It was Beauty Valiant's face that lay in the locket, and that could mean but one thing: it was he, not Sa.s.soon, whom her mother loved!

The lamplight seemed to grow and spread to an unbearable radiance.

Shirley thought she cried out with a sudden sweet wildness, but she had not moved or uttered a sound. The illumination was all about her, like a splendid cloud. The impossible had happened. The miracle for which she had hysterically prayed had been wrought!

When she blew out the light, the shining still remained. That glowing knowledge, like a vitalizing and physical presence, pa.s.sed with her through the hall to her own room. As she stood in the elfish light of her one candle, the poignancy of her joy was as sharp as her past pain.

Later was to come the wonder how that tragedy had bent Beauty Valiant's life to exile and her mother's to unfulfilment, and in time she was to know these things, too. But now the one great knowledge blotted out all else. She need starve her fancy no longer! The hours with her lover might again sweep across her memory undenied. She felt his arms, his kisses, heard his whispers against her cheek and smelled the perfume of Madonna lilies.

She drew the curtain and opened the window noiselessly to the night.

Only a few hours ago she had been singing to her harp in what wretchedness! She laughed softly to herself. The quiet night was full of his voice: "I love you! I want nothing but you!" How her pitiful error had tortured and wrung them both! But to-morrow he, too, would know that all was well.

A clear sound chimed across the distance--the bell of the court-house clock, striking midnight. _One!_... _Two!_... How often lately it had rung discordantly across her mood; now it seemed a clamant watcher, tolling joy. _Three!_... _Four!_... _Five!_... Perhaps he was sleepless, listening, too. Was he in the old library, thinking of her? _Six!_...

_Seven!_... _Eight!_... _Nine!_... If she could only send her message to him on the bells! _Ten!_... It swelled more loudly now, more deliberate.

_Eleven!_... Another day was almost gone. _Twelve!_... "Joy cometh in the morning"--ran the whisper across her thought. It was morning now.

_Thirteen!_

She caught a sharp breath. Her ear had not deceived her--the vibration still palpitated on the air like a heart of sound. It had struck thirteen! A little eery touch crept along her nerves and a cool dampness broke on her skin, for she seemed to hear, quavering through the wondering silence, the voice of Mad Anthony, as it had quavered to her ear on the door-step of the negro cabin, with the well-sweep throwing its long curved shadow across the group of laughing faces:

"Ah sees yo' gwine ter him. Ah heahs de co'ot-house clock a-strikin' in de night--en yo' gwine.... Don' wait, don' wait, li'l mistis, er de trouble-cloud gwine kyah him erway f'om yo'.... When de clock strike thuhteen--when de clock strike thuhteen--"

She dropped the flowered curtain and drew back. A weird fancy had begun to press on her brain. Had not Mad Anthony foretold truly what had gone before? What if there were some cryptic meaning in this, too? To go to him, at midnight, by a lonely country road--she, a girl? Incredible! Yet her mind had opened to a vague growing fear that was swiftly mounting to a thriving anxiety. That innate superst.i.tion, secretly cherished while derided, which is the heritage of the Southron-born bred from centuries of contact with a mystical race, had her in its grip. Yet all the while her sober actual common-sense was crying out upon her--and crying in vain. Unknown appetences that had lain darkling in her blood, come down to her from long generations, were suddenly compelling her. The curtain began to wave in a little wind that whispered in the silk, and somewhere in the yard below she could hear Selim nipping the clover.

She was to go or the "trouble-cloud" would carry him away!

A strange expression of mingled fright and resolve grew on her face. She ran on tiptoe to her wardrobe and with frantic haste dragged out a rough cloak that fell over her soft house-gown, covering it to the feet. It had a peaked hood falling from its collar and into this she thrust the resentful ma.s.ses of her hair. Every few seconds she caught her breath in a short gasp, and once she paused with an apprehensive glance over her shoulder and shivered. She scarcely knew what she did, nor did she ask herself what might be the outcome of such an absurd adventure. She neither knew nor cared. She was swept off her feet and whirled away into some outlandish limbo of shadowy fear and crying dread.

