THE VALIANTS
OF VIRGINIA

By HALLIE ERMINIE RIVES

(MRS. POST WHEELER)

Author of “The Kingdom of Slender Swords,”
“Satan Sanderson,” etc.

With Four Illustrations in Color

By ANDRÉ CASTAIGNE

Copyright 1912
The Bobbs-Merrill Company

TO

THE REAL JOHN

“Molly, Molly Bright!
Can I get there by candle-light?”
“Yes, if your legs are long enough.”

CONTENTS

THE VALIANTS OF
VIRGINIA

CHAPTER I

THE CRASH

“

Failed!” ejaculated John Valiant blankly, and the hat he held dropped to the claret-colored rug like a huge white splotch of sudden fright. “The Corporation—failed!”

The young man was the glass of fashion, from the silken ribbon on the spotless Panama to his pearl-gray gaiters, and well favored—a lithe stalwart figure, with wide-set hazel eyes and strong brown hair waving back from a candid forehead. The soft straw, however, had been wrung to a wisp between clutching fingers and the face was glazed in a kind of horrified and assiduous surprise, as if the rosy peach of life, bitten, had suddenly revealed itself an unripe persimmon. The very words themselves came with a galvanic twitch and a stagger that conveyed a sense at once of shock and of protest. Even the white bulldog stretched on the floor, nose between paws and one restless eye on his master in a troubled wonder that any one should prefer to forsake the ecstatic sunshine of the street, with its thousand fascinating scents and cross-trails, for a stuffy business office, lifted his wrinkling pink nose and snuffled with acute and hopeful inquiry.

Never had John Valiant’s innocuous and butterfly existence known a surprise more startling. He had swung into the room with all the nonchalant habits, the ingrained certitude of the man born with achievement ready-made in his hands. And a single curt statement—like the ruthless blades of a pair of shears—had snipped across the one splendid scarlet thread in the woof that constituted life as he knew it. He had knotted his lavender scarf that morning a vice-president of the Valiant Corporation—one of the greatest and most successful of modern-day organizations; he sat now in the fading afternoon trying to realize that the huge fabric, without warning, had toppled to its fall.

With every nerve of his six feet of manhood in rebellion, he rose and strode to the half-opened window, through which sifted the smell of growing things—for the great building fronted the square—and the soft alluring moistness of early spring. “Failed!” he repeated helplessly, and the echo seemed to go flittering about the substantial walls like a derisive India-rubber bat on a spree.

The bulldog sat up, thumping the rug with a vibrant tail. There was some mistake, surely; one went out by the door, not by the window! He rose, picked up the Panama in his mouth, and padding across the rug, poked it tentatively into his master’s hand. But no, the hand made no response. Clearly they were not to go out, and he dropped it and went puzzledly back and lay down with pricked ears, while his master stared out into the foliaged day.

How solid and changeless it had always seemed—that great business fabric woven by the father he could so dimly remember! His own invested fortune had been derived from the great corporation the elder Valiant had founded and controlled until his death. With almost unprecedented earnings, it had stood as a very Gibraltar of finance, a type and sign of brilliant organization. Now, on the heels of a trust’s dissolution which would be a nine-days’ wonder, the vast structure had crumpled up like a cardboard. The rains had descended and the floods had come, and it had fallen!

The man at the desk had wheeled in his revolving chair and was looking at the trim athletic back blotting the daylight, with a smile that was little short of a covert sneer. He was one of the local managers of the Corporation whose ruin was to be that day’s sensation, a colorless man who had acquired middle age with his first long trousers and had been dedicated to the commercial treadmill before he had bought a safety-razor. He despised all loiterers along the primrose paths, and John Valiant was but a decorative figurehead.

The bulldog lifted his head. The ghost of a furred throaty growl rumbled in the silence, and the man at the desk shrank a little, as the hair rippled up on the thick neck and the faithful red-rimmed eyes opened a shade wider. But John Valiant did not turn. He was bitterly absorbed with his own thoughts.

Till this moment he had never really known how proud he had always been of the Corporation, of the fact that he was its founder’s son. His election to high office in the small coterie that controlled its destinies he had known very well to be but the modern concrete expression of his individual holdings, but it had nevertheless deeply pleased him. The fleeting sense of power, the intimate touching of wide issues in a city of Big Things had flattered him; for a while he had dreamed of playing a great part, of pushing the activities of the Corporation into new territory, invading foreign soil. He might have done much, for he had begun with good equipment. He had read law, had even been admitted to the bar. But to what had it come? A gradual slipping back into the rut of careless amusement, the tacit assumption of his prerogatives by other waiting hands. The huge wheels had continued to turn, smoothly, inevitably, and he had drawn his dividends ... and that was all. John Valiant swallowed something that was very like a sob.

As he stood trying to plumb the depth of the calamity, self-anger began to stir and buzz in his heart like a great bee. Like a tingling X-ray there went stabbing through the husk woven of a thousand inherent habits the humiliating knowledge of his own uselessness. In those profitless seasons through which he had sauntered, as he had strolled through his casual years of college, he had given least of his time and thought to the concern which had absorbed his father’s young manhood. He, John Valiant—one of its vice-presidents! waster, on whose expenditures there had never been a limit, who had strewn with the foolish free-handedness of a prodigal! Idler, with a reputation in three cities as a leader of cotillions!

“Fool!” he muttered under his breath, and on the landscape outside the word stamped itself on everything as though a thousand little devils had suddenly turned themselves into letters of the alphabet and were skipping about in fours.

Valiant started as the other spoke at his elbow. He, too, had come to the window and was looking down at the pavement. “How quickly some news spreads!”

For the first time the young man noted that the street below was filling with a desultory crowd. He distinguished a knot of Italian laborers talking with excited gesticulations—a smudged plasterer, tools in hand,—clerks, some hatless and with thin alpaca coats—all peering at the voiceless front of the great building, and all, he imagined, with a thriving fear in their faces. As he watched, a woman, coarsely dressed, ran across the street, her handkerchief pressed to her eyes.

“The notice has gone up on the door,” said the manager. “I sent word to the police. Crowds are ugly sometimes.”

Valiant drew a sudden sharp breath. The Corporation down in the mire, with crowds at its doors ready to clamor for money entrusted to it, the aggregate savings of widow and orphan, the piteous hoarded sums earned by labor over which pinched sickly faces had burned the midnight oil!

The older man had turned back to the desk to draw a narrow typewritten slip of paper from a pigeonhole. “Here,” he said, “is a list of the bonds of the subsidiary companies recorded in your name. These are all, of course, engulfed in the larger failure. You have, however, your private fortune. If you take my advice, by the way,” he added significantly, “you’ll make sure of keeping that.”

“What do you mean?” John Valiant faced him quickly.

The other laughed shortly. “‘A word to the wise,’” he quoted. “It’s very good living abroad. There’s a boat leaving to-morrow.”

A dull red sprang into the younger face. “You mean—”

“Look at that crowd down there—you can hear them now. There’ll be a legislative investigation, of course. And the devil’ll get the hindmost.” He struck the desk-top with his hand. “Have you ever seen the bills for this furniture? Do you know what that rug under your feet cost? Twelve thousand—it’s an old Persian. What do you suppose the papers will do to that? Do you think such things will seem amusing to that rabble down there?” His hand swept toward the window. “It’s been going on for too many years, I tell you! And now some one’ll pay the piper. The lightning won’t strike me—I’m not tall enough. You’re a vice-president.”

“Do you imagine that I knew these things—that I have been a party to what you seem to believe has been a deliberate wrecking?” Valiant towered over him, his breath coming fast, his hands clenched hard.

“You?” The manager laughed again—an unpleasant laugh that scraped the other’s quivering nerves like hot sandpaper. “Oh, lord, no! How should you? You’ve been too busy playing polo and winning bridge prizes. How many board meetings have you attended this year? Your vote is proxied as regular as clockwork. But you’re supposed to know. The people down there in the street won’t ask questions about patent-leather pumps and ponies; they’ll want to hear about such things as rotten irrigation loans in the Stony-River Valley—to market an alkali desert that is the personal property of the president of this Corporation.”

Valiant turned a blank white face. “Sedgwick?”

“Yes. You know his principle: ‘It’s all right to be honest, if you’re not too damn honest.’ He owns the Stony-River Valley bag and baggage. It was a big gamble and he lost.”

For a moment there was absolute silence in the room. From outside came the rising murmur of the crowd and cutting through it the shrill cry of a newsboy calling an evening extra. Valiant was staring at the other with a strange look. Emotions to which in all his self-indulgent life he had been a stranger were running through his mind, and outré passions had him by the throat. Fool and doubly blind! A poor pawn, a catspaw raking the chestnuts for unscrupulous men whose ignominy he was now called on, perforce, to share! In his pitiful egotism he had consented to be a figurehead, and he had been made a tool. A red rage surged over him. No one had ever seen on John Valiant’s face such a look as grew on it now.

He turned, retrieved the Panama, and without a word opened the door. The older man took a step toward him—he had a sense of dangerous electric forces in the air—but the door closed sharply in his face. He smiled grimly. “Not crooked,” he said to himself; “merely callow. A well-meaning, manicured young fop wholly surrounded by men who knew what they wanted!” He shrugged his shoulders and went back to his chair.

Valiant plunged down in the elevator to the street. Its single other passenger had his nose buried in a newspaper, and over the reader’s shoulder he saw the double-leaded head-line: “Collapse of the Valiant Corporation!”

He pushed past the guarded door, and threading the crowd, made toward the curb, where the bulldog, with a bark of delight, leaped upon the seat of a burnished car, rumbling and vibrating with pent-up power. There were those in the sullen anxious crowd who knew whose was that throbbing metal miracle, the chauffeur spick and span from shining cap-visor to polished brown puttees, and recognizing the white face that went past, pelted it with muttered sneers. But he scarcely saw or heard them, as he stepped into the seat, took the wheel from the chauffeur’s hand and threw on the gear.

He had afterward little memory of that ride. Once the leaping anger within him jerked the throttle wide and the car responded with a breakneck dart through the startled traffic, till the sight of an infuriated mounted policeman, baton up, brought him to himself with a thud. He had small mind to be stopped at the moment. His mouth set in a sudden hard sharp line, and under it his hands gripped the slewing wheel to a tearing serpentine rush that sent the skidding monster rearing on side wheels, to swoop between two drays in a hooting plunge down a side street. His tight lips parted then in a ragged laugh, bit off by the jolt of the lurching motor and the slap of the bulging air.

As the sleek rubber shoes spun noiselessly and swiftly along the avenue the myriad lights that were beginning to gleam wove into a twinkling mist. He drove mechanically past a hundred familiar things and places: the particular chop-house of which he was an habitué—the ivied wall of his favorite club, with the cluster of faces at the double window—the florist’s where daily he stopped for his knot of Parma violets—but he saw nothing, till the massive marble fronts of the upper park side ceased their mad dance as the car halted before a tall iron-grilled doorway with wide glistening steps, between windows strangely shuttered and dark.

He sprang out and touched the bell. The heavy oak parted slowly; the confidential secretary of the man he had come to face stood in the gloomy doorway.

“I want to see Mr. Sedgwick.”

“You can’t see him, Mr. Valiant.”

“But I will!” Sharp passion leaped into the young voice. “He must speak to me.”

The man in the doorway shook his head. “He won’t speak to anybody any more,” he said. “Mr. Sedgwick shot himself two hours ago.”

CHAPTER II

VANITY VALIANT

“

The witness is excused.”

In the ripple that stirred across the court room at the examiner’s abrupt conclusion, John Valiant, who had withstood that pitiless hail of questions, rose, bowed to him and slowly crossed the cleared space to his counsel. The chairman looked severely over his eye-glasses, with his gavel lifted, and a statuesque girl, in the rear of the room, laid her delicately gloved hand on a companion’s and smiled slowly without withdrawing her gaze, and with the faintest tint of color in her face.

Katharine Fargo neither smiled nor flushed readily. Her smile was an index of her whole personality, languid, symmetrical, exquisitely perfect. The little group with whom she sat looked somewhat out of place in that mixed assemblage. They had not gasped at the tale of the Corporation’s unprecedented earnings, the lavish expenditure for its palatial offices. The recital of the tragic waste, the nepotism, the mole-like ramifications by which the vast structure had been undermined, had left them rather amusedly and satirically appreciative. Smartly groomed and palpably members of a set to whom John Valiant was a familiar, they had had only friendly nods and smiles for the young man at whom so many there had gazed with jaundiced eyes.

To the general public which read its daily newspaper perhaps none of the gilded set was better known than “Vanity Valiant.” The very nickname—given him by his fellows in facetious allusion to a flippant newspaper paragraph laying at his door the alleged new fashion of a masculine vanity-box—had taken root in the fads and elegancies he affected. The new Panhard he drove was the smartest car on the avenue, and the collar on the white bulldog that pranced or dozed on its leather seat sported a diamond buckle. To the space-writers of the social columns, he had been a perennial inspiration. They had delighted to herald a more or less bohemian gathering, into which he had smuggled this pet, as a “dog-dinner”; and when one midnight, after a staid and stodgy “bridge,” in a gust of wild spirits he had, for a wager, jumped into and out of a fountain on a deserted square, the act, dished up by a night-hawking reporter had, the following Sunday, inspired three metropolitan sermons on “The Idle Rich.” The patterns of his waistcoats, and the splendors of his latest bachelors’ dinner at Sherry’s—with such items the public had been kept sufficiently familiar. To it, he stood a perfect symbol of the eider ease and insolent display of inherited wealth. And the great majority of those who had found place in that roomy chamber to listen to the ugly tale of squandered millions, looked at him with a resentment that was sharpened by his apparent nonchalance.

For the failure of the concern upon which a legislature had now turned the search-light of its inquiry, might to him have been a thing of trivial interest, and the present task an alien one, which he must against his will go through with. Often his eyes had wandered to the window, through which came the crisp clip-trip-clop of the cab horses on the asphalt, the irritant clang of trolleys and the monstrous panther purr of motors. Only once had this seeming indifference been shaken: when the figures of the salary voted the Corporation’s chief officers had been sardonically cited—when in the tense quiet a woman had laughed out suddenly, a harsh jeering note quickly repressed. For one swift second then Valiant’s gaze had turned to the rusty black gown, the flushed face of the sleeping child against the tawdry fall of the widow’s veil. Then the gaze had come back, and he was once more the abstracted spectator, boredly waiting his release.

Long before the closing session it had been clear that, as far as indictments were concerned, the investigation would be barren of result. Of individual criminality, flight and suicide had been confession, but more sweeping charges could not be brought home. The gilded fool had not brought himself into the embarrassing purview of the law. This certainty, however, had served to goad the public and sharpen the satire of the newspaper paragraphist; and the examiner, who incidentally had a reputation of his own to guard, knew his cue. There were possibilities for the exercise of his especial gifts in a vice-president of the Corporation who was also Vanity Valiant, the decorative idler of social fopperies and sumptuous clothes.

Valiant took the chair with a sensation almost of relief. Since that day when he had spun down-town in his motor to that sharp enlightenment, his daily round had gone on as usual, but beneath the habitual pose, the worldly mask of his class, had lain a sore sensitiveness that had cringed painfully at the sneering word and the envenomed paragraph. Always his mental eye had seen a white-faced crowd staring at a marble building, a coarsely-dressed woman crossing the street with a handkerchief pressed to her face.

And mingling with the sick realization of his own inadequacy had woven panging thoughts of his father. The shattered bits of recollection of him that he had preserved had formed a mosaic which had pictured the hero of his boyhood. Yet his father’s name would now go down, linked not to success and achievement, but to failure, to chicanery, to the robbing of the poor. The thought had become a blind ache that had tortured him. Beneath the old characteristic veneer it had been working a strange change. Something old had been dying, something new budding under the careless exterior of the man who now faced his examiner in the big armchair that May afternoon.

John Valiant’s testimony, to those of his listeners who cherished a sordid disbelief in the ingenuousness of the man who counts his wealth in seven figures, seemed a pose of gratuitous insolence. It had a clarity and simplicity that was almost horrifying. He did not stoop to gloze his own monumental flippancy. He had attended only one directors’ meeting during that year. Till after the crash, he had known little, had cared less, about the larger investments of the Corporation’s capital: he had left all that to others.

Perhaps to the examiner himself this blunt directness—the bitter unshadowed truth that searched for no evasions—had appeared effrontery; the contemptuous and cynical frankness of the young egoist who sat secure, his own millions safe, on the ruins of the enterprise from which they were derived. The questions, that had been bland with suave innuendo, acquired an acrid sarcasm, a barbed and stinging satire, which at length touched indiscretion. He allowed himself a scornful reference to the elder Valiant as scathing as it was unjustified.

To the man in the witness-chair this had been like an electric shock. Something new and unguessed beneath the husk of boredom, the indolent pose of body, had suddenly looked from his blazing eyes: something foreign to Vanity Valiant, the club habitué, the spoiled scion of wealth. For a brief five minutes he spoke, in a fashion that surprised the court room—a passionate defense of his father, the principles on which the Corporation had been founded and its traditional policies: few sentences, but each hot as lava and quivering with feeling. Their very force startled the reporters’ bench and left his inquisitor for a moment silent.

The latter took refuge in a sardonic reference to the Corporation’s salary-list. Did the witness conceive, he asked with effective deliberation, that he had rendered services commensurate with the annual sums paid him? The witness thought that he had, in fact, received just about what those services were worth. Would Mr. Valiant be good enough to state the figures of the salary he had been privileged to draw as a vice-president?

The answer fell as slowly in the sardonic silence. “I have never drawn a salary as an officer of the Valiant Corporation.”

Then it was that the irritated examiner had abruptly dismissed the witness. Then the ripple had swept over the assemblage, and Katharine Fargo, gazing, had smiled that slow smile in which approval struggled with mingled wonder and question.

The jostling crowd flocked out into the square, among them a fresh-faced girl on the arm of a gray-bearded man in black frock coat and picturesque broad-brimmed felt hat. She turned her eyes to his.

“So that,” she said, “is John Valiant! I’d almost rather have missed Niagara Falls. I must write Shirley Dandridge about it. I’m so sorry I lost that picture of him that I cut out of the paper.”

“I reckon he’s not such a bad lot,” said her uncle. “I liked the way he spoke of his father.”

He hailed a cab. “Grand Central Station,” he directed, with a glance at his watch, “and be quick about it. We’ve just time to make our train.”

“Yessir! Dollar’n a half, sir.”

The gentleman seated the girl and climbed in himself. “I know the legal fare,” he said, “if I am from Virginia. And if you try to beat me out of more, you’ll be sorry.”

Some hours later, in an inner office of a down-town sky-scraper, the newly-appointed receiver of the Valiant Corporation, a heavy, thick-set man with narrow eyes, sat beside a table on which lay a small black satchel with a padlock on its handle, whose contents—several bundles of crisp papers—he had been turning over in his heavy hands with a look of incredulous amazement. A sheet containing a mass of figures and memoranda lay among them.

The shock was still on his face when a knock came at the door, and a man entered. The newcomer was gray-haired, slightly stooped and lean-jowled, with a humorous expression on his lips. He glanced in surprise at the littered table.

“Fargo,” said the man at the desk, “do you notice anything queer about me?”

His friend grinned. “No, Buck,” he said judicially, “unless it’s that necktie. It would stop a Dutch clock.”

“Hang the haberdashery! Read this—from young Valiant.” He passed over a letter.

Fargo read. He looked up. “Securities aggregating three millions!” he said in a hushed voice. “Why, unless I’ve been misinformed, that represents practically all his private fortune.”

The other nodded. “Turned over to the Corporation with his resignation as a vice-president, and without a blessed string tied to ’em! What do you think of that?”

“Think! It’s the most absurdly idiotic thing I ever met. Two weeks ago, before the investigation ... but now, when it’s perfectly certain they can bring nothing home to him—” He paused. “Of course I suppose it’ll save the Corporation, eh? But it may be ten years before its securities pay dividends. And this is real money. Where the devil does he come in meanwhile?”

The receiver pursed his lips. “I knew his father,” he said. “He had the same crazy quixotic streak.”

He gathered the scattered documents and locked them carefully with the satchel in a safe. “Spectacular young ass!” he said explosively.

“I should say so!” agreed Fargo. “Do you know, I used to be afraid my Katharine had a leaning toward him. But thank God, she’s a sensible girl!”

CHAPTER III

THE NEVER-NEVER LAND

Dusk had fallen that evening when John Valiant’s Panhard turned into a cross-street and circled into the yawning mouth of his garage. Here, before he descended, he wrote a check on his knee with a slobbering fountain-pen.

“Lars,” he said to the chauffeur, “as I dare say you’ve heard, things have not gone exactly smoothly with me lately, and I’m uncertain about my plans. I’ve made arrangements to turn the car over to the manufacturers, and take back the old one. I must drive myself hereafter. I’m sorry, but you must look for another place.”

The dapper young Swede touched his cap gratefully as he looked at the check’s figures. Embarrassment was burning his tongue. “I—I’ve heard, sir. I’m sure it’s very kind, sir, and when you need another....”

“Thank you, Lars,” said Valiant, as he shook hands, “and good luck. I’ll remember.”

Lars, the chauffeur, looked after him. “Going to skip out, he is! I thought so when he brought that stuff out of the safe-deposit. Afraid they’ll try to take the boodie away from him, I guess. The papers seem to think he’s rotten, but he’s been a mighty good boss to me. He’s a dead swell, all right, anyhow,” he added pridefully, as he slid the car to its moorings, “and they’ll have to get up early to catch him asleep!”

A little later John Valiant, the bulldog at his heels, ascended the steps of his club, where he lodged—he had disposed of his bachelor apartment a fortnight ago. The cavernous seats of the lounge were all occupied, but he did not pause as he strode through the hall. He took the little pile of letters the boy handed him at the desk and went slowly up the stairway.

He wandered into the deserted library and sat down, tossing the letters on the magazine-littered table. He had suddenly remembered that it was his twenty-fifth birthday.

In the reaction from the long strain he felt physically spent. He thought of what he had done that afternoon with a sense of satisfaction. A reversal of public judgment, in his own case, had not entered his head. He knew his world—its comfortable faculty of forgetting, and the multitude of sins that wealth may cover. To preserve at whatever personal cost the one noble monument his father’s genius had reared, and to right the wrong that would cast its gloomy shadow on his name—this had been his only thought. What he had done would have been done no matter what the outcome of the investigation. But now, he told himself, no one could say the act had been wrung from him. That, he fancied, would have been his father’s way.

Fancied—for his recollections of his father were vague and fragmentary. They belonged wholly to his pinafore years. His early memories of his mother were, for that matter, even more unsubstantial. They were of a creature of wonderful dazzling gowns, and more wonderful shining jewels, who lived for the most part in an over-sea city as far away as the moon (he was later to identify this as Paris) and who, when she came home—which was not often—took him driving in the park and gave him chocolate macaroons. He had always held her in more or less awe and had breathed easier when she had departed. She had died in Rome a year later than his father. He had been left then without a near relative in the world and his growing years had been an epic of nurses and caretakers, a boys’ school on the continent, and a university course at home. As far as his father was concerned, he had had only his own childish recollections.

He smiled—a slow smile of reminiscence—for there had come to him at that moment the dearest of all those memories—a play of his childhood.

He saw himself seated on a low stool, watching a funny old clock with a moon-face, whose smiling lips curved up like military mustachios, and wishing the lazy long hands would hurry. He saw himself stealing down a long corridor to the door of a big room strewn with books and papers, that through some baleful and mysterious spell could not be made to open at all hours. When the hands pointed right, however, there was the “Open Sesame”—his own secret knock, two fierce twin raps, with one little lonesome one afterward—and this was unfailing. Safe inside, he saw himself standing on a big, polar-bear-skin rug, the door tight-locked against all comers, an expectant baby figure, with his little hand clasped in his father’s. The white rug was the magic entrance to the Never-Never Country, known only to those two.

He could hear his own shrill treble:

“Wishing-House, Wishing-House, where are you?”

Then the deeper voice (quite unrecognizable as his father’s) answering:

“Here I am, Master; here I am!”

And instantly the room vanished and they were in the Never-Never Land, and before them reared the biggest house in the world, with a row of white pillars across its front a mile high.

Valiant drew a deep breath. Some magic of time and place was repainting that dead and dusty infancy in sudden delicate lights and filmy colors. What had been but blurred under-exposures on the retina of his brain became all at once elfin pictures, weird and specter-like as the dissolving views of a camera obscura.

He and his father had lived alone in Wishing-House. No one else had possessed the secret. Not his mother. Not even the more portentous person whom he had thought must own the vast hotel in which they lived (in such respect did she seem to be held by the servants), who wore crackling black silk and a big bunch of keys for a sole ornament, and who had called him her “lamb.” No, in the Never-Never Land there had been only his father and he!

Yet they were anything but lonely, for the country was inhabited by good-natured friendly savages, as black as a lump of coal, most of them with curly white hair. These talked a queer language, but of course his father and he could understand them perfectly. These savages had many curious and enthralling customs and strange cuddling songs that made one sleepy, and all these his father knew by heart. They lived in little square huts around Wishing-House, made of sticks, and had dozens and dozens of children who wore no clothes and liked to dance in the sun and eat cherries. They were very useful barbarians, too, for they chopped the wood and built the fires and made the horses’ coats shine—for he and his father would have scorned to walk, and went galloping like the wind everywhere. The forests about were filled with small brown cats, tremendously furry, with long whiskers and sharp, beedy black eyes, and sometimes they would hunt these on horseback; but they never caught them, because the cats could run just a little bit faster than the horses.

