She looked at him whitely. "Monty, Monty!" she cried. "Don't leave me this way! I always thought--"

He guessed what she would have said. "Heaven knows you're needed more than me, Judith. After all, I reckon when my time had to come I'd have chosen the quick way." His voice trailed out and he struggled for breath.

"Jerry's in the hall, Monty. He asked me to give you his love."

"Poor old n.i.g.g.e.r! He--used to tote me on his back when I was a little shaver." There was a silence. "Don't kneel, Judith," he said at length.

"You will be so tired."

She rose obediently and drew up a chair. "Monty," she faltered tremulously, "shall I say a prayer? I've never prayed much--my prayers never seemed to get above the ceiling, somehow. But I'll--try."

He smiled wanly. "I wouldn't want any better than yours, Judith. But seems as if I'd been prayed over enough. I reckon G.o.d Almighty's like anybody else, and doesn't want to be ding-donged all the time."

He seemed to have been gathering his resolution, and presently his hand fumbled over his breast. "My wallet; give it to me." She drew it from the pocket and the uncertain fingers took out a key. "It opens a tin box in my trunk. There's--a letter in it for you." He paused a moment, panting: "Judith," he said, "I've got to tell you, but it's mighty hard.

The letter ... it's one Valiant gave me for you--that morning, after the duel. I--never gave it to you."

If she had been white before, she grew like marble now. Her slim fingers clutched the little cane till it rattled against the chair, and the lace at her throat shook with her breathing. "Yes--Monty."

He lifted his hand with difficulty and put the key into hers. "The seal's still unbroken, Judith," he said, "but I've kept it these thirty years."

She was holding the key in her hands, looking down upon it. There was a strained half-fearful wonder in her face. For an instant she seemed quite to have forgotten him in the grip of some swift and painful emotion.

"I loved you, Judith!" he stammered in anguished appeal. "From the time we were boy and girl together, I loved you. You never cared for me--Sa.s.soon and Valiant had the inside track. You might have loved me; but I had no chance with either of them. Then came the duel. There was only Valiant then. I overheard his promise to you that night, Judith. He had broken that! If you cared more for him than for Sa.s.soon, you might have forgiven him, and I should have lost you! I didn't want you to call him back, Judith! I wanted my chance! And so--I took it. That's--the reason, dear. It's--it's a bad one, isn't it!"

A shiver went over her set face--like a breath of wind over tall gra.s.s, and she seemed to come back from an infinite distance to place and moment. Between the curtains a white b.u.t.terfly hovered an instant, and in the yard she heard the sound of some winged thing fluttering. The thought darted to her that it was the sound of her own dead heart awaking. She looked at the key and all at once put a hand to her mouth as though to still words clamoring there.

"Judith," he said tremulously, between short struggles for breath, "all these years, after I found there was no chance for me, I reckon I've--prayed only one prayer. 'G.o.d, let it be Sa.s.soon that she loved!'

And I've prayed that mighty near every day. The thought that maybe it was Valiant has haunted me like a ghost. You never told--and I never dared ask you. Judith--"

Her face was still averted, and when she did not speak he turned his head from her on the pillow, with a breath that was almost a moan. She started, looking at him an instant in piteous hesitation, then swiftly kissed the little key and closed her hand tight upon it. Truth? She saw only the pillow and the graying face upon it! She threw herself on her knees by the couch and laid her lips on the pallid forehead.

"It--it _was_ Sa.s.soon, Monty," she said, and her voice broke on the first lie she had ever told.

"Thank G.o.d!" he gasped. He struggled to raise himself on his elbow, then suddenly the strength faded out and he settled back.

Her cry brought the doctor, but this time the restorative seemed of no avail, and after a time he came and touched her shoulder. With a last long look at the ash-pale face on the settee she followed him from the room. In the yellow parlor he put her into a chair.

"No," he said, in answer to her look, "he won't rouse again."

"I will wait," she told him, and he left her, shutting the door with careful softness.

But the slight figure with its silver hair, sitting there, was not alone. Ghosts were walking up and down. Not the misty wraiths John Valiant had at times imagined went flitting along the empty corridors, but faces very clear in the sunlight, that came and went with the memories so long woven over by the shuttle of time--evoked now by the touch of a key that her hand still clenched tightly in its palm.

There welled over her in a tide those days of puzzle, the weeks of waiting silence, the slow inexorable months of heartache, the long years that had deepened the mystery of Beauty Valiant's exile. In the first shock of the news that Sa.s.soon had fallen by his hand, she had thought she could not forgive him that broken faith. She and his promise to her had not weighed in the balance against his idea of manly "honor"! But this bitterness had at length slipped away. "He will write," she had told herself, "and explain." But no word had come. Whispers had flitted to her--the tale of Sa.s.soon's intoxication--stinging barbs that clung to Beauty Valiant's name. That these should rest unanswered had filled her with resentment and anger. Slowly, but with deadly surety, had grown the belief that he no longer cared. In the end there had been left her only pride--the pride that covers its wound and smiles. And she had hidden her wound with flowers. But in the deepest well of her heart her love for him had rested unchanged, clear and defined as a moss in amber, wrapped in that mystery of silence.

