"She must keep up with her classes," said Mrs. Gano, answering for her, as Val went out of the room.
But it was a good hour before the algebra lesson. Val went up to her father's room and climbed into the window-seat. There, with judicious arrangement of blind and the curtain closed in round her, she watched for Ethan to mount and ride away. Julia must have grown impatient waiting. She called for him to-day. How beautiful she looked—beautifulin her new habit! Away they went laughing in the sunshine. Val opened the window; now they were turning into Mioto Avenue at a hard gallop. She drew her cautious head in out of the sweet keenair and buried her face in the musty old red moreen curtain.
"Why didn't you go, child, if you wanted to so much?" She uncovered startled eyes. Her grandmother was standing there, looking strangely gentle. "Your father would have postponed the algebra for once."
"I haven't got a riding-habit."
"The cashmere skirt you wear when you ride out with Julia does quite well."
The girl shook her head. "Besides, I've only got the skirt."
"What's wrong with your nice velveteen jacket?"
"Hideous!"
They were silent for a space. Then Val:
"Oh, I don't care, I've got lots to do."
She slid off the window-seat and went down-stairs. Val had her full share of the young heart's passionate instinct to keep its aching to itself. She had no idea that her grandmother had seen her standing outside the parlor door when Ethan was there alone, hesitating, trying to go in, trying to go away, and in the end succeeding only under strong inward compulsion in compassing the latter. It was well she never dreamed how much the old eyes saw. She was sure that the world she was dwelling in was a place no mortal foot had ever trod before. The girl felt herself a solitary way-breaker through a virgin forest; if she should tell the thousandth part of the magic and the mystery of this new world of her discovery, no mortal would believe such travellers' tales.
She listened fascinated the night Ethan said, in answer to his uncle's platitude about "the common experience":
"There's no such thing! Experience is no more reduplicated than faces are."
"Of course, I don't mean down to the smallest detail," John Gano had explained.
"Oh, as to that, we have birth and death in common, if that's all."
"There's a wonderful family likeness in the other facts of life," his uncle persisted.
"Yes," said Mrs. Gano; "it is when we are young that we think there could never have been anything to match our experience."
"Then do you think now that your life has been a replica of Mrs. Otway's?"
Mrs. Gano smiled.
"Oh no," said Val, with a pleased confidence, "there was never anybody just likeusbefore."
They all laughed.
"No doubt we are 'the peculiar people," said Mrs. Gano, calmly deserting her first postulate, and seeming quite equal to facing "the comic laugh."
"I mean," said Val, "that if there never was any 'me' in the world before, the world's a different place now there's 'me' in it."
They laughed with less misgiving.
"You have Goethe on your side, my dear," said her father. "Goethe says Nature is always interesting because she's always renewing the observer."
"I like my way of putting it best," the girl maintained—"sounds more interesting."
"I've found out, Val," said Ethan, "that most people who make believe that human nature is everywhere the same, and that we're all as alike as pins in a row, usually except themselves. That shows they're wiser than their theories."
"No one denies," said John Gano, "that a slight difference in the conditions makes some difference in the result. We were speaking broadly of the main outlines of life. They are curiously common to us all."
"I don't see those 'common outlines,'" Ethan answered, "any more than I see the same pattern twice in a kaleidoscope. I see the same boundary walls—birth and death—and all between the two, endlessly different for each."
"Yes, yes; I believe it's like that," said Val.
"It would be much pleasanter to agree with you, uncle," Ethan remarked, as he got out the chess-board. "It's more comfortable—more companionable. I think there are few thoughts so overwhelming as what John Morley calls 'the awful loneliness of life'—the loneliness that there's no help for, that no one can reach, no one can ever share. Each one of us"—slowly, absently, he set the chessmen in their places—"each man sits apart, with his own soul and its unique experience forever incommunicable, forever different."
"No; not even incommunicable, if he have genius," returned his uncle. "The odd thing is that in that case what he has to communicate is something we all recognize. We expect him to be different; we are amazed to find him just like ourselves, with the trifling addition of being able to say what the rest of us have only felt."
"You have more faith in the capacity and the veracity of genius than I have. In my opinion, not one of those who have tried to reveal themselves has been able to give us more than shreds and patches of reality. And they've discounted the fragments of truth by romancing, consciously or not—making themselves better, or making themselves worse than they were. The real revelations are the unconscious ones."
"St. Augustine," suggested John Gano.
His nephew laughed and shook his head.
"Well, Rousseau," he amended, looking in the table-drawer for a missing bishop.
"Rousseau, too—exactly a case in my favor. You can't see the forest for the trees, nor the man for his confessions."
John Gano shook his lion's mane.
"If you could project your notion of Rousseau, uncle, and I could do the same by mine, do you suppose they would be alike?"
"Possibly not; we are not in agreement about Rousseau."
"Exactly; and do you think if we could summon him from the shades he would own either your Jean Jacques ormine? Not he. And he'd be right. There's more bound up in men than they've ever been able to liberate. Even genius can do no more than make signals over the prison wall."
"Shakespeare, of course, never tried."
"No; think of it." Instead of beginning the game, Ethan stretched out his long legs under the table, and leaned back reflectively with his hands in his pockets—"think of it. Shakespeare, with all his knowledge, and his miraculous gift of expression, his vocabulary double that of the Bible, and greater than that of the Bible and Milton put together—even Shakespeare was too wise to try to do more than give a hint here, a little signal there, just as people do in real life." He looked up suddenly and caught Val's eye. She nodded faintly. "Reminds me of a talk I had with a fellow from Bengal who came over on the same Cunarder with me. He was telling me about the murder of the manager of a tea-garden in the Dooab—police a long time utterly at sea, till somebody discovered that, rummaging among his victim's belongings, the murderer had smudged a Bengali atlas with his thumb. This atlas was forwarded to the bureau where the thumb impressions of criminals are kept, and it was discovered that the impression on the atlas corresponded with the thumb recorded of a noted criminal then at large. The man was arrested on this fact alone. Other evidence was brought to light, and when the game was up the murderer confessed."
"Oh yes," said John Gano, quite unimpressed, "it's a good many years now since Galton—"
"Exactly, but when it comes to verifiable differences in our thumb whorls, who shall guess at the hidden differences in our brains and nerve ganglia? No, no; we are not alike. We are terribly and wonderfully and forever different, and it's your first play."
