“Dear Bluebird of mine:“I can’t wait any longer to talk to you. Less than a day has passed since we were together, but it might have been eons, if one measured time by heart-beats. What have you been doing and thinking, I wonder? I have spent those eons in the garden, just wandering about, dreaming over those wonderful, wonderful moments by the sun-dial. Ah, dear little wild heart born of the flowers, with the soul of a bird (yet you are woman, too!) that old disk is marking happy hours now for me!“How have I deserved this thing that has come to me?—sad bungler that I have been! Sometimes it seems too glad and sweet, and I am suddenly desperately afraid I shall wake to find myself facinganother dull morning in that old, useless, empty life of mine. I am very humble, dear, before your love.“Shall I tell you when it began with me? Not last night—nor the day we planted the ramblers. (Do you know, when your little muddy boot went trampling down the earth about their roots, I wanted to stoop down and kiss it? So dear everything about you was!) Not that evening at Rosewood, with the arbor fragrance about us. (I think I shall always picture you with roses all about you. Red roses the color of your lips!) No, it was not then that it began—nor that dreadful hour when you fought with me to save my life—nor the morning you sat your horse in the box-rows in that yew-green habit that made your hair look like molten copper. No, it began the first afternoon, when I sat in my motor with your rose in my hand! It has never left me since, by day or by night. And yet there are people in this age of airships and honking highways and typewriters who think love-at-first-sight is as out-of-date as our little grandmothers’ hoops rusting in the garret. Ah, sweetheart, I, for one, know better!“Suppose I had not come to Virginia—and knownyou! My heart jumps when I think of it. It makes one believe in fate. Here at the Court I found an old leaf-calendar—it sits at my elbow now, just as I came on it. The date it shows is May 14th, and its motto is:Every man carries his fate upon a riband about his neck. I like that.“That first Sunday at St. Andrew’s, I thought of a day—may it be soon!—when you and I might stand before that altar, with your people (my people, too, now) around us, and I shall hear yousay: ‘I, Shirley, take thee, John—’ And to think it is really to come true! Do you remember the text the minister preached from? It was ‘But all men perceive that they have riches, and that their faces shine as the faces of angels.’ I think I shall go about henceforth with my face shining, so that all men will see thatIhave riches—your love for me, dear.“I am so happy I can hardly see the words—or perhaps it is that the sun has set. I am sending this over by Uncle Jefferson. Send me back just a word by him, sweetheart, to say I may come to you to-night. And add the three short words I am so thirsty to hear over and over—one verb between two pronouns—so that I can kiss them all at once!”
“Dear Bluebird of mine:
“I can’t wait any longer to talk to you. Less than a day has passed since we were together, but it might have been eons, if one measured time by heart-beats. What have you been doing and thinking, I wonder? I have spent those eons in the garden, just wandering about, dreaming over those wonderful, wonderful moments by the sun-dial. Ah, dear little wild heart born of the flowers, with the soul of a bird (yet you are woman, too!) that old disk is marking happy hours now for me!
“How have I deserved this thing that has come to me?—sad bungler that I have been! Sometimes it seems too glad and sweet, and I am suddenly desperately afraid I shall wake to find myself facinganother dull morning in that old, useless, empty life of mine. I am very humble, dear, before your love.
“Shall I tell you when it began with me? Not last night—nor the day we planted the ramblers. (Do you know, when your little muddy boot went trampling down the earth about their roots, I wanted to stoop down and kiss it? So dear everything about you was!) Not that evening at Rosewood, with the arbor fragrance about us. (I think I shall always picture you with roses all about you. Red roses the color of your lips!) No, it was not then that it began—nor that dreadful hour when you fought with me to save my life—nor the morning you sat your horse in the box-rows in that yew-green habit that made your hair look like molten copper. No, it began the first afternoon, when I sat in my motor with your rose in my hand! It has never left me since, by day or by night. And yet there are people in this age of airships and honking highways and typewriters who think love-at-first-sight is as out-of-date as our little grandmothers’ hoops rusting in the garret. Ah, sweetheart, I, for one, know better!
“Suppose I had not come to Virginia—and knownyou! My heart jumps when I think of it. It makes one believe in fate. Here at the Court I found an old leaf-calendar—it sits at my elbow now, just as I came on it. The date it shows is May 14th, and its motto is:Every man carries his fate upon a riband about his neck. I like that.
“That first Sunday at St. Andrew’s, I thought of a day—may it be soon!—when you and I might stand before that altar, with your people (my people, too, now) around us, and I shall hear yousay: ‘I, Shirley, take thee, John—’ And to think it is really to come true! Do you remember the text the minister preached from? It was ‘But all men perceive that they have riches, and that their faces shine as the faces of angels.’ I think I shall go about henceforth with my face shining, so that all men will see thatIhave riches—your love for me, dear.
“I am so happy I can hardly see the words—or perhaps it is that the sun has set. I am sending this over by Uncle Jefferson. Send me back just a word by him, sweetheart, to say I may come to you to-night. And add the three short words I am so thirsty to hear over and over—one verb between two pronouns—so that I can kiss them all at once!”
He raised his head, a little flushed and with eyes brilliant, lighted a candle, sealed the letter with the ring he wore and despatched it.
Thereafter he sat looking into the growing dusk, watching the pale lamps of the constellations deepen to green gilt against the lapis-lazuli of the sky, and listening to the insect noises dulling into the woven chorus of evening. Uncle Jefferson was long in returning, and he grew impatient finally and began to prowl through the dusky corridors like a leopard, then to the front porch and finally to the driveway, listening at every turn for the familiar slouching step.
When at length the old negro appeared, Valianttook the note he brought, his heart beating rapidly, and carried it hastily in to the candle-light. He did not open it at once, but sat for a full minute pressing it between his palms as though to extract from the delicate paper the beloved thrill of her touch. His hand shook slightly as he drew the folded leaves from the envelope. How would it begin? “My Knight of the Crimson Rose?” or “Dear Gardener?” (She had called him Gardener the day they had set out the roses) or perhaps even “Sweetheart”? It would not be long, only a mere “Yes” or “Come to me,” perhaps; yet even the shortest missive had its beginning and its ending.
He opened and read.
For an instant he stared unbelievingly. Then the paper crackled to a ball in his clutched hand, and he made a hoarse sound which was half a cry, then sat perfectly still, his whole face shuddering. What he crushed in his hand was no note of tender love-phrases; it was an abrupt dismissal. The staggering contretemps struck the color from his face and left every nerve raw and quivering. To be “nothing to her, as she could be nothing to him”? He felt a ghastly inclination to laugh. Nothing to her! The meaning of the lines was monstrous. It was inconceivable.
