The Valiants of Virginia.

by Hallie Erminie Rives.

CHAPTER I

THE CRASH

"Failed!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed John Valiant blankly, and the hat he held dropped to the claret-colored rug like a huge white splotch of sudden fright.

"The Corporation--failed!"

The young man was the gla.s.s of fashion, from the silken ribbon on the spotless Panama to his pearl-gray gaiters, and well favored--a lithe stalwart figure, with wide-set hazel eyes and strong brown hair waving back from a candid forehead. The soft straw, however, had been wrung to a wisp between clutching fingers and the face was glazed in a kind of horrified and a.s.siduous surprise, as if the rosy peach of life, bitten, had suddenly revealed itself an unripe persimmon. The very words themselves came with a galvanic twitch and a stagger that conveyed a sense at once of shock and of protest. Even the white bulldog stretched on the floor, nose between paws and one restless eye on his master in a troubled wonder that any one should prefer to forsake the ecstatic sunshine of the street, with its thousand fascinating scents and cross-trails, for a stuffy business office, lifted his wrinkling pink nose and snuffled with acute and hopeful inquiry.

Never had John Valiant's innocuous and b.u.t.terfly existence known a surprise more startling. He had swung into the room with all the nonchalant habits, the ingrained cert.i.tude of the man born with achievement ready-made in his hands. And a single curt statement--like the ruthless blades of a pair of shears--had snipped across the one splendid scarlet thread in the woof that const.i.tuted life as he knew it.

He had knotted his lavender scarf that morning a vice-president of the Valiant Corporation--one of the greatest and most successful of modern-day organizations; he sat now in the fading afternoon trying to realize that the huge fabric, without warning, had toppled to its fall.

With every nerve of his six feet of manhood in rebellion, he rose and strode to the half-opened window, through which sifted the smell of growing things--for the great building fronted the square--and the soft alluring moistness of early spring. "Failed!" he repeated helplessly, and the echo seemed to go flittering about the substantial walls like a derisive India-rubber bat on a spree.

The bulldog sat up, thumping the rug with a vibrant tail. There was some mistake, surely; one went out by the door, not by the window! He rose, picked up the Panama in his mouth, and padding across the rug, poked it tentatively into his master's hand. But no, the hand made no response. Clearly they were not to go out, and he dropped it and went puzzledly back and lay down with p.r.i.c.ked ears, while his master stared out into the foliaged day.

How solid and changeless it had always seemed--that great business fabric woven by the father he could so dimly remember! His own invested fortune had been derived from the great corporation the elder Valiant had founded and controlled until his death. With almost unprecedented earnings, it had stood as a very Gibraltar of finance, a type and sign of brilliant organization. Now, on the heels of a trust's dissolution which would be a nine-days' wonder, the vast structure had crumpled up like a cardboard. The rains had descended and the floods had come, and it had fallen!

The man at the desk had wheeled in his revolving chair and was looking at the trim athletic back blotting the daylight, with a smile that was little short of a covert sneer. He was one of the local managers of the Corporation whose ruin was to be that day's sensation, a colorless man who had acquired middle age with his first long trousers and had been dedicated to the commercial treadmill before he had bought a safety-razor. He despised all loiterers along the primrose paths, and John Valiant was but a decorative figurehead.

The bulldog lifted his head. The ghost of a furred throaty growl rumbled in the silence, and the man at the desk shrank a little, as the hair rippled up on the thick neck and the faithful red-rimmed eyes opened a shade wider. But John Valiant did not turn. He was bitterly absorbed with his own thoughts.

Till this moment he had never really known how proud he had always been of the Corporation, of the fact that he was its founder's son.

His election to high office in the small coterie that controlled its destinies he had known very well to be but the modern concrete expression of his individual holdings, but it had nevertheless deeply pleased him. The fleeting sense of power, the intimate touching of wide issues in a city of Big Things had flattered him; for a while he had dreamed of playing a great part, of pushing the activities of the Corporation into new territory, invading foreign soil. He might have done much, for he had begun with good equipment. He had read law, had even been admitted to the bar. But to what had it come? A gradual slipping back into the rut of careless amus.e.m.e.nt, the tacit a.s.sumption of his prerogatives by other waiting hands. The huge wheels had continued to turn, smoothly, inevitably, and he had drawn his dividends ... and that was all. John Valiant swallowed something that was very like a sob.

