The Valiants of Virginia Part 35

It was true, then! It _was_ Sa.s.soon's death that her mother mourned. The man in whose arms she had stood such a little while ago by the old dial of Damory Court was the son of the man who had killed him! She lifted her hands to her breast with a gesture of anguish, then dropped to her knees, buried her face on the dusty seat of one of the rickety horsehair chairs and broke into a wild burst of sobs, noiseless but terrible, that seemed to rise in her heart and tear themselves up through her breast.

"Oh, G.o.d," she whispered, "just when I was so happy! Oh, mother, mother!

You loved him, and your heart broke when he died. It was Valiant who broke it--Valiant--Valiant. His father!"

She slipped down upon the bare floor and crouched there shuddering and agonized, her disheveled hair wet with her tears. Was her love to be but the thing of an hour, a single clasp--and then, forever, nothing? His father's deed was not his fault. Yet how could she love a man whose every feature brought a pang to that mother she loved more than herself? So, over and over, the wheel of her thought turned in the same desolate groove, and over and over the paroxysms of grief and longing submerged her.

Dawn was paling the guttering candle and streaking the sky outside before she composed herself. She rose heavily, as white as a narcissus flower, winding back her hair from her quivering face, and struggling to repress the tearless sobs that still caught stranglingly at her breath.

The gray infiltrating light seemed gaunt and cruel, and the thin cheeping of waking sparrows on the lawn came to her with a haunting intolerable note of pain.

Noiselessly as she had descended, she crept again up the stair. As she pa.s.sed her mother's door, she paused a moment, and laying her arms out across it, pressed her lips to the dark grain of the wood.

CHAPTER XL

THE AWAKENING

The sun had pa.s.sed the meridian next day when Valiant awoke, from a sleep as deep as Abou ben Adhem's, yet one crowded with flying tiptoe dreams. Inchoate and of such flimsy material that the first whiff of reality dissipated them like smoke, these nevertheless left behind them a fragrance, a sensation of golden sweetness and delight. The one great fact of Shirley's love had lain at the core of all these honied images, and his mind was full of it as his eyes opened, wide all at once, to the new day.

He looked at his watch and rolled from the bed with a laugh. "Past twelve!" he exclaimed. "Good heavens! What about all the work I had laid out for to-day?"

He went down the stair in his bath-robe. The walls were still wreath-hung, but the rooms had been despoiled of their roses: only a dozen vases of blooms still unwithered remained of the greater glory; and in the yellow parlor--a great heap of shriveled petals, broken ivy and dewy-blue cedar berries, sprinkled with wisps of feathers and sequinned beads--lay the shattered remainders of last night's gaiety.

Presently he was splashing in the lake, shooting under his curved hand unerring jets of water at Chum, who danced about the rim barking, now venturing to wet a valorous paw, now scrambling up the bank to escape the watery javelins.

It was another perfect day, though far on the mountainous horizon a blue-black density promised otherwise for the morrow. The sun lay golden-soft over the huddled hills. Birds darted hither and thither, self-important b.u.mble-bees boomed from vine to vine and the shady lake-corners flashed with dragon-flies. The stately white swans turned their arching necks interrogatively toward the splashing, and the brown ducks, Peezletree and Pilgarlic, quacked and gobbled softly to each other among the lily-pads.

Valiant came up the terraces with his blood bounding to a new rapture.

Crossing the garden, he ran quickly to the little close which held the sun-dial and pulled a single great pa.s.sion-flower. He stood a moment holding it to his face, his nostrils catching its faint elusive perfume.

Only last night, under the moon, he had stood there with Shirley in his arms. A gush of the unbelievable sweetness of that moment poured over him. His face softened.

Standing with his sandaled feet deep in the white blossoms, the sun on his damp hair and the loose robe clinging to his moist limbs, he gave himself to a sudden day-dream. A wonderful waking dream of joy overflooding years of ambitionless ease; of the Damory Court that should be in days to come.

Summer would pa.s.s to autumn, with maple-foliage falling in golden rain, and fawn-brown fields scattered with life-everlasting, with the wine-red beauty of October, its purple pageant of crimsoning woods, its opal haze of Indian summer, and scent of burning leaves. Frost would lay its spectral stain over the old house like star-dew, and the scent of cider would linger under the apple-trees. In his mind's eye he could see Uncle Jefferson bent with the weight of hickory-logs for the eager chimney-piece, deep as the cas.e.m.e.nt of a fortress. Snow-sandaled winter would lay its samite on the dark blue ramparts of the mountains, and droop the naked boughs of the mock-orange bushes, dishevel the evergreens like rough-and-tumble schoolboys, and cover the frosted ruts of the Red Road. But in Damory Court would be cheerful warmth and friendly noises, with a loved woman standing before the crackling fireplace whose mottoed "_I clinge_" was for him written in her fringed and gentian eyes. So he stood dreaming--a dream in the open sunlight, of a future that should never end, of work and plan, of comradeship and understanding, of cheer and tenderness and clasping hands and clinging lips--of a woman's arms held out in that same adorable gesture of the tourney field, to little children's uncertain footsteps across that polished floor.

