Emmie's clothes seemed never to wear out; it was part of her almost invariable advantage over Val. Mrs. Gano more than once pointed out that Val succeeded in working her toes through three pairs of boots while Emmie was carefully wearing one.
"Emmie isn't the captain at prisoner's base," the accused would say, in self-defence, "and she doesn't walk miles and miles with father on Sunday afternoons."
Val was very proud of these same walks, even if the conversation did usually begin with:
"Now that you are learning history, no doubt you can tell me what was happening in Paris 273 years ago to-day?" or, "This is the anniversary of a battle that settled the fate of an empire; of course you remember," etc.; or that less easily eluded form: "Whose birthday is this?" And while the child, innocent of a notion, seemed to be diving down into profound deeps of information after the required fragment, he would help her on with a hint—"One of therealbenefactors of the race; did more for the good of humanity by his discovery than all the saints in the calendar. I recollect speaking of him just a year ago, later in the day than this, about five o'clock, as we stood with Professor Black by the pyrus japonica."
"Oh yes," Val would cry out with delight at having a "glimmer," though not of what he asked; "I remember perfectly, and I asked you if the pyrus was the kind of burning bush Moses saw."
"Exactly."
And the best feeling prevailed, it not occurring to John Gano that even now his daughter had not the dimmestnotion who the great man was who thus unseasonably intruded on their Sundaytête-à-tête.
She was very sensitive to his disapproval, and suffered acutely when he showed how he despised a person who forgot the difference between a sycamore and a balsam poplar.
"What's the use of your having eyes if you don't use them?"
And she silently determined to be more observant, and win back her father's respect.
"You should greet these good friends by name when you walk abroad," he would say. "You wouldn't pass a woman every day in the street, as beautiful as that silver birch, or a man as magnificent as the Otways' copper beech, without asking his name; and you wouldn't be content with knowing his intimates called him 'John.' 'What family does he belong to?' you'd say. 'What is his history?' Now, here have I taken the pains to introduce you to these desirable acquaintances, and yet you—"
"I shall know 'em next time," she would protest, humbly.
By-and-by her father didn't need to interrupt the main thread of his discourse more than to pause with pointed walking-stick for a second, while his little companion would interpolate briskly: "Ulmus Americana," or "Tilia." And if, instead of his instantly resuming story or homily, he still stood pointing, she would proceed: "Also commonly called bass, lime, or linden; bark used for matting and ropes; wood for sounding-boards; sap for sugar, and its charcoal for gunpowder."
He would nod and walk on, finishing his broken sentence as though nothing had intervened between subject and predicate. Although he was severe with her constitutional forgetfulness of dates, her father, at least, did not obtrude upon her the disgrace of extreme youth. He talked the gravest matters to her with an air of conferring with an equal. They discussed religion with no little openness, and, by dint of diligent inquiry, she heard, amazed, the extent of his unbelief. He had at first meant to be reticent, but as she got older and yet more inquiring, he had said:
"One thing, at least, a child has a right to expect from its parents, and that is truth. I am bound, as I see the matter, to give my child as faithful an account of the world as I am able. I am the traveller coming home, of whom the young one setting forth asks the way. Shall I advise him to go in the wrong direction because the old sign-posts misledme?" He would shake his head gloomily, and go on as if communing with his own soul: "Not consciously to mislead, that is the basic human obligation." Then he would look down on a sudden at the little school-girl trotting solemnly along by his side, and resume with a kind of severity: "I don't owe my child money"—he used to revert to this as if it were a sore point—"I don't owe my child worldly position or honors, or houses or lands, but I owe him honesty. I shall never consciously deceive him."
And so Sunday by Sunday she heard the Gospel preached at St. Thomas's in the morning, and in the later day the new tidings of science, and a sort of sublimated socialism, preached among the lanes and hills. She heard the story of the making of the world (not according to Genesis), and was invited to observe in "Nature's Workshop," as her father called the hills, how the making and transforming still went on.
"In these high places," he would say, with enthusiasm, "you may detect Nature in the very act."
Val was shown how busy the little brooks were, and the wide river as well, ever making "sedimentary deposits," still carving out its channel, wearing down the fire-born rock as surely as the chalk cliffs in its "ancient ineradicable inclination to the sea."
She saw for herself how the wind and the weather worked away day and night disintegrating, tearing down, until even to a child it was clear that one day the proud upstanding hills would be brought low, and lay their heads in the plain. There was a tragic element in the story and its ocular proof. It made the solid earth waver under the feet as in an earthquake. Her father had pointed out howeven the old Fort that had so stoutly withstood the fierce Red Man could not hold out against this subtler foe. He had shown her where even the great corner-stones were exfoliating; with his finger-tip he could flake off the loosened bits, but regretfully, and only as an object-lesson. No child must lift a finger to help this insidious enemy; and yet, rightly comprehended, Nature and Nature's laws were our best friends, Val was given to understand. It was the theologian who had spoiled man's legitimate satisfaction in the world. Christianity had been the greatest curse of Time (this came as a lightning-flash); Christianity had killed art, discouraged learning, and set back the clock of Progress 2000 years; had turned man's thoughts and energies from the righteous task of making a heaven on earth; had filled him with foreboding, and forbidden him natural joys.
John Gano had no need to tell his daughter not to convey to her grandmother any inkling of this indictment of the holy faith. It was a thrilling secret. To be a sharer in it was a proud distinction which led to Val's being permitted to remain in the room when Professor Black, a contributor to her father's favorite periodical, thePopular Science Monthly, came on flying visits, and they sat and talked of these real dark ages of the world—Pliocene, Eocene, and the rest.
Mrs. Gano did not shrink from reading Darwin, and Spencer, and other books her son left about. As time went on she came to entertain the clearest views as to science being the handmaid of religion. In these later days of her own development, she had no quarrel with those "orthodox scientists," who regarded the Mosaic story with respect as "symbolical"—symbolical of what was not inquired. The vaster age of the world, the true story of the rocks, gave Mrs. Gano only a fresh and more passionate sense of the wonder and majesty of the ways of God. She corroborated and supported her new friends among modern historians and men of science as vehemently as of old she had upheld a favorite preacher, poet, or Biblicalcommentator. She objected vigorously to much she found in Buckle and Lecky, and to certain Germans whose names she disdained to utter, and bestowed her unqualified approval upon some of the lesser lights whose Theism was sound.
