VALIANTS THE VALIANTS OF VIRGINIA By HALLIE ERMINIE RIVES (Mrs. Post Wheeler) The Kingdom of Slender Swords Satan Sanderson Tales From Dickens The Castaway Hearts Courageous A Furnace of Earth THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY INDIANAPOLIS THE VALIANTS OF VIRGINIA By HALLIE ERMINIE RIVES (Mrs. POM Wheeler) ILLUSTRATED BY ANDRE CASTAIGNE INDIANAPOLIS THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY PUBLISHERS COPYRIGHT 1912 THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY PRESS OF BRAUNWORTH ft CO. BOOKBINDERS AND PRINTER*. BROOKLYN, N. V. 524 TO THE REAL JOHN "Molly, Molly Bright! Can I get there by candle-light? " "Yes, if your legs are long enough.* I THE CRASH .... II VANITY VALIANT III THE NEVER-NEVER LAND IV THE TURN OF THE PAGE V THE LETTER .... VI A VALIANT OF VIRGINIA VII ON THE RED ROAD VIII MAD ANTHONY .... IX UNCLE JEFFERSON X WHAT HAPPENED THIRTY YEARS AGO XI DAMORY COURT .... XII THE CASE OF MOROCCO LEATHER . XIII THE HUNT .... XIV SANCTUARY .... XV MRS. POLY GIFFORD PAYS A CALL XVI THE ECHO XVII THE TRESPASSER XVIII JOHN VALIANT MAKES A DISCOVERY XIX UNDER THE HEMLOCKS XX ON THE EDGE OF THE WORLD XXI AFTER THE STORM XXII THE ANNIVERSARY XXIII UNCLE JEFFERSON'S STORY XXIV IN DEVIL-JOHN'S DAY XXV JOHN VALIANT ASKS A QUESTION XXVI THE CALL OF THE ROSES . XXVII BEYOND THE BOX-HEDGE XXVIII NIGHT XXIX AT THE DOME 1 12 21 29 36 44 49 59 71 80 90 102 109 119 124 139 142 152 163 173 179 188 197 203 219 223 230 238 244 CONTENTS Continued CHAPTER PAGT XXX THE GARDENERS ...... 255 XXXI TOURNAMENT DAY 267 XXXII A VIRGINIAN RUNNYMEDE .... 275 XXXIII THE KNIGHT OF THE CRIMSON ROSE . . 289 XXXIV KATHARINE DECIDES 300 XXXV "WHEN KNIGHTHOOD WAS IN FLOWER ' . 309 XXXVI BY THE SUN-DIAL 317 XXXVII THE DOCTOR SPEAKS 328 XXXVIII THE AMBUSH 334 XXXIX WHAT THE CAPE JESSAMINES KNEW . . 340 XL THE AWAKENING 346 XLI THE COMING OF GREEF KING . . . 359 XLII IN THE RAIN 369 XLIII THE EVENING OF AN OLD SCORE . . . 378 XLIV THE MAJOR BREAKS SILENCE . . . 386 XLV RENUNCIATION 398 XLVI THE VOICE FROM THE PAST . . .408 XLVII WHEN THE CLOCK STRUCK .... 415 XLVIII THE SONG OF THE NIGHTINGALE 427 THE VALIANTS OF VIRGINIA CHAPTER I THE CRASH II TRAILED!" ejaculated John Valiant blankly, J/ and the hat he held dropped to the claret- colored rug like a huge white splotch of sudden fright " The Corporation failed 1 " 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 be tween 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 it self an unripe persimmon. The very words them selves came with a galvanic twitch and a stagger that conveyed a sense at once of shock and of pro test. Even the white bulldog stretched on the I 2 THE VALIANTS OF VIRGINIA 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 butter fly 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 Corpora tion 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 THE CRASH 3 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 pad ding 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 revolv ing 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 ac quired middle age with his first long trousers and had been dedicated to the commercial treadmill be- 4 THE VALIANTS OF VIRGINIA fore 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 elec tion 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 hold ings, 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 flat tered him ; for a while he had dreamed of playing a great part, of pushing the activities of the Cor poration 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 amuse ment, the tacit assumption of his prerogatives by other waiting hands. The huge wheels had con tinued to turn, smoothly,- inevitably, and he had THE CRASH 5 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 thou sand 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 alpha bet 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. 6 THE VALIANTS OF VIRGINIA 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 THE CRASH 7 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 sup pose 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 be lieve 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 8 THE VALIANTS OF VIRGINIA 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 per sonal property of the president of this Corporation." Valiant turned a blank white face. " Sedg- wick?" " 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 outre passions had him by the throat. Fool and doubly blind! A poor pawn, a catspaw raking the chest nuts for unscrupulous men whose ignominy he was now called on, perforce, to share! In hr 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 J ,hn Valiant's face such a look as grew on it now. He turned, retrieved the Panama, and without a THE CRASH 9 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 shoul der 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 bull dog, 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 recogniz ing 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 throt tle wide and the car responded with a breakneck dart through the startled traffic, till the sight of an io THE VALIANTS OF VIRGINIA 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 habitue 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 door way. " I want to see Mr, Sedgwick." " You can't see him, Mr. Valiant." THE CRASH n " 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 **A I ^SHE witness is excused." JL 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 read ily. Her smile was an index of her whole per sonality, languid, symmetrical, exquisitely perfect. The little group with whom she sat looked some what out of place in that mixed assemblage. They had not gasped at the tale of the Corporation's un precedented 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. 