Christmas time at home was not so very exciting, but at Wishing-House what a time they had! Then all the savages and their wives and children received presents, and he and his father had a dreadfully scary shivery time remembering them all, because some had so many children they ran out of names and had to use numbers instead. So there was always the harrowing fear that one might inadvertently be left out, and sometimes they couldn’t remember the last one till the very final minute. After the Christmas turkey, the oldest and blackest savage of all would come in where his father and he sat at the table, with a pudding as big as the gold chariot in the circus, and the pudding, by some magic spell, would set itself on fire, while he carried it round the table, with all the other savages marching after him. This was the most awe-inspiring spectacle of all. Christmases at other places were a long way apart, but they came as often as they were wanted at Wishing-House, which, he recalled, was very often indeed.

John Valiant felt an odd beating of the heart and a tightening of the throat, for he saw another scene, too. It was the one hushed and horrible night, after the spell had failed and the door had refused to open for a long time, when dread things had been happening that he could not understand, when a big man with gold eye-glasses, who smelled of some curious sickish-sweet perfume, came and took him by the hand and led him into a room where his father lay in bed, very gray and quiet.

The white hand on the coverlet had beckoned to him and he had gone close up to the bed, standing very straight, his heart beating fast and hard.

“John!” the word had been almost a whisper, very tense and anxious, very distinct. “John, you’re a little boy, and father is going away.”

“To—to Wishing-House?”

The gray lips had smiled then, ever so little, and sadly. “No, John.”

“Take me with you, father! Take me with you, and let us find it!” His voice had trembled then, and he had had to gulp hard.

“Listen, John, for what I am saying is very important. You don’t know what I mean now, but sometime you will.” The whisper had grown strained and frayed, but it was still distinct. “I can’t go to the Never-Never Land. But you may sometime. If you ... if you do, and if you find Wishing-House, remember that the men who lived in it ... before you and me ... were gentlemen. Whatever else they were, they were always that. Be ... like them, John ... will you?”

“Yes, father.”

The old gentleman with the eye-glasses had come forward then, hastily.

“Good-night, father—”

He had wanted to kiss him, but a strange cool hush had settled on the room and his father seemed all at once to have fallen asleep. And he had gone out, so carefully, on tiptoe, wondering, and suddenly afraid.

CHAPTER IV

THE TURN OF THE PAGE

John Valiant stirred and laughed, a little self-consciously, for there had been drops on his face.

Presently he took a check-book from his pocket and began to figure on the stub, looking up with a wry smile. “To come down to brass tacks,” he muttered, “when I’ve settled everything (thank heaven, I don’t owe my tailor!) there will be a little matter of twenty-eight hundred odd dollars, a passé motor and my clothes between me and the bread-line!”

Everything else he had disposed of—everything but the four-footed comrade there at his feet. At his look, the white bulldog sprang up whining and made joyful pretense of devouring his master’s immaculate boot-laces. Valiant put his hand under the eager muzzle, lifted the intelligent head to his knee and looked into the beseeching amber eyes. “But I’d not sell you, old chap,” he said softly; “not a single lick of your friendly pink tongue; not for a beastly hundred thousand!”

He withdrew his caressing hand and looked again at the check-stub. Twenty-eight hundred! He laughed bleakly. Why, he had spent more than that a month ago on a ball at Sherry’s! This morning he had been rich; to-night he was poor! He had imagined this in the abstract, but now of a sudden the fact seemed fraught with such a ghastly and nightmarish ridiculousness as a man might feel who, going to bed with a full thatch of hair, confronts the morning mirror to find himself as bald as a porcelain mandarin.

What could he do? He could not remember a time when he had not had all that he wanted. He had never borrowed from a friend or been dunned by an importunate tradesman. And he had never tried to earn a dollar in his life; as to current methods of making a living, he was as ignorant as a Pueblo Indian.

What did others do? The men he knew who joked of their poverty and their debts, and whose hilarious habit it was to picture life as a desperate handicap in which they were forever “three jumps ahead of the sheriff”, somehow managed to cling to their yachts and their stables. Few of his friends had really gone “smash”, and of these all but one had taken themselves speedily and decently off. He thought of Rod Creighton, the one failure who had clung to the old life, achieving for a transient period the brilliant success of living on his friends. When this ended he had gone on the road for some champagne or other. Everybody had ordered from him at the start. But this, too, had failed. He had dropped out of the clubs and there had at last befallen an evil time when he had come to haunt the avenue, as keen for stray quarters as any pan-handler. Where was Creighton now, he wondered?

Across the avenue was Larry Treadwell’s brokerage office. Larry had a brain for business; as a youthful scamp in knickerbockers he had been as sharp as a steel-trap. But what did he, John Valiant, know of business? Less than of law! Why, he was not fit to smirk behind a counter and measure lace insertion for the petticoats of the women he waltzed with! All he was really fit for was to work with his hands!

He thought of a gang of laborers he had seen that afternoon breaking the asphalt with crowbars. What must it be to toil through the clammy cold of winter and the smothering fur-heat of summer, in some revolting routine of filth and unredeemable ugliness? He looked down at his supple white fingers and shivered.

He rose grimly and dragged his chair facing the window. The night was balmy and he looked down across the darker sea of reefs, barred like a gigantic checker-board by the shining lines of streets, to where the flashing electric signs of the theater district laid their wide swath of colored radiance. The manifold calls of the street and the buzz of trolleys made a dull tonal background, subdued and far-away.

To be outside! All that light and color and comfort and pleasure would hum and sparkle on just the same, though he was no longer within the circle of its effulgence—slaving perhaps, he thought with a twisted smile, at some tawdry occupation that called for no experience, to pay for a meal in some second-rate restaurant and a pallet in some shabby-genteel, hall bedroom, till his clothes were replaced by ill-fitting “hand-me-downs”—till by wretched gradations he arrived finally at the status of the dime seat in the gallery and five-cent cigars!

There was one way back. It lay through the hackneyed gateway of marriage. Youth, comeliness and fine linen, in the world he knew, were a fair exchange for wealth any day. “Cutlet for cutlet”—the satiric phrase ran through his mind. Why not? Others did so. And as for himself, it perhaps need be no question of plain and spinstered millions—there was Katharine Fargo!

He had known her since a time when she bestrode a small fuzzy pony in the park, cool as a grapefruit and with a critical eye, even in her ten years, for social forms and observances. In the intervals of fashionable boarding-schools he had seen her develop, beautiful, cold, stately and correct. The Fargo fortune—thanks to modern journalism, which was fond of stating that if the steel rails of the Fargo railways were set end to end, the chain would reach from the earth to the planet Saturn or thereabouts—was as familiar to the public imagination as Caruso or the Hope diamond. And the daughter Katharine had not lacked admirers; shop-girls knew the scalps that dangled from her girdle. But in his heart John Valiant was aware, by those subtle signs which men and women alike distinguish, that while Katharine Fargo loved first and foremost only her own wonderful person, he had been an easy second in her regard.

He remembered the last Christmas house-party at the Fargos’ place on the St. Lawrence. Its habitués irreverently dubbed this “The Shack”, but it was the nursling of folk who took their camping luxuriously, in a palatial structure which, though built, as to its exterior, of logs, was equipped within with Turkish bath, billiard-room and the most indefatigable chef west of St. Petersburg. The evening before his host’s swift motor had hooted him off to the station, as its wide hall exhaled the bouquet of after-dinner cigars, he had looked at her standing in the wide doorway, a rare exquisite creature—her face fore-shortened and touched to a borrowed tenderness by the flickering glow of the burning logs in the room behind—the perfect flower, he had thought, of the civilization in which he lived.

John Valiant looked down at the bulldog squatted on the floor, his eyes shining in the dimness. A little hot ripple had run over him. “Not on your life, Chum!” he said. “No shameless barter! There must be other things besides money and social position in this doddering old world, after all!”

The dog whined with delight at the voice and jumped up to lick the strong tense hand held down to him. “Do you know, old chap,” his master continued, “I’ve been handing myself a collection of cold marble truths in the last few weeks? I’ve been the prize dolt of the whole show, and you ought to have thrown me over long ago. You’ve probably realized it all along, but it has never dawned on me until lately. I’ve worn the blue ribbon so long I’d come to think it was a decoration. All my life I’ve been just another of those well-meaning, brainless young idiots who have never done a blessed thing that’s the slightest value to anybody else. Well, Chum, we’re through. We’re going to begin doing something for ourselves, if it’s only raising cabbages! And we’re going to stand it without any baby-aching—the nurse never held our noses when we took our castor-oil!”

It was folded down, that old bright page. Finis had been written to the rose-colored chapter. And even as he told himself, he was conscious of a new rugged something that had been slowly dawning within him, a sense of courage, even of zest, and a furious hatred of the self-pity that had wrenched him even for a moment.

He turned from the window, picked up his letters, and followed by the dog, went slowly up another flight to his room.

CHAPTER V

THE LETTER

He tore open the letters abstractedly: the usual dinner-card or two, a tailor’s spring announcement, a chronic serial from an exclamatory marble-quarrying company, a quarterly statement of a club house-committee. The last two missives bore a nondescript look.

One was small, with the name of a legal firm in its corner. The other was largish, corpulent and heavy, of stout Manila paper, and bore, down one side, a gaudy procession of postage stamps proclaiming that it had been registered.

“What’s in that, I wonder?” he said to himself, and then, with a smile at the unmasculine speculation, opened the smaller envelope.

“Dear Sir,” began the letter, in the most uncompromisingly conventional of typewriting:

“Dear Sir:

“Enclosed please find, with title-deed, a memorandum opened in your name by the late John Valiant some years before his death. It was his desire that the services indicated in connection with this estate should continue till this date. We hand you herewith our check for $236.20 (two hundred and thirty-six dollars and twenty cents), the balance in your favor, for which please send receipt,

“And oblige,
“Yours very truly,
“Emerson and Ball.

“(Enclosure)”

He turned to the memorandum. It showed a sizable initial deposit against which was entered a series of annual tax payments with minor disbursements credited to “Inspection and care.” The tax receipts were pinned to the account.

The larger wrapper contained an unsealed envelope, across which was written in faded ink and in an unfamiliar dashing, slanting handwriting, his own name. The envelope contained a creased yellow parchment, from between whose folds there clumped and fluttered down upon the floor a long flattish object wrapped in a paper, a newspaper clipping and a letter.

Puzzledly he unfolded the crackling thing in his hands. “Why,” he said half aloud, “it’s—it’s a deed made over to me.” He overran it swiftly. “Part of an old Colony grant ... a plantation in Virginia, twelve hundred odd acres, given under the hand of a vice-regal governor in the sixteenth century. I had no idea titles in the United States went back so far as that!” His eye fled to the end. “It was my father’s! What could he have wanted of an estate in Virginia? It must have come into his hands in the course of business.”

He fairly groaned. “Ye gods! If it were only Long Island, or even Pike County! The sorriest, out-at-elbow, boulder-ridden, mosquito-stung old rock-farm there would bring a decent sum. But Virginia! The place where the dialect stories grow. The paradise of the Jim-crow car and the hook-worm, where land-poor, clay-colored colonels with goatees sit in green wicker lawn-chairs and watch their shadows go round the house, while they guzzle mint-juleps and cuss at lazy ‘cullud pussons.’ Where everybody is an F. F. V. and everybody’s grandfather was a patroon, or whatever they call ’em, and had a thousand slaves ‘befo de wah’!”

Who ever heard of Virginia nowadays, except as a place people came from? The principal event in the history of the state since the Civil War had been the discovery of New York. Its men had moved upon the latter en masse, coming with the halo about them of old Southern names and legends of planter hospitality—and had married Northern women, till the announcement in the marriage column that the fathers of bride and bridegroom had fought in opposing armies at the battle of Manassas had grown as hackneyed as the stereotyped “Whither are we drifting?” editorial. But was Virginia herself anything more, in this twentieth century, than a hot-blooded, high-handed, prodigal legend, kept alive in the North by the banquets of “Southern Societies” and annual poems on “The Lost Cause”?

He picked up the newspaper clipping. It was worn and broken in the folds as if it had been carried for months in a pocketbook.

“It will interest readers of this section of Virginia (the paragraph began) to learn, from a recent transfer received for record at the County Clerk’s Office, that Damory Court has passed to Mr. John Valiant, minor—”

He turned the paper over and found a date; it had been printed in the year of the transfer to himself, when he was six years old—the year his father had died.

“—John Valiant, minor, the son of the former owner.

“There are few indeed who do not recall the tragedy with which in the public mind the estate is connected. The fact, moreover, that this old homestead has been left in its present state (for, as is well known, the house has remained with all its contents and furnishings untouched) to rest during so long a term of years unoccupied, could not, of course, fail to be commented on, and this circumstance alone has perhaps tended to keep alive a melancholy story which may well be forgotten.”

He read the elaborate, rather stilted phraseology in the twenty-year-old paper with a wondering interest. “An old house,” he mused, “with a bad name. Probably he couldn’t sell it, and maybe nobody would even live in it. That would explain why it remained so long unoccupied—why there are no records of rentals. Probably the land was starved and run down. At any rate, in twenty years it would be overgrown with stubble.”

Yet, whatever their condition, acres of land were, after all, a tangible thing. This lawyer’s firm might, instead, have sent him a bundle of beautifully engraved certificates of stock in some zinc-mine whose imaginary bottom had dropped out ten years ago. Here was real property, in size, at least, a gentleman’s domain, on which real taxes had been paid during a long term—a sort of hilarious consolation prize, hurtling to him out of the void like the magic gift of the traditional fairy god-mother.

“It’s an off-set to the hall-bedroom idea, at any rate,” he said to himself humorously. “It holds out an escape from the noble army of rent-payers. When my twenty-eight hundred is gone, I could live down there a landed proprietor, and by the same mark an honorary colonel, and raise the cabbages I was talking about—eh, Chum?—while you stalk rabbits. How does that strike you?”

He laughed whimsically. He, John Valiant, of New York, first-nighter at its theaters, hail-fellow-well-met in its club corridors and welcome diner at any one of a hundred brilliant glass-and-silver-twinkling supper-tables, entombed on the wreck of a Virginia plantation, a would-be country gentleman, on an automobile and next to nothing a year!

He bethought himself of the fallen letter and possessed himself of it quickly. It lay with the superscription side down. On it was written, in the same hand which had addressed the other envelope:

For my son, John Valiant,
When he reaches the age of twenty-five.

That, then, had been written by his father—and he had died nearly twenty years ago! He broke the seal with a strange feeling as if, walking in some familiar thoroughfare, he had stumbled on a lichened and sunken tombstone.

“When you read this, my son, you will have come to man’s estate. It is curious to think that this black, black ink may be faded to gray and this white, white paper yellowed, just from lying waiting so long. But strangest of all is to think that you yourself whose brown head hardly tops this desk, will be as tall (I hope) as I! How I wonder what you will look like then! And shall I—the real, real I, I mean—be peering over your strong broad shoulder as you read? Who knows? Wise men have dreamed such a thing possible—and I am not a bit wise.

“John, you will not have forgotten that you are a Valiant. But you are also a Virginian. Will you have discovered this for yourself? Here is the deed to the land where I and my father, and his father, and many, many more Valiants before them were born. Sometime, perhaps, you will know why you are John Valiant of New York instead of John Valiant of Damory Court. I can not tell you myself, because it is too true a story, and I have forgotten how to tell any but fairy tales, where everything happens right, where the Prince marries the beautiful Princess and they live happily together ever after.

“You may never care to live at Damory Court. Maybe the life you will know so well by the time you read this will have welded you to itself. If so, well and good. Then leave the old place to your son. But there is such a thing as racial habit, and the call of blood. And I know there is such a thing, too, as fate. ‘Every man carries his fate on a riband about his neck’; so the Moslem put it. It was my fate to go away, and I know now—since distance is not made by miles alone—that I myself shall never see Damory Court again. But life is a strange wheel that goes round and round and comes back to the same point again and again. And it may be your fate to go back. Then perhaps you will cry (but, oh, not on the old white bear’s-skin rug—never again with me holding your small, small hand!)—

“‘Wishing-House! Wishing-House! Where are you?’

“And this old parchment deed will answer answer—

“‘Here I am, Master; here I am!’

“Ah, we are only children, after all, playing out our plays. I have had many toys, but O John, John! The ones I treasure most are all in the Never-Never Land!”

CHAPTER VI

A VALIANT OF VIRGINIA

For a long time John Valiant sat motionless, the opened letter in his hand, staring at nothing. He had the sensation, spiritually, of a traveler awakened with a rude shock amid wholly unfamiliar surroundings. He had passed through so many conflicting states of emotion that afternoon and evening that he felt numb.

He was trying to remember—to put two and two together. His father had been Southern-born; yes, he had known that. But he had known nothing whatever of his father’s early days, or of his forebears; since he had been old enough to wonder about such things, he had had no one to ask questions of. There had been no private papers or letters left for his adult perusal. It had been borne upon him very early that his father’s life had not been a happy one. He had seldom laughed, and his hair had been streaked with gray, yet when he died he had been but ten years older than the son was now.

Phrases of the letter ran through his mind: “Sometime, perhaps, you will know why you are John Valiant of New York instead of John Valiant of Damory Court.... I can not tell you myself.” There was some tragedy, then, that had blighted the place, some “melancholy story,” as the clipping put it.

He bent over the deed spread out upon the table, following with his finger the long line of transfers: “‘To John Valyante,’” he muttered; “what odd spelling! ‘Robert Valyant’—without the ‘e.’ Here, in 1730, the ‘y’ begins to be ‘i.’” There was something strenuous and appealing in the long line of dates. “Valiant. Always a Valiant. How they held on to it! There’s never a break.”

A curious pride, new-born and self-conscious, was dawning in him. He was descended from ancestors who had been no weaklings. A Valiant had settled on those acres under a royal governor, before the old frontier fighting was over and the Indians had sullenly retired to the westward. The sons of those who had braved sea and savages had bowed their strong bodies and their stronger hearts to raze the forests and turn the primeval jungles into golden plantations. Except as regarded his father, Valiant had never known ancestral pride before. He had been proud of his strong and healthy frame, of his ability to ride like a dragoon, unconsciously, perhaps, a little proud of his wealth. But pride in the larger sense, reverence for the past based upon a respect for ancient lineage, he had never known until this moment.

Where was his facetious concept of Virginia now? He remembered his characterization of it with a wincing half-humorous mortification—a slender needle-prick of shame. The empty pretensions, subsisting on the vanished glories of the past, had suddenly acquired character and meaning. He himself was a Virginian.

There below him stretched the great cañoned city, its avenues roaring with nightly gaiety, its roadways bright with the beams of shuttling motors, its theaters and cafés brilliant with women in throbbing hues and men in black and white, and its “Great White Way” blazing with incandescents, interminable and alluring—an apotheosis of fevered movement and hectic color. He knew suddenly that he was sick of it all: its jostle and glitter, its mad race after bubbles, its hideous under-surface contrasts of wealth and squalor, its lukewarm friendships and false standards which he had been so bitterly unlearning. He knew that, for all his self-pity, he was at heart full of a tired longing for wide uncrowded nature, for green breezy interludes and a sky of untainted sunlight or peaceful stars.

There stole into his mood an eery suggestion of intention. Why should the date assigned for that deed’s delivery have been the very day on which he had elected poverty? Here was a foreordination as pointed as the index-finger of a guide-post. “‘Every man carries his fate,’” he repeated, “‘on a riband about his neck.’ Chum, do you believe in fate?”

For answer the bulldog, cocking an alert eye on his master, discontinued his occupation—a conscientious if unsuccessful mastication of the flattish packet that had fallen from the folded deed—and with much solicitous tail-wagging, brought the sodden thing in his mouth and put it into the outstretched hand.

His master unrolled the pulpy wad and extricated the object it had enclosed—an old-fashioned iron door-key.

After a time Valiant thrust the key into his pocket, and rising, went to a trunk that lay against the wall. Searching in a portfolio, he took out a small old-fashioned photograph, much battered and soiled. It had been cut from a larger group and the name of the photographer had been erased from the back. He set it upright on the desk, and bending forward, looked long at the face it disclosed. It was the only picture he had ever possessed of his father.

He turned and looked into the glass above the dresser. The features were the same, eyes, brow, lips, and strong waving hair. But for its time-stains the photograph might have been one of himself, taken yesterday.

For an hour he sat in the bright light thinking, the pictured face propped on the desk before him, the dog snuggled against his knee.

CHAPTER VII

ON THE RED ROAD

The green, mid May Virginian afternoon was arched with a sky as blue as the tiles of the Temple of Heaven and steeped in a wash of sunlight as yellow as gold: smoke-hazy peaks piling up in the distance, billowy verdure like clumps of trembling jade between, shaded with masses of blue-black shadow, and lazying up and down, by gashed ravine and rounded knoll a road like red lacquer, fringed with stone wall and sturdy shrub and splashed here and there with the purple stain of the Judas-tree and the snow of dogwood blooms. Nothing in all the springy landscape but looked warm and opalescent and inviting—except a tawny bull that from across a barred fence-corner switched a truculent tail in silence and glowered sullenly at the big motor halted motionless at the side of the twisting road.

Curled worm-like in the driver’s seat, with his chin on his knees, John Valiant sat with his eyes upon the distance. For an hour he had whirred through that wondrous shimmer of color with a flippant loitering breeze in his face, sweet from the crimson clover that poured and rioted over the roadside: past nests of meditative farm-buildings, fields of baby-green corn, occasional ramshackle dirt-daubed cabins with doorways hung with yellow honeysuckle and flagrant trumpet-vines, and here and there a quiet old church, Gothic and ivied and gray whose leaded windows watched benignantly over myrtled graveyards. A great soothing suspiration of peace seemed to swell from it all to lap the traveler like the moist balminess of a semi-tropical sea.

“Chum old man,” said Valiant, with his arm about the bulldog’s neck, “if those color-photograph chaps had shown us this, we simply wouldn’t have believed it, would we? Such scenery beats the roads we’re used to, what? If it were all like this—but of course it isn’t. We’ll get to our own bailiwick presently, and wake up. Never mind; we’re country gentlemen, Chummy, en route to our estate! No silly snuffle, now! Out with it! That’s right,”—as a sharp bark rewarded him—“that’s the proper enthusiasm.” He wound his strong fingers in a choking grip in the scruff of the white neck, as a chipmunk chattered by on the low stone wall. “No, you don’t, you cannibal! He’s a jolly little beggar, and he doesn’t deserve being eaten!”

He filled his brier-wood pipe and drew in great breaths of the fragrant incense. “What a pity you don’t smoke, Chum; you miss such a lot! I saw a poodle once in a circus that did. But he’d been to college. Think how you could think if you only smoked! We may have to do a lot of thinking, where we’re bound to. Wonder what we’ll find? Oh, that’s right, leave it all to me, of course, and wash your paws of the whole blooming business!”

After a time he shook himself and knocked the red core from the pipe-bowl against his boot-heel. “I hate to start,” he confessed, half to the dog and half to himself. “To leave anything so sheerly beautiful as this! However, on with the dance! By the road map the village can’t be far now. So long, Mr. Bull!”

He clutched the self-starter. But there was only a protestant wheeze; the car declined to budge. Climbing down, he cranked vigorously. The motor turned over with a surly grunt of remonstrance and after a tentative throb-throb, coughed and stopped dead. Something was wrong. With a sigh he flung off his tweed jacket, donned a smudgy “jumper,” opened his tool-box, and, with a glance at his wrist-watch which told him it was three o’clock, threw up the monster’s hood and went bitterly to work.

At half past three the investigation had got as far as the lubricator. At four o’clock the bulldog had given it up and gone nosing afield. At half past four John Valiant lay flat on his back like some disreputable stevadore, alternately tinkering with refractory valves and cursing the obdurate mechanism. Over his right eye an ooze of orange-colored oil glowered and glistened and indefatigably drip-dripped into his shrinking collar. A sharp stone gnawed frenziedly into the small of his back and just as he made a final vicious lunge, something gave way and a prickling red-hot stab of pain shot zigzagging from his smitten crazy-bone through every tortured crevice of his impatient frame. Like steel from flint it struck out a crisp oath that brought an answering bovine snort from the fence-corner.

Worming like a lizard to freedom, his eyes puckered shut with the wretched pang, John Valiant sat up and shook his grimy fist in the air. “You silly loafing idiot!” he cried. “Thump your own crazy-bone and see how you like it! You—oh, lord!”

His arm dropped, and a flush spread over his face to the brow. For his eyes had opened. He was gesturing not at the bull but at a girl, who fronted him beside the road, haughtiness in the very hue of her gray-blue linen walking suit and, in the clear-cut cameo face under her felt cavalry hat, myrtle-blue eyes, that held a smolder of mingled astonishment and indignation. The long ragged stems of two crimson roses were thrust through her belt, a splash of blood-red against the pallid weave. An instant he gazed, all the muscles of his face tightened with chagrin.

“I—I beg your pardon,” he stammered. “I didn’t see you. I really didn’t. I was—I was talking to the bull.”

The girl had been glancing from the flushed face to the thistly fence-corner, while the startled dignity of her features warred with an unmistakable tendency to mirth. He could see the little rebellious twitch of the vivid lips, the tell-tale flutter of the eyelids, and the tremor of the gauntleted hand as it drew the hat firmly down over her curling masses of red-bronze. “What hair!” he was saying to himself. “It’s red, but what a red! It has the burnish of hot copper! I never saw such hair!”

He had struggled to his feet, nursing his bruised elbow, irritably conscious of his resemblance to an emerging chimney-sweep. “I don’t habitually swear,” he said, “but I’d got to the point when something had to explode.”

