THE GARDENERS
He saw them coming through the gate on the Red Road--the major and
Shirley in a lilac muslin by his side--and strode to meet them. Behind
them Ranston propelled a hand-cart filled with paper bundles from each
of which protruded a bunch of flowering stems. There was a flush in
Shirley's cheek as her hand lay in Valiant's. As for him, his eyes, like
wilful drunkards, returned again and again, between the major's
compliments, to her face.
"You have accomplished wonders, sah! I had no idea so much could be done
in such a limited time. We are leisurely down here, and seldom do to-day
what can be put off till to-morrow. Real Northern hustle, eh, Shirley?
You have certainly primped the old place up. I could almost think I was
looking at Damory Court in the sixties, sah!"
"That's quite the nicest thing you could have said, Major," responded
Valiant. "But it needs the flowers." He looked at Shirley with sparkling
eyes. "How splendid of you to bring them! I feel like a robber."
"With our bushels of them? We shall never miss them at all. Have you set
out the others?"
"I have, indeed. Every one has rooted, too. You shall see them." He led
the way up the drive till they stood before the porch.
"Gad!" chuckled the major. "Who would think it had been unoccupied for
three decades? At this rate, you'll soon be giving dances, sah."
"Ah," said Valiant. "That's the very thing I want to suggest. The
tournament comes off next week, I understand, and it's been the custom
to have a ball that night. The tourney ground is on this estate, and
Damory Court is handier than the Country Club. Why wouldn't it be
appropriate to hold the dance here? The ground-floor rooms are in order,
and if the young people would put up with it, it would be a great
pleasure to me, I assure you."
"Oh!" breathed Shirley. "That would be too wonderful!"
The major seized his hand and shook it heartily. "I can answer for the
committee," he said. "They'll jump at it. Why, sah, the new generation
has never set eyes inside the house. It's a golden legend to them."
"Then I'll go ahead with arrangements."
Shirley's eyes were overrunning the cropped lawn, which now showed a
clear smooth slope between the arching trees. "It was lovely in its
ruin," she said, "but it was pathetic, too. Unc' Jefferson used to
say 'De ol' place look lak et ben griebin' etse'f ter deff wid
lonesomeness.' Somehow, now it looks glad. Just hear that small
citizen!"
A red squirrel sat up in a tree-crotch, his paws tucked into his furry
breast, barking angrily at them. "He's shocked at the house-cleaning,"
she said; "a sign he's a bachelor."
"So am I," said Valiant.
"Maybe he's older than you," she countered; "and sot in his ways."
"I accept him as a warning," he said, and she laughed with him.
He led them around the house and down the terraces of the formal garden,
and here the major's encomiums broke forth again. "You are going to take
us old folks back, sah," he said with real feeling. "This gyarden in its
original lines was unique. It had a piquancy and a picturesqueness that,
thank God, are to be restored! One can understand the owner of an estate
like this having no desire to spend his life philandering abroad. We all
hope, sah, that you will recur to the habit of your ancestors, and count
Damory Court home."
Valiant smiled slowly. "I don't dream of anything else," he said. "My
life, as I map it out, seems to begin here. The rest doesn't count--only
the years when I was little and had my father."
The major carefully adjusted his eye-glasses. His head was turned away.
"Ah, yes," he said.
"The last twenty years," continued the other, "from my present
view-point, are valuable mainly for contrast."
"As a consistent regimen of _pate de foie gras_," said Shirley
quizzically, "makes one value bread and butter?"
He shook his head at her. "As starvation makes one appreciate plenty.
The next twenty years are to be here. But they hold side-trips, too. Now
and then there's a jaunt back to the city."
"Contrast again?" she asked interestedly.
"Yes and no. Yes, because no one who has never known that blazing
clanging life can really understand the peace and blessedness of a place
like this. No, because there are some things which are to be found only
there. There are the galleries and the opera. I need a breath of them
both."
"You're right," nodded the major. "Birds are birds, and Melba is Melba.
But a sward like this in the early morning, with the dew on the grass,
is the best opera for a steady diet."
"I called them only side-trips," said John Valiant.
"And semi-occasional longer flights, too," the major reflected. "A
look-see abroad once in a blue moon. Why not?"
"Yes. For mental photographs--impressions one can't get from between
book-covers. There's an old cloister garden I know in Italy and a
particular river-bank in Japan in the cherry-blossom season, and a tiny
island with a Greek castle on it in the AEgean. Little colored memories
for me to bring away to dream over. But always I come back here to
Damory Court. For this is--home!"
