THE LETTER
He tore open the letters abstractedly: the usual dinner-card or
two, a tailor's spring announcement, a chronic serial from an
exclamatory marble-quarrying company, a quarterly statement of a
club house-committee. The last two missives bore a nondescript look.
One was small, with the name of a legal firm in its corner. The other
was largish, corpulent and heavy, of stout Manila paper, and bore, down
one side, a gaudy procession of postage stamps proclaiming that it had
been registered.
"What's in that, I wonder?" he said to himself, and then, with a smile
at the unmasculine speculation, opened the smaller envelope.
"Dear Sir," began the letter, in the most uncompromisingly conventional
of typewriting:
"_Dear Sir_:
"Enclosed please find, with title-deed, a memorandum opened in
your name by the late John Valiant some years before his death.
It was his desire that the services indicated in connection
with this estate should continue till this date. We hand you
herewith our check for $236.20 (two hundred and thirty-six
dollars and twenty cents), the balance in your favor, for which
please send receipt,
"And oblige,
"Yours very truly,
"(Enclosure) EMERSON AND BALL."
He turned to the memorandum. It showed a sizable initial deposit
against which was entered a series of annual tax payments with minor
disbursements credited to "Inspection and care." The tax receipts were
pinned to the account.
The larger wrapper contained an unsealed envelope, across which was
written in faded ink and in an unfamiliar dashing, slanting handwriting,
his own name. The envelope contained a creased yellow parchment, from
between whose folds there clumped and fluttered down upon the floor a
long flattish object wrapped in a paper, a newspaper clipping and a
letter.
Puzzledly he unfolded the crackling thing in his hands. "Why," he said
half aloud, "it's--it's a deed made over to me." He overran it swiftly.
"Part of an old Colony grant ... a plantation in Virginia, twelve
hundred odd acres, given under the hand of a vice-regal governor in the
sixteenth century. I had no idea titles in the United States went back
so far as that!" His eye fled to the end. "It was my father's! What
could he have wanted of an estate in Virginia? It must have come into
his hands in the course of business."
He fairly groaned. "Ye gods! If it were only Long Island, or even Pike
County! The sorriest, out-at-elbow, boulder-ridden, mosquito-stung old
rock-farm there would bring a decent sum. But Virginia! The place where
the dialect stories grow. The paradise of the Jim-crow car and the
hook-worm, where land-poor, clay-colored colonels with goatees sit in
green wicker lawn-chairs and watch their shadows go round the house,
while they guzzle mint-juleps and cuss at lazy 'cullud pussons.' Where
everybody is an F. F. V. and everybody's grandfather was a patroon, or
whatever they call 'em, and had a thousand slaves 'befo de wah'!"
Who ever heard of Virginia nowadays, except as a place people came
_from_? The principal event in the history of the state since the Civil
War had been the discovery of New York. Its men had moved upon the
latter en masse, coming with the halo about them of old Southern names
and legends of planter hospitality--and had married Northern women, till
the announcement in the marriage column that the fathers of bride and
bridegroom had fought in opposing armies at the battle of Manassas had
grown as hackneyed as the stereotyped "Whither are we drifting?"
editorial. But was Virginia herself anything more, in this twentieth
century, than a hot-blooded, high-handed, prodigal legend, kept alive
in the North by the banquets of "Southern Societies" and annual poems on
"The Lost Cause"?
He picked up the newspaper clipping. It was worn and broken in the folds
as if it had been carried for months in a pocketbook.
"It will interest readers of this section of Virginia (the
paragraph began) to learn, from a recent transfer received for
record at the County Clerk's Office, that Damory Court has
passed to Mr. John Valiant, minor--"
He turned the paper over and found a date; it had been printed in the
year of the transfer to himself, when he was six years old--the year his
father had died.
"--John Valiant, minor, the son of the former owner.