“Oh,” she said, “don’t mind me!” Then mirth conquered and she broke forth suddenly into a laugh that seemed to set the whole place aquiver with a musical contagion. They both laughed in concert, while the bull pawed the ground and sent forth a rumbling bellow of affront and challenge.

She was the first to recover. “You did look so funny!” she gasped.

“I can believe it,” he agreed, making a vicious dab at his smudged brow. “The possibilities of a motor for comedy are simply stupendous.”

She came closer and looked curiously at the quiescent monster—at the steamer-trunk strapped on the carrier and the bulging portmanteau peeping over the side of the tonneau. “Is it broken?”

“Merely on strike, I imagine. I think it resents the quality of the gasoline I got at Charlottesville. I can’t decide whether it needs a monkey-wrench or a mustard-plaster. To tell the truth, it has been out of commission and I’m not much of an expert, though I can study it out in time. Are we far from the village?”

“About a mile and a half.”

“I’ll have to have it towed after me. The immediate point is my traps. I wonder if there is likely to be a team passing.”

“I’m afraid it’s not too certain,” answered the girl, and now he noted the liquid modulation, with its slightly questioning accent, charmingly Southern. “There is no livery, but there is a negro who meets the train sometimes. I can send him if you like.”

“You’re very good,” said Valiant, as she turned away, “and I’ll be enormously obliged. Oh—and if you see a white dog, don’t be frightened if he tries to follow you. He’s perfectly kind.”

She looked back momentarily.

“He—he always follows people he likes, you see—”

“Thank you,” she said. The tone had now a hint—small, yet perceptible—of aloofness. “I’m not in the least afraid of dogs.” And with a little nod, she swung briskly on up the Red Road.

John Valiant stood staring after her till she had passed from view around a curve. “Oh, glory!” he muttered. “To begin by shaking your fist at her and end by making her wonder if you aren’t trying to be fresh! You poor, profane, floundering dolt!”

After a time he discarded his “jumper” and contrived a make-shift toilet. “What a type!” he said to himself. “Corn-flower eyes and a blowse of coppery hair.” A fragment of verse ran through his mind:

“Tawny-flecked, russet-brown, in a tangle of gold,
The billowy sweep of her flame-washed hair,
Like amber lace, laid fold on fold,
Or beaten metal beyond compare.”

“Delicacy and strength!” he muttered, as he climbed again to the leather seat. “The steel blade in the silk scabbard. With that face in repose she might have been a maid of honor of the Stuarts’ time! Yet when she laughed—”

The girl walked on up the highway with a lilting stride, now and then laughing to herself, or running a few steps, occasionally stopping by some hedge to pull a leaf which she rubbed against her cheek, smelling its keen new scent, or stopping to gaze out across the orange-green belts of sunny wind-dimpled fields, one hand pushing back her mutinous hair from her brow, the other shielding her eyes. When she had passed beyond the ken of the stranded motor, she began to sing a snatch of a cabin song, her vivid red lips framing themselves about the absurd words with a humorous exaggeration of the soft darky pronunciation. Beneath its fun her voice held a haunting dreamy quality, as she sang, sometimes in the blaze of sun, sometimes with leaf-shadows above her through which the light spurted down in green-gilt splashes. Once she stopped suddenly, and crouching down by a thorn-hedge, whistled—a low mellow tentative pipe—and in a moment a brown-flecked covey of baby partridges rushed out of the grass to dart instantly back again. She laughed, and springing up, threw back her head and began a bird song, her slender throat pulsing to the shake and reedy trill. It was marvelously done, from the clear, long opening note to the soaring rapture that seemed to bubble and break all at once into its final crescendo.

Farther on the highroad looped around a strip of young forest, and she struck into this for a short cut. Here the trees stirred faintly in the breeze, filling the place with leafy rustlings and whisperings; yet it was so still that when a saffron-barred hornet darted through with an intolerant high-keyed hum, it made the air for an instant angrily vocal, and a woodpecker’s tattoo at some distance sounded with startling loudness, like a crackling series of pistol-shots.

In the depth of this wood she sat down to rest on the sun-splashed roots of a tree. Leaning back against the seamed trunk, her felt hat fallen to the ground, she looked like some sea-woman emerging from an earth-hued pool to comb her hair against a dappled rock. The ground was sparsely covered with gray-blue bushes whose fronds at a little distance blended into a haze till they seemed like billows of smoke suddenly solidified, and here and there a darting red or yellow flower gave the illusion of an under-tongue of flame. Her eyes, passionately eager, peered about her, drinking in each note of color as her quick ear caught each twig-fall, each sound of bird and insect.

She drew back against the tree and caught her breath as a bulldog frisked over a mossy boulder just in front of her.

A moment more and she had thrown herself on her knees with both arms outstretched. “Oh, you splendid creature!” she cried, “you big, lovely white darling!”

The dog seemed in no way averse to this sensational proceeding. He responded instantly not merely with tail-wagging; but with ecstatic grunts and growls. “Where did you come from?” she questioned, as his pink tongue struggled desperately to find a cheek through the whorl of coppery hair. “Why, you must be the one I was told not to be afraid of.”

She petted and fondled the smooth intelligent muzzle. “As if any one could be afraid of you! We’ll set your master right on that point.” Smiling to herself, she pulled one of the roses from her belt, and twisting a wisp of long grass, wound it round and round the dog’s neck and thrust the ragged rose-stem firmly through it. “Now,” she said, and pushed him gently from her, “go back, sir!”

He whined and licked her hand, but when she repeated the command, he turned obediently and left her. A little way from her he halted, with a sudden perception of mysterious punishment, shrugged, sat down, and tried to reach the irksome grass-wisp with his teeth. This failing, he rolled laboriously in the dirt.

Then he rose, cast a reproachful glance behind him, and trotted off.

CHAPTER VIII

MAD ANTHONY

Beyond the selvage of the sleepy leaf-sheltered village a cherry bordered lane met the Red Road. On its one side was a clovered pasture and beyond this an orchard, bounded by a tall hedge of close-clipped box which separated it from a broad yard where the gray-weathered roof of Rosewood showed above a group of tulip and catalpa trees. Viewed nearer, the low stone house, with its huge overhanging eaves, would have looked like a small boy with his father’s hat on but for the trellises of climbing roses that covered two sides and overflowed here and there on long arbors, flecking the dull brown stone with a glorious crimson, like a warrior’s blood. On the sunny steps a lop-eared hound puppy was playing with a mottled cat.

The front door was open, showing a hall where stood a grandfather’s clock and a spindle-legged table holding a bowl of potpourri. The timepiece had landed from a sailing vessel at Jamestown wharf with the household goods of that English Garland who had adopted the old Middle Plantation when Dunmore was royal governor under George III. Framed portraits and engravings lent tints of tarnished silver, old-rose and sunset-golds—colors time-toned and reminiscent, carrying a charming sense of peaceful content, of gentleness and long tradition. The dark polished stairway had at its turn a square dormer-window which looked out upon one of the rose-arbors.

Down this stair, somewhat later that afternoon, came Shirley Dandridge, booted and spurred, the rebellious whorls of her russet hair now as closely filleted as a Greek boy’s, in a short divided skirt of yew-green and a cool white blouse and swinging by its ribbon a green hat whose rolling brim was caught up at one side by a crisp blue-black hawk’s feather. She stopped to peer out of the dormer-window to where, under the latticed weave of bloom, beside a round iron table holding a hoop of embroidery and a book or two, a lady sat reading.

The lady’s hair was silver, but not with age. It had been so for many years, refuted by the transparent skin and a color as soft as the cheek of an apricot. It was solely in her dark eyes, deep and strangely luminous, that one might see lurking the somber spirit of passion and of pain. But they were eager and brilliant withal, giving the lie to the cane whose crook one pale delicate hand held with a clasp that somehow conveyed a sense of exasperate if semi-humorous rebellion. She wore nun’s gray; soft old lace was at her wrists and throat, and she was knitting a scarlet silk stocking.

She looked up at Shirley’s voice, and smiled brightly. “Off for your ride, dear?”

“Yes. I’m going with the Chalmers.”

“Oh, of course. Betty Page is visiting them, isn’t she?”

Shirley nodded. “She came yesterday. I’ll have to hurry, for I saw them from my window turning into the Red Road.” She waved her hand and ran lightly down the stair and across the lawn to the orchard.

She pulled a green apple from a bough that hung over a stone wall and with this in her hand she came close to the pasture fence and whistled a peculiar call. It was answered by a low whinny and a soft thud of hoofs, and a golden-chestnut hunter thrust a long nose over the bars, flaring flame-lined nostrils to the touch of her hand. She laid her cheek against the white thoroughbred forehead and held the apple to the eager reaching lip, with several teasing withdrawings before she gave it to its juicy crunching.

“No, Selim,” she said as the wide nostrils snuffled over her shoulder, the begging breath blowing warm against her neck. “No more—and no sugar to-day. Sugar has gone up two cents a pound.”

She let down the top bar of the fence and vaulting over, ran to a stable and presently emerging with a saddle on her arm, whistled the horse to her and saddled him. Then opening the gate, she mounted and cantered down the lane to meet the oncoming riders—a kindly-faced, middle-aged man, a younger one with dark features and coal-black hair, and two girls.

Chisholm Lusk spurred in advance and lifted his hat. “I held up the judge, Shirley,” he said, “and made him bring me along. He tells me there’s a fox-hunt on to-morrow; may I come?”

“Pshaw! Chilly,” said the judge. “I don’t believe you ever got up at five o’clock in your born days. You’ve learned bad habits abroad.”

“You’ll see,” he answered. “If my man Friday doesn’t rout me out to-morrow, I’ll be up for murder.”

They rode an hour, along stretches of sunny highways or on shaded bridle-paths where the horses’ hoofs fell muffled in brown pine-needles and drooping branches flicked their faces. Then, by a murky way gouged with brusk gullies, across shelving fields and “turn-rows” in a long détour around Powhattan Mountain, a rough spur in the shape of an Indian’s head that wedged itself forbiddingly between the fields of springing corn and tobacco. They approached the Red Road again by a crazy bridge whose adze-hewn flooring was held in place by wild grape-vines and weighted down against cloudburst and freshet by heavy boulders till it dipped its middle like an overloaded buckboard in the yellow waters of the sluggish stream beneath. On the farther side they pulled down to breathe their horses. Here the road was like a narrow ruler dividing a desert from a promised land. On one hand a guttered slope of marl and pebbles covered with a tatterdemalion forest—on the other acre upon acre of burnished grain.

“Ah never saw such a frowsley-looking thing in mah life,” said Betty Page, in her soft South Carolinian drawl that was all vowels and liquids, “as that wild hill beside those fields. For all the world like a disgraceful tramp leering across the wall at a dandy.”

Shirley applauded the simile, and the judge said, “This is a boundary. That hobo-landscape is part of the deserted Valiant estate. The hill hides the house.”

She nodded. “Damory Court. It’s still vacant, Ah suppose.”

“Yes, and likely to be. Valiant is dead long ago, but apparently there’s never been any attempt to let it. I suppose his son is so rich that one estate more or less doesn’t figure much to him.”

“I got a letter this morning from Dorothy Randolph,” said Shirley. “The Valiant Corporation is being investigated, you know, and her uncle had taken her to one of the hearings, when John Valiant was in the chair. From her description, they are making it sufficiently hot for that silver-spooned young man.”

“I don’t reckon he cares,” said Lusk satirically. “Nothing matters with his set if you have enough money.”

The judge pointed with his crop. “That narrow wagon-track,” he said, “goes to Hell’s-Half-Acre.”

“Oh, yes,” said Betty. “That’s that weird settlement on the Dome where Shirley’s little protégée Rickey Snyder came from.” It was all she said, but her glance at the girl beside her was one of open admiration. For, as all in the party knew, the lonely road had been connected with an act of sheer impulsive daring in Shirley’s girlhood that she would never hear spoken of.

Judge Chalmers flicked his horse’s ears gently with his rein and they moved slowly on, presently coming in sight of a humble patch of ground, enclosed in a worm-fence and holding a whitewashed cabin with a well shaded by varicolored hollyhocks. Under the eaves clambered a gourd-vine, beneath which dangled strings of onions and bright red peppers. “Do let us get a drink!” said Chilly Lusk. “I’m as thirsty as a cotton-batting camel.”

“All right, we’ll stop,” agreed the judge, “and you’ll have a chance to see another local lion, Betty. This is where Mad Anthony lives. You must have heard of him when you were here before. He’s almost as celebrated as the Reverend John Jasper of Richmond.”

Betty tapped her temple. “Where have Ah heard of John Jasper?”

“He was the author of the famous sermon on The Sun do Move. He used to prove it by a bucket of water that he set beside his pulpit Saturday night. As it hadn’t spilled in the morning he knew it was the earth that stood still.”

Betty nodded laughingly. “Ah remember now. He’s the one who said there were only four great races: the Huguenots, the Hottentots, the Abyssinians and the Virginians. Is Mad Anthony really mad?”

“Only harmlessly,” said Shirley. “He’s stone blind. The negroes all believe he conjures—that’s voodoo, you know. They put a lot of stock in his ‘prophecisms.’ He tells fortunes, too. S-sh!” she warned. “He’s sitting on the door-step. He’s heard us.”

The old negro had the torso of a black patriarch. He sat bolt upright with long straight arms resting on his knees, and his face had that peculiar expressionless immobility seen in Egyptian carvings. He had slightly turned his head in their direction, his brow, under its shock of perfectly white crinkly hair, twitching with a peculiar expression of inquiry. His age might have been anything judging from his face which was so seamed and creviced with innumerable tiny wrinkles that it most resembled the tortured glaze of some ancient bitumen pottery unearthed from a tomb of Kôr. Under their heavy lids his sightless eyeballs, whitely opaque and lusterless, turned mutely toward the sound of the horse hoofs.

The judge dismounted, and tossing his bridle over a fence-picket, took from his pocket a collapsible drinking cup. “Howdy do, Anthony,” he said. “We just stopped for a drink of your good water.”

The old negro nodded his head. “Good watah,” he said in the gentle quavering tones of extreme age. “Yas, Mars’. He’p yo’se’f. Come f’om de centah ob de yerf, dat watah. En dah’s folks say de centah of de yerf is all fiah. Yo’ reck’n dey’s right, Mars’ Chalmahs?”

“Now, how the devil do you know who I am, Anthony?” The judge set down his cup on the well-curb. “I haven’t been by here for a year.”

The ebony head moved slowly from side to side. “Ol’ Ant’ny don’ need no eyes,” he said, touching his hand to his brow. “He see ev’ything heah.”

The judge beckoned to the others and they trooped inside the paling. “I’ve brought some other folks with me, Anthony; can you tell who they are?”

The sightless look wavered over them and the white head shook slowly. “Don’ know young mars,’,” said the gentle voice. “How many yuddahs wid yo’? One, two? No, don’ know young mistis, eidah.”

“I reckon you don’t need any eyes,” Judge Chalmers laughed, as he passed the sweet cold water to the rest. “One of these young ladies wants you to tell her fortune.”

The old negro dropped his head, waving his gaunt hands restlessly. Then his gaze lifted and the whitened eyeballs roved painfully about as if in search of something elusive. The judge beckoned to Betty Page, but she shook her head with a little grimace and drew back.

“You go, Shirley,” she whispered, and with a laughing glance at the others, Shirley came and sat down on the lowest step.

Mad Anthony put out a wavering hand and touched the young body. His fingers strayed over the habit and went up to the curling bronze under the hat-brim. “Dis de li’l mistis,” he muttered, “ain’ afeahd ob ol’ Ant’ny. Dah’s fiah en she ain’ afeahd, en dah’s watah en she ain’ afeahd. Wondah whut Ah gwine tell huh? Whut de coloh ob yo’ haih, honey?”

“Black,” put in Chilly Lusk, with a wink at the others. “Black as a crow.”

Old Anthony’s hand fell back to his knee. “Young mars’ laugh at de ol’ man,” he said, “but he don’ know. Dat de coloh dat buhn mah han’s—de coloh ob gol’, en eyes blue like er cat-bird’s aig. Dah’s er man gwine look in dem eyes, honey, en gwine make ’em cry en cry.” He raised his head sharply, his lids shut tight, and swung his arm toward the North. “Dah’s whah he come f’om,” he said, “en heah”—his arm veered and he pointed straight toward the ragged hill behind them—“he stay.”

Lusk laughed noiselessly. “He’s pointing to Damory Court,” he whispered to Nancy Chalmers, “the only uninhabited place within ten miles. That’s as near as he often hits it, I fancy.”

“Heah’s whah he stay,” repeated the old man. “Heap ob trouble wait heah fo’ him too, honey,—heap ob trouble, heah whah li’l mistis fin’ him.” His voice dropped to a monotone, and he began to rock gently to and fro as if he were crooning a lullaby. “Li’l trouble en gr’et trouble! Fo’ dah’s fiah en she ain’ afeahd, en dah’s watah en she ain’ afeahd. It’s de thing whut eat de ha’at outen de breas’—dat whut she afeahd of!”

“Come, Anthony,” said Judge Chalmers, laying his hand on the old man’s shoulder. “That’s much too mournful! Give her something nice to top off with, at least!”

But Anthony paid no heed, continuing his rocking and his muttering. “Gr’et trouble. Dah’s fiah en she ain’ afeahd, en dah’s watah en she ain’ afeahd. En Ah sees yo’ gwine ter him, honey. Ah heah’s de co’ot-house clock a-strikin’ in de night—en yo’ gwine. Don’ wait, don’ wait, li’l mistis, er de trouble-cloud gwine kyah him erway f’om yo’.... When de clock strike thuhteen—when de clock strike thuhteen—”

The droning voice ceased. The gaunt form became rigid. Then he started and turned his eyes slowly about him, a vague look of anxiety on his face. For a moment no one moved. When he spoke again it was once more in his gentle quavering voice:

“Watah? Yas, Mars’, good watah. He’p yo’se’f.”

The judge set a dollar bill on the step and weighted it with a stone, as the rest remounted. “Well, good-by, Anthony,” he said. “We’re mightily obliged.”

He sprang into the saddle and the quartette cantered away. “My experiment wasn’t a great success, I’m afraid, Shirley,” he said ruefully.

“Oh, I think it was splendid!” cried Nancy. “Do you suppose he really believes those spooky things? I declare, at the time I almost did myself. What an odd idea—‘when the clock strikes thirteen,’ which, of course, it never does.”

“Don’t mind, Shirley,” bantered Lusk. “When you see all ‘dem troubles’ coming, sound the alarm and we’ll fly in a body to your rescue.”

They let their horses out for a pounding gallop which pulled down suddenly at a muffled shriek from Betty Page, as her horse went into the air at sight of an automobile by the roadside.

“Now, whose under the canopy is that?” exclaimed Lusk.

“It’s stalled,” said Shirley. “I passed here this afternoon when the owner was trying to start it, and I sent Unc’ Jefferson as first aid to the injured.”

“I wonder who he can be,” said Nancy. “I’ve never seen that car before.”

“Why,” said Betty gaily, “Ah know! It’s Mad Anthony’s trouble-man, of course, come for Shirley.”

CHAPTER IX

UNCLE JEFFERSON

A red rose, while ever a thing of beauty, is not invariably a joy forever. The white bulldog, as he plodded along the sunny highway, was sunk in depression. Being trammeled by the limitations of a canine horizon, he could not understand the whims of Adorable Ones met by the way, who seemed so glad to see him that they threw both arms about him, and then tied to his neck irksome colored weeds that prickled and scratched and would not be dislodged. Lacking a basis of painful comparison, since he had never had a tin can tied to his tail, he accepted it as condign punishment and was puzzledly wretched. So it was a chastened and shamed Chum who at length wriggled stealthily into the seat of the stranded automobile beside his master and thrust a dirty pink nose into his palm.

John Valiant lifted his hand to stroke the shapely head, then drew it back with an exclamation. A thorn had pricked his thumb. He looked down and saw the draggled flower thrust through the twist of grass. “Oh, pup of wonders!” he exclaimed. “Where did you get that rose?”

Chum sat up and wagged his tail, for his master’s tone, instead of ridicule, held a dawning delight. Perhaps the thing had not been intended as a disgrace after all! As the careful hand drew the misused blossom tenderly from its tether, he barked joyously with recovered spirits.

With the first sight of the decoration Valiant had had a sudden memory of a splotch of vivid red against the belted gray-blue of a gown. He grinned appreciatively. “And I warned her,” he chuckled. “Told her not to be afraid!” He dusted the blossom painstakingly with his handkerchief and held it to his face—a live brilliant thing, breathing musk-odors of the mid-moon of paradise.

A long time he sat, while the dog dozed and yawned on the shiny cushion beside him. Gradually the clover-breeze fainted and the lengthening shadows dipped their fingers into indigo. On the far amethystine peaks of the Blue Ridge leaned milky-breasted clouds through which the sun sifted in wide bars. A blackbird began to flute from some near-by tree and across the low stone wall he heard a feathery whir. Of a sudden Chum sat up and barked in earnest.

Turning his head, his master saw approaching a dilapidated hack with side-lanterns like great goggles and decrepit and palsied curtains. It was drawn by a lean mustard-tinted mule, and on its front seat sat a colored man of uncertain age, whose hunched vertebræ and outward-crooked arms gave him a curious expression of replete and bulbous inquiry. Abreast of the car he removed a moth-eaten cap.

“Evenin’, suh,” he said,—“evenin’, evenin’.”

“Howdy do,” returned the other amiably.

“Ah reck’n yo’-all done had er breck-down wid dat machine-thing dar. Spec’ er graveyahd rabbit done cross yo’ pahf. Yo’ been hyuh ’bout er hour, ain’ yo’?”

“Nearer three,” said Valiant cheerfully, “but the view’s worth it.”

A hoarse titter came from the conveyance, which gave forth sundry creakings of leather. “Huyh! Huyh! Dat’s so, suh. Dat’s so! Hm-m. Reck’n Ah’ll be gittin’ erlong back.” He clucked to the mule and proceeded to turn the vehicle round.

“Hold on,” cried John Valiant. “I thought you were bound in the other direction.”

“No, suh. Ah’m gwine back whah I come f’om. Ah jus’ druv out hyuh ’case Miss Shirley done met me, en she say, ‘Unc’ Jeffe’son, yo’ go ’treckly out de Red Road, ’case er gemman done got stalled-ed.’”

“Oh—Miss Shirley. She told you, did she? What did you say her first name was?”

“Dat’s huh fus’ name, Miss Shirley. Yas, suh! Miss Shirley done said f’ me ter come en git de gemman whut—whut kinder dawg is yo’ got dar?”

“It’s a bulldog. Can you give me a lift? I’ve got that small trunk and—”

“Dat’s a right fine dawg. Miss Shirley she moughty fond ob dawgs, too.”

“Fond of dogs, is she?” said Valiant. “I might have known it. It was nice of her to send you here, Uncle Jefferson. You can take me and my traps, I suppose?”

“’Pens on whah yo’ gwineter,” answered Uncle Jefferson sapiently.

“I’m going to Damory Court.”

A kind of shocked surprise that was almost stupefaction spread over the other’s face, like oil over a pool. “Dam’ry Co’ot! Dat’s de old Valiant place. Ain’ nobody lives dar. Ah reck’n ain’ nobody live dar fer mos’ er hun’erd yeahs!”

“The old house has a great surprise coming to it,” said Valiant gravely. “Henceforth some one is going to occupy it. How far is it away?”

“Measurin’ by de coonskin en th’owin’ in de tail, et’s erbout two mile. Ain’ gwineter live dar yo’se’f, suh, is yo’?”

“I am for the present,” was the crisp answer.

Uncle Jefferson stared at him a moment with his mouth open. Then ejaculating under his breath, “Fo’ de Lawd! Whut folks gwineter say ter dat!” he shambled to the rear of the motor and began to unship the steamer-trunk.

“By the way,”—John Valiant paused, with the portmanteau in his hands,—“what do you ask for the job?”

The owner of the hack scratched his grizzled head. “Ah gen’ly chahges er quahtah er trunk f’om de deepo’ less’n et’s one ob dem ar rich folks f’om up Norf.”

“I don’t happen to be rich, so we’ll make it a dollar. What makes you think I’m from the North?”

Again the aguish mirth agitated the other, as he put aboard a hamper and one of the motor’s lamps, which Valiant added as an afterthought. “Ah knows et,” he said ingenuously, “but Ah don’ know why. Ah’ll jes’ twis’ er rope eroun’ yo’ trunk. Whut yo’ gwineter do wid dat-ar?” he asked, pointing to the car. “Ah kin come wid ole Sukey—dat’s mah mule—en fotch it in in de mawnin’. Ain’ gwineter rain ter-night nohow.”—

This matter having been arranged, they started jogging down the green-bordered road, the bulldog prospecting alongside. A meadow-lark soared somewhere in the overarching blue, dropping golden notes; dusty bumble-bees boomed hither and thither; genial crickets tuned their fiddles in the “tickle-grass” and a hawking dragon-fly paused for an impudent siesta between the mule’s gyrating ears.

“S’pose’n de Co’ot done ben sold en yo’ gwineter fix it up fo’ de new ownah,” hazarded Uncle Jefferson presently.

Valiant did not answer directly. “You say the place hasn’t been occupied for many years,” he observed. “Did you ever hear why, Uncle Jefferson?”

“Ah done heerd,” said the other vaguely, “but Ah disremembahs. Sumpin dat happened befo’ Ah come heah f’om ol’ Post-Oak Plantation. Reck’n Majah Bristow he know erbout it, er Mis’ Judith—dat’s Miss Shirley’s mothah. Her fathah wus Gen’l Tawm Dandridge, en he died fo’ she wus bawn.”

