“All Ah wants in dis creation—Pretty yellah gal, en er big plantation!”
“All Ah wants in dis creation—Pretty yellah gal, en er big plantation!”
When the twangling notes died away in the distance they had served only to intensify the stillness. He felt that peculiar detachedness that one senses in thick black dark, as though he and his immediatesurroundings were floating in some soundless, ambient ether. The white bulldog scurried noiselessly back and forth across the clipped grass, now emerging like a canine ghost in the light from the doorway, now suffering total eclipse. Staring into the furry gloom, he seemed, as in those moments of semi-delirium in the forest, to see Shirley’s face advance and retreat as though it lay on the very pulsing heart of the darkness.
He stepped down to the graveled drive and followed it to the gate, then, bareheaded, took the Red Road. Along this highway he had rattled in Uncle Jefferson’s crazy hack—with her red rose in his hand. The musky scent of the pressed leaves in the book in his pocket seemed to be all about him.
The odor of living roses, in fact, was in the air. It came on the scarce-felt breeze, a heavy calling perfume. He walked on, keeping the road by the misty infiltrating shimmer of the stars, with a sensation rather of gliding than of walking. Now and then from some pasture came the snort and whinny of horses or the grunt of a frog from a marshy sink, and once, where a narrow path joined the road, he felt against his trousers the sniffing nose of a silent and friendly puppy. It occurred to him that if, as scientists say, colors emit sound-tones, scents also should possess a music of their own: the honeysuckle fragrance, maybe—softmellow fluting as of diminutive wind-instruments; the far-faint sickly odor of lilies—the upper register of faery violins; this spicy breath of roses—blending, throbbing chords like elfin echoes of an Italian harp. The fancy pleased him; he could imagine the perfume now in the air carried with it an under-music, like a ghostly harping.
It came to him at the same instant that this was no mere fancy. Somewhere in the languorous night a harp was being played. He paused and listened intently, then went on toward the sound. Presently he became aware that he had passed it, had left it on one side, and he went back, stumbling along the low stone wall till it opened to a shadowy lane, full of foliaged whispers. The rose scent had grown stronger; it was almost, in that heavy air, as if he were breasting an etherial sea of attar. He felt as if he were treading on a path of rose-leaves, down which the increasing melody flowed crimsonly to him, calling, calling.
He stopped stock-still. He had been skirting a close-cropped hedge of box. This had ended abruptly and he was looking straight up a bar of green-yellow radiance from a double doorway. The latter opened on a porch and the light, flung across this, drenched an arbor of climbing roses, making it stand out a mass of woven rubies set in emerald.
He drew a long sigh of more than delight, forframed in the doorway he saw a figure in misty white, leaning to the gilded upright of a harp. He knew at once that it was Shirley. Holding his breath, he came closer, his feet muffled in the thick grass. She wore a gown of some gauze-like material sprinkled with knots of embroidery and with her lifted face and filmy aureole of hair, she looked like a tall golden candle. He stood in the dense obscurity, one hand gripping the gnarled limb of a catalpa, his eyes following the shapely arms from wrist to shoulder, the fingers straying across the strings, the bending cheek caressing the carved wood. She was playing the melody of Shelley’sIndian Serenade—touching the chords softly and tenderly—and his lips moved, molding themselves soundlessly to the words:
“I arise from dreams of thee,In the first sweet sleep of night,When the winds are breathing lowAnd the stars are shining bright;I arise from dreams of thee,And a spirit in my feetHas led me—who knows how?To thy chamber window, Sweet!”
“I arise from dreams of thee,In the first sweet sleep of night,When the winds are breathing lowAnd the stars are shining bright;I arise from dreams of thee,And a spirit in my feetHas led me—who knows how?To thy chamber window, Sweet!”
The serenade died in a single long note. As if in answer to it there rose a flood of bird-music from beyond the arbor—jets of song that swelled and rippled to a soaring melody. She heard it, too, for the gracile fingers fell from the strings. She listeneda moment, with head held to one side, then sprang up and came through the door and down the steps.
He hesitated a moment, then a single stride took him from the shadow.
As he greeted her, his gaze plunged deep into hers. She had recoiled a step, startled, to recognize him almost instantly. He noted the shrinking and thought it due to a stabbing memory of that forest-horror. His first words were prosaic enough:
“I’m an unconscionable trespasser,” he said. “It must seem awfully prowly, but I didn’t realize I was on private property till I passed the hedge there.”
As her hand lay in his, a strange fancy stirred in him: in that wood-meeting she had seemed something witch-like, the wilful spirit of the passionate spring herself, mixed of her aerial essences and jungle wildernesses; in this scented dim-lit close she was grave-eyed, subdued, a paler pensive woman of under half-guessed sadnesses and haunting moods. With her answer, however, this gravity seemed to slip from her like a garment. She laughed lightly.
“I love to prowl myself. I think sometimes Ilike the night better than the day. I believe in one of my incarnations I must have been a panther.”
“Do you know,” he said, “I followed the scent of those roses? I smelled it at Damory Court.”
“It goes for miles when the air is heavy as it is to-night. How terrible it would be if roses were intoxicating like poppies! I get almost tipsy with the odor sometimes, like a cat with catnip.”
They both laughed. “I’m growing superstitious about flowers,” he said. “You know a rose figured in our first meeting. And in our last—”
She shrank momentarily. “The cape jessamines! I shall always think ofthatwhen I see them!”
“Ah, forgive me!” he begged. “But when I remember what you did—for me! Oh, I know! But for you, I must have died.”
“But for me you wouldn’t have been bitten. But don’t let’s talk of it.” She shivered suddenly.
“You are cold,” he said. “Isn’t that gown too thin for this night air?”
“No, I often walk here till quite late. Listen!”
