The Valiants of Virginia Part 23

He stepped down to the graveled drive and followed it to the gate, then, bareheaded, took the Red Road. Along this highway he had rattled in Uncle Jefferson's crazy hack--with her red rose in his hand. The musky scent of the pressed leaves in the book in his pocket seemed to be all about him.

The odor of living roses, in fact, was in the air. It came on the scarce-felt breeze, a heavy calling perfume. He walked on, keeping the road by the misty infiltrating shimmer of the stars, with a sensation rather of gliding than of walking. Now and then from some pasture came the snort and whinny of horses or the grunt of a frog from a marshy sink, and once, where a narrow path joined the road, he felt against his trousers the sniffing nose of a silent and friendly puppy. It occurred to him that if, as scientists say, colors emit sound-tones, scents also should possess a music of their own: the honeysuckle fragrance, maybe--soft mellow fluting as of diminutive wind-instruments; the far-faint sickly odor of lilies--the upper register of faery violins; this spicy breath of roses--blending, throbbing chords like elfin echoes of an Italian harp. The fancy pleased him; he could imagine the perfume now in the air carried with it an under-music, like a ghostly harping.

It came to him at the same instant that this was no mere fancy.

Somewhere in the languorous night a harp was being played. He paused and listened intently, then went on toward the sound. Presently he became aware that he had pa.s.sed it, had left it on one side, and he went back, stumbling along the low stone wall till it opened to a shadowy lane, full of foliaged whispers. The rose scent had grown stronger; it was almost, in that heavy air, as if he were breasting an etherial sea of attar. He felt as if he were treading on a path of rose-leaves, down which the increasing melody flowed crimsonly to him, calling, calling.

He stopped stock-still. He had been skirting a close-cropped hedge of box. This had ended abruptly and he was looking straight up a bar of green-yellow radiance from a double doorway. The latter opened on a porch and the light, flung across this, drenched an arbor of climbing roses, making it stand out a ma.s.s of woven rubies set in emerald.

He drew a long sigh of more than delight, for framed in the doorway he saw a figure in misty white, leaning to the gilded upright of a harp. He knew at once that it was Shirley. Holding his breath, he came closer, his feet m.u.f.fled in the thick gra.s.s. She wore a gown of some gauze-like material sprinkled with knots of embroidery and with her lifted face and filmy aureole of hair, she looked like a tall golden candle. He stood in the dense obscurity, one hand gripping the gnarled limb of a catalpa, his eyes following the shapely arms from wrist to shoulder, the fingers straying across the strings, the bending cheek caressing the carved wood. She was playing the melody of Sh.e.l.ley's _Indian Serenade_--touching the chords softly and tenderly--and his lips moved, molding themselves soundlessly to the words:

"I arise from dreams of thee, In the first sweet sleep of night, When the winds are breathing low And the stars are shining bright; I arise from dreams of thee, And a spirit in my feet Has led me--who knows how?

To thy chamber window, Sweet!"

The serenade died in a single long note. As if in answer to it there rose a flood of bird-music from beyond the arbor--jets of song that swelled and rippled to a soaring melody. She heard it, too, for the gracile fingers fell from the strings. She listened a moment, with head held to one side, then sprang up and came through the door and down the steps.

He hesitated a moment, then a single stride took him from the shadow.

CHAPTER XXVII

BEYOND THE BOX-HEDGE

As he greeted her, his gaze plunged deep into hers. She had recoiled a step, startled, to recognize him almost instantly. He noted the shrinking and thought it due to a stabbing memory of that forest-horror.

His first words were prosaic enough:

"I'm an unconscionable trespa.s.ser," he said. "It must seem awfully prowly, but I didn't realize I was on private property till I pa.s.sed the hedge there."

As her hand lay in his, a strange fancy stirred in him: in that wood-meeting she had seemed something witch-like, the wilful spirit of the pa.s.sionate spring herself, mixed of her aerial essences and jungle wildernesses; in this scented dim-lit close she was grave-eyed, subdued, a paler pensive woman of under half-guessed sadnesses and haunting moods. With her answer, however, this gravity seemed to slip from her like a garment. She laughed lightly.

"I love to prowl myself. I think sometimes I like the night better than the day. I believe in one of my incarnations I must have been a panther."

"Do you know," he said, "I followed the scent of those roses? I smelled it at Damory Court."

"It goes for miles when the air is heavy as it is to-night. How terrible it would be if roses were intoxicating like poppies! I get almost tipsy with the odor sometimes, like a cat with catnip."

They both laughed. "I'm growing superst.i.tious about flowers," he said.