After Professor Black was gone, or that other wise man from the East, the handsome and distinguished-looking editor of theEngineering and Mining Journal, Mrs. Gano would agitate the great red rocking-chair into an abortive rock, and lifting her chin with an air of disdain: "Humph!" she would say, "a mighty superior person!" Then, seeing her son would not respond to this obvious irony: "Who is he, to quarrel with the Bridgewater Treatises!"
"Black is too accurate a thinker to accept the theory of design carried to the highest perfection." And, hoping to stem the tide of further objurgation of his friend, he would demolish theTreatise on the Human Eye. "So far from its being the nicest adaptation of means to an end, the eye of man is a clumsy and pitiful production."
This was the kind of irreligion that in these days excited Mrs. Gano's ire more than any other. So hot would the argument grow, that sometimes her son would utterly lose sight of his determination never to disturb his mother's faith. He would turn upon her with all the enthusiasm of the passionate amateur.
"One glance through the magnifying-glass at the infinitely superior eye of the common house-fly is enough to—"
"Enough to make any Christian thankful, I should say, that his eyes are what Providence made them."
"The fly's eye is a far finer instrument."
"Humph! A pretty sight we'd be with protruding goggles bigger than all the rest of the face!"
"I assure you the fly has a beautiful eye! And then the way it is placed! Magnificent! A group of powerful lenses mounted on rods, controlled by delicate muscles that turn the eye about so that without moving his body he can see all round him.Therewas an invention if you like!"
"I shouldn't have liked it in the least."
"Ah, that's because you don't realize that to examine certain insects through the magnifying-glass is to dispose at once and forever of the notion than an omnipotent Providence did His level best by man. As a mechanical contrivance the human eye is merely an intricate failure." Then, perhaps perceiving that these intricate failures in his mother's head were shooting lightnings, he would shield his audacities behind a foreign authority. "Helmholtz says he would be ashamed of any novice in his laboratory who should design so poor an optical appliance."
"Just like his German impudence! A nation of boors and atheists!"
John Gano would always end by pulling himself up, and accepting these strictures on his authorities and his friends (and by implication on himself) with a silent tolerance.
Val felt a fine superiority in thinking thatsheunderstood. The grandmother, who was such an autocrat, and thought so highly of her own judgment, was in reality very bigoted and lamentably behind the age. But Val and her father bore with her, not even exchanging covert glances when, with shining eyes and sibylline aspect, she would burst into Old Testament denunciation and prophecy. Her father was really a miracle of forbearance. His behavior to his mother, in spite of her shortcomings, was beautiful. He would sit and read Ruskin aloud to her by the hour, and would give her his arm of an evening and slowly pace the gravel paths, instead of going any more interesting and inspiring tramps with his brisker companion along river or over hill.
On the occasions when Val tagged after the pair, she was firmly convinced that the tone of her grandmother's conversation was adjusted to young ears. It made her long to shout out: "Oh, he tells me a great deal more than ever he tells you!"
Mrs. Gano would sometimes interrupt her son with scant ceremony and say, glancing back at the child: "Great is the mystery of godliness. There is a point at which the finite mind must stop," and so on.
Val's contempt for this was profound; she felt it was not in alignment with what they had been saying before she came up with them. She would slip her hand into her father's, and squeeze it gently, to restore the sense of secret understanding. They would often, when she was there, talk about the stars, perhaps as being "safe ground," if one may so speak of the plains of heaven.
Did John Gano say, dreamily, "The Polar star is dim to-night," she would as likely as not answer with significance: "Isitdim, or our eyes?"
"No fault of our eyes this time, for we can see Mars well enough. He's in a warlike mood to-night, flaming angrily."
Mrs. Gano would pause, and half to herself repeat:
"'The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth His handiwork.'"
"Can you find the Scorpion, little girl?" her father would say.
And if she wasn't quick with eye and answer, her grandmother would stop, lifting her shawled arm with curious unmodern largeness of movement, and point the constellation out, half chanting:
"'By His Spirit He hath garnished the heavens; His hand hath formed the crooked serpent.'"
As if gently to divert her attention, the son would perhaps face about, and, walking slowly back with her to the house, would do a little quoting on his own account:
"'Many a night from yonder ivied casement, ere I went to rest,Did I look on great Orion sloping slowly to the West.'
"'Many a night from yonder ivied casement, ere I went to rest,Did I look on great Orion sloping slowly to the West.'
"'Many a night from yonder ivied casement, ere I went to rest,
Did I look on great Orion sloping slowly to the West.'
Ah! the music—the sheer music in that man!"
"There was music beforehisday. And Tennyson is one of them that hath ears to hear, as well as tongue to speak. Small doubt but from his ivied casement in the West he heard the voice of the Lord from out the chambers of the South. 'Canst thou bind the secret influences of Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion? Canst thou bringforth Mazzaroth in his season? Or canst thou guide Arcturus with his suns?'"
"I can see Cassiopeia," Val would observe, just to show that she was not quite out of it.
And she would grasp her father's hand tighter, to remind him of their agreement that the straggling W stood for "We"—Val and her father. Then he would find Lyra and the Little Bear, and tell how the Milky Way, instead of being, as Hiawatha and Val had thought, "pathway of the ghosts and shadows," was really star-dust, the scattered nebulæ of other suns and systems.
Mrs. Gano would look back before going in-doors, and say, with solemn upward gaze:
"Yes, yes! 'An undevout astronomer is mad.'"
Then they would go in silently to bed.
A letter by the late post from cousin Ethan! It would be the last before he himself would appear. Emmie watched, with luminous eyes, her grandmother's opening of the envelope. Val, in banishment, waited impatiently outside in the dusk on the stairs to hear the news; but the face of the reader in the long room darkened as she read. She dropped the letter in her lap at the close, speechless.
"Oh! what is it, gran'ma?" quivered the sympathetic Emmie.