12 VANITY VALIANT 13 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 news paper perhaps none of the gilded set was better known than " Vanity Valiant." The very nick name given him by his fellows in facetious allu sion 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 peren nial 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, in spired 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 suffi ciently familiar. To it, he stood a perfect symbol 14 THE VALIANTS OF VIRGINIA 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 mon strous 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 sec ond 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 re lease. Long before the closing session it had been clear that, as far as indictments were concerned, the in vestigation would be barren >f result. Of indi- VANITY VALIANT 15 vidual criminality, flight and suicide had been con fession, 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 par- agraphist; and the examiner, who incidentally had a reputation of his own to guard, knew his cue. There were possibilities for the exercise of his es pecial 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 16 THE VALIANTS OF. VIRGINIA success and achievement, but to failure, to chicanery, to the robbing of the poor. The thought had be come 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 listen ers who cherished a sordid disbelief in the ingenuous ness of the man who counts his wealth in seven fig ures, 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 direct ness 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 de rived. The questions, that had been bland with suave innuendo, acquired an acrid sarcasm, a barbed and stinging satire, which at length touched indis cretion. He allowed himself a scornful reference VANITY VALIANT 17 to the elder Valiant as scathing as it was unjusti fied. To the man in the witness-chair this had been like an electric shock. Something new and un- guessed beneath the husk of boredom, the indolent pose of body, had suddenly looked from his blazing eyes: something foreign to Vanity Valiant, the club habitue, the spoiled scion of wealth. For a brief five minutes he spoke, in a fashion that sur prised the court room a passionate defense of his father, the principles on which the Corporation had been founded and its traditional policies: few sen tences, but each hot as lava and quivering with feel ing. 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 con ceive, he asked with effective deliberation, that he had rendered services commensurate with the an nual sums paid him? The witness thought that he had, in fact, received just about what those serv ices 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 i8 THE VALIANTS OF VIRGINIA had swept over the assemblage, and Katharine Fargo, gazing, had smiled that slow smile in which approval struggled with mingled wonder and ques tion. 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 pictur esque broad-brimmed felt hat. She turned her eyes to his. " So that," she said, " is John Valiant! I'd al most 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 VANITY VALIANT 19 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 contain ing 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 new comer 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 no tice anything queer about me? " His friend grinned, " No, Buck," he said ju dicially, " 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 aggre gating three millions ! " he said in a hushed voice. " Why, unless I've been misinformed, that repre sents practically all his private fortune." The other nodded. " Turned over to the Cor poration 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 20 THE VALIANTS OF VIRGINIA 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. " Spec tacular young ass ! " he said explosively. " I should say so ! " agreed Fargo. " Do you know, I used to be afraid my Katharine had a lean ing toward him. But thank God, she's a sensible girl!" CHAPTER III THE NEVER-NEVER LAND DUSK had fallen that evening when John Val iant'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 hi 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 grate fully as he looked at the check's figures. Embar rassment 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 21 22 THE VALIANTS OF VIRGINIA 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 apart ment 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 phys ically 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 en tered his head. He knew his world its comfort able 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 THE NEVER-NEVER LAND 23 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 un substantial. 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 24 THE VALIANTS OF VIRGINIA 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 in fancy in sudden delicate lights and filmy colors. \Yhat had been but blurred under-exposures on the THE NEVER-NEVER LAND 25 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 per son 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 orna ment, 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 coun try was inhabited by good-natured friendly sav ages, as black as a lump of coal, most of them with curly white hair. These talked a queer lan guage, but of course his father and he could under stand them perfectly. These savages had many curious and enthralling customs and strange cud dling 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 cher ries. 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 26 THE VALIANTS OF VIRGINIA 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 excit ing, 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 pud ding, 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 THE NEVER-NEVER LAND 27 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 im portant. 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 gen tlemen. Whatever else they were, they were al- 28 THE VALIANTS OF VIRGINIA ways 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 sud denly afraid. CHAPTER IV THE TURN OF THE PACE JOHN VALIANT stirred and laughed, a lit tle 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 passe 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 un der 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 29 30 THE VALIANTS OF VIRGINIA 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 morn ing 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 THE TURN OF THE PAGE 31 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 be fallen 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 won dered ? 