The next afternoon Emmie, warmly tucked up on a sofa by the fire, had fallen asleep while her father read aloud.Mrs. Gano made her son a sign, and they went up-stairs to his room. Without preface she began to urge him to take the money he had been going to use in his journey to New York and go instead to the far South, as the doctor advised. She could put a little to it—enough to serve. No, no; he wouldn't. Why not? At last he said it was because of Val. He had promised her they would go East in the spring. He doubted if he would ever be strong enough to carry out the plan, but Val must not think he had gone back on his word. If he spent the money this winter, there would be nothing when the warm weather came.
"John," said his mother, "it is partly out of consideration for Val that I urge this."
John opened his eyes.
"I want you to go away for a change, and I don't want you to go alone. I want you to go with Ethan. I've already mentioned it to him. He knows of a place near Savannah."
John Gano seemed to be considering in a bewildered way.
"I must go back," said his mother, uneasily. "Emmie may wake and want—" She seemed oddly nervous. "Pity Emmie should choose this particular time for one of her colds."
"Yes, poor child! she's missing all the festivity."
"Festivity!" echoed his mother. "Hump! Anyhow, it leaves those two young people a great deal alone."
John Gano blinked.
"Ethan and Val?" he said, absent-mindedly.
His mother nodded.
"Oh, I wouldn't worry about that. He might be left to less entertaining people than Val."
"Precisely."
They looked at each other in silence for a moment.
"You don't mean—Val? Why, she's a child."
"She is older than my mother was when I was born."
"You don't think that Ethan—"
He was suddenly alert, anxious.
"No, no; I don't think it's his fault. He, too, looksupon her as a child. But it would be better if he went away."
"Ah! Ah, indeed; I wish I'd realized. We'll get him away as soon as possible."
His air of sudden energy seemed perhaps over-anxious.
"Don't do anything to excite suspicion. He is quite ready to go away with you at the end of the week."
"Where is he now?" demanded her son.
"In the parlor with Val."
They came down-stairs together, Mrs. Gano going back to Emmie. Her son laid his hand on the parlor door with something both anxious and inflexible in his manner. It might appear that the little scene on the other side was easily interrupted by a less extravagant expenditure of energy. So little may we know the people we spend our lives with, that the not unobservant old woman at the opposite door thought there was no more in her son's mind than in her own—a wish to save Val the pain of an unrequited devotion.
The talk with Ethan to which Mrs. Gano had just referred had taken place less than an hour before. Although it had been a most discreet interchange, beginning and ending with John Gano, it had left the young man in a state of acute discomfort and vague rage at fate. Why had he not gone away before? Why should his lingering be punished by this awful infliction of the care of his uncle, or at best his escort hundreds of miles away, and his establishment in Georgia? It was too much. He had been ready to deal generously with these queer relations in the matter of money. But to refuse his help to keep a whole roof over their heads, and then calmly to demand this of him! It made him laugh, but it made him angry too. He cursed his folly and inertia, as he called it, in staying on. Why, he might have been at Tuxedo at this moment! He had wasted enough time here to have gone to the Riviera. But as he thought of the dozens of things he might have done, a sharp realization came to him of the inner dulness of these outwardly glittering ways of killing time. He hadtried them all; he knew them for what they were worth. Whether work or play, they were just so many devices for shortening the spun-out tale of days. He knew of old where such thoughts would lead him. He walked up and down from Daniel Boone to the mirror, glowering out from time to time at the rain. Beast of a day! Where was everybody? Suddenly he opened the door. Val started back.
"Oh—a—oh!" she said, confused. "I was just coming to see if—"
She stopped, obviously at a loss.
"And I was just wondering where you were all this time."
She came in smiling and flushing, and shut the door.
"What an awful day!" he said, drawing up a chair for her to the neglected fire.
"Is it?" she inquired, blandly.
"Isit?"
He walked to the window.
"I hadn't noticed." She looked after him and beyond him, through the blurred window-panes. "Yes, it is rather rainy and blowy."
"Hardly four o'clock, and dark as a wolf's mouth."
"Yes, the sun sets early these days. I love the long evenings."
She poked the low-burned fire till a feeble flame sprang up. He turned and looked at her through the twilight.
"What do you do, little cousin, when you want to kill time?"
She glanced over her shoulder with sudden gravity, shovel in hand.
"Do you know, I think to 'kill time' is the most hideous, murderous phrase in the language. I wish you wouldn't use it."
"What do you propose as a substitute?"
"Just remembering how little time there is for all there is to do with it." (No coal left in the scuttle—she must go and tell Venie.)
"Ah, yes," Ethan said, coming back and sitting down."But suppose you haven't got a mission? Suppose nobody and nothing has any particular need of you?"
"Oh, I wasn't thinking of missions and needs. I was just thinking of how much there was to see and—to—to feel—tofind out about! Enough to last a million years, and we aren't given (in this life) a hundred." Gloom settled down upon her face. "I think it's simply awful that we're allowed so little time. Even elephants and ravens are better off."
He looked into her woe-begone countenance, and began to shake with laughter.
"Well, well, thisisthe other side of the shield."
Val was disconcerted at his mirth.
"I'm glad to see you so cheerful about it," she said. "Ithink it's simply tragic."
"You observe that even such optimism as yours has its dark side too."
"Dark? Yes, coal-black, but never dull." She spoke with great solemnity. "No matter what comes, it can't help being frantically interesting."
"How can you be sure of that? You may be—"
He stopped.
"How can I be sure? Why, just because, don't you see, it will be happening tome. That makes it quite new—makes it tremendous." She studied the dark enigmatic face, and her radiance paled a trifle. "You said so yourself the other night."
"Isaid so?"
"Don't you remember?—about everybody being different."
"Different? Yes."
"Oh, that made me so happy." She bent towards him, beaming again. "I so love thinking that none of the dull old rules hold for me—that I'm the first one of this sort. What did for other people won't do for me—what happened to them needn't make me afraid. Oh, it's splendid to think it's all new and different because of me!"
She pressed her hands together, and her face, yes, it was like a lamp in the gathering gloom.
"I wonder what you'll do with your life?" said the man, with something very tender in the low voice.
"Do with it? I shall love it so, it willhaveto be good to me. I shall sing, and I shall travel—go everywhere, do everything. I mustn't miss a single thing—oh, dear no! not a single, single thing." Silence a moment, and then, "There's just one thought troubles me," she said.
