Again and again the clear note rang out and a mounted figure plunged by, and presently, in a burst of cheering, the herald proclaimed "The Knight of the Black Eagle--one!" and Chilly Lusk, in old-rose doublet and inky plume cantered back with a silver ring upon his pike.

The hazards in the stand multiplied. Now it was Westover's Knight against him of the Silver Cross; now, the Lord of Brandon to win. The gentlemen wagered coin of the realm; the ladies gloves and chocolates.

One pretty girl, amid a gale of chaff, staked a greyhound puppy. The arena swam in a l.u.s.trous light, and the greensward glistened in its frame of white and dusky spectators. In the sunshine the horses--every one of them groomed till his coat shone like black, gray or sorrel satin--curveted and whinnied, restive and red-nostriled under the tense rein. The riders sat erect and statuesque, pikes in air, cloaks flapping from their shoulders, waiting the call that sent each in turn tilting against the glittering and elusively breeze-swinging silver circlet.

No simple thing, approaching leisurely and afoot, to send that tapering point straight to the tiny mark. But at headlong gallop, astride a blooded horse straining to take the bit, a deed requiring a nice eye, a perfect seat and an unwavering arm and hand! Those knights who looped back with their pikes thus braceleted had spent long hours in practise and each rode as naturally as he breathed; yet more than once a horse shied in mid-course and at the too-eager thrust of the spur bolted through the ropes. Valiant made his first essay--and missed--with the blood singing in his ears. The ring flew from his pike, catching him a swinging blow on the temple in its rebound, but he scarcely felt it.

As he cantered back he heard the major's ba.s.s pitting him against the field, and for a moment again the spot of blue seemed to spread over all the watching stand.

And then, suddenly, stand and field all vanished. He saw only the long level rope-lined lane with its twinkling mid-air point. An exhilaration caught him at the feel of the splendid horse-flesh beneath him--that sense of oneness with the creature he bestrode which the instinctive horseman knows. He lifted his lance and hefted it, seeking its absolute balance, feeling its point as a fencer with his rapier. When again the blood-red sash streamed away the herald's cry, "Knight of the Crimson Rose--One!" set the field hand-clapping. From the next joust also, Valiant returned with the gage upon his lance. Two had gone to the Champion of Castlewood and two to scattering riders. When Valiant won his fourth the grand stand thundered with applause.

Katherine Fargo was watching with a gaze that held a curious puzzle.

After that recognition of the White Knight, Judge Chalmers had told in a few words the story of Damory Court, its ancient history, the unhappy duel that had sent its owner into a Northern exile, and the son's recent coming. It had more than surprised her. Her father's appreciative chuckle that "the young vagabond seemed after all to have fallen on his feet" had left her strangely silent. She was undergoing a curious mental boulevers.e.m.e.nt. Valiant's pa.s.sionate defense of his father in that fierce burst of anger in the court room had at first startled her with its sense of unsuspected force. Later, however, she had come to think it theatric and overdrawn, and she had heard of his quixotic surrender of his fortune with a wonder not unmixed with an almost pitying scorn. She despised eccentricity as much as she respected wealth, and the act had seemed a ridiculous impulse or a silly affectation, destined to be repented long and bitterly in cold blood. So she had thought of him since his evanishment with a regret less sharp for being glozed with a certain contempt.

The discovery of him to-day had dissipated this. She had an unerring sense of social values and she made no error in her estimate of the people by whom she was now surrounded. The recital of the Valiant generations, the size of the estate, the position into which its heir had stepped by very reason of being who he was, appealed to her instinct and imagination and respect for blood. She had a sudden conception of new values, beside which money counted little. The last of a line more ancient than the state itself, master of a homestead famous throughout its borders, John Valiant loomed larger in her eyes at the moment than ever before.

The trumpet again pealed its silvery proclamation. Judge Chalmers was on his feet. "Fifty to ten on the Crimson Rose," he cried. This time, however, there were no takers. He called again, but none heard him; the last tilts were too absorbing.

