The grim posse that gathered in haste that afternoon did not ride far. Its work had been singularly well done. It brought back to Damory Court, however, a white bulldog whose broken leg made his would-be joyful bark trail into a sad whimper as his owner took him into welcoming arms.
Next day the major was carried to his final rest in the myrtled shadow of St. Andrew’s. At the service the old church was crowded to its doors. Valiant occupied a humble place at one side—the others, he knew, were older friends than he. The light of the late afternoon came dimly in through the stained-glass windows and seemed to clothe with subtle colors the voice of the rector as he read the solemn service. The responses came brokenly, and there were tears on many faces.
Valiant could see the side-face of the doctor, its saturnine grimness strangely moved, and beyond him, Shirley and her mother. Many glanced at them, for the major’s will had been opened that morning and few there had been surprised to learnthat, save for a life-annuity for old Jereboam, he had left everything he possessed to Shirley. Miss Mattie Sue was beside them, and between, wan with weeping, sat Rickey Snyder. Shirley’s arm lay shelteringly about the small shoulders as if it would stay the passion of grief that from time to time shook them.
The evening before had been further darkened by the child’s disappearance and Miss Mattie Sue had sat through half the night in tearful anxiety. It was Valiant who had solved the riddle. In her first wild compunction, Rickey had gasped out the story of her meeting with Greef King, his threat and her own terrorized silence, and when he heard of this he had guessed her whereabouts. He had found her at the Dome, in the deserted cabin from which on a snowy night six years ago, Shirley had rescued her. She had fled there in her shabbiest dress, her toys and trinkets left behind, taking with her only a string of blue glass beads that had been Shirley’s last Christmas present.
“Let me stay!” she had wailed. “I’m not fit to live down there! It’s all my fault that it happened. I was a coward. I ought to stay here in Hell’s-Half-Acre forever and ever!” Valiant had carried her back in his arms down the mountain—she had been too spent to walk.
He thought of this now as he saw that arm about the child in that protective, almost motherly gesture.It made his own heartache more unbearable. Such a little time ago he had felt that arm abouthim!
He leaned his hot head against the cool plastered wall, trying to keep his mind on the solemn reading. But Shirley’s voice and laugh seemed to be running eerily through the chanting lines, and her face shut out pulpit and lectern. It swept over him suddenly that each abominable hour could but make the situation more impossible for them both. He had seen her as she entered the church, had thought her even paler than in the wood, the bluish shadows deeper under her eyes. Those delicate charms were in eclipse.
And it was he who was to blame!
It came to him with a stab of enlightenment. He had been thinking only of himself all the while. But for her, it was his presence that had now become the unbearable thing. A cold sweat broke on his forehead. “... for I am a stranger with thee, and a sojourner: as all my fathers were. O spare me a little, that I may recover my strength before I go hence....” The intoning voice fell dully on his ears.
To go away! To pass out of her life, to a future empty of her? How could he do that? When he had parted from her in the rain he had felt a frenzy of obstinacy. It had seemed so clear that the barrier must in the end yield before their love. He had never thought of surrender. Now he told himselfthat flight was all that was left him. She—her happiness—nothing else mattered. Damory Court and its future—the plans he had made—the Valiant name—in that clarifying instant he knew that all these, from that May day on the Red Road, had clung abouther. She had been the inspiration of all.
“Lead, kindly Light, amid th’ encircling gloom—”
The voices of the unvested choir rose clearly and some one at his side was whispering that this had been the major’s favorite hymn. But he scarcely heard.
When the service was ended the people filled the big yard while the last reverent words were spoken at the grave. Valiant, standing with the rest, saw Shirley, with her mother and the doctor, pass out of the gate. She was not looking toward him. A mist was before his eyes as they drove away, and the vision of her remained wavering and indistinct—a pale blurred face under shining hair.
He realized after a time that the yard was empty and the sexton was locking the church door. He went slowly to the gate, and just outside some one spoke to him. It was Chisholm Lusk. They had not met since the night of the ball. Even in his own preoccupation, Valiant noted that Lusk’s face seemed to have lost its exuberant youthfulness. It was worn as if with sleeplessness, and had a look ofsuffering that touched him. And all at once, while they stood looking at each other, Valiant knew what the other had waited to say.
“I won’t beat about the bush,” said Lusk stammering. “I’ve got to ask you something. I reckon you’ve guessed that I—that Shirley—”
Valiant touched the young fellow’s arm. “Yes,” he said, “I think I know.”
“It’s no new thing, with me,” said the other hoarsely. “It’s been three years. The night of the ball, I thought perhaps that—I don’t mean to ask what you might have a right to resent—but I must find out. Is there any reason why I shouldn’t try my luck?”
Valiant shook his head. “No,” he said heavily, “there is no reason.”
The boyish look sprang back to Lusk’s face. He drew a long breath. “Why, then Iwill,” he said. “I—I’m sorry if I hurt you. Heaven knows I didn’t want to!”