"Ah yes, there's always one—when there aren't more."
"Less time than a silly old elephant's got—and here my father's had to put off starting till the spring. I hope I shall be able to wait all that time for him; but sometimes I feel as if I shouldn't."
"Ah, but your promise to me!"
"What was it I promised, cousin Ethan?"
Sharply, in the silence, a cry rang out. Ethan leaped to his feet.
"It's only the ghost," said Val, quietly.
"Of course—Yaffti. But what on earth—"
"Yaffti?"
"I heard it as a child, and called it 'Yaffti.' What the devil is it?"
"Only the clumsy old lightning-rod shrieking in its rusty fixtures when the wind blows."
"How do you know?"
"I lay on the rug here and listened, and then walked round and round the house in the wind till I found out what it was made the crying sound."
"Weren't you frightened?"
"Oh yes, dreadfully."
"H'm! So Yaffti turns out to be the spirit of the blast!"
"I was awfully disappointed. I hoped it was a real ghost. Why did you call it Yaffti?"
"Oh, well, what would you call it if you didn't call it Yaffti?"
She laughed.
"I'm forgetting you hate the gloaming. I must go and tell Venie to bring the coal, and—"
"Don't go!" he said, suddenly, holding out a hand.
She laughed, a little nervously.
"I believe you're afraid of the dark."
"Yes, little cousin, I've always been afraid of the dark."
She moved away towards the door.
"Val!" The voice seemed to fall on her naked heart, and made it shrink deliciously. "Val!"
"Yes," she said, hardly above a whisper.
Was anything else said? She never knew. She remembered nothing but groping blindly two or three steps, and then suddenly realizing that she was going towards him in the dusk with shaking, outstretched hands. For what? "Oh, God! what am I doing?" She wheeled about with a sharp inward twist of mortification. Blessing the kindly dark, she made for the door.
"Don't go!" said the voice.
"Only to get the light," she said, clinging to the door-knob, shaken into trembling from crown to toe.
"It's not dark, little cousin, while you're here."
She did not stir—nor he. The clock ticked loud. The wind had risen and was howling like a beaten hound. How curious, thought the man, vaguely, that the natural sounds of wind, or sea, or falling inland waters, or the voices of night creatures, are all sad or else discordant. Surely, surely the spirit of the world is the spirit of plaint and dole.
"Val!"
"Yes, cousin Ethan."
"You are too far off. Bring the light nearer."
She heard steps creaking down the stair. Or was it only that Yaffti turned and strained in his rusty fetters? The door was hurriedly opened.
"Why are you two sitting in the dark?" said John Gano.
"We've been telling ghost stories," said Ethan, as Val slipped out.
Mrs. Gano sat with Emmie that evening in the long room. The little girl had been having restless nights, and had fallen asleep just before supper. Val went alone into the parlor after that meal, and waited for the two men to join her. They were smoking in the dining-room—a thing unprecedented. They stayed a long time. Eight o'clock—nine o'clock—nearly ten. Val lay down on the sofa in the shadow behind the big arm-chair, so worn out with emotion she fell asleep. By-and-by, through the mist of her dreaming, the low sound of voices broke: her father's, with that familiar note of weary cheerfulness, and now another, deep, vibrant, full of mutiny and music. She lay a moment with shut eyes, her half-awakened senses luxuriously steeped in the sound, careless of the meaning. Now her father answered. Ah, how long his insistent staccato kept striking the troubled air. It was plain he was in one of his talking moods, when there was no stopping him, just as for days—sometimes for weeks—there would be no such thing as getting more than "Yes," or "No," or "Thank you," across his tightened lips. She was dropping off to sleep again when suddenly Ethan's voice stabbed her broad awake, saying:
"The world is a cruel place, the world is an evil place,ergo, I hate the world."
"No, no, you're wrong," said John Gano. "You're blind if you don't see the world is beautiful, is rooted in triumphing good."
Val sat up in the dark corner behind the chair, ready to cry "Hear, hear!"
"I admit," her father went on, "that man has defiled it and made it a den of thieves."
"Comes to the same thing in the end, although I don't agree—"
"It doesnotcome to the same thing. There's all the difference in what it "comes to" between the curable and the incurable. You and I may not live to see it, but the world will one day be a fit habitation for better men than we."
Val, peering out, saw Ethan shake his head.
"When men are truly brothers, when we have worked the ape and tiger out, when we may be fortunate without blood-guiltiness. Evenyou," his uncle went on, a swell of enthusiasm lifting up his voice—"even you may live to see men realizing that Science is the great Captain, the true Redeemer. I should envy you your chance of hailing the beginning of that bloodless revolution, except that I am as sure of its coming as my neighbor's children's children will be when they have ocular proof and daily profit of it."
"I wish I were as sure of it as you."
"My boy, you've only to look about you. Mind, I don't saywithin. No, no"—his voice dragged—"one sees there one's own failures and defeats, and one is blinded to the larger good. I'm no sentimentalist, either." He flared up. "I'm not saying I shall reap any, or even you much, of this harvest. But come!"—he pulled his shambling figure out of the chair and stood before the fire almost erect—"life is nobler than men thought. Some men's share is to see, before they stumble into the dark, the light that other men shall walk by—see it, and tell the shorter-sighted to be of good cheer, for the light is at hand."
"And those who stumbled before the light came near enough?"
"Oh, well, at most they 'fell on sleep.'"
"Ah-h-h!"
"Such men are no worse off than Plato, and Christ, and Buddha. The great thing was to know there was light."
"I wonder the memory of those old hopes doesn't lessen your faith in the new."
"Why? Progress isn't a passing fashion; it's thelifeprinciple, another name for the power that makes for righteousness, the impulse towards the light, the force that pushes the acorn sprout out of the mould, and goads man night and day towards some ultimate good. As long as there's life, my boy, it will be better and ever better life.It's the law."
As he stood with arm extended, girt about with sudden authority, Ethan had a vision of Moses on Mount Sinai. This was too old an aspect of her father for Val to be much impressed. She watched the effect on her cousin, however, with feverish interest.
"You're an incurable optimist, uncle," he was saying.
"Ah, don't mistake me. I'm not one of those who drug themselves with dreaming." No Hebrew prophet now; it was the keen, practical-minded American who spoke. "The new order won't be brought about by idle optimism any more than by prayers, or politics, or private magnanimities."
