CHAPTER XXIX

AT THE DOME

A warm sun and an air mildly mellow. A faint gold-shadowed mist over the valley and a soft lilac haze blending the rounded outlines of the hills.

A breeze shook the twigs on the cedars, fluttered the leaves of the poplars till they looked a quivering ma.s.s of palpitating silver, bearing away with it the cool elastic grace-notes of the dripping water, as it sparkled over the big green-streaked rocks at the foot of the little lake at Damory Court. Over the wild grape-vines a pair of drunken b.u.t.terflies reeled, kissing wings, and on the stone rim of the fountain basin a tiny brown-green lizard lay motionless, sunning itself. Through the shrubbery a cardinal darted like a crimson shuttle, to rock impudently from a fleering limb, and here and there on the bluish-ivory sky, motionless as a pasted wafer, hung a hawk; from time to time one of these wavered and slanted swiftly down, to climb once more in a huge spiral to its high tower of sky.

Perhaps it wondered, as its telescopic eye looked down. That had been its choicest covert, that disheveled tangle where the birds held perpetual carnival, the weasel lurked in the underbrush and the rabbit lined his windfall. Now the wildness was gone. The lines of the formal garden lay again ordered and fair. The box-rows had been thinned of their too-aged shrubs and filled in anew. The wilderness garden to-be was still a stretch of raked and level soil, but all across this slender green spears were thrusting up--the promise of buds and blooms. A pergola, glistening white, now upheld the runaway vines, making a sickle-like path from the upper terrace to the lake. In the barn loft the pigeons still quarrelled over their new cotes of fresh pine, and under a clump of locust trees at a little distance from the house, a half-dozen dolls' cabins on stilts stood waiting the honey-storage of the black and gold bees.

There were new denizens, also. These had arrived in a dozen zinc tanks and willow hampers, to the amaze of a sleepy express clerk at the railroad station: two swans now sailed majestically over the lily-pads of the lake, along its gravel rim a pair of bronze-colored ducks waddled and preened, and its placid surface rippled and broke to the sluggish backs of goldfish and the flirting fins of red j.a.panese carp. Hens and guinea-fowl strutted and ran in a wire wattle behind the kitchen, and on the wall, now straightened and repaired, a splendid peac.o.c.k spread his barbaric plumage of spangled purple and screeched exultingly to his sober-hued mate.

The house itself wore another air. Its look of unkemptness had largely vanished. The comb of the roof had been straightened and the warped shutters repaired. The boards of the porch flooring had been relaid.

Moss and green lichen had been scoured from the bases of the great weather-beaten pillars. These, however, bore no garish coat of new paint. The soft gray tone of age remained, but the bleakness and forlornness were gone; there was about all now a warmth and genial bearing that hinted at mellowed beauty, firelight and cheerful voices within.

Valiant heaved a long sigh of satisfaction as he stood in the sunlight gazing at the results of his labors. He was not now the flippant boulevardier to whom money was the _sine qua non_ of existence. He had learned a sovereign lesson--one gained not through the push and fight of crowds, but in the simple peace of a countryside, unvexed by the clamor of gold and the complex problems of a compet.i.tive existence--that he had inherited a need of activity, of achievement: that he had been born to do. He had worked hard, with hand and foot, with hoe and mattock--strenuous perspiring effort that made his blood course fast and brought muscle-weariness over which nature had nightly poured her soothing medicaments of peace and sleep. His tanned face was as clear as a fine brown porcelain, his eye bright, and his muscles rippled up under his skin with elastic power.

"Chum," he said, to the dog rolling on his back in the gra.s.s, "what do you think of it all, anyway?" He reached down, seized a hind leg and whirling him around like a teetotum, sent him flying into the bushes, whence Chum launched again upon him, like a catapult. He caught the white shoulders and held him vise-like. "Just about right, eh? But wait till we get those ramblers!

"And to think," he continued, whimsically releasing him, "that I might have gone on, one of the little-neck-clam crowd I've always trained with, at the same old pace, till the Vermouth-c.o.c.ktail-Palm-Beach career got a double Nelson on me and the umpire counted me out. And I'd have ended by lazying along through my forties with a bay-window and a bunch of boudoir keys! Now I can kiss my hand to it all. At this moment I wouldn't swap this old house and land, and the sunshine and that 'gyarden' and Unc' Jefferson and Aunt Daph and the chickens and the birds and all the rest of it, for a mile of Millionaires' Row."