Shirley Dandridge! A high-sounding name, with something of long-linked culture, of arrogant heritage. In some subtle way it seemed to clothe the personality of which Valiant had had that fleeting roadside glimpse.

Uncle Jefferson stared meditatively skyward whence dropped the bubbling lark song. “Dat-ar buhd kin sing!” he said. “Queeh dat folkses cyan’ do dat, dey so moughty much smahtah. Nevah knowed nobody could, dough, cep’n on’y Miss Shirley. Tain’ er buhd nowhah in de fiel’s dat she cyan’ mock.”

“You mean she knows their calls?”

“Yas, suh, ev’y soun’. Done fool me heap er times. Dah’s de cook’s li’l boy et Rosewood dat wuz sick las’ summah, en he listen ev’y day ter de mockin’-buhd dat nes’ in one ob de tulip-trees. He jes’ love dat buhd next ter he mammy, en when et come fall en et don’ come no mo’, he ha’at mos’ broke. He jes’ lay en cry en git right smaht wussur. Et las’ seems lak de li’l boy gwine die. When Mis’ Shirley heah dat, she try en try till she jes’ git dat buhd’s song ez pat ez de Lawd’s Prayah, en one evenin’ she gwine en say ter he mammy ter tell him he mockin’-buhd done come back, en he mammy she bundle him all up in de quilt en open de winder, en sho’ nuff, dah’s Mistah Mockin’-buhd behin’ de bushes, jes’ bus’in’ hisse’f. Well, suh, seems lak dat chile hang on ter living jes’ ter heah dat buhd, en ev’y evenin’, way till when de snow on de groun’, Mis’ Shirley she hide out in de trees en sing en sing till de po’ li’l feller gwine ter sleep.”

Valiant leaned forward, for Uncle Jefferson had paused. “Did the child get well?” he asked eagerly.

The old man clucked to the leisurely mule. “Yas, suh!” he said. “He done git well. He ’bout de on’riest young’un roun’ heah now!

“Reck’n yo’-all come f’om New York?” inquired Uncle Jefferson, after a little silence. “So! Dey say dat’s er pow’ful big place. But Ah reck’n ol’ Richmon’s big ernuf fo’ me.” He clucked to the leisurely mule and added, ”Ah bin ter Richmon’ onct. Yas, suh! Ah nevah see sech houses—mos’ all bigger’n de county co’ot-house.”

John Valiant expressed a somewhat absent interest. He was looking thoughtfully at the blossom in his hand, in an absorption through which Uncle Jefferson’s reminiscences oozed on:

“Mos’ cur’ousest thing wus how e’vybody dar seem ter know e’vybody else. Dey got street-kyahs dar, no hoss en no mule, jes’ shoot up de hill en down ergen, lak de debble skinnin’ tan-bahk. Well, suh, Ah got on er kyah en gib de man whut stan’ on de flatfawm er nickel, en Ah set dar lookin’ outen de win’ow, till de man he call out ‘Adams,’ en er gemman whut wah sittin’ ercross f’om me, he git up en git off. De kyah start ergen en de nex co’nah dat ar man on de flatfawm he yell out ‘Monroe.’ En Mistah Monroe, he was sittin’ up at de end, en he jump up en git off. Den de kyah took anuddah staht, en bress mah soul, dat ar man on de flatfawm he hollah ‘Jeffe’son!’ Ah clah’ ter goodness, suh, Ah nebbah skeered so bad en mah life. How dat man know me, suh? Well, suh, Ah jump up lak Ah be’n shot, en Ah says, ‘Fo’ de Lawd, boss, Ah wa’n’t gwineter git off at dis co’nah, but ef yo’ says so, Ah reck’n Ah got ter!’ So Ah git off en Ah walk erbout fo’ miles back ter de deepo!”

Uncle Jefferson’s inward and volcanic amusement shook his passenger from his reverie. “En dat ar wa’n’t de wust. When Ah got ter de deepo, Ah didn’ have mah pocketbook. Er burglar had ’scaped off wid it en lef me es nickelless ez er convic’.”

CHAPTER X

WHAT HAPPENED THIRTY YEARS AGO

When Shirley came across the lawn at Rosewood, Major Montague Bristow sat under the arbor talking to her mother.

The major was massive-framed, with a strong jaw and a rubicund complexion—the sort that might be supposed to have attained the utmost benefit to be conferred by a consistent indulgence in mint-juleps. His blue eyes were piercing and arched with brows like sable rainbows, at variance with his heavy iron-gray hair and imperial. His head was leonine and he looked like a king who has humbled his enemy. It may be added that his linen was fine and immaculate, his black string-tie precisely tied and a pair of gold-rimmed eye-glasses swung by a flat black cord against his white waistcoat. There was a touch of the military in the squareness of shoulder and the lift of the rugged head, no less than in the gallant little bow with which he rose to greet the girl coming toward them.

“Shirley,” said her mother, “the major’s brutal, and he shan’t have his mint-julep.”

“What has he been doing?” asked the other, her brows wrinkling in a delightful way she had.

“He has reminded me that I’m growing old.”

Shirley looked at the major skeptically, for his chivalry was undoubted. During a long career in law and legislature it had been said of him that he could neither speak on the tariff question nor defend a man for murder, without first paying a tribute to “the women of the South, sah.”

“Nothing of the sort,” he rumbled.

Mrs. Dandridge’s face softened to wistfulness. “Shirley, am I?” she asked, with a quizzical, almost a droll uneasiness. “Why, I’ve got every emotion I’ve ever had. I read all the new French novels, and I’m even thinking of going in for the militant suffragette movement.”

The girl had tossed her hat and crop on the table and seated herself by her mother’s chair. Now reaching down, she drew one of the fragile blue-veined hands up against her cheek, her bronze hair, its heavy coil loosened, dropping over one shoulder like sunlit seaweed. “What was it he said, dearest?”

“He thinks I ought to wear a worsted shawl and arctics.” Her mother thrust out one little thin-slippered foot, with its slender ankle gleaming through its open-work stocking like mother-of-pearl. “Imagine! In May. And he knows I’m vain of my feet! Major, if you had ever had a wife, you would have learned wisdom. But you mean well, and I’ll take back what I said about the julep. You mix it, Shirley. Yours is even better than Ranston’s.

“She makes me one every day, Monty,” she continued, as Shirley went into the house. “And when she isn’t looking, I pour it into the bush there. See those huge, maudlin-looking roses? That’s the shameless result. It’s a new species. I’m going to name it Tipsium Giganticum.”

Major Bristow laughed as he bit the end off a cigar. “All the same,” he said in his big rumbling voice, “you need ’em, I reckon. You need more than mint-juleps, too. You leave the whisky to me and the doctor, and you take Shirley and pull out for Italy. Why not? A year there would do you a heap of good.”

She shook her head. “No, Monty. It isn’t what you think. It’s—here.” She lifted her hand and touched her heart. “It’s been so for a long time. But it may—it can’t go on forever, you see. Nothing can.”

The major had leaned forward in his chair. “Judith!” he said, and his hand twitched, “it isn’t true!” And then, “How do you know?”

She smiled at him. “You remember when that big surgeon from Vienna came to see the doctor last year? Well, the doctor brought him to me. I’d known it before in a way, but it had gone farther than I thought. No one can tell just how long it may be. It may be years, of course, but I’m not taking any sea trips, Monty.”

He cleared his throat and his voice was husky when he spoke. “Shirley doesn’t know?”

“Certainly not. She mustn’t.” And then, in sudden sharpness: “You shan’t tell her, Monty. You wouldn’t dare!”

“No, indeed,” he assured her quickly. “Of course not.”

“It’s just among us three, Doctor Southall and you and me. We three have had our secrets before, eh, Monty?”

“Yes, Judith, we have.”

She bent toward him, her hands tightening on the cane. “After all, it’s true. To-day I am getting old. I may look only fifty, but I feel sixty and I’ll admit to seventy-five. It’s joy that keeps us young, and I didn’t get my fair share of that, Monty. For just one little week my heart had it all—all—and then—well, then it was finished. It was finished long before I married Tom Dandridge. It isn’t that I’m empty-headed. It’s that I’ve been an empty-hearted woman, Monty—as empty and dusty and desolate as the old house over yonder on the ridge.”

“I know, Judith, I know.”

“You’ve been empty in a way, too,” she said. “But it’s been a different way. You were never in love—really in love, I mean. Certainly not with me, Monty, though you tried to make me think so once upon a time, before Sassoon came along, and—Beauty Valiant.”

The major blinked, suddenly startled. It was out, the one name neither had spoken to the other for thirty years! He looked at her a little guiltily; but her eyes had turned away. They were gazing between the catalpas to where, far off on a gentle rise, the stained gable of a roof thrust up dark and gaunt above its nest of foliage. “Everything changed then,” she continued dreamily, “everything.”

The major’s fingers strayed across his waistcoat, fumbling uncertainly for his eye-glasses. For an instant he, too, was back in the long-ago past, when he and Valiant had been comrades. What a long panorama unfolded at the name; the times when they had been boys fly-fishing in the Rapidan and fox-hunting about Pilot-Knob with the yelping hounds—crisp winters of books and pipes together at the old university at Charlottesville—later maturer years about Damory Court when the trail of sex had deepened into man’s passion and the devil’s rivalry. It had been a curious three-sided affair—he, and Valiant, and Sassoon. Sassoon with his dissipated flair and ungovernable temper and strange fits of recklessness; clean, high-idealed, straight-away Valiant; and he—a Bristow, neither better nor worse than the rest of his name. He remembered that mad strained season when he had grimly recognized his own cause as hopeless, and with burning eyes had watched Sassoon and Valiant racing abreast. He remembered that glittering prodigal dance when he had come upon Valiant and Judith standing in the shrubbery, the candle-light from some open door engoldening their faces: hers smiling, a little flippant perhaps, and conscious of her spell; his grave and earnest, yet wistful.

“You promise, John?”

“I give my sacred word. Whatever the provocation, I will not lift my hand against him. Never, never!” Then the same voice, vibrant, appealing. “Judith! It isn’t because—because—you care for him?”

He had plunged away in the darkness before her answer came. What had it mattered then to him what she had replied? And that very night had befallen the fatal quarrel!

The major started. How that name had blown away the dust! “That’s a long time ago, Judith.”

“Think of it! I wore my hair just as Shirley does now. It was the same color, with the same fascinating little lights and whorls in it.” She turned toward him, but he sat rigidly upright, his gaze avoiding hers. Her dreamy look was gone now, and her eyes were very bright.

“Thirty years ago to-morrow they fought,” she said softly, “Valiant and Sassoon. Every woman has her one anniversary, I suppose, and to-morrow’s mine. Do you know what I do, every fourteenth of May, Monty? I keep my room and spend the day always the same way. There’s a little book I read. And there’s an old haircloth trunk that I’ve had since I was a girl. Down in the bottom of it are some—things, that I take out and set round the room ... and there is a handful of old letters I go over from first to last. They’re almost worn out now, but I could repeat them all with my eyes shut. Then, there’s a tiny old straw basket with a yellow wisp in it that once was a bunch of cape jessamines. I wore them to that last ball—the night before it happened. The fourteenth of May used to be sad, but now, do you know, I look forward to it! I always have a lot of jessamines that particular day—I’ll have Shirley get me some to-morrow—and in the evening, when I go down-stairs, the house is full of the scent of them. All summer long it’s roses, but on the fourteenth of May it has to be jessamines. Shirley must think me a whimsical old woman, but I insist on being humored.”

She was silent a moment, the point of her slender cane tracing circles in the gravel. “It’s a black date for you too, Monty. I know. But men and women are different. I wonder what takes the place to a man of a woman’s haircloth trunk?”

“I reckon it’s a demijohn,” he said mirthlessly.

A smile flashed over her face, like sunshine over a flower, and she looked up at him slowly. “What bricks men are to each other! You and the doctor were John Valiant’s closest friends. What did you two care what people said? Why, women don’t stick to each other like that! It isn’t in petticoats! It wouldn’t do for women to take to dueling, Monty; when the affair was over and done, the seconds would fall to with their hatpins and jab each other’s eyes out!”

He smiled, a little bleakly, and cleared his throat.

“Isn’t it strange for me to be talking this way now!” she said presently. “Another proof that I’m getting old. But the date brings it very close; it seems, somehow, closer than ever this year.—Monty, weren’t you tremendously surprised when I married Tom Dandridge?”

“I certainly was.”

“I’ll tell you a secret. I was, too. I suppose I did it because of a sneaking feeling that some people were feeling sorry for me, which I never could stand. Well, he was a man any one might honor. I’ve always thought a woman ought to have two husbands: one to love and cherish, and the other to honor and obey. I had the latter, at any rate.”

“And you’ve lived, Judith,” he said.

“Yes,” she agreed, with a little sigh, “I’ve lived. I’ve had Shirley, and she’s twenty and adorable. Some of my emotions creak a bit in the hinges, but I’ve enjoyed things. A woman is cat enough not to be wholly miserable if she can sit in the sun and purr. And I’ve had people enough, and books to read, and plenty of pretty things to look at, and old lace to wear, and I’ve kept my figure and my vanity—I’m not too old yet to thank the Lord for that! So don’t talk to me about worsted shawls and horrible arctics. For I won’t wear ’em. Not if I know myself! Here comes Shirley. She’s made two juleps, and if you’re a gentleman, you’ll distract her attention till I’ve got rid of mine in my usual way.”

The major, at the foot of the cherry-bordered lane, looked back across the box-hedge to where the two figures sat under the rose-arbor, the mother’s face turned lovingly down to Shirley’s at her knee. He stood a moment watching them from under his slouched hat-brim.

“You never looked at me that way, Judith, did you!” he sighed to himself. “It’s been a long time, too, since I began to want you to—’most forty years. When it came to the show-down, I wasn’t even as fit as Tom Dandridge!”

He pulled his hat down farther over his big brow and sighed again as he strode on. “You just couldn’t make yourself care, could you! People can’t, maybe. And I reckon you were right about it. I wasn’t fit.”

CHAPTER XI

DAMORY COURT

“

Dar’s Dam’ry Co’ot smack-dab ahaid, suh.”

John Valiant looked up. Facing them at an elbow of the broad road, was an old gateway of time-nicked stone, clasping an iron gate that was quaint and heavy and red with rust. Over it on either side twin sugar-trees flung their untrammeled strength, and from it, leading up a gentle declivity, ran a curving avenue of oaks. He put out his hand.

“Wait a moment,” he said in a low voice, and as the creaking conveyance stopped, he turned and looked about him.

Facing the entrance the land fell away sharply to a miniature valley through which rambled a willow-bordered brook, in whose shallows short-horned cows stood lazily. Beyond, alternating with fields of young grain and verdured pastures like crushed velvet, rose a succession of tranquil slopes crowned with trees that here and there grouped about a white colonial dwelling, with its outbuildings behind it. Beyond, whither wound the Red Road, he could see a drowsy village, with a spire and a cupolaed court-house; and farther yet a yellow gorge with a wisp of white smoke curling above it marked the course of a crawling far-away railway. Over all the dimming yellow sunshine, and girdling the farther horizon, in masses of purplish blue, the tumbled battlements of the Blue Ridge.

His conductor had laboriously descended and now the complaining gates swung open. Before them, as they toiled up the long ascent, the neglected driveway was a riot of turbulent growth: thistle, white-belled burdock, ragweed and dusty mullein stood waist high.

“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!

A Lilliputian spider-web was stretched over the preempted keyhole, and he fetched a grass-stem and poked out its tiny gray-striped denizen before he inserted the key in the rusted lock. He turned it with a curious sense of timidity. All the strength of his fingers was necessary before the massive door swung open and the leveling sun sent its late red rays into the gloomy interior.

He stood in a spacious hall, his nostrils filled with a curious but not unpleasant aromatic odor with which the place was strongly impregnated. The hall ran the full length of the building, and in its center a wide, balustraded double staircase led to upper darkness. The floor, where his footprints had disturbed the even gray film of dust, was of fine close parquetry and had been generously strewn everywhere with a mica-like powder. He stooped and took up a pinch in his fingers, noting that it gave forth the curious spicy scent. Dim paintings in tarnished frames hung on the walls. From a niche on the break of the stairway looked down the round face of a tall Dutch clock, and on one side protruded a huge bulging something draped with a yellowed linen sheet. From its shape he guessed this to be an elk’s head. Dust, undisturbed, lay thickly on everything, ghostly floating cobwebs crawled across his face, and a bat flitted out of a fireplace and vanished squeaking over his head. With Uncle Jefferson’s help he opened the rear doors and windows, knocked up the rusted belts of the shutters and flung them wide.

But for the dust and cobwebs and the strange odor, mingled with the faint musty smell that pervades a sunless interior, the former owner of the house might have deserted it a week ago. On a wall-rack lay two walking-sticks and a gold-mounted hunting-crop, and on a great carved chest below it had been flung an opened book bound in tooled leather. John Valiant picked this up curiously. It was Lucile. He noted that here and there passages were marked with penciled lines—some light and femininely delicate, some heavier, as though two had been reading it together, noting their individual preferences.

He laid it back musingly, and opening a door, entered the large room it disclosed. This had been the dining-room. The walls were white, in alternate panels with small oval mirrors whose dust-covered surfaces looked like ground steel. At one end stood a crystal-knobbed mahogany sideboard, holding glass candlesticks in the shape of Ionic columns—above it a quaint portrait of a lady in hoops and love-curls—and at the other end was a huge fireplace with rust-red fire-dogs and tarnished brass fender. All these, with the round centipede table and the Chippendale chairs set in order against the walls, were dimmed and grayed with a thick powdering of dust.

The next room that he entered was big and wide, a place of dark colors, nobly smutched of time. It had been at once library and living-room. Glass-faced book-shelves ran along one side—well-stocked, as the dusty panes showed—and a huge pigeonholed desk glowered in the big bow-window that opened on to what had been the garden. On the wall hung an old map of Virginia. At one side the dark wainscoting yawned to a cavernous fireplace and inglenook with seats in black leather. By it stood a great square tapestry screen, showing a hunting scene, set in a heavy frame. A great leather settee was drawn near the desk and beside this stood a reading-stand with a small china dog and a squat bronze lamp upon it. In contrast to the orderly dining-room there was about this chamber a sense of untouched disorder—a desk-drawer jerked half-open, a yellowed newspaper torn across and flung into a corner, books tossed on desk and lounge, and in the fireplace a little heap of whitened ashes in which charred fragments told of letters and papers burned in haste. A bottle that had once held brandy and a grimy goblet stood on the desk, and in a metal ash-tray on the reading-stand lay a half-smoked cigar that crumbled to dust in the intruder’s fingers.

One by one Valiant forced open the tall French windows, till the fading light lay softly over the austere dignity of the apartment. In that somber room, he knew, had had place whatever was most worthy in the lives of his forebears. The thought of generation upon generation had steeped it in human association.

Suddenly he lifted his eyes. Above the desk hung a life-size portrait of a man, in the high soft stock and velvet collar of half a century before. The right eye, strangely, had been cut from the canvas. He stood straight and tall, one hand holding an eager hound in leash, his face proud and florid, his single, cold, steel-blue eye staring down through its dusty curtain with a certain malicious arrogance, and his lips set in a sardonic curve that seemed about to sneer. It was for an instant as if the pictured figure confronted the young man who stood there, mutely challenging his entrance into that tomb-like and secret-keeping quiet; and he gazed back as fixedly, repelled by the craft of the face, yet subtly attracted. “I wonder who you were,” he said. “You were cruel. Perhaps you were wicked. But you were strong, too.”

He returned to the outer hall to find that the negro had carried in his trunk, and he bade him place it, with the portmanteau, in the room he had just left. Dusk was falling. The air was full of a faint far chirr of night insects, like an elfin serenade, and here and there among the trees pulsed the greenish-yellow spark of a firefly.

“Uncle Jefferson,” said Valiant abruptly, “have you a family?”

“No, suh. Jes’ me en mah ol’ ’ooman.”

“Can she cook?”

“Cook!” The genial titter again captured his dusky escort. “When she got de fixens, Ah reck’n she de beaten’es cook in dis heah county.”

“How much do you earn, driving that hack?”

Uncle Jefferson ruminated. “Well, suh, ’pens on de weddah. Mighty lucky sometimes dis yeah ef Ah kin pay de groc’ry man.”

“How would you both like to live here with me for a while? She could cook and you could take care of me.”

Uncle Jefferson’s eyes seemed to turn inward with mingled surprise and introspection. He shifted from one foot to the other, swallowed difficultly several times, and said, “Ah ain’ nebbah seed yo’ befo’, suh.”

“Well, I haven’t seen you either, have I?”

“Dat’s de trufe, suh, ’deed et is! Hyuh, hyuh! Whut Ah means ter say is dat de ol’ ’ooman kain’ cook no fancy didoes like what dey eats up Norf. She kin jes’ cook de Ferginey style.”

“That sounds good to me,” quoth Valiant. “I’ll risk it. Now as to wages—”

“Ah ain’ specticulous as ter de wages,” said Uncle Jefferson. “Ah knows er gemman when Ah sees one. ’Sides, ter-day’s Friday en et’s baid luck. Ah sho’ is troubled in mah min’ wheddah we-all kin suit yo’ perpensities, but Ah reck’n we kin take er try ef yo’ kin.”

“Then it’s a bargain,” responded Valiant with alacrity. “Can you come at once?”

“Yas, suh, me en Daph gwineter come ovah fus’ thing in de mawnin’. Whut yo’-all gwineter do fo’ yo’ suppah?”

“I’ll get along,” Valiant assured him cheerfully. “Here is five dollars. You can buy some food and things to cook with, and bring them with you. Do you think there’s a stove in the kitchen?”

“Ah reck’n,” replied Uncle Jefferson. “En ef dar ain’ Daph kin cook er Chris’mus dinnah wid fo’ stones en er tin skillet. Yas, suh!”

He trudged away into the shadows, but presently, as the new master of Damory Court stood in the gloomy hall, he heard the shambling step again behind him. “Ah done neglectuated ter ax yo’ name, suh. Ah did, fo’ er fac’.”

“My name is Valiant. John Valiant.”

Uncle Jefferson’s eyes turned upward and rolled out of orbit. “Mah Lawd!” he ejaculated soundlessly. And with his wide lips still framed about the last word, he backed out of the doorway and disappeared.

CHAPTER XII

THE CASE OF MOROCCO LEATHER

Alone in the ebbing twilight, John Valiant found his hamper, spread a napkin on the broad stone steps and took out a glass, a spoon and part of a loaf of bread. The thermos flask was filled with milk. It was not a splendid banquet, yet he ate it with as great content as the bulldog at his feet gnawed his share of the crust. He broke his bread into the milk as he had not done since he was a child, and ate the luscious pulp with a keen relish bred of the long outdoor day. When the last drop was gone he brushed up the very crumbs from the cloth, laughing to himself as he did so. It had been a long time since he remembered being so hungry!

It was almost dark when the meal was done and, depleted hamper in hand, he reentered the empty echoing house. He went into the library, lighted the great brass lamp from the motor and began to rummage. The drawers of the dining-room sideboard yielded nothing; on a shelf of the butler’s pantry, however, was a tin box which proved to be half full of wax candles, perfectly preserved.

“The very thing!” he said triumphantly. Carrying them back, he fixed several in the glass-candlesticks and set them, lighted, all about the somber room till the soft glow flooded its every corner. “There,” he said, “that is as it should be. No big blatant search-light here! And no glare of modern electricity would suit that old wainscoting, either.” He looked up at the painting on the wall; it seemed as if the sneer had smoothed out, the hard cruel eye softened. “You needn’t be afraid,” he said, nodding. “I understand.”

He dragged the leather settee to the porch and by the light of the motor-lamp dusted it thoroughly, and wheeling it back, set it under the portrait. He washed the glass from which he had dined and filled it at the cup of the garden fountain, put into it the rose from his hat and set it on the reading-stand. The small china dog caught his eye and he picked it up casually. The head came off in his hands. It had been a bon-bon box and was empty save for a narrow strip of yellowed paper, on which were written some meaningless figures: 17-28-94-0. He pondered this a moment, then thrust it into one of the empty pigeonholes of the desk. On the latter stood an old-fashioned leaf-calendar; the date it exposed was May 14th. Curiously enough the same date would recur to-morrow. The page bore a quotation: “Every man carries his fate on a riband about his neck.” The line had been quoted in his father’s letter. May 14th!—how much that date and that motto may have meant for him!

He put the calendar back, filled his pipe and sat down facing the open bow-window. The dark was mysteriously lifting, the air filling with a soft silver-gray translucence that touched the wild growth as with a fairy gossamer. Presently, from between the still elms, the new sickle moon climbed into view. From the garden came a plaintive bird-cry, long-drawn and wavering and then, from farther away, the triple mellow whistle of a whippoorwill.

The place was alive now with bird-notes, and he listened with a new delight. He thought suddenly, with a kind of impatient wonder, that never in his life had he sat perfectly alone in a solitude and listened to the voices of the night. The only out-of-doors he knew had been comprised in motor-whirls on frequented highroads, seashore, or mountain months where bridge and dancing were forever on the cards, or else such up-to-date “camping” as was indulged in at the Fargos’ “shack” on the St. Lawrence. He sat now with his senses alert to a new world that his sophisticated eye and ear had never known. Something new was entering into him that seemed the spirit of the place; the blessing of the tall silver poplars outside, the musical scented gardens and the moonlight laid like a placid benediction over all.