"How, then?"
"It will be the direct result of a higher standard of public health."
He spoke briskly, as one making a business proposition.
"Health!" echoed Ethan sharply—"health of the public conscience, I suppose you mean."
"Health of the body first of all," growled the prophet. "Health mental and moral as the natural result. But since the Maker of the world established the physical basis æons before he bothered about the soul, the first thingwehave to do is to make strong our foundations, since for ages we've systematically neglected them, when we haven't occupied ourselves in actively undermining them. The halt, the blind, the diseased, are not for this New Jerusalem. Its first condition of citizenship will bemens sana in corpore sano. And the beauty of it is that, to attain this health, no one man's welfare will avail. All men must share it, or all men are menaced. It means a perfect Socialism."
"Ah, Socialism!"
"Not the travesty that masquerades with banners and brass bands, and issues pamphlets against property; but the Socialism that is the true science of life, and that will make possible the men I see in the future."
Ethan regarded the rapt look of the seer with a kindly cynicism. The absent eyes of the elder fell upon the critical young face with a gleam of suspicion. Again and again since his arrival something in Ethan's easy, lounging attitudes had not only roused an obscure antagonism in the older man, but had seemed the most irritating expression of his nephew's habit of mind. His nonchalant grace seemed to say with smiling superiority: "What's your hurry? Why shouldIexert myself? Let the other man walk." John Gano, looking at him now, felt, in addition to the unreasoning rage at Ethan'slaissez allerway of taking life, a kind of half-morbid, half-fanatical desire to prick the young man into action, into some likeness to that desperate American strenuousness that had died so hard with John Gano.
"The men I'm thinking of aren't grown in arm-chairs or under glass, any more than they are made in filthy workshops or in thieves' alleys; they are the sons of happy, voluntary toil, and pure air, and honest dealing."
"Ah," said Ethan, "very likely."
"Not very likely—certain. It's one of the few things a man may be dogmatic about. It ought to be the prime article of faith. Now, you're a rich man, and you say you're going into politics—you're going to help prescribe for this sick old world. Very good. You have the more need to mark well how man's oppression of his brother recoils upon himself. It is accounted prosperity—'getting on in the world'—to be able to have a horde of grown-up, hardy men and women about you in your hot-house homes to wait upon you, to prevent you from doing any part of that work which alone will keep you whole. Why, as I think of it"—he tossed back his lion's mane with a fine contempt—"it sounds incredible this should be the rich man'sowndesire. It's like some cunning artifice practisedby a nimble-witted slave upon an imbecile and cruel master, a slow but certain process of undoing. You not only pay another man to take away your means of health, you usually maltreat him.Thinkof it from the point of view of economy, you who are going into politics. The precious contrivance spoils two constitutions, not to speak of possible heirs. One man dying for lack of physical exercise, another killing himself by doing two men's—ten men's—share. You don't believe me. You are sitting there hugging some mental reservation."
"No, no," said Ethan, "I was only turning it over."
"I assure you I know whereof I speak. These men who grind the faces of the poor; these railroad magnates, manufacturers, corn kings, bankers, toiling day and night in stuffy offices—oh, I saw them in New York; I lived among them; I see them still"—his eyes blazed—"toiling, oppressing, cheating, to lay up riches. What have they in reality left to their children—a hoard of yellow gold? More than that; more than an inheritance of strained nerves and bending backs. They have left them the means of gratifying their sloth and their gluttony."
He took a turn up and down the room, shaking his head. He stopped suddenly before his nephew with a look of grim pleasure.
"It's poor comfort, but let the beggar in the street know himself revenged. The rich man, who has just refused him a dime to buy a dinner, goes home, and what he overeats and overdrinks, that would feed and revive the beggar, provides your rich man with his gout and fifty fine disorders unknown among the poor. When he refuses to share his dinner with the hungry, your Dives gets not only curses, but diseases of the digestive organs."
Ethan burst out laughing at the vindictive satisfaction of the climax.
"Come, can you deny it?" his uncle urged. "Drugs, kurs, baths—these are needed only to repair the waste of stupid living; they are substitutes for the right kind oflabor and of fare, but they only patch the breach that simpler living would make whole."
"You make me think of James Benton. You know him by reputation?"
"Specialist?—nerves? Yes, very good man."
"Well, he'd been attending a fashionable woman in New York—for about ten years, he told me. She'd paid him enormous fees to run over from Boston and 'keep her going.' He was rather sick of it, and one day he said: 'Oh yes, I can vary the tonic and bolster you up for the season; but Icouldcure you, you know.' 'Brute!' she screamed, 'then why haven't you in all these years?' 'You won't take my medicine.' 'Which medicine?' 'Six months' service as housemaid in a farm-house in the White Mountains.'"
"Well," said John Gano, with interest, "and the woman?"
"Oh, she only laughed. However, there are a certain number of people, I find over here, who do care about physical culture. Fellows at the universities think a lot more about athletics than they did in my time. Girls' colleges pay tremendous attention to that sort of thing. Haven't you noticed? Our women are finding out it touches the 'beauty question.' That's done more than all the books and doctors in creation. Oddly enough, our society women in particular, as I saw at Newport—"
"Yes, yes," interrupted his uncle. "We're moving in the right direction, but slowly—very slowly. Even health is little more with us as yet than a newly discovered prerogative of the prosperous. They're finding out it's the condition of survival. Oh, give us time, and it'll come all right."
"Perhaps. But even in the Old World, where you'd think they'd had time enough, they've got at only one aspect of the evil. They're alive to the need of mere exercise, especially in England. Oh, the devices!" laughed the young man, "by which the idle well-to-do may, in default, as you would say, of trees to fell or coal to dig and bricks to lay,develop, notwithstanding, their biceps and their chests! I've seen many a fellow, with a quite ludicrous absence of enjoyment, doing dumb-bell whim-whams, or shouldering his golf-clubs, or going off to play rackets, with the stern resolve to get his quantum of exercise, whether it amuses him or not."
