He pulled his hat down farther over his big browand sighed again as he strode on. “You just couldn’t make yourself care, could you! People can’t, maybe. And I reckon you were right about it. I wasn’t fit.”
“
Dar’s Dam’ry Co’ot smack-dab ahaid, suh.”
John Valiant looked up. Facing them at an elbow of the broad road, was an old gateway of time-nicked stone, clasping an iron gate that was quaint and heavy and red with rust. Over it on either side twin sugar-trees flung their untrammeled strength, and from it, leading up a gentle declivity, ran a curving avenue of oaks. He put out his hand.
“Wait a moment,” he said in a low voice, and as the creaking conveyance stopped, he turned and looked about him.
Facing the entrance the land fell away sharply to a miniature valley through which rambled a willow-bordered brook, in whose shallows short-horned cows stood lazily. Beyond, alternating with fields of young grain and verdured pastures like crushed velvet, rose a succession of tranquil slopes crowned with trees that here and there grouped about a white colonial dwelling, with its outbuildings behind it. Beyond, whither wound the Red Road, he could see a drowsy village, with a spire and a cupolaedcourt-house; and farther yet a yellow gorge with a wisp of white smoke curling above it marked the course of a crawling far-away railway. Over all the dimming yellow sunshine, and girdling the farther horizon, in masses of purplish blue, the tumbled battlements of the Blue Ridge.
His conductor had laboriously descended and now the complaining gates swung open. Before them, as they toiled up the long ascent, the neglected driveway was a riot of turbulent growth: thistle, white-belled burdock, ragweed and dusty mullein stood waist high.
“Et’s er moughty fine ol’ place, suh, wid dat big revenue ob trees,” said Uncle Jefferson. “But Ah reck’n et ain’ got none ob de modern connivances.”
But Valiant did not answer; his gaze was straight before him, fixed on the noble old house they were approaching. Its wide and columned front peered between huge rugged oaks and slender silver poplars which cast cool long shadows across an unkempt lawn laden with ragged mock-orange, lilac and syringa bushes, its stately grandeur dimmed but not destroyed by the shameful stains of the neglected years.
As he jumped down he was possessed by an odd sensation of old acquaintance—as if he had seen those tall white columns before—an illusory half-vision into some shadowy, fourth-dimensional landscape that belonged to his subconscious self, orthat, glimpsed in some immaterial dream-picture, had left a faint-etched memory. Then, on a sudden, the vista vibrated and widened, the white columns expanded and shot up into the clouds, and from every bush seemed to peer a friendly black savage with woolly white hair!
“Wishing-House!” he whispered. He looked about him, half expecting—so vivid was the illusion—to see a circle of rough huts under the trees and a multitude of ebony imps dancing in the sunshine. So Virginia had been that secret Never-Never Land, the wondrous fairy demesne of his childhood, with its amiable barbarians and its thickets of coursing grimalkins! The hidden country which his father’s thoughts, sadly recurring, had painted to the little child that once he was, in the guise of an endless wonder-tale! His eyes misted over, and it seemed to him that moment that his father was very near.
Leaving the negro to unload his belongings, he traversed an overgrown path of mossed gravel, between box-rows frowsled like the manes of lions gone mad and smothered in an accumulation of matted roots and débris of rotting foliage, and presently, the bulldog at his heels, found himself in the rear of the house.
The building, with kitchen, stables and negro quarters behind it, had been set on the boss ofthe wooded knoll. Along half its side ran a wide porch that had once been glass-enclosed, now with panes gone and broken and putty-crumbling sashes. Below it lay the piteous remnants of a formal garden, grouped about an oval pool from whose center reared the slender yellowed shaft of a fountain in whose shallow cup a robin was taking its rain-water bath. The pool was dry, the tiles that had formed its floor were prized apart with weeds; ribald wild grape-vines ran amuck hither and thither; and over all was a drenching-sweet scent of trailing honeysuckle.
Threading his way among the dank undergrowth of the desolate wilderness, following the sound of running water, he came suddenly to a little lake fed from unseen pipes, that spread its lily-padded surface coolly and invitingly under a clump of elms. Beside it stood a spring-house with a sadly sagging roof. With a dead branch he probed the water’s depth. “Ten feet and a pebble bottom,” he said. The lake’s overflow poured in a musical cascade down between fern-covered rocks, to join, far below, the stream he had seen from the gateway. Beyond this the ground rose again to a hill, densely forested and flanked by runnelled slopes of poverty-stricken broom-sedge as stark and sear as the bad-lands of an alkali desert. As he gazed, a bird bubbled into a wild song from the grape-vinetangle behind him, and almost at his feet a rabbit scudded blithely out of the weeds and darted back.
“Mine!” he said aloud with a rueful pride. “And for general run-downness, it’s up to the advertisement.” He looked musingly at the piteous wreck and ruin, his gaze sweeping down across the bared fields and unkempt forest. “Mine!” he repeated. “All that, I suppose, for it has the same earmarks of neglect. Between those cultivated stretches it looks like a wedge of Sahara gone astray.” His gaze returned to the house. “Yet what a place it must have been in its time!” It had not sprung into being at the whim of any one man; it had grown mellowly and deliberately, expressing the multiform life and culture of a stock. Generation after generation, father and son, had lived there and loved it, and, ministering to all, it had given to each of itself. The wild weird beauty was infecting him and the pathos of the desolation caught at his heart. He went slowly back to where his conductor sat on the lichened horse-block.
“We’s heah,” called Uncle Jefferson cheerfully. “Whut we gwineter do nex’, suh? Reck’n Ah bettah go ovah ter Miss Dandridge’s place fer er crowbah. Lawd!” he added, “ef he ain’ got de key! Whut yo’ think ob dat now?”
John Valiant was looking closely at the big key; for there were words, which he had not noted before,engraved in the massive flange:Friends all hours.He smiled. The sentiment sent a warm current of pleasure to his finger-tips. Here was the very text of hospitality!
A Lilliputian spider-web was stretched over the preempted keyhole, and he fetched a grass-stem and poked out its tiny gray-striped denizen before he inserted the key in the rusted lock. He turned it with a curious sense of timidity. All the strength of his fingers was necessary before the massive door swung open and the leveling sun sent its late red rays into the gloomy interior.
