WHEN THE CLOCK STRUCK
"Sorrow weeps--sorrow sings." As Shirley played that night, the old
Russian proverb kept running through her mind. When she had pushed the
gold harp into its corner she threw herself upon a broad sofa in a
feathery drift of chintz cushions and dropped her forehead in her laced
fingers. A gilt-framed mirror hung on the opposite wall, out of which
her sorrowful brooding eyes looked with an expression of dumb and weary
suffering.
Her confused thoughts raced hither and thither. What would be the end?
Would Valiant forget after a time? Would he marry--Miss Fargo, perhaps?
The thought caused her a stab of anguish. Yet she herself could not
marry him. The barrier was impassable!
She was still lying listlessly among the cushions when a step sounded on
the porch and she heard Chilly Lusk's voice in the hall. With heavy
hands Shirley put into place her disheveled hair and rose to meet him.
"I'm awfully selfish to come to-night," he said awkwardly; "no doubt you
are tired out."
She disclaimed the weariness that dragged upon her spirits like leaden
weights, and made him welcome with her usual cordiality. She was, in
fact, relieved at his coming. At Damory Court, the night of the ball,
when she had come from the garden with her lips thrilling from Valiant's
kiss, she had suddenly met his look. It had seemed to hold a startled
realization that she had remembered with a remorseful compunction. Since
that night he had not been at Rosewood.
Ranston had lighted a pine-knot in the fireplace, and the walls were
shuddering with crimson shadows. Her hand was shielding her eyes, and as
she strove to fill the gaps in their somewhat spasmodic conversation
with the trivial impersonal things that belonged to their old intimacy,
the tiny flickering flames seemed to be darting unfriendly fingers
plucking at her secret. Leaning from her nest of cushions she thrust the
poker into the glowing resinous mass till sparks whizzed up the
chimney's black maw in a torrent.
"How they fly!" she said. "Rickey Snyder calls it raising a blizzard in
Hades. I used to think they flew up to the sky and became the littlest
stars. What a pity we have to grow up and learn so much! I'd rather have
kept on believing that when the red leaves in the woods whirled about in
a circle the fairies were dancing, and that it was the gnomes who put
the cockle-burs in the hounds' ears."
She had been talking at random, gradually becoming shrinkingly conscious
of his constrained and stumbling manner. She had, however, but half
defined his errand when he came to it all in a burst.
"I--I can't get to it, somehow, Shirley," he said with sudden
desperation, "but here it is. I've come to ask you to marry me. Don't
stop me," he went on hurriedly, lifting his hand; "whatever you say, I
must tell you. I've been trying to for months and months!" Now that he
had started, it came with a boyish vehemence that both chilled and
thrilled her. Even in her own desolation, and shrinking almost
unbearably from the avowal, the hope and brightness in his voice touched
her with pity. It seemed to her that life was a strange jumble of
unescapable and incomprehensible pain. And all the while, in the young
voice vibrant with feeling, her cringing ear was catching imagined
echoes of that other voice, graver and more self-contained, but shaken
by the same passion, in that iteration of "I love you! I love you!"
His answer came to him finally in her silence, and he released her hands
which he had caught in his own. They dropped, limp and unresponsive, in
her lap. "Shirley," he said brokenly, "maybe you can't care for me--yet.
But if you will marry me, I--I'll be content with so little, till--you
do."
She shook her head, her hair making dim flashes in the firelight. "No,
Chilly," she said. "It makes me wretched to give you pain, but I must--I
must! Love isn't like that. It doesn't come afterward. I know. I could
never give you what you want. You would end by despising me, as
I--should despise myself."
"I won't give up," he said incoherently. "I can't give up. Not so long
as I know there's nobody else. At the ball I thought--I thought perhaps
you cared for Valiant--but since he told me--"
He stopped suddenly, for she was looking at him from an ashen face. "He
told me there was no reason why I should not try my luck," he said
difficultly. "I asked him."
There was a silence, while he gazed at her, breathing deeply. Then he
tried to laugh.
"All right," he said hoarsely. "It--it doesn't matter. Don't worry."
She stretched out her hand to him in a gesture of wistful pain, and he
held it a moment between both of his, then released it and went
hurriedly out.
* * * * *
As the door closed, Shirley sat down, her head dropping into her hands
like a storm-broken flower. Valiant had accepted the finality of the
situation. With a wave of deeper hopelessness than had yet submerged
her, she realized that, against her own decision, something deep within
her had taken shy and secret comfort in his stubborn masculine refusal.