"Yes, yes, yes," John Gano broke in, "mere cultivators of muscle don't interest me much, though they go a step in the right direction. A man must face and overcome hardship,realhardship, before he's good for anything. Man is like the good wheat, he flourishes where it's cold enough to give him a good pinching frost once a year. Your finest-flavored fruits are grown where man contends with Nature, not as in the tropics, where she drops her insipid increase into his idle lap. Those games that men play at while their brothers starve are well enough for those who like 'em, but the great majority of average boys and girls, and even, to some extent, perverted men and women, too, are never so well amused as when they'remaking something. If every one had some bit of manual labor to do, something he could do with love, studying to bring it to perfection—"
"Ah yes," said Ethan, with a livelier interest, "that might bring men back a sense of beauty."
"At all events," said the elder, sturdily, "it would bring man back to the bed-rock of wholesome endeavor; and while he was strengthening his muscles and his morals, and laying up a fit inheritance for his children, he would be helping to solve the industrial problem of the world. The vulgar stigma would be lifted from the laboring class."
"Ah—h'm—yes," murmured Ethan, with a somewhat lackadaisical air.
John Gano studied his nephew's long, careless, lounging figure with a growing disapproval.
"In the time to come," said John Gano, significantly, "the only idle will be the few, and ever fewer, sick, and the very old. Chronic disease will be looked upon as the only lasting disgrace. The evil will hide their complaints as carefully as to-day they hide their crimes. They will bemore ashamed of an attack of indigestion or of gout than a man is to-day of being seen drunk in public, or caught robbing a till. He who passes a disease down the line will be looked upon as a traitor, the only criminal deserving capital punishment."
Ethan looked up quickly, scrutinizing the grim face for a moment, and then, unaccountably to himself, his own look went down.
Val had lost the sense with which she awoke of overhearing something not intended for her, and of being under the necessity of making her presence known in the first pause. The talk was just an amplification of views to which her father had accustomed her from childhood. She would have gone to sleep again, or come out and said good-night, but for the interest of seeing their effect on Ethan, who had already been wrought upon to the extent of saying that he "hated" the beautiful world. Why was he looking so black-browed and forbidding now? She must pay attention and follow this.
"There'll be fewer hospitals," her father was saying, with staccato emphasis, "and less vapid sentimentalizing over those who suffer from violation of the plain laws of health."
"Well, it strikes me," said Ethan, "that if the poor devil has got his weak digestion, or his gout, or what not, from some unenlightened ancestor—"
"It must strike you that in that case he's in the position of the man whose father died in debt, in disgrace. The loyal son must wipe out the score."
"It's devilish hard on the son. He'll say he has his own debts to pay—an obligation to himself."
"As a man of honor, or"—with a gesture of impatience—"of mere sense, he will know he has no obligation so binding as to end the evil with his life, leaving no offshoot to sow the seeds anew. It is civic duty, it"—the stern voice wavered—"it is fatherly pity. When I see my little girl's eyes bright with fever—with this old fever that's been wasting me these forty years—do you suppose I find much comfort in thinking I had it from my father, andhave by foolish living only augmented a little my inheritance?"
He shook his lion's head fiercely. The break in her father's voice, even more than the words with their dimly comprehended menace, brought back a quick realization to the girl that her father had no notion of her presence. Should she come out now? It would be embarrassing to them all, for he was strangely moved. If she waited a few moments he would get back to generalities, and then she would come out and say good-night. But under this playing at expediency was an eager curiosity to hear more, to understand better.
"What do you mean by 'this old fever'?" Ethan asked.
"Well"—his uncle turned his rough head slowly to the door to assure himself it was shut—"I mean something that my mother and I agreed not to talk about. There is a word that no one ever hears mentioned under this roof. We don't mention the word because"—he sunk his voice to a whisper—"because the thing itself is here."
"What is the word?"
"Consumption."
Ethan sat looking at him in silence. Val half rose. She must let them know she was there. But—consumption! She sank down. Was it truethatwas the ghost that haunted the Fort? Certainly it was true that she had never heard the word on the lips of her elders.
"My father and my wife died of it," John Gano was saying. "My mother has the old lingering form of it. It was 'galloping consumption' that carried my sister Valeria out of the world at thirty. I am dying of it. My children—"
A curious hoarse sound tore its way out of his throat, and he buried his head in his hands. When he looked up his eyes were wild and bright. Val held her breath, and the nails of her clinched hands dug into her palms.
"I have just one hope," her father said, "that my innocent children will go out as painlessly as may be, before the great battle begins."
Val drew back, crouching behind the chair-back with blanched face.
"It is too late to hope that," said Ethan.
"No, it's not too late; the enemy is still in ambush."
"The enemy?"
"Yes. The battle won't begin till sex finds them out."
"What then?"
"Then they will have to be told what I was not told in time."
"What would you say?"
"I"—the hoarse voice shook—"I'd tell them how full of holes their armor is."
"Uncle John, you'll never be so cruel."
Val, behind the big chair, lifted her scared face in the shadow, looking on as a woman might at a duel fought for her.
"It is the only kindness. When I thought I shouldn't live to see them old enough to know, I wrote the matter down. Ha!"—he laughed wearily—"in the form of a last will and testament; a legacy from a father who will leave them nothing else except—" He got up and turned away, coughing. He walked up and down the room again, with dragging step and bent head. He stopped suddenly and laid his hand on the young man's shoulder. "I see too plainly the lesson of the past not to hand my knowledge on. It's all I'm good for now. This fair future for the race that I've believed in, that I've foreseen so long—" He was interrupted by the painful cough, but conquered it an instant. "Not only have I always known I could have no personal share in it, not even through my children—"
The cough gripped him again, and he turned away with handkerchief to his lips.
Ethan watched him, unmoved, with a kind of unsympathetic fascination.
"I think," said the young man, before his uncle found his voice again, "you are going on to say something I had to try to disabuse my mind of, years ago, when my own health smashed up before I went to France."
John Gano dropped into the rocking-chair by the fire, and lay back a moment with closed eyes and laboring breath.
"I didn't know," he said, faintly, "that you'd had your warning, but I see"—he opened his eyes suddenly—"I see that your New England blood is too thin, too office-stricken, to save you. You've nothing—absolutely nothing to hope for from the Gano side." His voice was strong. It rang like a challenge. "My mother is wrong! Our fathershaveeaten sour grapes."
Ethan leaned forward about to speak, but his uncle broke in harshly:
"I tell you you belong to a worn-out race.Weare among those who are too remote from the soil—'there is no health in us.'"
"Oh come, Uncle John, don't talk as if we were Aztecs, or an effete monarchy."
