Vali

“ Valia promptly approached the bed, put his little hand, still red with the cold, on the large head of his mother, and spoke with the same serious staidness which distinguished this boy’s speech:
“Do not cry, mama. I will love you very much. I do not care to play with toys, but I will love you ever so much. If you wish, I will read to you the story of the poor water-nymph.” ”

“ One by one Valiant forced open the tall French windows, till the fading light lay softly over the austere dignity of the apartment. In that somber room, he knew, had had place whatever was most worthy in the lives of his forebears. The thought of generation upon generation had steeped it in human association.
Suddenly he lifted his eyes. Above the desk hung a life-size portrait of a man, in the high soft stock and velvet collar of half a century before. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The dowager, rather beside herself on the whole, had insisted on the leeches. Any one, seeing her conduct now, might have thought the invalid boy was really dear to her. Nothing of the sort. A hazy idea had been looming through her mind for years that Val was not strong; she had been mistaking mental disease for bodily illness; and a project to have full control of her grandchild, should he come into the succession prematurely, had coloured her dreams. ”

“ I could almost think I was looking at Damory Court in the sixties, sah!”
“That’s quite the nicest thing you could have said, Major,” responded Valiant. “But it needs the flowers.” He looked at Shirley with sparkling eyes. “How splendid of you to bring them! I feel like a robber.” ”

“ Valiant is coming to Damory Court?” [Pg 137]
The major sat down heavily. In the bright light his face seemed suddenly pale and old.
“No?” the lady’s tone was arch. “Have all the rest of us really got ahead of you for once? Yes, it’s true. There’s some one there getting it to rights. Now here’s the question. There was a woman, of course, at the bottom of the Valiant duel. I’d never dream of asking you who she was. But which was it she loved, Valiant or Sassoon?” ”

“ His eyes turned from the carven words and strayed to the pleasant sunny foliage outside. An arrogant boast, perhaps, yet in the event well justified. Valiants had held that selfsame slope when the encircling forests had rung with war-whoop and blazed with torture-fire. They had held on through Revolution and Civil War. Good and bad, abiding and lawless, every generation had cleaved stubbornly to its acres. I clinge. His father had clung through absence that seemed to have been almost [Pg 117] exile, and now he, the last Valiant, was come to make good the boast.
His gaze wavered. ”

“ Valiant had paled. His previous finding of the weapon had escaped his mind. Now he read, as clearly as if it had been printed in black-letter across the sunny wall, the significance of the major’s confusion. That weapon had been in his father’s hand when he had faced his opponent in that fatal duel! It flashed across his mind as the doctor lunged for his hat and stick and got to his feet.
[Pg 218]
“Come, Bristow,” said the latter irritably. “Your feet will grow fast to the floor presently. We mustn’t talk a new neighbor to death. I’ve got to see a patient at six.” ”

“ Valiant was no more responsible for it than for the quarrel. Neither was of his making. Just because a man [Pg 222] is a crack shot and stays sober, is he to bear any insult—stand up to be shot at into the bargain—and take no hand in the game himself? Answer me that?”
“It didn’t touch his honor, of course,” replied the major. “We could all agree on that. ”

“ The doctor shut his teeth with a snap, as though he had caught a rabbit. “Look here, Bristow,” he said hotly, “I’ve never cared a hang what your opinions of Valiant were after that duel. I’ll keep my own.”
“Oh, all right,” rejoined the major. “But let’s be honest with ourselves. If you could split a silver dollar nine times out of ten at fifteen paces, would you exchange shots with a man who was beside himself with liquor?”
“If Valiant was a dead shot, the better for him,” said the doctor grimly. “If Sassoon was drunk, so much the worse for Sassoon. ”

“ At the sound of wheels on the drive, Valiant went out quietly. Huddled in a corner of the hall were Uncle Jefferson and Aunt Daphne, with Jereboam, [Pg 389] the major’s body-servant. Aunt Daphne, her apron thrown over her face was rocking to and fro silently, and old Jereboam’s head was bowed on his breast. Valiant went quickly to the rear of the hall. A painful embarrassment had come to him—a curious confusion mingling with a fastidious sense of shrinking. How should he meet this woman who recoiled from the very sight of his face? ”

