The Valiants of Virginia Part 42

In the flickering light she undressed and rearranged her hair, catching its silvery curling meshes in a low soft coil. Looking almost furtively about her, she put on the rose-colored gown, and pinned the withered flower-spray on its breast. She lighted more candles--in the wall-brackets and on the dressing-table--and the reading-lamp on the desk. Standing before her mirror then, she gazed long at the reflection--the poor faded rose-tint against the pale ivory of her slender neck, and the white hair. A little quiver ran over her lips.

"'Whatever the fact,'" she whispered, "'... you and no other, as long as I live.'"

She unlocked the bureau-drawer then, took out the letter, and seating herself by the table, read the remainder:

"I write this in the old library and Bristow holds my horse by the porch. He will give you this letter when I am gone.

"Last night we were dancing--all of us--at the ball. I can scarcely believe it was less than twelve hours ago! The calendar on my desk has a motto for each leaf. To-day's is this: 'Every man carries his fate on a riband about his neck.'

Last night I would have smiled at that, perhaps; to-day I say to myself, 'It's true--it's true!' Two little hours ago I could have sworn that whatever happened to me, Sa.s.soon would suffer no harm.

"Judith, I could not avoid the meeting. You will know the circ.u.mstances, and will see that it was forced upon me. But though we met on the field, I kept my promise. _Sa.s.soon did not fall by my hand._"

She had begun to tremble so that the paper shook in her hands, and from her breast, shattered by her quick breathing, the brown jessamine petals dusted down in her lap. It was some moments before she could calm herself sufficiently to read on.

"He fired at the signal and the shot went wide. I threw my pistol on the ground. Then--whether maddened by my refusal to fire, I can not tell--he turned his weapon all at once and shot himself through the breast. It was over in an instant. The seconds did not guess--do not even now, for it happened but an hour ago. As the code decrees, their backs were turned when the shots were fired. But there were circ.u.mstances I can not touch upon to you which made them disapprove--which made my facing him just then seem unchivalrous. I saw it in Bristow's face, and liked him the better for it, even while it touched my pride. They could not know, of course, that I did not intend to fire. Well, you and they will know it now! And Bristow has my pistol; he will find it undischarged--thank G.o.d, thank G.o.d!

"But will that matter to you? If you loved Sa.s.soon, I shall always in your mind stand as the indirect cause of his death!

It is for this reason I am going away--I could not bear to look in your accusing eyes and hear you say it. Nor could I bear to stay here, a reminder to you of such a horror. If you love me, you will write and call me back to you. Oh, Judith, Judith, my own dear love! I pray G.o.d you will!"

She put the letter down and laid her face upon it. "Beauty! Beauty!"

she whispered, dry-eyed. "I never knew! I never knew! But it would have made no difference, darling. I would have forgiven you anything--everything! You know that, now, dear! You have been certain of it all these years that have been so empty, empty to me!"

But when the faded rose-colored gown and the poor time-yellowed slippers had been laid back in the haircloth trunk; when, her door once more unbolted, she lay in her bed in the dim glow of the reading-lamp, with her curling silvery hair drifting across the pillow and the letter beneath it, at last the tears came coursing down her cheeks.

And with the loosening of her tears, gradually and softly came joy--infinitely deeper than the anguish and sense of betrayal. It poured upon her like a trembling flood. Long, long ago he had gone out of the world--it was only his memory that counted to her. Now that could no longer spell pain or emptiness or denial. It was engoldened by a new light, and in that light she would walk gently and smilingly to the end.

She found the slender golden chain that hung about her neck and opened the little black locket with its circlet of laureled pearls. And as she gazed at the face it held, which time had not touched with change, the sound of Shirley's harp came softly in through the window. She was playing an old-fashioned song, of the sort she knew her mother loved best:

"Darling, I am growing old.

Silver threads among the gold Shine upon my brow to-day; Life is fading fast away.

But, my darling, you will be Always young and fair to me."

Outside the leaves rustled, the birds called and the crickets sang their unending epithalamia of summer nights, and on this tone-background the melody rose tenderly and lingeringly like a haunting perfume of pressed flowers. She smiled and lifted the locket to her face, whispering the words of the refrain:

"Yes, my darling, you will be Always young and fair to me!"

The smile was still on her lips when she fell asleep, and the little locket still lay in her fingers.

CHAPTER XLVII

WHEN THE CLOCK STRUCK

"Sorrow weeps--sorrow sings." As Shirley played that night, the old Russian proverb kept running through her mind. When she had pushed the gold harp into its corner she threw herself upon a broad sofa in a feathery drift of chintz cushions and dropped her forehead in her laced fingers. A gilt-framed mirror hung on the opposite wall, out of which her sorrowful brooding eyes looked with an expression of dumb and weary suffering.

Her confused thoughts raced hither and thither. What would be the end?

Would Valiant forget after a time? Would he marry--Miss Fargo, perhaps?

The thought caused her a stab of anguish. Yet she herself could not marry him. The barrier was impa.s.sable!

She was still lying listlessly among the cushions when a step sounded on the porch and she heard Chilly Lusk's voice in the hall. With heavy hands Shirley put into place her disheveled hair and rose to meet him.

"I'm awfully selfish to come to-night," he said awkwardly; "no doubt you are tired out."

She disclaimed the weariness that dragged upon her spirits like leaden weights, and made him welcome with her usual cordiality. She was, in fact, relieved at his coming. At Damory Court, the night of the ball, when she had come from the garden with her lips thrilling from Valiant's kiss, she had suddenly met his look. It had seemed to hold a startled realization that she had remembered with a remorseful compunction. Since that night he had not been at Rosewood.

