DAMORY COURT
"Dar's Dam'ry Co'ot smack-dab ahaid, suh."
John Valiant looked up. Facing them at an elbow of the broad road, was
an old gateway of time-nicked stone, clasping an iron gate that was
quaint and heavy and red with rust. Over it on either side twin
sugar-trees flung their untrammeled strength, and from it, leading up a
gentle declivity, ran a curving avenue of oaks. He put out his hand.
"Wait a moment," he said in a low voice, and as the creaking conveyance
stopped, he turned and looked about him.
Facing the entrance the land fell away sharply to a miniature valley
through which rambled a willow-bordered brook, in whose shallows
short-horned cows stood lazily. Beyond, alternating with fields of young
grain and verdured pastures like crushed velvet, rose a succession of
tranquil slopes crowned with trees that here and there grouped about a
white colonial dwelling, with its outbuildings behind it. Beyond,
whither wound the Red Road, he could see a drowsy village, with a spire
and a cupolaed court-house; and farther yet a yellow gorge with a wisp
of white smoke curling above it marked the course of a crawling far-away
railway. Over all the dimming yellow sunshine, and girdling the farther
horizon, in masses of purplish blue, the tumbled battlements of the Blue
Ridge.
His conductor had laboriously descended and now the complaining gates
swung open. Before them, as they toiled up the long ascent, the
neglected driveway was a riot of turbulent growth: thistle, white-belled
burdock, ragweed and dusty mullein stood waist high.
"Et's er moughty fine ol' place, suh, wid dat big revenue ob trees,"
said Uncle Jefferson. "But Ah reck'n et ain' got none ob de modern
connivances."
But Valiant did not answer; his gaze was straight before him, fixed on
the noble old house they were approaching. Its wide and columned front
peered between huge rugged oaks and slender silver poplars which cast
cool long shadows across an unkempt lawn laden with ragged mock-orange,
lilac and syringa bushes, its stately grandeur dimmed but not destroyed
by the shameful stains of the neglected years.
As he jumped down he was possessed by an odd sensation of old
acquaintance--as if he had seen those tall white columns before--an
illusory half-vision into some shadowy, fourth-dimensional landscape
that belonged to his subconscious self, or that, glimpsed in some
immaterial dream-picture, had left a faint-etched memory. Then, on a
sudden, the vista vibrated and widened, the white columns expanded and
shot up into the clouds, and from every bush seemed to peer a friendly
black savage with woolly white hair!
"Wishing-House!" he whispered. He looked about him, half expecting--so
vivid was the illusion--to see a circle of rough huts under the trees
and a multitude of ebony imps dancing in the sunshine. So Virginia had
been that secret Never-Never Land, the wondrous fairy demesne of his
childhood, with its amiable barbarians and its thickets of coursing
grimalkins! The hidden country which his father's thoughts, sadly
recurring, had painted to the little child that once he was, in the
guise of an endless wonder-tale! His eyes misted over, and it seemed to
him that moment that his father was very near.
Leaving the negro to unload his belongings, he traversed an overgrown
path of mossed gravel, between box-rows frowsled like the manes of lions
gone mad and smothered in an accumulation of matted roots and debris of
rotting foliage, and presently, the bulldog at his heels, found himself
in the rear of the house.
The building, with kitchen, stables and negro quarters behind it, had
been set on the boss of the wooded knoll. Along half its side ran a
wide porch that had once been glass-enclosed, now with panes gone and
broken and putty-crumbling sashes. Below it lay the piteous remnants of
a formal garden, grouped about an oval pool from whose center reared the
slender yellowed shaft of a fountain in whose shallow cup a robin was
taking its rain-water bath. The pool was dry, the tiles that had formed
its floor were prized apart with weeds; ribald wild grape-vines ran
amuck hither and thither; and over all was a drenching-sweet scent of
trailing honeysuckle.
Threading his way among the dank undergrowth of the desolate wilderness,
following the sound of running water, he came suddenly to a little lake
fed from unseen pipes, that spread its lily-padded surface coolly and
invitingly under a clump of elms. Beside it stood a spring-house with a
sadly sagging roof. With a dead branch he probed the water's depth. "Ten
feet and a pebble bottom," he said. The lake's overflow poured in a
musical cascade down between fern-covered rocks, to join, far below, the
stream he had seen from the gateway. Beyond this the ground rose again
to a hill, densely forested and flanked by runnelled slopes of
poverty-stricken broom-sedge as stark and sear as the bad-lands of an
alkali desert. As he gazed, a bird bubbled into a wild song from the
grape-vine tangle behind him, and almost at his feet a rabbit scudded
blithely out of the weeds and darted back.
