We’re mightily obliged.”
He sprang into the saddle and the quartette cantered away. “My experiment wasn’t a great success, I’m afraid, Shirley,” he said ruefully.
“Oh, I think it was splendid!” cried Nancy. “Do you suppose he really believes those spooky things? I declare, at the time I almost did myself. What an odd idea—‘when the clock strikes thirteen,’ which, of course, it never does.”
“Don’t mind, Shirley,” bantered Lusk. “When you see all ‘dem troubles’ coming, sound the alarm and we’ll fly in a body to your rescue.”
They let their horses out for a pounding gallop which pulled down suddenly at a muffled shriek from Betty Page, as her horse went into the air at sight of an automobile by the roadside.
“Now, whose under the canopy is that?” exclaimed Lusk.
“It’s stalled,” said Shirley. “I passed here this afternoon when the owner was trying to start it, and I sent Unc’ Jefferson as first aid to the injured.”
“I wonder who he can be,” said Nancy. “I’ve never seen that car before.”
“Why,” said Betty gaily, “Ahknow! It’s Mad Anthony’s trouble-man, of course, come for Shirley.”
Ared rose, while ever a thing of beauty, is not invariably a joy forever. The white bulldog, as he plodded along the sunny highway, was sunk in depression. Being trammeled by the limitations of a canine horizon, he could not understand the whims of Adorable Ones met by the way, who seemed so glad to see him that they threw both arms about him, and then tied to his neck irksome colored weeds that prickled and scratched and would not be dislodged. Lacking a basis of painful comparison, since he had never had a tin can tied to his tail, he accepted it as condign punishment and was puzzledly wretched. So it was a chastened and shamed Chum who at length wriggled stealthily into the seat of the stranded automobile beside his master and thrust a dirty pink nose into his palm.
John Valiant lifted his hand to stroke the shapely head, then drew it back with an exclamation. A thorn had pricked his thumb. He looked down and saw the draggled flower thrust through the twistof grass. “Oh, pup of wonders!” he exclaimed. “Where did you get that rose?”
Chum sat up and wagged his tail, for his master’s tone, instead of ridicule, held a dawning delight. Perhaps the thing had not been intended as a disgrace after all! As the careful hand drew the misused blossom tenderly from its tether, he barked joyously with recovered spirits.
With the first sight of the decoration Valiant had had a sudden memory of a splotch of vivid red against the belted gray-blue of a gown. He grinned appreciatively. “And Iwarnedher,” he chuckled. “Told her not to be afraid!” He dusted the blossom painstakingly with his handkerchief and held it to his face—a live brilliant thing, breathing musk-odors of the mid-moon of paradise.
A long time he sat, while the dog dozed and yawned on the shiny cushion beside him. Gradually the clover-breeze fainted and the lengthening shadows dipped their fingers into indigo. On the far amethystine peaks of the Blue Ridge leaned milky-breasted clouds through which the sun sifted in wide bars. A blackbird began to flute from some near-by tree and across the low stone wall he heard a feathery whir. Of a sudden Chum sat up and barked in earnest.
Turning his head, his master saw approaching a dilapidated hack with side-lanterns like great goggles and decrepit and palsied curtains. It wasdrawn by a lean mustard-tinted mule, and on its front seat sat a colored man of uncertain age, whose hunched vertebræ and outward-crooked arms gave him a curious expression of replete and bulbous inquiry. Abreast of the car he removed a moth-eaten cap.
“Evenin’, suh,” he said,—“evenin’, evenin’.”
“Howdy do,” returned the other amiably.
“Ah reck’n yo’-all done had er breck-down wid dat machine-thing dar. Spec’ er graveyahd rabbit done cross yo’ pahf. Yo’ been hyuh ’bout er hour, ain’ yo’?”
“Nearer three,” said Valiant cheerfully, “but the view’s worth it.”
A hoarse titter came from the conveyance, which gave forth sundry creakings of leather. “Huyh! Huyh! Dat’s so, suh. Dat’s so! Hm-m. Reck’n Ah’ll be gittin’ erlong back.” He clucked to the mule and proceeded to turn the vehicle round.
“Hold on,” cried John Valiant. “I thought you were bound in the other direction.”
“No,suh. Ah’m gwine back whah I come f’om. Ah jus’ druv out hyuh ’case Miss Shirley done met me, en she say, ‘Unc’ Jeffe’son, yo’ go ’treckly out de Red Road, ’case er gemman done got stalled-ed.’”