The old lady merely turned away her head.
"Gran'ma, he isn'tdead?"
"No, not exactly dead," she said, very low.
"He is very ill?"
"No. He is gone again to France."
"But I thought he was coming here forsurethis time?"
"So did I; not so Aaron Tallmadge!"
The name swept out like a sudden gust, scattering to the winds her unnatural calm.
"But you said he was nearly of age, when he would be his own master."
"Aaron Tallmadge remembered that." Her lips trembled with anger, and the big chair seemed to share her agitation. She held on to the red padded arms, as though she rocked on the high seas in a gale. "When Ethan comes of age he'll be five thousand miles away."
"But can't you stop him? Let Venie take a telegwaf."
"No, no!" The high wind, in which the great chair rocked, died down, the angry animation faded out of the old face, leaving it older still and very weary. "No, no; these things are not to be forced. It's natural. He hasbeen with Aaron Tallmadge all his days; he is his heir. He lives in a world where men think much of the bond of money, and little of the bond of blood. I shall not write again."
She folded up the letter and put it in its envelope. Her head drooped over the task.
"I thought cousin Ethan loved being here?"
"A long time ago. He was very little."
"But he never forgot?"
"It used to seem so."
Lower the old head sank, till the folds of white veil, falling on either side, met like two drawn curtains across her face.
"But you could see in his letters he was terribly sad and sorry to have put off coming—just to please his grandfather."
"Ah, well! it was a long time ago, and he was very little."
Mrs. Gano lifted her head—and, behold, her face was wet with tears. She found her pocket-handkerchief, and wiped them away angrily, as if she resented the salt-water drops more than her grandson's defection.
"Natural enough, I suppose," she said, with an assumption of half-scornful indifference. "Ethan's a man now, with wide means and the world before him. Why should he come to this dull, smoky town, when he can 'improve his accent' under brighter skies? There's no fortune here for him to inherit, and nothing new for him to see."
"He hasn't ever seenme," said Emmie, "nor Val."
Her grandmother drew her close and held the beautiful little face in her hands, looking down with unaccustomed tenderness, while again the tears gathered. A sudden movement of "This will never do." She cleared her voice and rose hurriedly.
"Good-night, child; go to bed. I must tell your father we needn't look for Ethan after this."
Emmie kept on going to bed at half-past eight, evenwhen she was old enough to have struck for another hour's freedom. But Emmie had not so much to get into her day; in fact, she was constantly going about saying she had nothing to do, and begging her grandmother to find her some way of getting through the hours. This frame of mind was, like godliness, one of the mysteries to Val. How anybody found the day long enough, and what being "bored" meant, were matters equally impenetrable. Her father was right. The world was a beautiful and absorbing place to one whose pleasure in it was unjaundiced. Val reflected with pride thathercapacity for enjoyment was not blighted by too great early piety. It was no doubt because she was so singularly enlightened and advanced that, to her, just being alive, was so rapturous a joy. There was Emmie, now. With all her advantages, she wasn't happy; and she was as religious as her grandmother, if not more so. The inference was plain. People who were worried about their souls could not be expected to relish the selfish joy of being first in the games at recess. They probably didn't even eat their meals with the immense relish of the unregenerate. They didn't feel their hearts swell up with unaccountable gladness, at mere waking in the morning, to receive a broadside from the sun straight between the eyes. But it was just the same if the wind blew, or the rain fell. For no discoverable reason beyond lack of piety, Val would feel herself filled from crown to toe with tingling delight at this mere "being alive." There were, alas! other times when, for reasons partly patent, partly obscure, she was sore oppressed; but never did any hour find her so bowed down that the wild tumult of a storm would not stimulate her like strong wine. She would run about the house with flying hair and wide, excited eyes, when she couldn't manage to escape out-doors, and feel the rapturous buffet of the winds and dash of the rain in her face.
"She is like an electrical eel when there's a thunder-gust," she once overheard her grandmother say.
"Some affinity between the child and the elements," her father had replied, half seriously. "She came into theworld during the wildest and most destructive storm that ever swept over the State."
After hearing that, Val felt no apology was needed for her desire to go out and romp with the winds. It was all very well for other people to shut doors and windows and sit in the middle of non-conducting feather-beds (as her mother had done), but how should Val be afraid of thunder and lightning? They had come forth in their splendor and their might to welcome her into the wonderful world. Dangerous to others? Oh, very likely. They were friends and allies of Val Gano.
But not only through these more or less usual avenues did gladness reach her, but through some of the thorny by-ways before which men had set up the warning signal, "Pain!"
There was that affair of the hornet's sting. How lustily she had howled when, stepping into the ash-gray nest down by the choke-pear-tree, she found herself surrounded by an army of angry enemies, darting little poisoned knives! How frantically she had run back to the house, rending the air with shrieks, and yet queerly conscious, after the first shock of surprise, that this was a curious experience and a great discovery, not alone of the power of hornets, but a discovery, too, of the power of pain in herself! Before she reached the house, and leaving a lusty yell only half finished in her throat, she had stopped to notice, with an excitement akin to pride, how the back of her hand and arm had puffed up to an enormous size, and was stinging still, as if a thousand knives were being turned about in the flesh. Here was something quite new. While it agonized her, it kept her sense of curiosity in a tumult of painful pleasure. She stood still, watching the hand swell, while the tears poured down her flushed cheeks, absorbed in noting the action of the poison, wondering how much more the uncanny power of the sting could swell her poor little distorted hand. Was there any pain more horrible than this? Was it possible human beings could endure anything worse? And if so, what? She shut her wet eyes, dizzy withsuffering, and yet in the dim background of her mind almost avid of that intenser pang, if any such there were in the arsenal of Nature's weapons against man.