He stood in a spacious hall, his nostrils filled with a curious but not unpleasant aromatic odor with which the place was strongly impregnated. The hall ran the full length of the building, and in its center a wide, balustraded double staircase led to upper darkness. The floor, where his footprints had disturbed the even gray film of dust, was of fine close parquetry and had been generously strewn everywhere with a mica-like powder. He stooped and took up a pinch in his fingers, noting that it gave forth the curious spicy scent. Dim paintings in tarnished frames hung on the walls. From a niche on the break of the stairway looked down the round face of a tall Dutch clock, and on one side protruded a huge bulging something draped with a yellowed linen sheet. From its shape he guessed this to be an elk’s head. Dust, undisturbed,lay thickly on everything, ghostly floating cobwebs crawled across his face, and a bat flitted out of a fireplace and vanished squeaking over his head. With Uncle Jefferson’s help he opened the rear doors and windows, knocked up the rusted belts of the shutters and flung them wide.
But for the dust and cobwebs and the strange odor, mingled with the faint musty smell that pervades a sunless interior, the former owner of the house might have deserted it a week ago. On a wall-rack lay two walking-sticks and a gold-mounted hunting-crop, and on a great carved chest below it had been flung an opened book bound in tooled leather. John Valiant picked this up curiously. It wasLucile. He noted that here and there passages were marked with penciled lines—some light and femininely delicate, some heavier, as though two had been reading it together, noting their individual preferences.
He laid it back musingly, and opening a door, entered the large room it disclosed. This had been the dining-room. The walls were white, in alternate panels with small oval mirrors whose dust-covered surfaces looked like ground steel. At one end stood a crystal-knobbed mahogany sideboard, holding glass candlesticks in the shape of Ionic columns—above it a quaint portrait of a lady in hoops and love-curls—and at the other end was ahuge fireplace with rust-red fire-dogs and tarnished brass fender. All these, with the round centipede table and the Chippendale chairs set in order against the walls, were dimmed and grayed with a thick powdering of dust.
The next room that he entered was big and wide, a place of dark colors, nobly smutched of time. It had been at once library and living-room. Glass-faced book-shelves ran along one side—well-stocked, as the dusty panes showed—and a huge pigeonholed desk glowered in the big bow-window that opened on to what had been the garden. On the wall hung an old map of Virginia. At one side the dark wainscoting yawned to a cavernous fireplace and inglenook with seats in black leather. By it stood a great square tapestry screen, showing a hunting scene, set in a heavy frame. A great leather settee was drawn near the desk and beside this stood a reading-stand with a small china dog and a squat bronze lamp upon it. In contrast to the orderly dining-room there was about this chamber a sense of untouched disorder—a desk-drawer jerked half-open, a yellowed newspaper torn across and flung into a corner, books tossed on desk and lounge, and in the fireplace a little heap of whitened ashes in which charred fragments told of letters and papers burned in haste. A bottle that had once held brandy and a grimy goblet stoodon the desk, and in a metal ash-tray on the reading-stand lay a half-smoked cigar that crumbled to dust in the intruder’s fingers.
One by one Valiant forced open the tall French windows, till the fading light lay softly over the austere dignity of the apartment. In that somber room, he knew, had had place whatever was most worthy in the lives of his forebears. The thought of generation upon generation had steeped it in human association.
Suddenly he lifted his eyes. Above the desk hung a life-size portrait of a man, in the high soft stock and velvet collar of half a century before. The right eye, strangely, had been cut from the canvas. He stood straight and tall, one hand holding an eager hound in leash, his face proud and florid, his single, cold, steel-blue eye staring down through its dusty curtain with a certain malicious arrogance, and his lips set in a sardonic curve that seemed about to sneer. It was for an instant as if the pictured figure confronted the young man who stood there, mutely challenging his entrance into that tomb-like and secret-keeping quiet; and he gazed back as fixedly, repelled by the craft of the face, yet subtly attracted. “I wonder who you were,” he said. “You were cruel. Perhaps you were wicked. But you were strong, too.”
He returned to the outer hall to find that the negrohad carried in his trunk, and he bade him place it, with the portmanteau, in the room he had just left. Dusk was falling. The air was full of a faint far chirr of night insects, like an elfin serenade, and here and there among the trees pulsed the greenish-yellow spark of a firefly.
“Uncle Jefferson,” said Valiant abruptly, “have you a family?”
“No,suh. Jes’ me en mah ol’ ’ooman.”
“Can she cook?”
“Cook!” The genial titter again captured his dusky escort. “When she got defixens, Ah reck’n she de beaten’es cook in dis heah county.”
“How much do you earn, driving that hack?”
Uncle Jefferson ruminated. “Well, suh, ’pens on de weddah. Mighty lucky sometimes dis yeah ef Ah kin pay de groc’ry man.”
“How would you both like to live here with me for a while? She could cook and you could take care of me.”
Uncle Jefferson’s eyes seemed to turn inward with mingled surprise and introspection. He shifted from one foot to the other, swallowed difficultly several times, and said, “Ah ain’ nebbah seed yo’ befo’, suh.”
“Well, I haven’t seen you either, have I?”
“Dat’s de trufe, suh, ’deed et is! Hyuh, hyuh! Whut Ah means ter say is dat de ol’ ’ooman kain’cook no fancy didoes like what dey eats up Norf. She kin jes’ cook de Ferginey style.”
“That sounds good to me,” quoth Valiant. “I’ll risk it. Now as to wages—”
“Ah ain’ specticulous as ter de wages,” said Uncle Jefferson. “Ah knows er gemman when Ah sees one. ’Sides, ter-day’s Friday en et’s baid luck. Ah sho’ is troubled in mah min’ wheddah we-all kin suit yo’ perpensities, but Ah reck’n we kin take er try efyo’kin.”
“Then it’s a bargain,” responded Valiant with alacrity. “Can you come at once?”
“Yas, suh, me en Daph gwineter come ovah fus’ thing in de mawnin’. Whut yo’-all gwineter do fo’ yo’ suppah?”
“I’ll get along,” Valiant assured him cheerfully. “Here is five dollars. You can buy some food and things to cook with, and bring them with you. Do you think there’s a stove in the kitchen?”
“Ah reck’n,” replied Uncle Jefferson. “En ef darain’Daph kin cook er Chris’mus dinnah wid fo’ stones en er tin skillet. Yas,suh!”
He trudged away into the shadows, but presently, as the new master of Damory Court stood in the gloomy hall, he heard the shambling step again behind him. “Ah done neglectuated ter ax yo’ name, suh. Ah did, fo’ er fac’.”
“My name is Valiant. John Valiant.”
Uncle Jefferson’s eyes turned upward and rolledout of orbit. “Mah Lawd!” he ejaculated soundlessly. And with his wide lips still framed about the last word, he backed out of the doorway and disappeared.
