He was trying to remember—to put two and two together. His father had been Southern-born; yes, he had known that. But he had known nothing whatever of his father’s early days, or of his forebears; since he had been old enough to wonder about such things, he had had no one to ask questions of. There had been no private papers or letters left for his adult perusal. It had been borne upon him very early that his father’s life had not been a happy one. He had seldom laughed, and his hair had been streaked with gray, yet when he died he had been but ten years older than the son was now. Phrases of the letter ran through his mind: [Pg 45]“Sometime, perhaps, you will know why you are John Valiant of New York instead of John Valiant of Damory Court.... I can not tell you myself.” There was some tragedy, then, that had blighted the place, some “melancholy story,” as the clipping put it. He bent over the deed spread out upon the table, following with his finger the long line of transfers: “‘To John Valyante,’” he muttered; “what odd spelling! ‘Robert Valyant’—without the ‘e.’ Here, in 1730, the ‘y’ begins to be ‘i.’” There was something strenuous and appealing in the long line of dates. “Valiant. Always a Valiant. How they held on to it! There’s never a break.” A curious pride, new-born and self-conscious, was dawning in him. He was descended from ancestors who had been no weaklings. A Valiant had settled on those acres under a royal governor, before the old frontier fighting was over and the Indians had sullenly retired to the westward. The sons of those who had braved sea and savages had bowed their strong bodies and their stronger hearts to raze the forests and turn the primeval jungles into golden plantations. Except as regarded his father, Valiant had never known ancestral pride before. He had been proud of his strong and healthy frame, of his ability to ride like a dragoon, unconsciously, perhaps, a little proud of his wealth. But pride in the larger sense, reverence for the past [Pg 46]based upon a respect for ancient lineage, he had never known until this moment. Where was his facetious concept of Virginia now? He remembered his characterization of it with a wincing half-humorous mortification—a slender needle-prick of shame. The empty pretensions, subsisting on the vanished glories of the past, had suddenly acquired character and meaning. He himself was a Virginian.