Later came the memorable attack of diphtheritic sore throat, that made them all so kind.Thatwas one of the most diverting things that had ever happened to her, not merely because her father sat by her nearly all the time, when her grandmother was or wasn't there; not only because her unwary elders fell into discussions that, no matter where else they led, could not terminate in Val's being ejected from the room, just as they got to the interesting crisis; not because of the thrilling tales of her grandmother's old acquaintance, Betsy Patterson, of Baltima', her marriage with Jerome Bonaparte, and her journey, alone and friendless, half across the world, to meet her mortal enemy and brother-in-law, the great Napoleon. Not in these obvious delights alone lay the whole advantage of the diphtheria incident, but in the discovery that there was a sensation, in or under the actual pain itself, that was new, exciting, almost agreeable. It was touching experience at a fresh point, and was far from being altogether regrettable. This sharp pain when one tried to swallow was only a keener way of feeling alive, a new accomplishment of the alert, responsive body. As if with foreknowledge that her experience in this direction was going to be limited, or as though she had heard Sir Thomas Brown say, "There is some sapor in all ailments," Val showed every inclination to make the most of this one.
"Now, you've got to behave, Emmie," she would say, if her sister seemed likely to forget that here at last her customary privileges must for the nonce give way. "You've only got a weak chest, butI'vegot a diphtheritic throat!"
It was during the agreeable time of convalescence that her grandmother showed her the faded samplers that she and her sisters and Aunt Valeria had worked as children. She got out the little boxes of old trinkets, too, and told the "story" of each and every one. There were volumes in these simple rings and mourning brooches, watch-chainsof hair, badly-painted miniatures, enamelled hearts and charms. She seemed to have literally dozens of gold and silver pencils. One was to be Val's and one Emmie's, when they were "old enough to take great care of them." But all the best ones seemed to belong to cousin Ethan. And there was that priceless and magnificent possession (that was also to be Ethan's), Grandfather Calvert's gold snuffbox, presented by the Burns Club, of "Baltima'," and inscribed with a verse of good-fellowship. This was the ancestor that Val took most interest in, even before the revelation of the snuffbox. He had been a merry gentleman, who amused himself so well in the "Baltima'" of his day, that he had to be sent when only nineteen as "supercargo," whatever that meant, to the West Indies. It was evident paternal punishments in those times were slight, for he had loved "supercargoing." He came home with a store of stories and a fortune, and—as it presently leaked out, to Val's and Emmie's delight—he ran away with his wife when he was only twenty-one and the little lady barely fifteen. Mrs. Gano had been betrayed into admitting that she was born before her mother had reached her sixteenth birthday.
"Why, then, our great-grandmother had a daughter when she was fifteen!"
"No, no; she was very nearly sixteen—one may say shewassixteen."
But Val and Emmie preferred the other form. A baby of your own to play with when you are only fifteen! Ha,thatwas the way to begin life! People in these times shilly-shallied so wastefully. This great-grandmother hadn't missed anything by her promptitude in marrying. After she was a wife and a mother, she used to call her girl friends into the high-walled garden, and stationing a slave on the gate-post, to keep watch and give warning when the husband could be seen coming home from his counting-house, this real, proper kind of a great-grandmother would tuck up her long skirts and have a rousing game of hide-and-seek, stopping breathless in the middle when Sambocried from his watch-tower, "Massa comin'!" She would let down her gown and pin up her curls and go demurely to the gate to meet her lord, and tell him the baby and she had had a good day. Ah, it was plain they had been a frivolous pair! Theirs were the mahogany tables with slender, twisted legs and baize-lined folding tops, that in these serious days never caught sight of a card. Instead of reading Blair's "Sermons" and Baxter's "Rest," this agreeable ancestor had accumulated all those French romances down-stairs, and even when he left gay youth behind, he had sat in his counting-house, not like the King of Hearts, counting out his money, but revelling in the novels of the Wizard of the North. And when it was noised about at home among his growing daughters that he had nearly finished the latest one, and would bring it back that evening, the three girls would start fair and even from the bottom step, at his coming-home hour, and race to meet him. The lucky one who reached him first got the newWaverley.
To the adaptable eye of youth "all things are possible," with parents as with God. It never occurred to Val and Emmie as a subject for surprise or inquiry how such a person as their grandmother had come to find herselfdans cette galère. Mrs. Gano would usually wind up her Calvert stories with a half-humorous, half-reverent smile.
"Your great-grandmother"—she never said "my father" or "mother," but with a detached, impartial air—"your great-grandmother was the best woman I ever knew; and your great-grandfather lived a useful life, and died, after receiving extreme unction, in all the odor of sanctity."
"He wasn't a Pisspocalian, like us?" Emmie asked.
"No; Roman Catholic. We had all gone different ways by that time, but he would say, 'Ah! wait till you're as old as I: you'll all come back into the bosom of Mother Church.'" She would smile at this. "He was not a thinker—he had lived all his best years in the active world of work and pleasure, and when he saw his end in sight, he looked abouthim for a priest." She would smile again—less tenderly, more ironically. "This was priests' business; best leave it in their hands."
It was interesting to the children to observe that not even for the benefit of the young was family history falsified.
"Oh, he was consistent enough. Even before he embraced Roman Catholicism, he never spoke of religion except with the greatest reverence." She would glance sharply at the children's father, if he were present when she reached this point in that or any similar narrative, seeming for the moment to lose sight of the younger generation in her desire to point the moral for the benefit of her son. "I never heard of a Calvert who questioned revealed religion; and as for the Ganos, any one who has a mind to look, may read in the family record that they were all eminent for piety in their day and generation."
"Does that little record go further back than 1760?" her son once asked, meditatively.
"No: but that's quite far enough to show what's expected."
During this illness in particular, there were times when Val was drawn unaccountably to the strange old woman. If the child had had more encouragement, she could have loved her well and openly, renouncing for her sake domestic heresy and schism. The secret passion for loving and being loved had grown in the girl with every year. It was not only the strongest current that swept through her being—that is true of many—but even in this young and sheltered life it rose betimes to freshet and to flood, hungry, devouring, unappeased. The girl led three lives—the gay, triumphant surface one at school, the checkered existence at home, and that deep heart life apart in the sunlit valley of imagination, whither, when the wind of destiny blew bleak on the uplands of domestic life, she would retreat with all the honors of war—rally and "captain her army of shining and generous dreams."
