Hallie Erminie Rives

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:

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.