"Weareeffete, and we deserve to die out root and branch."
The little movement over in the dark corner passed unnoticed in Ethan's attempt at protest.
"Or perhaps you think," said John Gano, "because we are not of noble descent, that being an old or rather a long dominant and idle race, doesn't count."
He smiled with a tinge of superior pity.
"How do you know we're so old a family?" demanded his nephew.
"I feel it in my bones; they ache—they ache." He had begun the sentence with a hoarse laugh, and at the end his haggard face settled into lines of pain. "But whether we're an old family in the paltry social sense is beside the mark. Nature doesn't care a continental copper," he went on fiercely, "whether you're a king or a bankrupt cotton-planter, or any other cumberer of the earth. What people don't realize is that a peasant or a rag-picker may come of an idle, worn-out stock, and if so, be sure Nature has marked him down. If purple and fine linen don't deceive her, neither do rags. No sickly sentimentality abouther. She'll find her enemy, the unfit, through any and alldisguise. As for your aristocrat, she won't distinguish him even by her revenge. She has nothing to do with that figment of the pompous mind, 'belonging to an old family.' Families areallold. The question is: How closely are you related to—well, to use the ready-made phrase: How near are you to the soil?—to the fountain-head of blood made sweet by denial and swift by strenuous living? Ah, my boy, our fathers sat too long at their ease in houses that the building and the tending of made muscle and brawn for others. We lounged in arm-chairs by our fires of fat Southern pine, but the men who got the vital warmth were the men who hewed the tall trees down. We've blinded our eyes over books, and blunted our humanity in a petty concern about our souls, while our bodies were going to destruction."
There was dead silence for a few minutes.
"And those more fortunate ones," his nephew said, in a dull, resentful voice, "who are they? How is it possible to besure? How shall your elect be known?"
"As of old, by their fruits. They and their children have broad shoulders; they haven't chests like ours—they haven't hands like mine."
He held his up, and both men (the girl, too, in the far corner) saw the fire glow red behind the thin, transparent fingers. He dropped them with an air of one who throws up a desperate game. Val pushed aside the rug that still partly covered her, and slid to the ground, arrested on the sofa's edge by Ethan's saying more angrily than she had thought that voice could sound:
"I tell you straight, Uncle John, I don't accept this paralyzing doctrine of yours, still less do I think your children will. I tell you frankly I rebel against—"
John Gano's wax-white hand caught him by the shoulder in a grip that made the young man wince.
"So didIrebel, and I've been paying for it these sixteen years. Oh yes, I knew very little, but I rebelled against the little I knew. I did worse—I married. I did worse even than that—I married my first cousin."
He drew off, as if the better to watch the effect of his words. Ethan, looking at him darkly, felt there was a devilish ingenuity in his uncle's ignoring the possibility of any further mixing of Gano blood, and yet holding up his own misdeed as a hideous warning to the world in general, a thing of unmitigated evil.
"These matters were not understood in my day," he went on, "but happily the men and women of these times are not left in darkness."
"Oh yes, they are," said Ethan. "The men and the women are new, but the darkness is the old darkness."
"No; science has put it to rout. I had no one when I was young to tell me the things I'm telling you."
Ethan's face was undisguisedly satirical, but his uncle was oblivious.
"The Ganos have all been well-intentioned people, and yet they went on down there in Virginia and Maryland, generation after generation, marrying their own cousins, breeding in and in, till—well, you, for instance, and my children are more like brother and sister than cousins. You are even nearer than some brothers and sisters are. You each have in you the concentrated essence of a single family's strain. As I've told you, when I look at my innocent children, I could curse the eternal law that will not let me pay my debt alone. If we rebel"—he fastened his lean fingers on Ethan's shoulder again, and spoke with growing excitement—"if we rebel againstthatcommandment, we and our wretched children are punished." He released his grip, but with eyes bloodshot, menacing, he stood over the young man still: "If we rebel, instead of dying out calmly and gently, we'll have to be stamped out."
"What do you mean?"
No lounging now; the young man sat arrow-straight and eagle-eyed.
"I mean that certainly inthisrace the weakest go to the wall. We Ganos can't compete."
"I wouldn't if I were Hercules. I loathe competition."
"Exactly—exactly. It's the very cry of the unfit."
"I deny it. It's the cry of the man willing to work without ignoble spurring, who doesn't want his comrades' disaster to sweeten victory, who wants to be fortunate, as you say, without blood-guiltiness."
"When that sentiment comes of strength, my friend, it means one thing; when it comes of weakness, it means another. There's hard fighting ahead, and Hercules will be to the fore. He'll be needed. The Ganos will be occupied in hating competition."
Ethan gave vent to a sound of stifled indignation. Val watched him with suspended breath. His uncle watched him calmly, and then he said:
"A Gano can inherit money. I doubt if he can make it. I doubt if he can even keep it. I doubt if he can lose it like a man."
Ethan winced, recalling the days of the lost allowance, and his impotent railing at destiny while he starved in the streets of Paris.
"There isn't the shadow of a doubt what the end of our family history will be," the hoarse voice ended. "Those of us who aren't ground under the heel of poverty will be snuffed out by disease."
"My God!" Ethan broke out; "and to think I called you an optimist! Why, you're just such another as Job, crying out: 'Let the day perish wherein I was born.' 'Oh, that I had given up the ghost, and no eye seen me'; or the Genevan confessing: 'Ma naissance fut le premier de mes malheurs.'" He would have been ready to swear that he was writhing, not under the sense of an impassible barrier raised between him and some concrete coveted good, but at being confronted, where he least expected it, with a new aspect of the ugliness and pain and helplessness of the human lot. "It doesn't seem to matter which way one turns," he burst out; "the sound loudest in one's ears is the lament of all the generations that have gone up and down hunting happiness, till, as you say, they fell on sleep. Whether I go to the classics or read the new philosophies, whether it's Socrates or Seneca preaching the dignity ofdeath, or the volcanic Nietzsche trying gloomily to exalt self, and losing himself in madness—whether I wander the Old World, or fly for better things to the New, it's the same thing. You began by telling me life was beautiful and good; you have ended by showing me afresh that it simply doesn't bear being thought about. Why,Val!"
He had risen and caught sight of the white, tear-drowned face looking out behind the chair.
"Val!" echoed her father; "I thought you were in bed!"