Alone in the ebbing twilight, John Valiant found his hamper, spread a napkin on the broad stone steps and took out a glass, a spoon and part of a loaf of bread. The thermos flask was filled with milk. It was not a splendid banquet, yet he ate it with as great content as the bulldog at his feet gnawed his share of the crust. He broke his bread into the milk as he had not done since he was a child, and ate the luscious pulp with a keen relish bred of the long outdoor day. When the last drop was gone he brushed up the very crumbs from the cloth, laughing to himself as he did so. It had been a long time since he remembered being so hungry!
It was almost dark when the meal was done and, depleted hamper in hand, he reentered the empty echoing house. He went into the library, lighted the great brass lamp from the motor and began to rummage. The drawers of the dining-room sideboard yielded nothing; on a shelf of the butler’s pantry, however, was a tin box which proved to be half full of wax candles, perfectly preserved.
“The very thing!” he said triumphantly. Carrying them back, he fixed several in the glass-candlesticks and set them, lighted, all about the somber room till the soft glow flooded its every corner. “There,” he said, “that is as it should be. No big blatant search-light here! And no glare of modern electricity would suit that old wainscoting, either.” He looked up at the painting on the wall; it seemed as if the sneer had smoothed out, the hard cruel eye softened. “You needn’t be afraid,” he said, nodding. “I understand.”
He dragged the leather settee to the porch and by the light of the motor-lamp dusted it thoroughly, and wheeling it back, set it under the portrait. He washed the glass from which he had dined and filled it at the cup of the garden fountain, put into it the rose from his hat and set it on the reading-stand. The small china dog caught his eye and he picked it up casually. The head came off in his hands. It had been a bon-bon box and was empty save for a narrow strip of yellowed paper, on which were written some meaningless figures: 17-28-94-0. He pondered this a moment, then thrust it into one of the empty pigeonholes of the desk. On the latter stood an old-fashioned leaf-calendar; the date it exposed was May 14th. Curiously enough the same date would recur to-morrow. The page bore a quotation: “Every man carries his fate on a riband about his neck.” The line had beenquoted in his father’s letter. May 14th!—how much that date and that motto may have meant for him!
He put the calendar back, filled his pipe and sat down facing the open bow-window. The dark was mysteriously lifting, the air filling with a soft silver-gray translucence that touched the wild growth as with a fairy gossamer. Presently, from between the still elms, the new sickle moon climbed into view. From the garden came a plaintive bird-cry, long-drawn and wavering and then, from farther away, the triple mellow whistle of a whippoorwill.
The place was alive now with bird-notes, and he listened with a new delight. He thought suddenly, with a kind of impatient wonder, that never in his life had he sat perfectly alone in a solitude and listened to the voices of the night. The only out-of-doors he knew had been comprised in motor-whirls on frequented highroads, seashore, or mountain months where bridge and dancing were forever on the cards, or else such up-to-date “camping” as was indulged in at the Fargos’ “shack” on the St. Lawrence. He sat now with his senses alert to a new world that his sophisticated eye and ear had never known. Something new was entering into him that seemed the spirit of the place; the blessing of the tall silver poplars outside, themusical scented gardens and the moonlight laid like a placid benediction over all.
He rose to push the shutter wider and in the movement his elbow sent a shallow case of morocco leather that had lain on the desk crashing to the floor. It opened and a heavy metallic object rolled almost to his feet. He saw at a glance that it was an old-fashioned rusted dueling-pistol.
The box had originally held two pistols. He shuddered as he stooped to pick up the weapon, and with the crawling repugnance mingled a panging anger and humiliation. From his very babyhood it had always been so—that unconquerable aversion to the touch of a firearm. There had been moments in his youth when this unreasoning shrinking had filled him with a blind fury, had driven him to strange self-tests of courage. He had never been able to overcome it. He had always had a natural distaste for the taking of life; hunting was an unthinkable sport to him, and he regarded the lusty pursuit of small feathered or furry things for pleasure with a mingled wonder and contempt. But analyzation had told him that his peculiar abhorrence was no mere outgrowth of this. It lay far deeper. He had rarely, of recent years, met the test. Now, as he stood in these unaccustomed surroundings, with the cold touch of the metal the old shuddering held him, and the sweat broke in beadson his forehead. Setting his teeth hard, he crossed the room, slipped the box with its pistol between the volumes of the bookcase, and returned to his seat.
The bulldog, aroused from a nap, thrust a warm muzzle between his knees. “It’s uncanny, Chum!” he said, as his hand caressed the velvety head. “Why should the touch of that fool thing chill my spine and make my flesh tiptoe over my bones? Is it a mere peculiarity of temperament? Some men hate cats’-eyes. Some can’t abide sitting on plush. I knew a chap once who couldn’t see milk poured from a pitcher without getting goose-flesh. People are born that way, but there must be a cause. Why should I hate a pistol? Do you suppose I was shot in one of my previous existences?”
For a long while he sat there, his pipe dead, his eyes on the moonlighted out-of-doors. The eery feeling that had gripped him had gone as quickly as it had come. At last he rose, stretching himself with a great boyish yawn, put out all save one of the candles and taking a bath-robe, sandals and a huge fuzzy towel from the steamer-trunk, stripped leisurely. He donned the bath-robe and sandals and went out through the window to the garden and down to where lay the little lake ruffling silverly under the moon. On its brink he stopped, and tossing back his head, tried to imitate one of the bird-calls but was unsuccessful. With a rueful laughhe threw off the bath-robe and stood an instant glistening, poised in the moonlight like a marble faun, before he dove, straight down out of sight.
Five minutes later he pulled himself up over the edge, his flesh tingling with the chill of the water, and drew the robe about his cool white shoulders. Then he thrust his feet into his sandals and sped quickly back. He rubbed himself to a glow, and blowing out the remaining candle, stretched himself luxuriously between the warm blankets on the couch. The dog sniffed inquiringly at his hand, then leaped up and snuggled down close to his feet.
The soft flooding moonlight sent its radiance into the gloomy room, touching lovingly its dark carven furniture and bringing into sharp relief the lithe contour of the figure under the fleecy coverlid, the crisp damp hair, the expressive face, and the wide-open dreamy eyes.
John Valiant’s thoughts had fled a thousand miles away, to the tall girl who all his life had seemed to stand out from his world, aloof and unsurpassed—Katharine Fargo. He tried to picture her, a perfect chatelaine, graceful and gracious as a tall, white, splendid lily, in this dead house that seemed still to throb with living passions. But the picture subtly eluded him and he stirred uneasily under the blanket.