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 32 THE VALIANTS OF VIRGINIA 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 com fort 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, comeli ness 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 be strode 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 in tervals of fashionable boarding-schools he had seen her develop, beautiful, cold, stately and correct. The Fargo fortune thanks to modern journalism, THE TURN OF THE PAGE 33 \vhich 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 im agination 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 hab itues irreverently dubbed this " The Shack ", but it w^as 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 in defatigable 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. 34 THE VALIANTS OF VIRGINIA John Valiant looked down at the bulldog squatted on the floor, his eyes shining in the dim ness. A little hot ripple had run over him. " Not on your life, Chum ! " he said. " No shameless bar ter! 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 con tinued, " 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 rib bon 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 dawn- THE TURN OF THE PAGE 35 ing 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 an nouncement, 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 pro claiming that it had been registered. "What's in that, I wonder?" he said to him self, and then, with a smile at the unmasculine spec ulation, opened the smaller envelope. " Dear Sir," began the letter, in the most uncom promisingly conventional of typewriting: " Dear Sir: " Enclosed please find, with title-deed, a memo randum 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 ihis date. We hand 36 THE LETTER 37 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, "(Enclosure) "EMERSON AND BALL." He turned to the memorandum. It showed a sizable initial deposit against which was entered a series of annual tax payments with minor dis bursements credited to " Inspection and care." The tax receipts were pinned to the account. The larger wrapper contained an unsealed envel ope, across which was written in faded ink and in an unfamiliar dashing, slanting handwriting, his own name. The envelope contained a creased yel low parchment, from between whose folds there clumped and fluttered down upon the floor a long flattish object wrapped in a paper, a newspaper clip ping 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 planta tion 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 38 THE VALIANTS OF VIRGINIA have come into his hands in the course of busi ness." 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 what ever they call 'em, and had a thousand slaves ' be- foh 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 col umn 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. Eat was Virginia herself anything more, in this twentieth THE LETTER 39 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 car ried for months in a pocketbook. " It will interest readers of this section of Vir ginia (the paragraph began) to learn, from a re cent 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 for gotten." 40 THE VALIANTS OF VIRGINIA He read the elaborate, rather stilted phraseology in the twenty-year-old paper with a wondering in terest. " An old house," he mused, " with a bad name. Probably he couldn't sell it, and maybe no body 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 beauti fully 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 THE LETTER 41 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 gentle man, 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 en velope : 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 'his 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, /eal I, I mean be peering over your strong broad .shoulder rs you read? Who knows? Wise men 42 THE VALIANTS OF VIRGINIA 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 my self, because it is too true a story, and I have for gotten how to tell any but fairy tales, wh^re everything happens right, where the Prince mar ries the beautiful Princess and they live happily to gether 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 racia 1 habit, and the call of blood. And I know there is such a thing, too, as fate. ' Every man carries his fate on a rib and about his neck ' ; so the Moslem put it. It was my fate to go away, and I know now since dis tance 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 per haps 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? ' THE LETTER 43 " And this old parchment deed will 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 noth ing. 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 after noon 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 noth ing 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 ques tions 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 ^ray, yet when 'he died he had been but ten years older than the son was now. Phrases of the letter ran through his mind: 44 A VALIANT OF VIRGINIA 45 "Sometime, perhaps, you will know why you are John Valiant of New York instead of John Valiant of Damory Court. ... 7 can . ot 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 io 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 an cestors who had been no weaklings. A Valiant had settled on those acres under a royal governor, be fore the old frontier fighting was over and the In dians had sullenly retired to the westward. The sons of those who had braved sea and savages had bowed their str ng 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 be fore. He had been proud of his strong and healthy frame, of his ability to ride like a dragoon, un consciously, perhaps, a little proud of his wealth. But pride in the larger sense, reverence for the past 46 THE VALIANTS OF VIRGINIA 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 preten sions, 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 cafioned city, its avenues roaring with nightly gaiety, its, roadways bright with the beams of shuttling mo tors, its theaters and cafes 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 sud denly that he was sick of it all : its jostle and glitter, its mad race after bubbles, its hideous under-sur- face contrasts of wealth and squalor, its lukewarm friendships and fr.lse 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 inter ludes 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 A VALIANT OF VIRGINIA 47 he had elected poverty? Here was a foreordina- tion 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 con scientious if unsuccessful mastication of the flattish packet that had fallen from