Slipping off her shoes, she went swiftly and noiselessly down the stair.

She let herself out of the door and, shoes on again, ran across the clover. A hound clambered about her, whining, but she silenced him with a whispered word. Selim lifted his head and she patted the snuffling inquiring muzzle an instant before, with her hand on his mane, she led him through the hedge to the stable. It was but the work of a moment to throw on a side-saddle and buckle the girth. Then, mounting, she turned him into the lane.

He was thoroughbred, and her tense excitement seemed to communicate itself to him. He blew the breath through his delicate flaring nostrils and flung up his head at her restraining hand on the bridle. Once on the Red Road, she let him have his will. The long vacant highway reeled out behind her to the fierce and lonely hoof-tattoo. She was scarcely conscious of consecutive thought--all was a vague jumble of chaotic impressions threaded by that necessity that called her like an insistent voice.

Copse and hedge flew by, streaks of distemper on the shifting gloom; swarthy farmhouse roofs huddled like giant Indians on the trail, and ponds in pastures glinted back the pale glimmering of stars. The faint mist, tangled in the branches of the trees, made them look like ghosts gathered to see her pa.s.s. Was this real or was she dreaming?

Was she, Shirley Dandridge, really galloping down an open road at midnight--because of the hare-brained maunderings of a half-mad old negro?

The great iron gate of Damory Court hung open, and scarcely slackening her pace, she rode through and up the long drive. The glooming house-front was blank and silent and its huge porch columns looked like lonely gray monoliths in the wan light. Not a twinkle showed at c.h.i.n.k or cranny; the ponderous shutters were closed. There was a sense of desertion, of emptiness about the place that brought her heart into her throat with a sickly horrible feeling of certainty.

She jumped down from the blowing horse and hurried around the house. The door of the kitchens was open and a ladder of dim reddish light fell from it across the gra.s.s. She ran swiftly and looked in. A huddled figure sat there, rocking to and fro in the lamplight.

"Aunt Daph," she called, "what is the matter?"

The turbaned head turned sharply toward her. "Dat yo', Miss Shirley?"

the old woman said huskily. "Is yo' come ter see Mars' John 'fo' he gwine away? Yo' too late, honey, too late! He done gone ter de deepo fo'

ter ketch de thoo train. En, oh, honey, Ah knows in mah ole ha'at dat Mars' John ain' nevah gwine come back ter Dam'ry Co'ot no mo'!"

CHAPTER XLVIII

THE SONG OF THE NIGHTINGALE

Along the dark turnpike John Valiant rode with his chin sunk on his breast. He was wretchedly glad of the darkness, for it covered a thousand familiar sights he had grown to love. Yet through the dark came drifting sounds that caught at him with clutching hands--the bay of a hound from some far-off kennel, the whirring note of frogs, the impatient high whinny of a horse across pasture-bars--and his nostrils widened to the wild braided fragrance of the fields over which the mist was spinning its fairy carded wool.

The preparations for his going had been quickly made. He was leaving behind him all but a single portmanteau. Uncle Jefferson had already taken this--with Chum--to the station. The old man had now gone sorrowfully afoot to the blockhouse, a half-mile up the track, to bespeak the stopping of the express. He would go back on the horse his master was riding.

The lonely little depot flanked a siding beside a dismal stretch of yellow clay-bank gouged by rains. Its windows were dark and the weather-beaten plank platform was illuminated by a single lantern that hung on a nail beside the locked door, its sickly flame showing bruise-like through smoky streakings of lamp-black. At one side, in the shadow, was his bag, and beside it the tethered bulldog--sole spot of white against the melancholy forlornness--lying with one splinted leg, like a swaddled ramrod, sticking straight out before him.

In the saddle, Valiant struck his hand hard against his knee. Surely it was a dream! It could not be that he was leaving Virginia, leaving Damory Court, leaving _her_! But he knew that it was not a dream.

