NIGHT
A quicker breeze was stirring as John Valiant went back along the Red
Road. It brushed the fraying clouds from the sky, leaving it a pale
gray-blue, sprinkled with wan stars. He had waited in the garden at
Rosewood till Shirley, aided by Emmaline and with Ranston's anxious face
hovering in the background, having performed those gentle offices which
a woman's fainting spell requires, had come to reassure him and to say
good night.
The road seemed no longer dark; it swam before him now in a soft winged
mistiness with here and there an occasional cedar thrusting grotesquely
above huddled cobble-wall and black-lined rail-fence. As he went, her
form swam before him. The texture of each shadowy bush seemed that gauzy
drapery, sprayed with lilies-of-the-valley, and the leaves syllabled her
name in cautious whispers. That brief touch of her, when he had caught
her in his arms, lingered, as the memory of the harp music on his inner
ear, pricking his senses like fine musk, a thing of soft new pulses
flashing over him like spurts of vapor.
As he threw off his coat in the bedroom he had chosen for his own, he
felt the hard corner of the _Lucile_ in the pocket, and drawing it out,
laid it on the table by the bedside. He seemed to feel again the tingle
of his cheek where a curling strand of her coppery hair had sprung
against it when her head had bent beside his own to read the marked
lines. By now perhaps that riotous crown was all unbound and falling
redly about her shoulders, those shoulders no longer peeping from a
weave of lilies, but draped in virginal white. Perhaps she knelt now by
her silk-covered bed, warming the coverlid with her breast, her
down-bent face above her locked palms. What did she pray for, he
wondered. As a child, his own prayers had been comprehensive ones. Even
the savages who lived at Wishing-House and their innumerable offspring
had been regularly included in those petitions.
When he had undressed he sat an hour in the candle-blaze, a
dressing-gown thrown over his shoulders, striving vainly to recreate
that evening call, to remember her every word and look and movement. For
a breath her face would flush suddenly before him, like a live thing;
then it would mysteriously fade and elude him, though he clenched his
hands on the arms of his chair in the fierce mental effort to recall it.
Only the intense blue of her eyes, the tawny sweep of her hair--these
and the touch of her, the consciousness of her warm and vivid fragrance,
remained to wrap all his senses in a mist woven of gold and fire.
* * * * *
Shirley, meanwhile, had sat some time beside her mother's bed, leaning
from a white chintz-covered chair, her anxiety only partially allayed by
reassurances, now and then stooping to lay her young cheek against the
delicate arm in its lacy sleeve or to pass her hand lovingly up and down
its outline, noting with a recurrent passion of tenderness the
transparency of the skin with its violet veining and the shadows beneath
the closed eyes. Emmaline, moving on soft worsted-shod feet about the
dim room, at length had whispered:
"You go tuh baid, honey. I stay with Mis' Judith till she go tuh sleep."
"Yes, go, Shirley," said her mother. "Haven't I any privileges at all?
Can't I even faint when I feel like it, without calling out the
fire-brigade? You'll pamper me to death and heaven knows I don't need
it."
"You won't let me telephone for Doctor Southall?"
"Certainly not!"
"And you are _sure_ it was nothing but the roses?"
"Why, what else should it be?" said her mother almost peevishly. "I must
really have the arbors thinned out. On heavy nights it's positively
overpowering. Go along now, and we'll talk about it to-morrow. I can
ring if I want anything."
In her own room Shirley undressed thoughtfully. There was between her
and her mother a fine tenuous bond of sympathy and feeling as rare,
perhaps, as it was lovely. She could not remember when the other had not
been a semi-invalid, and her earliest childhood recollections were
punctuated with the tap of the little cane. To-night's sudden
indisposition had shocked and disturbed her; to faint at a rush of
perfume seemed to suggest a growing weakness that was alarming.
To-morrow, she told herself, she would send Ranston with a wagon-load of
the roses to the hospital at Charlottesville.
She slipped on a pink shell-shaded dressing-gown of slinky silk with a
riot of azaleas scattered in the weave, and then, dragging a chair
before the open window, drew aside the light curtain and began to brush
her hair. She parted the lustrous mass with long sweeps of her white
arm, forward first over one shoulder, then over the other. The silver
brush smoothed the lighter ashen ripples that netted and fretted into a
fine amber lace, till they lay, a rich warm mahogany like red earth. The
coppery whorls eddied and merged themselves, showing under-glints of
russet and dun-gold, curling and clasping in flame-tinted furrows like a
living field of gold under a silver harrow. Outside the window the
stars lay on the lapis-lazuli sky like white flower-petals on still deep
water, and in the pasture across the hedges she could see the form of
Selim, her chestnut hunter, standing ghostly, like an equine sentinel.
When that shimmering glory lay in two thick braids against her
shoulders, Shirley rose with a sigh and went to her writing-desk, where
lay her diary. But she was in no mood to write, and she turned from it,
frowning a little, with the reflection that she had not written in it
since the night of the cape jessamines.
All at once her gaze fell upon the floor, and she shrank backward from a
twisting thread-like thing whose bright saffron-yellow glowed sharply
against the dark carpet. She saw in an instant, however, that it was
nothing more dangerous than a fragment of love-vine from the garden,
which had clung to her skirt. She picked up the tiny mass of tendrils
and with a slow smile tossed it over her right shoulder through the
window. "If it takes root," she said aloud, "my sweetheart loves me."
She leaned from the sill to peer down into the misty garden, but could
not follow its fall.
Long ago her visitor would have reached Damory Court. She had a vision
of him wandering, candle in hand, through the empty echoing rooms,
looking at the voiceless portraits on the walls, thinking perhaps of his
father, of the fatal duel of which he had never known. She liked the
way he had spoken of his father!
Or, maybe he was sitting in the lonely library, with some volume from
its shelves on his knees. She pictured Uncle Jefferson fetching his pipe
and jar of tobacco and striking the match on his broad foot to light it.
She remembered one of the old darky's sayings: "Er man ain' nachally no
angel, but 'thouten terbacker, Ah reck'n he be pizen-ugly ernuf ter giv
de Bad Man de toof-ache!" In that instant when her cheek had touched his
rough tweed jacket, she had been sensible of that woodsy pipy fragrance.
A vivid flush swept up her face and with a sudden gesture she caught her
open palms to her cheek. With what a daring softness his eyes had hazed
as they looked down at her under his crisp waving hair. Why was the
memory of that look so sharply sweet?
As she leaned, out of the stillness there came to her ear a mellow
sound. It was the bell of the court-house in the village. She counted
the strokes falling clearly or faintly as the sluggish breeze ebbed or
swelled. It was eleven.
She drew back, dropped the curtain to shut out the wan glimmer, and in
the darkness crept into the soft bed as if into a hiding-place.