"There are few indeed who do not recall the tragedy with which
in the public mind the estate is connected. The fact, moreover,
that this old homestead has been left in its present state
(for, as is well known, the house has remained with all its
contents and furnishings untouched) to rest during so long a
term of years unoccupied, could not, of course, fail to be
commented on, and this circumstance alone has perhaps tended to
keep alive a melancholy story which may well be forgotten."
He read the elaborate, rather stilted phraseology in the twenty-year-old
paper with a wondering interest. "An old house," he mused, "with a bad
name. Probably he couldn't sell it, and maybe nobody would even live in
it. That would explain why it remained so long unoccupied--why there are
no records of rentals. Probably the land was starved and run down. At
any rate, in twenty years it would be overgrown with stubble."
Yet, whatever their condition, acres of land were, after all, a tangible
thing. This lawyer's firm might, instead, have sent him a bundle of
beautifully engraved certificates of stock in some zinc-mine whose
imaginary bottom had dropped out ten years ago. Here was real property,
in size, at least, a gentleman's domain, on which real taxes had been
paid during a long term--a sort of hilarious consolation prize, hurtling
to him out of the void like the magic gift of the traditional fairy
god-mother.
"It's an off-set to the hall-bedroom idea, at any rate," he said to
himself humorously. "It holds out an escape from the noble army of
rent-payers. When my twenty-eight hundred is gone, I could live down
there a landed proprietor, and by the same mark an honorary colonel,
and raise the cabbages I was talking about--eh, Chum?--while you stalk
rabbits. How does that strike you?"
He laughed whimsically. He, John Valiant, of New York, first-nighter at
its theaters, hail-fellow-well-met in its club corridors and welcome
diner at any one of a hundred brilliant glass-and-silver-twinkling
supper-tables, entombed on the wreck of a Virginia plantation, a
would-be country gentleman, on an automobile and next to nothing a year!
He bethought himself of the fallen letter and possessed himself of it
quickly. It lay with the superscription side down. On it was written,
in the same hand which had addressed the other envelope:
_For my son, John Valiant,
When he reaches the age of twenty-five._
That, then, had been written by his father--and he had died nearly
twenty years ago! He broke the seal with a strange feeling as if,
walking in some familiar thoroughfare, he had stumbled on a lichened and
sunken tombstone.
"When you read this, my son, you will have come to man's
estate. It is curious to think that this black, black ink may
be faded to gray and this white, white paper yellowed, just
from lying waiting so long. But strangest of all is to think
that you yourself whose brown head hardly tops this desk, will
be as tall (I hope) as I! How I wonder what you will look like
then! And shall I--the real, real I, I mean--be peering over
your strong broad shoulder as you read? Who knows? Wise men
have dreamed such a thing possible--and I am not a bit wise.
"John, you will not have forgotten that you are a Valiant. But
you are also a Virginian. Will you have discovered this for
yourself? Here is the deed to the land where I and my father,
and his father, and many, many more Valiants before them were
born. Sometime, perhaps, you will know why you are John Valiant
of New York instead of John Valiant of Damory Court. I can not
tell you myself, because it is too true a story, and I have
forgotten how to tell any but fairy tales, where everything
happens right, where the Prince marries the beautiful Princess
and they live happily together ever after.
"You may never care to live at Damory Court. Maybe the life you
will know so well by the time you read this will have welded
you to itself. If so, well and good. Then leave the old place
to your son. But there is such a thing as racial habit, and the
call of blood. And I know there is such a thing, too, as fate.
'Every man carries his fate on a riband about his neck'; so the
Moslem put it. It was my fate to go away, and I know now--since
distance is not made by miles alone--that I myself shall never
see Damory Court again. But life is a strange wheel that goes
round and round and comes back to the same point again and
again. And it may be your fate to go back. Then perhaps you
will cry (but, oh, not on the old white bear's-skin rug--never
again with me holding your small, small hand!)--
"'Wishing-House! Wishing-House! Where are you?'
"And this old parchment deed will answer answer--
"'Here I am, Master; here I am!'
"Ah, we are only children, after all, playing out our plays. I
have had many toys, but O John, John! The ones I treasure most
are all in the Never-Never Land!"