Valiant

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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?” ”

“ 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.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ Valiant is dead long ago, but apparently there’s never been any attempt to let it. I suppose his son is so rich that one estate more or less doesn’t figure much to him.”
“I got a letter this morning from Dorothy Randolph,” said Shirley. “The Valiant Corporation is being investigated, you know, and her uncle had taken her to one of the hearings, when John Valiant was in the chair. From her description, they are [Pg 64] making it sufficiently hot for that silver-spooned young man.”
“I don’t reckon he cares,” said Lusk satirically. “Nothing matters with his set if you have enough money.” ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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.” ”

“ I can scarcely believe him the same John Valiant I’ve danced with a hundred times in New York. He’s been here such a short while and yet he couldn’t possibly be more at home if he’d lived in Virginia always. And you all treat him as if he were quite one of yourselves.”
Shirley smiled enchantingly. “Why, yes,” she said, “maybe it seems odd to outsiders. But, you see, with us a Valiant is always a Valiant. No matter where he has lived, he’s the son of his father and the master of Damory Court.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Oh, God, why must it be so hard for us? Millions of other people love each other and nothing separates them like this!”
Shirley’s warm breath made a little fog against the star-eyed moss. She was scarcely conscious of her wet and clinging clothing, and the soaked strands of her hair. She was so wrapped in her desolation that she no longer heard the sound of the persevering rain and the wet swishing of the bushes—parting now to a hurried step that fell almost without sound on the spongy forest soil. She started up suddenly to see Valiant before her. ”

“ 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 a long panorama unfolded at the name; the times when they had been boys fly-fishing in the Rapidan and fox-hunting about Pilot-Knob with the yelping hounds—crisp winters of books and pipes together at the old university at Charlottesville—later maturer years about Damory Court when the trail of sex had deepened into man’s passion and the devil’s rivalry. It had been a curious three-sided affair—he, and Valiant, and Sassoon. Sassoon with his dissipated flair and ungovernable temper and strange fits of recklessness; clean, high-idealed, straight-away Valiant ”

“ 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 ”

“ De chick’ns done peck fo’ deyselves en de yuddah things—yo’ o’ny gotter ’courage ’em en dey jes’ grows.”
Valiant ate his dessert with a thoughtful smile wrinkling his brow. As he pushed back his chair he smote his hands together and laughed aloud. “Back to the soil!” he said. “John Valiant, farmer! The miracle of it is that it sounds good to me. I want to raise my own grub and till my own soil. I want to be my own man! And I’m beginning to see my way. Crops will have to wait for another season, but there’s water and pasture for cattle now. ”

“ In his pitiful egotism he had consented to be a figurehead, and he had been made a tool. A red rage surged over him. No one had ever seen on John Valiant’s face such a look as grew on it now.
He turned, retrieved the Panama, and without a [Pg 9] word opened the door. The older man took a step toward him—he had a sense of dangerous electric forces in the air—but the door closed sharply in his face. He smiled grimly. “Not crooked,” he said to himself; “merely callow. A well-meaning, manicured young fop wholly surrounded by men who knew what they wanted!” ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ 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 ”

“ She turned her eyes to his.
“So that,” she said, “is John Valiant! I’d almost rather have missed Niagara Falls. I must write Shirley Dandridge about it. I’m so sorry I lost that picture of him that I cut out of the paper.”
“I reckon he’s not such a bad lot,” said her uncle. “I liked the way he spoke of his father.”
He hailed a cab. “Grand Central Station,” he directed, with a glance at his watch, “and be quick about it. We’ve just time to make our train.”
“Yessir! Dollar’n a half, sir.” ”

“ The major pulled his mustache meditatively. “Not a bad idea,” he said. “He’s starting right—eh, Southall? You’re bringing the view-point of practical science to bear on the problem, Mr. Valiant.”
“I’m afraid I’m a sad sketch as a scientist,” laughed the other. “My point of view has to be [Pg 211] a somewhat practical one. I must be self-supporting. Damory Court is a big estate. It has grain lands and forest as well. If my ancestors lived from it, I can. It’s not only that,” he went on more slowly, “I want to make the most of the place for its own sake, too. ”

“ But the other hung back. “Ah done tole yo’ Ah ain’ gwine be dat Valiant,” she said stubbornly.
“Look here, Greenville Female Seminary Simms,” Rickey retorted, “don’t you multiply words with me just because your mammy was working there when you were born and gave you a fancy name! If you’ll promise to be him, I’ll get Miss Mattie Sue to let us make molasses candy.”
[Pg 163]
CHAPTER XIX UNDER THE HEMLOCKS Shirley looked at Valiant with a deepening of her dimple. “Rickey isn’t an aristocrat,” she said: “she’s what we call here poor-white, but she’s got a heart of gold. ”

“ As she stood in the elfish light of her one candle, the poignancy of her joy was as sharp as her past pain. Later was to come the wonder how that tragedy had bent Beauty Valiant’s life to exile and her mother’s to unfulfilment, and in time she was to know these things, too. But now the one great knowledge blotted out all else. She need starve her fancy no longer! The [Pg 422] hours with her lover might again sweep across her memory undenied. She felt his arms, his kisses, heard his whispers against her cheek and smelled the perfume of Madonna lilies. ”