They walked beneath the pergola to the lake, where Shirley gave a cry of
delight at sight of its feathered population. "Where _did_ you get them
from?" she asked.
"Washington. In crates."
"That explains it," she exclaimed. "One day last week the little darkies
in the village all insisted a circus was coming. They must have seen
these being hauled here. They watched the whole afternoon for the
elephants."
"Poor youngsters!" he said. "It's a shame to fool them. But I've had all
the circus I want getting the live stock installed."
"They won't suffer," said the major. "Rickey Snyder'll get them up a
three-ringed show at the drop of a hat and drop it herself. Besides,
there's tournament day coming, and they can live on that. I see you've
dredged out some of the lilies."
"Yes. I take my dip here every morning."
"We used to have a diving-board when we were little shavers," pursued
the major. "I remember once, your father--"
He cleared his throat and stopped dead.
"Please," said John Valiant, "I--I like to hear about him."
"It was only that I struck my head on a rock on the bottom and--stayed
down. The others were frightened, but he--he dove down again and again
till he brought me out. It was a narrow squeak, I reckon."
A silence fell. Looking at the tall muscular form beside her, Shirley
had a sudden vision of a determined little body cleaving the dark water,
over and over, now rising panting for breath, now plunging again, never
giving up. And she told herself that the son was the same sort. That
hard set of the jaw, those firm lips, would know no flinching. He might
suffer, but he would be strong. Subconsciously her mind was also swiftly
contrasting him with Chilly Lusk: the same spare lithe frame but set off
by light skin, brown hair and hazel eyes; the two faces, alike sharply
and clearly chiseled, but this one purged of the lazy scorn, the
satiety, and reckless indulgence.
Half unconsciously she spoke her thought aloud: "You look like your
father, do you not?"
"Yes," he replied, "there's a strong likeness. I have a photograph which
I'll show you sometime. But how did you know?"
"Perhaps I only guessed," she said in some confusion. To cover this she
stooped by the pebbly marge and held out her hand to the bronze ducks
that pushed and gobbled about her fingers. "What have you named them?"
she asked.
"Nothing. _You_ christen them."
"Very well. The light one shall be Peezletree and the dark one
Pilgarlic. I got the names from John Jasper--he was Virginia's famous
negro preacher. I once heard him hold forth when he read from one of the
Psalms--the one about the harp and the psaltery--and he called it
peezletree."
"Speaking of ducks," said the major, tweaking his gray imperial,
"reminds me of Judge Chalmers' white mallard. He had a pair that were so
much in love they did nothing but loaf around honey-cafuddling with
their wings over each other's backs. It was a lesson in domesticity for
the community, sah. Well, the drake got shot for a wild one, and if
you'll believe it, the poor little duck was that inconsolable it would
have brought tears to your eyes. The whole Chalmers family were
affected."
Shirley had put one hand over her mouth to repress a smile. "Major,
Major!" she murmured reprovingly. But his guilty glance avoided her.
"Yes, sah, nothing would console her. So at last Chalmers got another
drake, the handsomest he could find, and trotted him out to please her.
What do you reckon that little white duck did? She looked at the judge
once reproachfully and then waddled down to a black muck-bed and lay
down in it. She came out with as fine a suit of mourning as you ever
saw. And believe it or not, sah, but she wouldn't go in the water for
ten days!"
Valiant's laugh rang out over the lake--to be answered by a sudden sharp
screech from the terrace, where the peacock strutted, a blaze of
spangled purple and gold. They turned to see Aunt Daphne issue from the
kitchen, twig-broom in hand.
"Heah!" she exclaimed. "What fo' yo' kyahin' on like er wil' _gyraff_
we'n we got comp'ny, yo' triflin' ol' fan-tail, yo'! Git outen heah!"
She waved her weapon and the bird, with a raucous shriek of defiance,
retired in ruffled disorder. The master of Damory Court looked at
Shirley. "What shall we name _him_?"
"I'd call him Fire-Cracker if he goes off like that," she said. And
Fire-Cracker the bird was christened forthwith.
"And now," said Shirley, "let's set out the ramblers."
The major had brought a rough plan, sketched from memory, of the old
arrangement of the formal garden. "I'll just go over the lines of the
beds with Unc' Jefferson," he proposed, "while you two potter over
these roses." So Valiant and Shirley walked back up the slope beneath
the pergola together. The sun was westering fast, and long lilac
cloud-trails lay over the terraces. But the bumbling bees were still
busy in the honeysuckle and hawking dragon-flies shot hither and
thither. A robin was tilting on the rim of the fountain and it looked at
them with head turned sidewise, with a low sweet pip that mingled with
the trickling laugh of the falling water.