He drew from his jacket pocket a somewhat worn note and unfolded the dainty paper with its characteristic twirly handwriting. "The scarlet geraniums r.i.m.m.i.n.g the porch," he muttered, "the coral honeysuckle on the old dead tulip-tree, and the fuchsias and verbenas by the straight walk. How right she is! They're all growing, too. I haven't lost a single slip." He caught himself up short, strode to the nearest porch-pillar and rapped on it smartly with his knuckles.

"I must knock on wood," he said, "or I'll lose my luck." He laughed a little. "I'm certainly catching Uncle Jefferson's superst.i.tions. Perhaps that's in the soil, too!"

He went into the house and to the library. The breeze through the wide-flung bow-window was fluttering the papers on the desk and the map on the wall was flapping sidewise. He went to straighten it, and then saw what he had not noticed before--that it covered something that had been let into the plaster. He swung it aside and made an exclamation.

He was looking at a square, uncompromising wall-safe, with a round figured disk of white metal on its face. He knelt before it and tried its k.n.o.b. After a moment it turned easily. But the resolute steel door would not open, though he tried every combination that came into his mind. "No use," he said disgustedly. "One must have the right numbers."

Then he lifted his fretted frame and smote his grimy hands together.

"Confound it!" he said with a short laugh. "Here I am, a bankrupt, with all this outfit--clear to the very finger-bowls--handed to me on a silver tray, and I'm mad as scat because I can't open the first locked thing I find!"

He ran up-stairs and donned a rough corduroy jacket and high leather leggings. "We're going to climb the hill to-day, Chum," he announced, "and no more moccasins need apply."

In the lower hall, however, he suddenly stopped stock-still. "The slip of paper that was in the china dog!" he exclaimed. "What a chump I am not to have thought of it!" He found it in its pigeonhole and, kneeling down before the safe, tried the numbers carefully, first right, then left: 17--28--94--0. The heavy door opened.

"I was right!" he exulted. "It's the plate." He drew it out, piece by piece. Each was bagged in dark-red Canton flannel. He broke the tape of one bag and exposed a great silver pitcher, tarnished purple-blue like a raven's wing--then a tea-service. Each piece, large and small, was marked with the greyhound rampant and the motto. "And to think," he said, "that my great-great-grandfather buried you with his own hands under the stables when Tarleton's raiders swept the valley before the surrender at Yorktown! Only wait till Aunt Daphne gets you polished up, and on the sideboard! You're the one thing the place has needed!"

With the dog for comrade he traversed the garden and plunged across the valley below, humming as he went one of the songs with which Uncle Jefferson was wont to regale his labors:

"My gran'mothah lived on yondah li'l green, Fines' ol' lady _evah_ wuz seen.

Tummy-eye, tummy-oh, tummy-umpy-tumpy-tee.

Fines' ol' lady _evah_ yo' see!"

The ridiculous refrain rang out through the bewildering vistas of the wooded slope as he swung on, up the hill, through the underbrush.

The place was pathless and overgrown with paw-paw bushes and sa.s.safras.

Great trees stood so thickly in places as to make a twilight and the sunnier spots were ma.s.ses of pink laurel, poison-ivy, flaming purple rhododendron and wine-red tendrils of interbraided briers. This was the forest land of whose possibilities he had thought. In the heart of the woods he came upon a great limb that had been wrenched off by storm. The broken wood was of a deep rich brown, shading to black. He broke off his song, snapped a twig and smelled it. Its sharp acrid odor was unmistakable. He suddenly remembered the walnut tree at Rosewood and what Shirley had said: "I know a girl who had two in her yard, and she went to Europe on them."

He looked about him; as far as he could see the trees reared, hardy and perfect, untouched for a generation. He selected one of medium size and pulling a creeper, measured its circ.u.mference and gaging this measure with his eye, made a penciled calculation on the back of an envelope.

"Great Scott!" he said jubilantly to the dog; "that would cut enough to wainscot the Damory Court library and build twenty sideboards!"

He sat down on a mossed boulder, breathless, his eyes sparkling. He had thought himself almost a beggar, and here in his hand was a small fortune! "Talk about engagement rings!" he muttered. "Why, a dozen of these ought to buy a whole tiara!"

Far below him he could see the square tower of the old parish church of St. Andrew. The day before he had gone there to service, slipping into a pew at the rear. There had been flowers in silver vases on either side of the reading-desk, and dim hues from the stained-gla.s.s windows had touched the gray head of the rector above the bra.s.s lectern and the crooked oak beams of the roof, and he had caught himself all at once thinking that but for its drooping hat, Shirley's head might have outshone that of the saint through whose bright mantle the colors came.

