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THE VALIANTS
OF VIRGINIA
By HALLIE ERMINIE RIVES
(MRS. POST WHEELER)
Author of "The Kingdom of Slender Swords,"
"Satan Sanderson," etc.
WITH FOUR ILLUSTRATIONS IN COLOR
BY ANDRE CASTAIGNE
A. L. BURT COMPANY
PUBLISHERS NEW YORK
COPYRIGHT 1912
THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
[Illustration]
TO
THE REAL JOHN
"Molly, Molly Bright!
Can I get there by candle-light?"
"Yes, if your legs are long enough."
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I THE CRASH 1
II VANITY VALIANT 12
III THE NEVER-NEVER LAND 21
IV THE TURN OF THE PAGE 29
V THE LETTER 36
VI A VALIANT OF VIRGINIA 44
VII ON THE RED ROAD 49
VIII MAD ANTHONY 59
IX UNCLE JEFFERSON 71
X WHAT HAPPENED THIRTY YEARS AGO 80
XI DAMORY COURT 90
XII THE CASE OF MOROCCO LEATHER 102
XIII THE HUNT 109
XIV SANCTUARY 119
XV MRS. POLY GIFFORD PAYS A CALL 124
XVI THE ECHO 138
XVII THE TRESPASSER 142
XVIII JOHN VALIANT MAKES A DISCOVERY 152
XIX UNDER THE HEMLOCKS 163
XX ON THE EDGE OF THE WORLD 173
XXI AFTER THE STORM 179
XXII THE ANNIVERSARY 188
XXIII UNCLE JEFFERSON'S STORY 197
XXIV IN DEVIL-JOHN'S DAY 203
XXV JOHN VALIANT ASKS A QUESTION 219
XXVI THE CALL OF THE ROSES 223
XXVII BEYOND THE BOX-HEDGE 230
XXVIII NIGHT 238
XXIX AT THE DOME 244
XXX THE GARDENERS 255
XXXI TOURNAMENT DAY 267
XXXII A VIRGINIAN RUNNYMEDE 275
XXXIII THE KNIGHT OF THE CRIMSON ROSE 289
XXXIV KATHARINE DECIDES 300
XXXV "WHEN KNIGHTHOOD WAS IN FLOWER" 309
XXXVI BY THE SUN-DIAL 317
XXXVII THE DOCTOR SPEAKS 328
XXXVIII THE AMBUSH 334
XXXIX WHAT THE CAPE JESSAMINES KNEW 340
XL THE AWAKENING 346
XLI THE COMING OF GREEF KING 359
XLII IN THE RAIN 369
XLIII THE EVENING OF AN OLD SCORE 378
XLIV THE MAJOR BREAKS SILENCE 386
XLV RENUNCIATION 398
XLVI THE VOICE FROM THE PAST 408
XLVII WHEN THE CLOCK STRUCK 415
XLVIII THE SONG OF THE NIGHTINGALE 427
THE VALIANTS OF VIRGINIA
CHAPTER I
THE CRASH
"Failed!" ejaculated John Valiant blankly, and the hat he held dropped
to the claret-colored rug like a huge white splotch of sudden fright.
"The Corporation--failed!"
The young man was the glass of fashion, from the silken ribbon on the
spotless Panama to his pearl-gray gaiters, and well favored--a lithe
stalwart figure, with wide-set hazel eyes and strong brown hair waving
back from a candid forehead. The soft straw, however, had been wrung to
a wisp between clutching fingers and the face was glazed in a kind of
horrified and assiduous surprise, as if the rosy peach of life, bitten,
had suddenly revealed itself an unripe persimmon. The very words
themselves came with a galvanic twitch and a stagger that conveyed a
sense at once of shock and of protest. Even the white bulldog stretched
on the floor, nose between paws and one restless eye on his master in
a troubled wonder that any one should prefer to forsake the ecstatic
sunshine of the street, with its thousand fascinating scents and
cross-trails, for a stuffy business office, lifted his wrinkling pink
nose and snuffled with acute and hopeful inquiry.
Never had John Valiant's innocuous and butterfly existence known a
surprise more startling. He had swung into the room with all the
nonchalant habits, the ingrained certitude of the man born with
achievement ready-made in his hands. And a single curt statement--like
the ruthless blades of a pair of shears--had snipped across the one
splendid scarlet thread in the woof that constituted life as he knew it.
He had knotted his lavender scarf that morning a vice-president of
the Valiant Corporation--one of the greatest and most successful of
modern-day organizations; he sat now in the fading afternoon trying to
realize that the huge fabric, without warning, had toppled to its fall.
With every nerve of his six feet of manhood in rebellion, he rose and
strode to the half-opened window, through which sifted the smell of
growing things--for the great building fronted the square--and the soft
alluring moistness of early spring. "Failed!" he repeated helplessly,
and the echo seemed to go flittering about the substantial walls like a
derisive India-rubber bat on a spree.