“ Val. No blood has stained her hand.
The sword she bears nor forms defence, nor wounds,
But guides the fight. Amidst its loudest din
And fiercest rage she shows a countenance
Most calmly brave, most femininely gentle.
Arn. And he, great Orleans' valiant son, was he—
Val. Ah! 'twas a curious sight to see how proud
He scorned the maid when first she reached the camp.
His great heart swelled against her, and his gibe,
Keen as his sword, betrayed contempt.
Arn. And well
He might be pardoned, if he deemed the thought
Injurious, that a woman should succeed
Where he himself had failed. ”

“ If this woman took Valia he would die.
“Listen,” Valia once said to his aunt, tearing himself away from his book for a moment. “Listen,” he repeated with his usual earnestness, and with a glance that gazed straight into the eyes of the person with whom he spoke: “I shall call you mama, not auntie. You talk nonsense when you say that the woman—is mama. You are mama, not she.”
“Why?” asked Nastasia Philippovna, blushing like a young girl who had just received a compliment. But [Pg 318] along with her joy there could also be heard in her voice the sound of fear for Valia. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I wonder if there is likely to be a team passing.”
“I’m afraid it’s not too certain,” answered the girl, and now he noted the liquid modulation, with its slightly questioning accent, charmingly Southern. “There is no livery, but there is a negro who meets the train sometimes. I can send him if you like.”
“You’re very good,” said Valiant, as she turned away, “and I’ll be enormously obliged. Oh—and if you see a white dog, don’t be frightened if he tries to follow you. He’s perfectly kind.” ”

“ He made a gesture toward the glass shelves. “Why, there’s a room up-stairs with the very toys they played with when they were children! To learn that I belong to it all; that I myself am the last link in such a chain!”
“The ancestral instinct,” said the doctor. “I’m glad to see that it means something still, in these rotten days.”
“Of course,” John Valiant continued, “every one knows that he has ancestors. But I’m beginning to see that what you call the ancestral instinct needs [Pg 205] a locality and a place. ”

“ A smile flashed over her face, like sunshine over a flower, and she looked up at him slowly. “What bricks men are to each other! You and the doctor were John Valiant’s closest friends. What did you two care what people said? Why, women don’t stick to each other like that! It isn’t in petticoats! It wouldn’t do for women to take to dueling, Monty ”

“ But Beauty Valiant was gone with her youth; in the room near by lay that old companion who would never speak to her again, the lifelong friend—who [Pg 396] had really failed her thirty years ago!... and in a tin box a mile away lay a letter....
“He won’t rouse again,” the doctor had said, but a little later, as he and Valiant sat beside the couch, the major opened his eyes suddenly.
“Shirley,” he whispered. “Where’s Shirley?”
She was sitting on the porch just outside the open window, and when she entered, tears were on her face. The doctor drew back silently ”

“ Lars, the chauffeur, looked after him. “Going to skip out, he is! I thought so when he brought that stuff out of the safe-deposit. Afraid they’ll try [Pg 22] to take the boodie away from him, I guess. The papers seem to think he’s rotten, but he’s been a mighty good boss to me. He’s a dead swell, all right, anyhow,” he added pridefully, as he slid the car to its moorings, “and they’ll have to get up early to catch him asleep!”
A little later John Valiant, the bulldog at his heels, ascended the steps of his club, where he lodged—he had disposed of his bachelor apartment a fortnight ago. ”

“ Valiant smiled slowly. “I don’t dream of anything else,” he said. “My life, as I map it out, seems to begin here. The rest doesn’t count—only the years when I was little and had my father.”
The major carefully adjusted his eye-glasses. His head was turned away. “Ah, yes,” he said.
[Pg 258]
“The last twenty years,” continued the other, “from my present view-point, are valuable mainly for contrast.”
“As a consistent regimen of pâté de foie gras,” said Shirley quizzically, “makes one value bread and butter?”
He shook his head at her. “As starvation makes one appreciate plenty. ”