"Mine!" he said aloud with a rueful pride. "And for general
run-downness, it's up to the advertisement." He looked musingly at the
piteous wreck and ruin, his gaze sweeping down across the bared fields
and unkempt forest. "Mine!" he repeated. "All that, I suppose, for it
has the same earmarks of neglect. Between those cultivated stretches it
looks like a wedge of Sahara gone astray." His gaze returned to the
house. "Yet what a place it must have been in its time!" It had not
sprung into being at the whim of any one man; it had grown mellowly and
deliberately, expressing the multiform life and culture of a stock.
Generation after generation, father and son, had lived there and loved
it, and, ministering to all, it had given to each of itself. The wild
weird beauty was infecting him and the pathos of the desolation caught
at his heart. He went slowly back to where his conductor sat on the
lichened horse-block.
"We's heah," called Uncle Jefferson cheerfully. "Whut we gwineter do
nex', suh? Reck'n Ah bettah go ovah ter Miss Dandridge's place fer er
crowbah. Lawd!" he added, "ef he ain' got de key! Whut yo' think ob dat
now?"
John Valiant was looking closely at the big key; for there were words,
which he had not noted before, engraved in the massive flange: _Friends
all hours._ He smiled. The sentiment sent a warm current of pleasure to
his finger-tips. Here was the very text of hospitality!
A Lilliputian spider-web was stretched over the preempted keyhole, and
he fetched a grass-stem and poked out its tiny gray-striped denizen
before he inserted the key in the rusted lock. He turned it with a
curious sense of timidity. All the strength of his fingers was necessary
before the massive door swung open and the leveling sun sent its late
red rays into the gloomy interior.
He stood in a spacious hall, his nostrils filled with a curious but not
unpleasant aromatic odor with which the place was strongly impregnated.
The hall ran the full length of the building, and in its center a wide,
balustraded double staircase led to upper darkness. The floor, where his
footprints had disturbed the even gray film of dust, was of fine close
parquetry and had been generously strewn everywhere with a mica-like
powder. He stooped and took up a pinch in his fingers, noting that it
gave forth the curious spicy scent. Dim paintings in tarnished frames
hung on the walls. From a niche on the break of the stairway looked down
the round face of a tall Dutch clock, and on one side protruded a huge
bulging something draped with a yellowed linen sheet. From its shape he
guessed this to be an elk's head. Dust, undisturbed, lay thickly on
everything, ghostly floating cobwebs crawled across his face, and a bat
flitted out of a fireplace and vanished squeaking over his head. With
Uncle Jefferson's help he opened the rear doors and windows, knocked up
the rusted belts of the shutters and flung them wide.
But for the dust and cobwebs and the strange odor, mingled with the
faint musty smell that pervades a sunless interior, the former owner of
the house might have deserted it a week ago. On a wall-rack lay two
walking-sticks and a gold-mounted hunting-crop, and on a great carved
chest below it had been flung an opened book bound in tooled leather.
John Valiant picked this up curiously. It was _Lucile_. He noted that
here and there passages were marked with penciled lines--some light and
femininely delicate, some heavier, as though two had been reading it
together, noting their individual preferences.
He laid it back musingly, and opening a door, entered the large room
it disclosed. This had been the dining-room. The walls were white,
in alternate panels with small oval mirrors whose dust-covered
surfaces looked like ground steel. At one end stood a crystal-knobbed
mahogany sideboard, holding glass candlesticks in the shape of
Ionic columns--above it a quaint portrait of a lady in hoops and
love-curls--and at the other end was a huge fireplace with rust-red
fire-dogs and tarnished brass fender. All these, with the round
centipede table and the Chippendale chairs set in order against the
walls, were dimmed and grayed with a thick powdering of dust.
The next room that he entered was big and wide, a place of dark colors,
nobly smutched of time. It had been at once library and living-room.
Glass-faced book-shelves ran along one side--well-stocked, as the dusty
panes showed--and a huge pigeonholed desk glowered in the big bow-window
that opened on to what had been the garden. On the wall hung an old map
of Virginia. At one side the dark wainscoting yawned to a cavernous
fireplace and inglenook with seats in black leather. By it stood a great
square tapestry screen, showing a hunting scene, set in a heavy frame.