He grasped the other’s hand with a man’s heartiness and went up the road with a swinging stride; and Valiant stood watching him go, with his hands tight-clenched at his side.
A little later Valiant climbed the sloping driveway of Damory Court. It seemed to stare at him from a thousand reproachful eyes. The bachelorred squirrel from his tree-crotch looked down at him askance. The redbirds, flashing through the hedges, fluttered disconsolately. Fire-Cracker, the peacock, was shrieking from the upper lawn and the strident discord seemed to mock his mood.
The great house had become home to him; he told himself that he would make no other. The few things he had brought—his books and trophies—had grown to be a part of it, and they should remain. The ax should not be laid to the walnut grove. As his father had done, he would leave behind him the life he had lived there, and the old Court should be once more closed and deserted. Uncle Jefferson and Aunt Daphne might live on in the cabin back of the kitchens. There was pasturage for the horse and the cows and for old Sukey, and some acres had already been cleared for planting. And there would be the swans, the ducks and chickens, the peafowl and the fish.
A letter had come to him that morning. The Corporation had resumed business with credit unimpaired. Public opinion was more than friendly now. A place waited for him there, and one of added honor, in a concern that had rigorously cleansed itself and already looked forward to a new career of prosperity. But he thought of this now with no thrill. The old life no longer called. There were still wide unpeopled spaces somewhere where aman’s hand and brain were no less needed, and there was work there that would help him to bear, if not forget.
He paced up and down the porch under the great gray columns, his steps spiritless and lagging. The Virginia creeper, trailing over its end, waved to and fro with a sound like a sigh. How long would it be before the lawn was once more unkempt and draggled? Before burdock and thistle, mullein and Spanish-needle would return to smother the clover? Before Damory Court, on which he had spent such loving labor, would lie again as it lay that afternoon when he had rattled thither on Uncle Jefferson’s crazy hack? Before there would be for him, in some far-away corner of the world, only Wishing-House and the Never-Never Land?
In the hall he stood a moment before the fireplace, his eyes on its carven motto,I clinge: the phrase was like a spear-thrust. He began to wander restlessly through the house, up and down, like a prowling animal. The dining-room looked austere and chill—only the little lady in hoops and love-curls who had been his great-grandmother smiled wistfully down from her gilt frame above the console—and in the library a melancholy deeper than that of yesterday’s tragedy seemed to hang, through which Devil-John, drawing closer the leash of his leaping hound, glared sardonically at him from his one cold eye. The shutters of the parlor wereclosed, but he threw them open and let the rich light pierce the yellow gloom, glinting from the figures in the cabinet and weaving a thousand tiny rainbows in the prisms of the great chandelier.
He went up-stairs, into the bedrooms one by one, now and then passing his hand over a polished chair-back or touching an ornament or a frame on the wall: intoThe Hilariumwith its records of childish study and play. The dolls stood now on dress-parade in glass cases, and prints in bright colors, dear to little people, were on the walls. He opened the shutters here, too, and stood some time on the threshold before he turned and went heavily down-stairs.
Through the rear door he could see the kitchens, and Aunt Daphne sitting under the trumpet-vine piecing a nine-patch calico quilt with little squares of orange and red and green cloth. Two diminutive darkies were sprawled on the ground looking up at her with round serious eyes, while a wary bantam pecked industriously about their bare legs.
“En den whut de roostah say, Aunt Daph?”
“Ol’ roostah he hollah ter all he wifes, ‘Oo—ooo! Oo—ooo! YoungMars’come!—YoungMars’come! YoungMars’come!’ En dey all mighty skeered, ’case Mars’ John he cert’n’y fond ob fried chick’n. But de big tuhkey gobbler he don’ b’leeve et ’tall. ‘Doubtful—doubtful—doubtful!’ he say, lak dat. Den de drake he peeperoun’ de cornah, en he say, ‘Haish! Haish! Haish!’ Fo’ he done seed Mars’ John comin’, sho’ nuff. But et too late by den, fo’ Aunt Daph she done grab Mis’ Pullet, en Mars’ John he gwineter eat huh dis bery evenin’ fo’ he suppah. Now you chillen run erlong home ter yo’ mammies, en don’ yo’ pick none ob dem green apples on de way, neidah.”
It was not till after dark had come that Valiant said good-by to the garden. He loved it best under the starlight. He sat a long hour under the pergola overlooking the lake, where he could dimly see the green rocks, and the white froth of the water bubbling and chuckling down over their rounded outlines to the shrouded level below. The moon lifted finally and soared through the sky, blowing out the little lamps of stars. Under its light a gossamer mist robed the landscape in a shimmering opalescence, in which tree and shrub altered their values and became transmuted to silver sentinels, watching over a demesne of violet-velvet shadows filled with sleepy twitterings and stealthy rustlings and the odor of wild honeysuckle.
