The Valiants of Virginia Part 3

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

"_Dear Sir_:

"Enclosed please find, with t.i.tle-deed, a memorandum opened in your name by the late John Valiant some years before his death.

It was his desire that the services indicated in connection with this estate should continue till this date. We hand you herewith our check for $236.20 (two hundred and thirty-six dollars and twenty cents), the balance in your favor, for which please send receipt,

"And oblige, "Yours very truly, "(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 disburs.e.m.e.nts credited to "Inspection and care." The tax receipts were pinned to the account.

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

Puzzledly he unfolded the crackling thing in his hands. "Why," he said half aloud, "it's--it's a deed made over to me." He overran it swiftly.

"Part of an old Colony grant ... a plantation in Virginia, twelve hundred odd acres, given under the hand of a vice-regal governor in the sixteenth century. I had no idea t.i.tles in the United States went back so far as that!" His eye fled to the end. "It was my father's! What could he have wanted of an estate in Virginia? It must have come into his hands in the course of business."

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

Who ever heard of Virginia nowadays, except as a place people came _from_? The princ.i.p.al 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 ma.s.se, coming with the halo about them of old Southern names and legends of planter hospitality--and had married Northern women, till the announcement in the marriage column that the fathers of bride and bridegroom had fought in opposing armies at the battle of Mana.s.sas had grown as hackneyed as the stereotyped "Whither are we drifting?"

editorial. But was Virginia herself anything more, in this twentieth century, than a hot-blooded, high-handed, prodigal legend, kept alive in the North by the banquets of "Southern Societies" and annual poems on "The Lost Cause"?

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

"It will interest readers of this section of Virginia (the paragraph began) to learn, from a recent transfer received for record at the County Clerk's Office, that Damory Court has pa.s.sed 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 circ.u.mstance alone has perhaps tended to keep alive a melancholy story which may well be forgotten."

He read the elaborate, rather stilted phraseology in the twenty-year-old paper with a wondering interest. "An old house," he mused, "with a bad name. Probably he couldn't sell it, and maybe n.o.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 beautifully engraved certificates of stock in some zinc-mine whose imaginary bottom had dropped out ten years ago. Here was real property, in size, at least, a gentleman's domain, on which real taxes had been paid during a long term--a sort of hilarious consolation prize, hurtling to him out of the void like the magic gift of the traditional fairy G.o.d-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 n.o.ble army of rent-payers. When my twenty-eight hundred is gone, I could live down there a landed proprietor, and by the same mark an honorary colonel, and raise the cabbages I was talking about--eh, Chum?--while you stalk rabbits. How does that strike you?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You may never care to live at Damory Court. Maybe the life you will know so well by the time you read this will have welded you to itself. If so, well and good. Then leave the old place to your son. But there is such a thing as racial habit, and the call of blood. And I know there is such a thing, too, as fate.

'Every man carries his fate on a riband about his neck'; so the Moslem put it. It was my fate to go away, and I know now--since distance is not made by miles alone--that I myself shall never see Damory Court again. But life is a strange wheel that goes round and round and comes back to the same point again and again. And it may be your fate to go back. Then perhaps you will cry (but, oh, not on the old white bear's-skin rug--never again with me holding your small, small hand!)--

"'Wishing-House! Wishing-House! Where are you?'

"And this old parchment deed will answer answer--

"'Here I am, Master; here I am!'

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

CHAPTER VI

A VALIANT OF VIRGINIA

For a long time John Valiant sat motionless, the opened letter in his hand, staring at nothing. He had the sensation, spiritually, of a traveler awakened with a rude shock amid wholly unfamiliar surroundings.

He had pa.s.sed through so many conflicting states of emotion that afternoon and evening that he felt numb.

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

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

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

A curious pride, new-born and self-conscious, was dawning in him. He was descended from ancestors who had been no weaklings. A Valiant had settled on those acres under a royal governor, before the old frontier fighting was over and the Indians had sullenly retired to the westward.

The sons of those who had braved sea and savages had bowed their strong bodies and their stronger hearts to raze the forests and turn the primeval jungles into golden plantations. Except as regarded his father, Valiant had never known ancestral pride before. He had been proud of his strong and healthy frame, of his ability to ride like a dragoon, unconsciously, perhaps, a little proud of his wealth. But pride in the larger sense, reverence for the past based upon a respect for ancient lineage, he had never known until this moment.

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

There below him stretched the great canoned city, its avenues roaring with nightly gaiety, its roadways bright with the beams of shuttling motors, 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 suddenly that he was sick of it all: its jostle and glitter, its mad race after bubbles, its hideous under-surface contrasts of wealth and squalor, its lukewarm friendships and false standards which he had been so bitterly unlearning. He knew that, for all his self-pity, he was at heart full of a tired longing for wide uncrowded nature, for green breezy interludes and a sky of untainted sunlight or peaceful stars.

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

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

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

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

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

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