"You know a rose figured in our first meeting. And in our last--"

She shrank momentarily. "The cape jessamines! I shall always think of _that_ when I see them!"

"Ah, forgive me!" he begged. "But when I remember what you did--for me!

Oh, I know! But for you, I must have died."

"But for me you wouldn't have been bitten. But don't let's talk of it."

She shivered suddenly.

"You are cold," he said. "Isn't that gown too thin for this night air?"

"No, I often walk here till quite late. Listen!"

The bird song had broken forth again, to be answered this time by a rival's in a distant thicket. "My nightingale is in good voice."

"I never heard a nightingale before I came to Virginia. I wonder why it sings only at night."

"What an odd idea! Why, it sings in the day-time, too."

"Really? But I suppose it escapes notice in the general chorus. Is it a large bird?"

"No; smaller than a thrush. Only a little bigger than a robin. Its nest is over there in that hedge--a tiny loose cup of dried oak-leaves, lined with hair, and the eggs are olive color. How pretty the hedge looks now, all tangled with firefly sparks!"

"Doesn't it! Uncle Jefferson calls them 'lightning-bugs.'"

"The name is much more picturesque. But all the darky sayings are. I heard him telling our butler once, of something, that 'when de debble heah dat, he gwine sen' fo' he smellin'-salts.' Who else would ever have put it that way? Do you find him and Aunt Daph useful?"

"He has been a G.o.dsend," he said fervently; "and her cooking has taught me to treat her with pa.s.sionate respect. As Uncle Jefferson says she can 'put de big pot in de li'l one en mek soup outer de laigs.' He's teaching me now about flowers--it's surprising how many kinds he knows.

He's a walking herbarium."

"Come and see mine," she said. "Roses are our specialty--we have to live up to the Rosewood name. But beyond the arbors, are beds and beds of other flowers. See--by this big tree are speedwell and delphinium. The tree is a black-walnut. It's a dreadful thing to have one as big as that. When you want something that costs a lot of money you go and look at it and wonder which you want most, that particular luxury or the tree. I know a girl who had two in her yard only a little bigger than this, and she went to Europe on them. But so far I've always voted for the tree."

"Perhaps you've not been sufficiently tempted."

"Maybe," she a.s.sented, and in a bar of light from a window, stooped over a glimmering patch to pull him a sprig of bluebells. "The wildings are hard to find," she said, "so I grow a few here. What ghostly tintings they show in this half-light! My corn-flowers aren't in bloom yet. Here are wild violets. They are the single ones, you know, the kind two children play c.o.c.k-fighting with." She picked two of the blossoms and hooked their heads together. "See, both pull till one rooster's head drops off." She bent again and pa.s.sed her hand lovingly over a ma.s.s of starry blooms. "And here are some bluet, the violet roosters' little pale-blue hens. How does _your_ garden come on?"

"Famously. Uncle Jefferson has shanghaied a half-dozen negro gardeners--from where I can't imagine--and he's having the time of his life hectoring over them. He refers to the upper and lower terraces as 'up- and down-stairs.' I've got seeds, but it will be a long time before they flower."

"Oh, would you like some slips?" she cried. "Or, better still, I can give you the roses already rooted--Mad Charles and Marechal Neil and Cloth of Gold and cabbage and ramblers. We have geraniums and fuchsias, too, and the coral honeysuckle. That's different from the wild one, you know."

"You are too good! If you would only advise me where to set them! But I dare say you think me presuming."

She turned her full face to him. "'Presuming!' You're punishing me now for the dreadful way I talked to you about Damory Court--before I knew who you were. Oh, it was unpardonable! And after the splendid thing you had done--I read about it that same evening--with your money, I mean!"

"No, no!" he protested. "There was nothing splendid about it. It was only pride. You see the Corporation was my father's great idea--the thing he created and put his soul into--and it was foundering. I know that would have hurt him. One thing I've wanted to say to you, ever since the day we talked together--about the duel. I want to say that whatever lay behind it, my father's whole life was darkened by that event. Now that I can put two and two together, I know that it was the cause of his sadness."

"Ah, I can believe that," she replied.

"I think he had only two interests--myself and the Corporation. So you see why I'd rather save that and be a beggar the rest of my natural life. But I'm not a beggar. Damory Court alone is worth--I know it now--a hundred times what I left."

"But to give up your own world--to let it all slip by, and to come here to a spot that to you must seem desperately dull."

"I came here because the door of the old life was closed to me."

"You closed it yourself," she answered quickly.

"Maybe. But for whatever reason, it was closed. And you call this dull--_dull_? Why, my life seems never to have had real interest before!"