At last he stood before the old sun-dial, rearing its column from its pearly clusters of blossoms. “I count no hours but the happy ones”: he read the inscription with an indrawn breath. Then, groping at its base, he lifted the ivy that had oncerambled there and drew up the tangle again over the stone disk. His Bride’s-Garden!
In the library, an hour later, sitting at the big black pigeonholed desk, he wrote to Shirley:
“I am leaving to-night on the midnight train. Uncle Jefferson will give you this note in the morning. I will not stay at Damory Court to bring more pain into your life. I am going very far away. I understand all you are feeling—and so, good-by, good-by. God keep you! I love you and I shall love you always, always!”
“I am leaving to-night on the midnight train. Uncle Jefferson will give you this note in the morning. I will not stay at Damory Court to bring more pain into your life. I am going very far away. I understand all you are feeling—and so, good-by, good-by. God keep you! I love you and I shall love you always, always!”
Though the doctor left the church with Shirley and her mother, he did not drive to Rosewood, but to his office. There, alone with Mrs. Dandridge while Shirley waited in the carriage, he unlocked the little tin box that had been the major’s, with the key Mrs. Dandridge gave him, and put into her hands a little packet of yellow oiled-silk which bore her name. He noted that it agitated her profoundly and as she thrust it into the bosom of her dress, her face seemed stirred as he had never seen it. When he put her again in the carriage, he patted her shoulder with a touch far gentler than his gruff good-by.
At Rosewood, at length, alone in her room, she sat down with the packet in her hands. During the long hours since first the little key had lain in her palm like a live coal, she had been all afire with eagerness. Now the moment had come, she was almost afraid.
She tried to imagine that letter’s coming to her—then. Thirty years ago! A May day, a day of golden sunshine and flowers. The arbors had beencovered with roses then, too, like those whose perfume drifted to her now. Evil news flies fast, and she had heard of the duel very early that morning. The letter would have reached her later. She would have fled away with it to this very room to read it alone—as she did now!
With unsteady fingers she unwrapped the oiled-silk, broke the letter’s seal, and read:
“Dearest:“Before you read this, you will no doubt have heard the thing that has happened this sunshiny morning. Sassoon—poor Sassoon! I can say that with all my heart—is dead. What this fact will mean to you, God help me! I can not guess. For I have never been certain, Judith, of your heart. Sometimes I have thought you loved me—me only—as I love you. Last night when I saw you wearing my cape jessamines at the ball, I was almost sure of it. But when you made me promise, whatever happened, not to lift my hand against him, then I doubted. Was it because you feared for him? Would to God at this moment I knew this was not true! For whatever the fact, I must love you, darling, you and no other, as long as I live!”
“Dearest:
“Before you read this, you will no doubt have heard the thing that has happened this sunshiny morning. Sassoon—poor Sassoon! I can say that with all my heart—is dead. What this fact will mean to you, God help me! I can not guess. For I have never been certain, Judith, of your heart. Sometimes I have thought you loved me—me only—as I love you. Last night when I saw you wearing my cape jessamines at the ball, I was almost sure of it. But when you made me promise, whatever happened, not to lift my hand against him, then I doubted. Was it because you feared for him? Would to God at this moment I knew this was not true! For whatever the fact, I must love you, darling, you and no other, as long as I live!”
When she had read thus far, she closed the letter, and pressing a hand against her heart as if to still its throbbing, locked the written pages in a drawer of her bureau. She went down-stairs and made Ranston bring her chair to its accustomed placeunder the rose-arbor, and sat there through the falling twilight.
She and Shirley talked but little at dinner, and what she said seemed to come winging from old memories—her own girlhood, its routs and picnics and harum-scarum pleasures. And there were long gaps in which she sat silent, playing with her napkin, the light color coming and going in her delicate cheek, lost in revery. It was not till the hall-clock struck her usual hour that she rose to go to her room.
“Don’t send Emmaline,” she said. “I shan’t want her.” She kissed Shirley good night. “Maybe after a while you will sing for me; you haven’t played your harp for ever so long.”
In the subdued candle-light Mrs. Dandridge locked the door of her room. She opened a closet, and from the very bottom of a small haircloth trunk, lifted and shook out from its many tissue wrappings a faded gown of rose-colored silk, with pointed bodice and old-fashioned puff-sleeves. She spread this on the bed and laid with it a pair of yellowed satin slippers and a little straw basket that held a spray of what had once been cape jessamine.
In the flickering light she undressed and rearranged her hair, catching its silvery curling meshes in a low soft coil. Looking almost furtively about her, she put on the rose-colored gown, and pinned the withered flower-spray on its breast. She lighted more candles—in the wall-brackets and on thedressing-table—and the reading-lamp on the desk. Standing before her mirror then, she gazed long at the reflection—the poor faded rose-tint against the pale ivory of her slender neck, and the white hair. A little quiver ran over her lips.
