The major laughed out suddenly, harshly, in the quiet room, and looked down as if he expected to see that letter still lying in his hand. But the laugh could not still a regular pulsing sound that was in his ears--elfin like the voices, but as distinct--the sound of a horse's hoofs going from Damory Court.

He had heard those hoof-beats echo in his brain for thirty years!

CHAPTER XVII

THE TRESPa.s.sER

Till the sun was high John Valiant lay on his back in the fragrant gra.s.s, meditatively watching a bucaneering chicken-hawk draw widening circles against the blue and listening to the vibrant tattoo of a "p.e.c.k.e.r-wood" on a far-away tree, and the timorous wet whistle of a bob-white. The sun shone through the tracery of the foliage, making a quivering mosaic of light and shadow all about him. A robin ran across the gra.s.s with his breast puffed out as if he had been stealing apples; now and then an inquisitive yellow-hammer darted above and in the bushes cardinals wove slender sharp flashes of living crimson. The whole place was very quiet now. For just one thrilling moment it had burgeoned into sound and movement: when the sweaty horses had stood snorting and stamping in the yard with the hounds scampering between their legs and the riding-coats winking like rubies in the early sunshine!

Had she recognized him as the smudged tinkerer of the stalled car? "She saw me drop that wretched brute through the window," he chuckled. "I could take oath to that. But she didn't give me away, true little sport that she was. And she won't. I can't think of any reason, but I know."

The chuckle broadened to an appreciative grin. "What an a.s.s she must have thought me! To risk a nasty bite and rob her of her brush into the bargain! How she looked at me, just for a minute, with that thoroughbred face, out of those sea-deep eyes, under that whorling, marvelous heaped-up hair of hers! Was she angry? I wonder!"

At length he rose and went back to the house. With a bunch of keys he had found he went to the stables, after some difficulty gained access, and propped the crazy doors and windows open to the sun. The building was airy and well-lighted and contained a dozen roomy box-stalls, a s.p.a.cious loft and a carriage-house. The straw bedding had been unremoved, mice-gnawed sacking and rotted hay lay in the mangers, and the warped harness, hanging on its pegs, was a smelly ma.s.s of mildew and decay. In the carriage-house were three vehicles--a coach with rat-riddled upholstery and old-fashioned hoop-iron springs eaten through with rust, a rockaway and a surrey. The latter had collapsed where it stood. He found a stick, mowed away the festooning cobwebs, and moved the debris piece-meal.

"There!" he said with satisfaction. "There's a place for the motor--if Uncle Jefferson ever gets it here."

It was noon when he returned, after a wash-up in the lake, to the meal with which Aunt Daphne, in a costume dimly suggestive of a bran-meal poultice with a gingham ap.r.o.n on, regaled him. Fried chicken, corn-bread so soft and fluffy that it had to be lifted from the pan with a spoon, browned potatoes, and to his surprise, fresh milk. "Ah done druv ouah ol' cow ovah, suh," explained Aunt Daphne. "'Case she gotter be milked, er she run dry ez de Red Sea fo' de chillen ob Izril."

"Aunt Daphne," inquired Valiant with his mouth full, "what do you call this green thing?"

"Dat? Dat's jes' turnip-tops, suh, wid er hunk er bacon in de pot.

Laws-er-me, et cert'n'y do me good ter see yo' git arter it dat way, suh. Reck'n yo' got er appert.i.te! Hyuh, Hyuh!"

"I have. I never guessed it before, and it's a magnificent discovery.

However, it suggests unwelcome reflections. Aunt Daphne, how long do you estimate a man can dine like this on--well, say on a hundred dollars?"

"Er hun'ed dollahs, suh? Dat's er right smart heap o' money, 'deed et is! Well, suh, 'pen's on whut yo' raises. Ef yo' raises yo' own gyarden-sa.s.s, en chick'ns en aigs, Ah reck'n yo' kin live longah dan dat ar Methoosalum, en still haf mos' of it in de ol' stockin'."

"Ah! I can grow all those things myself, you think?"

"Yo' cert'n'y _kin_," said Aunt Daphne. "Ev'ybody do. 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. There's timber--lots of it--on that hillside, too. I must look into that."

