Hallie Erminie Rives

“ Shirley saw the horse coming down the line, its rider bareheaded now, and her heart began to race wildly. Beyond wanting him to take part, she had not thought. She looked about her, suddenly dismayed. People were smiling at her and clapping their hands. From the other end of the stand she saw Nancy Chalmers throwing her a kiss, and beside her a tall pale girl in champagne-color staring through a jeweled lorgnette.
She was conscious all at once that the flanneled rider was very close ... that his pike-point, with its big red blossom, was stretching up to her. ”

“ This was a spacious level meadow into which debouched the ravine on whose rim he had stood with Shirley on that unforgettable day. But its stake-and-ridered fence enclosed now no mere stretch of ill-kept sward. Busy scythes, rollers and grass-cutters from the Country Club had smoothed and shaven a rectangle in its center till it lay like a carpet of crushed green velvet, set in an expanse of life-everlasting and pale budding goldenrod.
He halted his car at the end of the field and snapped a leash in the bulldog’s collar. ”

“ And what had lain always in the back of her mind as a half-formed intention, had become a self-admitted purpose during the motor ride. So as she watched them in the waltz, seasoned artificialist as she was, Katharine for a breath had had need of all her address to keep the ball of conversation sparklingly a-roll. Her natural assurance, however, came quickly to her aid. She had been an acknowledged beauty too many seasons—had known John Valiant, or believed she had, too long and too well—to allow the swift keen edge of trepidation that had touched her to cool into prescience. ”

“ The wild honeysuckle was alive with quick whirrings of hummingbirds, and he hung his pocket-mirror from a twig and shaved with a woodsy chorus in his ears.
He came up the trail again to find the reading-stand transferred to the porch and laid with a white cloth on which was set a steaming coffee-pot, with fresh cream, saltless butter and crisp hot biscuit; and as he sat down, with a sigh of pure delight, in his dressing-gown—a crêpy Japanese thing redeemed from womanishness by the bold green bamboo of its design—Uncle Jefferson planted before him a generous platter of bacon, eggs and potatoes. ”

“ As he came up the path the doctor opened his office door. Standing on the threshold, his legs wide apart and his hands under his coat-tails, he nodded grimly across the marigolds. “How do you feel this morning, Major.”
“Feel?” rumbled the major; “the way any gentleman ought to feel this time of the morning, sah. Like hell, sah.”
The doctor bent his gaze on the hilarious blossom in the other’s lapel. “If I were you, Bristow,” he said scathingly, “I reckon I’d quit galivanting around to bridge-fights with perfumery on my handkerchief every evening. It’s a devil of an example to the young.” ”

“ The coppery whorls eddied and merged themselves, showing under-glints of russet and dun-gold, curling and clasping in flame-tinted furrows like a living field of gold under a silver harrow. Outside the window [Pg 242] the stars lay on the lapis-lazuli sky like white flower-petals on still deep water, and in the pasture across the hedges she could see the form of Selim, her chestnut hunter, standing ghostly, like an equine sentinel.
When that shimmering glory lay in two thick braids against her shoulders, Shirley rose with a sigh and went to her writing-desk, where lay her diary. ”

“ For this he had come to Virginia. For this fate had turned and twisted a thousand ways. Through the riot of his senses, like a silver blaze, ran the legend of the calendar: “Every man carries his fate [Pg 327] upon a riband about his neck.” For her, something seemed to pass from her soul with that kiss, some deep irrevocable thing, shy but fiercely strong, that had sprung to him at that lip-contact as steel to magnet. The foliage about them flared up in green light and the ground under her feet rose and fell like deep sea-waves. ”

“ The Virginia creeper waved gently to and fro in a soundless breeze that was little more than a whisper. The sky was heavily sprinkled with stars whose wan clustering was blotted here and there by floating shreds of cloud, like vaporous, filmy leaves stripped by some upper gale from the Tree of Heaven. The lawn lay a mass of mysterious shadow, stirring with faint chirps and rustles and laden with the poignant scent of the garden honeysuckle. ”

“ 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 mass of woven rubies set in emerald. ”

“ The curtain began to wave in a little wind that whispered in the silk, and somewhere in the yard below she could hear Selim nipping the clover.
She was to go or the “trouble-cloud” would carry him away!
A strange expression of mingled fright and resolve grew on her face. She ran on tiptoe to her wardrobe and with frantic haste dragged out a rough cloak that fell over her soft house-gown, covering it to the feet. It had a peaked hood falling from its collar and into this she thrust the resentful masses of her hair. ”

“ The music of a two-step was languishing when, a little later, Valiant and Shirley strolled down between the garden box-hedges, cypress-shaped and lifting spire-like toward a sky which bent, a silent canopy of mauve and purplish blue. The moon drowsed between the trees like a great yellow moth, and the shadows of the branches lay on the ground like sharp bluish etchings on light green paper. Behind them Damory Court lay a nest of woven music and laughter. ”

“ Shirley’s gown was of pure white: her arms were swathed in tulle, crossed with straps of seed-pearl, over which hung long semi-flowing sleeves of satin, and from her shoulders rose a stiff pointed medieval collar of Venetian lace, against whose pale traceries her bronze hair glowed with rosy lights. The edge of the square-cut corsage was powdered with the pearls and against their sheen her breast and neck had the soft creamy ivory of magnolia buds. ”