After a time his hand stretched out to the reading-stand and drew the glass with its vivid blossomnearer, till, in his nostrils, its musky odor mingled with the dew-wet scent of the honeysuckle from the garden. At last his eyes closed. “Every man carries his fate ... on a riband about his neck,” he muttered drowsily, and then, “Roses ... red roses....”
And so he fell asleep.
He awoke to a musical twittering and chirping, to find the sun pouring into the dusty room in a very glory. He rolled from the blanket and stood upright, filling his lungs with a long deep breath of satisfaction. He felt singularly light-hearted and alive. The bulldog came bounding through the window, dirty from the weeds, and flung himself upon his master in a canine rapture.
“Get out!” quoth the latter, laughing. “Stop licking my feet! How the dickens do you suppose I’m to get into my clothes with your ridiculous antics going on? Down, I say!”
He began to dress rapidly. “Listen to those birds, Chum!” he said. “There’s an ornithological political convention going on out there. Wish I knew what they were chinning about—they’re so mightily in earnest. See them splashing in that fountain? If you had any self-respect you’d be taking a bath yourself. You need it! Hark!” He broke off and listened. “Who’s that singing?”
The sound drew nearer—a lugubrious chant, with the weirdest minor reflections, faintly suggestiveof the rag-time ditties of the music-halls, yet with a plaintive cadence:
“As he went mowin’ roun’ de fiel’Er moc’sin bit him on de heel.Right toodle-link-uh-day,Right toodle-link-uh-day,Right toodle-link-uh, toodle-link-uh,Da-a-dee-e-eaye!“Dey kyah’d him in ter his Sally deah.She say, ‘Mah Lawd, yo’ looks so queah!’Right toodle-link-uh-day,Right toodle-link-uh-day,Right toodle-link-uh, toodle-link-uh,Da-a-dee-e-e-aye!”
“As he went mowin’ roun’ de fiel’Er moc’sin bit him on de heel.Right toodle-link-uh-day,Right toodle-link-uh-day,Right toodle-link-uh, toodle-link-uh,Da-a-dee-e-eaye!“Dey kyah’d him in ter his Sally deah.She say, ‘Mah Lawd, yo’ looks so queah!’Right toodle-link-uh-day,Right toodle-link-uh-day,Right toodle-link-uh, toodle-link-uh,Da-a-dee-e-e-aye!”
A smile of genuine delight crossed the listener’s face. “That would make the everlasting fortune of a music-hall artist,” Valiant muttered, as, coatless, and with a towel over his arm, he stepped to the piazza.
“Dey laid him down—spang on de groun’.He-e-e shet-up-his-eyes en looked all aroun’.Right toodle-link-uh-day,Right toodle-link-uh-day,Right toodle-link-uh, toodle-link-uh,Da-a-dee e-e-aye!“So den he died, giv’ up de Ghos’.To Abrum’s buzzum he did pos’—Right toodle-link-uh-day,Right toodle-link-uh-day—”
“Dey laid him down—spang on de groun’.He-e-e shet-up-his-eyes en looked all aroun’.Right toodle-link-uh-day,Right toodle-link-uh-day,Right toodle-link-uh, toodle-link-uh,Da-a-dee e-e-aye!“So den he died, giv’ up de Ghos’.To Abrum’s buzzum he did pos’—Right toodle-link-uh-day,Right toodle-link-uh-day—”
“Good morning, Uncle Jefferson.”
The singer broke off his refrain, set down the twig-broom that he had been wielding and came toward him. “Mawnin’, suh. Mawnin’,” he said. “Hopes yo’-all slep’ good. Ah reck’n dem ar birds woke yo’ up; dey’s makin’ seh er ’miration.”
“Thank you. Never slept better in my life. Am I laboring under a delusion when I imagine I smell coffee?”
Just then there came a voice from the open door of the kitchen: “Calls yo’se’f erman, yo’ triflin’ reconstructed niggah! W’en marstah gwineter git he brekfus’ wid’ yo’ ramshacklin’ eroun’ wid dat dawg all dis Gawd’s-blessid mawnin’? Go fotch some mo’ fiah-wood dis minute. Yo’ heah?”
A turbaned head poked itself through the door, with a good-natured leaf-brown face beneath it, which broadened into a wide smile as its owner bobbed energetically at Valiant’s greeting. “Fo’ deLawd!” she exclaimed, wiping floury hands on a gingham apron. “Yo’ sho’ is up early, but Ah got yo’ brekfus’ mos’ ready, suh.”
“All right, Aunt Daphne. I’ll be back directly.”
He sped down to the lake to plunge his head into the cool water and thereby sharpen the edge of an appetite that needed no honing. From the little valley through which the stream meandered, rose a curdled mist, fraying now beneath the warming sun.The tall tangled grass through which he passed was beaded with dew like diamonds and hung with a thousand fairy jeweled webs. The wild honeysuckle was alive with quick whirrings of hummingbirds, and he hung his pocket-mirror from a twig and shaved with a woodsy chorus in his ears.
He came up the trail again to find the reading-stand transferred to the porch and laid with a white cloth on which was set a steaming coffee-pot, with fresh cream, saltless butter and crisp hot biscuit; and as he sat down, with a sigh of pure delight, in his dressing-gown—a crêpy Japanese thing redeemed from womanishness by the bold green bamboo of its design—Uncle Jefferson planted before him a generous platter of bacon, eggs and potatoes. These he attacked with a surprising keenness. As he buttered his fifth biscuit he looked at the dog, rolling on his back in morning ecstasy, with a look of humorous surprise.
“Chum,” he said, “what do you think of that? All my life a single roll and a cup of coffee have been the most I could ever negotiate for breakfast, and then it was apt to taste like chips and whetstones. And now look at this plate!” The dog ceased winnowing his ear with a hind foot and looked back at his master with much the same expression. Clearly his own needs had not been forgotten.
“Reck’n Ah bettah go ter git dat ar machinething,” said Uncle Jefferson behind him. “Ol’ ’ooman, heah, she ’low ter fix up de kitchen dis mawnin’ en we begin on de house dis evenin’.”
“Right-o,” said Valiant. “It’s all up-hill, so the motor won’t run away with you. Aunt Daphne, can you get some help with the cleaning?”
“He’p?” that worthy responded with fine scorn. “No, suh. Moughty few, in de town ’cep’n low-down yaller new-issue trash det ain’ wu’f killin’! Ah gwineter go fo’ dat house mahse’f ’fo’ long, hammah en tongs, en git it fix’ up!”