The bird song had broken forth again, to be answered this time by a rival’s in a distant thicket. “My nightingale is in good voice.”
“I never heard a nightingale before I came to Virginia. I wonder why it sings only at night.”
“What an odd idea! Why, it sings in the day-time, too.”
“Really? But I suppose it escapes notice in the general chorus. Is it a large bird?”
“No; smaller than a thrush. Only a little bigger than a robin. Its nest is over there in that hedge—a tiny loose cup of dried oak-leaves, lined with hair, and the eggs are olive color. How pretty the hedge looks now, all tangled with firefly sparks!”
“Doesn’t it! Uncle Jefferson calls them ‘lightning-bugs.’”
“The name is much more picturesque. But all the darky sayings are. I heard him telling our butler once, of something, that ‘when de debble heah dat, he gwine sen’ fo’ he smellin’-salts.’ Who else would ever have put it that way? Do you find him and Aunt Daph useful?”
“He has been a godsend,” he said fervently; “and her cooking has taught me to treat her with passionate respect. As Uncle Jefferson says she can ‘put de big pot in de li’l one en mek soup outer de laigs.’ He’s teaching me now about flowers—it’s surprising how many kinds he knows. He’s a walking herbarium.”
“Come and see mine,” she said. “Roses are our specialty—we have to live up to the Rosewood name. But beyond the arbors, are beds and beds of other flowers. See—by this big tree are speedwell and delphinium. The tree is a black-walnut. It’s a dreadful thing to have one as big as that.When you want something that costs a lot of money you go and look at it and wonder which you want most, that particular luxury or the tree. I know a girl who had two in her yard only a little bigger than this, and she went to Europe on them. But so far I’ve always voted for the tree.”
“Perhaps you’ve not been sufficiently tempted.”
“Maybe,” she assented, and in a bar of light from a window, stooped over a glimmering patch to pull him a sprig of bluebells. “The wildings are hard to find,” she said, “so I grow a few here. What ghostly tintings they show in this half-light! My corn-flowers aren’t in bloom yet. Here are wild violets. They are the single ones, you know, the kind two children play cock-fighting with.” She picked two of the blossoms and hooked their heads together. “See, both pull till one rooster’s head drops off.” She bent again and passed her hand lovingly over a mass of starry blooms. “And here are some bluet, the violet roosters’ little pale-blue hens. How doesyourgarden come on?”
“Famously. Uncle Jefferson has shanghaied a half-dozen negro gardeners—from where I can’t imagine—and he’s having the time of his life hectoring over them. He refers to the upper and lower terraces as ‘up- and down-stairs.’ I’ve got seeds, but it will be a long time before they flower.”
“Oh, would you like some slips?” she cried. “Or, better still, I can give you the roses alreadyrooted—Mad Charles and Maréchal Neil and Cloth of Gold and cabbage and ramblers. We have geraniums and fuchsias, too, and the coral honeysuckle. That’s different from the wild one, you know.”
“You are too good! If you would only advise me where to set them! But I dare say you think me presuming.”
She turned her full face to him. “‘Presuming!’ You’re punishing me now for the dreadful way I talked to you about Damory Court—before I knew who you were. Oh, it was unpardonable! And after the splendid thing you had done—I read about it that same evening—with your money, I mean!”
“No, no!” he protested. “There was nothing splendid about it. It was only pride. You see the Corporation was my father’s great idea—the thing he created and put his soul into—and it was foundering. I know that would have hurt him. One thing I’ve wanted to say to you, ever since the day we talked together—about the duel. I want to say that whatever lay behind it, my father’s whole life was darkened by that event. Now that I can put two and two together, I know that it was the cause of his sadness.”
“Ah, I can believe that,” she replied.
“I think he had only two interests—myself and the Corporation. So you see why I’d rather savethat and be a beggar the rest of my natural life. But I’m not a beggar. Damory Court alone is worth—I know it now—a hundred times what I left.”
“But to give up your own world—to let it all slip by, and to come here to a spot that to you must seem desperately dull.”
“I came here because the door of the old life was closed to me.”
“You closed it yourself,” she answered quickly.
“Maybe. But for whatever reason, it was closed. And you call this dull—dull? Why, my life seems never to have had real interest before!”
“I’m so glad you think that! You are so utterly different from what I imagined you!”
“I could never have imagined you,” he said, “never.”
“I must be terribly outré.”
“You are so many women in one. When I listened to your harp playing I could hardly believe it was the same you I saw galloping across the fields that morning. Now you are a different woman from both of those.”
As she looked at him, her lips curled corner-wise, her foot slipped on the sheer edge of the turf. She swayed toward him and he caught her, feeling for a sharp instant the adorable nearness of her body. It ridged all his skin with a creeping delight. She recovered her footing with an exclamation,and turned back somewhat abruptly to the porch where she seated herself on the step, drawing her filmy skirt aside to make a place for him. There was a moment of silence which he broke.
“That exquisite serenade you were playing! You know the words, of course.”
“They are more lovely, if possible, than the score. Do you care for poetry?”
“I’ve always loved it,” he said. “I’ve been reading some lately—a little old-fashioned book I found at Damory Court. It’sLucile. Do you know it?”
“Yes. It’s my mother’s favorite.”
He drew it from his pocket. “See, I’ve got it here. It’s marked, too.”
He opened it, to close it instantly—not, however, before she had put out her hand and laid it, palm down, on the page. “That rose! Oh, let me have it!”
“Never!” he protested. “Look here. When I put it between the leaves, I did so at random. I didn’t see till now that I had opened it at a marked passage.”
“Let us read it,” she said.
He leaned and held the leaf to the light from the doorway and the two heads bent together over the text.
A sound fell behind them and both turned. Aslight figure, in a soft gray gown with old lace at the throat, stood in the doorway behind them. John Valiant sprang to his feet.
