The elder of the two men pulled up beside the leader, his astonished eyes sweeping the house-front, with its open blinds, the wisp of smoke curling from the kitchen chimney. He said something to her, and she nodded. The younger man, meanwhile, had flung himself from his horse, a wild-eyed roan, and with his arm thrust through its bridle, strode forward among the welter of hounds, where they scurried at fault, hither and thither, yelping and eager.

"What rotten luck!" he exclaimed. "Gone to ground after twelve miles!

After him, Tawny! You mongrels! Do you imagine he's up a tree? After him, Bulger! Bring him here!"

[Ill.u.s.tration]

He glanced up, and for the first time saw the figure in tweeds looking on. Valiant was attracted by his face, its dash and generosity overlying its inherent profligacy and weakness. Dark as the girl was light, his features had the same delicate chiseling, the inbreeding, n.o.bility and indulgence of generations. He stared a moment, and the somewhat supercilious look traveled over the gazer, from dusty boots to waving brown hair.

"Oh!" he said. His view slowly took in the evidences of occupation. "The house is open, I see. Going to get it fit for occupancy, I presume?"

"Yes."

The other turned. "Well, Judge Chalmers, what do you think of that? The unexpected has happened at last." He looked again at the porch. "Who's to occupy it?"

"The owner."

"Wonders will never cease!" said the young man easily, shrugging. "Well, our quarry is here somewhere. From the way the dogs act I should say he's bolted into the house. With your permission I'll take one of them in and see." He stooped and snapped a leash on a dog-collar.

"I'm really very sorry," said Valiant, "but I'm living in it at present."

The edge of a smile lifted the carefully trained mustache over the other's white teeth. It had the perfectly courteous air of saying, "Of course, if you say so. But--"

Valiant turned, with a gesture that included all. "If you care to dismount and rest," he said, "I shall be honored, though I'm afraid I can't offer you such hospitality as I should wish."

The judge raised his broad soft hat. "Thank you, sir," he said, with a soft accent that delightfully disdained the letter "r." "But we mustn't intrude any further. As you know, of course, the place has been uninhabited for any number of years, and we had no idea it was to acquire a tenant. You will overlook our riding through, I hope. I'm afraid the neighborhood has got used to considering this a sort of no-man's land. It's a pleasure to know that the Court is to be reclaimed, sir. Come along, Chilly," he added. "Our fox has a burrow under the house, I reckon--hang the cunning little devil!"

He whistled sharply to the dogs, who came leaping about his horse's legs for their meed of praise--and clubbing. "Down, Fan! Down Trojan! Come on, you young folks, to breakfast. We've had a prime run of it, anyhow, and we'll put him up another day."

He waved his hat at the porch and turned his horse down the path, side by side with the golden-chestnut. After them trooped the others, horses walking wearily, riders talking in low voices, the girls turning often to send swift bird-like glances behind them to where the straight masculine figure still stood with the yellow sunshine on his face. They did not leap the wall this time, but filed decorously through the swinging gate to the Red Road. Then, as they pa.s.sed from view behind the hedges, John Valiant heard the younger voices break out together like the sound of a bomb thrown into a poultry-yard.

After a time he saw the straggling bunch of riders emerge at a slow canter on the far-away field. He saw the roan spurred beside the golden chestnut and both dashed away, neck and neck in a race, the light patrician form of the man leaning far forward and the girl swaying to the pace as if she and her hunter were one.

John Valiant stood watching till the last rider was out of sight. There was a warm flush of color in his face.

At length he turned with the ghost of a sigh, opened the hall door wide and stalking a hundred yards away, sat down on the shady gra.s.s and began to whistle, with his eyes on the door.

Presently he was rewarded. On a sudden, around the edge of the sill peered a sharp, suspicious little muzzle. Then, like a flash of tawny light, the fox broke sanctuary and shot for the thicket.

CHAPTER XV

MRS. POLY GIFFORD PAYS A CALL

The brown ivied house in the village was big and square and faced the sleepy street. Its front was gay with pink oleanders in green tubs and the yard spotted with annual encampments of geraniums and marigolds. A one-storied wing contained a small door with a doctor's bra.s.s plate on the clapboarding beside it. Doctor Southall was one of Mrs. Merryweather Mason's paying guests--for she would have deemed the word boarder a gratuitous insult, no less to them than to her. Another was the major, who for a decade had occupied the big old-fashioned corner-room on the second floor, companioned by a monstrous gray cat and waited on by an ancient negro named Jereboam, who had been a slave of his father's.

The doctor was a sallow taciturn man with a saturnine face, eyebrows like frosted thistles, a mouth as if made with one quick knife-slash and a head nearly bald, set on a neck that would not have disqualified a yearling ox. His broad shoulders were slightly stooped, and his mouth wore habitually an expression half resentful, half sardonic, conveying a cynical opinion of the motives of the race in general and of the special depravity of that particular countryside. Altogether he exhaled an air in contrast to which the major's old-school blend of charm and courtesy seemed an almost ribald frivolity.

On this particular morning neither the major nor the doctor was in evidence, the former having gone out early, and the latter being at the moment in his office, as the bra.s.sy buzz of a telephone from time to time announced. Two of the green wicker rocking-chairs on the porch, however, were in agitant commotion. Mrs. Mason was receiving a caller in the person of Mrs. Napoleon Gifford.