The bulldog sat up, thumping the rug with a vibrant tail. There was
some mistake, surely; one went out by the door, not by the window! He
rose, picked up the Panama in his mouth, and padding across the rug,
poked it tentatively into his master's hand. But no, the hand made no
response. Clearly they were not to go out, and he dropped it and went
puzzledly back and lay down with pricked ears, while his master stared
out into the foliaged day.
How solid and changeless it had always seemed--that great business
fabric woven by the father he could so dimly remember! His own invested
fortune had been derived from the great corporation the elder Valiant
had founded and controlled until his death. With almost unprecedented
earnings, it had stood as a very Gibraltar of finance, a type and sign
of brilliant organization. Now, on the heels of a trust's dissolution
which would be a nine-days' wonder, the vast structure had crumpled up
like a cardboard. The rains had descended and the floods had come, and
it had fallen!
The man at the desk had wheeled in his revolving chair and was looking
at the trim athletic back blotting the daylight, with a smile that was
little short of a covert sneer. He was one of the local managers of
the Corporation whose ruin was to be that day's sensation, a colorless
man who had acquired middle age with his first long trousers and had
been dedicated to the commercial treadmill before he had bought a
safety-razor. He despised all loiterers along the primrose paths, and
John Valiant was but a decorative figurehead.
The bulldog lifted his head. The ghost of a furred throaty growl rumbled
in the silence, and the man at the desk shrank a little, as the hair
rippled up on the thick neck and the faithful red-rimmed eyes opened a
shade wider. But John Valiant did not turn. He was bitterly absorbed
with his own thoughts.
Till this moment he had never really known how proud he had always
been of the Corporation, of the fact that he was its founder's son.
His election to high office in the small coterie that controlled
its destinies he had known very well to be but the modern concrete
expression of his individual holdings, but it had nevertheless deeply
pleased him. The fleeting sense of power, the intimate touching of wide
issues in a city of Big Things had flattered him; for a while he had
dreamed of playing a great part, of pushing the activities of the
Corporation into new territory, invading foreign soil. He might have
done much, for he had begun with good equipment. He had read law, had
even been admitted to the bar. But to what had it come? A gradual
slipping back into the rut of careless amusement, the tacit assumption
of his prerogatives by other waiting hands. The huge wheels had
continued to turn, smoothly, inevitably, and he had drawn his dividends
... and that was all. John Valiant swallowed something that was very
like a sob.
As he stood trying to plumb the depth of the calamity, self-anger began
to stir and buzz in his heart like a great bee. Like a tingling X-ray
there went stabbing through the husk woven of a thousand inherent habits
the humiliating knowledge of his own uselessness. In those profitless
seasons through which he had sauntered, as he had strolled through his
casual years of college, he had given least of his time and thought to
the concern which had absorbed his father's young manhood. He, John
Valiant--one of its vice-presidents! waster, on whose expenditures there
had never been a limit, who had strewn with the foolish free-handedness
of a prodigal! Idler, with a reputation in three cities as a leader of
cotillions!
"Fool!" he muttered under his breath, and on the landscape outside the
word stamped itself on everything as though a thousand little devils had
suddenly turned themselves into letters of the alphabet and were
skipping about in fours.
Valiant started as the other spoke at his elbow. He, too, had come to
the window and was looking down at the pavement. "How quickly some news
spreads!"
For the first time the young man noted that the street below was filling
with a desultory crowd. He distinguished a knot of Italian laborers
talking with excited gesticulations--a smudged plasterer, tools in
hand,--clerks, some hatless and with thin alpaca coats--all peering at
the voiceless front of the great building, and all, he imagined, with a
thriving fear in their faces. As he watched, a woman, coarsely dressed,
ran across the street, her handkerchief pressed to her eyes.
"The notice has gone up on the door," said the manager. "I sent word to
the police. Crowds are ugly sometimes."
Valiant drew a sudden sharp breath. The Corporation down in the mire,
with crowds at its doors ready to clamor for money entrusted to it, the
aggregate savings of widow and orphan, the piteous hoarded sums earned
by labor over which pinched sickly faces had burned the midnight oil!
The older man had turned back to the desk to draw a narrow typewritten
slip of paper from a pigeonhole. "Here," he said, "is a list of the
bonds of the subsidiary companies recorded in your name. These are
all, of course, engulfed in the larger failure. You have, however,
your private fortune. If you take my advice, by the way," he added
significantly, "you'll make sure of keeping that."
"What do you mean?" John Valiant faced him quickly.
The other laughed shortly. "'A word to the wise,'" he quoted. "It's
very good living abroad. There's a boat leaving to-morrow."