“Ah, Shirley, I thought I heard voices. Is that you, Chilly?”
“It’s not Mr. Lusk, mother,” said Shirley. “It’s our new neighbor, Mr. Valiant.”
As he bent over the frail hand, murmuring the conventional words that presentations are believed to require, Mrs. Dandridge sank into a deep cushioned chair. “Won’t you sit down?” she said. He noticed that she did not look directly at him, and that her face was as pallid as her hair.
“Thank you,” said John Valiant, and resumed his place on the lower step.
Shirley, who had again seated herself, suddenly laughed, and pointed to the book which lay between them. “Imagine what we were doing, dearest! We were readingLuciletogether.”
She saw the other wince, and the deep dark eyes lifted, as if under compulsion, from the book-cover to Valiant’s face. He was startled by Shirley’s cry and the sudden limp unconscious settling-back into the cushions of the fragile form.
Aquicker breeze was stirring as John Valiant went back along the Red Road. It brushed the fraying clouds from the sky, leaving it a pale gray-blue, sprinkled with wan stars. He had waited in the garden at Rosewood till Shirley, aided by Emmaline and with Ranston’s anxious face hovering in the background, having performed those gentle offices which a woman’s fainting spell requires, had come to reassure him and to say good night.
The road seemed no longer dark; it swam before him now in a soft winged mistiness with here and there an occasional cedar thrusting grotesquely above huddled cobble-wall and black-lined rail-fence. As he went, her form swam before him. The texture of each shadowy bush seemed that gauzy drapery, sprayed with lilies-of-the-valley, and the leaves syllabled her name in cautious whispers. That brief touch of her, when he had caught her in his arms, lingered, as the memory of the harp music on his inner ear, pricking his senses like finemusk, a thing of soft new pulses flashing over him like spurts of vapor.
As he threw off his coat in the bedroom he had chosen for his own, he felt the hard corner of theLucilein the pocket, and drawing it out, laid it on the table by the bedside. He seemed to feel again the tingle of his cheek where a curling strand of her coppery hair had sprung against it when her head had bent beside his own to read the marked lines. By now perhaps that riotous crown was all unbound and falling redly about her shoulders, those shoulders no longer peeping from a weave of lilies, but draped in virginal white. Perhaps she knelt now by her silk-covered bed, warming the coverlid with her breast, her down-bent face above her locked palms. What did she pray for, he wondered. As a child, his own prayers had been comprehensive ones. Even the savages who lived at Wishing-House and their innumerable offspring had been regularly included in those petitions.
When he had undressed he sat an hour in the candle-blaze, a dressing-gown thrown over his shoulders, striving vainly to recreate that evening call, to remember her every word and look and movement. For a breath her face would flush suddenly before him, like a live thing; then it would mysteriously fade and elude him, though he clenched his hands on the arms of his chair in the fierce mental effort to recall it. Only the intense blue of hereyes, the tawny sweep of her hair—these and the touch of her, the consciousness of her warm and vivid fragrance, remained to wrap all his senses in a mist woven of gold and fire.
Shirley, meanwhile, had sat some time beside her mother’s bed, leaning from a white chintz-covered chair, her anxiety only partially allayed by reassurances, now and then stooping to lay her young cheek against the delicate arm in its lacy sleeve or to pass her hand lovingly up and down its outline, noting with a recurrent passion of tenderness the transparency of the skin with its violet veining and the shadows beneath the closed eyes. Emmaline, moving on soft worsted-shod feet about the dim room, at length had whispered:
“You go tuh baid, honey. I stay with Mis’ Judith till she go tuh sleep.”
“Yes, go, Shirley,” said her mother. “Haven’t I any privileges at all? Can’t I even faint when I feel like it, without calling out the fire-brigade? You’ll pamper me to death and heaven knows I don’t need it.”
“You won’t let me telephone for Doctor Southall?”
“Certainly not!”
“And you aresureit was nothing but the roses?”
“Why, what else should it be?” said her mother almost peevishly. “I must really have the arborsthinned out. On heavy nights it’s positively overpowering. Go along now, and we’ll talk about it to-morrow. I can ring if I want anything.”
In her own room Shirley undressed thoughtfully. There was between her and her mother a fine tenuous bond of sympathy and feeling as rare, perhaps, as it was lovely. She could not remember when the other had not been a semi-invalid, and her earliest childhood recollections were punctuated with the tap of the little cane. To-night’s sudden indisposition had shocked and disturbed her; to faint at a rush of perfume seemed to suggest a growing weakness that was alarming. To-morrow, she told herself, she would send Ranston with a wagon-load of the roses to the hospital at Charlottesville.
She slipped on a pink shell-shaded dressing-gown of slinky silk with a riot of azaleas scattered in the weave, and then, dragging a chair before the open window, drew aside the light curtain and began to brush her hair. She parted the lustrous mass with long sweeps of her white arm, forward first over one shoulder, then over the other. The silver brush smoothed the lighter ashen ripples that netted and fretted into a fine amber lace, till they lay, a rich warm mahogany like red earth. The coppery whorls eddied and merged themselves, showing under-glints of russet and dun-gold, curling and clasping in flame-tinted furrows like a living field of gold under a silver harrow. Outside the windowthe stars lay on the lapis-lazuli sky like white flower-petals on still deep water, and in the pasture across the hedges she could see the form of Selim, her chestnut hunter, standing ghostly, like an equine sentinel.
When that shimmering glory lay in two thick braids against her shoulders, Shirley rose with a sigh and went to her writing-desk, where lay her diary. But she was in no mood to write, and she turned from it, frowning a little, with the reflection that she had not written in it since the night of the cape jessamines.
