The Valiants of Virginia Part 8

Sa.s.soon with his dissipated flair and ungovernable temper and strange fits of recklessness; clean, high-idealed, straight-away Valiant; and he--a Bristow, neither better nor worse than the rest of his name. He remembered that mad strained season when he had grimly recognized his own cause as hopeless, and with burning eyes had watched Sa.s.soon and Valiant racing abreast. He remembered that glittering prodigal dance when he had come upon Valiant and Judith standing in the shrubbery, the candle-light from some open door engoldening their faces: hers smiling, a little flippant perhaps, and conscious of her spell; his grave and earnest, yet wistful.

"You promise, John?"

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

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

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

"Think of it! I wore my hair just as s.h.i.+rley does now. It was the same color, with the same fascinating little lights and whorls in it." She turned toward him, but he sat rigidly upright, his gaze avoiding hers.

Her dreamy look was gone now, and her eyes were very bright.

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

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

"I reckon it's a demijohn," he said mirthlessly.

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

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

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

"I certainly was."

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

"And you've lived, Judith," he said.

"Yes," she agreed, with a little sigh, "I've lived. I've had s.h.i.+rley, 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 s.h.i.+rley. 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 s.h.i.+rley's at her knee. He stood a moment watching them from under his slouched hat-brim.

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

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

CHAPTER XI

DAMORY COURT

"Dar's Dam'ry Co'ot smack-dab ahaid, suh."

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

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

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

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

"Et's er moughty fine ol' place, suh, wid dat big revenue ob trees,"

said Uncle Jefferson. "But Ah reck'n et ain' got none ob de modern connivances."

But Valiant did not answer; his gaze was straight before him, fixed on the n.o.ble old house they were approaching. Its wide and columned front peered between huge rugged oaks and slender silver poplars which cast cool long shadows across an unkempt lawn laden with ragged mock-orange, lilac and syringa bushes, its stately grandeur dimmed but not destroyed by the shameful stains of the neglected years.

As he jumped down he was possessed by an odd sensation of old acquaintance--as if he had seen those tall white columns before--an illusory half-vision into some shadowy, fourth-dimensional landscape that belonged to his subconscious self, or that, glimpsed in some immaterial dream-picture, had left a faint-etched memory. Then, on a sudden, the vista vibrated and widened, the white columns expanded and shot up into the clouds, and from every bush seemed to peer a friendly black savage with woolly white hair!

"Wis.h.i.+ng-House!" he whispered. He looked about him, half expecting--so vivid was the illusion--to see a circle of rough huts under the trees and a mult.i.tude of ebony imps dancing in the suns.h.i.+ne. So Virginia had been that secret Never-Never Land, the wondrous fairy demesne of his childhood, with its amiable barbarians and its thickets of coursing grimalkins! The hidden country which his father's thoughts, sadly recurring, had painted to the little child that once he was, in the guise of an endless wonder-tale! His eyes misted over, and it seemed to him that moment that his father was very near.

Leaving the negro to unload his belongings, he traversed an overgrown path of mossed gravel, between box-rows frowsled like the manes of lions gone mad and smothered in an acc.u.mulation 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 the wooded knoll. Along half its side ran a wide porch that had once been gla.s.s-enclosed, now with panes gone and broken and putty-crumbling sashes. Below it lay the piteous remnants of a formal garden, grouped about an oval pool from whose center reared the slender yellowed shaft of a fountain in whose shallow cup a robin was taking its rain-water bath. The pool was dry, the tiles that had formed its floor were prized apart with weeds; ribald wild grape-vines ran amuck hither and thither; and over all was a drenching-sweet scent of trailing honeysuckle.

Threading his way among the dank undergrowth of the desolate wilderness, following the sound of running water, he came suddenly to a little lake fed from unseen pipes, that spread its lily-padded surface coolly and invitingly under a clump of elms. Beside it stood a spring-house with a sadly sagging roof. With a dead branch he probed the water's depth. "Ten feet and a pebble bottom," he said. The lake's overflow poured in a musical cascade down between fern-covered rocks, to join, far below, the stream he had seen from the gateway. Beyond this the ground rose again to a hill, densely forested and flanked by runnelled slopes of poverty-stricken broom-sedge as stark and sear as the bad-lands of an alkali desert. As he gazed, a bird bubbled into a wild song from the grape-vine tangle behind him, and almost at his feet a rabbit scudded blithely out of the weeds and darted back.