“Splendid! My destiny is in your hands. You might take the dog with you, Uncle Jefferson; the run will do him good.”
When the latter had disappeared and truculent sounds from the kitchen indicated that the era of strenuous cleaning had begun, he reentered the library, changed the water in the rose-glass and set it on the edge of the shady front porch, where its flaunting blossom made a dash of bright crimson against the grayed weather-beaten brick. This done, he opened the one large room on the ground-floor that he had not visited.
It was double the size of the library, a parlor hung in striped yellow silk vaguely and tenderly faded, with a tall plate mirror set over a marble-topped console at either side. In one corner stood a grand piano of Circassian walnut with keys of tinted mother-of-pearl and a slender music-rack inlaid withmorning-glories in the same material. From the center of the ceiling, above an oval table, depended a great chandelier hung with glass prisms. He drew his handkerchief across the table; beneath the disfiguring dust it showed a highly polished surface inlaid with different colored woods, in an intricate Italian-like landscape. The legs of the consoles were bowed, delicately carved, and of gold-leaf. The chairs and sofas were covered with dusty slip-covers of muslin. He lifted one of these. The tarnished gold furniture was Louis XV, the upholstery of yellow brocade with a pattern of pink roses. Two Japanese hawthorn vases sat on teak-wood stands and a corner held a glass cabinet containing a collection of small ivories and faience.
His appreciative eye kindled. “What a room!” he muttered. “Not a jarring note anywhere! That’s an old Crowe and Christopher piano. I’ll get plenty of music out of that! You don’t see such chandeliers outside of palaces any more except in the old French châteaus. It holds a hundred candles if it holds one! I never knew before all there was in that phrase ‘the candle-lighted fifties.’ I can imagine what it looked like, with the men in white stocks and flowered waistcoats and the women in their crinolines and red-heeled slippers, bowing to the minuet under that candle-light! I’ll bet the girls bred in this neighborhood won’t take much to the turkey-trot and the bunny-hug!”
He went thoughtfully back to the great hall, where sat the big chest on which lay the volume ofLucile. He pushed down the antique wrought-iron hasp and threw up the lid. It was filled to the brim with textures: heavy portières of rose-damask, table-covers of faded soft-toned tapestry, window-hangings of dull green—all with tobacco-leaves laid between the folds and sifted thickly over with the sparkling white powder. At the bottom, rolled in tarry-smelling paper, he found a half-dozen thin, Persian prayer-rugs.
“Phew!” he whistled. “I certainly ought to be grateful to that law firm that ‘inspected’ the place. Think of the things lying here all these years! And that powder everywhere! It’s done the work, too, for there’s not a sign of moth. If I’m not careful, I’ll stumble over the family plate—it seems to be about the only thing wanting.”
The mantelpiece, beneath the shrouded elk’s head, was of gray marble in which a crest was deeply carved. He went close and examined it. “A sable greyhound, rampant, on a field argent,” he said. “That’s my own crest, I suppose.” There touched him again the same eery sensation of acquaintance that had possessed him with his first sight of the house-front. “Somehow it’s familiar,” he muttered; “where have I seen it before?”
He thought a moment, then went quickly into the library and began to ransack the trunk. At length he found a small box containing keepsakes of various kinds. He poured the medley on to the table—an uncut moonstone, an amethyst-topped pencil that one of his tutors had given him as a boy, a tiger’s claw, a compass and what-not. Among them was a man’s seal-ring with a crest cut in a cornelian. He looked at it closely. It was the same device.
The ring had been his father’s. Just when or how it had come into his possession he could never remember. It had lain among these keepsakes so many years that he had almost forgotten its existence. He had never worn a ring, but now, as he went back to the hall, he slipped it on his finger. The motto below the crest was worn away, but it showed clear in the marble of the hall-mantel:I clinge.
His eyes turned from the carven words and strayed to the pleasant sunny foliage outside. An arrogant boast, perhaps, yet in the event well justified. Valiants had held that selfsame slope when the encircling forests had rung with war-whoop and blazed with torture-fire. They had held on through Revolution and Civil War. Good and bad, abiding and lawless, every generation had cleaved stubbornly to its acres.I clinge.His father had clung through absence that seemed to have been almostexile, and now he, the last Valiant, was come to make good the boast.
His gaze wavered. The tail of his eye had caught through the window a spurt of something dashing and vivid, that grazed the corner of a far-off field. He craned his neck, but it had passed the line of his vision. The next moment, however, there came trailing on the satiny stillness the high-keyed ululation of a horn, and an instant later a long-drawnhallo-o-o! mixed with a pattering chorus of yelps.
He went close, and leaning from the sill, shaded his eyes with his hand. The noise swelled and rounded in volume; it was nearing rapidly. As he looked, the hunt dashed into full view between the tree-boles—a galloping mêlée of khaki and scarlet, swarming across the fresh green of a wheat field, behind a spotted swirl of hounds. It mounted a rise, dipped momentarily into a gully and then, in a narrow sweeping curve, came pounding on up the long slope, directly toward the house.
“Confound it!” said John Valiant belligerently; “they’re on my land!”
They were near enough now for him to hear the voices of the men, calling encouragement to the dogs, and to see the white ribbons of foam across the flanks of the laboring horses. One scarlet-coated feminine rider, detached from the bunch, had spurred in advance and was leading by a clean hundredyards, bareheaded, her hat fallen back to the limit of its ribbon knotted under her chin, and her waving hair gleaming like tarnished gold.
“How she rides!” muttered the solitary watcher. “Cross-saddle, of course,—the sensible little sport! She’ll never in the world do that wall!—Yes, by George!” For, with a beseeching cry and a straining tug, she had fairly lifted her big golden-chestnut hunter over the high barrier in a leap as clean as the flight of a flying squirrel. He saw her lean forward to pat the wet arching neck as the horse settled again into its pace.
John Valiant’s admiration turned to delight. “Why,” he said, “it’s the Lady-of-the-Roses!”
He put his hands on the sill and vaulted to the porch.
The tawny scudding streak that led that long chase had shot into the yard, turning for a last desperate double. It saw the man in the foreground and its bounding, agonized little wild heart that so prayed for life, gave way. With a final effort, it gained the porch and crouched down in its corner, an abject, sweated, hunted morsel, at hopeless bay.
Like a flash, Valiant stooped, caught the shivering thing by the scruff, and as its snapping jaws grazed his thumb, dropped it through the open window behind him. “Sanctuary!” quoth he, and banged the shutter to.