He rose to push the shutter wider and in the movement his elbow sent a shallow case of morocco leather that had lain on the desk crashing to the floor. It opened and a heavy metallic object rolled almost to his feet. He saw at a glance that it was an old-fashioned rusted dueling-pistol.

The box had originally held two pistols. He shuddered as he stooped to pick up the weapon, and with the crawling repugnance mingled a panging anger and humiliation. From his very babyhood it had always been so—that unconquerable aversion to the touch of a firearm. There had been moments in his youth when this unreasoning shrinking had filled him with a blind fury, had driven him to strange self-tests of courage. He had never been able to overcome it. He had always had a natural distaste for the taking of life; hunting was an unthinkable sport to him, and he regarded the lusty pursuit of small feathered or furry things for pleasure with a mingled wonder and contempt. But analyzation had told him that his peculiar abhorrence was no mere outgrowth of this. It lay far deeper. He had rarely, of recent years, met the test. Now, as he stood in these unaccustomed surroundings, with the cold touch of the metal the old shuddering held him, and the sweat broke in beads on his forehead. Setting his teeth hard, he crossed the room, slipped the box with its pistol between the volumes of the bookcase, and returned to his seat.

The bulldog, aroused from a nap, thrust a warm muzzle between his knees. “It’s uncanny, Chum!” he said, as his hand caressed the velvety head. “Why should the touch of that fool thing chill my spine and make my flesh tiptoe over my bones? Is it a mere peculiarity of temperament? Some men hate cats’-eyes. Some can’t abide sitting on plush. I knew a chap once who couldn’t see milk poured from a pitcher without getting goose-flesh. People are born that way, but there must be a cause. Why should I hate a pistol? Do you suppose I was shot in one of my previous existences?”

For a long while he sat there, his pipe dead, his eyes on the moonlighted out-of-doors. The eery feeling that had gripped him had gone as quickly as it had come. At last he rose, stretching himself with a great boyish yawn, put out all save one of the candles and taking a bath-robe, sandals and a huge fuzzy towel from the steamer-trunk, stripped leisurely. He donned the bath-robe and sandals and went out through the window to the garden and down to where lay the little lake ruffling silverly under the moon. On its brink he stopped, and tossing back his head, tried to imitate one of the bird-calls but was unsuccessful. With a rueful laugh he threw off the bath-robe and stood an instant glistening, poised in the moonlight like a marble faun, before he dove, straight down out of sight.

Five minutes later he pulled himself up over the edge, his flesh tingling with the chill of the water, and drew the robe about his cool white shoulders. Then he thrust his feet into his sandals and sped quickly back. He rubbed himself to a glow, and blowing out the remaining candle, stretched himself luxuriously between the warm blankets on the couch. The dog sniffed inquiringly at his hand, then leaped up and snuggled down close to his feet.

The soft flooding moonlight sent its radiance into the gloomy room, touching lovingly its dark carven furniture and bringing into sharp relief the lithe contour of the figure under the fleecy coverlid, the crisp damp hair, the expressive face, and the wide-open dreamy eyes.

John Valiant’s thoughts had fled a thousand miles away, to the tall girl who all his life had seemed to stand out from his world, aloof and unsurpassed—Katharine Fargo. He tried to picture her, a perfect chatelaine, graceful and gracious as a tall, white, splendid lily, in this dead house that seemed still to throb with living passions. But the picture subtly eluded him and he stirred uneasily under the blanket.

After a time his hand stretched out to the reading-stand and drew the glass with its vivid blossom nearer, till, in his nostrils, its musky odor mingled with the dew-wet scent of the honeysuckle from the garden. At last his eyes closed. “Every man carries his fate ... on a riband about his neck,” he muttered drowsily, and then, “Roses ... red roses....”

And so he fell asleep.

CHAPTER XIII

THE HUNT

He awoke to a musical twittering and chirping, to find the sun pouring into the dusty room in a very glory. He rolled from the blanket and stood upright, filling his lungs with a long deep breath of satisfaction. He felt singularly light-hearted and alive. The bulldog came bounding through the window, dirty from the weeds, and flung himself upon his master in a canine rapture.

“Get out!” quoth the latter, laughing. “Stop licking my feet! How the dickens do you suppose I’m to get into my clothes with your ridiculous antics going on? Down, I say!”

He began to dress rapidly. “Listen to those birds, Chum!” he said. “There’s an ornithological political convention going on out there. Wish I knew what they were chinning about—they’re so mightily in earnest. See them splashing in that fountain? If you had any self-respect you’d be taking a bath yourself. You need it! Hark!” He broke off and listened. “Who’s that singing?”

The sound drew nearer—a lugubrious chant, with the weirdest minor reflections, faintly suggestive of the rag-time ditties of the music-halls, yet with a plaintive cadence:

“As he went mowin’ roun’ de fiel’
Er moc’sin bit him on de heel.
Right toodle-link-uh-day,
Right toodle-link-uh-day,
Right toodle-link-uh, toodle-link-uh,
Da-a-dee-e-eaye!
“Dey kyah’d him in ter his Sally deah.
She say, ‘Mah Lawd, yo’ looks so queah!’
Right toodle-link-uh-day,
Right toodle-link-uh-day,
Right toodle-link-uh, toodle-link-uh,
Da-a-dee-e-e-aye!”

A smile of genuine delight crossed the listener’s face. “That would make the everlasting fortune of a music-hall artist,” Valiant muttered, as, coatless, and with a towel over his arm, he stepped to the piazza.

“Dey laid him down—spang on de groun’.
He-e-e shet-up-his-eyes en looked all aroun’.
Right toodle-link-uh-day,
Right toodle-link-uh-day,
Right toodle-link-uh, toodle-link-uh,
Da-a-dee e-e-aye!
“So den he died, giv’ up de Ghos’.
To Abrum’s buzzum he did pos’—
Right toodle-link-uh-day,
Right toodle-link-uh-day—”

“Good morning, Uncle Jefferson.”

The singer broke off his refrain, set down the twig-broom that he had been wielding and came toward him. “Mawnin’, suh. Mawnin’,” he said. “Hopes yo’-all slep’ good. Ah reck’n dem ar birds woke yo’ up; dey’s makin’ seh er ’miration.”

“Thank you. Never slept better in my life. Am I laboring under a delusion when I imagine I smell coffee?”

Just then there came a voice from the open door of the kitchen: “Calls yo’se’f er man, yo’ triflin’ reconstructed niggah! W’en marstah gwineter git he brekfus’ wid’ yo’ ramshacklin’ eroun’ wid dat dawg all dis Gawd’s-blessid mawnin’? Go fotch some mo’ fiah-wood dis minute. Yo’ heah?”

A turbaned head poked itself through the door, with a good-natured leaf-brown face beneath it, which broadened into a wide smile as its owner bobbed energetically at Valiant’s greeting. “Fo’ de Lawd!” she exclaimed, wiping floury hands on a gingham apron. “Yo’ sho’ is up early, but Ah got yo’ brekfus’ mos’ ready, suh.”

“All right, Aunt Daphne. I’ll be back directly.”

He sped down to the lake to plunge his head into the cool water and thereby sharpen the edge of an appetite that needed no honing. From the little valley through which the stream meandered, rose a curdled mist, fraying now beneath the warming sun. The tall tangled grass through which he passed was beaded with dew like diamonds and hung with a thousand fairy jeweled webs. The wild honeysuckle was alive with quick whirrings of hummingbirds, and he hung his pocket-mirror from a twig and shaved with a woodsy chorus in his ears.

He came up the trail again to find the reading-stand transferred to the porch and laid with a white cloth on which was set a steaming coffee-pot, with fresh cream, saltless butter and crisp hot biscuit; and as he sat down, with a sigh of pure delight, in his dressing-gown—a crêpy Japanese thing redeemed from womanishness by the bold green bamboo of its design—Uncle Jefferson planted before him a generous platter of bacon, eggs and potatoes. These he attacked with a surprising keenness. As he buttered his fifth biscuit he looked at the dog, rolling on his back in morning ecstasy, with a look of humorous surprise.

“Chum,” he said, “what do you think of that? All my life a single roll and a cup of coffee have been the most I could ever negotiate for breakfast, and then it was apt to taste like chips and whetstones. And now look at this plate!” The dog ceased winnowing his ear with a hind foot and looked back at his master with much the same expression. Clearly his own needs had not been forgotten.

“Reck’n Ah bettah go ter git dat ar machine thing,” said Uncle Jefferson behind him. “Ol’ ’ooman, heah, she ’low ter fix up de kitchen dis mawnin’ en we begin on de house dis evenin’.”

“Right-o,” said Valiant. “It’s all up-hill, so the motor won’t run away with you. Aunt Daphne, can you get some help with the cleaning?”

“He’p?” that worthy responded with fine scorn. “No, suh. Moughty few, in de town ’cep’n low-down yaller new-issue trash det ain’ wu’f killin’! Ah gwineter go fo’ dat house mahse’f ’fo’ long, hammah en tongs, en git it fix’ up!”

“Splendid! My destiny is in your hands. You might take the dog with you, Uncle Jefferson; the run will do him good.”

When the latter had disappeared and truculent sounds from the kitchen indicated that the era of strenuous cleaning had begun, he reentered the library, changed the water in the rose-glass and set it on the edge of the shady front porch, where its flaunting blossom made a dash of bright crimson against the grayed weather-beaten brick. This done, he opened the one large room on the ground-floor that he had not visited.

It was double the size of the library, a parlor hung in striped yellow silk vaguely and tenderly faded, with a tall plate mirror set over a marble-topped console at either side. In one corner stood a grand piano of Circassian walnut with keys of tinted mother-of-pearl and a slender music-rack inlaid with morning-glories in the same material. From the center of the ceiling, above an oval table, depended a great chandelier hung with glass prisms. He drew his handkerchief across the table; beneath the disfiguring dust it showed a highly polished surface inlaid with different colored woods, in an intricate Italian-like landscape. The legs of the consoles were bowed, delicately carved, and of gold-leaf. The chairs and sofas were covered with dusty slip-covers of muslin. He lifted one of these. The tarnished gold furniture was Louis XV, the upholstery of yellow brocade with a pattern of pink roses. Two Japanese hawthorn vases sat on teak-wood stands and a corner held a glass cabinet containing a collection of small ivories and faience.

His appreciative eye kindled. “What a room!” he muttered. “Not a jarring note anywhere! That’s an old Crowe and Christopher piano. I’ll get plenty of music out of that! You don’t see such chandeliers outside of palaces any more except in the old French châteaus. It holds a hundred candles if it holds one! I never knew before all there was in that phrase ‘the candle-lighted fifties.’ I can imagine what it looked like, with the men in white stocks and flowered waistcoats and the women in their crinolines and red-heeled slippers, bowing to the minuet under that candle-light! I’ll bet the girls bred in this neighborhood won’t take much to the turkey-trot and the bunny-hug!”

He went thoughtfully back to the great hall, where sat the big chest on which lay the volume of Lucile. He pushed down the antique wrought-iron hasp and threw up the lid. It was filled to the brim with textures: heavy portières of rose-damask, table-covers of faded soft-toned tapestry, window-hangings of dull green—all with tobacco-leaves laid between the folds and sifted thickly over with the sparkling white powder. At the bottom, rolled in tarry-smelling paper, he found a half-dozen thin, Persian prayer-rugs.

“Phew!” he whistled. “I certainly ought to be grateful to that law firm that ‘inspected’ the place. Think of the things lying here all these years! And that powder everywhere! It’s done the work, too, for there’s not a sign of moth. If I’m not careful, I’ll stumble over the family plate—it seems to be about the only thing wanting.”

The mantelpiece, beneath the shrouded elk’s head, was of gray marble in which a crest was deeply carved. He went close and examined it. “A sable greyhound, rampant, on a field argent,” he said. “That’s my own crest, I suppose.” There touched him again the same eery sensation of acquaintance that had possessed him with his first sight of the house-front. “Somehow it’s familiar,” he muttered; “where have I seen it before?”

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.

CHAPTER XIV

SANCTUARY

The tawny scudding streak that led that long chase had shot into the yard, turning for a last desperate double. It saw the man in the foreground and its bounding, agonized little wild heart that so prayed for life, gave way. With a final effort, it gained the porch and crouched down in its corner, an abject, sweated, hunted morsel, at hopeless bay.

Like a flash, Valiant stooped, caught the shivering thing by the scruff, and as its snapping jaws grazed his thumb, dropped it through the open window behind him. “Sanctuary!” quoth he, and banged the shutter to.

At the same instant, as the place overflowed with a pandemonium of nosing leaping hounds, he saw the golden-chestnut reined sharply down among the ragged box-rows, with a shamefaced though brazen knowledge that the girl who rode it had seen.

She sat moveless, her head held high, one hand on the hunter’s foam-flecked neck, and their glances met like crossed swords. The look stirred something vague and deep within him. For an unforgettable instant their eyes held each other, in a gaze rigid, challenging, almost defiant; then it broke and she turned to the rest of the party spurring in a galloping zigzag: a genial-faced man of middle age in khaki who sat his horse like a cavalryman, a younger one with a reckless dark face and straight black hair, and following these a half-dozen youthful riders of both sexes, one of the lads heavily plastered with mud from a wet cropper, and the girls chiefly gasps and giggles.

The elder of the two men pulled up beside the leader, his astonished eyes sweeping the house-front, with its open blinds, the wisp of smoke curling from the kitchen chimney. He said something to her, and she nodded. The younger man, meanwhile, had flung himself from his horse, a wild-eyed roan, and with his arm thrust through its bridle, strode forward among the welter of hounds, where they scurried at fault, hither and thither, yelping and eager.

“What rotten luck!” he exclaimed. “Gone to ground after twelve miles! After him, Tawny! You mongrels! Do you imagine he’s up a tree? After him, Bulger! Bring him here!”

He glanced up, and for the first time saw the figure in tweeds looking on. Valiant was attracted by his face, its dash and generosity overlying its inherent profligacy and weakness. Dark as the girl was light, his features had the same delicate chiseling, the inbreeding, nobility and indulgence of generations. He stared a moment, and the somewhat supercilious look traveled over the gazer, from dusty boots to waving brown hair.

“Oh!” he said. His view slowly took in the evidences of occupation. “The house is open, I see. Going to get it fit for occupancy, I presume?”

“Yes.”

The other turned. “Well, Judge Chalmers, what do you think of that? The unexpected has happened at last.” He looked again at the porch. “Who’s to occupy it?”

“The owner.”

“Wonders will never cease!” said the young man easily, shrugging. “Well, our quarry is here somewhere. From the way the dogs act I should say he’s bolted into the house. With your permission I’ll take one of them in and see.” He stooped and snapped a leash on a dog-collar.

“I’m really very sorry,” said Valiant, “but I’m living in it at present.”

The edge of a smile lifted the carefully trained mustache over the other’s white teeth. It had the perfectly courteous air of saying, “Of course, if you say so. But—”

Valiant turned, with a gesture that included all. “If you care to dismount and rest,” he said, “I shall be honored, though I’m afraid I can’t offer you such hospitality as I should wish.”

The judge raised his broad soft hat. “Thank you, sir,” he said, with a soft accent that delightfully disdained the letter “r.” “But we mustn’t intrude any further. As you know, of course, the place has been uninhabited for any number of years, and we had no idea it was to acquire a tenant. You will overlook our riding through, I hope. I’m afraid the neighborhood has got used to considering this a sort of no-man’s land. It’s a pleasure to know that the Court is to be reclaimed, sir. Come along, Chilly,” he added. “Our fox has a burrow under the house, I reckon—hang the cunning little devil!”

He whistled sharply to the dogs, who came leaping about his horse’s legs for their meed of praise—and clubbing. “Down, Fan! Down Trojan! Come on, you young folks, to breakfast. We’ve had a prime run of it, anyhow, and we’ll put him up another day.”

He waved his hat at the porch and turned his horse down the path, side by side with the golden-chestnut. After them trooped the others, horses walking wearily, riders talking in low voices, the girls turning often to send swift bird-like glances behind them to where the straight masculine figure still stood with the yellow sunshine on his face. They did not leap the wall this time, but filed decorously through the swinging gate to the Red Road. Then, as they passed from view behind the hedges, John Valiant heard the younger voices break out together like the sound of a bomb thrown into a poultry-yard.

After a time he saw the straggling bunch of riders emerge at a slow canter on the far-away field. He saw the roan spurred beside the golden chestnut and both dashed away, neck and neck in a race, the light patrician form of the man leaning far forward and the girl swaying to the pace as if she and her hunter were one.

John Valiant stood watching till the last rider was out of sight. There was a warm flush of color in his face.

At length he turned with the ghost of a sigh, opened the hall door wide and stalking a hundred yards away, sat down on the shady grass and began to whistle, with his eyes on the door.

Presently he was rewarded. On a sudden, around the edge of the sill peered a sharp, suspicious little muzzle. Then, like a flash of tawny light, the fox broke sanctuary and shot for the thicket.

CHAPTER XV

MRS. POLY GIFFORD PAYS A CALL

The brown ivied house in the village was big and square and faced the sleepy street. Its front was gay with pink oleanders in green tubs and the yard spotted with annual encampments of geraniums and marigolds. A one-storied wing contained a small door with a doctor’s brass plate on the clapboarding beside it. Doctor Southall was one of Mrs. Merryweather Mason’s paying guests—for she would have deemed the word boarder a gratuitous insult, no less to them than to her. Another was the major, who for a decade had occupied the big old-fashioned corner-room on the second floor, companioned by a monstrous gray cat and waited on by an ancient negro named Jereboam, who had been a slave of his father’s.

The doctor was a sallow taciturn man with a saturnine face, eyebrows like frosted thistles, a mouth as if made with one quick knife-slash and a head nearly bald, set on a neck that would not have disqualified a yearling ox. His broad shoulders were slightly stooped, and his mouth wore habitually an expression half resentful, half sardonic, conveying a cynical opinion of the motives of the race in general and of the special depravity of that particular countryside. Altogether he exhaled an air in contrast to which the major’s old-school blend of charm and courtesy seemed an almost ribald frivolity.

On this particular morning neither the major nor the doctor was in evidence, the former having gone out early, and the latter being at the moment in his office, as the brassy buzz of a telephone from time to time announced. Two of the green wicker rocking-chairs on the porch, however, were in agitant commotion. Mrs. Mason was receiving a caller in the person of Mrs. Napoleon Gifford.

The latter had a middle-aged affection for baby-blue and a devouring penchant for the ages and antecedents of others, at times irksome to those to whom her “Let me see. You went to school with my first husband’s sister, didn’t you?” or “Your daughter Jane must have been married the year the old Israel Stamper place was burned,” were unwelcome reminders of the pace of time. To-day, of course, the topic was the new arrival at Damory Court.

“After all these years!” the visitor was saying in her customary italics. (The broad “a” which lent a dulcet softness to the speech of her hostess was scorned by Mrs. Poly, her own “a’s” being as narrow as the needle through which the rich man reaches heaven.) “We came here from Richmond when I was a bride—that’s twenty-one years ago—and Damory Court was forsaken then. And think what a condition the house must be in now! Cared for by an agent who comes every other season from New York. Trust a man to do work like that!”

“I’m glad a Valiant is to occupy it,” remarked Mrs. Mason in her sweet flute-like voice. “It would be sad to see any one else there. For after all, the Valiants were gentlemen.”

Mrs. Gifford sniffed. “Would you have called Devil-John Valiant a gentleman? Why, he earned the name by the dreadful things he did. My grandfather used to say that when his wife lay sick—he hated her, you know—he would gallop his horse with all his hounds full-cry after him under her windows. Then that ghastly story of the slave he pressed to death in the hogshead of tobacco.”

“I know,” acquiesced Mrs. Mason. “He was a cruel man, and wicked, too. Yet of course he was a gentleman. In the South the test of a gentleman has never been what he does, but who he is. Devil-John was splendid, for all his wickedness. He was the best swordsman in all Virginia. It used to be said there was a portrait of him at Damory Court, and that during the war, in the engagement on the hillside, a bullet took out one of its eyes. But his grandson, Beauty Valiant, who lived at Damory Court thirty years ago, wasn’t his type at all. He was only twenty-five when the duel occurred.”

“He must have been brilliant,” said the visitor, “to have founded that great Corporation. It’s a pity the son didn’t take after him. Have you seen the papers lately? It seems that though he was to blame for the wrecking of the concern they can’t do anything to him. Some technicality in the law, I suppose. But if a man is only rich enough they can’t convict him of anything. Why he should suddenly make up his mind to come down here I can’t see. With that old affair of his father’s behind him, I should think he’d prefer Patagonia.”

“I take it, then, madam,” Doctor Southall’s forbidding voice rose from the doorway, “that you are familiar with the circumstances of that old affair, as you term it?”

The lady bridled. Her passages at arms with the doctor did not invariably tend to sweeten her disposition. “I’m sure I only know what people say,” she said.

“‘People?’” snorted the doctor irascibly. “Just another name for a community that’s a perfect sink of meanness and malice. If one believed all he heard here he’d quit speaking to his own grandmother.”

“You will admit, I suppose,” said Mrs. Gifford with some spirit, “that the name Valiant isn’t what it used to be in this neighborhood?”

“I will, madam,” responded the doctor. “When Valiant left this place (a mark of good taste, I’ve always considered it) he left it the worse, if possible, for his departure. Your remark, however, would seem to imply demerit on his part. Was he the only man who ever happened to be at the lucky end of a dueling-ground?”

“Then it isn’t true that Valiant was a dead shot and Sassoon intoxicated?”

“Madam,” said the doctor, “I have no wish to discuss the details of that unhappy incident with you or anybody else. I was one of those present, but the circumstances you mention have never been descanted upon by me. I merely wish to point out that the people whom you have been quoting, are not only a set of ignoramuses with cotton-back souls, but as full of uncharitableness as an egg is of meat.”

“I see by the papers,” said Mrs. Gifford, with an air of resignedly changing the subject, “they’ve been investigating the failure of the Valiant Corporation. The son seems to be getting the sharp end of the stick. Perhaps he’s coming down here because they’ve made it so hot for him in New York. Well, I’m afraid he’ll find this county disappointing.”

“He will that!” agreed the doctor savagely. “No doubt he imagines he’s coming to a kindly countryside of gentle-born people with souls and imaginations; he’ll find he’s lit in a section that’s entirely too ready to hack at his father’s name and prepared in advance to call him Northern scum and turn up its nose at his accent—a community so full of dyed-in-the-wool snobbery that it would make Boston look like a poor-white barbecue. I’m sorry for him!”

Mrs. Gifford, having learned wisdom from experience, resisted the temptation to reply. She merely rocked a trifle faster and turned a smile which she strove to make amusedly deprecative upon her hostess. Just then from the rear of the house came a strident voice:

“Yo’, Raph’el! Take yo’ han’s outer dem cherries! Don’ yo’ know ef yo’ swallahs dem ar pits, yo’ gwineter hab ’pendegeetus en lump up en die?”

The sound of a slap and a shrill yelp followed, and around the porch dashed an infantile darky, as nude as a black Puck, with his hands full of cherries, who came to a sudden demoralized stop in the embarrassing foreground.

“Raph!” thundered the doctor. “Didn’t I tell you to go back to that kitchen?”

“Yas, suh,” responded the imp. “But yo’ didn’ tell me ter stay dar!”

“If I see you out here again,” roared the doctor, “I’ll tie your ears back—and grease you—and SWALLOW you!” At which grisly threat, the apparition, with a shrill shriek, turned and ran desperately for the corner of the house.

“I hear,” said the doctor, resuming, “that the young man who came to fix the place up has hired Uncle Jefferson and his wife to help him. Who’s responsible for that interesting information?”

“Rickey Snyder,” said Mrs. Mason. “She’s got a spy-glass rigged up in a sugar-tree at Miss Mattie Sue’s and she saw them pottering around there this morning.”

“Little limb!” exclaimed Mrs. Gifford, with emphasis. “She’s as cheeky as a town-hog. I can’t imagine what Shirley Dandridge was thinking of when she brought that low-born child out of her sphere.”

Something like a growl came from the doctor as he struck open the screen-door. “‘Limb!’ I’ll bet ten dollars she’s an angel in a cedar-tree at a church fair compared with some better-born young ones I know of who are only fit to live when they’ve got the scarlet-fever and who ought to be in the reformatory long ago. And as for Shirley Dandridge, it’s my opinion she and her mother and a few others like her have got about the only drops of the milk of human kindness in this whole abandoned community!”

“Dreadful man!” said Mrs. Gifford, sotto voce, as the door banged viciously. “To think of his being born a Southall! Sometimes I can’t believe it!”

Mrs. Mason shook her head and smiled. “Ah, but that isn’t the real Doctor Southall,” she said. “That’s only his shell.”

“I’ve heard that he has another side,” responded the other with guarded grimness, “but if he has, I wish he’d manage to show it sometimes.”

Mrs. Mason took off her glasses and wiped them carefully. “I saw it when my husband died,” she said softly. “That was before you came. They were old friends, you know. He was sick almost a year, and the doctor used to carry him out here on the porch every day in his arms, like a child. And then, when the typhus came that summer among the negroes, he quarantined himself with them—the only white man there—and treated and nursed them and buried the dead with his own hands, till it was stamped out. That’s the real Doctor Southall.”

The rockers vibrated in silence for a moment. Then Mrs. Gifford said: “I never knew before that he had anything to do with that duel. Was he one of Valiant’s seconds?”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Mason; “and the major was the other. I was a little girl when it happened. I can barely remember it, but it made a big sensation.”

“And over a love-affair!” exclaimed Mrs. Gifford in the tone of one to whom romance was daily bread.

“I suppose it was.”