"Mine!" he said aloud with a rueful pride. "And for general run-downness, it's up to the advertis.e.m.e.nt." He looked musingly at the piteous wreck and ruin, his gaze sweeping down across the bared fields and unkempt forest. "Mine!" he repeated. "All that, I suppose, for it has the same earmarks of neglect. Between those cultivated stretches it looks like a wedge of Sahara gone astray." His gaze returned to the house. "Yet what a place it must have been in its time!" It had not sprung into being at the whim of any one man; it had grown mellowly and deliberately, expressing the multiform life and culture of a stock.

Generation after generation, father and son, had lived there and loved it, and, ministering to all, it had given to each of itself. The wild weird beauty was infecting him and the pathos of the desolation caught at his heart. He went slowly back to where his conductor sat on the lichened horse-block.

"We's heah," called Uncle Jefferson cheerfully. "Whut we gwineter do nex', suh? Reck'n Ah bettah go ovah ter Miss Dandridge's place fer er crowbah. Lawd!" he added, "ef he ain' got de key! Whut yo' think ob dat now?"

John Valiant was looking closely at the big key; for there were words, which he had not noted before, engraved in the ma.s.sive f.l.a.n.g.e: _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 gra.s.s-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 ma.s.sive door swung open and the leveling sun sent its late red rays into the gloomy interior.

He stood in a s.p.a.cious 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, bal.u.s.traded double staircase led to upper darkness. The floor, where his footprints had disturbed the even gray film of dust, was of fine close parquetry and had been generously strewn everywhere with a mica-like powder. He stooped and took up a pinch in his fingers, noting that it gave forth the curious spicy scent. Dim paintings in tarnished frames hung on the walls. From a niche on the break of the stairway looked down the round face of a tall Dutch clock, and on one side protruded a huge bulging something draped with a yellowed linen sheet. From its shape he guessed this to be an elk's head. Dust, undisturbed, lay thickly on everything, ghostly floating cobwebs crawled across his face, and a bat flitted out of a fireplace and vanished squeaking over his head. With Uncle Jefferson's help he opened the rear doors and windows, knocked up the rusted belts of the shutters and flung them wide.

But for the dust and cobwebs and the strange odor, mingled with the faint musty smell that pervades a sunless interior, the former owner of the house might have deserted it a week ago. On a wall-rack lay two walking-sticks and a gold-mounted hunting-crop, and on a great carved chest below it had been flung an opened book bound in tooled leather.

John Valiant picked this up curiously. It was _Lucile_. He noted that here and there pa.s.sages were marked with penciled lines--some light and femininely delicate, some heavier, as though two had been reading it together, noting their individual preferences.

He laid it back musingly, and opening a door, entered the large room it disclosed. This had been the dining-room. The walls were white, in alternate panels with small oval mirrors whose dust-covered surfaces looked like ground steel. At one end stood a crystal-k.n.o.bbed mahogany sideboard, holding gla.s.s candlesticks in the shape of Ionic columns--above it a quaint portrait of a lady in hoops and love-curls--and at the other end was a huge fireplace with rust-red fire-dogs and tarnished bra.s.s 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, n.o.bly s.m.u.tched of time. It had been at once library and living-room.

Gla.s.s-faced book-shelves ran along one side--well-stocked, as the dusty panes showed--and a huge pigeonholed desk glowered in the big bow-window that opened on to what had been the garden. On the wall hung an old map of Virginia. At one side the dark wainscoting yawned to a cavernous fireplace and inglenook with seats in black leather. By it stood a great square tapestry screen, showing a hunting scene, set in a heavy frame.

A great leather settee was drawn near the desk and beside this stood a reading-stand with a small china dog and a squat bronze lamp upon it.

In contrast to the orderly dining-room there was about this chamber a sense of untouched disorder--a desk-drawer jerked half-open, a yellowed newspaper torn across and flung into a corner, books tossed on desk and lounge, and in the fireplace a little heap of whitened ashes in which charred fragments told of letters and papers burned in haste. A bottle that had once held brandy and a grimy goblet stood on the desk, and in a metal ash-tray on the reading-stand lay a half-smoked cigar that crumbled to dust in the intruder's fingers.

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

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

Perhaps you were wicked. But you were strong, too."