“ A twig snapped under Valiant’s foot. The singers faced about and saw them. Both scrambled to their feet, the black girl to look at them with a wide self-conscious grin. Rickey, tossing her short hair back from her freckled face, came toward them.
“My goodness, Miss Shirley,” she said, “we didn’t see you at all.” She looked at Valiant. “Are you the man that’s going to fix up Damory Court?” she inquired, without any tedious formalities.
[Pg 160]
“Yes,” said Valiant.
“Well,” she said critically, “you’ve got your job cut out for you. But I should say you’re the kind to do it.” ”

“ What then was to become of Val—Val, who was the apple of her eye, whose very childishness and helplessness were dear to her, whose beauty of face and form—stop, she had it, she laughed as she told herself she had it. And how often she strained those dim old eyes of hers to see more clearly when her darling's step was heard, and how fondly they rested on the approaching figure and strove to appraise at its exact value the curiously beautiful face, no one but herself knew. ”

“ Vale broke down with a gasp and a sob. His piteous aspect might have moved even Tod.
“Look here,” said he, “I don’t care in general to punish a coward; I regard him as an abject animal beneath me: but I cannot go from my word. Ducking is too good for you, Vale, but you shall have it. Be off to that tree yonder; we’ll give you so much grace. Let him start fair, boys, and then hound him on. It will be a fine chase.” ”

“ On getting back to England, after the profitable sale of his South African farm and stud, and observing that the sun seldom shone, Val had said to himself: "I've absolutely got to have an interest in life, or this country will give me the blues. Hunting's not enough, I'll breed and I'll train." With just that extra pinch of shrewdness and decision imparted by long residence in a new country, Val had seen the weak point of modern breeding. They were all hypnotised by fashion and high price. He should buy for looks, and let names go hang! ”

“ I give thee the meadows that adjoin thy farm and round off thy land; that I think will repay thee thy time and trouble, and if not, say so--I'll be beholden to thee for nothing--ask what thou will but get thee from before my eyes."
"I want nought--I'll have nought but thee, Wally. All is one to me without thee. Thou'st well nigh murdered me, thou'st ill used me every time I've ever seen thee--and--the devil's in it--I cannot give thee up. Look here--I did it all for thee. For thee I'd commit a murder--for thee I'd sell my soul's salvation--and thou thinks to put me off with a few meadows? ”

“ Although the time of seeing the apparition was only an instant, Val could remember every detail, so plainly did he see it. The figure was dressed in the frock coat affected by the old Virginia planters and gentlemen, and his face was shaded by a large soft hat. His face was pasty, old, with a white goatee and mustache, and the eyes were unutterably mournful and aged, dark windows that looked upon the world in sorrowful aloofness. Every line on the figure’s face was plain to Val in the fraction of a second in which he glimpsed it, standing there at the window. ”

“ Tanned and wrinkled by Colonial weather and the wiles inseparable from horses, and handicapped by the leg which, weakened in the Boer War, had probably saved his life in the War just past, Val was still much as he had been in the days of his courtship; his smile as wide and charming, his eyelashes, if anything, thicker and darker, his eyes screwed up under them, as bright a grey, his freckles rather deeper, his hair a little grizzled at the sides. He gave the impression of one who has lived actively with horses in a sunny climate. ”

“ Wally raised herself a little to see what had startled the bird. There, over the slippery, fissured glacier came a human form straight towards the rock where Wally sat. She recognized the dark eyes, the short, black beard, she saw the friendly glance and greeting, she heard the "Jodel" that he sent up to her--as once years ago, when from the Sonnenplatte she had seen him pass through the gorge with the stranger--she, an innocent, hopeful child in those days, not yet cast out and cursed by her father--not yet an incendiary--not yet a murderess. ”