Presently, his brows frowning heavily, he spread out the crumpled paper and reread it with bitter slowness, weighing each phrase. “Something whichshe had learned since she last saw him, which lay between them.” She had not known it, then, last night, when they had kissed beside the sun-dial! She had loved him then! What could there be that thrust them irrevocably apart?
He sprang up and paced the floor in a blinding passion of resentment and revolt. “Youshall!youshall!” he said between his set teeth. “We belong to each other! There can be nothing, nothing to separate us!” Again he pored over the page. “She could not see him again, could not even explain.” The words seemed to echo themselves, bleak as hail on a prison pane. “If he went to St. Andrew’s, he might find the reason why.” What could she mean by the reference to St. Andrew’s? He caught at that as a clue. Could the old church tell him what had reared itself in such dismal fashion between them?
Without stopping to think of the darkness or that the friendly doors of the edifice would be closed, he caught up his hat and went swiftly down the drive to the road, along which he plunged breathlessly. The blue star-sprinkled sky was now streaked with clouds like faded orchids, and the shadows on the uneven ground under his hurried feet made him giddy. Through the din and hurly-burly of his thoughts he was conscious of dimly-moving shapes across fences, the sweet breath of cows, and a negro pedestrian who greeted him inpassing. He was stricken suddenly with the thought that Shirley was suffering, too. It seemed incredible that he should now be raging along a country road at nightfall to find something that so horribly hurt them both.
It was almost dark—save for the starlight—when he saw the shadow of the square ivy-grown spire rearing stark from its huddle of foliage against the blurred background. He pushed open the gate and went slowly up the worn path toward the great iron-bound and hooded door. Under the larches on either hand the outlines of the gravestones loomed pallidly, and from the bell-tower came the faint inquiring cry of a small owl. Valiant stood still, looking about him. What could he learn here? He read no answer to the riddle. A little to one side of the path something showed snow-like on the ground, and he went toward it. Nearer, he saw that it was a mass of flowers, staring up whitely from the semi-obscurity from within an iron railing. He bent over, suddenly noting the scent; it was cape jessamine.
With a curious sensation of almost prescience plucking at him, he took a box of vestas from his pocket and struck one. It flared up illuminating a flat granite slab in which was cut a name and inscription:
EDWARD SASSOON“Forgive us our trespasses.”
The silence seemed to crash to earth like a great looking-glass and shiver into a million pieces. The wax dropped from his fingers and in the supervening darkness a numb fright gripped him by the throat. Shirley had laid these there, on the grave of the man his father had killed—the cape jessamines she had wanted that day,for her mother! He understood.
It came to him at last that there was a chill mist groping among the trees and that he was very cold.
He went back along the Red Road stumblingly. Was this to be the end of the dream, which he had fancied would last forever? Could it be that she was not for him? Was it no hoary lie that the sins of the fathers were visited upon the third and fourth generation?
When he reentered the library the candle was guttering in the burned wings of a night-moth. The place looked all at once gaunt and desolate and despoiled. What could Virginia, what could Damory Court, be to him without her? The wrinkled note lay on the desk and he bent suddenly with a sharp catching breath and kissed it. There welled over him a wave of rebellious longing. The candle spread to a hazy yellow blur. The walls fell away. He stood under the moonlight, with his arms about her, his lips on hers and his heart beating to the sound of the violins behind them.
He laughed—a harsh wild laugh that rang through the gloomy room. Then he threw himself on the couch and buried his face in his hands. He was still lying there when the misty rain-wet dawn came through the shutters.
It was Sunday afternoon, and under the hemlocks, Rickey Snyder had gathered her minions—a dozen children from the near-by houses with the usual sprinkling of little blacks from the kitchens. There were parents, of course, to whom this mingling of color and degree was a matter of conventional prohibition, but since the advent of Rickey, in whose soul lay a Napoleonic instinct of leadership, this was more honored in the breach than in the observance.
“My! Ain’t it scrumptious here now!” said Cozy Cabell, hanging yellow lady-slippers over her ears. “I wish we could play here always.”
“Mr. Valiant will let us,” said Rickey. “I asked him.”
“Oh,hewill,” responded Cozy gloomily, “but he’ll probably go and marry somebody who’ll be mean about it.”
“Everybody doesn’t get married,” said one of the Byloe twins, with masculine assurance. “Maybe he won’t.”
“Much a boy knows about it!” retorted Cozy scornfully. ”Womenhaveto, and some one ofthem will make him. (Greenville Female Seminary Simms, if you slap that little nigger again, I’ll slapyou!)”
Greenie rolled over on the grass and tittered. “Miss Mattie Sue didn’,” she said. “Ah heah huh say de yuddah day et wuz er moughty good feelin’ ter go ter baid Mistis en git up Marstah!”
“Well,” said Cozy, tossing her head till the flower earrings danced, “I’m going to get married if the man hasn’t got anything but a character and a red mustache. Married women don’t have to prove they could have got a husband if they had wanted to.”
“Let’s play something,” proposed Rosebud Meredith, on whom the discussion palled. “Let’s play King, King Katiko.”
“It’s Sunday!”—this from her smaller and more righteous sister. “We’re forbidden to play anything but Bible games on Sunday, and if Rosebud does, I’ll tell.”
“Jay-bird tattle-tale!” sang Rosebud derisively. “Don’t care if you do!”
“Well,” decreed Rickey. “We’ll play Sunday-school then. It would take a saint to object to that. I’m superintendent and this stump’s my desk. All you children sit down under that tree.”
They ranged themselves in two rows, the white children, in clean Sabbath pinafores and go-to-meeting knickerbockers, in front and the colored ones, in ginghams and cotton-prints, in the rear—thehabitual expression of a differing social station. “Oh!” shrieked Miss Cabell, “and I’ll be Mrs. Merryweather Mason and teach the infants’ class.”
“There isn’t any infant class,” said Rickey. “How could there be when there aren’t any infants? The lesson is over and I’ve just rung the bell for silence. Children, this is Missionary Sunday, and I’m glad to see so many happy faces here to-day. Cozy,” she said, relenting, “you can be the organist if you want to.”
“I won’t,” said Cozy sullenly. “If I can’t be table-cloth I won’t be dish-rag.”
“All right, you needn’t,” retorted Rickey freezingly. “Sit up, Greenie. People don’t lie on their backs in Sunday-school.”
Greenie yawned dismally, and righted herself with injured slowness. “Ah diffuses ter ’cep’ yo’ insult, Rickey Snydah,” she said. “Ah’d ruthah lose mah ’ligion dan mah laz’ness. En Ah ’spises yo’ ’spisable dissisition!”