"Oh, I wish I had been!" She came out of the corner with her plumage of brave looks crushed and broken, all her young brightness tarnished. "Father," she said, while the tears rained down, "I'm sorry you're so sad about the world, and about all us Ganos, but you needn't try to make cousin Ethan sad too, and me—and me—"
Ethan made a gesture forward, as if to take the girl in his protecting arms. John Gano's angry eyes flashed warning. He tried to hush his daughter's sobbing in his breast.
"You are my wise little girl, and you—"
"Wise! Yes; a great deal too wise to believe all this. I don't knowwhyI'm crying so." She looked up, smiling miserably through her tears. "Why, it's just nothing but arguing. When cousin Ethan's with me he never has such awful, awful notions. He's a little sad sometimes, and has to be cheered up, and you oughtn't to argue with him like this—"
The heaving sobs clutched her voice, stifling the last words.
"Come, come, child; you're over-excited. There—there!"
"WhenI'mold"—she flung back her head with a poor little travesty of her common gesture—"I'll tell my children—allof them—that it's been a good world to be in, and that they're not to be afraid, and—and not to be any sadder than they can help."
"Come, come; dry your eyes and go to bed."
She turned away with her handkerchief over her face.
"Good-night, little cousin," said Ethan, steadying his voice and taking her hand.
"Oh, good-night," she faltered, and with a movement full of exquisite young tenderness she lifted her little handkerchief and brushed it lightly across his misty eyes. "Father was only arguing," she said.
But the tears flowed down her cheeks afresh as she opened the door and went out.
Two days later Ethan was on his way South with John Gano.
He stayed with his uncle for a month, and then sent for the despised Drouet, who was an excellent nurse. As he grew weaker, John Gano developed not only a tolerance, but a liking, for the alert, amusing Frenchman, and stayed contentedly in the quarters Ethan had found, until the spring, making a herbarium of the flora of that region. At the beginning of May he was to return home. Early in April, Drouet wired to his master in Boston to say that the doctor was alarmed at the patient's condition. Ethan went South at once, and three days after his arrival his uncle died in his arms.
"Don't drag me back to the North," he had said; "bury me where I fall." And it was done.
Mrs. Gano was too ill to travel, and telegraphed that Ethan was to come back afterwards to the Fort.
It was a very different arrival from the last. The little cousins, dressed in black, looked more than ever like snow flowers on the fringe of winter.
Mrs. Gano was profoundly moved on seeing Ethan entering alone. She motioned the children out of the room, and had one long talk with her grandson about the end. Afterwards, in her fashion when she was suffering most, she shut herself up, and no one except the servants saw her until the following Sunday, which was Easter.
It struck Ethan as curious, and unexpected, that even the girls should put such restraint upon their grief. Emmie, it was true, was often seen in tears, but the most she ever said of her father was, "He knows there's a heavennow." Val conducted the household in default of her grandmother, and Ethan caught himself smiling surreptitiously at the old-fashioned decorum she imposed upon herself in playing the unaccustomed rôle.
Emmie was to be confirmed this Easter. She was going through a very devout phase, and, when Val was not there, she talked to Ethan about the coming consecration with a curious religious fervor. There was a strain of unconscious mysticism in the girl that struck Ethan oddly, against the bare American background. It was to him more of an anachronism than any manifestation he had yet encountered, even at the Fort, that stronghold of the past.
"I love to talk about these things to you, cousin Ethan," she said; "Val doesn't understand."
Learning something of these confidences, Mrs. Gano took the first opportunity of saying, privately:
"I do not know quite where you stand, my dear Ethan, in matters of religious faith—" and she waited.
"I don't know quite where I stand myself," he had answered.
"You used to have a fine perception for things spiritual."
He smiled.
"Ioncethought I might find Rome at the end of my wandering."
"Ah!" she said, quite calmly, "my father used to say, 'You will all have to come back to Mother Church.'"
"I do not mean that I felt like that long," Ethan said, hurriedly, realizing that he was sailing under false colors, "or that I think now as I suppose you do. It's probably little more with me than that 'I was born in the wilds of Christianity, and the briers and thorns still hang about me.'"
"You got that from your Uncle John," she said, coldly.
"No; it was said the century before he was born."
"To me, God is the great fact of life. To be without God is to be without hope in the world."
Ethan shaded his lowered eyes with one hand as he answered:
"Yes, I've thought that, too."
She looked at him reassured.
"Ah! I have ceased to be troubled at minor differences of creed; but when we are young, we are less—catholic," she smiled, and then grew grave. "I hope you will never say anything to unsettle the faith of the little girls."
"Oh, I shouldn't dream— But Val has not been confirmed, I understand."
"No; I don't believe any longer in pressing these things."
"She would have required pressing?"
"She has not developed any great concern about spiritual matters. And yet, as a child, she was much occupied about religion. Not as you and Emmie were. With Val it was all the wrong way up."
"Wrong way—"
Mrs. Gano nodded, reflectively.
"Her interest in the Bible seemed founded upon the large opportunity it gave her for the exercise of rank unbelief. I was always hoping to overcome the tendency. But"—she shook her head—"if, as a treat, I allowed her to choose what portion of the Scripture should be read aloud, it was always the Revelation."
"Oh, I don't think that so depraved."
"Neither did I, till one Sunday, as I got to the words, 'And I, John, saw,' I was arrested by a movement from the child sitting at my feet. I looked down and saw the small face puckered with the concentrated essence of suspicion. 'Who saw it 'sides John?' she demanded. And that, briefly, has been her attitude ever since. I lament it, but I don't talk to her about it any more. The one Christian tenet that I am satisfied Val holds is the doctrine of the Resurrection. Strange—strange! Now, Emmie is like all the rest of the Ganos."
Ethan nodded. "Yes, Val is a stranger among us. Poor Val!"
Emmie was certainly a vision of innocent loveliness, as she went up to the chancel that Easter morning, to be received into the communion of the faithful. There was something poetic, something not wholly of this world, inher fragile beauty, her rapt and lighted look. Ethan recognized in the sweet face—never so unclouded as to-day—the subtle ecstasy of the devotee. Something in him stirred painfully, regretfully, answering to it with a sense of unwilling sympathy, of kinship that would not be denied. People in the church that day whispered to each other:
"Emmie Gano and her cousin are more alike than most brothers and sisters are."