“Why, my dear! Of course it was. That’s always been the story. What on earth have men to fight duels about except us women? They only pretend it’s cards or horses. Trust me, there’s always a pair of silk stockings at the bottom of it! Girls are so thoughtless—though you and I were just as bad, I suppose, if we only remembered!—and they don’t realize that it’s sometimes a serious thing to trifle with a man. That is, of course, if he’s of a certain type. I think our Virginian girls flirt outrageously. They quit only at the church door (though I will say they generally stop then) and they take a man’s ring without any idea whatever of the sacredness of an engagement. You remember Ilsa Eustis who married the man from Petersburg? She was engaged to two men at once, and used to wear whichever ring belonged to the one who was coming to see her. One day they came together. She was in the yard when they stopped at the horse-block. Well, she tied her handkerchief round her hand and said she’d burned herself pulling candy. (No, neither one of them was the man from Petersburg.) When she was married, one of them wrote her and asked for his ring. It had seven diamonds set in the shape of a cross. I’m telling you this in confidence, just as it was told to me. She didn’t write a reply—she only sent him a telegram: ‘Simply to thy cross I cling.’ She wears the stones yet in a bracelet.”

For a time the conversation languished. Then Mrs. Gifford asked suddenly: ”Who do you suppose she could have been?—the girl behind that old Valiant affair.”

Mrs. Mason shook her head. “No one knows for certain—unless, of course, the major or the doctor, and I wouldn’t question either of them for worlds. You see, people had stopped gossiping about it before I was out of school.”

“But surely your husband—”

“The only quarrel we had while we were engaged was over that. I tried to make him tell me. I imagined from something he said then that the young men who did know had pledged one another not to speak of it.”

“I wonder why?” said the other thoughtfully.

“Oh, undoubtedly out of regard for the girl. I’ve always thought it so decent of them! If there was a girl in the case, her position must have been unpleasant enough, if she was not actually heart-broken. Imagine the poor thing, knowing that wherever she went, people would be saying: ‘She’s the one they fought the duel over! Look at her!’ If she grieved, they’d say she’d been crazy in love with Sassoon, and point out the dark circles under her eyes, and wonder if she’d ever get over it. If she didn’t mope, they’d say she was in love with Valiant and was glad it was Sassoon who was shot. If she shut herself up, they’d say she had no pride; if she didn’t, they’d say she had no heart. It was far better to cover the story up and let it die.”

But the subject was too fascinating for her morning visitor to abandon. “She probably loved one of them,” she said. “I wonder which it was. I’ll ask the major when I see him. I’m not afraid. He can’t eat me! Wouldn’t it be curious,” she continued, “if it should be somebody who lives here now—whom we’ve always known! I can’t think who it could have been, though. There’s Jenny Quarles—she’s eight years older than we are, if she’s a day—she was a nice little thing, but you couldn’t dream of anybody ever fighting a duel over her. There’s Polly Pendleton, and Berenice Garland—they must have been about the right age, and they never married—but no, it couldn’t have been either of them. The only other spinster I can think of is Miss Mattie Sue, and she was as poor as Job’s turkey and teaching school. Besides, she must have been years and years too old. Hush! There’s Major Bristow at the gate now. And the doctor’s just coming out again.”

The major wore a suit of white linen, with a broad-brimmed straw hat, and a pink was in his button-hole, but to the observing, his step might have seemed to lack an accustomed jauntiness. As he came up the path the doctor opened his office door. Standing on the threshold, his legs wide apart and his hands under his coat-tails, he nodded grimly across the marigolds. “How do you feel this morning, Major.”

“Feel?” rumbled the major; “the way any gentleman ought to feel this time of the morning, sah. Like hell, sah.”

The doctor bent his gaze on the hilarious blossom in the other’s lapel. “If I were you, Bristow,” he said scathingly, “I reckon I’d quit galivanting around to bridge-fights with perfumery on my handkerchief every evening. It’s a devil of an example to the young.”

The rocking-chairs behind the screening vines became motionless, and the ladies exchanged surreptitious smiles. If the two gentlemen were aware of each other’s sterling qualities, their mutual appreciation was in inverse ratio to its expression, and, as the Elucinian mysteries, cloaked before the world. In public the doctor was wont to remark that the major talked like a Cæsar, looked like a piano-tuner and was the only man he had ever seen who could strut sitting down. Never were his gibes so barbed as when launched against the major’s white-waistcoated and patrician calm, and conversely, never did the major’s bland suavity so nearly approach an undignified irritation as when receiving the envenomed darts of that accomplished cynic.

The major settled his black tie. “A little wholesome exercise wouldn’t be a bad thing for you, Doctor,” he said succinctly. “You’re looking a shade pasty to-day.”

“Exercise!” snapped the other viciously, as he pounded down the steps. “Ha, ha! I suppose you exercise—lazying out to the Dandridges once a week for a julep, and the rest of the time wearing out good cane-bottoms and palm-leaf fans and cussing at the heat. You’ll go off with apoplexy one of these days.”

“I shall if they’re scared enough to call you,” the major shot after him, nettled. But the doctor did not pause. He went on down the street without turning his head.

The major lifted his hat gallantly to the ladies, whose presence he had just observed. “I reckon,” he said, as he found the string of his glasses and adjusted them to gaze after the retreating form; “I reckon if I did have apoplexy, I’d want Southall to handle the case, but the temptation to get one in on him is sometimes a little too much for me.”

“Do sit down, Major,” said Mrs. Gifford. “There’s a question I’m just dying to ask you. We’ve had such an interesting conversation. You’ve heard the news, of course, that young Mr. Valiant is coming to Damory Court?”

The major sat down heavily. In the bright light his face seemed suddenly pale and old.

“No?” the lady’s tone was arch. “Have all the rest of us really got ahead of you for once? Yes, it’s true. There’s some one there getting it to rights. Now here’s the question. There was a woman, of course, at the bottom of the Valiant duel. I’d never dream of asking you who she was. But which was it she loved, Valiant or Sassoon?”

CHAPTER XVI

THE ECHO

When the major entered his room, Jereboam, his ancient body-servant, was dawdling about putting things to rights, his seamed visage under his white wool suggesting a charred stump beneath a crisp powdering of snow. “Jedge Chalmahs done tellyfoam ter ax yo’ ovah ter Gladden Hall ter suppah ter-night, suh,” he said. “De jedge ’low he gwine git eben wid yo’ fo’ dat las’ game ob pokah when yo’ done lam him.”

“Tell him not to-night, Jerry,” said the other wearily. “Some other time.”

The old darky ruminated as he plodded down to the doctor’s telephone. “Whut de mattah now? He got dat ar way-off-yondah look ergen.” He shook his head forebodingly. “Ah heahed he hummin’ dat tune when he dress hisse’f dis mawnin’. Sing befo’ yo’ eat, cry befo’ yo’ sleep!”

The major had, indeed, a far-away look as he sat there, a heavy lonely figure, that bright morning. It had slipped to his face with the news of the arrival at Damory Court. He told himself that he felt queer. A mocking-bird was singing in a tulip-tree outside, and the gray cat sat on the window-sill, watching the foliage with blinking lust. There was no breeze and the leaves of the Virginia creeper that curled about the sash were trembling with the sensuous delight of the sunshine. Suddenly he seemed to hear elfin voices close to his ear:

“Which was it she loved? Valiant or Sassoon?”

It was so distinct that he started, vexed and disturbed. Really, it was absurd. He would be seeing things next! “Southall may be right about that exercise,” he muttered; “I’ll walk more.” He began the projected reform without delay, striding up and down the room. But the little voices presently sounded again, shouting like gnomes inside a hill:

“Which was it? Valiant or Sassoon?”

“I wish to God I knew!” said the major roughly, standing still. It silenced them, but the sound of his own voice, as though it had been a pre-concerted signal, drew together a hundred inchoate images of other days. There was the well-ordered garden of Damory Court—it rose up, gloomy with night shadows, across his great clothes-press against the wall—with himself sitting on a rustic bench smoking and behind him the candle-lighted library window with Beauty Valiant pacing up and down, waiting for daylight. There was a sun-lighted stretch between two hemlocks, with Southall and he measuring the ground—the grass all dewy sparkles and an early robin teetering on a thorn-bush. Eight—nine—ten—he caught himself counting the paces.

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!”

At length he rose and went back to the house. With a bunch of keys he had found he went to the stables, after some difficulty gained access, and propped the crazy doors and windows open to the sun. The building was airy and well-lighted and contained a dozen roomy box-stalls, a spacious loft and a carriage-house. The straw bedding had been unremoved, mice-gnawed sacking and rotted hay lay in the mangers, and the warped harness, hanging on its pegs, was a smelly mass of mildew and decay. In the carriage-house were three vehicles—a coach with rat-riddled upholstery and old-fashioned hoop-iron springs eaten through with rust, a rockaway and a surrey. The latter had collapsed where it stood. He found a stick, mowed away the festooning cobwebs, and moved the débris piece-meal.

“There!” he said with satisfaction. “There’s a place for the motor—if Uncle Jefferson ever gets it here.”

It was noon when he returned, after a wash-up in the lake, to the meal with which Aunt Daphne, in a costume dimly suggestive of a bran-meal poultice with a gingham apron on, regaled him. Fried chicken, corn-bread so soft and fluffy that it had to be lifted from the pan with a spoon, browned potatoes, and to his surprise, fresh milk. “Ah done druv ouah ol’ cow ovah, suh,” explained Aunt Daphne. “’Case she gotter be milked, er she run dry ez de Red Sea fo’ de chillen ob Izril.”

“Aunt Daphne,” inquired Valiant with his mouth full, “what do you call this green thing?”

“Dat? Dat’s jes’ turnip-tops, suh, wid er hunk er bacon in de pot. Laws-er-me, et cert’n’y do me good ter see yo’ git arter it dat way, suh. Reck’n yo’ got er appertite! Hyuh, Hyuh!”

“I have. I never guessed it before, and it’s a magnificent discovery. However, it suggests unwelcome reflections. Aunt Daphne, how long do you estimate a man can dine like this on—well, say on a hundred dollars?”

“Er hun’ed dollahs, suh? Dat’s er right smart heap o’ money, ’deed et is! Well, suh, ’pen’s on whut yo’ raises. Ef yo’ raises yo’ own gyarden-sass, en chick’ns en aigs, Ah reck’n yo’ kin live longah dan dat ar Methoosalum, en still haf mos’ of it in de ol’ stockin’.”

“Ah! I can grow all those things myself, you think?”

“Yo’ cert’n’y kin,” said Aunt Daphne. “Ev’ybody do. De chick’ns done peck fo’ deyselves en de yuddah things—yo’ o’ny gotter ’courage ’em en dey jes’ grows.”

Valiant ate his dessert with a thoughtful smile wrinkling his brow. As he pushed back his chair he smote his hands together and laughed aloud. “Back to the soil!” he said. “John Valiant, farmer! The miracle of it is that it sounds good to me. I want to raise my own grub and till my own soil. I want to be my own man! And I’m beginning to see my way. Crops will have to wait for another season, but there’s water and pasture for cattle now. There’s timber—lots of it—on that hillside, too. I must look into that.”

He filled his pipe and climbed the staircase to the upper floor. Here the lower hall was duplicated. He proceeded slowly and carefully with the dusty task of window-opening. There were many bedrooms with great four-posted, canopied beds and old-fashioned carved furniture of mahogany and curly-maple, and in one he found a great cedar-lined chest filled with bed-linen and napery. In these rooms were more evidences of decay. They showed in faded hues, streaked and discolored finishings, yellow mildew beneath the glass of framed engravings and unsightly stains on walls and floors from leaks in the roof. On a dainty dressing-table had been left a pin-cushion; its stuffing was strewn in a tiny trickling trail to a mouse-hole in the base-board. The bedroom he mentally chose for his own was the plainest of all, and was above the library, fronting the vagabond garden. It had a great black desk with many glass-knobbed drawers and a book-rack. The volumes this contained were mostly of the historical sort: a history of the Middle Plantation, Meade’s Old Churches, and at the end a parchment-bound tome inscribed The Valiants of Virginia.

He lingered longest in a room over whose door was painted The Hilarium. It had evidently been a nursery and schoolroom. Here on the walls were many shelves wound over with networks of cobwebs, and piled with the oddest assemblage of toys: wooden and splintered soldiers that had once been bravely painted, dolls in various states of worn-outness—one rag doll in a calico dress with shoe-button eyes and a string of bright glass beads round her neck—a wooden box of marbles, a tattered boxing-glove. There were school-books, too, thumbed and dog-eared, from First Reader to Cæsar’s Gallic Wars, with names of small Valiants scrawled on their fly-leaves. He carefully relocked the door of this room; he wanted to dust those toys and books with his own hands.

In the upper hall again he leaned from the window, sniffing the far-flung scent of orchards and peach-blown fence-rows. The soft whirring sound of a bird’s wing went past, almost brushing his startled face, and the old oaks seemed to stretch their bent limbs with a faithful brute-like yawn of pleasure. In the room below he could hear the vigorous sound of Aunt Daphne’s hard-driven broom and the sound flooded the echoing space with a comfortable commotion.

The present task was one after Aunt Daphne’s own heart. A small mountain of dust was growing on the terrace, and as beneath brush and rag the colors of wall and parquetry stood forth, her face became one shiny expanse of ebony satisfaction. When the bulldog, returning from his jaunt, out-stripping Uncle Jefferson, bounced in to prance against her she smote him lustily with her scrubbing-brush.

“Git outer heah, yo’ good-fo’-nuffin’ w’ite rapscallyun! Gwine trapse yo’ muddy feet all ovah dis yeah floor, whut Ah jes’ scrubbed tell yo’ marstah kin eat off’n et?” She broke off to listen to Uncle Jefferson’s voice outside, directed toward the upper window.

“Dat yo’, suh? Yas, suh, dis me. Well, suh, Ah take ol’ Sukey out de Red Road, en Ah hitch huh ter yo’ machine-thing, en she done balk. Won’t go nohow ... whut, suh? ‘Beat huh ovah de haid?’ Yas, suh, done hit huh in de haid six times wid de whip-han’l, en she look me in de eye en ain’ said er word.... ‘Twis’ huh tail?’ Me, suh? No-suh-ree, suh. Mars’ Quarles’ boy one time he twis’ huh tail en dey sen’ him ter de horspit’l. ‘Daid,’ suh? No, suh, ain’ daid, but et mos’ bust him wide open.... ‘Set fiah undah huh?’ Yas, suh, done set fiah undah huh. Mos’ burn up de harness, en ain’ done no good.... Well, suh, Ah jes’ gwineter say no use waitin’ fo’ Sukey ter change huh min’, so Ah put some fence-rails undah huh en jock huh up en come home. En Ah’s gwine out arter suppah en Sukey be all right den, suh, Ah reck’n. Yas, suh.”

Aunt Daphne plunged out with fire in her eye, but the laugh that came from above was reassuring. “Never mind, Uncle Jefferson, Miss Sukey’s whims shall be regarded.”

Chum, bouncing up the stairs like an animated bundle of springs, met his master coming down. “Old man,” said the latter, “I don’t mind telling you that I’m beginning to be taken with this place. But it’s in a bad way, and it’s going to be put in shape. It’s a large order, and we’ll have to work like horses. Don’t you bother Aunt Daph! You just come with your Uncle Dudley. He’s going to take a look over the grounds.”

He went to his trunk and fished out a soft shirt on which he knotted a loose tie, exchanged his Panama for a slouch hat, and whistling the barcarole from Tales of Hoffmann, went gaily out. “I feel tremendously alive to-day,” he confided to the dog, as he tramped through the lush grass. “If you see me ladle the muck out of that fountain with my own fair hands, don’t have a fit. I’m liable to do anything.”

His eye swept up and down the slope. “There probably isn’t a finer site for a house in the whole South,” he told himself. “The living-rooms front south and west. We’ll get scrumptious sunsets from that back porch. And on the other side there’s the view clear to the Blue Ridge. And as for this garden, no landscape artist need apply. The outlines are all here; it needs only to be put back. We’ll first rake out the rubbish, chop down that underbrush and trim the box. The shrubs only want pruning. Then we’ll mend the pool and set the fountain going and put in some goldfish. Flower-seeds and bulbs are cheap enough, I fancy. Just think of a bed of black and gold pansies running down to the lake! And on the other side a wilderness garden. I’ve seen pictures of them in the illustrated weeklies. Those rotten posts, under that snarl of vines, were a pergola. Any old carpenter can rebuild that—I can draw the plans myself.”

He skirted the lake. “Only to grub out some of the lilies—there’s too many of them—and straighten the rim—and weed the pebble margin to give those green rocks a show. I’ll build a little wharf below them to dive from, and—yes, I’ll stock it with spotted trout. Not just to yank out with a barbed hook, but to make it inhabited. How well a couple of white swans would look preening in the shade out there! The roof’s gone from that oval summer-house, but it’s no trick to put another on.”

He penetrated farther into the tangle and came out into a partially cleared space shaded with great trees, where the grass was matted with clover into a thick rug, sprinkled with designs worked in bluebells and field-daisies, with here and there a flaunting poppy, like a scarlet medallion. He was but a few hundred yards from the house, yet the silence was so deep that there might have been no habitation within fifty miles. All at once he stopped short; there was a sudden movement in the thicket beyond—the sound of light fast footfalls, as of some one running away.

He made a lunge for the dog, but with a growl Chum tore himself from the restraining grasp and dashed into the bushes. “A child, no doubt,” he thought as he plunged in pursuit, “and that lubberly brute will scare it half to death!”

He pulled up with an exclamation. In a narrow wood-path a little way from him, partly hidden by a windfall, stood a girl, her skirt transfixed with a wickedly jagged sapling. He saw instantly how it had happened; the windfall had blocked the way, and she had sprung clean over it, not noting the screened spear, which now held her as effectually as any railroad spike. She was struggling with silent helpless fury to release herself, wrenching viciously at the offending stuff, which seemed ridiculously stout, and disregarding utterly the bulldog, frisking madly about her feet with sharp joyous barks.

In another moment Valiant had reached her and met her face, flushed, half defiant, her eyes a blue gleam of smoldering anger as she desperately, almost savagely, thrust wild tendrils of flame-colored hair beneath the broad curved brim of her straw hat. At her feet lay a great armful of cape jessamines.

A little thrill, light and warm and joyous, ran through him. Until that instant he had not recognized her.

CHAPTER XVIII

JOHN VALIANT MAKES A DISCOVERY

“

I’m so sorry,” was what he said, as he kneeled to release her, and she was grateful that his tone was unmixed with amusement. She bit her lips, as by sheer strength of elbow and knee he snapped the offending bole short off—one of those quick exhibitions of reserved strength that every woman likes. Meanwhile he was uttering banal fragments of sentences: “I hope you’re not hurt. It was that unmannerly dog, I suppose. What a sword-edge that sliver has! A bad tear, I’m afraid. There!—now it’s all right.”

“I don’t know how I could have been so silly—thank you so much,” said Shirley, panting slightly from her exertions. “I’m not the least bit hurt—only my dress—and you know very well that I wasn’t afraid of that ridiculous dog.” A richer glow stole to her cheeks as she spoke, a burning recollection of a rose, which from her horse that morning at Damory Court, she had glimpsed in its glass on the porch.

Both laughed a little. He imagined that he could smell that wonderful hair, a subtle fragrance like that of sun-dried seaweed or the elusive scent that clings to a tuft of long-plucked Spanish moss. “Chum stands absolved, then,” he said, bending to sweep together the scattered jessamine. “Do you—do you run like that when you’re not frightened?”

“When I’m caught red-handed. Don’t you?”

He looked puzzled.

She pointed to the flowers. “I had stolen them, and I was trying to ‘’scape off wid ’em’ as the negroes say. Shocking, isn’t it? But you see, nobody has lived here since long before I was born, and I suppose the flower-thieving habit has become ingrown.”

“But,” he interrupted, “there’s acres of them going to waste. Why on earth shouldn’t you have them?”

“Of course I know better to-day, but there was a—a special reason. We have none and this is the nearest place where they grow. My mother wanted some for this particular day.”

“Good heavens!” he cried. “You don’t think you can’t go right on taking them? Why, you can ‘’scape off’ with the whole garden any time!”

A droll little gleam of azure mischief darted at him suddenly out of her eyes and then dodged back again. “Aren’t you just a little rash with other people’s property?”

“Other people’s?”

“What will the owner say?”

He bent back one of the long jessamine stems and wound it around the others. “I can answer for him. Besides, I owe you something, you know. I robbed you this morning—of your brush.”

She looked at him, abruptly serious. “Why did you do that?”

“Sanctuary. His two beady eyes begged so hard for it. ‘Twenty ravenous hounds,’ they said, ‘and a dozen galloping horses. And look what a poor shivering little red-brown morsel I am!’”

For just an instant the bronze-gold head gave a quick imperious toss, like a high-mettled pony under the flick of the whip. But as suddenly the shadow of resentment passed; the mobile face under the bent hat-brim turned thoughtful. “Poor little beastie!” she said meditatively. “We so seldom think of his side, do we! We think only of the run, the dog-music, the wild rush along the wet fields, with the horses straining and pounding under us. I’ve ridden to hounds all my life. Everybody does down here.” She looked again at him. “Do you think it’s wrong to kill things?” she asked gravely.

“Oh, dear, no,” he smiled. “I haven’t a single ism. I’m not even a vegetarian.”

“But you would be if you had to kill your own meat?”

“Perhaps. So many of us would. As a matter of fact, I don’t hunt myself, but I’m no reformer.”

“Why don’t you hunt?”

“I don’t enjoy it.” He flushed slightly. “I hate firearms,” he said, a trifle difficultly. “I always have. I don’t know why. Idiosyncrasy, I suppose. But I shouldn’t care for hunting, even with bows and arrows. I would kill a tiger or a poisonous reptile, or anything else, in case of necessity. But even then I should hardly enjoy it. I know some animals are pests and have to be killed. Some men do, too. But I don’t like to do it myself.”

“Wouldn’t that theory lead to a wholesale evasion of responsibility?”

“Perhaps. I’m no philosopher. But a blackbird or a red fox is so pretty, even when he is thieving, that I’d let him have the corn. I’m like the Lord High Executioner in The Mikado who was so tender-hearted that he couldn’t execute anybody and planned to begin with guinea-pigs and work up. Only I’m afraid I couldn’t even manage the guinea-pigs.”

She laughed. “You wouldn’t find many to practise on here. Do you raise guinea-pigs up North?”

“Ah,” he said ruefully, “you tag me, too. Have I by chance a large letter N tattooed upon my manly brow? But I suppose it’s the accent. Uncle Jefferson catalogued me in five minutes. He said he didn’t know why I was from ‘de Norf,’ but he ‘knowed’ it. I’ve annexed him and his wife, by the way.”

“You’re lucky to have them. Unc’ Jefferson and Aunt Daph might have slipped out of a plantation of the last century. They’re absolutely ante-bellum. Most of the negroes are more or less spoiled, as you’ll find, I’m afraid.” She turned the conversation bluntly. “Had you seen Damory Court before?”

“No, never.”

“Do you like the general plan of the place?”

“Do I like it?” cried John Valiant. “Do I like it!”

A quick pleasure glanced across her face. “It’s nice of you to say it that way. We ask that question so often it’s become mechanical. You see, it’s our great show-place. We exhibit it to strangers as we show them the Natural Bridge and Monticello, and expect them to rhapsodize. Years ago the negroes would never set foot here. The house was supposed to be haunted.”

“I’m not afraid,” he laughed. “I wouldn’t blame any ghost for hanging around. I’m thinking of haunting it myself in a hundred years or so.”

“Oh, the specters are all laid long ago, if there ever were any.”

At that moment a patter of footsteps and shrill shrieks came flying over the last-year’s leaves beyond the lilac bushes. “It’s Rickey Snyder,” she said, peering out smilingly as two children, pursued and pursuer, burst into view. “Hush!” she whispered; “I wonder what they are up to.”

The pair came in a whirl through the bushes. The foremost was a seven-year-old negro girl, in a single short cottonade garment, wizened, barelegged and bareheaded, her black wool parted in little angular patches and tightly wrapped with bits of cord. The other was white and as freckled as a turkey’s egg, with hair cropped like a boy’s. She held a carving-knife cut from a shingle, whose edge had been deeply ensanguined by poke-berry juice. The pursued one stumbled over a root and came to earth in a heap, while the other pounced upon her like a wildcat.

“Hold still, you limb of Satan,” she scolded. “How can I do it when you won’t stay still?”

“Oh, Lawd,” moaned the prostrate one, in simulated terror; “oh, Doctah, good Doctah Snydah, has Ah gotter hab dat operation? Is yo’ sho’ gwineter twitter eroun’ mah insides wid dem knives en saws en things?”

“It won’t hurt,” reassured the would-be operator; “no more than it did Mis’ Poly Gifford. And I’ll put your liver right back again.”

“Wait er minute. Ah jes’ remembahs Ah fo’got ter make mah will. Ah leabs—”

“Nonsense!” objected the other irritably. “You made it yesterday. They always do it beforehand.”

“No, suh; Ah done clean fergot et. Ah leabs mah thimble ter de Mefodis’ church, en mah black en w’ite kitten ter Rickey Snydah, en—”

“I don’t want your old tabby!” said the beneficiary unfeelingly. “Now flatten out, while I give you the chloroform.”

“All right, Doctah. Ah’s in de free-ward en ’tain’t costin’ me er cent! But Ah’s mighty skeered Ah gwineter wake up daid! Gord A’mighty, ef Ah dies, save mah sinful soul! Oh, Mars’ Judge Jesus, swing dat cha’yut down en kyah me up ter Hebben! Rickey, yo’ reck’n, arter all, Ah’s gwineter be er black angel? Hesh-sh! Ah’s driftin’ away, Doctah, Ah’s driftin’ away on de big wide ribber.”