After the service the rector had showed him the vestry and the church books with their many records of Valiants before him, and he had sat for a moment in the Valiant pew, fancying her standing there sometime beside him, with her trim gloved hand by his on the prayer-book.

At length he rose and climbed on, presently turning at a right-angle to bisect the strip to its boundary before he paused to rest. "I'm no timber-cruiser," he said to himself as he wiped his brow, "but I calculate there are all of three hundred trees big enough to cut. Why, suppose they are worth on an average only a hundred apiece. That would make--Good lord!" he muttered, "and I've been mooning about poverty!"

The growth was smaller and spa.r.s.er now and before long he came, on the hill's very crest, to the edge of a ragged clearing. It held a squalid settlement, perhaps a score of dirt-daubed cabins little better than hovels, some of them mere mud-walled lean-tos, with sod roofs and window-panes of flour-sacking. Fences and outhouses there was none.

Littered paths rambled aimlessly hither and thither from chip-strewn yards to starved patches of corn, under-cultivated and blighted. Over the whole place hung an indescribable atmosphere of disconsolate filth, of unredeemed squalor and vileness. Razor-backed hogs rooted everywhere, snapped at by a handful of lean and spiritless hounds. A slatternly woman lolled under a burlap awning beside one of the cabins from whose interior came the sound of men's voices raised in a fierce quarrel.

Undisturbed by the hideous din, a little girl of about three years was dragging by a string an old cigar-box in which was propped a rag-doll.

She was barelegged and barearmed, her tiny limbs burned a dark red by the sun, and she wore a single garment made from the leg of a patched pair of overalls. Her hair, bleached the color of corn-silk, fell over her face in elfin wildness.

With one hand on the dog's collar, hushing him to silence, Valiant, unseen, looked at the wretched place with a shiver. He had glimpsed many wretched purlieus in the slums of great cities, but this, in the open sunlight, with the clean woods about it and the sweet clear blue above, stood out with an unrelieved boldness and contrast that was doubly sinister and forbidding. He knew instantly that the tawdry corner was the community known as h.e.l.l's-Half-Acre, the place to which Shirley had made her night ride to rescue Rickey Snyder.

A quick glad realization of her courage rushed through him. On its heels came a feeling of shame that a spot like this could exist, a foul blot on such a landscape. It was on his own land! Its denizens held place by squatter sovereignty, but he was, nevertheless, their landlord. The thought bred a new sense of responsibility. Something should be done for them, too--for that baby, dragging its rag-doll in the cigar-box, poor little soul, abandoned to a life of besottedness, ignorance and evil!

As he gazed, the uproar in the cabin reached a climax. A red-bearded figure in nondescript garments shot from the door and collapsed in a heap in the dirt. He got up with a dreadful oath--a thrown jug grazing his temple as he did so--and shaking his fist behind him, staggered into a near-by lean-to.

Valiant turned away with a feeling almost of nausea, and plunged back down the forest hillside, the shrill laughter of the woman under the strip of burlap echoing in his ears.

CHAPTER x.x.x

THE GARDENERS

He saw them coming through the gate on the Red Road--the major and Shirley in a lilac muslin by his side--and strode to meet them. Behind them Ranston propelled a hand-cart filled with paper bundles from each of which protruded a bunch of flowering stems. There was a flush in Shirley's cheek as her hand lay in Valiant's. As for him, his eyes, like wilful drunkards, returned again and again, between the major's compliments, to her face.

"You have accomplished wonders, sah! I had no idea so much could be done in such a limited time. We are leisurely down here, and seldom do to-day what can be put off till to-morrow. Real Northern hustle, eh, Shirley?

You have certainly primped the old place up. 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."

"With our bushels of them? We shall never miss them at all. Have you set out the others?"

"I have, indeed. Every one has rooted, too. You shall see them." He led the way up the drive till they stood before the porch.

"Gad!" chuckled the major. "Who would think it had been unoccupied for three decades? At this rate, you'll soon be giving dances, sah."

"Ah," said Valiant. "That's the very thing I want to suggest. The tournament comes off next week, I understand, and it's been the custom to have a ball that night. The tourney ground is on this estate, and Damory Court is handier than the Country Club. Why wouldn't it be appropriate to hold the dance here? The ground-floor rooms are in order, and if the young people would put up with it, it would be a great pleasure to me, I a.s.sure you."