Ranston had lighted a pine-knot in the fireplace, and the walls were shuddering with crimson shadows. Her hand was shielding her eyes, and as she strove to fill the gaps in their somewhat spasmodic conversation with the trivial impersonal things that belonged to their old intimacy, the tiny flickering flames seemed to be darting unfriendly fingers plucking at her secret. Leaning from her nest of cushions she thrust the poker into the glowing resinous ma.s.s till sparks whizzed up the chimney's black maw in a torrent.

"How they fly!" she said. "Rickey Snyder calls it raising a blizzard in Hades. I used to think they flew up to the sky and became the littlest stars. What a pity we have to grow up and learn so much! I'd rather have kept on believing that when the red leaves in the woods whirled about in a circle the fairies were dancing, and that it was the gnomes who put the c.o.c.kle-burs in the hounds' ears."

She had been talking at random, gradually becoming shrinkingly conscious of his constrained and stumbling manner. She had, however, but half defined his errand when he came to it all in a burst.

"I--I can't get to it, somehow, Shirley," he said with sudden desperation, "but here it is. I've come to ask you to marry me. Don't stop me," he went on hurriedly, lifting his hand; "whatever you say, I must tell you. I've been trying to for months and months!" Now that he had started, it came with a boyish vehemence that both chilled and thrilled her. Even in her own desolation, and shrinking almost unbearably from the avowal, the hope and brightness in his voice touched her with pity. It seemed to her that life was a strange jumble of unescapable and incomprehensible pain. And all the while, in the young voice vibrant with feeling, her cringing ear was catching imagined echoes of that other voice, graver and more self-contained, but shaken by the same pa.s.sion, in that iteration of "I love you! I love you!"

His answer came to him finally in her silence, and he released her hands which he had caught in his own. They dropped, limp and unresponsive, in her lap. "Shirley," he said brokenly, "maybe you can't care for me--yet.

But if you will marry me, I--I'll be content with so little, till--you do."

She shook her head, her hair making dim flashes in the firelight. "No, Chilly," she said. "It makes me wretched to give you pain, but I must--I must! Love isn't like that. It doesn't come afterward. I know. I could never give you what you want. You would end by despising me, as I--should despise myself."

"I won't give up," he said incoherently. "I can't give up. Not so long as I know there's n.o.body else. At the ball I thought--I thought perhaps you cared for Valiant--but since he told me--"

He stopped suddenly, for she was looking at him from an ashen face. "He told me there was no reason why I should not try my luck," he said difficultly. "I asked him."

There was a silence, while he gazed at her, breathing deeply. Then he tried to laugh.

"All right," he said hoa.r.s.ely. "It--it doesn't matter. Don't worry."

She stretched out her hand to him in a gesture of wistful pain, and he held it a moment between both of his, then released it and went hurriedly out.

As the door closed, Shirley sat down, her head dropping into her hands like a storm-broken flower. Valiant had accepted the finality of the situation. With a wave of deeper hopelessness than had yet submerged her, she realized that, against her own decision, something deep within her had taken shy and secret comfort in his stubborn masculine refusal.

Against all fact, in face of the impossible, her heart had been clinging to this--as though his love might even attain the miraculous and somewhere, somehow, recreate circ.u.mstance. But now he, too, had bowed to the decree. A kind of utter apathetic wretchedness seized upon her, to replace the sharp misery that had so long been her companion--an empty numbness in which, in a measure, she ceased to feel.

An hour dragged slowly by and at length she rose and went slowly up the stairs. Her head felt curiously heavy, but it did not ache. Outside her mother's door, as was her custom, she paused mechanically to listen. A tiny pencil of light struck through the darkness and painted a spot of brightness on her gown. It came through the keyhole; the lamp in her mother's room was burning. "She has fallen asleep and forgotten it," she thought, and softly turning the k.n.o.b, pushed the door noiselessly open and entered.

A moment she stood listening to the low regular breathing of the sleeper. The reading-lamp shed a shaded glow on the pillow with its spread-out silver hair, and on the delicate hands clasped loosely on the coverlet. Shirley came close and looked down on the placid face. It was smooth as a child's and a smile touched it lightly as if some pleasant sleep-thought had just laid rosy fingers on the dreaming lips. The light caught and sparkled from something bright that lay between her mother's hands. It was the enamel brooch that held her own baby curl, and she saw suddenly that what she had all her life thought was a solid pendant, was now open locket-wise and that the two halves clasped a miniature. It came to her at once that the picture must be Sa.s.soon's, and a quick thrill of pity and yearning welled up through her own dejection. Stooping, she looked at it closely. She started as she did so, for the face on the little disk of ivory was that of John Valiant.

An instant she stared unbelievingly. Then recollection of the resemblance of which Valiant had told her rushed to her, and she realized that it must be the picture of his father. The fact shocked and confounded her. Why should her mother carry in secret the miniature of the man who had killed--

Shirley's breath stopped. She felt her face tinging and a curious weakness came on her limbs. Why indeed, unless--and the thought was like a wild prayer in her mind--she had been mistaken in her surmise?

Thoughts came thronging in panic haste: the fourteenth of May and the cape jessamines--these might point no less to Valiant than to Sa.s.soon.

But her mother's fainting at the sight of the son--the eager interest she had displayed in Shirley's accounts of him, from the episode of the rose and the bulldog to the tournament ball--seemed now to stand out in a new light, throbbing and roseate. Could it be? Had she been stumbling along a blind trail, misled by the cunning dovetailing of circ.u.mstance?

Her heart was beating stiflingly. If she should be mistaken _now_! She dashed her hand across her eyes as though to compel their clearness, and looked again.