All at once her gaze fell upon the floor, and she shrank backward from a twisting thread-like thing whose bright saffron-yellow glowed sharply against the dark carpet. She saw in an instant, however, that it was nothing more dangerous than a fragment of love-vine from the garden, which had clung to her skirt. She picked up the tiny mass of tendrils and with a slow smile tossed it over her right shoulder through the window. “If it takes root,” she said aloud, “my sweetheart loves me.” She leaned from the sill to peer down into the misty garden, but could not follow its fall.
Long ago her visitor would have reached Damory Court. She had a vision of him wandering, candle in hand, through the empty echoing rooms, looking at the voiceless portraits on the walls, thinking perhaps of his father, of the fatal duel of which hehad never known. She liked the way he had spoken of his father!
Or, maybe he was sitting in the lonely library, with some volume from its shelves on his knees. She pictured Uncle Jefferson fetching his pipe and jar of tobacco and striking the match on his broad foot to light it. She remembered one of the old darky’s sayings: “Er man ain’ nachally no angel, but ’thouten terbacker, Ah reck’n he be pizen-ugly ernuf ter giv de Bad Man de toof-ache!” In that instant when her cheek had touched his rough tweed jacket, she had been sensible of that woodsy pipy fragrance.
A vivid flush swept up her face and with a sudden gesture she caught her open palms to her cheek. With what a daring softness his eyes had hazed as they looked down at her under his crisp waving hair. Why was the memory of that look so sharply sweet?
As she leaned, out of the stillness there came to her ear a mellow sound. It was the bell of the court-house in the village. She counted the strokes falling clearly or faintly as the sluggish breeze ebbed or swelled. It was eleven.
She drew back, dropped the curtain to shut out the wan glimmer, and in the darkness crept into the soft bed as if into a hiding-place.
Awarm sun and an air mildly mellow. A faint gold-shadowed mist over the valley and a soft lilac haze blending the rounded outlines of the hills. A breeze shook the twigs on the cedars, fluttered the leaves of the poplars till they looked a quivering mass of palpitating silver, bearing away with it the cool elastic grace-notes of the dripping water, as it sparkled over the big green-streaked rocks at the foot of the little lake at Damory Court. Over the wild grape-vines a pair of drunken butterflies reeled, kissing wings, and on the stone rim of the fountain basin a tiny brown-green lizard lay motionless, sunning itself. Through the shrubbery a cardinal darted like a crimson shuttle, to rock impudently from a fleering limb, and here and there on the bluish-ivory sky, motionless as a pasted wafer, hung a hawk; from time to time one of these wavered and slanted swiftly down, to climb once more in a huge spiral to its high tower of sky.
Perhaps it wondered, as its telescopic eye looked down. That had been its choicest covert, that disheveled tangle where the birds held perpetual carnival,the weasel lurked in the underbrush and the rabbit lined his windfall. Now the wildness was gone. The lines of the formal garden lay again ordered and fair. The box-rows had been thinned of their too-aged shrubs and filled in anew. The wilderness garden to-be was still a stretch of raked and level soil, but all across this slender green spears were thrusting up—the promise of buds and blooms. A pergola, glistening white, now upheld the runaway vines, making a sickle-like path from the upper terrace to the lake. In the barn loft the pigeons still quarrelled over their new cotes of fresh pine, and under a clump of locust trees at a little distance from the house, a half-dozen dolls’ cabins on stilts stood waiting the honey-storage of the black and gold bees.
There were new denizens, also. These had arrived in a dozen zinc tanks and willow hampers, to the amaze of a sleepy express clerk at the railroad station: two swans now sailed majestically over the lily-pads of the lake, along its gravel rim a pair of bronze-colored ducks waddled and preened, and its placid surface rippled and broke to the sluggish backs of goldfish and the flirting fins of red Japanese carp. Hens and guinea-fowl strutted and ran in a wire wattle behind the kitchen, and on the wall, now straightened and repaired, a splendid peacock spread his barbaric plumage of spangled purple and screeched exultingly to his sober-hued mate.
The house itself wore another air. Its look of unkemptness had largely vanished. The comb of the roof had been straightened and the warped shutters repaired. The boards of the porch flooring had been relaid. Moss and green lichen had been scoured from the bases of the great weather-beaten pillars. These, however, bore no garish coat of new paint. The soft gray tone of age remained, but the bleakness and forlornness were gone; there was about all now a warmth and genial bearing that hinted at mellowed beauty, firelight and cheerful voices within.
Valiant heaved a long sigh of satisfaction as he stood in the sunlight gazing at the results of his labors. He was not now the flippant boulevardier to whom money was thesine qua nonof existence. He had learned a sovereign lesson—one gained not through the push and fight of crowds, but in the simple peace of a countryside, unvexed by the clamor of gold and the complex problems of a competitive existence—that he had inherited a need of activity, of achievement: that he had been born to do. He had worked hard, with hand and foot, with hoe and mattock—strenuous perspiring effort that made his blood course fast and brought muscle-weariness over which nature had nightly poured her soothing medicaments of peace and sleep. His tanned face was as clear as a fine brown porcelain,his eye bright, and his muscles rippled up under his skin with elastic power.
“Chum,” he said, to the dog rolling on his back in the grass, “what do you think of it all, anyway?” He reached down, seized a hind leg and whirling him around like a teetotum, sent him flying into the bushes, whence Chum launched again upon him, like a catapult. He caught the white shoulders and held him vise-like. “Just about right, eh? But wait till we get those ramblers!
“And to think,” he continued, whimsically releasing him, “that I might have gone on, one of the little-neck-clam crowd I’ve always trained with, at the same old pace, till the Vermouth-cocktail-Palm-Beach career got a double Nelson on me and the umpire counted me out. And I’d have ended by lazying along through my forties with a bay-window and a bunch of boudoir keys! Now I can kiss my hand to it all. At this moment I wouldn’t swap this old house and land, and the sunshine and that ‘gyarden’ and Unc’ Jefferson and Aunt Daph and the chickens and the birds and all the rest of it, for a mile of Millionaires’ Row.”