“Let us all rise,” continued Rickey, unmoved, “and singKingdom Coming.” And she struck up lustily, beating time on the stump with a stick:
“From all the dark places of earth’s heathen races,O, see how the thick shadows flee!”
“From all the dark places of earth’s heathen races,O, see how the thick shadows flee!”
and the rows of children joined in with unction, the colored contingent coming out strong on the chorus:
“De yerf shall be full ob de wunduhful storyAs watahs dat covah de sea!”
“De yerf shall be full ob de wunduhful storyAs watahs dat covah de sea!”
The clear voices in the quiet air startled the fluttering birds and sent a squirrel to the tip-top of an oak, from which he looked down, flirting his brush. They roused a man, too, who had lain in a sodden sleep under a bush at a little distance. He was ragged and soiled and his heavy brutal face, covered with a dark stubble of some days’ growth, had an ugly scar slanting from cheek to hair. Without getting up, he rolled over to command a better view, and set his eyes, blinking from their slumber, on the children.
“We will now take up the collection,” said Rickey. (“You can do it, June. Use a flat piece of bark). Remember that what we give to-day is for the poor heathen in—in Alabama.”
“That’s no heathen place,” objected Cozy with spirit. “My cousin lives in Alabama.”
“Well, then,” acquiesced Rickey, “anywhere you like. But I reckon your cousin wouldn’t be above taking the money. For the poor heathen who have never heard of God, or Virginia, or anything. Think of them and give cheerfully.”
The bark-slab made its rounds, receiving leaves, acorns, and an occasional pin. Midway, however, there arose a shrill shriek from the bearer and the collection was scattered broadcast. “Rosebud Meredith,” said Rickey witheringly, “it wouldserve you right for putting that toad in the plate if your hand would get all over warts! I’m sure I hope it will.” She rescued the fallen piece of bark and announced: “The collection this afternoon has amounted to a hundred dollars and seven cents. And now, children, we will skip the catechism and I will tell you a story.”
Her auditors hunched themselves nearer, a double row of attentive white and black faces, as Rickey with a preliminary bass cough, began in a drawling tone whose mimicry called forth giggles of ecstasy.
“There were once two little sisters, who went to Sunday-school and loved their teacher ve-e-ery much. They were always good and attentive—notlike that little nigger overthere! The one with his thumb in his mouth! One was little Mary and the other was little Susy. They had a mighty rich uncle who lived in Richmond, and once he came to see them and gave them each a dollar. And they were ve-e-ery glad. It wasn’t a mean old paper dollar, all dirt and creases; nor a battered whitey silver dollar; but it was a bright roundgolddollar, right out of the mint. Little Mary and little Susy could hardly sleep that night for thinking of what they could buy with those gold dollars.
“Early next morning they went down-town, hand in hand, to the store, and little Susy bought a bag of goober-peas, and sticks and sticks of striped candy, and a limber jack, and a gold ring, and a waxdoll with a silk dress on that could open and shut its eyes—”
“Huh!” said the captious Cozy. “You can’t buy a wax doll for a dollar. My littlest, littlest one cost three, and she didn’t have a stitch to her back!”
“Shut up!” said Rickey briefly. “Dolls were cheaper then.” She looked at the row of little negroes, goggle-eyed at the vision of such largess. “What do you think little Mary did withhergold dollar? She loved dolls and candy, too, but she had heard about the poo-oo-r heathen. There was a tear in her eye, but she took the dollar home, and next day when she went to Sunday-school, she dropped it in the missionary-box.
“Little children, what do you reckon became of that dollar? It bought a big satchelful of tracts for a missionary. He had been a poor man with six children and a wife with a bone-felon on her right hand—not a child old enough to wash dishes and all of them young enough to fall in the fire—so he had to go and be a missionary. He was going to Alabam—to a cannibal island, and he took the tracts and sailed away in a ship that landed him on the shore. And when the heathen cannibals saw him they were ve-e-ery glad, for there hadn’t been any shipwrecked sailors for a long time, and they were ve-e-ery hungry. So they tied up the missionary and gathered a lot of wood to make a fire and cook him.
“But it had rained and rained and rained for so long that the wood was all wet, and it wouldn’t burn, and they all cried because they were so hungry. And then they happened to find the satchelful of tracts, and the tracts were ve-e-erydry. They took them and stuck them under the wet wood, and the tracts burned and the wood caught fire and theycookedthe missionary and ATE him.
“Now, little children, which do you think did the most good with her dollar—little Susy or little Mary?”
The front row sniggered, and a sigh came from the colored ranks. “Dem ar’ can’bals,” gasped a dusky infant breathlessly, “—dey done eat up all dat candy en dem goober-peas, too?”
The inquiry was drowned in a shriek from several children in unison. They scrambled to their feet, casting fearful glances over their shoulders. The man who had been lying behind the bush had risen and was coming toward them at a slouching amble, one foot dragging slightly. His appearance, indeed, was enough to cause panic. With his savage face, set now in a grin, and his tramp-like costume, he looked fierce and animal-like. White and black, the children fled like startled rabbits, older ones dragging younger, without a backward look—all save Rickey, who stood quite still, her widening eyes fixed on him in a kind of blanched fascinated terror.
He came close to her, never taking his eyes from hers, then put his heavy grimy hand under her chin and turned her twitching face upward, chuckling.
“Ain’t afeahd, damn me!” he said with admiration. “Wouldn’t skedaddle with th’ fine folks’ white-livered young ’uns! Know who I am, don’t ye?”
“Greef King.” Rickey’s lips rather formed than spoke the name.
“Right. An’ I know you, too. Got jes’ th’ same look ez when ye wuzn’t no higher’n my knee. So ye ain’t at th’ Dome no mo’, eh? Purkle an’ fine linning an’ a eddication. Ho-ho! Goin’ ter make ye another ladyess like the sweet ducky-dovey that rescooed ye from th’ lovin’ embrace o’ yer fond step-parient, eh?”
Rickey’s small arm went suddenly out and her fingers tore at his shirt-band. “Don’t you,” she burst in a paroxysm of passion; “don’t you even speak her name! If you do, I’ll kill you!”
So fierce was her leap that he fell back a step in sheer surprise. Then he laughed loudly. “Why, ye little spittin’ wile-cat!” he grinned.
