“It would take as many for me.” Valiant laughed a little. “You who have always lived here, can scarcely understand what I am feeling, I imagine. You see, I never knew till quite recently—my childhood was largely spent abroad, and I have no near relatives—that my father was a Virginian and that my ancestors always lived here. To discover this all at once and to come to this house, with their portraits on the walls and their names on the title-pages of these books!” He made a gesture toward the glass shelves. “Why, there’s a room up-stairs with the very toys they played with when they were children! To learn that I belong to it all; that I myself am the last link in such a chain!”
“The ancestral instinct,” said the doctor. “I’m glad to see that it means something still, in these rotten days.”
“Of course,” John Valiant continued, “every one knows that he has ancestors. But I’m beginning to see that what you call the ancestral instinct needs a locality and a place. In a way it seems to me that an old estate like this has a soul too—a sort of clan or family soul that reacts on the descendant.”
“Rather a Japanesy idea, isn’t it?” observed the major. “But I know what you mean. Maybe that’s why old Virginian families hang on to their land in spite of hell and high-water. They count their forebears real live people, quite capable of turning over in their graves.”
“Mine are beginning to seem very real to me. Though I don’t even know their Christian names yet, I can judge them by their handiwork. The men who built Damory Court had a sense of beauty and of art.”
“And their share of deviltry, too,” put in the doctor.
“I suppose so,” admitted his host. “At this distance I can bear even that. But good or bad, I’m deeply thankful that they chose Virginia. Since I’ve been laid up, I’ve been browsing in the library here—”
“A bit out of date now, I reckon,” said the major, “but it used to pass muster. Your grandfather was something of a book-worm. He wrote a history of the family, didn’t he?”
“Yes. I’ve found it. The Valiants of Virginia. I’m reading the Revolutionary chapters now. It never seemed real before—it’s been only a slice of impersonal and rather dull history. But the book has made it come alive. I’m having the thrill of the globe-trotter the first time he sees the Tower of London or the field of Waterloo. I see more than that stubble-field out yonder; I see a big wooden stockade with soldiers in ragged buff and blue guarding it.”
The major nodded, “Ah, yes,” he said. “The Continental prison-camp.”