Against all fact, in face of the impossible, her heart had been clinging
to this--as though his love might even attain the miraculous and
somewhere, somehow, recreate circumstance. But now he, too, had bowed to
the decree. A kind of utter apathetic wretchedness seized upon her, to
replace the sharp misery that had so long been her companion--an empty
numbness in which, in a measure, she ceased to feel.
An hour dragged slowly by and at length she rose and went slowly up the
stairs. Her head felt curiously heavy, but it did not ache. Outside her
mother's door, as was her custom, she paused mechanically to listen. A
tiny pencil of light struck through the darkness and painted a spot of
brightness on her gown. It came through the keyhole; the lamp in her
mother's room was burning. "She has fallen asleep and forgotten it," she
thought, and softly turning the knob, pushed the door noiselessly open
and entered.
A moment she stood listening to the low regular breathing of the
sleeper. The reading-lamp shed a shaded glow on the pillow with its
spread-out silver hair, and on the delicate hands clasped loosely on the
coverlet. Shirley came close and looked down on the placid face. It was
smooth as a child's and a smile touched it lightly as if some pleasant
sleep-thought had just laid rosy fingers on the dreaming lips. The
light caught and sparkled from something bright that lay between her
mother's hands. It was the enamel brooch that held her own baby curl,
and she saw suddenly that what she had all her life thought was a solid
pendant, was now open locket-wise and that the two halves clasped a
miniature. It came to her at once that the picture must be Sassoon's,
and a quick thrill of pity and yearning welled up through her own
dejection. Stooping, she looked at it closely. She started as she did
so, for the face on the little disk of ivory was that of John Valiant.
An instant she stared unbelievingly. Then recollection of the
resemblance of which Valiant had told her rushed to her, and she
realized that it must be the picture of his father. The fact shocked and
confounded her. Why should her mother carry in secret the miniature of
the man who had killed--
Shirley's breath stopped. She felt her face tinging and a curious
weakness came on her limbs. Why indeed, unless--and the thought was like
a wild prayer in her mind--she had been mistaken in her surmise?
Thoughts came thronging in panic haste: the fourteenth of May and the
cape jessamines--these might point no less to Valiant than to Sassoon.
But her mother's fainting at the sight of the son--the eager interest
she had displayed in Shirley's accounts of him, from the episode of the
rose and the bulldog to the tournament ball--seemed now to stand out in
a new light, throbbing and roseate. Could it be? Had she been stumbling
along a blind trail, misled by the cunning dovetailing of circumstance?
Her heart was beating stiflingly. If she should be mistaken _now_! She
dashed her hand across her eyes as though to compel their clearness, and
looked again.
It was Beauty Valiant's face that lay in the locket, and that could mean
but one thing: it was he, not Sassoon, whom her mother loved!
The lamplight seemed to grow and spread to an unbearable radiance.
Shirley thought she cried out with a sudden sweet wildness, but she had
not moved or uttered a sound. The illumination was all about her, like a
splendid cloud. The impossible had happened. The miracle for which she
had hysterically prayed had been wrought!
When she blew out the light, the shining still remained. That glowing
knowledge, like a vitalizing and physical presence, passed with her
through the hall to her own room. As she stood in the elfish light of
her one candle, the poignancy of her joy was as sharp as her past pain.
Later was to come the wonder how that tragedy had bent Beauty Valiant's
life to exile and her mother's to unfulfilment, and in time she was to
know these things, too. But now the one great knowledge blotted out all
else. She need starve her fancy no longer! The hours with her lover
might again sweep across her memory undenied. She felt his arms, his
kisses, heard his whispers against her cheek and smelled the perfume of
Madonna lilies.
She drew the curtain and opened the window noiselessly to the night.
Only a few hours ago she had been singing to her harp in what
wretchedness! She laughed softly to herself. The quiet night was full of
his voice: "I love you! I want nothing but you!" How her pitiful error
had tortured and wrung them both! But to-morrow he, too, would know that
all was well.
A clear sound chimed across the distance--the bell of the court-house
clock, striking midnight. _One!_... _Two!_... How often lately it had
rung discordantly across her mood; now it seemed a clamant watcher,
tolling joy. _Three!_... _Four!_... _Five!_... Perhaps he was sleepless,
listening, too. Was he in the old library, thinking of her? _Six!_...
_Seven!_... _Eight!_... _Nine!_... If she could only send her message to
him on the bells! _Ten!_... It swelled more loudly now, more deliberate.
_Eleven!_... Another day was almost gone. _Twelve!_... "Joy cometh in
the morning"--ran the whisper across her thought. It was morning now.