the folded deed and with much solicitous tail-wagging, brought the sod den thing in his mouth and put it into the out stretched hand. His master unrolled the pulpy wad and extri cated 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 dis closed. It was the only picture he had ever pos sessed 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- 48 THE VALIANTS OF VIRGINIA stains the photograph might have been one of him self, 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. THE green, mid -May Virginian afternoon was arched with ? sky as blue as the tiles of the Temple of Heaven and steeped in a wash of sun light as yellow as gold : smoke-hazy peaks piling uj> in the distance billowy verdure like clumps of trem bling jade between, shaded with masses of blue-Mack 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 ^ere 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 opales cent 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 49 SO THE VALIANTS OF VIRGINIA roadside: past nests of meditative farm-buildings, fields of baby-green corn, occasional ramshackle dirt-daubed cabins with doorways hung with yel- ..ow honeysuckle and flagrant trumpet-vines, and here and there ~ quiet ola church, Gothic and ivied and gray, whooe leaded windows watched be- nignantly over myrtled graveyards. A great sooth ing suspi ration 01" 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 ihe bulldog's neck, " if those color-photo graph chaps haa 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 ! " ON THE RED ROAD 51 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 bit terly to work. At half past three the investigation had got as far as the lubricator. At four o'clock the bull dog had given it up and gone nosing afield. At half past four John Valiant lay flat on his back 52 THE VALIANTS OF VIRGINIA like some disreputable stevadore, alternately tinker ing 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 puck ered 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 1 " 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 aston ishment 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 tight ened with chagrin. ON THE RED ROAD 53 "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 dig nity 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." 54 THE VALIANTS OF VIRGINIA She came closer and looked curiously at the quiescent monster at the steamer-trunk strapped on the carrier and the bulging portmanteau peep ing over the side of the tonneau. " Is it broken? " " Merely on strike, I imagine. I think it re sents the quality of the gasoline I got at Charlottes- ville. 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 im mediate 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 South ern. " 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 ON THE RED ROAD 55 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 con trived a make-shift toilet. " What a type ! " he said to himself. " Corn-flower eyes and a blowse of cop pery 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 run ning a few steps, occasionally stopping by some hedge to pull a leaf which she rubbed against her 56 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 mu tinous 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 exaggera tion 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 in stantly 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 open ing note to the soaring rapture that seemed to bub ble 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 whisper ings; yet it was so still that when a saffron-barred hornet darted through with an intolerant high- ON THE RED ROAD '57 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 dis tance blended into a haze till they seemed like bil lows of smoke suddenly solidified, and here and there a darting red or yellow flower gave the illu sion of an under-tongue of flame. Her eyes, pas sionately 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 sensa tional proceeding. He responded instantly not merely with tail-wagging, but with ecstatic grunts and growls. "Where did you come from?" she 58 THE VALIANTS OF VIRGINIA 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." Smil ing 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 sud den perception of mysterious punishment, shrugged, sat down, and tried to reach the irksome grass- wisp with his teeth. This failing, he rolled labori ously 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-shel tered 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 crim son, 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 Planta- 59 60 THE VALIANTS OF VIRGINIA tion 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 trans parent 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 exas perate if semi-humorous rebellion. She wore MAD ANTHONY 61 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 pe culiar 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 sev eral teasing withdrawings before she gave it to its juicy crunching. " No, Selim," she said as the wide nostrils snuf fled 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 62 THE VALIANTS OF, VIRGINIA 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 be lieve 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 Fri day doesn't rout me out to-morrow, I'll be up for murder." They rode an hour, along stretches of sunny high ways or on shaded bridle-paths where the horses' hoofs fell muffled in brown pine-needles and droop ing branches flicked their faces. Then, by a murky way gouged with brusk gullies, across shelving fields and " turn-rows " in a long detbur 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 MAD ANTHONY 63 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 f rowsley-looking thing in mah life," said Betty Page, in her soft South Caro linian 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 Ran dolph," 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 64 THE VALIANTS OF VIRGINIA 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 nar row wagon-track," he said, " goes to Hell's-Half- Acre." " Oh, yes," said Betty. " That's that weird set tlement on the Dome where Shirley's little protegee 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, en closed in a worm-fence and holding a white washed 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 MAD ANTHONY 65 have heard of him when you were here before. He's almost