THE CALL OF THE ROSES
In the great hall at Damory Court the candles in their brass
wall-sconces blinked back from the polished parquetry and the shining
fire-dogs, filling the rather solemn gloom with an air of warmth and
creature-comfort.
Leaning against the newel-post, Valiant gazed about him. How different
it all looked from the night of his coming!
It occurred to him with a kind of wonder that a fortnight ago he had
never known this house existed. Then he had conceived the old hectic
life the only one worth knowing, the be-all and end-all of modern
felicity. It was as if a single stroke had cut his life in two parts
which had instantly recoiled as far asunder as the poles. Strangely,
the new seemed more familiar than the old; there had been moments
when he remembered the past almost as in the placid day one recalls a
thriving dream of the night before, which, itself unreal, has left an
overpowering impression behind it. Little fragments of the old nightly
mosaic--the bitt-music across the dulled glisten of pounded asphalt,
the featherbone girl flaring high in air in electric rain, a pointed
clock-tower spiking the upper night-gloom, the faint halitus of musk
from a downy theater-wrap--fluttered about him. But all seemed far away,
hackneyed, shop-worn, as banal as the scenery of an opera.
He began to walk up and down the floor, teasing pricks of restlessness
urging him. He opened the door and passed into the unlighted
dining-room. On the sideboard sat a silver loving-cup that had arrived
the day before in a huge box with his books and knick-knacks. He had won
it at polo. He lifted it, fingering its carved handles. He remembered
that when that particular score had been made, Katharine Fargo had sat
in one of the drags at the side-line.
But the memory evoked no thrill. Instead, the thought of her
palely-cold, passionless beauty called up another mobile thoroughbred
face instinct with quick flashings of mirth and hauteur. Again he felt
the fierce clutch of small fingers, as they fought with his in that
struggle for his life. Each line of that face stood before him--the
arching brows, the cameo-delicacy of profile, the magnolia skin and hair
like a brown-gold cloud across the sun.
A soft clicking patter trailed itself over the polished floor and the
bulldog's nose was thrust between his knees. He bent down and fondled
the satiny head to still the sudden surge of loneliness that had
overflowed his heart--an ache for he knew not what. A depression was on
him, he knew not why--something that had a keen edge of longing like
physical hunger.
He set back the loving-cup and went out to the front porch to prowl
aimlessly up and down past the great gray-stained Ionic columns. It was
not late, but the night was very still. The Virginia creeper waved
gently to and fro in a soundless breeze that was little more than a
whisper. The sky was heavily sprinkled with stars whose wan clustering
was blotted here and there by floating shreds of cloud, like vaporous,
filmy leaves stripped by some upper gale from the Tree of Heaven. The
lawn lay a mass of mysterious shadow, stirring with faint chirps and
rustles and laden with the poignant scent of the garden honeysuckle. He
could hear the howl of a lonesome hound, a horse neighed impatiently on
a distant meadow, and from far down the Red Road, beyond the gate, came
the rude twitter of a banjo and the voice of the strolling darky player:
"All Ah wants in dis creation--
Pretty yellah gal, en er big plantation!"
When the twangling notes died away in the distance they had served only
to intensify the stillness. He felt that peculiar detachedness that one
senses in thick black dark, as though he and his immediate surroundings
were floating in some soundless, ambient ether. The white bulldog
scurried noiselessly back and forth across the clipped grass, now
emerging like a canine ghost in the light from the doorway, now
suffering total eclipse. Staring into the furry gloom, he seemed, as in
those moments of semi-delirium in the forest, to see Shirley's face
advance and retreat as though it lay on the very pulsing heart of the
darkness.
He stepped down to the graveled drive and followed it to the gate, then,
bareheaded, took the Red Road. Along this highway he had rattled in
Uncle Jefferson's crazy hack--with her red rose in his hand. The musky
scent of the pressed leaves in the book in his pocket seemed to be all
about him.
The odor of living roses, in fact, was in the air. It came on the
scarce-felt breeze, a heavy calling perfume. He walked on, keeping the
road by the misty infiltrating shimmer of the stars, with a sensation
rather of gliding than of walking. Now and then from some pasture came
the snort and whinny of horses or the grunt of a frog from a marshy
sink, and once, where a narrow path joined the road, he felt against his
trousers the sniffing nose of a silent and friendly puppy. It occurred
to him that if, as scientists say, colors emit sound-tones, scents
also should possess a music of their own: the honeysuckle fragrance,
maybe--soft mellow fluting as of diminutive wind-instruments; the
far-faint sickly odor of lilies--the upper register of faery violins;
this spicy breath of roses--blending, throbbing chords like elfin echoes
of an Italian harp. The fancy pleased him; he could imagine the perfume
now in the air carried with it an under-music, like a ghostly harping.
It came to him at the same instant that this was no mere fancy.
Somewhere in the languorous night a harp was being played. He paused and
listened intently, then went on toward the sound. Presently he became
aware that he had passed it, had left it on one side, and he went back,
stumbling along the low stone wall till it opened to a shadowy lane,
full of foliaged whispers. The rose scent had grown stronger; it was
almost, in that heavy air, as if he were breasting an etherial sea of
attar. He felt as if he were treading on a path of rose-leaves, down
which the increasing melody flowed crimsonly to him, calling, calling.
He stopped stock-still. He had been skirting a close-cropped hedge of
box. This had ended abruptly and he was looking straight up a bar of
green-yellow radiance from a double doorway. The latter opened on a
porch and the light, flung across this, drenched an arbor of climbing
roses, making it stand out a mass of woven rubies set in emerald.
He drew a long sigh of more than delight, for framed in the doorway he
saw a figure in misty white, leaning to the gilded upright of a harp. He
knew at once that it was Shirley. Holding his breath, he came closer,
his feet muffled in the thick grass. She wore a gown of some gauze-like
material sprinkled with knots of embroidery and with her lifted face and
filmy aureole of hair, she looked like a tall golden candle. He stood
in the dense obscurity, one hand gripping the gnarled limb of a catalpa,
his eyes following the shapely arms from wrist to shoulder, the
fingers straying across the strings, the bending cheek caressing
the carved wood. She was playing the melody of Shelley's _Indian
Serenade_--touching the chords softly and tenderly--and his lips
moved, molding themselves soundlessly to the words:
"I arise from dreams of thee,
In the first sweet sleep of night,
When the winds are breathing low
And the stars are shining bright;
I arise from dreams of thee,
And a spirit in my feet
Has led me--who knows how?
To thy chamber window, Sweet!"
The serenade died in a single long note. As if in answer to it there
rose a flood of bird-music from beyond the arbor--jets of song that
swelled and rippled to a soaring melody. She heard it, too, for the
gracile fingers fell from the strings. She listened a moment, with head
held to one side, then sprang up and came through the door and down the
steps.
He hesitated a moment, then a single stride took him from the shadow.