“Oh—Miss Shirley. She told you, did she? What did you say her first name was?”
“Dat’shuh fus’ name, Miss Shirley. Yas,suh!Miss Shirley done said f’ me ter come en git de gemman whut—whut kinder dawg is yo’ got dar?”
“It’s a bulldog. Can you give me a lift? I’ve got that small trunk and—”
“Dat’s a right fine dawg. Miss Shirley she moughty fond ob dawgs, too.”
“Fond of dogs, is she?” said Valiant. “I might have known it. It was nice of her to send you here, Uncle Jefferson. You can take me and my traps, I suppose?”
“’Pens on whah yo’ gwineter,” answered Uncle Jefferson sapiently.
“I’m going to Damory Court.”
A kind of shocked surprise that was almost stupefaction spread over the other’s face, like oil over a pool. “Dam’ry Co’ot! Dat’s de old Valiant place. Ain’ nobody livesdar. Ah reck’n ain’ nobody live dar fer mos’ er hun’erd yeahs!”
“The old house has a great surprise coming to it,” said Valiant gravely. “Henceforth some one is going to occupy it. How far is it away?”
“Measurin’ by de coonskin en th’owin’ in de tail, et’s erbout two mile. Ain’ gwineter live dar yo’se’f, suh, is yo’?”
“I am for the present,” was the crisp answer.
Uncle Jefferson stared at him a moment with his mouth open. Then ejaculating under his breath, “Fo’ deLawd! Whut folks gwineter say ter dat!”he shambled to the rear of the motor and began to unship the steamer-trunk.
“By the way,”—John Valiant paused, with the portmanteau in his hands,—“what do you ask for the job?”
The owner of the hack scratched his grizzled head. “Ah gen’ly chahges er quahtah er trunk f’om de deepo’ less’n et’s one ob dem ar rich folks f’om up Norf.”
“I don’t happen to be rich, so we’ll make it a dollar. What makes you think I’m from the North?”
Again the aguish mirth agitated the other, as he put aboard a hamper and one of the motor’s lamps, which Valiant added as an afterthought. “Ahknowset,” he said ingenuously, “but Ah don’ knowwhy. Ah’ll jes’ twis’ er rope eroun’ yo’ trunk. Whut yo’ gwineter do wid dat-ar?” he asked, pointing to the car. “Ah kin come wid ole Sukey—dat’s mah mule—en fotch it in in de mawnin’. Ain’ gwineter rain ter-night nohow.”—
This matter having been arranged, they started jogging down the green-bordered road, the bulldog prospecting alongside. A meadow-lark soared somewhere in the overarching blue, dropping golden notes; dusty bumble-bees boomed hither and thither; genial crickets tuned their fiddles in the “tickle-grass” and a hawking dragon-fly pausedfor an impudent siesta between the mule’s gyrating ears.
“S’pose’n de Co’ot done ben sold en yo’ gwineter fix it up fo’ de new ownah,” hazarded Uncle Jefferson presently.
Valiant did not answer directly. “You say the place hasn’t been occupied for many years,” he observed. “Did you ever hear why, Uncle Jefferson?”
“Ah doneheerd,” said the other vaguely, “but Ah disremembahs. Sumpin dat happened befo’ Ah come heah f’om ol’ Post-Oak Plantation. Reck’n Majah Bristowheknow erbout it, er Mis’ Judith—dat’s Miss Shirley’s mothah. Her fathah wus Gen’l Tawm Dandridge, en he died fo’ she wus bawn.”
Shirley Dandridge! A high-sounding name, with something of long-linked culture, of arrogant heritage. In some subtle way it seemed to clothe the personality of which Valiant had had that fleeting roadside glimpse.
Uncle Jefferson stared meditatively skyward whence dropped the bubbling lark song. “Dat-ar buhd kinsing!” he said. “Queeh dat folkses cyan’ do dat, dey so moughty much smahtah. Nevah knowed nobodycould, dough, cep’n on’y Miss Shirley. Tain’ er buhd nowhah in de fiel’s dat she cyan’ mock.”
“You mean she knows their calls?”