Where had John Valiant learned that trick of the loose wrist and inflexible thrust, but at the fencing club? Where that subconscious management of the rein, that nice gage of speed and distance, but on the polo field? The old sports stood him now in good stead. "Why, he has a seat like a centaur!" exclaimed the judge--praise indeed in a community where riding was a pa.s.sion and horse-flesh a fetish!

"Oh, dear!" mourned Nancy Chalmers. "I've bet six pairs of gloves on Quint Carter. Never mind; if it has to be anybody else, I'd rather it were Mr. Valiant. It's about time Damory Court got something after Rip-Van-Winkling it for thirty years. Besides, he's giving us the dance, and I _love_ him for that! Quint still has a chance, though. If he takes the next two, and Mr. Valiant misses--"

Katherine looked at her with a little smile. "He won't miss," she said.

She had seen that look on his face before and read it aright. John Valiant had striven in many contests, not only of skill but of strength and daring, before crowded grand stands. But never in all his life had he so desired to pluck the prize. His grip was tense on the lance as the yellow doublet and olive plume of Castlewood shot away for a last time--and failed. An instant later the Knight of the Crimson Rose flashed down the lists with the last ring on his pike.

And the tourney was won.

In the shouting and hand-clapping Valiant took the rose from his hat-band and bound it with a shred of his sash to his lance-point. As he rode slowly toward the ma.s.sed stand, the whole field was so still that he could hear the hoofs of the file of knights behind him. The people were on their feet.

The mounted herald blew his blast. "By the Majesties of St. Michael and St. George," he proclaimed, "I declare the Knight of the Crimson Rose the victor of this our tourney, and do charge him now to choose his Queen of Beauty, that all may do her homage!"

Shirley saw the horse coming down the line, its rider bareheaded now, and her heart began to race wildly. Beyond wanting him to take part, she had not thought. She looked about her, suddenly dismayed. People were smiling at her and clapping their hands. From the other end of the stand she saw Nancy Chalmers throwing her a kiss, and beside her a tall pale girl in champagne-color staring through a jeweled lorgnette.

She was conscious all at once that the flanneled rider was very close ... that his pike-point, with its big red blossom, was stretching up to her.

With the rose in her hand she curtsied to him, while the blurred throng cheered itself hoa.r.s.e, and the band struck up _You Great Big Beautiful Doll_, with extraordinary rapture, to the tune of which the noise finally subsided to a battery of hilarious congratulations which left her flushed and a little breathless. Nancy Chalmers and Betty Page had burst upon her like petticoated whirlwinds and presently, when the crowd had lessened, the judge came to introduce his visitor.

"Mr. Fargo and his daughter are our guests at Gladden Hall," he told her. "They are old friends of Valiant's, by the way; they knew him in New York."

"Katharine's lighting her incense now, I guess," observed Silas Fargo.

"See there!" He pointed across the stand, where stood a willowy tan figure, one hand beckoning to the concourse below, where Valiant stood, the center of a shifting group, round which the white bulldog, mad with recovered liberty, tore in eccentric circles.

As they looked, she called softly, "John! John!"

Shirley saw him start and face about, then come quickly toward her, amazement and welcome in his eyes.

As Shirley turned away a little later with the major, that whispering voice seemed still to sound in her ears--"John! John!" There smote her suddenly the thought that when he had chosen her his Queen of Beauty, he had not seen the other--had not known she was there.

A few moments before the day had been golden; she went home through a landscape that somehow seemed to have lost its brightest glow.

CHAPTER x.x.xIV

KATHARINE DECIDES

Katharine left the field of Runnymede with John Valiant in the dun-colored motor. She sat in the pa.s.senger's seat beside him, while the bulldog capered, ecstatically barking, from side to side of the rear cushions. Her father had declined the honor, remarking that he considered a professional chauffeur a sufficient risk of his valuable life and that the Chalmers' grays were good enough for him--a decision which did not wholly displease Katharine.