“ Thick branches of holly, axed from the hollows by Uncle Jefferson, lined the balustrade of the stairway, the burnished green of ivy leaves was twined with the prisms of the chandelier in the big yellow-hung parlor, and bands of twisted laurel were festooned along the upper walls. The massed green was a setting for a prodigal use of flowers. Everywhere wild blossoms showed their spreading clusters, and he had searched every corner of the estate, even climbing the ragged forest slope, to the tawdry edge of Hell’s Half-Acre, to plunder each covert of its hidden blooms. ”

“ She fainted, Bristow, when she saw him—Shirley told me about it. Her mother has made her think it was the scent of the roses! He’s his father’s living image, and he’s brought the past back with him. Every sound of his voice, every sight of his face, will be a separate stab! Oh, his mere presence will be enough for Judith to bear. But with her heart in the grave with Sassoon, what would love between Shirley and young Valiant mean to her? ”

“ It was Sassoon’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. ”

“ Thus her mind had come to hold a double image: the grave man these shadowed forth, and the man she had loved, whose youthful face was in the locket she wore always on her breast. It was this face that was printed on her heart, and when John Valiant had stood before her on the porch at Rosewood, it had seemed to have risen, instinct, from that old grave. ”

“ 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 casement 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. ”

“ The wilderness garden to-be was still a stretch of raked and level soil, but all across this slender green spears were thrusting up—the promise of buds and blooms. A pergola, glistening white, now upheld the runaway vines, making a sickle-like path from the upper terrace to the lake. In the barn loft the pigeons still quarrelled over their new cotes of fresh pine, and under a clump of locust trees at a little distance from the house, a half-dozen dolls’ cabins on stilts stood waiting the honey-storage of the black and gold bees. ”

“ CHAPTER XXI AFTER THE STORM Inky clouds were gathering over the sunlight when Shirley came from Damory Court, along the narrow wood-path under the hemlocks, and the way was striped with blue-black shadows and filled with sighing noises. She walked warily, halting often at some leafy rustle to catch a quick breath of dread. As she approached the tree-roots where the cape jessamines lay, she had to force her feet forward by sheer effort of will. ”

“ A craving for a glass of water has served its purpose a thousand times; as her cavalier solicitously departed to fetch the cooling draught, she rose, and carelessly humming the refrain the music had just left off, sauntered lightly out by another door to the open air. A swift glance about her showed her she was unobserved and she stepped down to the grass and along the winding path to a bench at some distance in the shrubbery. Here the smiling mask slipped from her face and with a shiver she dropped her hot face in her hands.
There were no tears. ”

“ With Ranston puffing and blowing like a black porpoise over his creaking go-cart, they planted the ramblers—crimson and pink and white—Valiant much of the time on his knees, his hands plunging deep into the black spongy earth, and Shirley with broad hat flung on the grass, her fingers separating the clinging thread-like roots and her small arched foot tamping down the soil about them. Her hair—the color of wet raw wood in the sunlight—was very near the brown head and sometimes their fingers touched over the work. ”

“ It was not till the hall-clock struck her usual hour that she rose to go to her room.
“Don’t send Emmaline,” she said. “I shan’t want her.” She kissed Shirley good night. “Maybe after a while you will sing for me; you haven’t played your harp for ever so long.”
In the subdued candle-light Mrs. Dandridge locked the door of her room. She opened a closet, and from the very bottom of a small haircloth trunk, lifted and shook out from its many tissue wrappings a faded gown of rose-colored silk, with pointed bodice and old-fashioned puff-sleeves. ”

“ CHAPTER XXIII UNCLE JEFFERSON’S STORY John Valiant sat propped up on the library couch, an open magazine unheeded on his knee. The reading-stand beside him was a litter of letters and papers. The bow-window was open and the honeysuckle breeze blew about him, lifting his hair and ruffling the leaves of the papers. In one corner, in a splotch of bright sunshine, lay the bulldog, watching a strayed blue-bottle darting in panic hither and thither near the ceiling. ”

“ He would perhaps still be lying on the couch in the dull-colored library, under the one-eyed portrait, his hair waving crisply against the white blanket, his hands moving restlessly, his lips muttering. Her imagination followed Aunt Daph shuffling to fetch this and that, nagged by the doctor’s sharp admonitions.
He would get well! The thought that perhaps she had saved his life gave her a thrill that ran over her whole body. ”

“ He began to wander restlessly through the house, up and down, like a prowling animal. The dining-room looked austere and chill—only the little lady in hoops and love-curls who had been his great-grandmother smiled wistfully down from her gilt frame above the console—and in the library a melancholy deeper than that of yesterday’s tragedy seemed to hang, through which Devil-John, drawing closer the leash of his leaping hound, glared sardonically at him from his one cold eye. ”

“ She made an exclamation of delight. The onyx-pillar stood in an oasis of white—moonflowers, white dahlias, mignonette and narcissus; bars of late lilies-of-the-valley beyond these, bordered with Arum-lilies, white clematis, iris and bridal-wreath, shading out into tender paler hues that ringed the spotless purity like dawning passion.
[Pg 325]
“White for happiness,” he quoted. “You said that when you brought me here—the day we planted the ramblers. Do you remember what I said? That some day, perhaps, I should love this spot the best of all at Damory Court.” ”