A great leather settee was drawn near the desk and beside this stood a
reading-stand with a small china dog and a squat bronze lamp upon it.
In contrast to the orderly dining-room there was about this chamber a
sense of untouched disorder--a desk-drawer jerked half-open, a yellowed
newspaper torn across and flung into a corner, books tossed on desk and
lounge, and in the fireplace a little heap of whitened ashes in which
charred fragments told of letters and papers burned in haste. A bottle
that had once held brandy and a grimy goblet stood on the desk, and in
a metal ash-tray on the reading-stand lay a half-smoked cigar that
crumbled to dust in the intruder's fingers.
One by one Valiant forced open the tall French windows, till the fading
light lay softly over the austere dignity of the apartment. In that
somber room, he knew, had had place whatever was most worthy in the
lives of his forebears. The thought of generation upon generation had
steeped it in human association.
Suddenly he lifted his eyes. Above the desk hung a life-size portrait
of a man, in the high soft stock and velvet collar of half a century
before. The right eye, strangely, had been cut from the canvas. He stood
straight and tall, one hand holding an eager hound in leash, his face
proud and florid, his single, cold, steel-blue eye staring down through
its dusty curtain with a certain malicious arrogance, and his lips set
in a sardonic curve that seemed about to sneer. It was for an instant as
if the pictured figure confronted the young man who stood there, mutely
challenging his entrance into that tomb-like and secret-keeping quiet;
and he gazed back as fixedly, repelled by the craft of the face, yet
subtly attracted. "I wonder who you were," he said. "You were cruel.
Perhaps you were wicked. But you were strong, too."
He returned to the outer hall to find that the negro had carried in his
trunk, and he bade him place it, with the portmanteau, in the room he
had just left. Dusk was falling. The air was full of a faint far chirr
of night insects, like an elfin serenade, and here and there among the
trees pulsed the greenish-yellow spark of a firefly.
"Uncle Jefferson," said Valiant abruptly, "have you a family?"
"No, _suh_. Jes' me en mah ol' 'ooman."
"Can she cook?"
"Cook!" The genial titter again captured his dusky escort. "When she got
de _fixens_, Ah reck'n she de beaten'es cook in dis heah county."
"How much do you earn, driving that hack?"
Uncle Jefferson ruminated. "Well, suh, 'pens on de weddah. Mighty lucky
sometimes dis yeah ef Ah kin pay de groc'ry man."
"How would you both like to live here with me for a while? She could
cook and you could take care of me."
Uncle Jefferson's eyes seemed to turn inward with mingled surprise and
introspection. He shifted from one foot to the other, swallowed
difficultly several times, and said, "Ah ain' nebbah seed yo' befo',
suh."
"Well, I haven't seen you either, have I?"
"Dat's de trufe, suh, 'deed et is! Hyuh, hyuh! Whut Ah means ter say
is dat de ol' 'ooman kain' cook no fancy didoes like what dey eats up
Norf. She kin jes' cook de Ferginey style."
"That sounds good to me," quoth Valiant. "I'll risk it. Now as to
wages--"
"Ah ain' specticulous as ter de wages," said Uncle Jefferson. "Ah
knows er gemman when Ah sees one. 'Sides, ter-day's Friday en et's
baid luck. Ah sho' is troubled in mah min' wheddah we-all kin suit
yo' perpensities, but Ah reck'n we kin take er try ef _yo'_ kin."
"Then it's a bargain," responded Valiant with alacrity. "Can you come at
once?"
"Yas, suh, me en Daph gwineter come ovah fus' thing in de mawnin'. Whut
yo'-all gwineter do fo' yo' suppah?"
"I'll get along," Valiant assured him cheerfully. "Here is five dollars.
You can buy some food and things to cook with, and bring them with you.
Do you think there's a stove in the kitchen?"
"Ah reck'n," replied Uncle Jefferson. "En ef dar _ain'_ Daph kin cook er
Chris'mus dinnah wid fo' stones en er tin skillet. Yas, _suh_!"
He trudged away into the shadows, but presently, as the new master of
Damory Court stood in the gloomy hall, he heard the shambling step again
behind him. "Ah done neglectuated ter ax yo' name, suh. Ah did, fo' er
fac'."
"My name is Valiant. John Valiant."
Uncle Jefferson's eyes turned upward and rolled out of orbit. "Mah
Lawd!" he ejaculated soundlessly. And with his wide lips still framed
about the last word, he backed out of the doorway and disappeared.