As he stood trying to plumb the depth of the calamity, self-anger began to stir and buzz in his heart like a great bee. Like a tingling X-ray there went stabbing through the husk woven of a thousand inherent habits the humiliating knowledge of his own uselessness. In those profitless seasons through which he had sauntered, as he had strolled through his casual years of college, he had given least of his time and thought to the concern which had absorbed his father's young manhood. He, John Valiant--one of its vice-presidents! waster, on whose expenditures there had never been a limit, who had strewn with the foolish free-handedness of a prodigal! Idler, with a reputation in three cities as a leader of cotillions!

"Fool!" he muttered under his breath, and on the landscape outside the word stamped itself on everything as though a thousand little devils had suddenly turned themselves into letters of the alphabet and were skipping about in fours.

Valiant started as the other spoke at his elbow. He, too, had come to the window and was looking down at the pavement. "How quickly some news spreads!"

For the first time the young man noted that the street below was filling with a desultory crowd. He distinguished a knot of Italian laborers talking with excited gesticulations--a smudged plasterer, tools in hand,--clerks, some hatless and with thin alpaca coats--all peering at the voiceless front of the great building, and all, he imagined, with a thriving fear in their faces. As he watched, a woman, coa.r.s.ely dressed, ran across the street, her handkerchief pressed to her eyes.

"The notice has gone up on the door," said the manager. "I sent word to the police. Crowds are ugly sometimes."

Valiant drew a sudden sharp breath. The Corporation down in the mire, with crowds at its doors ready to clamor for money entrusted to it, the aggregate savings of widow and orphan, the piteous h.o.a.rded sums earned by labor over which pinched sickly faces had burned the midnight oil!

The older man had turned back to the desk to draw a narrow typewritten slip of paper from a pigeonhole. "Here," he said, "is a list of the bonds of the subsidiary companies recorded in your name. These are all, of course, engulfed in the larger failure. You have, however, your private fortune. If you take my advice, by the way," he added significantly, "you'll make sure of keeping that."

"What do you mean?" John Valiant faced him quickly.

The other laughed shortly. "'A word to the wise,'" he quoted. "It's very good living abroad. There's a boat leaving to-morrow."

A dull red sprang into the younger face. "You mean--"

"Look at that crowd down there--you can hear them now. There'll be a legislative investigation, of course. And the devil'll get the hindmost." He struck the desk-top with his hand. "Have you ever seen the bills for this furniture? Do you know what that rug under your feet cost? Twelve thousand--it's an old Persian. What do you suppose the papers will do to that? Do you think such things will seem amusing to that rabble down there?" His hand swept toward the window. "It's been going on for too many years, I tell you! And now some one'll pay the piper. The lightning won't strike _me_--I'm not tall enough. _You're_ a vice-president."

"Do you imagine that _I_ knew these things--that I have been a party to what you seem to believe has been a deliberate wrecking?" Valiant towered over him, his breath coming fast, his hands clenched hard.

"You?" The manager laughed again--an unpleasant laugh that sc.r.a.ped the other's quivering nerves like hot sandpaper. "Oh, lord, no! How should you? You've been too busy playing polo and winning bridge prizes. How many board meetings have you attended this year? Your vote is proxied as regular as clockwork. But you're _supposed_ to know. The people down there in the street won't ask questions about patent-leather pumps and ponies; they'll want to hear about such things as rotten irrigation loans in the Stony-River Valley--to market an alkali desert that is the personal property of the president of this Corporation."

Valiant turned a blank white face. "Sedgwick?"

"Yes. You know his principle: 'It's all right to be honest, if you're not too _d.a.m.n_ honest.' He owns the Stony-River Valley bag and baggage.