In the little haircloth trunk back in her room lay an old sc.r.a.p-book. It held a few leaves torn from letters and many newspaper clippings. From these she had known of his work, his marriage, the great commercial success for which his name had stood--the name that from the day of his going, she had so seldom taken upon her lips. Some of them had dealt with his habits and idiosyncrasies, hints of an altered personality, an aloofness or loneliness that had set him apart and made him, in a way, a stranger to those who should have known him best. Thus her mind had come to hold a double image: the grave man these shadowed forth, and the man she had loved, whose youthful face was in the locket she wore always on her breast. It was this face that was printed on her heart, and when John Valiant had stood before her on the porch at Rosewood, it had seemed to have risen, instinct, from that old grave.

He had not kept silence! He had written! It pealed through her brain like a m.u.f.fled bell. But Beauty Valiant was gone with her youth; in the room near by lay that old companion who would never speak to her again, the lifelong friend--who had really failed her thirty years ago!... and in a tin box a mile away lay a letter....

"He won't rouse again," the doctor had said, but a little later, as he and Valiant sat beside the couch, the major opened his eyes suddenly.

"Shirley," he whispered. "Where's Shirley?"

She was sitting on the porch just outside the open window, and when she entered, tears were on her face. The doctor drew back silently; but when Valiant would have done so, the major called him nearer.

"No," he panted; "I like to see you two together." His voice was very weak and tired.

As she leaned and touched his hand, he smiled whimsically. "It's mighty curious," he said, "but I can't get it out of my head that it's Beauty Valiant and Judith that I'm really talking to. Foolish--isn't it?" But the idea seemed to master him, and presently he began to call Shirley by her mother's name. An odd youthfulness crept into his eyes; a subtle paradoxical boyishness. His cheek tinged with color. The deep lines about his mouth smoothed miraculously out.

"Judith," he whispered, "--you--sure you told me the truth a while ago, when you said--you said--"

"Yes, yes," Shirley answered, putting her young arm under him, thinking only to soothe the anxiety that seemed vaguely to thread some vague hallucination.

He smiled again. "It makes it easier," he said. He looked at Valiant, his mind seeming to slip farther and farther away. "Beauty," he gasped, "you didn't go away after all, did you! I dreamed it--I reckon. It'll be--all right with you both."

He sighed peacefully, and his eyes turned to Shirley's and closed.

"I'm--so glad," he muttered, "so glad I--didn't really do it, Judith. It would have--been the--only--low-down thing--I--ever did."

The doctor went swiftly to the door and beckoned to Jereboam. "Come in now, Jerry," he said in a low voice, "quickly."

The old negro fell on his knees by the couch. "Mars' Monty!" he cried.

"Is yo' gwine away en leab ol' Jerry? Is yo'? Mars'?"

The cracked but loving voice struck across the void of the failing sense. For a last time the major opened his misting eyes.

"Jerry, you--black scoundrel!" he whispered, and Shirley felt his head grow heavier on her arm, "I reckon it's--about time--to be going--home!"

CHAPTER XLV

RENUNCIATION

The grim posse that gathered in haste that afternoon did not ride far.

Its work had been singularly well done. It brought back to Damory Court, however, a white bulldog whose broken leg made his would-be joyful bark trail into a sad whimper as his owner took him into welcoming arms.

Next day the major was carried to his final rest in the myrtled shadow of St. Andrew's. At the service the old church was crowded to its doors.

Valiant occupied a humble place at one side--the others, he knew, were older friends than he. The light of the late afternoon came dimly in through the stained-gla.s.s windows and seemed to clothe with subtle colors the voice of the rector as he read the solemn service. The responses came brokenly, and there were tears on many faces.

Valiant could see the side-face of the doctor, its saturnine grimness strangely moved, and beyond him, Shirley and her mother. Many glanced at them, for the major's will had been opened that morning and few there had been surprised to learn that, save for a life-annuity for old Jereboam, he had left everything he possessed to Shirley. Miss Mattie Sue was beside them, and between, wan with weeping, sat Rickey Snyder.

Shirley's arm lay shelteringly about the small shoulders as if it would stay the pa.s.sion of grief that from time to time shook them.

The evening before had been further darkened by the child's disappearance and Miss Mattie Sue had sat through half the night in tearful anxiety. It was Valiant who had solved the riddle. In her first wild compunction, Rickey had gasped out the story of her meeting with Greef King, his threat and her own terrorized silence, and when he heard of this he had guessed her whereabouts. He had found her at the Dome, in the deserted cabin from which on a snowy night six years ago, Shirley had rescued her. She had fled there in her shabbiest dress, her toys and trinkets left behind, taking with her only a string of blue gla.s.s beads that had been Shirley's last Christmas present.