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, humming as 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’ lady evah wuz seen.
Tummy-eye, tummy-oh, tummy-umpy-tumpy-tee.
Fines’ ol’ lady evah yo’ 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 and gaging 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.