“Now you’re asleep,” declared the surgeon, and fell to with a flourish of the gory blade.

The other reared herself. “Huh! How yo’ reck’n Ah’s gwineter be ersleep wid yo’ chunkin’ me in de shoht-ribs wid dat ar stick? Ain’ yo’ done cyarvin’ me up yet?”

“Oh, nurse,” wailed Rickey, turning the drama into a new channel, “I can’t wake Greenie up! She won’t come out of the chloroform! She’s dying. Let’s all sing and maybe it’ll make it easier:

“‘I went down to Jordan and what did I see,
Coming for to carry me home?
A band of angels waiting for me,
Coming for to carry me home!’”

The melody, however, was too much for the prospective corpse. She sat up, shook the dead leaves from her hair and joined in, swaying her lean body to and fro and clapping her yellow-lined hands together in an ecstasy:

“‘Sweeng low! Sweet Char-ee-yut!
Comin’ fo’ t’kyah me ho-o-o-ome.
Swee-eng low, swee-et Char-ee-yut!
Comin’ fo’ t’kyah me home!’”

The two were a strange contrast as they sang, the negro child swaying with the emotionalism of her race and her voice dropping instinctively to a soft alto accompaniment to the other’s rigid soprano, and lending itself to subtle half-tones and minor cadences.

A twig snapped under Valiant’s foot. The singers faced about and saw them. Both scrambled to their feet, the black girl to look at them with a wide self-conscious grin. Rickey, tossing her short hair back from her freckled face, came toward them.

“My goodness, Miss Shirley,” she said, “we didn’t see you at all.” She looked at Valiant. “Are you the man that’s going to fix up Damory Court?” she inquired, without any tedious formalities.

“Yes,” said Valiant.

“Well,” she said critically, “you’ve got your job cut out for you. But I should say you’re the kind to do it.”

“Rickey!” Shirley’s voice tried to be stern, but there was a hint of laughter in it.

“What did I say now?” inquired Rickey. “I’m sure I meant it to be complimentary.”

“It was,” said Valiant. “I shall try to deserve your good opinion.”

“But what a ghastly play!” exclaimed Shirley. “Where did you learn it?”

“We were playing Mis’ Poly Gifford in the hospital,” Rickey answered. “She’s got a whole lot of little pebbles that they cut out—”

“Oh, Rickey!” expostulated Shirley with a shudder.

“They did. She keeps them in a little pasteboard box like wedding-cake, with a blue ribbon around it. She was showing it to Miss Mattie Sue yesterday. She was telling her all about it. She said all the women there showed each other their cuts and bragged about how long they were.”

Valiant’s merriment rang out under the trees, but Shirley was crimson. “Well, I don’t think it’s a nice play,” she said decidedly.

“That’s just the way,” murmured Rickey disconsolately, “yesterday it was Romeo and Juliet with the Meredith children, and their mother had a conniption fit.”

“Was that gruesome, too?”

“Not so very. I only poisoned Rosebud and June and stabbed myself. I don’t call that gruesome.”

“You certainly have a highly developed taste for the dramatic,” said Shirley. “I wonder what your next effort will be.”

“It’s to-morrow,” Rickey informed her. “We’re going to have the duel between Valiant and Sassoon.”

The smile was stricken from John Valiant’s face. A duel—the duel—between Valiant and Sassoon! He felt his blood beat quickly. Had there been such a thing in his father’s life? Was that what had blighted it?

“Only not here where it really happened, but in the Meredith orchard. Greenie’s going to be—”

“Ah ain’!” contradicted Greenie. “Ah ain’ gwineter be dat Valiant, nohow!”

“You are, too!” insisted Rickey wrathfully. “You needn’t be so pickety and choosety—and after she kills Sassoon, we put the bloodhounds on her trail.”

Greenie tittered. “Dey ain’ no dawg eroun’ heah’d tech me,” she said, “en ’sides—”

“But, Rickey,” Shirley interposed, “that wasn’t a murder. That was a duel between gentlemen. They don’t—”

“I know it,” assented Rickey cheerfully. “But it makes it more exciting. Will you come, Miss Shirley, deed and double? I won’t charge you any admission.”

“I can’t promise,” said Shirley. “I might stand the duel, but I’m afraid the hounds would be too blood-curdling. By the way,” she added, “isn’t it about time Miss Mattie Sue had her tea?”

“It certainly is, Miss Shirley!” said Rickey, with penitent emphasis. “I clean forgot it, and she’ll row me up the gump-stump! Come on, Greenie,” and she started off through the bushes.

But the other hung back. “Ah done tole yo’ Ah ain’ gwine be dat Valiant,” she said stubbornly.

“Look here, Greenville Female Seminary Simms,” Rickey retorted, “don’t you multiply words with me just because your mammy was working there when you were born and gave you a fancy name! If you’ll promise to be him, I’ll get Miss Mattie Sue to let us make molasses candy.”

CHAPTER XIX

UNDER THE HEMLOCKS

Shirley looked at Valiant with a deepening of her dimple. “Rickey isn’t an aristocrat,” she said: “she’s what we call here poor-white, but she’s got a heart of gold. She’s an orphan, and the neighborhood in general, and Miss Mattie Sue Mabry in particular, have adopted her.”

He hardly heard her words for the painful wonder that was holding him. He had canvassed many theories to explain his father’s letter but such a thing as a duel he had never remotely imagined. His father had taken a man’s life. Was it this thought—whatever the provocation, however justified by the customs of the time and section—that had driven him to self-exile? He recalled himself with an effort, for she was speaking again.

“You’ve found Lovers’ Leap, no doubt?”

“No. This is the first time I’ve been so far from the house. Is it near here?”

“I’ll show it to you.” She held out her hand for the bunch of jessamine and laid it on the broad roots of a tree that were mottled with lichen. “Look there,” she said suddenly; “isn’t that a beauty?”

She was pointing to a jimson-weed on which had settled, with glassy wings vibrating, a long, ungainly, needle-like insect with an odd sword-like beak. “What is that?” he asked.

“A snake-doctor. If Unc’ Jefferson were here he’d say, ‘Bettah watch out! Dah’s er snek roun’ erbout heah, sho’!’ He’ll fill you full of darky superstitions.”

He shrugged his shoulders. “I’m being introduced to them hourly. I’ve met the graveyard rabbit—one of them had hoodooed my motor yesterday. I’m to carry a buckeye in my pocket—by the way, is a buckeye a horse-chestnut?—if I want to escape rheumatism. I’ve learned that it’s bad luck to make a bargain on a Friday, and the weepy consequences of singing before breakfast.” A blue-jay darted by them, to perch on a limb and eye them saucily. “And the jay-bird! He goes to hell every Friday noon to carry brimstone and tell the devil what folks have been up to.”

She clapped her hands. “You’re certainly learning fast. When I was little I used to be delighted to see a blue-jay in the cedars on Friday afternoon. It was a sign we’d been so good there was nothing to tell. Follow me now and I’ll show you the view from Lovers’ Leap. But look down. Don’t lift your eyes till I tell you.”

He dropped his gaze to the small brown boots and followed, his eyes catching low side-glimpses of woodsy things—the spangled dance of leaf-shadows, a chameleon lizard whisking through the roots of the bracken, the creamy wavering wings of a white moth resting on a dead stump. Suddenly the slim path between the trees took a quick turn, and fell away at their feet. “There,” she said. “This is the finest view at Damory Court.”

They stood on the edge of a stony ravine which widened at one end to a shallow marshy valley. The rocks were covered with gray-green feathery creepers, enwound with curly yellow tendrils of love-vine. Across the ravine, on a lower level, began a grove of splendid trees that marched up into the long stretch of neglected forest he had seen from the house. Looking down the valley, fields of young tobacco lay tier on tier, and beyond, in the very middle of the mellow vaporous distance, lifted the tapering tower of a far-off church, hazily outlined against the azure.

“You love it?” he asked, without withdrawing his eyes.

“I’ve loved it all my life. I love everything about Damory Court. Ruined as it is, it is still one of the most beautiful estates in all Virginia. There’s nothing finer even in Italy. Just behind us, where those hemlocks stand, is where the duel the children spoke of was fought.”

He turned his head. “Tell me about it,” he said.

She glanced at him curiously. “Didn’t you know? That was the reason the place was abandoned. Valiant, who lived here, and the owner of another plantation, who was named Sassoon, quarreled. They fought, the story is, under those big hemlock trees. Sassoon was killed.”

He looked out across the distance; he could not trust his face. “And—Valiant?”

“He went away the same day and never came back; he lived in New York till he died. He was the father of the Court’s present owner. You never heard the story?”

“No,” he admitted. “I—till quite recently I never heard of Damory Court.”

“As a little girl,” she went on, “I had a very vivid imagination, and when I came here to play I used to imagine I could see them, Valiant so handsome—his nickname was Beauty Valiant—and Sassoon. How awful to come to such a lovely spot, just because of a young man’s quarrel, and to—to kill one’s friend! I used to wonder if the sky was blue that day and whether poor Sassoon looked up at it when he took his place; and whom else he thought of that last moment.”

“Had he parents?”

“No, neither of them had, I believe. But there might have been some one else,—some one he cared for and who cared for him. That was the last duel ever fought in Virginia. Dueling was a dreadful custom. I’m glad it’s gone. Aren’t you?”

“Yes,” he said slowly, “it was a thing that cut two ways. Perhaps Valiant, if he could have had his choice afterward, would rather have been lying there that morning than Sassoon.”

“He must have suffered, too,” she agreed, “or he wouldn’t have exiled himself as he did. I used to wonder if it was a love-quarrel—whether they could have been in love with the same woman.”

“But why should he go away?”

“I can’t imagine, unless she had really loved the other man. If so, she couldn’t have borne seeing Valiant afterward.” She paused with a little laugh. “But then,” she said, “it may have been nothing so romantic. Perhaps they quarreled over cards or differed as to whose horse was the better jumper. Valiant’s grandfather, who was known as Devil-John, is said to have called a man out because he rode past him on the wrong side. Our ancestors in Virginia, I’m afraid, didn’t stand on ceremony when they felt uppish.”

He did not smile. He was looking out once more over the luminous stretch of fields, his side-face toward her. Curious and painful questions were running through his brain. With an effort, he thrust these back and recalled his attention to what she was saying.

“You wonder, I suppose, that we feel as we do toward these old estates, and set store by them, and—yes, and brag of them insufferably as we do. But it’s in our blood. We love them as the English do their ancient manors. They have made our legends and our history. And the history of Virginia—”

She broke off with a shrug and, more himself now, he finished for her: “—isn’t exactly a trifling part of the history of these United States. You are right.”

“You Northerners think we are desperately conceited,” she smiled, “but it’s true. We’re still as proud of our land, and its old, old places, and love them as well as our ancestors ever did. We wouldn’t change a line of their stately old pillars or a pebble of their darling homey gardens. Do you wonder we resent their passing to people who don’t care for them in the Southern way?”

“But suppose the newcomers do care for them?”

Her lips curled. “A young millionaire who has lived all his life in New York, to care for Damory Court! A youth idiotically rich, brought up in a superheated atmosphere of noise and money!”

He started uncontrollably. So that was what she thought! He felt himself flushing. He had wondered what would be his impression of the neighborhood and its people; their possible opinion of himself had never occurred to him.

“Why,” she went on, “he’s never cared enough about the place even to come and see it. For reasons of his own—good enough ones, perhaps, according to the papers,—he finds himself tired of the city. I can imagine him reflecting.” With a mocking simulation of a brown-study, she put her hand to her brow, pushing impatiently back the wayward luster: “‘Let me see. Don’t I own an estate somewhere in the South? Ah-ha! yes. If I remember, it’s in Virginia. I’ll send down and fix up the old hovel.’ Then he telephones for his architect to run down and see what ‘improvements’ it needs. And—here you are!”

He laughed shortly—a tribute to her mimicry—but it was a difficult laugh. The desperately ennuyée pose, the lax drawl, the unaccustomed mental effort and the sudden self-congratulatory “ah-ha!”—hitting off to a hair the lackadaisical boredom of the haplessly rich young boulevardier—this was the countryside’s pen-picture of him!

“Don’t you consider a longing for nature a wholesome sign?”

“Perhaps. The vagaries of the rich are always suggestive.”

“You think there’s no chance of his choosing to stay here because he actually likes it?”

“Not the slightest,” she said indifferently.

“You are so certain of this without ever having seen him?”

She glanced at him covertly, annoyedly sensible of the impropriety of the discussion, since the man discussed was certainly his patron, maybe his friend. But his insistence had roused a certain balky wilfulness that would have its way. “It’s true I’ve never seen him,” she said, “but I’ve read about him a hundred times in the Sunday supplements. He’s a regular feature of the high-roller section. His idea of a good time is a dog-banquet at Sherry’s. Why, a girl told me once that there was a cigarette named after him—the Vanity Valiant!”

An angry glint slanted across his eyes. For some reason the silly story on her lips stung him deeply. “You find the Sunday newspapers always so dependable?”

“Well,” she flashed, “you must know Mr. Valiant. Is he a useful citizen? What has he ever done except play polo and furnish spicy paragraphs for the society columns?”

“Isn’t that beside the point? Because he has been an idler, must he necessarily be a—vandal?”

She laughed again. “He wouldn’t call it vandalism. He’d think it decided improvement to make Damory Court as frantically different as possible. I suppose he’ll erect a glass cupola and a porte-cochère, all up-to-date and varnishy, and put orchid hot-houses where the wilderness garden was, and a modern marble cupid instead of the summer-house, and lay out a kite-shaped track—”

Everything that was impulsive and explosive in John Valiant’s nature came out with a bang. “No!” he cried, “whatever else he is, he’s not such a preposterous ass as that!”

She faced him squarely now. Her eyes were sparkling. “Since you know him so intimately and so highly approve of him—”

“No, no,” he interrupted. “You mistake me. I shouldn’t try to justify him.” His flush had risen to the roots of his brown hair, but he did not lower his gaze. Now the red color slowly ebbed, leaving him pale. “He has been an idler—that’s true enough—and till a week ago he was ‘idiotically rich.’ But his idling is over now. At this moment, except for this one property, he is little better than a beggar.”

She had taken a hasty step or two back from him, and her eyes were now fixed on his with a dawning half-fearful question in them.

“Till the failure of the Valiant Corporation, he had never heard of Damory Court, much less been aware that he owned it. It wasn’t because he loved it that he came here—no! How could it be? He had never set foot in Virginia in his mortal life.”

She put up her hands to her throat with a start. “Came?” she echoed. “Came!”

“But if you think that even he could be so crassly stupid, so monumentally blind to all that is really fine and beautiful—”

“Oh!” she cried with flashing comprehension. “Oh, how could you! You—”

He nodded curtly. “Yes,” he said. “I am that haphazard harlequin, John Valiant, himself.”

CHAPTER XX

ON THE EDGE OF THE WORLD

There was a pause not to be reckoned by minutes but suffocatingly long. She had grown as pale as he.

“That was ungenerous of you,” she said then with icy slowness. “Though no doubt you—found it entertaining. It must have still further amused you to be taken for an architect?”

“I am flattered,” he replied, with a trace of bitterness, “to have suggested, even for a moment, so worthy a calling.”

Though he spoke calmly enough, his thoughts were in ragged confusion. As her gaze dived into his, he was conscious of outré fancies. She seemed to him like some snow-cloud in woman’s shape, edged with anger and swept by a wrathful wind into this summery afternoon. For her part she was telling herself with passionate resentment that he had no right so to misrepresent himself—to lead her on to such a dénouement. At his answer she put out her hand with a sudden gesture, as if bluntly thrusting the matter from her concern, and turning, went back along the tree-shadowed path.

He followed glumly, gnawing his lip, wanting to say he knew not what, but wretchedly tongue-tied, noting that the great white moth was still waving its creamy wings on the dead stump and wondering if she would take the cape jessamines. He felt an embarrassed relief when, passing the roots where they lay, she stooped to raise them.

Then all at once the blood seemed to shrink from his heart. With a hoarse cry he leaped toward her, seized her wrist and roughly dragged her back, feeling as he did so, a sharp fiery sting on his instep. The next moment, with clenched teeth, he was viciously stamping his heel again and again, driving into the soft earth a twisting root-like something that slapped the brown wintered leaves into a hissing turmoil.

He had flung her from him with such violence that she had fallen sidewise. Now she raised herself, kneeling in the feathery light, both hands clasped close to her breast, trembling excessively with loathing and feeling the dun earth-floor billow like a canvas sea in a theater. Little puffs of dust from the protesting ground were wreathing about her set face, and she pressed one hand against her shoulder to repress her shivers.

“The horrible—horrible—thing!” she said whisperingly. “It would have bitten me!”

He came toward her, panting, and grasping her hand, lifted her to her feet. He staggered slightly as he did so, and she saw his lips twist together oddly. “Ah,” she gasped, “it bit you! It bit you!”

“No,” he said, “I think not.”

“Look! There on your ankle—that spot!”

“I did feel something, just that first moment.” He laughed uncertainly. “It’s queer. My foot’s gone fast asleep.”

Every remnant of color left her face. She had known a negro child who had died of a water-moccasin’s bite some years before—the child of a house-servant. It had been wading in the creek in the gorge. The doctor had said then that if one of the other children....

She grasped his arm. “Sit down,” she commanded, “here, on this log, and see.”

Her pale fright caught him. He obeyed, dragged off the low shoe and bared the tingling spot. The firm white flesh was puffing up around two tiny blue-rimmed punctures. He reached into his pocket, then remembered that he had no knife. As a next best thing he knotted his handkerchief quickly above the ankle, thrust a stick through the loop and twisted it till the ligature cut deeply, while she knelt beside him, her lips moving soundlessly, saying over and over to herself words like these: “I must not be frightened. He doesn’t realize the danger, but I do! I must be quite collected. It is a mile to the doctor’s. I might run to the house and send Unc’ Jefferson, but it would take too long. Besides, the doctor might not be there. There is no one to do anything but me.”

She crouched beside him, putting her hands by his on the stick and wrenching it over with all her strength. “Tighter, tighter,” she said. “It must be tighter.” But, to her dismay, at the last turn the improvised cord snapped, and the released stick flew a dozen feet away.

Her heart leaped chokingly, then dropped into hammer-like thudding. He leaned back on one arm, trying to laugh, but she noted that his breath came shortly as if he had been running. “Absurd!” he said, frowning. “How such—a fool thing—can hurt!”

Suddenly she threw herself on the ground and grasped his foot with both her hands. He could see her face twitch with shuddering, and her eyes dilating with some determined purpose.

“What are you going to do?”

“This,” she said, and he felt her shrinking lips, warm and tremulous, pressed hard against his instep.

He drew away sharply, with savage denial. “No—no! Not that! You shan’t! My lord—you shan’t!” He dragged his numbing foot from her desperate grasp, lifting himself, pushing her from him; but she fought with him, clinging, panting broken sentences:

“You must! It’s the only way. It was—a moccasin, and it’s deadly. Every minute counts!”

“I won’t. No, stop! How do you know? It’s not going to—here, listen! Take your hands away. Listen!—Listen! I can go to the house and send Uncle Jefferson for the doctor and he—No! stop, I say! Oh—I’m sorry if I hurt you. How strong you are!”

“Let me!”

“No! Your lips are not for that—good God, that damnable thing! You yourself might be—”

“Let me! Oh, how cruel you are! It was my fault. But for me it would never have—”

“No! I would rather—”

“Let me! Oh, if you died!”

With all the force of her strong young body she wrenched away his protestant hands. A thirst and a sickish feeling were upon him, a curious irresponsible giddiness, and her hair which that struggle had brought in tumbled masses about her shoulders, seemed to have little flames running all over it. His foot had entirely lost its feeling. There was a strange weakness in his limbs.

He felt it with a cool thriving surprise. Could it be death stealing over him—really death, in this silly inglorious guise, from a miserable crawling reptile? Death, when he had just begun a life that seemed so worth living?

A sense of unreality came. He was asleep! The failure, the investigation, Virginia—all was a dream. Presently he would wake in his bachelor quarters to find his man setting out his coffee and grapefruit. He settled back and closed his eyes.

Moments of half-consciousness, or consciousness jumbled with strange imaginings, followed. At times he felt the pressure upon the wounded foot, was sensible of the suction of the young mouth striving desperately to draw the poison from the wound. From time to time he was conscious of a white desperate face haloed with hair that was a mist of woven sparkles. At times he thought himself a recumbent stone statue in a wood, and her a great tall golden-headed flower lying broken at his feet. Again he was a granite boulder and she a vine with yellow leaves winding and clinging about him. Then a blank—a sense of movement and of troublous disturbance, of insistent voices that called to him and inquisitive hands that plucked at him, and then voices growing distant again, and hands falling away, and at last—silence.

CHAPTER XXI

AFTER THE STORM

Inky clouds were gathering over the sunlight when Shirley came from Damory Court, along the narrow wood-path under the hemlocks, and the way was striped with blue-black shadows and filled with sighing noises. She walked warily, halting often at some leafy rustle to catch a quick breath of dread. As she approached the tree-roots where the cape jessamines lay, she had to force her feet forward by sheer effort of will. At a little distance from them she broke a stick and with it managed to drag the bunch to her, turning her eyes with a shiver from the trampled spot near by. She picked up the flowers, and treading with caution, retraced her steps to the wider path.

She stepped into the Red Road at length in the teeth of a thunder-storm, which had arisen almost without warning to break with the passionate intensity of electric storms in the South. The green-golden fields were now a gray seethe of rain and the farther peaks lifted like huge tumbled masses of onyx against a sky stippled with wan yellow and vicious violet. The wind leaped and roared and swished through the weeping foliage, lashing the dull Pompeian-red puddles, swirling leaves and twigs from the hedges and seeming to be intent on dragging her very garments from her as she ran.

There was no shelter, but even had there been, she would not have sought it. The turbulence of nature around her matched, in a way, her overstrained feeling, and she welcomed the fierce bulge of the wind in the up-blowing whorls of her hair and the drenching wetness of the rain. At length, out of breath, she crouched down under a catalpa tree, watching the fangs of lightning knot themselves against the baleful gray-yellow dimness, making sudden flares of unbearable brightness against which twigs etched themselves with the unrelieved sharpness of black paper silhouettes.

She tried to fix her mind on near things, the bending grasses, the scurrying red runnels and flapping shrubbery, but her thoughts wilfully escaped the tether, turning again and again to the events of the last two hours. She pictured Unc’ Jefferson’s eyes rolling up in ridiculous alarm, his winnowing arm lashing his indignant mule in his flight for the doctor.

At the mental picture she choked with hysterical laughter, then cringed suddenly against the sopping bark. She saw again the doctor’s gaze lift from his first examination of the tiny punctures to send a swift penetrant glance straight at her, before he bent his great body to carry the unconscious man to the house. Again a fit of shuddering swept over her. Then, all at once, tears came, strangling sobs that bent and swayed her. It was the discharge of the Leyden jar, the loosing of the tense bow-string, and it brought relief.

After a time she grew quieter. He would perhaps still be lying on the couch in the dull-colored library, under the one-eyed portrait, his hair waving crisply against the white blanket, his hands moving restlessly, his lips muttering. Her imagination followed Aunt Daph shuffling to fetch this and that, nagged by the doctor’s sharp admonitions.

He would get well! The thought that perhaps she had saved his life gave her a thrill that ran over her whole body. And until yesterday she had never seen him! She kneeled in the blurred half-light, pushing her wet hair back from her forehead and smiling up in the rain that still fell fast.

In a few moments she rose and went on. The lightning came now at longer and more irregular intervals and the thunder pealed less heavily. The wan yellow murk was lifting. Here and there a soaked sun-beam peered half-frightened through the racked mist-wreaths, as though to smell the over-sweet fragrance of the wet jessamine in her arms.

At the gate of the Rosewood lane stood a mailbox on a cedar post and she paused to fish out a draggled Richmond newspaper. As she thrust it under her arm her eye caught a word of a head-line. With a flush she tore it from its soggy wrapper, the wetted fiber parting in her eager fingers, and resting her foot on the lower rail of the gate, spread it open on her knee.

She stood stock-still until she had read the whole. It was the story of John Valiant’s sacrifice of his private fortune to save the ruin of the involved Corporation.

Its effect upon her was a shock. She felt her throat swell as she read; then she was chilled by the memory of what she had said to him: “What has he ever done except play polo and furnish spicy paragraphs for the society columns?”

“What a beast I was!” she said, addressing the wet hedge. “He had just done that splendid thing. It was because of that that he was little better than a beggar, and I said those horrible things!” Again she bent her eyes, rereading the sentences: “Took his detractors by surprise ... had just sustained a grilling at the hands of the State’s examiner which might well have dried at their fount the springs of sympathy.”

She crushed up the paper in her hand and rested her forehead on the wet rail. Idiotically rich—a vandal—a useless purse-proud flâneur. She had called him all that! She could still see the paleness of his look as she had said it.

Shirley, overexcited as she still was, felt the sobs returning. These, however, did not last long and in a moment she found herself smiling again. Though she had hurt him, she had saved him, too! When she whispered this over to herself it still thrilled and startled her. She folded the paper and hastened on under the cherry-trees.

Emmaline, the negro maid was waiting anxiously on the porch. She was thin to spareness, with a face as brown as a tobacco leaf, restless black eyes and wool neatly pinned and set off by an amber comb.