“Yas, suh, ev’y soun’. Done fool me heap er times. Dah’s de cook’s li’l boy et Rosewood dat wuz sick las’ summah, en he listen ev’y day ter de mockin’-buhd dat nes’ in one ob de tulip-trees. He jes’ love dat buhd next ter he mammy, en when et come fall en et don’ come no mo’, he ha’at mos’ broke. He jes’ lay en cry en git right smaht wussur. Et las’ seems lak de li’l boy gwine die. When Mis’ Shirley heah dat, she try en try till she jes’ git dat buhd’s song ez pat ez de Lawd’s Prayah, en one evenin’ she gwine en say ter he mammy ter tell him he mockin’-buhd done come back, en he mammy she bundle him all up in de quilt en open de winder, en sho’ nuff, dah’s Mistah Mockin’-buhd behin’ de bushes, jes’ bus’in’ hisse’f. Well, suh, seems lak dat chile hang on ter living jes’ ter heah dat buhd, en ev’y evenin’, way till when de snow on de groun’, Mis’ Shirley she hide out in de trees en sing en sing till de po’ li’l feller gwine ter sleep.”
Valiant leaned forward, for Uncle Jefferson had paused. “Did the child get well?” he asked eagerly.
The old man clucked to the leisurely mule. “Yas,suh!” he said. “He done git well. He ’bout de on’riest young’un roun’ heah now!
“Reck’n yo’-all come f’om New York?” inquired Uncle Jefferson, after a little silence. “So! Dey say dat’s er pow’ful big place. But Ah reck’n ol’Richmon’s big ernuf fo’ me.” He clucked to the leisurely mule and added, ”Ahbin ter Richmon’ onct. Yas,suh! Ah nevah see sech houses—mos’ all bigger’n de county co’ot-house.”
John Valiant expressed a somewhat absent interest. He was looking thoughtfully at the blossom in his hand, in an absorption through which Uncle Jefferson’s reminiscences oozed on:
“Mos’ cur’ousest thing wus how e’vybody dar seem ter know e’vybody else. Dey got street-kyahs dar, no hoss en no mule, jes’ shoot up de hill en down ergen, lak de debble skinnin’ tan-bahk. Well, suh, Ah got on er kyah en gib de man whut stan’ on de flatfawm er nickel, en Ah set dar lookin’ outen de win’ow, till de man he call out ‘Adams,’ en er gemman whut wah sittin’ ercross f’om me, he git up en git off. De kyah start ergen en de nex co’nah dat ar man on de flatfawm he yell out ‘Monroe.’ En Mistah Monroe, he was sittin’ up at de end, en he jump up en git off. Den de kyah took anuddah staht, en bress mah soul, dat ar man on de flatfawm he hollah ‘Jeffe’son!’ Ah clah’ ter goodness, suh, Ah nebbah skeered so bad en mah life. How dat man know me, suh? Well, suh, Ah jump up lak Ah be’n shot, en Ah says, ‘Fo’ deLawd, boss, Ah wa’n’t gwineter git off at dis co’nah, but ef yo’saysso, Ah reck’n Ahgotter!’ So Ah git off en Ah walk erbout fo’ miles back ter de deepo!”
Uncle Jefferson’s inward and volcanic amusement shook his passenger from his reverie. “En dat ar wa’n’t de wust. When Ah got ter de deepo, Ah didn’ have mah pocketbook. Er burglar had ’scaped off wid it en lef me es nickelless ez er convic’.”
When Shirley came across the lawn at Rosewood, Major Montague Bristow sat under the arbor talking to her mother.
The major was massive-framed, with a strong jaw and a rubicund complexion—the sort that might be supposed to have attained the utmost benefit to be conferred by a consistent indulgence in mint-juleps. His blue eyes were piercing and arched with brows like sable rainbows, at variance with his heavy iron-gray hair and imperial. His head was leonine and he looked like a king who has humbled his enemy. It may be added that his linen was fine and immaculate, his black string-tie precisely tied and a pair of gold-rimmed eye-glasses swung by a flat black cord against his white waistcoat. There was a touch of the military in the squareness of shoulder and the lift of the rugged head, no less than in the gallant little bow with which he rose to greet the girl coming toward them.
“Shirley,” said her mother, “the major’s brutal, and he shan’t have his mint-julep.”
“What has he been doing?” asked the other, her brows wrinkling in a delightful way she had.
“He has reminded me that I’m growing old.”
Shirley looked at the major skeptically, for his chivalry was undoubted. During a long career in law and legislature it had been said of him that he could neither speak on the tariff question nor defend a man for murder, without first paying a tribute to “the women of the South, sah.”
“Nothing of the sort,” he rumbled.