At the same instant, as the place overflowed with a pandemonium of nosing leaping hounds, he saw the golden-chestnut reined sharply down among the ragged box-rows, with a shamefaced though brazen knowledge that the girl who rode it had seen.
She sat moveless, her head held high, one hand on the hunter’s foam-flecked neck, and their glances met like crossed swords. The look stirred something vague and deep within him. For an unforgettableinstant their eyes held each other, in a gaze rigid, challenging, almost defiant; then it broke and she turned to the rest of the party spurring in a galloping zigzag: a genial-faced man of middle age in khaki who sat his horse like a cavalryman, a younger one with a reckless dark face and straight black hair, and following these a half-dozen youthful riders of both sexes, one of the lads heavily plastered with mud from a wet cropper, and the girls chiefly gasps and giggles.
The elder of the two men pulled up beside the leader, his astonished eyes sweeping the house-front, with its open blinds, the wisp of smoke curling from the kitchen chimney. He said something to her, and she nodded. The younger man, meanwhile, had flung himself from his horse, a wild-eyed roan, and with his arm thrust through its bridle, strode forward among the welter of hounds, where they scurried at fault, hither and thither, yelping and eager.
“What rotten luck!” he exclaimed. “Gone to ground after twelve miles! After him, Tawny! You mongrels! Do you imagine he’s up a tree? After him, Bulger! Bring him here!”
He glanced up, and for the first time saw the figure in tweeds looking on. Valiant was attracted by his face, its dash and generosity overlying its inherent profligacy and weakness. Dark as the girl was light, his features had the same delicate chiseling,the inbreeding, nobility and indulgence of generations. He stared a moment, and the somewhat supercilious look traveled over the gazer, from dusty boots to waving brown hair.
“Oh!” he said. His view slowly took in the evidences of occupation. “The house is open, I see. Going to get it fit for occupancy, I presume?”
“Yes.”
The other turned. “Well, Judge Chalmers, what do you think of that? The unexpected has happened at last.” He looked again at the porch. “Who’s to occupy it?”
“The owner.”
“Wonders will never cease!” said the young man easily, shrugging. “Well, our quarry is here somewhere. From the way the dogs act I should say he’s bolted into the house. With your permission I’ll take one of them in and see.” He stooped and snapped a leash on a dog-collar.
“I’m really very sorry,” said Valiant, “but I’m living in it at present.”
The edge of a smile lifted the carefully trained mustache over the other’s white teeth. It had the perfectly courteous air of saying, “Of course, if you say so. But—”
Valiant turned, with a gesture that included all. “If you care to dismount and rest,” he said, “I shall be honored, though I’m afraid I can’t offer you such hospitality as I should wish.”
The judge raised his broad soft hat. “Thank you, sir,” he said, with a soft accent that delightfully disdained the letter “r.” “But we mustn’t intrude any further. As you know, of course, the place has been uninhabited for any number of years, and we had no idea it was to acquire a tenant. You will overlook our riding through, I hope. I’m afraid the neighborhood has got used to considering this a sort of no-man’s land. It’s a pleasure to know that the Court is to be reclaimed, sir. Come along, Chilly,” he added. “Our fox has a burrow under the house, I reckon—hang the cunning little devil!”
He whistled sharply to the dogs, who came leaping about his horse’s legs for their meed of praise—and clubbing. “Down, Fan! Down Trojan! Come on, you young folks, to breakfast. We’ve had a prime run of it, anyhow, and we’ll put him up another day.”
He waved his hat at the porch and turned his horse down the path, side by side with the golden-chestnut. After them trooped the others, horses walking wearily, riders talking in low voices, the girls turning often to send swift bird-like glances behind them to where the straight masculine figure still stood with the yellow sunshine on his face. They did not leap the wall this time, but filed decorously through the swinging gate to the Red Road. Then, as they passed from view behind thehedges, John Valiant heard the younger voices break out together like the sound of a bomb thrown into a poultry-yard.
After a time he saw the straggling bunch of riders emerge at a slow canter on the far-away field. He saw the roan spurred beside the golden chestnut and both dashed away, neck and neck in a race, the light patrician form of the man leaning far forward and the girl swaying to the pace as if she and her hunter were one.
John Valiant stood watching till the last rider was out of sight. There was a warm flush of color in his face.
At length he turned with the ghost of a sigh, opened the hall door wide and stalking a hundred yards away, sat down on the shady grass and began to whistle, with his eyes on the door.
Presently he was rewarded. On a sudden, around the edge of the sill peered a sharp, suspicious little muzzle. Then, like a flash of tawny light, the fox broke sanctuary and shot for the thicket.
The brown ivied house in the village was big and square and faced the sleepy street. Its front was gay with pink oleanders in green tubs and the yard spotted with annual encampments of geraniums and marigolds. A one-storied wing contained a small door with a doctor’s brass plate on the clapboarding beside it. Doctor Southall was one of Mrs. Merryweather Mason’s paying guests—for she would have deemed the word boarder a gratuitous insult, no less to them than to her. Another was the major, who for a decade had occupied the big old-fashioned corner-room on the second floor, companioned by a monstrous gray cat and waited on by an ancient negro named Jereboam, who had been a slave of his father’s.
The doctor was a sallow taciturn man with a saturnine face, eyebrows like frosted thistles, a mouth as if made with one quick knife-slash and a head nearly bald, set on a neck that would not have disqualified a yearling ox. His broad shoulders were slightly stooped, and his mouth wore habitually an expression half resentful, half sardonic,conveying a cynical opinion of the motives of the race in general and of the special depravity of that particular countryside. Altogether he exhaled an air in contrast to which the major’s old-school blend of charm and courtesy seemed an almost ribald frivolity.
On this particular morning neither the major nor the doctor was in evidence, the former having gone out early, and the latter being at the moment in his office, as the brassy buzz of a telephone from time to time announced. Two of the green wicker rocking-chairs on the porch, however, were in agitant commotion. Mrs. Mason was receiving a caller in the person of Mrs. Napoleon Gifford.
The latter had a middle-aged affection for baby-blue and a devouring penchant for the ages and antecedents of others, at times irksome to those to whom her “Let me see. You went to school with my first husband’s sister, didn’t you?” or “Your daughter Jane must have been married the year the old Israel Stamper place was burned,” were unwelcome reminders of the pace of time. To-day, of course, the topic was the new arrival at Damory Court.