The intensity of the craving for approbation, the love-hunger in the child's heart, would be called morbid bythose who find that epithet a ready one to apply to heights and depths from which they themselves are debarred by a niggard nature. It was true (even if, like many another fact about this young creature, it is not to be approved) that she had had an affair of the heart in New York—princes apart—when she had attained the ripe age of seven. It had been a kind of infidelity to the dark-browed hero of dream, for the gentleman in question was not a nobleman, not even a Nimrod, and he had red hair. But, nevertheless, he was a peril to the peace of mind of a diminutive maid, and all unconsciously to himself "brought her acquainted with" a more thrilling joy and a more poignant pain than some women can look back upon from the height of fifty years. Oh, these strange stirrings of the too eager heart!—the sharp rapture and the sharper pain, the whimsical, bitter pathos of them read by the light of later "exultations, agonies!" Who that has had this window opened for him into the virginal chamber of awakening woman-life can look through it without tears? But this particular window is not for our eyes. After that premature romance had come to an untimely end, or, rather, when its hopelessness was comforted and covered by the quick-growing ivy of new affections, there was peace for a time in the camp of love, or only border skirmishing. Not, of course, for any lack of enterprise, or any dearth of heroes, for almost any passer in the street will serve for a peg to drape the gossamer of a dream upon. He is perhaps the unrequited lover—he is some one in disguise; not Mr. Ernest Halliwell, the son of the local doctor, but heir to an earldom over the sea. You are sorry you can never love him; he must break his heart in vain. It is almosttoosad, for his hair curls prettily over his ears, and his smile is gentle and haunting. But high above all these little "foot-notes," as it were, to the great main text of the romance, ran the radiant "continued story" of that one who cometh—he with swift, unfaltering feet, he with the sheltering arms—bearing the great gift in his bosom, and his face, still for a little space—still hidden.
Meanwhile, eager friendships at school, and devotion to her father at home, and to Jerry's handsome brother in the promised land beyond the osage hedge—not all these and hope besides could fill the foolish, hungry heart. Nobody else in the world but a few novel-writers and herself seemed in the least concerned about the chief business of life, which was plainly loving and being loved. It did not appear to be a subject of conversation with grown persons. Not only at the Fort, with a grandmother who plainly could know nothing of such matters, and a father who, besides his children, loved only rocks and trees, but in the homes of the other girls as well, the supreme topic was neglected, ignored, except when considered covertly among the young, as conspirators whisper treason. It was very queer. Evidently her absorption in the subject was part and parcel of her perverted nature, her "low curiosity." It was, at all events, a weakness to be hid except from that very best of all her "best friends," Julia Otway. Not that Julia even was told of the Great Romance, but the two girls wondered and surmised together, bringing day by day to their common store every new scrap of knowledge or conjecture that came their way. Val was the more adventurous, the less fastidious. She it was who would speculate most boldly, sketching out certain chapters, certain scenes even, in that great coming drama, that are currently supposed not to enter the imagining of maidens. Yes, yes; it was all wrong perhaps to think about these things; but why, then, were they so interesting? It wasn't her fault. But at last one day, when the more modest-minded Julia said, "I want awfully to hear, but I don't think we'll tell these stories any more. I don't feel somehow as if it was quite right," then Val knew that indeed she was "low-minded," and was as humiliated as the sternest moralist could desire.
She admired Julia more than ever for her rigid asceticism. Ah yes! there was no blinking the fact.Thatwas the kind of strength of mind it was fine to have, but the richly merited rebuke of herself made her wince with shame.The very memory of the moment was like a dagger-thrust for years.
And still there was a buoyancy in her that was always lifting her mountains high after these deep descents into the pit. One potent device for the recovery of self-respect was to name a day from the dawn of which she should start a new life, absolutely different from the past, which was by this act cut off and dropped into oblivion. Monday mornings began not alone a new week, but a new era. Her great fresh start of the year was taken annually at Christmas, or if one made a slip—one always did—the New Year was the time, or else Easter, or, after all, one's birthday was a fitting moment for such regeneration. The girl who had been only eleven was inevitably a poor creature, but the person of twelve! Ah, when the clock struck that complete and significant number a new and quite perfect existence was inaugurated! The next year, to be about to enter one's teens, was discovered to be, after all, the psychological moment for starting a new life. Then fourteen! Ah,thatwas the true age of understanding, besides being twice the sacred number seven! If she was much happier than other people for the most part—as she knew she was—she had also moments of being much nearer despair. There were all the times when people hurt her feelings, and when her only consolation was the old one of pretending she hadn't any feelings to hurt. If life ministered to her more than it did to most, it bruised her too from crown to sole.
There were those hours of reaction, after long expectation of some birthday-party, or the Fourth of July fireworks, or the school Commencement, when a blank wretchedness fell upon her. It hadn't been what she had hoped. How or where it had failed was partly a mystery, but there was a strange bitterness left behind. She refused vehemently in her own mind to accept for truth the rumor abroad in the world, "Nothing ever comes up to expectation." Oh yes, things would by-and-by come up to and exceed anticipation. It was only now, and through somefault in her, that they fell short of perfection. As she grew older she developed a pitiless self-criticism—of her speech, her manners, her looks, her attainments. This creature, among certain girls that were awkward, and certain others that put on airs and graces, this profoundly egotistical little person, was actually commended for being "perfectly un-selfconscious"; the fact being that she was fartoo"aware" of herself, saw herself far too vividly in her mind's eye, to go on making the current mistakes of affectation or of clumsiness. She knew unerringly when she giggled with embarrassment, when she had been "making eyes," when she was in danger of seeming superior, or what her grandmother called "toploftical." She was keenly, quiveringly self-conscious, and conscious too of other people; feeling their moods as an Æolian harp feels the light wind, brightening under their unspoken, their merely looked approval, and shrinking beneath her careless exterior at their unuttered blame, wearing her reputation for hardness like an inversion of the magic suit of mail, seeming stout armor, and yet letting every arrow through. Still, it served its purpose, since no one dared say, "See! that struck home!"