With Ranston puffing and blowing like a black porpoise over his creaking
go-cart, they planted the ramblers--crimson and pink and white--Valiant
much of the time on his knees, his hands plunging deep into the black
spongy earth, and Shirley with broad hat flung on the grass, her fingers
separating the clinging thread-like roots and her small arched foot
tamping down the soil about them. Her hair--the color of wet raw wood in
the sunlight--was very near the brown head and sometimes their fingers
touched over the work. Once, as they stood up, flushed with the
exercise, a great black and orange butterfly, dazed with the sun-glow,
alighted on Valiant's rolled-up sleeve. He held his arm perfectly still
and blew gently on the wavering pinions till it swam away. When a
redbird flirted by, to his delight she whistled its call so perfectly
that it wheeled in mid-flight and tilted inquiringly back toward them.
As they descended the terrace again to the pergola, he said, "There's
only one thing lacking at Damory Court--a sun-dial."
"Then you haven't found it?" she cried delightedly. "Come and let me
show you."
She led the way through the maze of beds at one side till they reached a
hedge laced thickly with Virginia creeper. He parted this leafy screen,
bending back the springing fronds that thrust against the flimsy muslin
of her gown and threatened to spear the pink-rosed hat that cast an
adorable warm tint over her creamy face, thinking that never had the old
place seen such a picture as she made framed in the deep green.
Some such thought was in the major's mind, too, as he came slowly up the
terrace below. He paused, to take off his hat and wipe his brow.
"With the place all fixed up this way," he sighed to himself, "I could
believe it was only last week that Beauty Valiant and Southall and I
were boys, loafing around this gyarden. And to think that now it's
Valiant's son and Judith's daughter! Why, it seems like yesterday that
Shirley there was only knee-high to a grasshopper--and I used to tell
her her hair was that color because she ran through hell bareheaded. I'm
about a thousand years old, I reckon!"
Meanwhile the two figures above had pushed through the tangle into a
circular sunny space where stood a short round pillar of red onyx. It
was a sun-dial, its vine-clad disk cut of gray polished stone in which
its metal tongue was socketed. Round the outer edge of the disk ran an
inscription in archaic lettering. Valiant pulled away the clustering ivy
leaves and read: _I count no hours but the happy ones_.
"If that had only been true!" he said.
"It is true. See how the vines hid the sun from it. It ceased to mark
the time after the Court was deserted."
He snapped the clinging tendrils and swept the cluster from its stone
face. "It shall begin to count again from this moment. Will it mark only
happy hours for me, I wonder? I'll bribe it with flowers."
"White for happiness," she said.
"I'll put moonflowers at its base and where you are standing, Madonna
lilies. The outer part of the circle shall have bridal-wreath and white
irises, and they shall shade out into pastel colors--mauves and grays
and heliotropes. Oh, I shall love this spot!--perhaps sometime the best
of all."
"Which do you love the most now?"
He leaned slightly toward her, one hand on the dial's time-notched rim.
"Don't you know?" he said in a lower voice. "Could any other spot mean
to me what that acre under the hemlocks means?"
Her face was turned from him, her fingers pulling at the drifting vine,
and a splinter of sunlight tangled in her hair like a lace of fireflies.
"I could never forget it," he continued. "The thing that spoiled my
father's life happened there, yet there we two first talked, and there
you--"
"Don't!" she said, facing him. "Don't!"
"Ah, let me speak! I want to tell you that I shall carry the memory of
that afternoon, and of your brave kindness, always, always! If I were
never to see you again in this life, I should always treasure it. If I
died of thirst in some Sahara, it would be the last thing I should
remember--your face would be the last thing I should see! If I--"
He paused, his veins beating hard under the savage self-repression, his
hand trembling against the stone, his voice a traitor, yielding to
something that rose in his throat to choke the stumbling words.
In the silence there was the sound of a slow footfall on the gravel
walk, and at the same moment he saw a magical change. Shirley drew back.
The soft gentian blue of her eyes darkened. The lips that an instant
before had been tremulous, parted in a low delicious laugh. She swept
him a deep curtsey.
"I am beholden to you, sir," she said gaily, "for a most knightly
compliment. There's the major. Come and let us show him where we've
planted the ramblers."