The car was not the smart Panhard in which she had so often spun down the avenue or along the sh.e.l.l-roads of the north sh.o.r.e. It lacked those fin-de-siecle appurtenances which marked the ne plus ultra of its kind, as her observant eye recognized; but it ran staunch and true. The powerful hands that gripped the steering-wheel were brown with sun and wind, and the handsome face above it had a look of keenness and energy she had never surprised before. They pa.s.sed many vehicles and there were few whose occupants did not greet him. In fact, as he presently remarked, it was a saving of energy to keep his hat off; and he tossed the Panama into the rear seat. On the rim of the village a group raised a cheer to which he nodded laughingly, and farther on a little old lady on a timid vine-covered porch beside a church, waved a black-mitted hand to him with a sweet old-time gesture. Katharine noted that he bowed to her with extra care.

"That's Miss Mattie Sue Mabry," he said, "the quaintest, dearest thing you ever saw. She taught my father his letters." A small freckled-faced girl was swinging on the gate. "You really must know Rickey Snyder!" he said, and halted the car at the curb. "Rickey," he called, "I want to introduce you to Miss Fargo."

"Howdy do?" said Rickey, approaching with an ingratiating bob of the head. "I saw you at the tournament. Is it true that you can ride on the train wherever you want to without ever buying any ticket?"

Katharine smiled back. "I'm not sure they'd all take me for nothing,"

she said, "but perhaps a few of them would."

"That must be grand," sighed Rickey. "I reckon you've seen everything in the world, almost."

"No, indeed. I never saw a tournament like this, for instance. It was tremendously exciting. Wasn't it!"

"My goodness gracious, yes! Mr. Valiant, I most cried when you chose Miss Shirley Queen of Beauty, I was that glad! She was a lot the prettiest girl there. Though I like your looks right much too, Miss Fargo," she added tactfully.

"Oh, Mr. Valiant!" Rickey called after them as the car started. "Now you're at Damory Court, are you going to let us children keep on playing up at the Hemlocks?"

"Well I should _think_ so!" he answered. "Play there all the time, if you like."

"Oh, thank you," said Rickey, radiant. "And there won't be any snakes there now, for you've cleared all the underbrush away."

As they sped on, Katharine's cheek had a faintly heightened color. But, "What a deliciously odd child!" she laughed.

"She's a character," he said. "She worships the ground Miss Dandridge walks on. There's a good reason for it. You must get Miss Chalmers to tell you the story."

Where the Red Road stretched level before them, he threw the throttle open for a long rush through the thymy-scented air. The light, late afternoon breeze drew by them, sweeping back Katharine's graceful sinuous veil and spraying them with odors of clover and sunny fruit.

They pa.s.sed orchard clumps bending with young apples, boundless aisles of green, young-ta.s.seled corn and shadowy groves that smelled of fern and sa.s.safras, opening out into more sun-lighted vistas overarched by the intense penetrable blue of the June sky.

John Valiant had never seemed to her so wholly good to see, with his waving hair ruffling in their flight and the westerning sun shining redly on his face. Midway of this spurt he looked at her to say: "Did you ever know a more beautiful countryside? See how the pink-and-yellow of those grain fields fades into the purple of the hills. Very few painters have ever captured a tint like that. It's like raspberries crushed in curdled milk."

"I've quite lost my heart to it all," she said, her voice jolting with the speed of their course. "It's a perfect pastoral ... so different from our terrific city pace.... Of course it must be a trifle dull at times ... seeing the same people always ... and without the theater and the opera and the whirl about one--but ... the kind of life one reads about ... in the novels of the South, you know ... I suppose one doesn't realize that it actually exists until one comes to a Southern place like this. And the negro servants! How odd it must be to have a white-headed old darky in a bra.s.s-b.u.t.toned swallow-tail for a butler! So picturesque!

At Judge Chalmers', I have a feeling all the time that I'm walking through a stage rehearsal."

The car slackened speed as it slid by a whitewashed cabin at whose entrance sat a dusky gray-bearded figure. Valiant pointed. "Do you see him?" he asked.

"I see a very ordinary old colored man sitting on the door-step,"

Katharine replied.