He leaned suddenly, gripped her wrist and covering her mouth tightly with his palm, dragged her behind a clump of dogwood bushes. A heavy step was coming along the wood-path. He held her motionless and breathless in this cruel grip till the pedestrian passed. It was Major Bristow, hisspruce white hat on the back of his head, his unsullied waistcoat dappled with the leaf-shadows. He stepped out briskly toward Damory Court, swinging his stick, all unconscious of the fierce scrutiny bent on him from behind the dogwoods.
Greef King did not withdraw his hand till the steps had died in the distance. When he did, he clenched his fist and shook it in the air. “There he goes!” he said with bitter hatred. “Yer noble friend that sent me up for six years t’ break my heart on th’ rock-pile! Oh, he’s a top-notcher, he is! But he’s got Greef King to reckon with yit!” He looked at her balefully and shook her.
“Look-a-yere,” he said in a hissing voice. “Ye rememberme. I’m a bad one ter fool with. Yer maw foun’ that out, I reckon. Now ye’ll promise me ye’ll tell nobody who ye’ve seen. I’m only a tramp; d’ye hear?” He shook her roughly.
Rickey’s fingers and teeth were clenched hard and she said no word. He shook her again viciously, the blood pouring into his scarred face. “Ye snivelin’ brat, ye!” he snarled. “I’ll show yer!” He began to drag her after him through the bushes. A few yards and they were on the brink of the headlong ugly chasm of Lovers’ Leap. She cast one desperate look about her and shut her eyes. Catching her about the waist he leaned over and held her out in mid-air, as if she had been a kitten. “Ye ain’t seen me, hev yer? Promise, or over yego. Ye won’t look so pretty when yere layin’ down there on them rocks!”
The child’s face was paper-white and she had begun to tremble like a leaf, but her eyes remained closed.
“One—two—” he counted deliberately.
Her eyes opened. She turned one shuddering glance below, then her resolution broke. She clutched his arm and broke into wild supplications. “I promise, I promise!” she cried. “Oh, don’t let go! I promise!”
He set her on the solid ground and released her, looking at her with a sneering laugh. “Now we’ll see ef ye belong here or up ter Hell’s-Half-Acre,” he said. “Fine folks keeps their promises, I’ve heerd tell.”
Rickey looked at him a moment shaking; then she burst into a passion of sobs and with her face averted ran from him like a deer through the bushes.
Shirley stood looking out at the rain. It was falling in no steady downpour which held forth promise of ending, but with a gentle constancy that gave the hills a look of sodden discomfort and made disconsolate miry pools by the roadside. The clouds were not too thick, however, to let through a dismal gray brightness that shone on the foliage and touched with glistening lines of high-light the draggled tufts of the soaked bluegrass. Now and then, across the dripping fields, fraying skeins of mist wandered, to lie curdled in the flooded hollows where, here and there, cattle stood lowing at intervals in a mournful key.
The indoors had become impossible to her. She was sick of trying to read, sick of the endless pacings and purposeless invention of needless tasks. She wanted movement, the cobwebby mist about her knees, the wet rain in her face. She ran up-stairs and came down clad in a close scarlet jersey, with leather gaiters and a soft hat.
Emmaline saw her thus accoutered with disapproval.“Lawdy-mercy, chile!” she urged; “you ain’t goin’ out? It’s rainin’ cats en dawgs!”
“I’m neither sugar nor salt, Emmaline,” responded Shirley listlessly, dragging on her rain-coat, “and the walk will do me good.”
On the sopping lawn she glanced up at her mother’s window. Since the night of the ball her own panging self-consciousness had overlaid the fine and sensitive association between them. She had been full of a horrible feeling that her face must betray her and the cause of her loss of spirits be guessed.
Her mother had, in fact, been troubled by this, but was far from guessing the truth. A somewhat long indisposition had followed her first sight of Valiant, and she had not witnessed the tournament. She had hung upon Shirley’s description of it, however, with an excited interest that the other was later to translate in the light of her own discovery. If the thought had flitted to her that fate might hold something deeper than friendship in Shirley’s acquaintance with Valiant, it had been of the vaguest. His choice of her as Queen of Beauty had seemed a natural homage to that swift and unflinching act of hers which had saved his life. There was in her mind a more obvious explanation of Shirley’s altered demeanor. “Perhaps it’s Chilly Lusk,” she had said to herself. “Have theyhad a foolish quarrel, I wonder? Ah, well, in her own time she will tell me.”
There was some relief to Shirley’s overcharged feelings in the very discomfort of the drenched weather: the sucking pull of the wet clay on her boots and the flirt of the drops on her cheeks and hair. She thrust her dog-skin gloves into her pocket and held her arms outstretched to let the wind blow through her fingers. The moisture clung in damp wreaths to her hair and rolled in great drops down her coat as she went.
The wildest, most secluded walks had always drawn her most and she instinctively chose one of these to-day. It was the road whereon squatted Mad Anthony’s whitewashed cabin. “Dah’s er man gwine look in dem eyes, honey, en gwine make ’em cry en cry.” She had forgotten the incident of that day, when he had read her fortune, but now the quavering prophecy came back to her with a shivering sense of reality. “Fo’ dah’s fiah en she ain’ afeahd, en dah’s watah en she ain’ afeahd. Et’s de thing whut eat de ha’at outen de breas’—dat whut she afeahd of!” If it were only fire and water that threatened her!
She struck her hands together with an inarticulate cry. She remembered the laugh in Valiant’s eyes as they had planted the roses, the characteristic gesturewith which he tossed the waving hair from his forehead—how she had named the ducks and the peacock and chosen the spots for his flowers; and she smiled for such memories, even in the stabbing knowledge that these dear trivial things could mean nothing to her in the future. She tried to realize that he was gone from her life, that he was the one man on earth whom to marry would be to strike to the heart her love and loyalty to her mother, and she said this over and over to herself in varying phrases:
“You can’t! No matter how much you love him, you can’t! His father deliberately ruined your mother’s life—your own mother! It’s bad enough to love him—you can’t help that. But you can help marrying him. You would hate yourself. You can never kiss him again, or feel his arms around you. You can’t touch his hand. You mustn’t even see him. Not if it breaks your heart—as your mother’s heart was broken!”
She had turned into an unbeaten way that ambled from the road through a track of tall oaks and pines, scarce more than a bridle-path, winding aimlessly through bracken-strewn depths so dense that even the wild-roses had not found them. In her childish hurts she had always fled to the companionship of the trees. She had known them every one—the black-gum and pale dogwood and gnarled hickory, the prickly-balled “button-wood,” thelowly mulberry and the majestic red oak and walnut. They had seemed friendly and pitying counselors, standing about her with arms intertwined. Now, with the rain weeping in soughing gusts through them, they offered her no comfort. She suddenly threw herself face down on the soaked moss.