He filled his pipe and climbed the staircase to the upper floor. Here the lower hall was duplicated. He proceeded slowly and carefully with the dusty task of window-opening. There were many bedrooms with great four-posted, canopied beds and old-fashioned carved furniture of mahogany and curly-maple, and in one he found a great cedar-lined chest filled with bed-linen and napery. In these rooms were more evidences of decay. They showed in faded hues, streaked and discolored finishings, yellow mildew beneath the gla.s.s of framed engravings and unsightly stains on walls and floors from leaks in the roof. On a dainty dressing-table had been left a pin-cushion; its stuffing was strewn in a tiny trickling trail to a mouse-hole in the base-board. The bedroom he mentally chose for his own was the plainest of all, and was above the library, fronting the vagabond garden. It had a great black desk with many gla.s.s-k.n.o.bbed drawers and a book-rack. The volumes this contained were mostly of the historical sort: a history of the _Middle Plantation, Meade's Old Churches,_ and at the end a parchment-bound tome inscribed _The Valiants of Virginia_.

He lingered longest in a room over whose door was painted _The Hilarium_. It had evidently been a nursery and schoolroom. Here on the walls were many shelves wound over with networks of cobwebs, and piled with the oddest a.s.semblage of toys: wooden and splintered soldiers that had once been bravely painted, dolls in various states of worn-outness--one rag doll in a calico dress with shoe-b.u.t.ton eyes and a string of bright gla.s.s beads round her neck--a wooden box of marbles, a tattered boxing-glove. There were school-books, too, thumbed and dog-eared, from _First Reader_ to Caesar's _Gallic Wars_, with names of small Valiants scrawled on their fly-leaves. He carefully relocked the door of this room; he wanted to dust those toys and books with his own hands.

In the upper hall again he leaned from the window, sniffing the far-flung scent of orchards and peach-blown fence-rows. The soft whirring sound of a bird's wing went past, almost brushing his startled face, and the old oaks seemed to stretch their bent limbs with a faithful brute-like yawn of pleasure. In the room below he could hear the vigorous sound of Aunt Daphne's hard-driven broom and the sound flooded the echoing s.p.a.ce with a comfortable commotion.

The present task was one after Aunt Daphne's own heart. A small mountain of dust was growing on the terrace, and as beneath brush and rag the colors of wall and parquetry stood forth, her face became one shiny expanse of ebony satisfaction. When the bulldog, returning from his jaunt, out-stripping Uncle Jefferson, bounced in to prance against her she smote him l.u.s.tily with her scrubbing-brush.

"Git outer heah, yo' good-fo'-nuffin' w'ite rapscallyun! Gwine trapse yo' muddy feet all ovah dis yeah floor, whut Ah jes' scrubbed tell yo'

marstah kin eat off'n et?" She broke off to listen to Uncle Jefferson's voice outside, directed toward the upper window.

"Dat yo', suh? Yas, suh, dis me. Well, suh, Ah take ol' Sukey out de Red Road, en Ah hitch huh ter yo' machine-thing, en she done balk. Won't go nohow ... whut, suh? 'Beat huh ovah de haid?' Yas, suh, done hit huh in de haid six times wid de whip-han'l, en she look me in de eye en ain'

said er word.... 'Twis' huh tail?' _Me_, suh? No-suh-ree, suh. Mars'

Quarles' boy one time he twis' huh tail en dey sen' him ter de horspit'l. 'Daid,' suh? No, suh, ain' daid, but et mos' bust him wide open.... 'Set fiah undah huh?' Yas, suh, done set fiah undah huh. Mos'

burn up de harness, en ain' done no good.... Well, suh, Ah jes' gwineter say no use waitin' fo' Sukey ter change huh min', so Ah put some fence-rails undah huh en jock huh up en come home. En Ah's gwine out arter suppah en Sukey be all right den, suh, Ah reck'n. Yas, suh."

Aunt Daphne plunged out with fire in her eye, but the laugh that came from above was rea.s.suring. "Never mind, Uncle Jefferson, Miss Sukey's whims shall be regarded."

Chum, bouncing up the stairs like an animated bundle of springs, met his master coming down. "Old man," said the latter, "I don't mind telling you that I'm beginning to be taken with this place. But it's in a bad way, and it's going to be put in shape. It's a large order, and we'll have to work like horses. Don't you bother Aunt Daph! You just come with your Uncle Dudley. He's going to take a look over the grounds."

He went to his trunk and fished out a soft shirt on which he knotted a loose tie, exchanged his Panama for a slouch hat, and whistling the barcarole from _Tales of Hoffmann_, went gaily out. "I feel tremendously alive to-day," he confided to the dog, as he tramped through the lush gra.s.s. "If you see me ladle the muck out of that fountain with my own fair hands, don't have a fit. I'm liable to do anything."