_Thirteen!_
She caught a sharp breath. Her ear had not deceived her--the vibration
still palpitated on the air like a heart of sound. It had struck
thirteen! A little eery touch crept along her nerves and a cool dampness
broke on her skin, for she seemed to hear, quavering through the
wondering silence, the voice of Mad Anthony, as it had quavered to her
ear on the door-step of the negro cabin, with the well-sweep throwing
its long curved shadow across the group of laughing faces:
"Ah sees yo' gwine ter him. Ah heahs de co'ot-house clock a-strikin' in
de night--en yo' gwine.... Don' wait, don' wait, li'l mistis, er de
trouble-cloud gwine kyah him erway f'om yo'.... When de clock strike
thuhteen--when de clock strike thuhteen--"
She dropped the flowered curtain and drew back. A weird fancy had begun
to press on her brain. Had not Mad Anthony foretold truly what had gone
before? What if there were some cryptic meaning in this, too? To go to
him, at midnight, by a lonely country road--she, a girl? Incredible! Yet
her mind had opened to a vague growing fear that was swiftly mounting to
a thriving anxiety. That innate superstition, secretly cherished while
derided, which is the heritage of the Southron-born bred from centuries
of contact with a mystical race, had her in its grip. Yet all the while
her sober actual common-sense was crying out upon her--and crying in
vain. Unknown appetences that had lain darkling in her blood, come down
to her from long generations, were suddenly compelling her. The curtain
began to wave in a little wind that whispered in the silk, and somewhere
in the yard below she could hear Selim nipping the clover.
She was to go or the "trouble-cloud" would carry him away!
A strange expression of mingled fright and resolve grew on her face. She
ran on tiptoe to her wardrobe and with frantic haste dragged out a rough
cloak that fell over her soft house-gown, covering it to the feet. It
had a peaked hood falling from its collar and into this she thrust the
resentful masses of her hair. Every few seconds she caught her breath in
a short gasp, and once she paused with an apprehensive glance over her
shoulder and shivered. She scarcely knew what she did, nor did she ask
herself what might be the outcome of such an absurd adventure. She
neither knew nor cared. She was swept off her feet and whirled away into
some outlandish limbo of shadowy fear and crying dread.
Slipping off her shoes, she went swiftly and noiselessly down the stair.
She let herself out of the door and, shoes on again, ran across the
clover. A hound clambered about her, whining, but she silenced him with
a whispered word. Selim lifted his head and she patted the snuffling
inquiring muzzle an instant before, with her hand on his mane, she led
him through the hedge to the stable. It was but the work of a moment to
throw on a side-saddle and buckle the girth. Then, mounting, she turned
him into the lane.
He was thoroughbred, and her tense excitement seemed to communicate
itself to him. He blew the breath through his delicate flaring nostrils
and flung up his head at her restraining hand on the bridle. Once on the
Red Road, she let him have his will. The long vacant highway reeled out
behind her to the fierce and lonely hoof-tattoo. She was scarcely
conscious of consecutive thought--all was a vague jumble of chaotic
impressions threaded by that necessity that called her like an insistent
voice.
Copse and hedge flew by, streaks of distemper on the shifting gloom;
swarthy farmhouse roofs huddled like giant Indians on the trail, and
ponds in pastures glinted back the pale glimmering of stars. The
faint mist, tangled in the branches of the trees, made them look like
ghosts gathered to see her pass. Was this real or was she dreaming?
Was she, Shirley Dandridge, really galloping down an open road at
midnight--because of the hare-brained maunderings of a half-mad old
negro?
The great iron gate of Damory Court hung open, and scarcely slackening
her pace, she rode through and up the long drive. The glooming
house-front was blank and silent and its huge porch columns looked like
lonely gray monoliths in the wan light. Not a twinkle showed at chink
or cranny; the ponderous shutters were closed. There was a sense of
desertion, of emptiness about the place that brought her heart into
her throat with a sickly horrible feeling of certainty.
She jumped down from the blowing horse and hurried around the house. The
door of the kitchens was open and a ladder of dim reddish light fell
from it across the grass. She ran swiftly and looked in. A huddled
figure sat there, rocking to and fro in the lamplight.
"Aunt Daph," she called, "what is the matter?"
The turbaned head turned sharply toward her. "Dat yo', Miss Shirley?"
the old woman said huskily. "Is yo' come ter see Mars' John 'fo' he
gwine away? Yo' too late, honey, too late! He done gone ter de deepo fo'
ter ketch de thoo train. En, oh, honey, Ah knows in mah ole ha'at dat
Mars' John ain' nevah gwine come back ter Dam'ry Co'ot no mo'!"