He thought a moment, then went quickly into the library and began to ransack the trunk. At length he found a small box containing keepsakes of various kinds. He poured the medley on to the table—an uncut moonstone, an amethyst-topped pencil that one of his tutors had given him as a boy, a tiger’s claw, a compass and what-not. Among them was a man’s seal-ring with a crest cut in a cornelian. He looked at it closely. It was the same device.
The ring had been his father’s. Just when or how it had come into his possession he could never remember. It had lain among these keepsakes so many years that he had almost forgotten its existence. He had never worn a ring, but now, as he went back to the hall, he slipped it on his finger. The motto below the crest was worn away, but it showed clear in the marble of the hall-mantel: I clinge.
His eyes turned from the carven words and strayed to the pleasant sunny foliage outside. An arrogant boast, perhaps, yet in the event well justified. Valiants had held that selfsame slope when the encircling forests had rung with war-whoop and blazed with torture-fire. They had held on through Revolution and Civil War. Good and bad, abiding and lawless, every generation had cleaved stubbornly to its acres. I clinge. His father had clung through absence that seemed to have been almost exile, and now he, the last Valiant, was come to make good the boast.
His gaze wavered. The tail of his eye had caught through the window a spurt of something dashing and vivid, that grazed the corner of a far-off field. He craned his neck, but it had passed the line of his vision. The next moment, however, there came trailing on the satiny stillness the high-keyed ululation of a horn, and an instant later a long-drawn hallo-o-o! mixed with a pattering chorus of yelps.
He went close, and leaning from the sill, shaded his eyes with his hand. The noise swelled and rounded in volume; it was nearing rapidly. As he looked, the hunt dashed into full view between the tree-boles—a galloping mêlée of khaki and scarlet, swarming across the fresh green of a wheat field, behind a spotted swirl of hounds. It mounted a rise, dipped momentarily into a gully and then, in a narrow sweeping curve, came pounding on up the long slope, directly toward the house.
“Confound it!” said John Valiant belligerently; “they’re on my land!”
They were near enough now for him to hear the voices of the men, calling encouragement to the dogs, and to see the white ribbons of foam across the flanks of the laboring horses. One scarlet-coated feminine rider, detached from the bunch, had spurred in advance and was leading by a clean hundred yards, bareheaded, her hat fallen back to the limit of its ribbon knotted under her chin, and her waving hair gleaming like tarnished gold.
“How she rides!” muttered the solitary watcher. “Cross-saddle, of course,—the sensible little sport! She’ll never in the world do that wall!—Yes, by George!” For, with a beseeching cry and a straining tug, she had fairly lifted her big golden-chestnut hunter over the high barrier in a leap as clean as the flight of a flying squirrel. He saw her lean forward to pat the wet arching neck as the horse settled again into its pace.
John Valiant’s admiration turned to delight. “Why,” he said, “it’s the Lady-of-the-Roses!”
He put his hands on the sill and vaulted to the porch.