Far away, rounding Powhattan Mountain, he heard the long-drawn hoot of the coming train, flinging its sky-warning in a host of scampering echoes. Among them mixed another sound far up the desolate road, coming nearer--the sound of a horse, galloping fast and hard.

His own fidgeted, flung up wide nostrils and neighed shrilly. Who was coming along that runnelled highway at such an hour in such breakneck fashion?

The train was nearer now; he could hear its low rumbling hum, rising to a roar, and the click and spring of the rails. But though he lifted a foot from the stirrup, he did not dismount. Something in the whirlwind speed of that coming caught and held him motionless. He had a sudden curious feeling that all the world beside did not exist; there were only the sweeping rush of the nearing train--impersonal, unhuman--he, sitting his horse in the gloom, and that unknown rider whose anguish of speed outstripped the steam, riding--to whom?

The road skirted the track as it neared the station, and all at once a white glare from the opened fire-box flung itself blindingly across the dark, illuminating like a flare of summer lightning the patch of highway and the rider. Valiant, staring, had an instant's vision of a streaming cloak, of a girl's face, set in a tawny swirl of loosened hair. With a cry that was lost in the shriek of escaping steam, he dragged his plunging horse around and the white blaze swept him also, as the rider pulled down at his side.

"You!" he cried. He leaned and caught the slim hands gripped on the bridle, shaking now. "You!"

The dazzling brightness had gone by, and the air was full of the groaning of the brakes as the long line of darkened sleepers shuddered to its enforced stop. "John!"--He heard the sweet wild cry pierce through the jumble of noises, and something in it set his blood running molten through his veins. It held an agony of relief, of shame and of appeal. "John ... John!"

And knowing suddenly, though not how or why, that all barriers were swept away, his arms went out and around her, and in the shadow of the lonely little station, they two, in their saddles, clung and swayed together with clasping hands and broken words, while the train, breathing heavily for a resentful second, shrieked itself away into the night, and left only the fragrance from the misty fields, the crowding silence and the sprinkling stars.

The breeze had risen and was blowing the mist away as they went back along the road. A faint light was lifting, forerunner of the moon. They rode side by side, and to the slow gait of the horses, touching noses in low whinnyings of equine comradeship, by the faint glamour they gazed into each other's faces. The adorable tweedy roughness of his shoulder thrilled her cheek.

"... And you were going away. Yes, yes, I know. It was my fault. I ...

misunderstood. Forgive me!"

He kissed her hand. "As if there were anything to forgive! Do you remember in the woods, sweetheart, the day it rained? What a brute I was--to fight so! And all the time I wanted to take you in my arms like a little hurt child...."

She turned toward him. "Oh, I _wanted_ you to fight! Even though it was no use. I had given up, but your strength comforted me. To have you surrender, too--"

"It was your face in the churchyard," he told her. "How pale and worn you looked! It came to me then for the first time how horribly selfish it would be to stay--how much easier going would make it for you."

"... And to think that it was Mad Anthony--Did the clock _really_ strike thirteen, do you think? Or did I fancy it?"

"Why question it?" he said. "I believe in mysteries. The greatest mystery of all is that you should love me. I doubt no miracle hereafter.

Dearest, dearest!"

At the entrance of the cherry lane, he fastened his horse to the hedge, and noiselessly let down the pasture-bars for her golden chestnut. When he came back to where she stood waiting on the edge of the lawn, the late moon, golden-vestured, was just showing above the rim of the hills, painting the deep soft blueness of the Virginian night with a translucence as pure as prayer. Above the fallen hood of her cloak her hair shone like a nimbus, and the loveliness of her face made him catch his breath for the wonderfulness of it.

As they stood heavened in each other's arms, heart beating against heart, and the whole world throbbing to joy, the nightingale beyond the arbors began to bubble and thrill its unimaginable melody. It came to them like the voice of the magical rose-scented night itself, set to the wordless music of the silver leaves. It rose and swelled exultant to break and die in a cascade of golden notes.

But in their hearts was the song that is fadeless, immortal.