He drew from his jacket pocket a somewhat worn note and unfolded the dainty paper with its characteristic twirly handwriting. “The scarlet geraniums rimming the porch,” he muttered, “the coral honeysuckle on the old dead tulip-tree, and thefuchsias and verbenas by the straight walk. How right she is! They’re all growing, too. I haven’t lost a single slip.” He caught himself up short, strode to the nearest porch-pillar and rapped on it smartly with his knuckles.
“I must knock on wood,” he said, “or I’ll lose my luck.” He laughed a little. “I’m certainly catching Uncle Jefferson’s superstitions. Perhaps that’s in the soil, too!”
He went into the house and to the library. The breeze through the wide-flung bow-window was fluttering the papers on the desk and the map on the wall was flapping sidewise. He went to straighten it, and then saw what he had not noticed before—that it covered something that had been let into the plaster. He swung it aside and made an exclamation.
He was looking at a square, uncompromising wall-safe, with a round figured disk of white metal on its face. He knelt before it and tried its knob. After a moment it turned easily. But the resolute steel door would not open, though he tried every combination that came into his mind. “No use,” he said disgustedly. “One must have the right numbers.”
Then he lifted his fretted frame and smote his grimy hands together. “Confound it!” he said with a short laugh. “Here I am, a bankrupt, with all this outfit—clear to the very finger-bowls—handedto me on a silver tray, and I’m mad as scat because I can’t open the first locked thing I find!”
He ran up-stairs and donned a rough corduroy jacket and high leather leggings. “We’re going to climb the hill to-day, Chum,” he announced, “and no more moccasins need apply.”
In the lower hall, however, he suddenly stopped stock-still. “The slip of paper that was in the china dog!” he exclaimed. “What a chump I am not to have thought of it!” He found it in its pigeonhole and, kneeling down before the safe, tried the numbers carefully, first right, then left: 17—28—94—0. The heavy door opened.
“I was right!” he exulted. “It’s the plate.” He drew it out, piece by piece. Each was bagged in dark-red Canton flannel. He broke the tape of one bag and exposed a great silver pitcher, tarnished purple-blue like a raven’s wing—then a tea-service. Each piece, large and small, was marked with the greyhound rampant and the motto. “And to think,” he said, “that my great-great-grandfather buried you with his own hands under the stables when Tarleton’s raiders swept the valley before the surrender at Yorktown! Only wait till Aunt Daphne gets you polished up, and on the sideboard! You’re the one thing the place has needed!”
With the dog for comrade he traversed the garden and plunged across the valley below, hummingas he went one of the songs with which Uncle Jefferson was wont to regale his labors:
“My gran’mothah lived on yondah li’l green,Fines’ ol’ ladyevahwuz seen.Tummy-eye, tummy-oh, tummy-umpy-tumpy-tee.Fines’ ol’ ladyevahyo’ see!”
“My gran’mothah lived on yondah li’l green,Fines’ ol’ ladyevahwuz seen.Tummy-eye, tummy-oh, tummy-umpy-tumpy-tee.Fines’ ol’ ladyevahyo’ see!”
The ridiculous refrain rang out through the bewildering vistas of the wooded slope as he swung on, up the hill, through the underbrush.
The place was pathless and overgrown with paw-paw bushes and sassafras. Great trees stood so thickly in places as to make a twilight and the sunnier spots were masses of pink laurel, poison-ivy, flaming purple rhododendron and wine-red tendrils of interbraided briers. This was the forest land of whose possibilities he had thought. In the heart of the woods he came upon a great limb that had been wrenched off by storm. The broken wood was of a deep rich brown, shading to black. He broke off his song, snapped a twig and smelled it. Its sharp acrid odor was unmistakable. He suddenly remembered the walnut tree at Rosewood and what Shirley had said: “I know a girl who had two in her yard, and she went to Europe on them.”
He looked about him; as far as he could see the trees reared, hardy and perfect, untouched for a generation. He selected one of medium size and pulling a creeper, measured its circumference andgaging this measure with his eye, made a penciled calculation on the back of an envelope. “Great Scott!” he said jubilantly to the dog; “that would cut enough to wainscot the Damory Court library and build twenty sideboards!”
He sat down on a mossed boulder, breathless, his eyes sparkling. He had thought himself almost a beggar, and here in his hand was a small fortune! “Talk about engagement rings!” he muttered. “Why, a dozen of these ought to buy a whole tiara!”
Far below him he could see the square tower of the old parish church of St. Andrew. The day before he had gone there to service, slipping into a pew at the rear. There had been flowers in silver vases on either side of the reading-desk, and dim hues from the stained-glass windows had touched the gray head of the rector above the brass lectern and the crooked oak beams of the roof, and he had caught himself all at once thinking that but for its drooping hat, Shirley’s head might have outshone that of the saint through whose bright mantle the colors came. After the service the rector had showed him the vestry and the church books with their many records of Valiants before him, and he had sat for a moment in the Valiant pew, fancying her standing there sometime beside him, with her trim gloved hand by his on the prayer-book.
At length he rose and climbed on, presently turningat a right-angle to bisect the strip to its boundary before he paused to rest. “I’m no timber-cruiser,” he said to himself as he wiped his brow, “but I calculate there are all of three hundred trees big enough to cut. Why, suppose they are worth on an average only a hundred apiece. That would make—Good lord!” he muttered, “and I’ve been mooning about poverty!”