After several years' supremacy as "the greatest dancer on the earth," that brilliant career was suddenly abandoned. It was evident that a mistake had been made. Val's true destiny was to be Queen of Song. It was difficult to illustrate the fact in your unmusical grandmother's house, but you could do a good deal in that direction at the New Plymouth Seminary for Young Ladies. You could roar down several hundred girls in the morning hymn, and you could even have occasional surreptitious performances in the gymnasium, or at home in the kitchen, where whole cycles of impromptu operas were given in a season. For the rest, you sang to yourself in lonely places and exulted. Sometimes you trembled, shaken to the verge of tears by the beauty and pathos of your own voice.
There had been a brief interval when the sum of achievements in the drawing-class seemed, in Val's mind, to point to her becoming a second Rosa Bonheur. It was certain that her copy of Landseer's "Rabbits" was a work of extreme merit. Even her grandmother, who usually said "Hum!" when she looked at Val's original designs for wall-paper or carpet, remarked on beholding the rabbits: "I'll have them framed."
If that were not distinction, where shall it be found?
But it was grasping to set more than one snare for greatness—let Emmie be Rosa Bonheur, Val would be the great singer of her time.
"Let me have music lessons," she prayed. "I'll practise at school and at Julia's."
"It is out of the question," said her grandmother.
Val knew "out of the question" meant it was a question of being out of pocket.
"I'll give up drawing."
"Drawing is much less expensive; and even so, you and Emmie must give it up after this term."
"Then, what on earth are we going to learn besides common lessons?"
"I'll teach you botany and gardening," said her father.
"I don't care about botany," said Val, hotly, "and"—unmasking the hypocrisy of years—"and as for gardening, there isn'tanything I hate so much."
"What?"
Her father couldn't believe his ears.
"Yes. I'm sorry. It's very kind of you to offer so often to teach me; but I really quite hate flowers."
Her father looked at her with a severity she had seldom seen in his face.
"Then, in that case"—he spoke as though originating a punishment fit for a new unnatural crime—"in that case you should learn cooking."
After such a blow, there was nothing for it but to remember that for weeks Jerusha had wanted her to take some household sewing to poor old Miss Kirby up on Plymouth Hill. Val would run all the way to the Dug Road and there, in the deep cut in the hill-side, or in the even more lonely ravine above, she would sit with the bundle of sewing on her knees, raging solemnly over it at fate, and devising spirited revenges. In a wood on the farther side there was a place deep hidden in bush and brier, where a wild grape-vine made a swing between two old forest trees. It was a distinct source of comfort to Val that she didn't know the names of these trees. She would shut her eyes tight, and swing high out in the free air, with a sense that she was flying from two calling voices, afraid the accents should reach her clearly, afraid lest by an unwary peep something in bark or leaf should press back upon her impatient memory "their ugly names," cheered and strengthened after each escape by finding her ignorance intact.
Out, far out, on the wild grape-vine, swinging till she forgot the importunate trees, forgot all threatened ignominy, forgot everything but the ecstasy of living and swinging and singing, and looking forward—looking out past home perplexities and wild wood tangles, out, far out, towards the secure beauty and the certain wonder of the coming years.
Emmie came home from school earlier than usual one memorable day, and told Mrs. Gano with frightened eyes that Val had done something awful. She couldn't make out what, for all the Academic and Collegiate girls whispered about it secretly at recess. But Val was locked up in the Principal's room, and it was considered doubtful if she'deverbe let out, so angry was Miss Appleby. But even the Principal's wrath was less than the wrath of her niece, Miss Beach, the new teacher of the primary school and of gymnastics.
Emmie had naturally felt humiliated at her sister's disgrace. She thought she could never, never go back to school again. By the time the miscreant got home, Mrs. Gano was properly worked up to receive her.
Val saw at a glance from Emmie's cloudy eyes and her grandmother's, cold and gleaming, how her story had been forestalled. She held up her head, and said, carelessly:
"Well, I've got myself into a scrape."
Her grandmother fixed her silently for an instant, and then said:
"'Scrape' is not the word. You've heard that expression from Jerningham Otway.Wedon't get into scrapes."
Emmie seemed to Val's overheated imagination to sit and plume herself.
"All the members of your family have been well-mannered and well-conducted people. We leave 'scrapes' to others."
Val fell a sudden prey to the old loneliness in the midst of so much family rectitude.
"I am waiting to hear what has happened."
Mrs. Gano folded her blue-veined hands across the open book on her knee.
"Well, I think they mean to expel me."
"Expel you!"
She shut the book with a snap.
"Oh, Miss Appleby's coming to see you," said Val, with overacted indifference. "She'll tell you everything that Emmie hasn't told you already."
"I don't choose to ask Miss Appleby for details that I ought to hear from you."
Val looked at Emmie's curiosity-lighted face and kept silence. Her grandmother understood.
"Run out and play, child; you sit too much in the house," she said to the younger child.
"I've got nobody to play with," came from Emmie, not budging.
"Then go and get me some jonquils and narcissuses."
"I've hurt my finger."
"Then take a book and sit in the porch."
"I've read all the books on the juvenile shelf."
"Leave the room!"
Val's heart swelled up in gratitude. It was considerate of her judge not to hold the court of inquiry before Emmie.
"Well," said Val, plunging into the unhappy business the moment the door was closed, "you know how we hate and despise—I mean how we don't like Miss Beach."
"Humph! I dare say Miss Beach doesn't like all her pupils."
"I should think she didn't! She hates us!"
"I don't want to hear such strong expressions. I've nothing to do with the other girls; but it's a bad lookout for you if you haven't earned the respect of an estimable woman like Miss Beach."
"You wouldn't call her that if she gaveyouunfair marks, and said andlookedspiteful things at you."
"Looked! What nonsense are you talking?"
"Well, she"—Val dropped her eyes and crimsoned—"she laughed at my new gymnastic dress." There was a pause. "Itisunlike the others."
"Beyond a doubt. Far too good for the purpose. That broché came from Baltima'. Your aunt Valeria never wore it but once. It was as good as new."
"Well, all the other girls wear blue serge, but they never laughed. Miss Beachdid. Perhaps she didn't mean me to see, but I did."
"Humph! Well?"