When he came from the little close there was a new mystery in the sunshine, a fresh and joyous meaning in the intense blue overarching of the imponderable sky. Every bird-note held its own love-secret. A wood-thrush sang it from a silver birch beside the summer-house, and a bob-white whistled it in the little valley beyond. Even the long trip-hammer of a far-away woodp.e.c.k.e.r beat a radiant tattoo.

He paused to greet the flaming peac.o.c.k that sent out a curdling screech, in which the tentative _potterack! potterack!_ of a guinea-fowl tangled itself softly. "Go on," he invited. "Explode all you want to, old Fire-Cracker. Hang your purple-and-gold pessimism! You only make the birds sound sweeter. Perhaps that's what you're for--who knows?"

He tried to work, but work was not for that marvelous afternoon. He wandered about the gardens, planning this or that addition: a little longer sweep to the pansy-bed--a clump of bull-rushes at the farther end of the lake. He peered into the stable: a saddle horse stood there now, but there should be more steeds stamping in those stalls one day, good horse-flesh bought with sound walnut timber from the hillside. How he and Shirley would go galloping over those gleaming roads, in that roseate future when she belonged to him!

Uncle Jefferson, from the door of the kitchens, watched him swinging about in the sunshine, whistling the _Indian Serenade_.

"Young mars' feel 'way up in de clouds _dis_ day," he said to Aunt Daphne. "He wake up ez glad ez ef he done 'fessed 'ligion las' night.

Well, all de folkses cert'n'y 'joyed deyselves. Ol' Mistah Fargo done eat 'bout forty uh dem jumbles. Ah heah him talkin' ter Mars' John.

'Reck'n yo' mus' hab er crackahjack cook down heah,' he say. Hyuh, hyuh!"

"G'way wid yo' blackgyardin'!" sniffed Aunt Daphne, delighted. "Don'

need ter come eroun' honey-caffuddlin' _me_!"

"Dat's whut he say," insisted Uncle Jefferson; "he did fo' er fac'!"

She drew her hands from the suds and looked at him anxiously.

"Jeffe'son, yo' reck'n Mars' John gwineter fetch dat Yankee 'ooman heah ter Dam'ry Co'ot, ter be ouah mistis?"

"Humph!" scoffed her spouse. "Dat high-falutin' gal whut done swaller de ramrod? No suh-ree-bob-tail! De oldah yo' gits, de mo' foolishah yo'

citations is! Don' yo' tek no mo' trouble on yo' back den yo' kin keek off'n yo' heels! _She_ ain' gwineter run _dis_ place, er ol' Devil-John tuhn ovah in he grave!"

Sunset found Valiant sitting in the music-room before the old square piano. In the shadowy chamber the keys of mother-of-pearl gleamed with dull colors under his fingers. He struck at first only broken chords, that became finally the haunting barcarole of _Tales of Hoffmann_. It was the air that had drifted across the garden when he had stood with Shirley by the sun-dial, in the moment of their first kiss. Over and over he played it, improvising dreamy variations, till the tender melody seemed the dear ghost of that embrace. At length he went into the library and in the crimsoning light sat down at the desk, and began to write:

"_Dear Bluebird of mine_:

"I can't wait any longer to talk to you. Less than a day has pa.s.sed since we were together, but it might have been eons, if one measured time by heart-beats. What have you been doing and thinking, I wonder? I have spent those eons in the garden, just wandering about, dreaming over those wonderful, wonderful moments by the sun-dial. Ah, dear little wild heart born of the flowers, with the soul of a bird (yet you are woman, too!) that old disk is marking happy hours now for me!

"How have I deserved this thing that has come to me?--sad bungler that I have been! Sometimes it seems too glad and sweet, and I am suddenly desperately afraid I shall wake to find myself facing another dull morning in that old, useless, empty life of mine. I am very humble, dear, before your love.

"Shall I tell you when it began with me? Not last night--nor the day we planted the ramblers. (Do you know, when your little muddy boot went trampling down the earth about their roots, I wanted to stoop down and kiss it? So dear everything about you was!) Not that evening at Rosewood, with the arbor fragrance about us. (I think I shall always picture you with roses all about you. Red roses the color of your lips!) No, it was not then that it began--nor that dreadful hour when you fought with me to save my life--nor the morning you sat your horse in the box-rows in that yew-green habit that made your hair look like molten copper. No, it began the first afternoon, when I sat in my motor with your rose in my hand! It has never left me since, by day or by night. And yet there are people in this age of airships and honking highways and typewriters who think love-at-first-sight is as out-of-date as our little grandmothers' hoops rusting in the garret. Ah, sweetheart, I, for one, know better!