The growth was smaller and sparser now and before long he came, on the hill’s very crest, to the edge of a ragged clearing. It held a squalid settlement, perhaps a score of dirt-daubed cabins little better than hovels, some of them mere mud-walled lean-tos, with sod roofs and window-panes of flour-sacking. Fences and outhouses there was none. Littered paths rambled aimlessly hither and thither from chip-strewn yards to starved patches of corn, under-cultivated and blighted. Over the whole place hung an indescribable atmosphere of disconsolate filth, of unredeemed squalor and vileness. Razor-backed hogs rooted everywhere, snapped at by a handful of lean and spiritless hounds. A slatternly woman lolled under a burlap awning beside one of the cabins from whose interior came the sound of men’s voices raised in a fierce quarrel. Undisturbed by the hideous din, a little girl of about three years was dragging by a string an old cigar-box in which was propped a rag-doll. She was barelegged and barearmed, her tiny limbs burneda dark red by the sun, and she wore a single garment made from the leg of a patched pair of overalls. Her hair, bleached the color of corn-silk, fell over her face in elfin wildness.
With one hand on the dog’s collar, hushing him to silence, Valiant, unseen, looked at the wretched place with a shiver. He had glimpsed many wretched purlieus in the slums of great cities, but this, in the open sunlight, with the clean woods about it and the sweet clear blue above, stood out with an unrelieved boldness and contrast that was doubly sinister and forbidding. He knew instantly that the tawdry corner was the community known as Hell’s-Half-Acre, the place to which Shirley had made her night ride to rescue Rickey Snyder.
A quick glad realization of her courage rushed through him. On its heels came a feeling of shame that a spot like this could exist, a foul blot on such a landscape. It was on his own land! Its denizens held place by squatter sovereignty, but he was, nevertheless, their landlord. The thought bred a new sense of responsibility. Something should be done for them, too—for that baby, dragging its rag-doll in the cigar-box, poor little soul, abandoned to a life of besottedness, ignorance and evil!
As he gazed, the uproar in the cabin reached a climax. A red-bearded figure in nondescript garments shot from the door and collapsed in a heap in the dirt. He got up with a dreadful oath—athrown jug grazing his temple as he did so—and shaking his fist behind him, staggered into a near-by lean-to.
Valiant turned away with a feeling almost of nausea, and plunged back down the forest hillside, the shrill laughter of the woman under the strip of burlap echoing in his ears.
He saw them coming through the gate on the Red Road—the major and Shirley in a lilac muslin by his side—and strode to meet them. Behind them Ranston propelled a hand-cart filled with paper bundles from each of which protruded a bunch of flowering stems. There was a flush in Shirley’s cheek as her hand lay in Valiant’s. As for him, his eyes, like wilful drunkards, returned again and again, between the major’s compliments, to her face.
“You have accomplished wonders, sah! I had no idea so much could be done in such a limited time. We are leisurely down here, and seldom do to-day what can be put off till to-morrow. Real Northern hustle, eh, Shirley? You have certainly primped the old place up. I could almost think I was looking at Damory Court in the sixties, sah!”
“That’s quite the nicest thing you could have said, Major,” responded Valiant. “But it needs the flowers.” He looked at Shirley with sparkling eyes. “How splendid of you to bring them! I feel like a robber.”
“With our bushels of them? We shall never miss them at all. Have you set out the others?”
“I have, indeed. Every one has rooted, too. You shall see them.” He led the way up the drive till they stood before the porch.
“Gad!” chuckled the major. “Who would think it had been unoccupied for three decades? At this rate, you’ll soon be giving dances, sah.”
“Ah,” said Valiant. “That’s the very thing I want to suggest. The tournament comes off next week, I understand, and it’s been the custom to have a ball that night. The tourney ground is on this estate, and Damory Court is handier than the Country Club. Why wouldn’t it be appropriate to hold the dance here? The ground-floor rooms are in order, and if the young people would put up with it, it would be a great pleasure to me, I assure you.”
“Oh!” breathed Shirley. “That would be too wonderful!”
The major seized his hand and shook it heartily. “I can answer for the committee,” he said. “They’ll jump at it. Why, sah, the new generation has never set eyes inside the house. It’s a golden legend to them.”
“Then I’ll go ahead with arrangements.”
Shirley’s eyes were overrunning the cropped lawn, which now showed a clear smooth slope between the arching trees. “It was lovely in its ruin,” she said, “but it was pathetic, too. Unc’ Jefferson used tosay ‘De ol’ place look lak et ben griebin’ etse’f ter deff wid lonesomeness.’ Somehow, now it looks glad. Just hear that small citizen!”
A red squirrel sat up in a tree-crotch, his paws tucked into his furry breast, barking angrily at them. “He’s shocked at the house-cleaning,” she said; “a sign he’s a bachelor.”
“So am I,” said Valiant.
“Maybe he’s older than you,” she countered; “and sot in his ways.”
“I accept him as a warning,” he said, and she laughed with him.
He led them around the house and down the terraces of the formal garden, and here the major’s encomiums broke forth again. “You are going to take us old folks back, sah,” he said with real feeling. “This gyarden in its original lines was unique. It had a piquancy and a picturesqueness that, thank God, are to be restored! One can understand the owner of an estate like this having no desire to spend his life philandering abroad. We all hope, sah, that you will recur to the habit of your ancestors, and count Damory Court home.”
Valiant smiled slowly. “I don’t dream of anything else,” he said. “My life, as I map it out, seems to begin here. The rest doesn’t count—only the years when I was little and had my father.”
The major carefully adjusted his eye-glasses. His head was turned away. “Ah, yes,” he said.
“The last twenty years,” continued the other, “from my present view-point, are valuable mainly for contrast.”
“As a consistent regimen ofpâté de foie gras,” said Shirley quizzically, “makes one value bread and butter?”
He shook his head at her. “As starvation makes one appreciate plenty. The next twenty years are to be here. But they hold side-trips, too. Now and then there’s a jaunt back to the city.”