“Oh, God!” she cried. “I love him so! And I had only that one evening. It doesn’t seem just. If I could only have him, and suffer some other way! He’s suffering, too, and it isn’t our fault! We neither of us harmed any one! He isn’t responsible for what his father did—why, he hardly knew him! Oh, God, why must it be so hard for us? Millions of other people love each other and nothing separates them like this!”
Shirley’s warm breath made a little fog against the star-eyed moss. She was scarcely conscious of her wet and clinging clothing, and the soaked strands of her hair. She was so wrapped in her desolation that she no longer heard the sound of the persevering rain and the wet swishing of the bushes—parting now to a hurried step that fell almost without sound on the spongy forest soil. She started up suddenly to see Valiant before her.
He was in a somewhat battered walking suit of brown khaki, with a leather belt and a felt hat whose brim, stiff with the wet, was curved down visor-wise over his brow. In an instant he haddrawn her upright, and they stood, looking at each other, drenched and trembling.
“How can you?” he said with a roughness that sounded akin to anger. “Here in this atrocious weather—like this!” he laid a hand on her arm. “You’re wet through.”
“I—don’t mind the rain,” she answered, drawing away, yet feeling with a guilty thrill the masterfulness of his tone, as well as its real concern. “I’m often wet.”
His gaze searched her face, feature by feature, noting her pallor, the blue-black shadows beneath her eyes, the caught breath, uneven like a child’s from crying. He still held her hands in his.
“Shirley,” he said, “I know what you intended to tell me by those flowers—I went to St. Andrew’s that night, in the dark, after I read your letter. Who told you? Your—mother?”
“No, no!” she cried. “She would never have told me!”
His face lighted. With an irresistible movement he caught her to him. “Shirley!” he cried. “It shan’t be! It shan’t, I tell you! You can’t break our lives in two like this! It’s unthinkable.”
“No, no!” she said piteously, pushing him from her. “You don’t understand. You are a man, and men—can’t.”
“I do understand,” he insisted. “Oh, my darling, my darling! It isn’t right for that spectralthing to come between us! Why, it belonged to a past generation! However sad the outcome of that duel, it held no dishonor. I know only too well the ruin it brought my father! It’s enough that it wrecked three lives. It shan’t rise again, like Banquo’s ghost to haunt ours! I know what you think—I would love you the more, if Icouldlove you more, for that sweet loyalty—but it’s wrong, dear. It’s wrong!”
“It’s the only way.”
“Listen. Your mother loves you. If she knew you loved me, she would bearanythingrather than have you suffer like this. You say she wouldn’t have told you herself. Why, if my father—”
She tore her hands from his and faced him with a cry. “Ah, that is it! You knew your father so little. He was never to you what she is to me. Why, I’ve been all the life she has had. I remember when she mended my dolls, and held me when I had scarlet fever, and sang me the songs the trees sang to themselves at night. I said my prayers at her knee till I was twelve years old. We were never apart a day till I went away to school.”
She paused, breathless.
“Doesn’t that prove what I say?” he said, bending toward her. “She loves you far better than herself. She wantsyourhappiness.”
“Could that mean hers?” she demanded, her bosom heaving. “To see us together—always—always!To be reminded in everything—the lines of your face—the tones of your voice, maybe,—ofthat! Oh, you don’t know how women feel—how they remember—how they grieve! I’ve gone over all you can say till my soul cries out, but it can’t change it. It can’t!”
Valiant felt as though he were battering with bruised knuckles at a stone wall. A helpless anger simmered in him. “Suppose,” he said bitterly, “that your mother one day, perhaps after long years, learns of your sacrifice. She is likely to guess in the end, I think. Will it add to her pleasure, do you fancy, to discover that out of this conception of filial loyalty—for it’s that, I suppose!—you have spoiled your own life?”
She shuddered. “She will never learn,” she said brokenly. “Oh, I know she would not have spoken. She would suffer anything for my happiness. But I wouldn’t have her bear any more for my sake.”
His anger faded suddenly, and when he looked at her again, tears were burning in his eyes.
“Shirley!” he said. “It’smyheart, too, that you are binding on the wheel! I love you. I want nothing but you! I’d rather beg my bread from door to door with your hand in mine than sit on a throne without you! What can there be in life for me unless you share it? Think of our love! Think of the fate that brought me here to find you in Virginia! Think of our garden—where I thought wewould live and work and dream, till we were old and gray—together, darling! Don’t throw our love away like this!”
His entreaties left her only whiter, but unmoved. She shook her head, gazing at him through great clear tears that welled over and rolled down her cheeks.
“I can’t fight,” she said. “I have no strength left.” She put out her hand as she spoke and dropped it with a little limp gesture that had in it tired despair, finality and hopelessness. It caught at his heart more strongly than any words. He felt a warm gush of pity and tenderness.
He took her hand gently without speaking, and pressed it hard against his lips. It seemed to him very small and cold.
They passed together through the wet bracken, his strong arm guiding her over the uneven path, and came to the open in silence.
“Don’t come with me,” she said then, and without a backward glance, went rapidly from him down the shimmering road.
Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat!—Major Bristow’s ivory-headed camphor-wood stick thumped on the great door of Damory Court. The sound had a tang of impatience, for he had used the knocker more than once without result. Now he strode to the end of the porch and raised his voice in a stentorian bellow that brought Uncle Jefferson shuffling around the path from the kitchens with all the whites of his eyes showing.
“You dog-gone lazy rascal!” thundered the major. “What do you mean, sah, by keeping a gentleman cooling his heels on the door-step like a tax-collector? Where’s your master?”
“Fo’ de Lawd, Major, Ah ain’ seen Mars’ John sence dis mawnin’. Staht out aftah breakfus’ en he nevah showed up ergen et all. Yo’ reck’n whut de mattah, suh?” he added anxiously. “’Peahs lak sumpin’ preyin’ on he mind. Don’ seem er bit hese’f lately.”
“H-m-m!” The major looked thoughtful. “Isn’t he well?”
“No,suh. Ain’ et no mor’n er hummin’-buhd dese las’ few days. Jes’ hangs eroun’ lonesome lak. Don’ laugh no mo’, don’ sing no mo’. Ain’ play de pianny sence de day aftah de ball. Me en Daph moght’ly pestered ’bout him.”
“Pshaw!” said the major. “Touch of spring fever, I reckon. Aunt Daph feeds him too well. Give him less fried chicken and more ash-cake and buttermilk. Make him some juleps.”
