AT THE DOME
A warm sun and an air mildly mellow. A faint gold-shadowed mist over the
valley and a soft lilac haze blending the rounded outlines of the hills.
A breeze shook the twigs on the cedars, fluttered the leaves of the
poplars till they looked a quivering mass of palpitating silver, bearing
away with it the cool elastic grace-notes of the dripping water, as it
sparkled over the big green-streaked rocks at the foot of the little
lake at Damory Court. Over the wild grape-vines a pair of drunken
butterflies reeled, kissing wings, and on the stone rim of the fountain
basin a tiny brown-green lizard lay motionless, sunning itself. Through
the shrubbery a cardinal darted like a crimson shuttle, to rock
impudently from a fleering limb, and here and there on the bluish-ivory
sky, motionless as a pasted wafer, hung a hawk; from time to time one of
these wavered and slanted swiftly down, to climb once more in a huge
spiral to its high tower of sky.
Perhaps it wondered, as its telescopic eye looked down. That had been
its choicest covert, that disheveled tangle where the birds held
perpetual carnival, the weasel lurked in the underbrush and the rabbit
lined his windfall. Now the wildness was gone. The lines of the formal
garden lay again ordered and fair. The box-rows had been thinned of
their too-aged shrubs and filled in anew. The wilderness garden to-be
was still a stretch of raked and level soil, but all across this slender
green spears were thrusting up--the promise of buds and blooms. A
pergola, glistening white, now upheld the runaway vines, making a
sickle-like path from the upper terrace to the lake. In the barn loft
the pigeons still quarrelled over their new cotes of fresh pine, and
under a clump of locust trees at a little distance from the house, a
half-dozen dolls' cabins on stilts stood waiting the honey-storage of
the black and gold bees.
There were new denizens, also. These had arrived in a dozen zinc tanks
and willow hampers, to the amaze of a sleepy express clerk at the
railroad station: two swans now sailed majestically over the lily-pads
of the lake, along its gravel rim a pair of bronze-colored ducks waddled
and preened, and its placid surface rippled and broke to the sluggish
backs of goldfish and the flirting fins of red Japanese carp. Hens and
guinea-fowl strutted and ran in a wire wattle behind the kitchen, and on
the wall, now straightened and repaired, a splendid peacock spread his
barbaric plumage of spangled purple and screeched exultingly to his
sober-hued mate.
The house itself wore another air. Its look of unkemptness had largely
vanished. The comb of the roof had been straightened and the warped
shutters repaired. The boards of the porch flooring had been relaid.
Moss and green lichen had been scoured from the bases of the great
weather-beaten pillars. These, however, bore no garish coat of new
paint. The soft gray tone of age remained, but the bleakness and
forlornness were gone; there was about all now a warmth and genial
bearing that hinted at mellowed beauty, firelight and cheerful voices
within.
Valiant heaved a long sigh of satisfaction as he stood in the sunlight
gazing at the results of his labors. He was not now the flippant
boulevardier to whom money was the _sine qua non_ of existence. He had
learned a sovereign lesson--one gained not through the push and fight
of crowds, but in the simple peace of a countryside, unvexed by the
clamor of gold and the complex problems of a competitive existence--that
he had inherited a need of activity, of achievement: that he had been
born to do. He had worked hard, with hand and foot, with hoe and
mattock--strenuous perspiring effort that made his blood course fast and
brought muscle-weariness over which nature had nightly poured her
soothing medicaments of peace and sleep. His tanned face was as clear as
a fine brown porcelain, his eye bright, and his muscles rippled up
under his skin with elastic power.
"Chum," he said, to the dog rolling on his back in the grass, "what do
you think of it all, anyway?" He reached down, seized a hind leg and
whirling him around like a teetotum, sent him flying into the bushes,
whence Chum launched again upon him, like a catapult. He caught the
white shoulders and held him vise-like. "Just about right, eh? But wait
till we get those ramblers!