“Contrast again?” she asked interestedly.
“Yes and no. Yes, because no one who has never known that blazing clanging life can really understand the peace and blessedness of a place like this. No, because there are some things which are to be found only there. There are the galleries and the opera. I need a breath of them both.”
“You’re right,” nodded the major. “Birds are birds, and Melba is Melba. But a sward like this in the early morning, with the dew on the grass, is the best opera for a steady diet.”
“I called them only side-trips,” said John Valiant.
“And semi-occasional longer flights, too,” the major reflected. “A look-see abroad once in a blue moon. Why not?”
“Yes. For mental photographs—impressions one can’t get from between book-covers. There’s an old cloister garden I know in Italy and a particular river-bank in Japan in the cherry-blossom season, and a tiny island with a Greek castle on it in the Ægean. Little colored memories for me to bring away to dream over. But always I come back here to Damory Court. For this is—home!”
They walked beneath the pergola to the lake, where Shirley gave a cry of delight at sight of its feathered population. “Wheredidyou get them from?” she asked.
“Washington. In crates.”
“That explains it,” she exclaimed. “One day last week the little darkies in the village all insisted a circus was coming. They must have seen these being hauled here. They watched the whole afternoon for the elephants.”
“Poor youngsters!” he said. “It’s a shame to fool them. But I’ve had all the circus I want getting the live stock installed.”
“They won’t suffer,” said the major. “Rickey Snyder’ll get them up a three-ringed show at the drop of a hat and drop it herself. Besides, there’s tournament day coming, and they can live on that. I see you’ve dredged out some of the lilies.”
“Yes. I take my dip here every morning.”
“We used to have a diving-board when we were little shavers,” pursued the major. “I remember once, your father—”
He cleared his throat and stopped dead.
“Please,” said John Valiant, “I—I like to hear about him.”
“It was only that I struck my head on a rock on the bottom and—stayed down. The others were frightened, but he—he dove down again and again till he brought me out. It was a narrow squeak, I reckon.”
A silence fell. Looking at the tall muscular form beside her, Shirley had a sudden vision of a determined little body cleaving the dark water, over and over, now rising panting for breath, now plunging again, never giving up. And she told herself that the son was the same sort. That hard set of the jaw, those firm lips, would know no flinching. He might suffer, but he would be strong. Subconsciously her mind was also swiftly contrasting him with Chilly Lusk: the same spare lithe frame but set off by light skin, brown hair and hazel eyes; the two faces, alike sharply and clearly chiseled, but this one purged of the lazy scorn, the satiety, and reckless indulgence.
Half unconsciously she spoke her thought aloud: “You look like your father, do you not?”
“Yes,” he replied, “there’s a strong likeness. I have a photograph which I’ll show you sometime. But how did you know?”
“Perhaps I only guessed,” she said in some confusion. To cover this she stooped by the pebbly marge and held out her hand to the bronze ducks that pushed and gobbled about her fingers. “What have you named them?” she asked.
“Nothing.Youchristen them.”
“Very well. The light one shall be Peezletree and the dark one Pilgarlic. I got the names from John Jasper—he was Virginia’s famous negro preacher. I once heard him hold forth when he read from one of the Psalms—the one about the harp and the psaltery—and he called it peezletree.”
“Speaking of ducks,” said the major, tweaking his gray imperial, “reminds me of Judge Chalmers’ white mallard. He had a pair that were so much in love they did nothing but loaf around honey-cafuddling with their wings over each other’s backs. It was a lesson in domesticity for the community, sah. Well, the drake got shot for a wild one, and if you’ll believe it, the poor little duck was that inconsolable it would have brought tears to your eyes. The whole Chalmers family were affected.”
Shirley had put one hand over her mouth to repress a smile. “Major, Major!” she murmured reprovingly. But his guilty glance avoided her.
“Yes, sah, nothing would console her. So at last Chalmers got another drake, the handsomest he could find, and trotted him out to please her. What do you reckon that little white duck did? She looked at the judge once reproachfully and then waddled down to a black muck-bed and lay down in it. She came out with as fine a suit of mourning as you ever saw. And believe it or not, sah, but she wouldn’t go in the water for ten days!”
Valiant’s laugh rang out over the lake—to be answered by a sudden sharp screech from the terrace, where the peacock strutted, a blaze of spangled purple and gold. They turned to see Aunt Daphne issue from the kitchen, twig-broom in hand.
“Heah!” she exclaimed. “What fo’ yo’ kyahin’ on like er wil’gyraffwe’n we got comp’ny, yo’ triflin’ ol’ fan-tail, yo’! Git outen heah!” She waved her weapon and the bird, with a raucous shriek of defiance, retired in ruffled disorder. The master of Damory Court looked at Shirley. “What shall we namehim?”
“I’d call him Fire-Cracker if he goes off like that,” she said. And Fire-Cracker the bird was christened forthwith.
“And now,” said Shirley, “let’s set out the ramblers.”
The major had brought a rough plan, sketched from memory, of the old arrangement of the formal garden. “I’ll just go over the lines of the beds with Unc’ Jefferson,” he proposed, “while you two potter over these roses.” So Valiant and Shirley walked back up the slope beneath the pergola together. The sun was westering fast, and long lilac cloud-trails lay over the terraces. But the bumbling bees were still busy in the honeysuckle and hawking dragon-flies shot hither and thither. A robin was tilting on the rim of the fountain and it looked at them with head turned sidewise, with a low sweet pip thatmingled with the trickling laugh of the falling water.