The old negro shook his head. “Moghty neah use up all dat mint-baid Ah foun’,” he said, “but ain’ do no good. Majah, Ah’s sho’ ’feahed sumpin’ gwineter happen.”
“Nonsense!” the major sniffed. “What fool idea’s got under your wool now? Been seeing Mad Anthony again, I’ll bet a dollar.”
Uncle Jefferson swallowed once or twice with seeming difficulty and turned the gravel with his toe. “Dat’s so,” he said gloomily. “Ah done see de old man de yuddah day ’bout et. Ant’ny,heknow! He see trouble er-comin’ en trouble er-gwine. Dat same night de hoss-shoe drop off’n de stable do’, en dis ve’y mawnin’ er buhd done fly inter de house. Das’ er mighty bad hoodoo, er mighty bad hoodoo!”
“Shucks!” said the major. “You’re as loony as old Anthony, with your infernal signs. If your Mars’ John’s been out all day I reckon he’ll turn up before long. I’ll wait for him a while.”He started in, but paused on the threshold. “Did you say—ah—that mint was all gone, Unc’ Jefferson?”
Uncle Jefferson’s lips relaxed in a wide grin. “Ah reck’n dah’s er few stray sprigs lef’, suh. Step in en mek yo’se’f et home. Ef Mars’ John see yo’, he be mought’ly hoped up. Ah gwineter mix yo’ dat julep in two shakes!”
He disappeared around the corner of the porch and the major strode into the hall, threw his gray slouch hat on the table, and sat down.
It was quiet and peaceful, that ancient hall. He fell to thinking of the many times, of old, when he had sat there. The house was the same again, now. It had waked from a thirty-years’ slumber to a renewed prime. Only he had lived on meanwhile and now was old! He sighed.
How gay the place had been the night of the ball, with the lights and roses and music! He remembered what the doctor had said about Valiant and Shirley—it had lain ever since in his mind, a painful speculation. The recollection roused another thought from which he shrank. He stirred uneasily. What on earth kept that old darky so long over that julep?
A slight noise made him turn his head. But nothing moved. Only a creak of the woodwork, he thought, and settled back again in his chair.
It was, in fact, a stealthy footfall he had heard. It came from the library, where a shabby figure crouched, listening, in the corner behind the tapestried screen—a man evilly clad, with a scarred cheek.
It had been with no good purpose that Greef King had dogged the major these last days. He hugged a hot hatred grown to white heat in six years of prison labor within bleak walls at the clicking shoe-machine, or with the chain-gang on blazing or frosty turnpikes. He had slunk behind him that afternoon, creeping up the drive under cover of the bushes, and while the other talked with Uncle Jefferson, had skirted the house and entered from the farther side, through an open French window. Now as he peered from behind the screen, a poker, snatched from the fireplace, was in his hand. His furtive gaze fell upon a morocco-covered case on a commode by his side. He lifted its lid and his eyes narrowed as he saw that it held a pistol. He set down the poker noiselessly and took the weapon. He tilted it—it was rusted, but there were loads in the chambers. He crouched lower, with a whispered curse: the major was coming into the library, but not alone—the old nigger was with him!
Uncle Jefferson bore a tray with a frosted goblet over whose rim peeped green leaves and which spread abroad an ambrosial odor, which the majorsniffed approvingly as the other set the burden on the desk at his elbow.
“Majah,” said the latter solemnly, “you reck’n Mars’ John en Miss Shirley—”
“Good lord!” said the major, wheeling to the small ormolu clock on the desk. “It’s ’most four o’clock. Haven’t you any idea where he’s gone?”
“No, suh, less’n he’s gwineter look ovah dem walnut trees. Whut Ah’s gwine ter say—yo’ reck’n Mars’ John en Miss—”
“Walnut trees? Is he going to sell them?”
“Tree man come f’om up Norf’ somewhah ter see erbout et yistiddy. Yas, suh. Yo’ reck’n Mars’ John en—”
“Nice pot of money tied up in that timber!Hesaw it right off. You’re a lucky old rascal to have him for a master.”
“Hyuh, hyuh!” agreed Uncle Jefferson. “Dam’ry Co’ot er heap bettah dan drivin’ er ol’ stage ter de deepo fer drummahs en lightnin’-rod agents. Ah sho’ do pray de Good Man ter mek Mars’ John happy,” he added soberly, “but Ah’s mought’ly ’sturbed in mah mind—mought’ly ’sturbed!”
The hidden watcher waited motionless. From where he stood he could look through the rear window. He waited till he saw the negro’s bent figure disappear into the kitchens. Then he noiselessly lifted himself upright, and resting the pistolon the screen-top, took deliberate aim and pulled the trigger.
The hammer clicked sharply on the worthless thirty-year old cartridge, and the major sprang around with an exclamation, as with an oath, the other dashed the screen aside and again pulled the trigger.
“You infernal murderer!” cried the major. It was all he said, for, as he swung his chair up, the one-time bully of Hell’s-Half-Acre rushed in and struck him a single sledge-hammer blow with the clubbed pistol. It fell full on the major’s temple, and the heavy iron crashed through.
Greef King stood an instant breathing hard, then, without withdrawing his eyes from the prostrate form, his hand groped for the cold goblet and lifting it to his lips he drained it to its dregs. “There!” he said. “There’s my six-years’ debt paid in full, ye lily-livered, fancy-weskited hellion! Take that from the mayor of the Dome!”
There was a man’s step on the gravel and the sudden bark of a dog. The pistol fell from his hand. He stole on tiptoe along the corridor and leaped through the French window. As he dashed across the lawn, a startled cry came from the house behind him.
No human eye had seen him, but he had been observed for all that: Run your best now, Greef King! Double and turn how you will, there is aswifter Nemesis pursuing. It is only a dog, and not a big one at that, but it is of a faithful breed that knows neither fear nor quarter. Like white lightning, without a bark or growl, Chum launched himself on the fleeing quarry, and in the shadow of the trees his teeth met in the ragged trousers-leg.
Kicking, beating with his hands at the dragging weight, the man dashed on. Not till they had reached the hemlocks was that fierce grip broken, and then it was with a tearing of flesh and sinew. Panting, snarling with rage and pain, the man seized a fallen branch and stood at bay, striking out with vicious sweeping blows. But the bulldog, the hair bristling up on his thick neck, his red-rimmed eyes fiery, circled beyond reach of the flail, crouching for another spring.
Again he launched himself, and the man, dodging, blundered full-face into a thorn-bush. The sharp spines slashed his forehead and the starting blood blinded him, so that he ran without sense of direction—straight upon the declivity of Lovers’ Leap.