“‘Whatever the fact,’” she whispered, “‘... you and no other, as long as I live.’”
She unlocked the bureau-drawer then, took out the letter, and seating herself by the table, read the remainder:
“I write this in the old library and Bristow holds my horse by the porch. He will give you this letter when I am gone.“Last night we were dancing—all of us—at the ball. I can scarcely believe it was less than twelve hours ago! The calendar on my desk has a motto for each leaf. To-day’s is this: ‘Every man carries his fate on a riband about his neck.’ Last night I would have smiled at that, perhaps; to-day I say to myself, ‘It’s true—it’s true!’ Two little hours ago I could have sworn that whatever happened to me, Sassoon would suffer no harm.“Judith, I could not avoid the meeting. You will know the circumstances, and will see that it was forced upon me. But though we met on the field, I kept my promise.Sassoon did not fall by my hand.”
“I write this in the old library and Bristow holds my horse by the porch. He will give you this letter when I am gone.
“Last night we were dancing—all of us—at the ball. I can scarcely believe it was less than twelve hours ago! The calendar on my desk has a motto for each leaf. To-day’s is this: ‘Every man carries his fate on a riband about his neck.’ Last night I would have smiled at that, perhaps; to-day I say to myself, ‘It’s true—it’s true!’ Two little hours ago I could have sworn that whatever happened to me, Sassoon would suffer no harm.
“Judith, I could not avoid the meeting. You will know the circumstances, and will see that it was forced upon me. But though we met on the field, I kept my promise.Sassoon did not fall by my hand.”
She had begun to tremble so that the paper shook in her hands, and from her breast, shattered by her quick breathing, the brown jessamine petals dusteddown in her lap. It was some moments before she could calm herself sufficiently to read on.
“He fired at the signal and the shot went wide. I threw my pistol on the ground. Then—whether maddened by my refusal to fire, I can not tell—he turned his weapon all at once and shot himself through the breast. It was over in an instant. The seconds did not guess—do not even now, for it happened but an hour ago. As the code decrees, their backs were turned when the shots were fired. But there were circumstances I can not touch upon to you which made them disapprove—which made my facing him just then seem unchivalrous. I saw it in Bristow’s face, and liked him the better for it, even while it touched my pride. They could not know, of course, that I did not intend to fire. Well, you and they will know it now! And Bristow has my pistol; he will find it undischarged—thank God, thank God!“But will that matter to you? If you loved Sassoon, I shall always in your mind stand as the indirect cause of his death! It is for this reason I am going away—I could not bear to look in your accusing eyes and hear you say it. Nor could I bear to stay here, a reminder to you of such a horror. If you love me, you will write and call me back to you. Oh, Judith, Judith, my own dear love! I pray God you will!”
“He fired at the signal and the shot went wide. I threw my pistol on the ground. Then—whether maddened by my refusal to fire, I can not tell—he turned his weapon all at once and shot himself through the breast. It was over in an instant. The seconds did not guess—do not even now, for it happened but an hour ago. As the code decrees, their backs were turned when the shots were fired. But there were circumstances I can not touch upon to you which made them disapprove—which made my facing him just then seem unchivalrous. I saw it in Bristow’s face, and liked him the better for it, even while it touched my pride. They could not know, of course, that I did not intend to fire. Well, you and they will know it now! And Bristow has my pistol; he will find it undischarged—thank God, thank God!
“But will that matter to you? If you loved Sassoon, I shall always in your mind stand as the indirect cause of his death! It is for this reason I am going away—I could not bear to look in your accusing eyes and hear you say it. Nor could I bear to stay here, a reminder to you of such a horror. If you love me, you will write and call me back to you. Oh, Judith, Judith, my own dear love! I pray God you will!”
She put the letter down and laid her face upon it. “Beauty! Beauty!” she whispered, dry-eyed. “I never knew! I never knew! But it would havemade no difference, darling. I would have forgiven you anything—everything! You know that, now, dear! You have been certain of it all these years that have been so empty, empty to me!”
But when the faded rose-colored gown and the poor time-yellowed slippers had been laid back in the haircloth trunk; when, her door once more unbolted, she lay in her bed in the dim glow of the reading-lamp, with her curling silvery hair drifting across the pillow and the letter beneath it, at last the tears came coursing down her cheeks.
And with the loosening of her tears, gradually and softly came joy—infinitely deeper than the anguish and sense of betrayal. It poured upon her like a trembling flood. Long, long ago he had gone out of the world—it was only his memory that counted to her. Now that could no longer spell pain or emptiness or denial. It was engoldened by a new light, and in that light she would walk gently and smilingly to the end.
She found the slender golden chain that hung about her neck and opened the little black locket with its circlet of laureled pearls. And as she gazed at the face it held, which time had not touched with change, the sound of Shirley’s harp came softly in through the window. She was playing an old-fashioned song, of the sort she knew her mother loved best:
“Darling, I am growing old.Silver threads among the goldShine upon my brow to-day;Life is fading fast away.But, my darling, you will beAlways young and fair to me.”