A dull red sprang into the younger face. "You mean--"
"Look at that crowd down there--you can hear them now. There'll be
a legislative investigation, of course. And the devil'll get the
hindmost." He struck the desk-top with his hand. "Have you ever seen
the bills for this furniture? Do you know what that rug under your feet
cost? Twelve thousand--it's an old Persian. What do you suppose the
papers will do to that? Do you think such things will seem amusing to
that rabble down there?" His hand swept toward the window. "It's been
going on for too many years, I tell you! And now some one'll pay the
piper. The lightning won't strike _me_--I'm not tall enough. _You're_
a vice-president."
"Do you imagine that _I_ knew these things--that I have been a party to
what you seem to believe has been a deliberate wrecking?" Valiant
towered over him, his breath coming fast, his hands clenched hard.
"You?" The manager laughed again--an unpleasant laugh that scraped the
other's quivering nerves like hot sandpaper. "Oh, lord, no! How should
you? You've been too busy playing polo and winning bridge prizes. How
many board meetings have you attended this year? Your vote is proxied
as regular as clockwork. But you're _supposed_ to know. The people down
there in the street won't ask questions about patent-leather pumps and
ponies; they'll want to hear about such things as rotten irrigation
loans in the Stony-River Valley--to market an alkali desert that is the
personal property of the president of this Corporation."
Valiant turned a blank white face. "Sedgwick?"
"Yes. You know his principle: 'It's all right to be honest, if you're
not too _damn_ honest.' He owns the Stony-River Valley bag and baggage.
It was a big gamble and he lost."
For a moment there was absolute silence in the room. From outside came
the rising murmur of the crowd and cutting through it the shrill cry of
a newsboy calling an evening extra. Valiant was staring at the other
with a strange look. Emotions to which in all his self-indulgent life he
had been a stranger were running through his mind, and outre passions
had him by the throat. Fool and doubly blind! A poor pawn, a catspaw
raking the chestnuts for unscrupulous men whose ignominy he was now
called on, perforce, to share! In his pitiful egotism he had consented
to be a figurehead, and he had been made a tool. A red rage surged over
him. No one had ever seen on John Valiant's face such a look as grew on
it now.
He turned, retrieved the Panama, and without a word opened the door.
The older man took a step toward him--he had a sense of dangerous
electric forces in the air--but the door closed sharply in his face. He
smiled grimly. "Not crooked," he said to himself; "merely callow. A
well-meaning, manicured young fop wholly surrounded by men who knew what
they wanted!" He shrugged his shoulders and went back to his chair.
Valiant plunged down in the elevator to the street. Its single other
passenger had his nose buried in a newspaper, and over the reader's
shoulder he saw the double-leaded head-line: "Collapse of the Valiant
Corporation!"
He pushed past the guarded door, and threading the crowd, made toward
the curb, where the bulldog, with a bark of delight, leaped upon the
seat of a burnished car, rumbling and vibrating with pent-up power.
There were those in the sullen anxious crowd who knew whose was that
throbbing metal miracle, the chauffeur spick and span from shining
cap-visor to polished brown puttees, and recognizing the white face that
went past, pelted it with muttered sneers. But he scarcely saw or heard
them, as he stepped into the seat, took the wheel from the chauffeur's
hand and threw on the gear.
He had afterward little memory of that ride. Once the leaping anger
within him jerked the throttle wide and the car responded with a
breakneck dart through the startled traffic, till the sight of an
infuriated mounted policeman, baton up, brought him to himself with a
thud. He had small mind to be stopped at the moment. His mouth set in a
sudden hard sharp line, and under it his hands gripped the slewing wheel
to a tearing serpentine rush that sent the skidding monster rearing on
side wheels, to swoop between two drays in a hooting plunge down a side
street. His tight lips parted then in a ragged laugh, bit off by the
jolt of the lurching motor and the slap of the bulging air.
As the sleek rubber shoes spun noiselessly and swiftly along the avenue
the myriad lights that were beginning to gleam wove into a twinkling
mist. He drove mechanically past a hundred familiar things and places:
the particular chop-house of which he was an habitue--the ivied wall of
his favorite club, with the cluster of faces at the double window--the
florist's where daily he stopped for his knot of Parma violets--but he
saw nothing, till the massive marble fronts of the upper park side
ceased their mad dance as the car halted before a tall iron-grilled
doorway with wide glistening steps, between windows strangely shuttered
and dark.
He sprang out and touched the bell. The heavy oak parted slowly; the
confidential secretary of the man he had come to face stood in the
gloomy doorway.
"I want to see Mr. Sedgwick."
"You can't see him, Mr. Valiant."
"But I _will_!" Sharp passion leaped into the young voice. "He must
speak to me."
The man in the doorway shook his head. "He won't speak to anybody any
more," he said. "Mr. Sedgwick shot himself two hours ago."