as celebrated as the Reverend John Jas per 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 Satur day 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 Abyssin- ians 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 rest ing on his knees, and his face had that peculiar expressionless immobility seen in Egyptian carv ings. He had slightly turned his head in their di rection, his brow, under its shock of perfectly white crinkly hair, twitching with a peculiar expression of inquiry. His age might have been anything 66 THE VALIANTS OF VIRGINIA judging from his face which was so seamed and creviced with innumerable tiny wrinkles that it most resembled the tortured glaze of some ancient bitu men pottery unearthed from a tomb of Kor. Un der 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 col lapsible 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' Chahmahs ? " " 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 MAD ANTHONY 67 white head shook slowly. " Don' know young mars,'," said the gentle voice. " How many yud- dahs wid yo'? One, two? No, don' know young mistis, eidah." " I reckon you don't need any eyes," Judge Chal mers 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 68 THE VALIANTS OF VIRGINIA he don' know. Dat de coloh dat buhn mah ban'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 to ward 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 rock ing and his muttering. " Gr'et trouble. Dab/s fiah en she ain' afeahd, en dah's watah en sbe ain' MAD ANTHONY 69 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 be came 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 quaver ing 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 can tered away. " My experiment wasn't a great suc cess, 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 thir teen/ 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." 70 THE VALIANTS OF. VIRGINIA 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?" ex claimed 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 in jured." " 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 Shir ley." 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 under stand 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 pain ful 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 chas tened 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 72 THE VALIANTS OF VIRGINIA of grass. " Oh, pup of wonders ! " he exclaimed. 11 Where did you get that rose ? " Chum sat up and wagged his tail, for his mas ter's tone, instead of ridicule, held a dawning de light. 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 blos som 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. Grad ually 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 UNCLE JEFFERSON 73 drawn by a lean mustard-tinted mule, and on its front seat sat a colored man of uncertain age, whose hunched vertebrae and outward-crooked arms gave him a curious expression of replete and bulbous in quiry. 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 rab bit 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 fust name, Miss Shirley. Yas, suh! 74 THE VALIANTS OF VIRGINIA Miss Shirley done said f me ter come en git de gem- man 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 moghty 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 ? " " Tens on whah yo' gwineter," answered Uncle Jefferson sapiently. " I'm going to Damory Court." A kind of shocked surprise that was almost stupe faction spread over the other's face, like oil over a pool. " Dam'ry Co'ot ! Dat's de old Valiant place. Am' nobody lives dar. Ah reck'n am' no body 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 Lawdl Whut folks gwineter say ter dat ! " UNCLE JEFFERSON 75 iie shambled to the rear of the motor arid 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'um de deepo' les'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, point ing to the car. " Ah kin come wid ole Sukey dat's mah mule en fotch it in in de mawnin'. Am' 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 76 THE VALIANTS OF VIRGINIA 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 Jef ferson presently. Valiant did not answer directly. " You say the place hasn't been occupied for many years," he ob served. " Did you ever hear why, Uncle Jeffer son?" " Ah done heerd/' said the other vaguely, " but Ah disremembahs. Sump'in 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 fleet ing 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 ? " UNCLE JEFFERSON 77 " 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 wus- sur. 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 mam my 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' 78 THE VALIANTS OF VIRGINIA 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 inter est. 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 79 Uncle Jefferson's inward and volcanic amuse ment 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 con- vie'." CHAPTER X .WHAT HAPPENED THIRTY YEARS AGO WHEN Shirley came across the lawn at Rose wood, Major Montague Bristovv 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 bene fit 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 waist coat. 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 bru tal, and he shan't have his mint-julep." 80 THIRTY YEARS AGO Si " 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 de fend a man for murder, without first paying a trib ute 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, al most 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, dear est?" " 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 82 THE VALIANTS OF VIRGINIA 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 bet ter than Ranston's." " She makes me one every day, Monty," she con tinued, 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 far- THIRTY YEARS AGO 83 ther 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 be fore, 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 get ting 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 Dan- dridge. 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 84 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, " every thing." 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 ma- turer 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 THIRTY YEARS AGO 85 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 glit tering 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 provo cation, 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. 