“After all theseyears!” the visitor was saying in her customary italics. (The broad “a” which lent a dulcet softness to the speech of her hostess was scorned by Mrs. Poly, her own “a’s” being as narrow as the needle through which the rich manreaches heaven.) “We came here from Richmond when I was a bride—that’s twenty-one years ago—and Damory Court was forsaken then. And think what a condition the house must be in now! Cared for by an agent who comes every other season from New York. Trust amanto do work like that!”
“I’m glad a Valiant is to occupy it,” remarked Mrs. Mason in her sweet flute-like voice. “It would be sad to see any one else there. For after all, the Valiants were gentlemen.”
Mrs. Gifford sniffed. “Would you have called Devil-John Valiant a gentleman? Why, he earned the name by the dreadful things he did. My grandfather used to say that when his wife lay sick—he hated her, you know—he would gallop his horse with all his hounds full-cry after him under her windows. Then thatghastlystory of the slave he pressed to death in the hogshead of tobacco.”
“I know,” acquiesced Mrs. Mason. “He was a cruel man, and wicked, too. Yet of course he was a gentleman. In the South the test of a gentleman has never been what hedoes, but who he is. Devil-John was splendid, for all his wickedness. He was the best swordsman in all Virginia. It used to be said there was a portrait of him at Damory Court, and that during the war, in the engagement on the hillside, a bullet took out one ofits eyes. But his grandson, Beauty Valiant, who lived at Damory Court thirty years ago, wasn’t his type at all. He was only twenty-five when the duel occurred.”
“He must have been brilliant,” said the visitor, “to have founded that great Corporation. It’s a pity the son didn’t take after him. Have you seen thepaperslately? It seems that though he was to blame for the wrecking of the concern they can’t do anything to him. Some technicality in the law, I suppose. But if a man is only rich enough they can’t convict him of anything. Why he should suddenly make up his mind to come downhereIcan’tsee. With that old affair of his father’s behind him, I should think he’d prefer Patagonia.”
“I take it, then, madam,” Doctor Southall’s forbidding voice rose from the doorway, “that you are familiar with the circumstances of that old affair, as you term it?”
The lady bridled. Her passages at arms with the doctor did not invariably tend to sweeten her disposition. “I’m sure I only know what people say,” she said.
“‘People?’” snorted the doctor irascibly. “Just another name for a community that’s a perfect sink of meanness and malice. If one believed all he heard here he’d quit speaking to his own grandmother.”
“You will admit, I suppose,” said Mrs. Giffordwith some spirit, “that the name Valiant isn’t what it used to be in this neighborhood?”
“I will, madam,” responded the doctor. “When Valiant left this place (a mark of good taste, I’ve always considered it) he left it the worse, if possible, for his departure. Your remark, however, would seem to imply demerit on his part. Was he the only man who ever happened to be at the lucky end of a dueling-ground?”
“Then it isn’t true that Valiant was a dead shot and Sassoon intoxicated?”
“Madam,” said the doctor, “I have no wish to discuss the details of that unhappy incident with you or anybody else. I was one of those present, but the circumstances you mention have never been descanted upon by me. I merely wish to point out that the people whom you have been quoting, are not only a set of ignoramuses with cotton-back souls, but as full of uncharitableness as an egg is of meat.”
“I see by the papers,” said Mrs. Gifford, with an air of resignedly changing the subject, “they’ve been investigating the failure of the Valiant Corporation. The son seems to be getting the sharp end of the stick. Perhaps he’s coming down here because they’ve made it so hot for him in New York. Well, I’m afraid he’ll findthiscounty disappointing.”
“He will that!” agreed the doctor savagely.“No doubt he imagines he’s coming to a kindly countryside of gentle-born people with souls and imaginations; he’ll find he’s lit in a section that’s entirely too ready to hack at his father’s name and prepared in advance to call him Northern scum and turn up its nose at his accent—a community so full of dyed-in-the-wool snobbery that it would make Boston look like a poor-white barbecue. I’m sorry forhim!”
Mrs. Gifford, having learned wisdom from experience, resisted the temptation to reply. She merely rocked a trifle faster and turned a smile which she strove to make amusedly deprecative upon her hostess. Just then from the rear of the house came a strident voice:
“Yo’, Raph’el! Take yo’ han’s outer dem cherries! Don’ yo’ know ef yo’ swallahs dem ar pits, yo’ gwineter hab ’pendegeetus en lump up en die?”
The sound of a slap and a shrill yelp followed, and around the porch dashed an infantile darky, as nude as a black Puck, with his hands full of cherries, who came to a sudden demoralized stop in the embarrassing foreground.
“Raph!” thundered the doctor. “Didn’t I tell you to go back to that kitchen?”
“Yas, suh,” responded the imp. “But yo’ didn’ tell me ter stay dar!”
“If I see you out here again,” roared the doctor, “I’ll tie your ears back—andgreaseyou—andSWALLOW you!” At which grisly threat, the apparition, with a shrill shriek, turned and ran desperately for the corner of the house.
“I hear,” said the doctor, resuming, “that the young man who came to fix the place up has hired Uncle Jefferson and his wife to help him. Who’s responsible for that interesting information?”
“Rickey Snyder,” said Mrs. Mason. “She’s got a spy-glass rigged up in a sugar-tree at Miss Mattie Sue’s and she saw them pottering around there this morning.”
“Littlelimb!” exclaimed Mrs. Gifford, with emphasis. “She’s as cheeky as a town-hog. I can’t imagine what Shirley Dandridge was thinking of when she brought that low-born child out of her sphere.”
Something like a growl came from the doctor as he struck open the screen-door. “‘Limb!’ I’ll bet ten dollars she’s an angel in a cedar-tree at a church fair compared with some better-born young ones I know of who are only fit to live when they’ve got the scarlet-fever and who ought to be in the reformatory long ago. And as for Shirley Dandridge, it’s my opinion she and her mother and a few others like her have got about the only drops of the milk of human kindness in this whole abandoned community!”
“Dreadful man!” said Mrs. Gifford, sotto voce, as the door banged viciously. “To think of hisbeing born a Southall! Sometimes I can’t believe it!”
Mrs. Mason shook her head and smiled. “Ah, but that isn’t the real Doctor Southall,” she said. “That’s only his shell.”
“I’ve heard that he has another side,” responded the other with guarded grimness, “but if he has, I wish he’d manage to show it sometimes.”
Mrs. Mason took off her glasses and wiped them carefully. “I saw it when my husband died,” she said softly. “That was before you came. They were old friends, you know. He was sick almost a year, and the doctor used to carry him out here on the porch every day in his arms, like a child. And then, when the typhus came that summer among the negroes, he quarantined himself with them—the only white man there—and treated and nursed them and buried the dead with his own hands, till it was stamped out. That’s the real Doctor Southall.”