"Well, she invents new marches—in-and-out figures, you know—and she only does them once very quickly, and makes me lead off afterwards, and blames me if there's the least mistake. So I—I—just thought the next time she invented something new I'd see if I—I—couldn't make her do it slower. So—well, I collected parlor-matches for a week."
Mrs. Gano's quick movement said, "That'swhere the matches have gone."
"And I cut off their heads, and I gave some to—three of my friends, and I had a lot myself; and as we marched we threw 'em little by little under Miss Beach's ugly fat—I mean under her feet."
"I'm amazed at you—simply amazed!"
Mrs. Gano's eyebrows had shot up to the middle of her forehead. Val studied for the hundredth time the hairless bony arches above the piercing eyes, and the strange look of the patches of eyebrow sitting up on her forehead in that amazed fashion.
"Well, shediddo that new march very slow, stopping and looking round surprised when the matches exploded, and at last she gave up marching altogether, and kind of exploded herself. Shewasangry, and red too—purple, all over her ugly podgy—over her face."
"I don't wonder she blushed for you. I am very much ashamed of you myself. It was the action of a ruffianly street-boy."
"Shewasn't ashamed. She was just mad—I mean angry. She asked who had done it, and nobody said—"
"I'm not surprised you wanted to hide it."
"Then she said she should get her aunt to suspend the whole class; so I had to tell her it was me, and they shut me up in Miss Appleby's room."
"Quite right," said Mrs. Gano, backing up the authorities as usual.
"Oh yes," said Val, bitterly, "that's what Miss Beach thought too; shesaidit was the only thing to do with a wild beast."
"She didn't use those words!"
The eyebrows suddenly shot up again.
"Yes'm, she did. Ask Julia Otway. Miss Beach'd sayanything. Why, she was educated at a mixed school."
"You don't mean blacks and whites together?"
"Yes'm—Oberlin."
Mrs. Gano had some ado to recover her rigid attitude of respect for those in authority over her grandchild; but she relaxed the upward tension of her eyebrows and was studying Val straight through her spectacles.
"You can learn manners at home. Miss Beach is quite competent to teach Emmie spelling and you dancing and calisthenics, and her manners are not your business. It is only the young people who are quite perfect themselves who can waste time criticising their elders."
"Yes'm," answered Val, meekly. She was surprised that her crowning misdeed and public disgrace were taken so calmly. "Please, who's going to tell my father I'm expelled?"
"Nobody is to tell him anything of the sort!" she fired up. "Now that things have come to this pass I must try to make you understand. We can't go on like this. What you have done to-day would disgrace a street urchin; and yet you are old enough to be a comfort to your father."
Val fidgeted miserably.
"You have given us more trouble than all the other children of the family put together; and yet I have discovered there is a kind of reasonableness in you when it's deliberately appealed to."
Val looked up quickly. She felt there was a new note in these remarks.
"I should be very sorry to go to your father with this miserable story; he has enough to trouble him, and he is ill; he does not get better." She had laid convulsive hold on the red-padded arms of the great rocking-chair, and the purple veins started up on the long hands. "I sometimes think—I sometimes think he gets worse." Her voice had sunk very low. There was a look in the waxen features that made the girl's heart grow chill. "I have noticed your impulse to be considerate towards your father, to spare him the knowledge of your antics. I have been glad you had this instinct.Youwill be glad when you are older—when you are alone."
There was a long silence. Neither looked at the other. Presently, with lowered eyes, Val came closer, and on a sudden impulse, kneeling, she laid her cheek on the long left hand that still clutched the chair-arm.
"You'll see," she said, fighting down her tears—"you'll see I shall be better."
She felt the other hand laid softly on her head, and neither of the two spoke or moved for a long time.
A sharp ring broke the spell, and the quick following clatter of "E. Gano's" knocker sent all gentle influences flying.
"Miss Appleby!" Val sprang up. Yes. They could hear her voice. Before Venus had time to come and say she was in the parlor, Mrs. Gano had opened her own door and closed it behind her. Val stood looking out of the window, trembling with anxiety, registering vows that if she were let off this time, if by some miracle she were not expelled, she would be such an honor to the family, such a comfort to her father, that he would be encouraged to live practically forever.
Emmie presently opened the door very softly, and crept in.
"She's just goin', I think," whispered the little sister, who seldom bore a grudge. "Oh, shehasbeen getting it!"
"Not gran'ma?"
Emmie squirmed with suppressed merriment at this notion.
"I should think not! Miss Appleby's been getting it. Gran'ma said they were making a mounting out of a molehill—and expelling people did the school no good. Said you'd tell Miss Beach you were sorry, and that was a good deal, 'cause you didn't like beggin' pardings."
"Didshe say that?"
"Yes. An' Miss Appleby said she was very grieved, but she had promised her niece not to take you back this term."
"Her niece! Her sneaking Black and White Oberlin woer-r-r-rm!"
"Gran'madidn't call her that," whispered Emmie, with an air of gentle reproof. "She just said, 'Unless your niece is very foolish'" (Emmie could mimic astonishingly well), "'and unfit for her post, she will be glad to reconsider.' Miss Appleby got mad at that, and seemed to be going away, so I ran into the dining-room. When I got back gran'ma was saying, if they expelled you, I should be taken away too."
"Gracious!"
"And they were bothawfulmad then, an' gran'ma said, Oh, she'djust as soontake us away, and she wouldn't hesitate to say why. 'We don't send our daughters to school to be called wild beasts by young women from Oberlin.'"
"Hooray! hooray!" Val spun about the room, waving her arms victoriously. "We've got a oner for a grandmother after all!"
The room door opened and the hall door banged.
"Whatareyou doing?" said Mrs. Gano, stopping short.
"Oh, nothing," replied Val, composing herself expeditiously; "only Idolove you, gran'ma," and she held up her face to be kissed.
"If you love me, keep my commandments," said the lady, without enthusiasm, and equally without sense of irreverence. "That will do. Now go."
She was turning away, when some sudden thoughtoccurred to her. She gleamed at Val through her glasses in an enigmatic way, and said:
"Is this true about the trouble you've given your preceptors over the Bible verse every morning?"