Mrs. Dandridge’s face softened to wistfulness. “Shirley,amI?” she asked, with a quizzical, almost a droll uneasiness. “Why, I’ve got every emotion I’ve ever had. I read all the new French novels, and I’m even thinking of going in for the militant suffragette movement.”
The girl had tossed her hat and crop on the table and seated herself by her mother’s chair. Now reaching down, she drew one of the fragile blue-veined hands up against her cheek, her bronze hair, its heavy coil loosened, dropping over one shoulder like sunlit seaweed. “What was it he said, dearest?”
“He thinks I ought to wear a worsted shawl and arctics.” Her mother thrust out one little thin-slippered foot, with its slender ankle gleaming through its open-work stocking like mother-of-pearl. “Imagine! InMay. And he knows I’m vain of my feet! Major, if you had ever had awife, you would have learned wisdom. But you mean well, and I’ll take back what I said about the julep. You mix it, Shirley. Yours is even better than Ranston’s.
“She makes me one every day, Monty,” she continued, as Shirley went into the house. “And when she isn’t looking, I pour it into the bush there. See those huge, maudlin-looking roses? That’s the shameless result. It’s a new species. I’m going to name itTipsium Giganticum.”
Major Bristow laughed as he bit the end off a cigar. “All the same,” he said in his big rumbling voice, “you need ’em, I reckon. You need more than mint-juleps, too. You leave the whisky to me and the doctor, and you take Shirley and pull out for Italy. Why not? A year there would do you a heap of good.”
She shook her head. “No, Monty. It isn’t what you think. It’s—here.” She lifted her hand and touched her heart. “It’s been so for a long time. But it may—it can’t go on forever, you see. Nothing can.”
The major had leaned forward in his chair. “Judith!” he said, and his hand twitched, “it isn’t true!” And then, “How do you know?”
She smiled at him. “You remember when that big surgeon from Vienna came to see the doctor last year? Well, the doctor brought him to me. I’d known it before in a way, but it had gone fartherthan I thought. No one can tell just how long it may be. It may be years, of course, but I’m not taking any sea trips, Monty.”
He cleared his throat and his voice was husky when he spoke. “Shirley doesn’t know?”
“Certainlynot. She mustn’t.” And then, in sudden sharpness: “You shan’t tell her, Monty. You wouldn’t dare!”
“No, indeed,” he assured her quickly. “Of course not.”
“It’s just among us three, Doctor Southall and you and me. We three have had our secrets before, eh, Monty?”
“Yes, Judith, we have.”
She bent toward him, her hands tightening on the cane. “After all, it’s true. To-day Iamgetting old. I may look only fifty, but I feel sixty and I’ll admit to seventy-five. It’s joy that keeps us young, and I didn’t get my fair share of that, Monty. For just one little week my heart had it all—all—and then—well, then it was finished. It was finished long before I married Tom Dandridge. It isn’t that I’m empty-headed. It’s that I’ve been an empty-heartedwoman, Monty—as empty and dusty and desolate as the old house over yonder on the ridge.”
“I know, Judith, I know.”
“You’ve been empty in a way, too,” she said. “But it’s been a different way. You were neverin love—really in love, I mean. Certainly not with me, Monty, though you tried to make me think so once upon a time, before Sassoon came along, and—Beauty Valiant.”
The major blinked, suddenly startled. It was out, the one name neither had spoken to the other for thirty years! He looked at her a little guiltily; but her eyes had turned away. They were gazing between the catalpas to where, far off on a gentle rise, the stained gable of a roof thrust up dark and gaunt above its nest of foliage. “Everything changed then,” she continued dreamily, “everything.”
The major’s fingers strayed across his waistcoat, fumbling uncertainly for his eye-glasses. For an instant he, too, was back in the long-ago past, when he and Valiant had been comrades. What a long panorama unfolded at the name; the times when they had been boys fly-fishing in the Rapidan and fox-hunting about Pilot-Knob with the yelping hounds—crisp winters of books and pipes together at the old university at Charlottesville—later maturer years about Damory Court when the trail of sex had deepened into man’s passion and the devil’s rivalry. It had been a curious three-sided affair—he, and Valiant, and Sassoon. Sassoon with his dissipated flair and ungovernable temper and strange fits of recklessness; clean, high-idealed, straight-away Valiant; and he—a Bristow, neitherbetter nor worse than the rest of his name. He remembered that mad strained season when he had grimly recognized his own cause as hopeless, and with burning eyes had watched Sassoon and Valiant racing abreast. He remembered that glittering prodigal dance when he had come upon Valiant and Judith standing in the shrubbery, the candle-light from some open door engoldening their faces: hers smiling, a little flippant perhaps, and conscious of her spell; his grave and earnest, yet wistful.