The latter had a middle-aged affection for baby-blue and a devouring penchant for the ages and antecedents of others, at times irksome to those to whom her "Let me see. You went to school with my first husband's sister, didn't you?" or "Your daughter Jane must have been married the year the old Israel Stamper place was burned," were unwelcome reminders of the pace of time. To-day, of course, the topic was the new arrival at Damory Court.

"After all these _years_!" the visitor was saying in her customary italics. (The broad "a" which lent a dulcet softness to the speech of her hostess was scorned by Mrs. Poly, her own "a's" being as narrow as the needle through which the rich man reaches heaven.) "We came here from Richmond when I was a bride--that's twenty-one years ago--and Damory Court was forsaken then. And think what a condition the house must be in now! Cared for by an agent who comes every other season from New York. Trust a _man_ to do work like that!"

"I'm glad a Valiant is to occupy it," remarked Mrs. Mason in her sweet flute-like voice. "It would be sad to see any one else there. For after all, the Valiants were gentlemen."

Mrs. Gifford sniffed. "Would you have called Devil-John Valiant a gentleman? Why, he earned the name by the dreadful things he did. My grandfather used to say that when his wife lay sick--he hated her, you know--he would gallop his horse with all his hounds full-cry after him under her windows. Then that _ghastly_ story of the slave he pressed to death in the hogshead of tobacco."

"I know," acquiesced Mrs. Mason. "He was a cruel man, and wicked, too.

Yet of course he was a gentleman. In the South the test of a gentleman has never been what he _does_, but who he is. Devil-John was splendid, for all his wickedness. He was the best swordsman in all Virginia. It used to be said there was a portrait of him at Damory Court, and that during the war, in the engagement on the hillside, a bullet took out one of its eyes. But his grandson, Beauty Valiant, who lived at Damory Court thirty years ago, wasn't his type at all. He was only twenty-five when the duel occurred."

"He must have been brilliant," said the visitor, "to have founded that great Corporation. It's a pity the son didn't take after him. Have you seen the _papers_ lately? It seems that though he was to blame for the wrecking of the concern they can't do anything to him. Some technicality in the law, I suppose. But if a man is only rich enough they can't convict him of anything. Why he should suddenly make up his mind to come down _here_ I _can't_ see. With that old affair of his father's behind him, I should think he'd prefer Patagonia."

"I take it, then, madam," Doctor Southall's forbidding voice rose from the doorway, "that you are familiar with the circ.u.mstances of that old affair, as you term it?"

The lady bridled. Her pa.s.sages at arms with the doctor did not invariably tend to sweeten her disposition. "I'm sure I only know what people say," she said.

"'People?'" snorted the doctor irascibly. "Just another name for a community that's a perfect sink of meanness and malice. If one believed all he heard here he'd quit speaking to his own grandmother."

"You will admit, I suppose," said Mrs. Gifford with some spirit, "that the name Valiant isn't what it used to be in this neighborhood?"

"I will, madam," responded the doctor. "When Valiant left this place (a mark of good taste, I've always considered it) he left it the worse, if possible, for his departure. Your remark, however, would seem to imply demerit on his part. Was he the only man who ever happened to be at the lucky end of a dueling-ground?"

"Then it isn't true that Valiant was a dead shot and Sa.s.soon intoxicated?"

"Madam," said the doctor, "I have no wish to discuss the details of that unhappy incident with you or anybody else. I was one of those present, but the circ.u.mstances you mention have never been descanted upon by me.

I merely wish to point out that the people whom you have been quoting, are not only a set of ignoramuses with cotton-back souls, but as full of uncharitableness as an egg is of meat."

"I see by the papers," said Mrs. Gifford, with an air of resignedly changing the subject, "they've been investigating the failure of the Valiant Corporation. The son seems to be getting the sharp end of the stick. Perhaps he's coming down here because they've made it so hot for him in New York. Well, I'm afraid he'll find _this_ county disappointing."

"He will that!" agreed the doctor savagely. "No doubt he imagines he's coming to a kindly countryside of gentle-born people with souls and imaginations; he'll find he's lit in a section that's entirely too ready to hack at his father's name and prepared in advance to call him Northern sc.u.m and turn up its nose at his accent--a community so full of dyed-in-the-wool sn.o.bbery that it would make Boston look like a poor-white barbecue. I'm sorry for _him_!"

Mrs. Gifford, having learned wisdom from experience, resisted the temptation to reply. She merely rocked a trifle faster and turned a smile which she strove to make amusedly deprecative upon her hostess.

Just then from the rear of the house came a strident voice:

"Yo', Raph'el! Take yo' han's outer dem cherries! Don' yo' know ef yo'

swallahs dem ar pits, yo' gwineter hab 'pende_gee_tus en lump up en die?"

The sound of a slap and a shrill yelp followed, and around the porch dashed an infantile darky, as nude as a black Puck, with his hands full of cherries, who came to a sudden demoralized stop in the embarra.s.sing foreground.

"Raph!" thundered the doctor. "Didn't I tell you to go back to that kitchen?"

"Yas, suh," responded the imp. "But yo' didn' tell me ter stay dar!"