With Ranston puffing and blowing like a black porpoise over his creaking go-cart, they planted the ramblers—crimson and pink and white—Valiant much of the time on his knees, his hands plunging deep into the black spongy earth, and Shirley with broad hat flung on the grass, her fingers separating the clinging thread-like roots and her small arched foot tamping down the soil about them. Her hair—the color of wet raw wood in the sunlight—was very near the brown head and sometimes their fingers touched over the work. Once, as they stood up, flushed with the exercise, a great black and orange butterfly, dazed with the sun-glow, alighted on Valiant’s rolled-up sleeve. He held his arm perfectly still and blew gently on the wavering pinions till it swam away. When a redbird flirted by, to his delight she whistled its call so perfectly that it wheeled in mid-flight and tilted inquiringly back toward them.
As they descended the terrace again to the pergola, he said, “There’s only one thing lacking at Damory Court—a sun-dial.”
“Then you haven’t found it?” she cried delightedly. “Come and let me show you.”
She led the way through the maze of beds at one side till they reached a hedge laced thickly with Virginia creeper. He parted this leafy screen, bendingback the springing fronds that thrust against the flimsy muslin of her gown and threatened to spear the pink-rosed hat that cast an adorable warm tint over her creamy face, thinking that never had the old place seen such a picture as she made framed in the deep green.
Some such thought was in the major’s mind, too, as he came slowly up the terrace below. He paused, to take off his hat and wipe his brow.
“With the place all fixed up this way,” he sighed to himself, “I could believe it was only last week that Beauty Valiant and Southall and I were boys, loafing around this gyarden. And to think that now it’s Valiant’s son and Judith’s daughter! Why, it seems like yesterday that Shirley there was only knee-high to a grasshopper—and I used to tell her her hair was that color because she ran through hell bareheaded. I’m about a thousand years old, I reckon!”
Meanwhile the two figures above had pushed through the tangle into a circular sunny space where stood a short round pillar of red onyx. It was a sun-dial, its vine-clad disk cut of gray polished stone in which its metal tongue was socketed. Round the outer edge of the disk ran an inscription in archaic lettering. Valiant pulled away the clustering ivy leaves and read:I count no hours but the happy ones.
“If that had only been true!” he said.
“It is true. See how the vines hid the sun from it. It ceased to mark the time after the Court was deserted.”
He snapped the clinging tendrils and swept the cluster from its stone face. “It shall begin to count again from this moment. Will it mark only happy hours for me, I wonder? I’ll bribe it with flowers.”
“White for happiness,” she said.
“I’ll put moonflowers at its base and where you are standing, Madonna lilies. The outer part of the circle shall have bridal-wreath and white irises, and they shall shade out into pastel colors—mauves and grays and heliotropes. Oh, I shall love this spot!—perhaps sometime the best of all.”
“Which do you love the most now?”
He leaned slightly toward her, one hand on the dial’s time-notched rim. “Don’t you know?” he said in a lower voice. “Could any other spot mean to me what that acre under the hemlocks means?”
Her face was turned from him, her fingers pulling at the drifting vine, and a splinter of sunlight tangled in her hair like a lace of fireflies.
“I could never forget it,” he continued. “The thing that spoiled my father’s life happened there, yet there we two first talked, and there you—”
“Don’t!” she said, facing him. “Don’t!”
“Ah, let me speak! I want to tell you that I shall carry the memory of that afternoon, and of your brave kindness, always, always! If I werenever to see you again in this life, I should always treasure it. If I died of thirst in some Sahara, it would be the last thing I should remember—your face would be the last thing I should see! If I—”
He paused, his veins beating hard under the savage self-repression, his hand trembling against the stone, his voice a traitor, yielding to something that rose in his throat to choke the stumbling words.
In the silence there was the sound of a slow footfall on the gravel walk, and at the same moment he saw a magical change. Shirley drew back. The soft gentian blue of her eyes darkened. The lips that an instant before had been tremulous, parted in a low delicious laugh. She swept him a deep curtsey.
“I am beholden to you, sir,” she said gaily, “for a most knightly compliment. There’s the major. Come and let us show him where we’ve planted the ramblers.”
The noon sun of tournament day shone brilliantly over the village, drowsy no longer, for many vehicles were hitched at the curb, or moved leisurely along the leafy street: big, canvas-topped country wagons drawn by shaggy-hoofed horses and set with chairs that had bumped and jostled their holiday loads from outlying tobacco plantation and stud-farm; sober, black-covered buggies, long, narrow, springless buckboards, frivolous side-bar runabouts and antique shays resurrected from the primeval depths of cobwebbed stables, relics of tarnished grandeur and faded fortune. Here and there a motor crept, a bilious and replete beetle among insects of wider wing. Knots of high-booted men conversed on street corners, men hand-cuffed, it would seem, to their whips; children romped and ran hither and thither; and through all sifted a varicolored stream of negroes, male and female, good-natured and voluble. For tournament day was a county event, and the annual sportof the quality had long outstripped even circus day in general popularity.
At midday vehicles resolved themselves into luncheon-booths—hampers stowed away beneath the seats, disclosing all manner of picnic edibles—the court-house yard was an array of grass-spread table-cloths, and an air of plenty reigned.
Within Mrs. Merryweather Mason’s brown house hospitality sat enthroned and the generous dining-room was held by a regiment of feminine out-of-town acquaintances. At intervals Aunt Charity, the cook, issued from the kitchen to peer surreptitiously through the dining-room door with vast delight.
“Dey cert’n’y do take aftah dat fried chick’n,” she said to old Jereboam, who, with a half-dozen extras, had been pressed into perspiring tray-service. “Dey got all de Mefodis’ preachahs Ah evah see laid in de shade dis day. Hyuh! hyuh!”
“’Deed dey has! Hyuh! hyuh!” echoed Jereboam huskily.
The Mason yard, an hour later, was an active encampment of rocking-chairs, and a din of conversation floated out over the pink oleanders, whose tubs had achieved a fresh coat of bright green paint for the occasion. Mrs. Poly Gifford—a guest of the day—here shone resplendent.