"And to think," he continued, whimsically releasing him, "that I might
have gone on, one of the little-neck-clam crowd I've always trained
with, at the same old pace, till the Vermouth-cocktail-Palm-Beach career
got a double Nelson on me and the umpire counted me out. And I'd have
ended by lazying along through my forties with a bay-window and a bunch
of boudoir keys! Now I can kiss my hand to it all. At this moment I
wouldn't swap this old house and land, and the sunshine and that
'gyarden' and Unc' Jefferson and Aunt Daph and the chickens and the
birds and all the rest of it, for a mile of Millionaires' Row."
He drew from his jacket pocket a somewhat worn note and unfolded the
dainty paper with its characteristic twirly handwriting. "The scarlet
geraniums rimming the porch," he muttered, "the coral honeysuckle on
the old dead tulip-tree, and the fuchsias and verbenas by the straight
walk. How right she is! They're all growing, too. I haven't lost a
single slip." He caught himself up short, strode to the nearest
porch-pillar and rapped on it smartly with his knuckles.
"I must knock on wood," he said, "or I'll lose my luck." He laughed a
little. "I'm certainly catching Uncle Jefferson's superstitions. Perhaps
that's in the soil, too!"
He went into the house and to the library. The breeze through the
wide-flung bow-window was fluttering the papers on the desk and the map
on the wall was flapping sidewise. He went to straighten it, and then
saw what he had not noticed before--that it covered something that had
been let into the plaster. He swung it aside and made an exclamation.
He was looking at a square, uncompromising wall-safe, with a round
figured disk of white metal on its face. He knelt before it and tried
its knob. After a moment it turned easily. But the resolute steel door
would not open, though he tried every combination that came into his
mind. "No use," he said disgustedly. "One must have the right numbers."
Then he lifted his fretted frame and smote his grimy hands together.
"Confound it!" he said with a short laugh. "Here I am, a bankrupt, with
all this outfit--clear to the very finger-bowls--handed to me on a
silver tray, and I'm mad as scat because I can't open the first locked
thing I find!"
He ran up-stairs and donned a rough corduroy jacket and high leather
leggings. "We're going to climb the hill to-day, Chum," he announced,
"and no more moccasins need apply."
In the lower hall, however, he suddenly stopped stock-still. "The slip
of paper that was in the china dog!" he exclaimed. "What a chump I am
not to have thought of it!" He found it in its pigeonhole and, kneeling
down before the safe, tried the numbers carefully, first right, then
left: 17--28--94--0. The heavy door opened.
"I was right!" he exulted. "It's the plate." He drew it out, piece by
piece. Each was bagged in dark-red Canton flannel. He broke the tape of
one bag and exposed a great silver pitcher, tarnished purple-blue like a
raven's wing--then a tea-service. Each piece, large and small, was
marked with the greyhound rampant and the motto. "And to think," he
said, "that my great-great-grandfather buried you with his own hands
under the stables when Tarleton's raiders swept the valley before the
surrender at Yorktown! Only wait till Aunt Daphne gets you polished up,
and on the sideboard! You're the one thing the place has needed!"
* * * * *
With the dog for comrade he traversed the garden and plunged across the
valley below, humming as he went one of the songs with which Uncle
Jefferson was wont to regale his labors:
"My gran'mothah lived on yondah li'l green,
Fines' ol' lady _evah_ wuz seen.
Tummy-eye, tummy-oh, tummy-umpy-tumpy-tee.
Fines' ol' lady _evah_ yo' see!"
The ridiculous refrain rang out through the bewildering vistas of the
wooded slope as he swung on, up the hill, through the underbrush.
The place was pathless and overgrown with paw-paw bushes and sassafras.
Great trees stood so thickly in places as to make a twilight and the
sunnier spots were masses of pink laurel, poison-ivy, flaming purple
rhododendron and wine-red tendrils of interbraided briers. This was the
forest land of whose possibilities he had thought. In the heart of the
woods he came upon a great limb that had been wrenched off by storm. The
broken wood was of a deep rich brown, shading to black. He broke off
his song, snapped a twig and smelled it. Its sharp acrid odor was
unmistakable. He suddenly remembered the walnut tree at Rosewood and
what Shirley had said: "I know a girl who had two in her yard, and she
went to Europe on them."
