“Et’s er moughty fine ol’ place, suh, wid dat big revenue ob trees,” said Uncle Jefferson. “But Ah reck’n et ain’ got none ob de modern connivances.”
But Valiant did not answer; his gaze was straight before him, fixed on the noble old house they were approaching. Its wide and columned front peered between huge rugged oaks and slender silver poplars which cast cool long shadows across an unkempt lawn laden with ragged mock-orange, lilac and syringa bushes, its stately grandeur dimmed but not destroyed by the shameful stains of the neglected years.
As he jumped down he was possessed by an odd sensation of old acquaintance—as if he had seen those tall white columns before—an illusory half-vision into some shadowy, fourth-dimensional landscape that belonged to his subconscious self, or that, glimpsed in some immaterial dream-picture, had left a faint-etched memory. Then, on a sudden, the vista vibrated and widened, the white columns expanded and shot up into the clouds, and from every bush seemed to peer a friendly black savage with woolly white hair!
“Wishing-House!” he whispered. He looked about him, half expecting—so vivid was the illusion—to see a circle of rough huts under the trees and a multitude of ebony imps dancing in the sunshine. So Virginia had been that secret Never-Never Land, the wondrous fairy demesne of his childhood, with its amiable barbarians and its thickets of coursing grimalkins! The hidden country which his father’s thoughts, sadly recurring, had painted to the little child that once he was, in the guise of an endless wonder-tale! His eyes misted over, and it seemed to him that moment that his father was very near.
Leaving the negro to unload his belongings, he traversed an overgrown path of mossed gravel, between box-rows frowsled like the manes of lions gone mad and smothered in an accumulation of matted roots and débris of rotting foliage, and presently, the bulldog at his heels, found himself in the rear of the house.
The building, with kitchen, stables and negro quarters behind it, had been set on the boss of the wooded knoll. Along half its side ran a wide porch that had once been glass-enclosed, now with panes gone and broken and putty-crumbling sashes. Below it lay the piteous remnants of a formal garden, grouped about an oval pool from whose center reared the slender yellowed shaft of a fountain in whose shallow cup a robin was taking its rain-water bath. The pool was dry, the tiles that had formed its floor were prized apart with weeds; ribald wild grape-vines ran amuck hither and thither; and over all was a drenching-sweet scent of trailing honeysuckle.
Threading his way among the dank undergrowth of the desolate wilderness, following the sound of running water, he came suddenly to a little lake fed from unseen pipes, that spread its lily-padded surface coolly and invitingly under a clump of elms. Beside it stood a spring-house with a sadly sagging roof. With a dead branch he probed the water’s depth. “Ten feet and a pebble bottom,” he said. The lake’s overflow poured in a musical cascade down between fern-covered rocks, to join, far below, the stream he had seen from the gateway. Beyond this the ground rose again to a hill, densely forested and flanked by runnelled slopes of poverty-stricken broom-sedge as stark and sear as the bad-lands of an alkali desert. As he gazed, a bird bubbled into a wild song from the grape-vine tangle behind him, and almost at his feet a rabbit scudded blithely out of the weeds and darted back.
“Mine!” he said aloud with a rueful pride. “And for general run-downness, it’s up to the advertisement.” He looked musingly at the piteous wreck and ruin, his gaze sweeping down across the bared fields and unkempt forest. “Mine!” he repeated. “All that, I suppose, for it has the same earmarks of neglect. Between those cultivated stretches it looks like a wedge of Sahara gone astray.” His gaze returned to the house. “Yet what a place it must have been in its time!” It had not sprung into being at the whim of any one man; it had grown mellowly and deliberately, expressing the multiform life and culture of a stock. Generation after generation, father and son, had lived there and loved it, and, ministering to all, it had given to each of itself. The wild weird beauty was infecting him and the pathos of the desolation caught at his heart. He went slowly back to where his conductor sat on the lichened horse-block.
“We’s heah,” called Uncle Jefferson cheerfully. “Whut we gwineter do nex’, suh? Reck’n Ah bettah go ovah ter Miss Dandridge’s place fer er crowbah. Lawd!” he added, “ef he ain’ got de key! Whut yo’ think ob dat now?”
John Valiant was looking closely at the big key; for there were words, which he had not noted before, engraved in the massive flange: Friends all hours. He smiled. The sentiment sent a warm current of pleasure to his finger-tips. Here was the very text of hospitality!