He was toppling on its edge before he could stop, and then threw himself backward, clutching desperately at the slippery fern-covered rock, feeling his feet dangling over nothing. He dug his fingers into the yielding soil and with knee and elbow strove frenziedly to crawl to the path.
But the white bulldog was upon him. The clamping teeth met in the striving fingers, and with a scream of pain Greef King’s hold let go and dog and man went down together.
Ten minutes later a motor was hurling itself along the Red Road to the village. The doctor was in his office and no time was lost in the return. En route they passed Judge Chalmers driving, and seeing the flying haste, he turned his sweating pair and lashed them after the car.
So that when the major finally opened his eyes from the big leather couch, he looked on the faces of two of his oldest friends. Recollection and understanding seemed to come at once.
“Well—Southall?”
The doctor’s hand closed over the white one on the settee. He did not answer, but his chin was quivering and he was winking fast.
“How long?” asked the major after a lengthy minute.
“Maybe—maybe an hour, Bristow. Maybe not.”
The major winced and shut his eyes, but when the doctor, reaching swiftly for a phial on the table, turned again, it was to find that look once more on him, now in yearning appeal. “Southall,” he said,“send for Judith. I—I must see her. There’s time.”
The judge started up. “I’ll bring her,” he said, and his voice had all the tenderness of a woman’s. “My carriage is at the door and with those horses she ought to be here in twenty minutes.” He leaned over the couch. “Bristow,” he said, “would you—would you like me to send for the rector?”
The major smiled, a little wistfully, and shook his head. He lay silent for a while after the judge had gone out—he seemed housing his strength—while the ormolu clock on the desk ticked ominously on, and the doctor busied himself with the glasses beside him. Presently he said huskily:
“You’ve had a bad fall, Bristow. You were dizzy, I reckon.”
“Dizzy!” echoed the major with feeble asperity. “It was Greef King.”
“Greef King! Good God!”
“He was hiding behind the screen. He struck me with something. He swore at his trial he’d get me. I was—a fool not to have remembered his time was out.”
A look, wolf-like and grim, had sprung into the doctor’s face. His eyes searched the room, and he crossed the floor and picked up something from the rug. He looked at it a moment, then thrust it hastily into his breast pocket.
“I—remember now. It was a pistol. He snapped it twice, but it missed fire.”
“He can’t hide where we’ll not find him!” The doctor spoke with low but terrible energy.
“Not that I care—myself,” said the major difficultly. “But I reckon he’d better be settled with, or he’ll—be killing some one worth while one of these days.”
A big tear suddenly loosed itself from the doctor’s eyelid and rolled down his cheek, and he turned hastily away.
“There’s no call to feel bad,” said the major gruffly. “I’ve sort of been a thorn-in-the-flesh to you, Southall. We always rowed, somehow, and yet—”
The doctor choked and cleared his throat.
“I reckon,” the major murmured with a faint smile, “you won’t get quite so much fun out of Chalmers—and the rest. They never did rise to you like I did.”
A little later he asked for the restorative. “Ten minutes gone,” he said then. “Chalmers ought to be at Rosewood by now ... what a fool way to go—like this. But it wasn’t—apoplexy, Southall, anyway.”
At the sound of wheels on the drive, Valiant went out quietly. Huddled in a corner of the hall were Uncle Jefferson and Aunt Daphne, with Jereboam,the major’s body-servant. Aunt Daphne, her apron thrown over her face was rocking to and fro silently, and old Jereboam’s head was bowed on his breast. Valiant went quickly to the rear of the hall. A painful embarrassment had come to him—a curious confusion mingling with a fastidious sense of shrinking. How should he meet this woman who recoiled from the very sight of his face? In the swiftness of the tragic event he had forgotten this. From the background he saw Judge Chalmers lift down the frail form, and suddenly his heart leaped. There were two feminine figures; Shirley was with her mother.
The doctor stood just inside the library door and Mrs. Dandridge went hastily toward him, her light cane tapping through the stricken silence. Jereboam lifted his head and looked at her piteously.
“Reck’n Mars’ Monty cyan’ see ole Jerry now,” he quavered, “but yo’-all gib him mah love, Mis’ Judith, and tell him—” His voice broke.
“Yes, yes, Jerry. I will.”
The doctor closed the door upon her and came to where Shirley waited. “Come, my dear,” he said, and dropped his arm about her. “Let us go out to the garden.”
As they passed Valiant, she held out her hand to him. There was no word between them, but as his hand swallowed hers, his heart said to her, “Ilove you, I love you! No matter what is between us, I shall always love you!”
It was wordless, a heart-whisper that only love itself could hear, and he could read no answer in the deep pools of her eyes, heavy now with unshed tears. But in some subtle way this voiceless greeting comforted and lightened by a little the weight of dumb impotence that he had borne.
In the library, lighted so brightly by the sunlight, yet grave with the hush of that solemn presence, the major looked into the face of the woman for whose coming he had waited so anxiously.
“It’s all—up, Judith,” he said faintly. “I’ve come to the jumping-off place.”
She looked at him whitely. “Monty, Monty!” she cried. “Don’t leave me this way! I always thought—”
He guessed what she would have said. “Heaven knows you’re needed more than me, Judith. After all, I reckon when my time had to come I’d have chosen the quick way.” His voice trailed out and he struggled for breath.
“Jerry’s in the hall, Monty. He asked me to give you his love.”
“Poor old nigger! He—used to tote me on his back when I was a little shaver.” There was a silence. “Don’t kneel, Judith,” he said at length. “You will be so tired.”
She rose obediently and drew up a chair. “Monty,” she faltered tremulously, “shall I say a prayer? I’ve never prayed much—my prayers never seemed to get above the ceiling, somehow. But I’ll—try.”
He smiled wanly. “I wouldn’t want any better than yours, Judith. But seems as if I’d been prayed over enough. I reckon God Almighty’s like anybody else, and doesn’t want to be ding-donged all the time.”
He seemed to have been gathering his resolution, and presently his hand fumbled over his breast. “My wallet; give it to me.” She drew it from the pocket and the uncertain fingers took out a key. “It opens a tin box in my trunk. There’s—a letter in it for you.” He paused a moment, panting: “Judith,” he said, “I’ve got to tell you, but it’s mighty hard. The letter ... it’s one Valiant gave me for you—that morning, after the duel. I—never gave it to you.”
If she had been white before, she grew like marble now. Her slim fingers clutched the little cane till it rattled against the chair, and the lace at her throat shook with her breathing. “Yes—Monty.”
He lifted his hand with difficulty and put the key into hers. “The seal’s still unbroken, Judith,” he said, “but I’ve kept it these thirty years.”
