“No,” he said, in answer to her look, “he won’t rouse again.”
“I will wait,” she told him, and he left her, shutting the door with careful softness.
But the slight figure with its silver hair, sitting there, was not alone. Ghosts were walking up and down. Not the misty wraiths John Valiant had at times imagined went flitting along the empty corridors, but faces very clear in the sunlight, that came and went with the memories so long woven over by the shuttle of time—evoked now by the touch of a key that her hand still clenched tightly in its palm.
There welled over her in a tide those days of puzzle, the weeks of waiting silence, the slow inexorable months of heartache, the long years that had deepened the mystery of Beauty Valiant’s exile. In the first shock of the news that Sassoon had fallen by his hand, she had thought she could not forgive him that broken faith. She and his promise to her had not weighed in the balance against his idea of manly “honor”! But this bitterness had at length slipped away. “He will write,” she had told herself, “and explain.” But no word had come. Whispers had flitted to her—the tale of Sassoon’s intoxication—stinging barbs that clung to Beauty Valiant’s name. That these should rest unanswered had filled her with resentment and anger. Slowly, but with deadly surety, had grown the belief that he no longer cared. In the end there had been left her only pride—the pride that covers its wound and smiles. And she had hidden her wound with flowers. But in the deepest well of her heart her love for him had rested unchanged, clear and defined as a moss in amber, wrapped in that mystery of silence.
In the little haircloth trunk back in her room lay an old scrap-book. It held a few leaves torn from letters and many newspaper clippings. From these she had known of his work, his marriage, the great commercial success for which his name had stood—the name that from the day of his going, she had so seldom taken upon her lips. Some of them had dealt with his habits and idiosyncrasies, hints of an altered personality, an aloofness or loneliness that had set him apart and made him, in a way, a stranger to those who should have known him best. Thus her mind had come to hold a double image: the grave man these shadowed forth, and the man she had loved, whose youthful face was in the locket she wore always on her breast. It was this face that was printed on her heart, and when John Valiant had stood before her on the porch at Rosewood, it had seemed to have risen, instinct, from that old grave.
He had not kept silence! He had written! It pealed through her brain like a muffled bell. But Beauty Valiant was gone with her youth; in the room near by lay that old companion who would never speak to her again, the lifelong friend—who had really failed her thirty years ago!... and in a tin box a mile away lay a letter....
“He won’t rouse again,” the doctor had said, but a little later, as he and Valiant sat beside the couch, the major opened his eyes suddenly.