86 THE VALIANTS OF. VIRGINIA " Thirty years ago to-morrow they fought," she said softly, " Valiant and Sassoon. Every woman has her one anniversary, I suppose, and to-mor row's mine. Do you know what I do, every four teenth 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. 7 know. But men and THIRTY YEARS AGO 87 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 sec onds 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 peo ple 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." 88 THE VALIANTS OF VIRGINIA " 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 THIRTY YEARS AGO 89 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 ** "INVAR'S Dam'ry Co'ot smack-dab ahaid, suh." 1 J 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 wil low-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 90 DAMORY COURT 91 court-house; and farther yet a yellow gorge with a wisp of white smoke curling above it marke4 the course of a crawling far-away railway. Over all the dimming yellow sunshine, and girdling the farther horizon, in masses of purplish blue r the tumbled battlements of the Blue Ridge. His conductor had laboriously descended am now the complaining gates swung open. Before them, as they toiled up the long ascent, the neg lected 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 pop lars which cast cool long shadows across an un kempt 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 land scape that belonged to his subconscious self, or 92 THE VALIANTS OF VIRGINIA that, glimpsed in some immaterial dream-picture, had left a faint-etched memory. Then, on a sud den, the vista vibrated and widened, the white col umns 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 il lusion 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 thick ets 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, be tween box-rows frowsled like the manes of lions gone mad and smothered in an accumulation of matted roots and debris 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 DAMORY COURT 93 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 gar den, 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 gate way. 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- 94 THE VALIANTS OF VIRGINIA 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 ad vertisement." He looked musingly at the piteous wreck and ruin, his gaze sweeping down across the bared fields and unkempt forest. " Mine ! " he re peated. " 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, ex pressing 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 bet- tah go ovah ter Miss Dandridge's place fer er crow- bah. Lawd!" he added, " ef he am' 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 be- DAMORY COURT 95 fore, 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, undis- 96 turbed, 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 per vades 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 alter nate 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 DAMORY COURT 97 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-win dow 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 98 THE VALIANTS OF VIRGINIA on the desk, and in a metal ash-tray on the read ing-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 hu man 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 can vas. 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 pic tured 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 ne- DAMORY COURT 99 gro 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 sere nade, 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 ftxens, 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 cf 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 diffi cultly several times, and said, " Ah ain' nebbah seed yo' befo', suh." " Well, I haven't seen you either, have I ? " " Dat's de truf e, 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 f o' 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 be hind 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 DAMORY COURT 101 out of orbit. " Mah Lawd ! " he ejaculated sound lessly. 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 side board 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. 1 02 THE CASE OF MOROCCO LEATHER 103 ' The very thing! " he said triumphantly. Car rying 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 I4th. 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 104 THE VALIANTS OF VIRGINIA quoted in his father's letter. May I4th! 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 whip- poorwill. 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 " camp ing " 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 enter ing into him that seemed the spirit of the place; the blessing of the tall silver poplars outside, the THE CASE OF MOROCCO LEATHER 105 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 mo ments 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 un thinkable 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 abhor rence 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 sur roundings, with the cold touch of the metal the old shuddering held him, and the sweat broke in beads 106 THE VALIANTS OF VIRGINIA 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 sup pose 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 toss ing back his head, tried to imitate one of the bird calls but was unsuccessful. With a rueful laugh THE CASE OF MOROCCO LEATHER 107 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 him self 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 per fect 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 read ing-stand and drew tfie glass with its vivid blossom io8 THE VALIANTS OF VIRGINIA 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 car ries 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 1 , 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 sugges- 109 no THE VALIANTS OF VIRGINIA tive of the rag-time ditties of the music-halls, yet with a plaintive cadence : / " As he went mowin' roun' de fiel' Er mocc'son 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-ec.ye ! " Dey kyah'd him in ter his Sally deah. She say, ' M:ih 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, coat- less, 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 toc