He looked about him; as far as he could see the trees reared, hardy and
perfect, untouched for a generation. He selected one of medium size and
pulling a creeper, measured its circumference and gaging this measure
with his eye, made a penciled calculation on the back of an envelope.
"Great Scott!" he said jubilantly to the dog; "that would cut enough to
wainscot the Damory Court library and build twenty sideboards!"
He sat down on a mossed boulder, breathless, his eyes sparkling. He
had thought himself almost a beggar, and here in his hand was a small
fortune! "Talk about engagement rings!" he muttered. "Why, a dozen of
these ought to buy a whole tiara!"
Far below him he could see the square tower of the old parish church of
St. Andrew. The day before he had gone there to service, slipping into a
pew at the rear. There had been flowers in silver vases on either side
of the reading-desk, and dim hues from the stained-glass windows had
touched the gray head of the rector above the brass lectern and the
crooked oak beams of the roof, and he had caught himself all at once
thinking that but for its drooping hat, Shirley's head might have
outshone that of the saint through whose bright mantle the colors came.
After the service the rector had showed him the vestry and the church
books with their many records of Valiants before him, and he had sat for
a moment in the Valiant pew, fancying her standing there sometime beside
him, with her trim gloved hand by his on the prayer-book.
At length he rose and climbed on, presently turning at a right-angle to
bisect the strip to its boundary before he paused to rest. "I'm no
timber-cruiser," he said to himself as he wiped his brow, "but I
calculate there are all of three hundred trees big enough to cut. Why,
suppose they are worth on an average only a hundred apiece. That would
make--Good lord!" he muttered, "and I've been mooning about poverty!"
The growth was smaller and sparser now and before long he came, on the
hill's very crest, to the edge of a ragged clearing. It held a squalid
settlement, perhaps a score of dirt-daubed cabins little better than
hovels, some of them mere mud-walled lean-tos, with sod roofs and
window-panes of flour-sacking. Fences and outhouses there was none.
Littered paths rambled aimlessly hither and thither from chip-strewn
yards to starved patches of corn, under-cultivated and blighted. Over
the whole place hung an indescribable atmosphere of disconsolate filth,
of unredeemed squalor and vileness. Razor-backed hogs rooted everywhere,
snapped at by a handful of lean and spiritless hounds. A slatternly
woman lolled under a burlap awning beside one of the cabins from whose
interior came the sound of men's voices raised in a fierce quarrel.
Undisturbed by the hideous din, a little girl of about three years was
dragging by a string an old cigar-box in which was propped a rag-doll.
She was barelegged and barearmed, her tiny limbs burned a dark red by
the sun, and she wore a single garment made from the leg of a patched
pair of overalls. Her hair, bleached the color of corn-silk, fell over
her face in elfin wildness.
With one hand on the dog's collar, hushing him to silence, Valiant,
unseen, looked at the wretched place with a shiver. He had glimpsed many
wretched purlieus in the slums of great cities, but this, in the open
sunlight, with the clean woods about it and the sweet clear blue above,
stood out with an unrelieved boldness and contrast that was doubly
sinister and forbidding. He knew instantly that the tawdry corner was
the community known as Hell's-Half-Acre, the place to which Shirley had
made her night ride to rescue Rickey Snyder.
A quick glad realization of her courage rushed through him. On its heels
came a feeling of shame that a spot like this could exist, a foul blot
on such a landscape. It was on his own land! Its denizens held place
by squatter sovereignty, but he was, nevertheless, their landlord. The
thought bred a new sense of responsibility. Something should be done for
them, too--for that baby, dragging its rag-doll in the cigar-box, poor
little soul, abandoned to a life of besottedness, ignorance and evil!
As he gazed, the uproar in the cabin reached a climax. A red-bearded
figure in nondescript garments shot from the door and collapsed in a
heap in the dirt. He got up with a dreadful oath--a thrown jug grazing
his temple as he did so--and shaking his fist behind him, staggered into
a near-by lean-to.
Valiant turned away with a feeling almost of nausea, and plunged back
down the forest hillside, the shrill laughter of the woman under the
strip of burlap echoing in his ears.