His eye swept up and down the slope. "There probably isn't a finer site for a house in the whole South," he told himself. "The living-rooms front south and west. We'll get scrumptious sunsets from that back porch. And on the other side there's the view clear to the Blue Ridge.

And as for this garden, no landscape artist need apply. The outlines are all here; it needs only to be put back. We'll first rake out the rubbish, chop down that underbrush and trim the box. The shrubs only want pruning. Then we'll mend the pool and set the fountain going and put in some goldfish. Flower-seeds and bulbs are cheap enough, I fancy.

Just think of a bed of black and gold pansies running down to the lake!

And on the other side a wilderness garden. I've seen pictures of them in the ill.u.s.trated weeklies. Those rotten posts, under that snarl of vines, were a pergola. Any old carpenter can rebuild that--I can draw the plans myself."

He skirted the lake. "Only to grub out some of the lilies--there's too many of them--and straighten the rim--and weed the pebble margin to give those green rocks a show. I'll build a little wharf below them to dive from, and--yes, I'll stock it with spotted trout. Not just to yank out with a barbed hook, but to make it inhabited. How well a couple of white swans would look preening in the shade out there! The roof's gone from that oval summer-house, but it's no trick to put another on."

He penetrated farther into the tangle and came out into a partially cleared s.p.a.ce shaded with great trees, where the gra.s.s was matted with clover into a thick rug, sprinkled with designs worked in bluebells and field-daisies, with here and there a flaunting poppy, like a scarlet medallion. He was but a few hundred yards from the house, yet the silence was so deep that there might have been no habitation within fifty miles. All at once he stopped short; there was a sudden movement in the thicket beyond--the sound of light fast footfalls, as of some one running away.

He made a lunge for the dog, but with a growl Chum tore himself from the restraining grasp and dashed into the bushes. "A child, no doubt," he thought as he plunged in pursuit, "and that lubberly brute will scare it half to death!"

He pulled up with an exclamation. In a narrow wood-path a little way from him, partly hidden by a windfall, stood a girl, her skirt transfixed with a wickedly jagged sapling. He saw instantly how it had happened; the windfall had blocked the way, and she had sprung clean over it, not noting the screened spear, which now held her as effectually as any railroad spike. She was struggling with silent helpless fury to release herself, wrenching viciously at the offending stuff, which seemed ridiculously stout, and disregarding utterly the bulldog, frisking madly about her feet with sharp joyous barks.

In another moment Valiant had reached her and met her face, flushed, half defiant, her eyes a blue gleam of smoldering anger as she desperately, almost savagely, thrust wild tendrils of flame-colored hair beneath the broad curved brim of her straw hat. At her feet lay a great armful of cape jessamines.

A little thrill, light and warm and joyous, ran through him. Until that instant he had not recognized her.

CHAPTER XVIII

JOHN VALIANT MAKES A DISCOVERY

"I'm so sorry," was what he said, as he kneeled to release her, and she was grateful that his tone was unmixed with amus.e.m.e.nt. She bit her lips, as by sheer strength of elbow and knee he snapped the offending bole short off--one of those quick exhibitions of reserved strength that every woman likes. Meanwhile he was uttering ba.n.a.l fragments of sentences: "I hope you're not hurt. It was that unmannerly dog, I suppose. What a sword-edge that sliver has! A bad tear, I'm afraid.

There!--now it's all right."

"I don't know how I could have been so silly--thank you so much," said Shirley, panting slightly from her exertions. "I'm not the least bit hurt--only my dress--and you know very well that I wasn't afraid of that ridiculous dog." A richer glow stole to her cheeks as she spoke, a burning recollection of a rose, which from her horse that morning at Damory Court, she had glimpsed in its gla.s.s on the porch.

Both laughed a little. He imagined that he could smell that wonderful hair, a subtle fragrance like that of sun-dried seaweed or the elusive scent that clings to a tuft of long-plucked Spanish moss. "Chum stands absolved, then," he said, bending to sweep together the scattered jessamine. "Do you--do you run like that when you're _not_ frightened?"

"When I'm caught red-handed. Don't you?"

He looked puzzled.

She pointed to the flowers. "I had stolen them, and I was trying to "scape off wid 'em' as the negroes say. Shocking, isn't it? But you see, n.o.body has lived here since long before I was born, and I suppose the flower-thieving habit has become ingrown."