The rockers vibrated in silence for a moment. Then Mrs. Gifford said: “I never knew before that he had anything to do with that duel. Was he one of Valiant’s seconds?”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Mason; “and the major was the other. I was a little girl when it happened. I can barely remember it, but it made a big sensation.”
“And over a love-affair!” exclaimed Mrs. Giffordin the tone of one to whom romance was daily bread.
“I suppose it was.”
“Why, mydear! Ofcourseit was. That’s always been the story. What on earth have men to fight duels about except us women? They onlypretendit’s cards or horses. Trust me, there’s always a pair of silk stockings at the bottom of it! Girls are so thoughtless—though you and I were just as bad, I suppose, if we only remembered!—and they don’t realize that it’s sometimes a serious thing to trifle with a man. That is, of course, if he’s of a certain type.Ithink our Virginian girls flirt outrageously. They quit only at the church door (though Iwillsay they generally stop then) and they take a man’s ring without any idea whatever of the sacredness of an engagement. You remember Ilsa Eustis who married the man from Petersburg? She was engaged to two men at once, and used to wear whichever ring belonged to the one who was coming to see her. One day they came together. She was in the yard when they stopped at the horse-block. Well, she tied her handkerchief round her hand and said she’d burned herself pulling candy. (No, neither one of them was the man from Petersburg.) When she was married, one of them wrote her and asked for his ring. It had seven diamonds set in the shape of a cross. I’m telling you this in confidence, just asit was told to me. She didn’t write a reply—she only sent him a telegram: ‘Simply to thy cross I cling.’ She wears the stones yet in a bracelet.”
For a time the conversation languished. Then Mrs. Gifford asked suddenly: ”Whodo you suppose she could have been?—the girl behind that old Valiant affair.”
Mrs. Mason shook her head. “No one knows for certain—unless, of course, the major or the doctor, and I wouldn’t question either of them for worlds. You see, people had stopped gossiping about it before I was out of school.”
“But surely your husband—”
“The only quarrel we had while we were engaged was over that. I tried to make him tell me. I imagined from something he said then that the young men whodidknow had pledged one another not to speak of it.”
“I wonder why?” said the other thoughtfully.
“Oh, undoubtedly out of regard for the girl. I’ve always thought it so decent of them! If there was a girl in the case, her position must have been unpleasant enough, if she was not actually heart-broken. Imagine the poor thing, knowing that wherever she went, people would be saying: ‘She’s the one they fought the duel over! Look at her!’ If she grieved, they’d say she’d been crazy in love with Sassoon, and point out the dark circles under her eyes, and wonder if she’d ever get over it.If she didn’t mope, they’d say she was in love with Valiant and was glad it was Sassoon who was shot. If she shut herself up, they’d say she had no pride; if she didn’t, they’d say she had no heart. It was far better to cover the story up and let it die.”
But the subject was too fascinating for her morning visitor to abandon. “She probably loved one of them,” she said. “I wonder which it was. I’ll ask the major when I see him.I’mnot afraid. He can’t eat me! Wouldn’t it becurious,” she continued, “if it should be somebody who lives here now—whom we’ve always known! I can’t think who it could have been, though. There’s Jenny Quarles—she’s eight years older than we are, if she’s a day—she was a nice little thing, but you couldn’tdreamof anybody ever fighting a duel over her. There’s Polly Pendleton, and Berenice Garland—they must have been about the right age, and they never married—but no, itcouldn’thave been either of them. The only other spinster I can think of is Miss Mattie Sue, and she was as poor as Job’s turkey and teaching school. Besides, she must have been years and years too old. Hush! There’s Major Bristow at the gate now. And the doctor’s just coming out again.”
The major wore a suit of white linen, with a broad-brimmed straw hat, and a pink was in his button-hole, but to the observing, his step mighthave seemed to lack an accustomed jauntiness. As he came up the path the doctor opened his office door. Standing on the threshold, his legs wide apart and his hands under his coat-tails, he nodded grimly across the marigolds. “How do you feel this morning, Major.”
“Feel?” rumbled the major; “the way any gentleman ought to feel this time of the morning, sah. Like hell, sah.”
The doctor bent his gaze on the hilarious blossom in the other’s lapel. “If I were you, Bristow,” he said scathingly, “I reckon I’d quit galivanting around to bridge-fights with perfumery on my handkerchief every evening. It’s a devil of an example to the young.”
The rocking-chairs behind the screening vines became motionless, and the ladies exchanged surreptitious smiles. If the two gentlemen were aware of each other’s sterling qualities, their mutual appreciation was in inverse ratio to its expression, and, as the Elucinian mysteries, cloaked before the world. In public the doctor was wont to remark that the major talked like a Cæsar, looked like a piano-tuner and was the only man he had ever seen who could strut sitting down. Never were his gibes so barbed as when launched against the major’s white-waistcoated and patrician calm, and conversely, never did the major’s bland suavity so nearly approach an undignified irritation as whenreceiving the envenomed darts of that accomplished cynic.
The major settled his black tie. “A little wholesome exercise wouldn’t be a bad thing for you, Doctor,” he said succinctly. “You’re looking a shade pasty to-day.”
“Exercise!” snapped the other viciously, as he pounded down the steps. “Ha, ha! I suppose you exercise—lazying out to the Dandridges once a week for a julep, and the rest of the time wearing out good cane-bottoms and palm-leaf fans and cussing at the heat. You’ll go off with apoplexy one of these days.”
“I shall if they’re scared enough to callyou,” the major shot after him, nettled. But the doctor did not pause. He went on down the street without turning his head.
The major lifted his hat gallantly to the ladies, whose presence he had just observed. “I reckon,” he said, as he found the string of his glasses and adjusted them to gaze after the retreating form; “I reckon if I did have apoplexy, I’d want Southall to handle the case, but the temptation to get one in on him is sometimes a little too much for me.”
“Dosit down, Major,” said Mrs. Gifford. “There’s a question I’m just dying to ask you. We’ve hadsuchan interesting conversation. You’ve heard the news, of course, that young Mr. Valiant is coming to Damory Court?”
The major sat down heavily. In the bright light his face seemed suddenly pale and old.
“No?” the lady’s tone was arch. “Have all the rest of usreallygot ahead of you for once? Yes, it’s true. There’s some one there getting it to rights. Now here’s the question. There was a woman, of course, at the bottom of the Valiant duel. I’d neverdreamof asking you who she was. But which was it she loved, Valiant or Sassoon?”