She was holding the key in her hands, lookingdown upon it. There was a strained half-fearful wonder in her face. For an instant she seemed quite to have forgotten him in the grip of some swift and painful emotion.
“I loved you, Judith!” he stammered in anguished appeal. “From the time we were boy and girl together, I loved you. You never cared for me—Sassoon and Valiant had the inside track. You might have loved me; but I had no chance with either of them. Then came the duel. There was only Valiant then. I overheard his promise to you that night, Judith. He had broken that! If you cared more for him than for Sassoon, you might have forgiven him, and I should have lost you! I didn’t want you to call him back, Judith! I wanted my chance! And so—I took it. That’s—the reason, dear. It’s—it’s a bad one, isn’t it!”
A shiver went over her set face—like a breath of wind over tall grass, and she seemed to come back from an infinite distance to place and moment. Between the curtains a white butterfly hovered an instant, and in the yard she heard the sound of some winged thing fluttering. The thought darted to her that it was the sound of her own dead heart awaking. She looked at the key and all at once put a hand to her mouth as though to still words clamoring there.
“Judith,” he said tremulously, between shortstruggles for breath, “all these years, after I found there was no chance for me, I reckon I’ve—prayed only one prayer. ‘God, let it be Sassoon that she loved!’ And I’ve prayed that mighty near every day. The thought that maybe it was Valiant has haunted me like a ghost. You never told—and I never dared ask you. Judith—”
Her face was still averted, and when she did not speak he turned his head from her on the pillow, with a breath that was almost a moan. She started, looking at him an instant in piteous hesitation, then swiftly kissed the little key and closed her hand tight upon it. Truth? She saw only the pillow and the graying face upon it! She threw herself on her knees by the couch and laid her lips on the pallid forehead.
“It—itwasSassoon, Monty,” she said, and her voice broke on the first lie she had ever told.
“Thank God!” he gasped. He struggled to raise himself on his elbow, then suddenly the strength faded out and he settled back.
Her cry brought the doctor, but this time the restorative seemed of no avail, and after a time he came and touched her shoulder. With a last long look at the ash-pale face on the settee she followed him from the room. In the yellow parlor he put her into a chair.
“No,” he said, in answer to her look, “he won’t rouse again.”
“I will wait,” she told him, and he left her, shutting the door with careful softness.
But the slight figure with its silver hair, sitting there, was not alone. Ghosts were walking up and down. Not the misty wraiths John Valiant had at times imagined went flitting along the empty corridors, but faces very clear in the sunlight, that came and went with the memories so long woven over by the shuttle of time—evoked now by the touch of a key that her hand still clenched tightly in its palm.
There welled over her in a tide those days of puzzle, the weeks of waiting silence, the slow inexorable months of heartache, the long years that had deepened the mystery of Beauty Valiant’s exile. In the first shock of the news that Sassoon had fallen by his hand, she had thought she could not forgive him that broken faith. She and his promise to her had not weighed in the balance against his idea of manly “honor”! But this bitterness had at length slipped away. “He will write,” she had told herself, “and explain.” But no word had come. Whispers had flitted to her—the tale of Sassoon’s intoxication—stinging barbs that clung to Beauty Valiant’s name. That these should rest unanswered had filled her with resentment and anger. Slowly, but with deadly surety, had grown the belief that he no longer cared. In the end there had been left her only pride—the pride that coversits wound and smiles. And she had hidden her wound with flowers. But in the deepest well of her heart her love for him had rested unchanged, clear and defined as a moss in amber, wrapped in that mystery of silence.
In the little haircloth trunk back in her room lay an old scrap-book. It held a few leaves torn from letters and many newspaper clippings. From these she had known of his work, his marriage, the great commercial success for which his name had stood—the name that from the day of his going, she had so seldom taken upon her lips. Some of them had dealt with his habits and idiosyncrasies, hints of an altered personality, an aloofness or loneliness that had set him apart and made him, in a way, a stranger to those who should have known him best. Thus her mind had come to hold a double image: the grave man these shadowed forth, and the man she had loved, whose youthful face was in the locket she wore always on her breast. It was this face that was printed on her heart, and when John Valiant had stood before her on the porch at Rosewood, it had seemed to have risen, instinct, from that old grave.
He had not kept silence! He had written! It pealed through her brain like a muffled bell. But Beauty Valiant was gone with her youth; in the room near by lay that old companion who would never speak to her again, the lifelong friend—whohad really failed her thirty years ago!... and in a tin box a mile away lay a letter....
“He won’t rouse again,” the doctor had said, but a little later, as he and Valiant sat beside the couch, the major opened his eyes suddenly.
“Shirley,” he whispered. “Where’s Shirley?”
She was sitting on the porch just outside the open window, and when she entered, tears were on her face. The doctor drew back silently; but when Valiant would have done so, the major called him nearer.
“No,” he panted; “I like to see you two together.” His voice was very weak and tired.
As she leaned and touched his hand, he smiled whimsically. “It’s mighty curious,” he said, “but I can’t get it out of my head that it’s Beauty Valiant and Judith that I’m really talking to. Foolish—isn’t it?” But the idea seemed to master him, and presently he began to call Shirley by her mother’s name. An odd youthfulness crept into his eyes; a subtle paradoxical boyishness. His cheek tinged with color. The deep lines about his mouth smoothed miraculously out.
“Judith,” he whispered, “—you—sure you told me the truth a while ago, when you said—you said—”
“Yes, yes,” Shirley answered, putting her young arm under him, thinking only to soothe the anxietythat seemed vaguely to thread some vague hallucination.
He smiled again. “It makes it easier,” he said. He looked at Valiant, his mind seeming to slip farther and farther away. “Beauty,” he gasped, “you didn’t go away after all, did you! I dreamed it—I reckon. It’ll be—all right with you both.”
He sighed peacefully, and his eyes turned to Shirley’s and closed. “I’m—so glad,” he muttered, “so glad I—didn’t really do it, Judith. It would have—been the—only—low-down thing—I—ever did.”
The doctor went swiftly to the door and beckoned to Jereboam. “Come in now, Jerry,” he said in a low voice, “quickly.”
The old negro fell on his knees by the couch. “Mars’ Monty!” he cried. “Is yo’ gwine away en leab ol’ Jerry? Is yo’? Mars’?”
The cracked but loving voice struck across the void of the failing sense. For a last time the major opened his misting eyes.
“Jerry, you—black scoundrel!” he whispered, and Shirley felt his head grow heavier on her arm, “I reckon it’s—about time—to be going—home!”