“You promise, John?”
“I give my sacred word. Whatever the provocation, I will not lift my hand against him. Never, never!” Then the same voice, vibrant, appealing. “Judith! It isn’t because—because—you care for him?”
He had plunged away in the darkness before her answer came. What had it mattered then to him what she had replied? And that very night had befallen the fatal quarrel!
The major started. How that name had blown away the dust! “That’s a long time ago, Judith.”
“Think of it! I wore my hair just as Shirley does now. It was the same color, with the same fascinating little lights and whorls in it.” She turned toward him, but he sat rigidly upright, his gaze avoiding hers. Her dreamy look was gone now, and her eyes were very bright.
“Thirty years ago to-morrow they fought,” she said softly, “Valiant and Sassoon. Every woman has her one anniversary, I suppose, and to-morrow’s mine. Do you know what I do, every fourteenth of May, Monty? I keep my room and spend the day always the same way. There’s a little book I read. And there’s an old haircloth trunk that I’ve had since I was a girl. Down in the bottom of it are some—things, that I take out and set round the room ... and there is a handful of old letters I go over from first to last. They’re almost worn out now, but I could repeat them all with my eyes shut. Then, there’s a tiny old straw basket with a yellow wisp in it that once was a bunch of cape jessamines. I wore them to that last ball—the night before it happened. The fourteenth of May used to be sad, but now, do you know, I look forward to it! I always have a lot of jessamines that particular day—I’ll have Shirley get me some to-morrow—and in the evening, when I go down-stairs, the house is full of the scent of them. All summer long it’s roses, but on the fourteenth of May it has to be jessamines. Shirley must think me a whimsical old woman, but I insist on being humored.”
She was silent a moment, the point of her slender cane tracing circles in the gravel. “It’s a black date for you too, Monty.Iknow. But men andwomen are different. I wonder what takes the place to a man of a woman’s haircloth trunk?”
“I reckon it’s a demijohn,” he said mirthlessly.
A smile flashed over her face, like sunshine over a flower, and she looked up at him slowly. “What bricks men are to each other! You and the doctor were John Valiant’s closest friends. What did you two care what people said? Why,womendon’t stick to each other like that! It isn’t in petticoats! It wouldn’t do for women to take to dueling, Monty; when the affair was over and done, the seconds would fall to with their hatpins and jab each other’s eyes out!”
He smiled, a little bleakly, and cleared his throat.
“Isn’t it strange for me to be talking this way now!” she said presently. “Another proof that I’m getting old. But the date brings it very close; it seems, somehow, closer than ever this year.—Monty, weren’t you tremendously surprised when I married Tom Dandridge?”
“I certainly was.”
“I’ll tell you a secret.Iwas, too. I suppose I did it because of a sneaking feeling that some people were feeling sorry for me, which I never could stand. Well, he was a man any one might honor. I’ve always thought a woman ought to have two husbands: one to love and cherish, and the other to honor and obey. I had the latter, at any rate.”
“And you’ve lived, Judith,” he said.
“Yes,” she agreed, with a little sigh, “I’ve lived. I’ve had Shirley, and she’s twenty and adorable. Some of my emotions creak a bit in the hinges, but I’ve enjoyed things. A woman is cat enough not to be wholly miserable if she can sit in the sun and purr. And I’ve had people enough, and books to read, and plenty of pretty things to look at, and old lace to wear, and I’ve kept my figure and my vanity—I’m not too old yet to thank the Lord for that! So don’t talk to me about worsted shawls and horrible arctics. For I won’t wear ’em. Not if I know myself! Here comes Shirley. She’s made two juleps, and if you’re a gentleman, you’ll distract her attention till I’ve got rid of mine in my usual way.”
The major, at the foot of the cherry-bordered lane, looked back across the box-hedge to where the two figures sat under the rose-arbor, the mother’s face turned lovingly down to Shirley’s at her knee. He stood a moment watching them from under his slouched hat-brim.
“You never looked at me that way, Judith, did you!” he sighed to himself. “It’s been a long time, too, since I began to want you to—’most forty years. When it came to the show-down, I wasn’t even as fit as Tom Dandridge!”