He wiped his forehead. Between the hemlocks now were two figures facing each other, one twitching uncertainly, the other palely rigid; and at one side, held screen-wise, a raised umbrella. In some ghostly way he could see straight through the latter—see the doctor’s hand gripping the handle, his own, outstretched beyond its edge, holding a handkerchief ready to flutter down. A silly subterfuge those umbrellas, but there must be no actual witnesses to the final act of a “gentlemen’s meeting”! A silly code, the whole of it, now happily outgrown! He thought thus with a kind of dumb irritant wonder, while the green picture hung a moment—as a stone thrown in air hangs poised at height before it falls—then dissolved itself in two sharp crackles, with a gasping interval between. The scene blurred into a single figure huddling down—huddling down—
“Which did she love?” The major shook his head helplessly. It was, after all, only the echo, become all at once audible on a shallow woman’s lips, of a question that had always haunted him. It had first come to him on the heels of that duel, when he had stood, somewhat later that hateful morning, holding a saddled horse before the big pillared porch. It had whispered itself then from every moving leaf. “Sassoon or Valiant?” If she had loved Sassoon, of what use the letter Valiant was so long penning in the library? But—if it were Valiant she loved? The man who, having sworn not to lift his hand against the other, had broken his sacred word to her! Who had stained the unwritten code by facing an opponent maddened with liquor! Yet, what was there a woman might not condone in the one man? Would she read, forgive and send for him?
The major laughed out suddenly, harshly, in the quiet room, and looked down as if he expected to see that letter still lying in his hand. But the laugh could not still a regular pulsing sound that was in his ears—elfin like the voices, but as distinct—the sound of a horse’s hoofs going from Damory Court.
He had heard those hoof-beats echo in his brain for thirty years!
CHAPTER XVII
THE TRESPASSER
Till the sun was high John Valiant lay on his back in the fragrant grass, meditatively watching a bucaneering chicken-hawk draw widening circles against the blue and listening to the vibrant tattoo of a “pecker-wood” on a far-away tree, and the timorous wet whistle of a bob-white. The sun shone through the tracery of the foliage, making a quivering mosaic of light and shadow all about him. A robin ran across the grass with his breast puffed out as if he had been stealing apples; now and then an inquisitive yellow-hammer darted above and in the bushes cardinals wove slender sharp flashes of living crimson. The whole place was very quiet now. For just one thrilling moment it had burgeoned into sound and movement: when the sweaty horses had stood snorting and stamping in the yard with the hounds scampering between their legs and the riding-coats winking like rubies in the early sunshine!
Had she recognized him as the smudged tinkerer of the stalled car? “She saw me drop that wretched brute through the window,” he chuckled. “I could take oath to that. But she didn’t give me away, true little sport that she was. And she won’t. I can’t think of any reason, but I know.” The chuckle broadened to an appreciative grin. “What an ass she must have thought me! To risk a nasty bite and rob her of her brush into the bargain! How she looked at me, just for a minute, with that thoroughbred face, out of those sea-deep eyes, under that whorling, marvelous heaped-up hair of hers! Was she angry? I wonder!”