“Darling, I am growing old.Silver threads among the goldShine upon my brow to-day;Life is fading fast away.But, my darling, you will beAlways young and fair to me.”
Outside the leaves rustled, the birds called and the crickets sang their unending epithalamia of summer nights, and on this tone-background the melody rose tenderly and lingeringly like a haunting perfume of pressed flowers. She smiled and lifted the locket to her face, whispering the words of the refrain:
“Yes, my darling, you will beAlways young and fair to me!”
“Yes, my darling, you will beAlways young and fair to me!”
The smile was still on her lips when she fell asleep, and the little locket still lay in her fingers.
“
Sorrow weeps—sorrow sings.” As Shirley played that night, the old Russian proverb kept running through her mind. When she had pushed the gold harp into its corner she threw herself upon a broad sofa in a feathery drift of chintz cushions and dropped her forehead in her laced fingers. A gilt-framed mirror hung on the opposite wall, out of which her sorrowful brooding eyes looked with an expression of dumb and weary suffering.
Her confused thoughts raced hither and thither. What would be the end? Would Valiant forget after a time? Would he marry—Miss Fargo, perhaps? The thought caused her a stab of anguish. Yet she herself could not marry him. The barrier was impassable!
She was still lying listlessly among the cushions when a step sounded on the porch and she heard Chilly Lusk’s voice in the hall. With heavy hands Shirley put into place her disheveled hair and rose to meet him.
“I’m awfully selfish to come to-night,” he said awkwardly; “no doubt you are tired out.”
She disclaimed the weariness that dragged upon her spirits like leaden weights, and made him welcome with her usual cordiality. She was, in fact, relieved at his coming. At Damory Court, the night of the ball, when she had come from the garden with her lips thrilling from Valiant’s kiss, she had suddenly met his look. It had seemed to hold a startled realization that she had remembered with a remorseful compunction. Since that night he had not been at Rosewood.
Ranston had lighted a pine-knot in the fireplace, and the walls were shuddering with crimson shadows. Her hand was shielding her eyes, and as she strove to fill the gaps in their somewhat spasmodic conversation with the trivial impersonal things that belonged to their old intimacy, the tiny flickering flames seemed to be darting unfriendly fingers plucking at her secret. Leaning from her nest of cushions she thrust the poker into the glowing resinous mass till sparks whizzed up the chimney’s black maw in a torrent.
“How they fly!” she said. “Rickey Snyder calls it raising a blizzard in Hades. I used to think they flew up to the sky and became the littlest stars. What a pity we have to grow up and learn so much! I’d rather have kept on believing that when the red leaves in the woods whirled about in acircle the fairies were dancing, and that it was the gnomes who put the cockle-burs in the hounds’ ears.”
She had been talking at random, gradually becoming shrinkingly conscious of his constrained and stumbling manner. She had, however, but half defined his errand when he came to it all in a burst.
“I—I can’t get to it, somehow, Shirley,” he said with sudden desperation, “but here it is. I’ve come to ask you to marry me. Don’t stop me,” he went on hurriedly, lifting his hand; “whatever you say, I must tell you. I’ve been trying to for months and months!” Now that he had started, it came with a boyish vehemence that both chilled and thrilled her. Even in her own desolation, and shrinking almost unbearably from the avowal, the hope and brightness in his voice touched her with pity. It seemed to her that life was a strange jumble of unescapable and incomprehensible pain. And all the while, in the young voice vibrant with feeling, her cringing ear was catching imagined echoes of that other voice, graver and more self-contained, but shaken by the same passion, in that iteration of “I love you! I love you!”
His answer came to him finally in her silence, and he released her hands which he had caught in his own. They dropped, limp and unresponsive, in her lap. “Shirley,” he said brokenly, “maybe you can’t care for me—yet. But if you will marryme, I—I’ll be content with so little, till—you do.”
She shook her head, her hair making dim flashes in the firelight. “No, Chilly,” she said. “It makes me wretched to give you pain, but I must—I must! Love isn’t like that. It doesn’t come afterward. I know. I could never give you what you want. You would end by despising me, as I—should despise myself.”
“I won’t give up,” he said incoherently. “I can’t give up. Not so long as I know there’s nobody else. At the ball I thought—I thought perhaps you cared for Valiant—but since he told me—”
He stopped suddenly, for she was looking at him from an ashen face. “He told me there was no reason why I should not try my luck,” he said difficultly. “I asked him.”
There was a silence, while he gazed at her, breathing deeply. Then he tried to laugh.
“All right,” he said hoarsely. “It—it doesn’t matter. Don’t worry.”
She stretched out her hand to him in a gesture of wistful pain, and he held it a moment between both of his, then released it and went hurriedly out.