"I don't give troubleeverymorning; but it's so tiresome, gran'ma, to begin exercises every day the same way."
"I should think so, if several hundred girlswillgo on repeating exactly the same texts year in and year out."
"Well, when they scolded us for never learning new ones, I tried to oblige them—I did, indeed."
"Hum! Miss Appleby tells me you appeared next day with 'Jesus wept.'"
Val grinned, and then grew grave.
"They are very hard to please. They want something we hadn't all said a thousand times, and something longer than—"
"Naturally."
"You can'tthinkhow furious they are now if we happen on the same thing. I do my best to oblige them. I suppose a—Miss Appleby—"
Val tried to find out from the non-committal face whether the principal had entered upon this. If not, so much confessing all in one day was perhaps overdoing it.
"Well," said her grandmother, "Miss Applebytellsme—I can hardly credit it—that you stood up in your place yesterday morning and recited, 'Comfort me with apples, for I am sick of love.'"
"Well, it wasn'tmethat laughed; and I told Miss Appleby it was in the Bible right enough."
"Yes. Well, I'll pick out your texts for you in future." She spoke with charming geniality, and a glint through her glasses. "Now go and get your lessons for to-morrow."
After the failure of Miss Beach to have Val disgraced and expelled, the girl felt that though her grandmother might herself abuse her, she would not permit any one else to do so. The early years of warfare merged by degrees, and in spite of lapses, into a less lawless scheme of life.
The reason of it was not in any great measure regard forher father. He lived too much apart from the din of daily events for their remote effect on him to be much present to the preoccupied mind of youth. The change came about through a growing, albeit unwilling, admiration and sense of friendship for her grandmother. She was entertaining, this old lady, in spite of her terrible faults. One was never dull with her. She told delightful stories, and she laughed at yours when they were good. Indeed, no matter how abandoned had been your conduct, if you could make her laugh you were saved. It was not in child-nature not to lay traps for that pardoning gleam of the fierce eye, that involuntary twitching of the judicial mouth. An exchange of anecdotes tends inevitably to a good understanding. But more than by any other means, perhaps, the perverse school-girl and the autocratic old woman were brought together by a mutual recognition of a common regard for justice. When Val found out that her grandmother was not as arbitrary as she had supposed, the battle was half over. Mrs. Gano had been overheard advising her son, "Don't try to coerce Val. If you can convince that child's reason you can do what you like with her, but you can't drive her an inch." The girl felt that she was being understood. Perhaps the truth was they were both changing, both developing, the old no less than the young.
Certain it is they became better and better friends, and had surprisingly much in common. Still, Val had struggled so long against owning to herself that any good could come out of this Nazareth, that it was some time before a belated sense of fairness led her to avow guardedly to her old fellow-sufferer her new view of the autocrat. She must try, little by little, to convince her father that, contrary to appearance, and despite many sore experiences, his mother had her good points.
"Gran'ma's been real kind to me and Julia to-day."
"Has she?"
"Julia thinks she's awfully nice."
This rather in the tone of "there's no accounting for tastes."
"Yes," said her father, not seeming enough impressed.
"She says I may readThe H—— Familyand all the Frederika Bremer books now that I've finished theWaverleys."
"H'm! I never looked at them myself."
"But do you know why she was so nice aboutThe H—— Family?" It was one thing to do justice to her good deeds, but it was no use setting up a false ideal and pretending she was better than she was. "You see, we'd read all the horrid silly little Harry and Lucys and Sandford and Mertons andMoral Talesand things, and I'd begun Bohn'sWilhelm Meister."
"Oh, ho!"
"I put down the book while I tied my shoe, and when I looked up she was putting it into the fire."
He laughed.
"But it wasn'therbook at all; I got it out of your room underneath the big Brande and Taylor'sChemistry. It had your name in it."
"Yes"—reflectively—"I bought it on April 9, 1870."
"Well, it's burnt now."
He was still smiling and stroking his ragged beard.
"I hope she isn't going to keep the big bookcases locked up forever," sighed Val.
"She will never like to see Valeria's books knocking about."
"Gracious, no! Sherefusedto lend Mrs. OtwayHelen Whitman's Poems, because she said it had Poe's notes in it; but I knew it wasn't a bit on account of Poe. It had some ofAunt Valeria'snotes in it, and that was why she wouldn't let it go out o' the house. I was awfully ashamed, and Mrs. Otway looked so snubbed."
And still he only smiled.
"She isn't a bit like other people, but sometimes I'm not sorry."
"Never be sorry, my child. Never be so dull as not to realize that the woman who stands at the head of our line gives us our best title to honor—and to hope."
Val opened astonished eyes. Her father was indeed forgiving—fantastically generous. He was gazing off into space now, and his look was strangely lighted.
"She belongs to the heroic age," he said, with a kind of worship in his face. "She was born before we began to split hairs, and have nerves instead of nerve."
Val couldn't stand it. Her father was worth fifty grandmothers.
"I should imagine shethoughtshe was a pretty fine sort of person."
"She hasn't a notion how utterly she stands alone. I've gone up and down the world for over forty years, and never seen her equal. Herequal?"
He laughed derisively, and began to talk of her as he might have talked of Semiramis or Boadicea, only more vividly. It was very annoying.Hehad come to care about her too, "only more so." But the real blow fell when it came out that he had felt like this all along. Appreciation, fairness were all very well, but this besotted heroine-worship was a little pitiable. All these years that Val had been so sure he was silently nursing his injuries and modestly contemplating his own superiority, he had been on the side of the oppressor.
"H'm!" mused Val. "I s'pose she was different, then, to herownchildren."
"Ah yes; I've often observed the softening of late years."
"Thewhat?"
"The growing tolerance, the forbearance with my children, that she never showed Valeria and me."
Val's imagination reeled at the thought of what her grandmother could have been like when she was more intolerant than she was to-day. And it was all forgotten and forgiven! Here he was now leaving glittering generalities, and telling story after story of his mother's courage and her wisdom. She did seem to have been a useful kind of parent, and it appeared she had been more generous in money matters than Val had thought.
"And what she did that time she has always done. She never failed anybody who depended on her. I always think of her when I read the lines: