The Valiants of Virginia Part 21

"She's growing younger," the doctor said. "Sixteen or seventeen years ago she was very feeble and the Ladies' Guild agreed to support her for life on consideration that she will her house and lot to the church, next door. Mrs. Poly Gifford refers to her now, I believe, as a dispensation of Providence. Did she bring the apple-b.u.t.ter herself?"

"No," smiled John Valiant. "She sent it afterward by Miss Rickey Snyder."

The major stroked his imperial. "Rickey's an inst.i.tution," he said. "I hope she gave us all good characters. I'd hate to have Rickey Snyder down on me! Have you heard her history?"

"Yes, Uncle Jefferson told me."

"I'm glad of that," shot out the doctor. "Now, we needn't have it from Bristow. He's as fond of oratory as a maltese cat is of milk."

"He gave me a hint of the major's powers in that direction, in his account of Greef King's trial."

"Humph!" retorted the doctor gloomily, "that was in his palmy days.

He's fallen off since then. Plenty of others been here to bore you, I reckon, though of course you don't remember all the names yet."

Valiant summoned Uncle Jefferson.

"Yas, suh," grinned the old darky pridefully, "de folkses mos' lam de face off'n dat-ar ol' knockah. Day 'fo' yistiddy dah wuz Mars' Quarles en Jedge en Mis' Chalmahs. De jedge done sen' er streng o' silvah perch."

"His place is Gladden Hall," the major said, "one of the finest mansions round here. A sportsman, sah, and one of the best pokah hands in the county."

"--En yistiddy dah's Mars' Chilly Lusk en de Pen'letons en de Byloes en Mars' Livy Stowe f'om Seven Oaks, en de Woodrows en--"

"That'll do," said the major. "I'll just run over the tax-list; it'll be quicker. There are kindly people here, sah," he went on, "but after all, it's a narrow circle. We have our little pleasures and courtships and scandals and we are satisfied with them. We're not gadabouts. Our girls haven't all flirted around Europe and they don't talk of the Pincio and the Champs Elysees as if they were Capitol Hill and Madison Street in Richmond. But if I may say so, sah, I think in Virginia we get a little closer to life as G.o.d Almighty intended it than people in some of your big cities."

"Come, Bristow," interrupted the doctor, "tell the truth. This dog-gone borough is as dull as a mud fence sticking with tadpoles. There isn't a man in it with a soul above horse-flesh."

The doctor's shafts to-day, however, glanced off the major's buckler of geniality like the Lilliputian arrows from Gulliver's eye-gla.s.s. "I hope you ride, Mr. Valiant?" the latter asked genially.

"I'm fond of it," said Valiant, "but I have no horse as yet."

"I was thinking," pursued the major, "of the coming tournament."

"Tournament?"

The doctor cut in. "A ridiculous c.o.c.k-a-doodle-do which gives the young bucks a chance to rig out in silly toggery and prance their colts before a lot of petticoats!"

"It's an annual affair," explained the major; "a kind of spectacle.

For many years, by the way, it has been held on a part of this estate--perhaps you will have no objection to its use this season?--and at night there is a dance at the Country Club. By the way, you must let me introduce you there to-morrow. I've taken the liberty already of putting your name up."

"Good lord!" growled the doctor, aside. "He counts himself _young_! If I'd reached your age, Bristow--"

"You have," said the major, nettled. "Four years ago!--As I was saying, Mr. Valiant, they ride for a prize. It's a very ancient thing--I've seen references to it in a colonial ma.n.u.script in the Byrd Library at Westover. No doubt it's come down directly from the old jousts."

"You don't mean to say," cried his hearer in genuine astonishment, "that Virginia has a lineal descendant of the tourney?"

The major nodded. "Yes. Certain sections of Kentucky used to have it, too, but it has died out there. It exists now only in this state. It's a curious thing that the old knightly meetings of the middle ages should survive to-day only on American soil and in a corner of Virginia."

Doctor Southall, meanwhile, had set his gaze on the litter of pamphlets.

He turned with an appreciative eye. "You're beginning in earnest. The Agricultural Department. And the Congressional frank."

"I've gone to the fountainhead," said Valiant. "I'm trying to find out possibilities. I've sent samples of the soil. It's lain fallow so long it has occurred to me it may need special treatment."

The major pulled his mustache meditatively. "Not a bad idea," he said.

"He's starting right--eh, Southall? You're bringing the view-point of practical science to bear on the problem, Mr. Valiant."

"I'm afraid I'm a sad sketch as a scientist," laughed the other.

"My point of view has to be a somewhat practical one. I must be self-supporting. Damory Court is a big estate. It has grain lands and forest as well. If my ancestors lived from it, I can. It's not only that," he went on more slowly, "I want to make the most of the place for its own sake, too. Not only of its possibilities for earning, but of its natural beauties. I lack the resources I once had, but I can give it thought and work, and if they can bring Damory Court back to anything even remotely resembling what it once was, I'll not spare either."

The major smote his knee and even the doctor's face showed a grim, if transient approval. "I believe you'll do it!" exclaimed the former. "And let me say, sah, that the neighborhood is not unaware of the splendid generosity which is responsible for the present lack of which you speak."

Valiant put out his hand with a little gesture of deprecation, but the other disregarded it. "Confound it, sah, it was to be expected of a Valiant. Your ancestors wrote their names in capital letters over this county. They were an up and down lot, but good or bad (and, as Southall says, I reckon"--he nodded toward the great portrait above the couch--"they weren't all little woolly lambs) they did big things in a big way."

Valiant leaned forward eagerly, a question on his lips. But at the moment a diversion occurred in the shape of Uncle Jefferson, who reentered, bearing a tray on which sat sundry jugs and clinking gla.s.ses, glowing with white and green and gold.

"You old humbug," said the doctor, "don't you know the major's that poisoned with mint-juleps already that he can't get up before eight in the morning?"

"Well, suh," t.i.ttered Uncle Jefferson, "Ah done foun' er mint-baid down below de kitchens dis mawnin'. Yo'-all gemmun' 'bout de bigges' expuhts in dis yeah county, en Ah reck'n Mars' Valiant sho' 'sist on yo'

samplin' et."

"Sah," said the major feelingly, turning to his host, "I'm proud to drink your health in the typical beverage of Virginia!" He touched gla.s.ses with Valiant and glared at the doctor, who was sipping his own thoughtfully. "In my travels," he said, "I have become acquainted with a drink called pousse-cafe, which contains all the colors of the rainbow.

But for chaste beauty, sah, give me this. No garish combination, you will observe. A frosted goblet, golden at the bottom as an autumn corn-ear, shading into emerald and then into snow. On top a white rim of icebergs with the mint sprigs like fairy pine-trees. Poems have been written on the julep, sah."

"They make good epitaphs, too," observed the doctor.

"I notice your gla.s.s isn't going begging," the major retorted. "Unc'

Jefferson, that's as good mint as grew in the gyarden of Eden. See that those lazy n.i.g.g.e.rs of yours don't grub the patch out by mistake."

"Yas, _suh_," said Uncle Jefferson, as he retired with the tray. "Ah gwineter put er fence eroun' dat ar baid 'fo' sundown."

The question that had sprung to Valiant's lips now found utterance. "I saw you look at the portrait there," he said to the major. "Which of my ancestors is it?"

The other got up and stood before the mantelpiece in a Napoleonic att.i.tude. "That," he said, fixing his eye-gla.s.ses, "is your great-grandfather, Devil-John Valiant."

"Devil-John!" echoed his host. "Yes, I've heard the name."

The doctor guffawed. "He earned it, I reckon. I never realized what a sinister expression that missing optic gives the old ruffian. There was a skirmish during the war on the hillside yonder and a bullet cut it out. When we were boys we used to call him 'Old One-Eye.'"

"It interests me enormously." John Valiant spoke explosively.

"The stories of Devil-John would fill a mighty big book," said the major. "By all accounts he ought to have lived in the middle ages."

Crossing the library, he looked into the dining-room. "I thought I remembered. The portrait over the console there is his wife, your great-grandmother. She was a wonderful swimmer, by the way," he went on, returning to his seat. "It was said she had swum across the Potomac in her hunting togs. When Devil-John heard of the feat, he swore he would marry her and he did. It was a love-match, no doubt, on her side; he must have been one to take with women. Even in those days, when men still lived picturesquely and weren't all cut to the same pattern, he must have been unique. There was something satanically splendid and savage about him. My great-uncle used to say he stood six feet two, and walked like an emperor on a love-spree. He was a man of sky-high rages, with fingers that could bend a gold coin double.

"They say he bet that when he brought his bride home, she should walk into Damory Court between rows of candlesticks worth twenty-thousand dollars. He made the wager good, too, for when she came up those steps out there, there was a row of ten candles burning on either side of the doorway, each held by a young slave worth a thousand dollars in the market. The whole state talked of the wedding and for a time Damory Court was ablaze with tea-parties and dances. That was in the old days of coaching and red-heeled slippers, when Virginia planters lived like viceroys and money was only to throw to the birds. They were fast livers and hard drinkers, and their pa.s.sions ran away with them. Devil-John's knew neither saddle nor bridle. Some say he grew jealous of his wife's beauty. There were any number of stories told of his cruelties to her that aren't worth repeating. She died early--poor lady--and your grandfather was the only issue. Devil-John himself lived to be past seventy, and at that age, when most men were stacking their sins and groaning with the gout, he was dicing and fox-hunting with the youngest of them. He always swore he would die with his boots on, and they say when the doctor told him he had only a few hours leeway, he made his slaves dress him completely and prop him on his horse. They galloped out so, a negro on either side of him. It was a stormy night, black as the Earl of h.e.l.l's riding-boots, with wind and lightning, and he rode cursing at both. There's an old black-gum tree a mile from here that they still call Devil-John's tree. They were just pa.s.sing under it when the lightning struck it. Lightning has no effect on the black-gum, you know. The bolt glanced from the tree and struck him between the two slaves without harming either of them. It killed his horse, too. That's the story. To be sure at this date n.o.body can separate fact from fiction. Possibly he wasn't so much worse than the rest of his neighbors--not excepting even the parsons. 'Other times, other manners.'"

"They weren't any worse than the present generation," said the doctor malevolently. "Your four bottle men then knew only claret: now they punish whisky-straight. They still trice up their gouty legs to take after harmless foxes. And I dare say the women will be wearing red-heeled slippers again next year."

The major buried his nose in his julep for a long moment before he looked at the doctor blandly. "I agree with you, Bristow," he said; "but it's the first time I ever heard you admit that much good of your ancestors."

"Good!" said the doctor belligerently. "Me? I don't! I said people now were no better. As for the men of that time, they were a cheap swaggering lot of bullies and swash-bucklers. When I read history I'm ashamed to be descended from them."