As the door closed, Shirley sat down, her head dropping into her hands like a storm-broken flower. Valiant had accepted the finality of the situation. With a wave of deeper hopelessness than had yet submerged her, she realized that, against her own decision,something deep within her had taken shy and secret comfort in his stubborn masculine refusal. Against all fact, in face of the impossible, her heart had been clinging to this—as though his love might even attain the miraculous and somewhere, somehow, recreate circumstance. But now he, too, had bowed to the decree. A kind of utter apathetic wretchedness seized upon her, to replace the sharp misery that had so long been her companion—an empty numbness in which, in a measure, she ceased to feel.
An hour dragged slowly by and at length she rose and went slowly up the stairs. Her head felt curiously heavy, but it did not ache. Outside her mother’s door, as was her custom, she paused mechanically to listen. A tiny pencil of light struck through the darkness and painted a spot of brightness on her gown. It came through the keyhole; the lamp in her mother’s room was burning. “She has fallen asleep and forgotten it,” she thought, and softly turning the knob, pushed the door noiselessly open and entered.
A moment she stood listening to the low regular breathing of the sleeper. The reading-lamp shed a shaded glow on the pillow with its spread-out silver hair, and on the delicate hands clasped loosely on the coverlet. Shirley came close and looked down on the placid face. It was smooth as a child’s and a smile touched it lightly as if some pleasant sleep-thoughthad just laid rosy fingers on the dreaming lips. The light caught and sparkled from something bright that lay between her mother’s hands. It was the enamel brooch that held her own baby curl, and she saw suddenly that what she had all her life thought was a solid pendant, was now open locket-wise and that the two halves clasped a miniature. It came to her at once that the picture must be Sassoon’s, and a quick thrill of pity and yearning welled up through her own dejection. Stooping, she looked at it closely. She started as she did so, for the face on the little disk of ivory was that of John Valiant.
An instant she stared unbelievingly. Then recollection of the resemblance of which Valiant had told her rushed to her, and she realized that it must be the picture of his father. The fact shocked and confounded her. Why should her mother carry in secret the miniature of the man who had killed—
Shirley’s breath stopped. She felt her face tinging and a curious weakness came on her limbs. Why indeed, unless—and the thought was like a wild prayer in her mind—she had been mistaken in her surmise? Thoughts came thronging in panic haste: the fourteenth of May and the cape jessamines—these might point no less to Valiant than to Sassoon. But her mother’s fainting at the sight of the son—the eager interest she had displayed in Shirley’s accounts of him, from the episode of therose and the bulldog to the tournament ball—seemed now to stand out in a new light, throbbing and roseate. Could it be? Had she been stumbling along a blind trail, misled by the cunning dovetailing of circumstance? Her heart was beating stiflingly. If she should be mistakennow! She dashed her hand across her eyes as though to compel their clearness, and looked again.
It was Beauty Valiant’s face that lay in the locket, and that could mean but one thing: it was he, not Sassoon, whom her mother loved!
The lamplight seemed to grow and spread to an unbearable radiance. Shirley thought she cried out with a sudden sweet wildness, but she had not moved or uttered a sound. The illumination was all about her, like a splendid cloud. The impossible had happened. The miracle for which she had hysterically prayed had been wrought!
When she blew out the light, the shining still remained. That glowing knowledge, like a vitalizing and physical presence, passed with her through the hall to her own room. As she stood in the elfish light of her one candle, the poignancy of her joy was as sharp as her past pain. Later was to come the wonder how that tragedy had bent Beauty Valiant’s life to exile and her mother’s to unfulfilment, and in time she was to know these things, too. But now the one great knowledge blotted out all else. She need starve her fancy no longer! Thehours with her lover might again sweep across her memory undenied. She felt his arms, his kisses, heard his whispers against her cheek and smelled the perfume of Madonna lilies.
She drew the curtain and opened the window noiselessly to the night. Only a few hours ago she had been singing to her harp in what wretchedness! She laughed softly to herself. The quiet night was full of his voice: “I love you! I want nothing but you!” How her pitiful error had tortured and wrung them both! But to-morrow he, too, would know that all was well.
A clear sound chimed across the distance—the bell of the court-house clock, striking midnight.One!...Two!... How often lately it had rung discordantly across her mood; now it seemed a clamant watcher, tolling joy.Three!...Four!...Five!... Perhaps he was sleepless, listening, too. Was he in the old library, thinking of her?Six!...Seven!...Eight!...Nine!... If she could only send her message to him on the bells!Ten!... It swelled more loudly now, more deliberate.Eleven!... Another day was almost gone.Twelve!... “Joy cometh in the morning”—ran the whisper across her thought. It was morning now.
Thirteen!