Very different was the mutinous face of the elder girl, sitting beside Ethan in her mourning, looking neither at bishop nor white-robed brides of the Church, but with unreconciled, tear-filled eyes at the white cross, in memory of her father, that hung among the Easter decorations in the chancel. The wreath upon the lectern, that all the town knew to be the annual "In memoriam" to that Valeria Gano who had been in her grave these twenty years—for that, only Ethan of the dead woman's kindred had eyes and tender remembering.
"Father's cross looked very beautiful," Emmie said, in a hushed voice, to her grandmother that afternoon.
Mrs. Gano inclined her head.
"I am glad we chose calla lilies; he loved them," murmured Emmie.
"He didn't love to hear them called calla lilies," said Val, without a particle of feeling in her voice.
"Yes," said Emmie, "I mean those great—"
"He would be very angry to hear you call them lilies."
"Angry?" Mrs. Gano looked up.
"Yes, angry," said Val. "Callas are not liliaceæ, they are araceæ, and belong to the Jack-in-the-pulpit family. If he hears us, he'll hate to think we've forgotten so soon." Her defiant eyes suddenly filled up. "He taught us not to be so ignorant as to call them lilies, just as he taught us not to say 'wisteria.'"
"What are you to say, then?" asked Ethan.
"Wistaria."
"Not really?"
"Yes, itiswistaria, and we must allsaywistaria,because he told us to, and because it's named after General Wistar."
"Why have you put these fine linen doilies on the arms of the chairs?" asked Mrs. Gano.
"Because the arms are covered with velvet," Val answered, without thinking, and then shot a shy look at Ethan.
"Velvet? Of course. What then?"
Val looked in her lap and said, mendaciously:
"I don't like velvet arms. Please let the doilies stay."
Mrs. Gano was satisfied in her own mind that Val was ashamed of the condition of the ancient covering. The difficulty plainly was that ithadbeen velvet. She forbore to pursue the question before her grandson.
The days went on; Ethan refused to count them.
One late afternoon a deluge of rain brought down a part of the ceiling in the old red room that had been John Gano's. Ethan took his courage in both hands, and described to Mrs. Gano, in forcible terms, the extent of the damage and the danger of leaving the roof as it was.
"I don't propose to leave it as it is."
He studied her.
"Do you remember telling me when I was a little chap that this was my home?"
"H'm—did I?"
"I haven't any othernow. Let me think of the Fort as my home." He paused, but her aspect was not encouraging, was hardly hospitable. He went on: "Letmelook after the roof, and—"
"Certainly not. I have looked after everything for half a century. When I'm dead some one else may do it—not before."
"Ah, you know what I mean. You've lost your only son. Give me some of his privileges." She jerked away her head, as she did when she was moved, and wanted not to betray the fact. "I am tired of being homeless," Ethan said.
"You will make a home of your own, my dear."
"I want this for my home."
She turned suddenly, and looked at him with eyes that were keen and intent under their film of tears.
"No," she said, slowly, "this does for us. It is not the kind of home for you."
"It is the kind I want."
He smiled in that sudden, radiant way of his.
"No; the Fort is here to shelter and protect other people. You don't need it."
"But I do; and it'smyFort. Why, you've never even taken my name off the door."
The old woman recalled a glimpse she had had the evening before of Val laying her cheek against the graven name.
"I'm not sure but Ishalltake it off," she said, half smiling, half threatening.
"You don't want to get me out of the habit of thinking of the Fort as 'home'?"
"You've never really been in the habit—you belong elsewhere."
He studied her in perplexity.
"Do you realize that at this moment the rain is coming in floods into Uncle John's room?"
"The rain won't trouble your uncle John." She had turned away again.
"But there are others here—"
"It is those others I have to consider. Your uncle John's insurance will mend his children's roof."
"And you won't give me the happiness—"
"My dear boy," she said, with some impatience, "your happiness doesn't lie here."
She began to rock back and forth with lowering brow.
"You want to get rid of me."
She stopped rocking, and turned to him with a moved and gentler aspect.
"Personally, I very much want you to stay; but there are many things to think of. I am not alone here. You bring an atmosphere of—of unrest from out the world youbelong to. I see the danger that you may import some of it into our quiet lives."
"How little you realize! The young life here is seething with unrest."
"That is what I am realizing."
"But I found it like that."
She shook her head.
"You must go away, my dear."
She was of the same mind, then, as her son had been. Go away! Go away! That was all the welcome they had here for Ethan Gano. A feeling of bitterness took hold on him, of such loneliness that it was as if, without warning, he had heard pronounced a sentence of perpetual exile. "For that's what it is," he thought: "she will never ask me to come again." And he was right—she never did.
He had got up after a moment or two, and gone out to the veranda, where he walked up and down, with the noise of the rain in his ears.
Presently Emmie looked out.
"Where's Val?" asked Ethan.
"Up-stairs. Ever since supper she's been seeing if the tubs and things are under all the leaks."
"Ask her to come out here when she's finished, will you?"
"Yes," said Emmie reluctantly, and turned away.
Ethan had no eyes for the sudden shadow on the sweet face. He began to stride up and down again, angrily, eagerly, looking out through the tracery of the wistaria as an animal might through the bars of its cage.
"Well, here I am!"
Val stood smiling as he turned.
"Oh, good! Let us sit down."
"On the black benches? Never!"
She gathered her skirts round her with a gesture of comic horror.
"Here, then"—he spread out a large white handkerchief—"sit on this."
"And you?"
"Sit down!" he commanded.
She took the place meekly, with hands crossed in mockery, and laughing eyes, but her pale cheeks flushed.
"Now, you are to promise me something," he said, standing before her with folded arms.
"Oh, I've always got to promise you things. What have you ever promised me?"
His moody eyes caressed the upturned face.
"What do you want me to promise?" he said, more gently.
"Will you do it?"
"I—a—"
"Yousee!"
"I only want to know what it is."
She looked away.
"Tell me whatyouwant first," she said.
Instead of answering, her cousin turned and walked to the end of the dripping veranda, where the wind had blown the rain in several feet across the boards. She watched him furtively, biting her upper lip the while, catching it cruelly with her sharp white teeth to still its trembling. She watched him turn slowly, come back a few paces, raising his eyes as he was passing the first of the long room windows, and stop short with a queer, guilty start. He nodded gravely to the watchful eyes within and continued his walk, only more rapidly, muttering to himself, "The old lioness!"