"Suppose I had not come to Virginia--and known _you_! My heart jumps when I think of it. It makes one believe in fate. Here at the Court I found an old leaf-calendar--it sits at my elbow now, just as I came on it. The date it shows is May 14th, and its motto is: _Every man carries his fate upon a riband about his neck_. I like that.

"That first Sunday at St. Andrew's, I thought of a day--may it be soon!--when you and I might stand before that altar, with your people (my people, too, now) around us, and I shall hear you say: 'I, Shirley, take thee, John--' And to think it is really to come true! Do you remember the text the minister preached from? It was 'But all men perceive that they have riches, and that their faces shine as the faces of angels.' I think I shall go about henceforth with my face shining, so that all men will see that _I_ have riches--your love for me, dear.

"I am so happy I can hardly see the words--or perhaps it is that the sun has set. I am sending this over by Uncle Jefferson. Send me back just a word by him, sweetheart, to say I may come to you to-night. And add the three short words I am so thirsty to hear over and over--one verb between two p.r.o.nouns--so that I can kiss them all at once!"

He raised his head, a little flushed and with eyes brilliant, lighted a candle, sealed the letter with the ring he wore and despatched it.

Thereafter he sat looking into the growing dusk, watching the pale lamps of the constellations deepen to green gilt against the lapis-lazuli of the sky, and listening to the insect noises dulling into the woven chorus of evening. Uncle Jefferson was long in returning, and he grew impatient finally and began to prowl through the dusky corridors like a leopard, then to the front porch and finally to the driveway, listening at every turn for the familiar slouching step.

When at length the old negro appeared, Valiant took the note he brought, his heart beating rapidly, and carried it hastily in to the candle-light. He did not open it at once, but sat for a full minute pressing it between his palms as though to extract from the delicate paper the beloved thrill of her touch. His hand shook slightly as he drew the folded leaves from the envelope. How would it begin? "My Knight of the Crimson Rose?" or "Dear Gardener?" (She had called him Gardener the day they had set out the roses) or perhaps even "Sweetheart"? It would not be long, only a mere "Yes" or "Come to me," perhaps; yet even the shortest missive had its beginning and its ending.

He opened and read.

For an instant he stared unbelievingly. Then the paper crackled to a ball in his clutched hand, and he made a hoa.r.s.e sound which was half a cry, then sat perfectly still, his whole face shuddering. What he crushed in his hand was no note of tender love-phrases; it was an abrupt dismissal. The staggering contretemps struck the color from his face and left every nerve raw and quivering. To be "nothing to her, as she could be nothing to him"? He felt a ghastly inclination to laugh. Nothing to her! The meaning of the lines was monstrous. It was inconceivable.

Presently, his brows frowning heavily, he spread out the crumpled paper and reread it with bitter slowness, weighing each phrase. "Something which she had learned since she last saw him, which lay between them."

She had not known it, then, last night, when they had kissed beside the sun-dial! She had loved him then! What could there be that thrust them irrevocably apart?

He sprang up and paced the floor in a blinding pa.s.sion of resentment and revolt. "You _shall!_ you _shall_!" he said between his set teeth. "We belong to each other! There can be nothing, nothing to separate us!"

Again he pored over the page. "She could not see him again, could not even explain." The words seemed to echo themselves, bleak as hail on a prison pane. "If he went to St. Andrew's, he might find the reason why."

What could she mean by the reference to St. Andrew's? He caught at that as a clue. Could the old church tell him what had reared itself in such dismal fashion between them?

Without stopping to think of the darkness or that the friendly doors of the edifice would be closed, he caught up his hat and went swiftly down the drive to the road, along which he plunged breathlessly. The blue star-sprinkled sky was now streaked with clouds like faded orchids, and the shadows on the uneven ground under his hurried feet made him giddy.

Through the din and hurly-burly of his thoughts he was conscious of dimly-moving shapes across fences, the sweet breath of cows, and a negro pedestrian who greeted him in pa.s.sing. He was stricken suddenly with the thought that Shirley was suffering, too. It seemed incredible that he should now be raging along a country road at nightfall to find something that so horribly hurt them both.

It was almost dark--save for the starlight--when he saw the shadow of the square ivy-grown spire rearing stark from its huddle of foliage against the blurred background. He pushed open the gate and went slowly up the worn path toward the great iron-bound and hooded door. Under the larches on either hand the outlines of the gravestones loomed pallidly, and from the bell-tower came the faint inquiring cry of a small owl.