She caught a sharp breath. Her ear had not deceived her—the vibration still palpitated on the airlike a heart of sound. It had struck thirteen! A little eery touch crept along her nerves and a cool dampness broke on her skin, for she seemed to hear, quavering through the wondering silence, the voice of Mad Anthony, as it had quavered to her ear on the door-step of the negro cabin, with the well-sweep throwing its long curved shadow across the group of laughing faces:
“Ah sees yo’ gwine ter him. Ah heahs de co’ot-house clock a-strikin’ in de night—en yo’ gwine.... Don’ wait, don’ wait, li’l mistis, er de trouble-cloud gwine kyah him erway f’om yo’.... When de clock strike thuhteen—when de clock strike thuhteen—”
She dropped the flowered curtain and drew back. A weird fancy had begun to press on her brain. Had not Mad Anthony foretold truly what had gone before? What if there were some cryptic meaning in this, too? To go to him, at midnight, by a lonely country road—she, a girl? Incredible! Yet her mind had opened to a vague growing fear that was swiftly mounting to a thriving anxiety. That innate superstition, secretly cherished while derided, which is the heritage of the Southron-born bred from centuries of contact with a mystical race, had her in its grip. Yet all the while her sober actual common-sense was crying out upon her—and crying in vain. Unknown appetences that had lain darkling in her blood, come down to her fromlong generations, were suddenly compelling her. The curtain began to wave in a little wind that whispered in the silk, and somewhere in the yard below she could hear Selim nipping the clover.
She was to go or the “trouble-cloud” would carry him away!
A strange expression of mingled fright and resolve grew on her face. She ran on tiptoe to her wardrobe and with frantic haste dragged out a rough cloak that fell over her soft house-gown, covering it to the feet. It had a peaked hood falling from its collar and into this she thrust the resentful masses of her hair. Every few seconds she caught her breath in a short gasp, and once she paused with an apprehensive glance over her shoulder and shivered. She scarcely knew what she did, nor did she ask herself what might be the outcome of such an absurd adventure. She neither knew nor cared. She was swept off her feet and whirled away into some outlandish limbo of shadowy fear and crying dread.
Slipping off her shoes, she went swiftly and noiselessly down the stair. She let herself out of the door and, shoes on again, ran across the clover. A hound clambered about her, whining, but she silenced him with a whispered word. Selim lifted his head and she patted the snuffling inquiring muzzle an instant before, with her hand on his mane, she led him through the hedge to the stable. It wasbut the work of a moment to throw on a side-saddle and buckle the girth. Then, mounting, she turned him into the lane.
He was thoroughbred, and her tense excitement seemed to communicate itself to him. He blew the breath through his delicate flaring nostrils and flung up his head at her restraining hand on the bridle. Once on the Red Road, she let him have his will. The long vacant highway reeled out behind her to the fierce and lonely hoof-tattoo. She was scarcely conscious of consecutive thought—all was a vague jumble of chaotic impressions threaded by that necessity that called her like an insistent voice.
Copse and hedge flew by, streaks of distemper on the shifting gloom; swarthy farmhouse roofs huddled like giant Indians on the trail, and ponds in pastures glinted back the pale glimmering of stars. The faint mist, tangled in the branches of the trees, made them look like ghosts gathered to see her pass. Was this real or was she dreaming? Was she, Shirley Dandridge, really galloping down an open road at midnight—because of the hare-brained maunderings of a half-mad old negro?
The great iron gate of Damory Court hung open, and scarcely slackening her pace, she rode through and up the long drive. The glooming house-front was blank and silent and its huge porch columns looked like lonely gray monoliths in the wan light. Not a twinkle showed at chink or cranny; the ponderousshutters were closed. There was a sense of desertion, of emptiness about the place that brought her heart into her throat with a sickly horrible feeling of certainty.
She jumped down from the blowing horse and hurried around the house. The door of the kitchens was open and a ladder of dim reddish light fell from it across the grass. She ran swiftly and looked in. A huddled figure sat there, rocking to and fro in the lamplight.
“Aunt Daph,” she called, “what is the matter?”
The turbaned head turned sharply toward her. “Dat yo’, Miss Shirley?” the old woman said huskily. “Is yo’ come ter see Mars’ John ’fo’ he gwine away? Yo’ too late, honey, too late! He done gone ter de deepo fo’ ter ketch de thoo train. En, oh, honey, Ah knows in mah ole ha’at dat Mars’ John ain’ nevah gwine come back ter Dam’ry Co’ot no mo’!”
Along the dark turnpike John Valiant rode with his chin sunk on his breast. He was wretchedly glad of the darkness, for it covered a thousand familiar sights he had grown to love. Yet through the dark came drifting sounds that caught at him with clutching hands—the bay of a hound from some far-off kennel, the whirring note of frogs, the impatient high whinny of a horse across pasture-bars—and his nostrils widened to the wild braided fragrance of the fields over which the mist was spinning its fairy carded wool.