“Honey,” called Emmaline, “I’se been feahin’ fo’ yo’ wid all that lightnin’ r’arin’ eroun’. Do yo’ remembah when yo’ useter run up en jump plumb down in th’ middle of yore feddah-baid en covah up dat little gol’ haid, en I useter tell yo’ th’ noise was th’ Good Man rollin’ eroun’ his rain-barr’l?” She laughed noiselessly, holding both hands to her thin sides. “Yo’ grow’d up now so yo’ ain’ skeered o’ nothin’ this side th’ Bad Place! Yo’ got th’ jess’mine? Give ’em to Em’line. She’ll fix ’em all nice, jes’ how Mis’ Judith like.”

“All right, Emmaline,” replied Shirley. “And I’ll go and dress. Has mother missed me?”

“No’m. She ain’ lef’ huh room this whole blessed day. Now yo’ barth’s all ready—all ’cep’n th’ hot watah, en I sen’ Ranston with that th’ fus’ thing. Yo’ hurry en peel them wet close off yo’se’f, or yo’ have one o’ them digested chills.”

Her young mistress flown and the hot water despatched, the negro woman spread a cloth on the floor and began to cut and dress the long stalks of the flowers. This done she fetched bowls and vases, and set the pearly-white clumps here and there—on the dining-room sideboard, the hall mantel and the desk of the living-room—till the delicate fragrance filled the house, quite vanquishing the rose-scent from the arbors.

When all was done, she stood in the doorway with arms akimbo, turning about to survey her handiwork. “Mis’ Judith be pleas’ with that,” she said, nodding her woolly head with vigor. “Wondah why she want them sprangly things! All th’ res’ o’ th’ time roses, but ’bout onct a yeah seems like she jes’ got to have them jess’mine en nothin’ else.”

She swept up the scattered twigs and leaves, and going into the dining-room, began to lay the table for dinner. This room was square and low, with a carved console and straight-backed chairs thinly cushioned in faded blue to match the china. The olive-gray walls were brightened with the soft dull gold of an old mirror and picture frames from which dim faces looked placidly down. The crumbling splendor of the storm-racked sunset fell through old-fashioned leaded window-panes, tinging the white Capodimonte figures on the mantelpiece.

As the trim colored woman moved lightly about in the growing dusk, with the low click of glass and muffled clash of silver, the light tat-tat of a cane sounded, and she ran to the hall, where Mrs. Dandridge was descending the stairway, one slim white hand holding the banister, under the edge of a white silk shawl which drooped its heavy fringes to her daintily-shod feet. On the lower step she halted, looking smilingly about at the blossoming bowls.

“Don’ they smell up th’ whole house?” said Emmaline. “I knowed yo’ be pleas’, Mis’ Judith. Now put yo’ han’ on mah shouldah en I’ll take yo’ to yo’ big cha’h.”

They crossed the hall, the dusky form bending to the fragile pressure of the fingers. “Now heah’s yo’ cha’h. Ranston he made up a little fiah jes’ to take th’ damp out, en th’ big lamp’s lit, en Miss Shirley’ll be down right quick.”

A moment later, in fact, Shirley descended the stair, in a filmy gown of India-muslin, with a narrow belting of gold, against whose flowing sleeves her bare arms showed with a flushed pinkness the hue of the pale coral beads about her neck. The damp newspaper was in her hand.

At her step her mother turned her head: she was listening intently to voices that came from the garden—a child’s shrill treble opposing Ranston’s stentorian grumble.

“Listen, Shirley. What’s that Rickey is telling Ranston?”

“Don’ yo’ come heah wid yo’ no-count play-actin’. Cyan’ fool Ranston wid no sich snek-story, neidah. Ain’ no moc’sin at Dam’ry Co’ot, en nebbah was!”

“There was, too!” insisted Rickey. “One bit him and Miss Shirley found him and sent Uncle Jefferson for Doctor Southall and it saved his life! So there! Doctor Southall told Mrs. Mason. And he isn’t a man who’s just come to fix it up, either; he’s the really truly man that owns it!”

“Who on earth is that child talking about?”

Shirley put her arm around her mother and kissed her. Her heart was beating quickly. “The owner has come to Damory Court. He—”

The small book Mrs. Dandridge held fell to the floor. “The owner! What owner?”

“Mr. Valiant—Mr. John Valiant. The son of the man who abandoned it so long ago.” As she picked up the fallen volume and put it into her mother’s hands, Shirley was startled by the whiteness of her face.

“Dearest!” she cried. “You are ill. You shouldn’t have come down.”

“No. It’s nothing. I’ve been shut up all day. Go and open the other window.”

Shirley threw it wide. “Can I get your salts?” she asked anxiously.

Her mother shook her head. “No,” she said almost sharply. “There’s nothing whatever the matter with me. Only my nerves aren’t what they used to be, I suppose—and snakes always did get on them. Now, give me the gist of it first. I can wait for the rest. There’s a tenant at Damory Court. And his name’s John—Valiant. And he was bitten by a moccasin. When?”

“This afternoon.”

Mrs. Dandridge’s voice shook. “Will he—will he recover?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Beyond any question?”

“The doctor says so.”

“And you found him, Shirley—you?”

“I was there when it happened.” She had crouched down on the rug in her favorite posture, her coppery hair against her mother’s knee, catching strange reddish over-tones like molten metal, from the shaded lamp. Mrs. Dandridge fingered her cane nervously. Then she dropped her hand on the girl’s head.

“Now,” she said, “tell me all about it.”

CHAPTER XXII

THE ANNIVERSARY

The story was not a long one, though it omitted nothing: the morning fox-hunt and the identification of the new arrival at Damory Court as the owner of yesterday’s stalled motor; the afternoon raid on the jessamine, the conversation with John Valiant in the woods.

Mrs. Dandridge, gazing into the fire, listened without comment, but more than once Shirley saw her hands clasp themselves together and thought, too, that she seemed strangely pale. The swift and tragic sequel to that meeting was the hardest to tell, and as she ended she put up her hand to her shoulder, holding it hard. “It was horrible!” she said. Yet now she did not shudder. Strangely enough, the sense of loathing which had been surging over her at recurrent intervals ever since that hour in the wood, had vanished utterly!

She read the newspaper article aloud and her mother listened with an expression that puzzled her. When she finished, both were silent for a moment, then she asked, “You must have known his father, dearest; didn’t you?”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Dandridge after a pause. “I—knew his father.”

Shirley said no more, and facing each other in the candle-glow, across the spotless damask, they talked, as with common consent, of other things. She thought she had never seen her mother more brilliant. An odd excitement was flooding her cheek with red and she chatted and laughed as she had not done for years. Even Ranston rolled his eyes in appreciation, later confiding to Emmaline in the kitchen that “Mis’ Judith cert’n’y chipper ez er squ’rl dis evenin’. Reck’n she be breckin’ dat cane ovah some o’ ouah haids yit! What yo’ spos’n she say ’bout dem aryplanes? She ’clah she tickle tuh deff ter ride in one—yas’m. Say et soun’ lak er thrash’n-machine en look lak er debble-fish but she don’ keer. When she ride, she want tuh zip—yas she did! Dat’s jes’ whut Mis’ Judith say.”

But after dinner the gaiety and effervescence faded quickly and Mrs. Dandridge went early to her room. She mounted the stair with her arm thrown about Shirley’s pliant waist. At the window, where the balustrade turned, she paused to peer into the night. The air outside was moist and heavy with rose-scent.

“How alive they seem, Shirley,” she said, “—the roses. But the jessamine deserves its little hour.” At her door she kissed her, looking at her with a strange smile. “How curious,” she said, as if to herself, “that it should have happened, to-day!”

The reading-lamp had been lighted on her table. She drew a slim gold chain from the bosom of her dress and held to the light a little locket-brooch it carried. It was of black enamel, with a tiny laurel-wreath of pearls on one side encircling a single diamond. The other side was of crystal and covered a baby’s russet-colored curl. In her fingers it opened and disclosed a miniature at which she looked closely for a moment.

As she snapped the halves shut, her eye fell on the open page of a book that lay on the table in the circle of radiance. It was Lucile:

“Alas! who shall number the drops of the rain?
Or give to the dead leaves their greenness again?
Who shall seal up the caverns the earthquake hath rent?
Who shall bring forth the winds that within them are pent?
To a voice who shall render an image? or who
From the heats of the noontide shall gather the dew?”

Her eyes turned restlessly about the room. It had been hers as a girl, for Rosewood had been the old Garland homestead. It seemed now all at once to be full of calling memories of her youth. She looked again at the page and turned the leaf:

“Hush! That which is done
I regret not. I breathe no reproaches. That’s best
Which God sends. ’Twas His will; it is mine. And the rest
Of that riddle I will not look back to!”

She closed the book hastily and thrust it out of sight, beneath a magazine.

“How strange that it should have been to-day!” It had been on Shirley’s lips to question, but the door had closed, and she went slowly down-stairs. She sat a while thinking, but at length grew restless and began to walk to and fro across the floor, her hands clasped behind her head so that the cool air filled her flowing sleeves. In the hall she could hear the leisurely kon-kon—kon-kon of the tall clock. The evening outside was exquisitely still and the metallic monotone was threaded with the airy fiddle-fiddle of crickets in the grass and punctuated with the rain-glad cloap of a frog.

Presently, with the mellow whirrings that accompany the movements of such antiques, the ancient timepiece struck ten. At the sound she threw a thin scarf over her shoulders and stole out to the porch. Its deep odorous shadow was crossed by oblongs of lemon-colored light from the windows. Before the kitchen door Ranston’s voice was humming huskily:

“‘Steal away; Steal away!
Steal away to Jesus.
Steal away! Steal away home—’”

accompanied by the soft alto of Aunt Judy the cook.

Shirley stepped lightly down to the wet grass. Looking back, she could see her mother’s lighted blind. All around the ground was splotched with rose-petals, looking in the squares of light like bloody rain. Beyond the margin of this brightness all was in darkness, for the moon was not yet risen, and a light damp breeze passed in a slow rhythm as if the earth were breathing moistly in its sleep. Somewhere far away sounded the faint inquiring woo-o-o of an owl and in the wet branches of a walnut tree a pigeon moved murmurously.

She skimmed the lawn and ran a little way down the lane. A shuffling sound presently fell on her ear.

“Is that you, Unc’ Jefferson?” she called softly.

“Yas’m!” The footsteps came nearer. “Et’s me, Miss Shirley.” He tittered noiselessly, and she could see his bent form vibrating in the gloom. “Yo’ reck’n Ah done fergit?”

“No, indeed. I knew you wouldn’t do that. How is he?”

“He right much bettah,” he replied in the same guarded tone. “Doctah he say he be all right in er few days, on’y he gotter lay up er while. Dat was er ugly nip he got f’om dat ’spisable reptyle. Ah reck’n de moc’sins is wuss’n dem ar Floridy yallargaters.”

“Do you think there can be any others about the grounds?”

“No’m. Dey mos’ly keeps ter de ma’shlan’ en on’y runs whah de undah-bresh ez thick. I gwineter fix dat ter-morrow. Mars’ Valiant he tell me ter grub et all out en make er bon-fiah ob it.”

“That’s right, Unc’ Jefferson. Good night, and thank you for coming.”

She started back to the house, when his voice stopped her.

“Mis Shirley, yo’ don’ keer ef de ole man geddahs two er three ob dem roses? Seems lak young mars’ moughty fon’ ob dem. He got one in er glass but et’s mos’ daid now.”

“Wait a minute,” she said, and disappeared in the darkness, returning quickly with a handful which she put in his grasp.

“There!” she whispered, and slipped back through the perfumed dark.

An hour later she stood in the cozy stillness of her bedroom. It was hung in silvery blue with curtains of softly figured shadow-cloth having a misty design of mauve and pink hydrangeas. A tilted mirror on the draped dressing-table had a dark mahogany frame set in upright posts carved in a heavy pattern of grape-leaves. Two candles in silver candlesticks stood before it, their friendly light winking from the fittings of the dark bed, from the polished surface of the desk in the corner and from the old piece of brocade stretched above the mantel, worked like shredded silver cobwebs.

She threw off her gown, slipped into a soft loose robe of maize-colored silk and stood before the small glass. She pulled out the amber pins and drew her wonderful hair on either side of her face, looking out at her reflection like a mermaid from between the rippling waves of a moon-golden sea. She gazed a long critical minute from eyes whose blue seemed now almost black.

At last she turned, and seating herself at the desk, took from it a diary. She scanned the pages at random, her eyes catching lines here and there. “A good run to-day. Betty and Judge Chalmers and the Pendleton boys. My fourth brush this season.” A frown drew itself across her brows, and she turned the page. “One of the hounds broke his leg, and I gave him to Rickey.” ... “Chilly Lusk to dinner to-day, after swimming the Loring Rapid.”

She bit her lip, turned abruptly to the new page and took up her pen. “This morning a twelve mile run to Damory Court,” she wrote. “This afternoon went for cape jessamines.” There she paused. The happenings and sensations of that day would not be recorded. They were unwritable.

She laid down her pen and put her forehead on her clasped hands. How empty and inane these entries seemed beside this rich and eventful twenty-four hours just passed! What had she been doing a year ago to-day? she wondered. The lower drawer of the desk held a number of slim diaries like the one before her. She pulled it out, took up the last-year’s volume and opened it.

“Why,” she said in surprise, “I got jessamine for mother this very same day last year!” she pondered frowning, then reached for a third and a fourth. From these she looked up, startled. That date in her mother’s calendar called for cape jessamines. What was the fourteenth of May to her?

She bent a slow troubled gaze about her. The room had been hers as a child. She seemed suddenly back in that childhood, with her mother bending over her pillow and fondling her rebellious hair. When the wind cried for loneliness out in the dark she had sung old songs to her that had seemed to suit a windy night: Mary of the Wild Moor, and I am Dreaming Now of Hallie. Sad songs! Even in those pinafore years Shirley had vaguely realized that pain lay behind the brave gay mask. Was there something—some event—that had caused that dull-colored life and unfulfilment? And was to-day, perhaps, its anniversary?

Her thought darted to her father who had died before her birth, on whose gray hair had been set the greenest laurels of the Civil War. She had always been deeply proud of his military record—had never read his name on a page of Confederate history without a new thrill. But she had never thought of him and her mother as actors in a passionate love-romance. Their portraits hung together in the living-room down-stairs: the grave middle-aged man with graying hair, and the pale proud girl with the strange shadow in the dark eyes. The canvases had been painted in the year of her mother’s marriage. The same sadness had been in her face then. And their marriage and his death had both fallen in midwinter. No, this May date was not connected with him!

“Dearest, dearest!” whispered Shirley, and a slow tear drew its shining track down her cheek. “Is there something I’ve never known? Is there?”

CHAPTER XXIII

UNCLE JEFFERSON’S STORY

John Valiant sat propped up on the library couch, an open magazine unheeded on his knee. The reading-stand beside him was a litter of letters and papers. The bow-window was open and the honeysuckle breeze blew about him, lifting his hair and ruffling the leaves of the papers. In one corner, in a splotch of bright sunshine, lay the bulldog, watching a strayed blue-bottle darting in panic hither and thither near the ceiling.

Outside a colored maid—a new acquisition of Aunt Daphne’s—named Cassandra, black (in Doctor Southall’s phrase) “as the inside of a cow,” and dressed in a trim cotton-print “swing-clear,” was sweeping the big porch. Over the little cabin by the kitchens, morning-glories twirled their young tendrils. Before its step stood a low shuck-bottom “rocker” with a crimson dyed sheep-skin for upholstery, on which was curled a brindle cat. Through its door Valiant could see a spool what-not, with green pasteboard partitions, a chromo framed in pine-covers on the wall and on a shelf a crêton-covered can full of bustling paper lighters. In the garden three darkies were laboring, under the supervision of Uncle Jefferson. The unsightly weeds and lichen were gone from the graveled paths, and from the fountain pool, whose shaft now spouted a slender spray shivered by the breeze into a million diamonds, which fell back into the pool with a tintinabulant trickle and drip. The drunken wild grape-vines now trailed with a pruned and sobered luxuriance and the clamor of hammer and saw came from the direction of the lake, where a carpenter refurbished the ruined summer-house.

The master of Damory Court closed the magazine with a sigh. “If I could only do it all at once!” he muttered. “It takes such a confounded time. Four days they’ve been working now, and they haven’t done much more than clean up.” He laughed, and threw the magazine at the dog who dodged it with injured alacrity. “After all, Chum,” he remarked, “it’s been thirty years getting in this condition. I guess we’re doing pretty well.”

He picked up a plump package and weighed it in his hand. “There are the seeds for the wilderness garden. Bachelor’s-buttons and love-lies-bleeding and Jacob’s-ladder and touch-me-nots and daffy-down-dillies and phlox and sweet-williams and love-in-a-mist and four-o’clocks—not a blessed hot-house name among ’em, Chum! Don’t they sound homey and old-fashioned? The asters and dahlias and scarlet geraniums are for nearer the house, and the pansies and petunias for that sunny stretch down by the lake. Then there’ll be sunflowers around the kitchens and a trumpet-vine over the side of this porch.”

He stretched luxuriously. “I’ll take a hand at it myself to-morrow. I’m as right as rain again now, thanks to Aunt Daph and the doctor. Something of a crusty citizen, the doctor, but he’s all to the good.”

A heavy step came along the porch and Uncle Jefferson appeared with a tray holding a covered dish with a plate of biscuit and a round jam-pot. “Look here,” said John Valiant, “I had my luncheon three hours ago. I’m being stuffed like a milk-fed turkey.”

The old man smiled widely. “Et’s jes’ er li’l snack er broth,” he said. “Reck’n et’ll kinder float eroun’ de yuddah things. Daph ain’ got no use fo’ tea. She say she boun’ ter mek yo’ fit fo’ ernuddah rassle wid dem moc’sins. Dis’ yeah pot’s dat apple-buttah whut Miss Mattie Sue sen’ yo’ by Rickey Snyder.”

Valiant sniffed with satisfaction. “I’m getting so confoundedly spoiled,” he said, “that I’m tempted to stay sick and do nothing but eat. By the way, Uncle Jefferson, where did Rickey come from? Does she belong here?”

“No, suh. She come f’om Hell’s-Half-Acre.”

“What’s that?”

“Dat’s dat ornery passle o’ folks yondah on de Dome,” explained Uncle Jefferson. “Dey’s been dah long’s Ah kin recommembah—jes’ er ramshackle lot o’ shif’less po’-white trash whut git erlong anyways ’t all. Ain’ nobody boddahs erbout dem ’less’n et’s er guv’ment agint, fo’ dey makes dey own whisky, en dey drinks et, too.”

“That’s interesting,” said Valiant. “So Rickey belonged there?”

“Yas, suh; nebbah’d a-come down heah ’cep’n fo’ Miss Shirley. She de one whut fotch de li’l gal outen dat place, en put huh wid Miss Mattie Sue, three yeah ergo.”

A sudden color came into John Valiant’s cheeks. “Tell me about it.” His voice vibrated eagerly.

“Well, suh,” continued Uncle Jefferson, “dey was one o’ dem low-down Hell’s-Half-Acrers, name’ Greef King, whut call hese’f de mayah ob de Dome, en he went on de rampage one day, en took ahtah his wife. She was er po’ sickly ’ooman, wid er li’l gal five yeah ol’ by er fus’ husban’. He done beat huh heap o’ times befo’, but dis time he boun’ ter finish huh. Ah reck’n he was too drunk fo’ dat, en she got erway en run down heah. Et was wintah time en dah’s snow on de groun’. Dah’s er road f’om de Dome dat hits de Red Road clost’ ter Rosewood—dat ar’s de Dandridge place—en she come dah. Reck’n she wuz er pitiful-lookin’ obstacle. ’Peahs lak she done put de li’l gal up in de cabin lof’ en hid de laddah, en she mos’ crazy fo’ feah Greef git huh. She lef’ he huntin’ fo’ de young ’un when she run erway. Dey was on’y Mis’ Judith en Miss Shirley en de gal Em’line at Rosewood, ’case Ranston de butlah en de yuddahs gone ter disstracted meetin’ down ter de Cullud Mefodis’ Chu’ch. Well, suh, dey wa’nt no time ter sen’ fo’ men. Whut yo’ reck’n Miss Shirley do? She ain’ afeahd o’ nuffin on dis yerf, en she on’y sebenteen yeah ol’ den, too. She don’ tell Mis’ Judith—no, suh! She run out ter de stable en saddle huh hoss, en she gallop up dat road ter Hell’s-Half-Acre lak er shot outen er shovel.”

Valiant brought his hands together sharply. “Yes, yes,” he said. “And then?”

“When she come ter Greef King’s cabin, he done foun’ de laddah, en one er he foots was on de rung. He had er ax in he han’. De po’ li’l gal was peepin’ down thoo’ de cracks o’ de flo’, en prayin’ de bestes’ she know how. She say arterwuhds dat she reck’n de Good Lawd sen’ er angel, fo’ Miss Shirley were all in white—she didn’ stop ter change huh close. She didn’ say nuffin, Miss Shirley didn’. She on’y lay huh han’ on Greef King’s ahm, en he look at huh face, en he drop he ax en go. Den she clumb de laddah en fotch de chile down in huh ahms en take huh on de hoss en come back. Dat de way et happen, suh.”

“And Rickey was that little child!”

“Yas, suh, she sho’ was. In de mawnin’ er posse done ride up ter Hell’s-Half-Acre en take Greef King in. De majah he argyfy de case fo’ de State, en when he done git thoo’, dey mos’ put de tow eroun’ King’s nek in de co’ot room. He done got th’ee yeah, en et mos’ broke de majah’s ha’at dat dey couldn’ give him no mo’. He wuz cert’n’y er bad aig, dat Greef wuz. Dey say he done sw’ah he gwineter do up de majah when he git out. De po’ ’ooman she stay sick dah at Rosewood all wintah, but she git no bettah moughty fas’, en in de spring she up en die. Den Miss Shirley she put li’l Rickey at Miss Mattie Sue’s, en she pay fo’ huh keep eber sence outer huh own money. Dat whut she done, suh.”

Such was the story which Uncle Jefferson told, standing in the doorway. When his shuffling step had retreated, Valiant went to the table and picked up a slim tooled volume that lay there. It was the Lucile he had found in the hall the night of his arrival. He opened it to a page where, pressed and wrinkled but still retaining its bright red pigment, lay what had been a rose.

He stood looking at it abstractedly, his nostrils widening to its crushed spicy scent, then closed it and slipped it into his pocket.

CHAPTER XXIV

IN DEVIL-JOHN’S DAY

He was still sitting motionless when there came a knock at the door and it opened to admit the gruff voice of Doctor Southall. A big form was close behind him.

“Hello. Up, I see. I took the liberty of bringing Major Bristow.”

The master of Damory Court came forward—limping the least trifle—and shook hands.

“Glad to know you, sah,” said the major. “Allow me to congratulate you; it’s not every one who gets bitten by one of those infernal moccasins that lives to talk about it. You must be a pet of Providence, or else you have a cast-iron constitution, sah.”

Valiant waved his hand toward the man of medicine, who said, “I reckon Miss Shirley was the Providence in the case. She had sense enough to send for me quick and speed did it.”

“Well, sah,” the major said, “I reckon under the circumstances, your first impressions of the section aren’t anything for us to brag about.”

“I’m delighted; it’s hard for me to tell how much.”

“Wait till you know the fool place,” growled the doctor testily. “You’ll change your tune.”

The major smiled genially. “Don’t be taken in by the doctor’s pessimism. You’d have to get a yoke of three-year oxen to drag him out of this state.”

“It would take as many for me.” Valiant laughed a little. “You who have always lived here, can scarcely understand what I am feeling, I imagine. You see, I never knew till quite recently—my childhood was largely spent abroad, and I have no near relatives—that my father was a Virginian and that my ancestors always lived here. To discover this all at once and to come to this house, with their portraits on the walls and their names on the title-pages of these books!” He made a gesture toward the glass shelves. “Why, there’s a room up-stairs with the very toys they played with when they were children! To learn that I belong to it all; that I myself am the last link in such a chain!”

“The ancestral instinct,” said the doctor. “I’m glad to see that it means something still, in these rotten days.”

“Of course,” John Valiant continued, “every one knows that he has ancestors. But I’m beginning to see that what you call the ancestral instinct needs a locality and a place. In a way it seems to me that an old estate like this has a soul too—a sort of clan or family soul that reacts on the descendant.”

“Rather a Japanesy idea, isn’t it?” observed the major. “But I know what you mean. Maybe that’s why old Virginian families hang on to their land in spite of hell and high-water. They count their forebears real live people, quite capable of turning over in their graves.”

“Mine are beginning to seem very real to me. Though I don’t even know their Christian names yet, I can judge them by their handiwork. The men who built Damory Court had a sense of beauty and of art.”

“And their share of deviltry, too,” put in the doctor.

“I suppose so,” admitted his host. “At this distance I can bear even that. But good or bad, I’m deeply thankful that they chose Virginia. Since I’ve been laid up, I’ve been browsing in the library here—”

“A bit out of date now, I reckon,” said the major, “but it used to pass muster. Your grandfather was something of a book-worm. He wrote a history of the family, didn’t he?”

“Yes. I’ve found it. The Valiants of Virginia. I’m reading the Revolutionary chapters now. It never seemed real before—it’s been only a slice of impersonal and rather dull history. But the book has made it come alive. I’m having the thrill of the globe-trotter the first time he sees the Tower of London or the field of Waterloo. I see more than that stubble-field out yonder; I see a big wooden stockade with soldiers in ragged buff and blue guarding it.”

The major nodded, “Ah, yes,” he said. “The Continental prison-camp.”