It was a big gamble and he lost."

For a moment there was absolute silence in the room. From outside came the rising murmur of the crowd and cutting through it the shrill cry of a newsboy calling an evening extra. Valiant was staring at the other with a strange look. Emotions to which in all his self-indulgent life he had been a stranger were running through his mind, and outre pa.s.sions had him by the throat. Fool and doubly blind! A poor p.a.w.n, a catspaw raking the chestnuts for unscrupulous men whose ignominy he was now called on, perforce, to share! 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 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!" He shrugged his shoulders and went back to his chair.

Valiant plunged down in the elevator to the street. Its single other pa.s.senger had his nose buried in a newspaper, and over the reader's shoulder he saw the double-leaded head-line: "Collapse of the Valiant Corporation!"

He pushed past the guarded door, and threading the crowd, made toward the curb, where the bulldog, with a bark of delight, leaped upon the seat of a burnished car, rumbling and vibrating with pent-up power.

There were those in the sullen anxious crowd who knew whose was that throbbing metal miracle, the chauffeur spick and span from shining cap-visor to polished brown puttees, and recognizing the white face that went past, pelted it with muttered sneers. But he scarcely saw or heard them, as he stepped into the seat, took the wheel from the chauffeur's hand and threw on the gear.

He had afterward little memory of that ride. Once the leaping anger within him jerked the throttle wide and the car responded with a breakneck dart through the startled traffic, till the sight of an infuriated mounted policeman, baton up, brought him to himself with a thud. He had small mind to be stopped at the moment. His mouth set in a sudden hard sharp line, and under it his hands gripped the slewing wheel to a tearing serpentine rush that sent the skidding monster rearing on side wheels, to swoop between two drays in a hooting plunge down a side street. His tight lips parted then in a ragged laugh, bit off by the jolt of the lurching motor and the slap of the bulging air.

As the sleek rubber shoes spun noiselessly and swiftly along the avenue the myriad lights that were beginning to gleam wove into a twinkling mist. He drove mechanically past a hundred familiar things and places: the particular chop-house of which he was an habitue--the ivied wall of his favorite club, with the cl.u.s.ter of faces at the double window--the florist's where daily he stopped for his knot of Parma violets--but he saw nothing, till the ma.s.sive marble fronts of the upper park side ceased their mad dance as the car halted before a tall iron-grilled doorway with wide glistening steps, between windows strangely shuttered and dark.

He sprang out and touched the bell. The heavy oak parted slowly; the confidential secretary of the man he had come to face stood in the gloomy doorway.

"I want to see Mr. Sedgwick."

"You can't see him, Mr. Valiant."

"But I _will_!" Sharp pa.s.sion leaped into the young voice. "He must speak to me."

The man in the doorway shook his head. "He won't speak to anybody any more," he said. "Mr. Sedgwick shot himself two hours ago."

CHAPTER II

VANITY VALIANT

"The witness is excused."

In the ripple that stirred across the court room at the examiner's abrupt conclusion, John Valiant, who had withstood that pitiless hail of questions, rose, bowed to him and slowly crossed the cleared s.p.a.ce to his counsel. The chairman looked severely over his eye-gla.s.ses, with his gavel lifted, and a statuesque girl, in the rear of the room, laid her delicately gloved hand on a companion's and smiled slowly without withdrawing her gaze, and with the faintest tint of color in her face.

Katharine Fargo neither smiled nor flushed readily. Her smile was an index of her whole personality, languid, symmetrical, exquisitely perfect. The little group with whom she sat looked somewhat out of place in that mixed a.s.semblage. They had not gasped at the tale of the Corporation's unprecedented earnings, the lavish expenditure for its palatial offices. The recital of the tragic waste, the nepotism, the mole-like ramifications by which the vast structure had been undermined, had left them rather amusedly and satirically appreciative. Smartly groomed and palpably members of a set to whom John Valiant was a familiar, they had had only friendly nods and smiles for the young man at whom so many there had gazed with jaundiced eyes.