The preparations for his going had been quickly made. He was leaving behind him all but a single portmanteau. Uncle Jefferson had already taken this—with Chum—to the station. The old man had now gone sorrowfully afoot to the blockhouse, a half-mile up the track, to bespeak the stopping of the express. He would go back on the horse his master was riding.
The lonely little depot flanked a siding beside a dismal stretch of yellow clay-bank gouged by rains. Its windows were dark and the weather-beatenplank platform was illuminated by a single lantern that hung on a nail beside the locked door, its sickly flame showing bruise-like through smoky streakings of lamp-black. At one side, in the shadow, was his bag, and beside it the tethered bulldog—sole spot of white against the melancholy forlornness—lying with one splinted leg, like a swaddled ramrod, sticking straight out before him.
In the saddle, Valiant struck his hand hard against his knee. Surely it was a dream! It could not be that he was leaving Virginia, leaving Damory Court, leavingher! But he knew that it was not a dream.
Far away, rounding Powhattan Mountain, he heard the long-drawn hoot of the coming train, flinging its sky-warning in a host of scampering echoes. Among them mixed another sound far up the desolate road, coming nearer—the sound of a horse, galloping fast and hard.
His own fidgeted, flung up wide nostrils and neighed shrilly. Who was coming along that runnelled highway at such an hour in such breakneck fashion?
The train was nearer now; he could hear its low rumbling hum, rising to a roar, and the click and spring of the rails. But though he lifted a foot from the stirrup, he did not dismount. Something in the whirlwind speed of that coming caught and held him motionless. He had a sudden curious feeling that all the world beside did not exist; therewere only the sweeping rush of the nearing train—impersonal, unhuman—he, sitting his horse in the gloom, and that unknown rider whose anguish of speed outstripped the steam, riding—to whom?
The road skirted the track as it neared the station, and all at once a white glare from the opened fire-box flung itself blindingly across the dark, illuminating like a flare of summer lightning the patch of highway and the rider. Valiant, staring, had an instant’s vision of a streaming cloak, of a girl’s face, set in a tawny swirl of loosened hair. With a cry that was lost in the shriek of escaping steam, he dragged his plunging horse around and the white blaze swept him also, as the rider pulled down at his side.
“You!” he cried. He leaned and caught the slim hands gripped on the bridle, shaking now. “You!”
The dazzling brightness had gone by, and the air was full of the groaning of the brakes as the long line of darkened sleepers shuddered to its enforced stop. “John!”—He heard the sweet wild cry pierce through the jumble of noises, and something in it set his blood running molten through his veins. It held an agony of relief, of shame and of appeal. “John ... John!”
And knowing suddenly, though not how or why, that all barriers were swept away, his arms went out and around her, and in the shadow of the lonelylittle station, they two, in their saddles, clung and swayed together with clasping hands and broken words, while the train, breathing heavily for a resentful second, shrieked itself away into the night, and left only the fragrance from the misty fields, the crowding silence and the sprinkling stars.
The breeze had risen and was blowing the mist away as they went back along the road. A faint light was lifting, forerunner of the moon. They rode side by side, and to the slow gait of the horses, touching noses in low whinnyings of equine comradeship, by the faint glamour they gazed into each other’s faces. The adorable tweedy roughness of his shoulder thrilled her cheek.
“... And you were going away. Yes, yes, I know. It was my fault. I ... misunderstood. Forgive me!”
He kissed her hand. “As if there were anything to forgive! Do you remember in the woods, sweetheart, the day it rained? What a brute I was—to fight so! And all the time I wanted to take you in my arms like a little hurt child....”
She turned toward him. “Oh, Iwantedyou to fight! Even though it was no use. I had given up, but your strength comforted me. To have you surrender, too—”
“It was your face in the churchyard,” he toldher. “How pale and worn you looked! It came to me then for the first time how horribly selfish it would be to stay—how much easier going would make it for you.”
“... And to think that it was Mad Anthony—Did the clockreallystrike thirteen, do you think? Or did I fancy it?”
“Why question it?” he said. “I believe in mysteries. The greatest mystery of all is that you should love me. I doubt no miracle hereafter. Dearest, dearest!”
At the entrance of the cherry lane, he fastened his horse to the hedge, and noiselessly let down the pasture-bars for her golden chestnut. When he came back to where she stood waiting on the edge of the lawn, the late moon, golden-vestured, was just showing above the rim of the hills, painting the deep soft blueness of the Virginian night with a translucence as pure as prayer. Above the fallen hood of her cloak her hair shone like a nimbus, and the loveliness of her face made him catch his breath for the wonderfulness of it.
As they stood heavened in each other’s arms, heart beating against heart, and the whole world throbbing to joy, the nightingale beyond the arbors began to bubble and thrill its unimaginable melody. It came to them like the voice of the magical rose-scentednight itself, set to the wordless music of the silver leaves. It rose and swelled exultant to break and die in a cascade of golden notes.
But in their hearts was the song that is fadeless, immortal.