Val had an impulse to go and look through the window nearest her, but something held her where she was. Presently, as Ethan paced back and forth, a pale shine came through the panes, mixing uncertainly with the evening light. Venie must have taken in the big bronze lamp. Yes, one could hear her now letting down the blinds. Val was glad she had resisted the impulse to look in. Ethan had stopped his restless pacing, as soon as the blinds were drawn.
"I have asked her," he said, with a motion of the headtowards the long room, "to let me attend to the roof, and a few little things like that." He paused, and looked sharply at the shrouded windows.
"She says you take a great deal upon yourself," Val smiled.
"Oh, she does! Well, I shall take more. I am going to take the liberty of giving you five hundred dollars, to do what you can here without her knowing; and when's it's gone I shall give you as much again, and you're not to tell anybody. Promise."
"I couldn't do that."
"Why not?"
"Simply, I couldn't. I know so well what she'd say—'It's against all our traditions.' And the money you are offering—"
"Well?"
"You see,it's Tallmadge money!" Val resented a little his whimsical look. She drew herself up. "You can't expect us Ganos—" She broke off as he took a letter out of his pocket and unfolded it. "Oh!" She turned a sudden scarlet and grasped at the incriminating document.
"No, no," he said. "I was defrauded of this letter a long time by an imbecile postal system. But I'll take good care of it now I have got it."
"I—I was very young when I wrote it."
"—a little over a year ago," he completed her sentence, laughing.
"Please don't think I'm wanting you to help me now."
"Well, that's a good thing," he said, with an unexpected hardness, "for I haven't the smallest intention of doing so."
Val's eyes were angry and bright with drops of humiliation.
"I wouldn't take it if you begged me to," she said.
"Don't you see, dear Val"—he leaned nearer, but she averted her face from him—"don't you see that, at all events until Emmie is older, you can't desert the Fort?" No answer. "Don't be angry with me, little cousin.Don't you feel how much your own people need you?" Still no answer. "Seventy-five!" he went on; "you mayn't have long to wait."
She turned on him sharply.
"As if I grudged—as if I wanted to shorten the time!"
She swallowed a little sob.
"No, no; of course you don't. I understand you quite well."
"The last thing father said to me was, 'Take care of her, she's growing old.'"
He nodded.
"That's all I mean by putting this money into your hands."
"Oh, but Ican'ttake five hund— I understand better than I did when I wrote that stupid letter; she'd half kill me!"
"She's not to know, and I"—he glowered down at her with a laugh—"I'llhalf kill you if you don't do what I tell you."
She looked in her lap. Her eyelids fluttered.
"You must write me regularly, and tell me all that's happening."
She lifted her head as if she had been stung.
"You—you aren't going away!"
"Yes."
"When are you coming back?"
"I don't know."
The dull rain poured, the defective spouts at the eaves played gray fountains, the great tulipifera rhododendron waved answering arms to the signals of the storm.
In the momentary lull, An' Jerusha in the kitchen could be heard quavering out wild notes, among which Ethan recognized the words:
"No mo' peace on de earf."
"No mo' peace on de earf."
"No mo' peace on de earf."
"I don'tbelieveyou'll go," said Val.
He couldn't see her face so well now in the gray light.
"What makes you believe I won't go?"
She clasped her hands and wrung them unconsciously.
"Val—"
"Or, if you go, you'll come back?"
"Don't you know that's what I must not do?"
"No," she said, in a muffled but resolute voice.
They sat silent, motionless, for some time. She turned at last with wide, shining eyes, putting her face close to his in the uncertain light, and saying, with a quick-drawn breath:
"Why, cousin Ethan!"
"What is it?"
"Why do you look like that?"
"Like what?"
"So—so terribly unhappy."
He didn't answer.
"What's the matter?"
He tried to say something, moved his lips faintly, but no sound came.
"Oh, what is it?" she cried; "something new?"
He nodded, echoing: "Something new, and something very, very old."
"And sad?"
"Saddest of all sad things."
"What is?"
"Haven't you ever heard? Love is the saddest of all."
A ray of light fell like a sword between them, and a sharp rap on the window at their backs made them fly to their feet. Turning, they saw Mrs. Gano's face against the pane. She had lifted a corner of the blind, and was beckoning with imperious hand.
"I must go," whispered Val; and she vanished.
Ethan walked up and down till the early bed hour, listening to the rain and to the sound of An' Jerusha's crooning.
Emmie had begun to teach a class in the Infant Sunday-school. She would go off soon after breakfast, the others following an hour or so later, and meeting her at morning service.
"I don't think I'll go to-day," said Ethan the subsequent Sunday. "Why don't you take a holiday, too?"
"No," answered Val. "If I stay at home grandma will— But you might walk part way with me, mightn't you?"
"Yes, I don't mind a walk. I'll take a book along and go up on the Hill after I leave you."
As they set off, Mrs. Gano stood at the window looking after them. Ethan made her a little half-mocking bow, whereat she smiled grimly.
Val, glancing back at her, said, "Though you do pretend to be so gloomy, you always put other people into better spirits. I haven't seen her smile since—not since.... She cares more for you than she does for anybody."
"She won't be sorry when I go."
Val flashed a side look at him, and the brightness dimmed in her eyes. But here was Miss Tibbs, hurrying by with a sharp glance and "Good-morning," and other people passing on their way home from Sunday-school. She mustn't cry in public.
"You oughtn't to say that she won't be sorry. You ought to be gratefuller to people for caring so tremendously for you—as she does." Her heart seemed to be beating high up in her throat. "Emmie and I often notice how she lets you do all the forbidden things—pick the myrtle and narcissus, play as loud and as hard as you like on thepiano, have sangaree and julep when you aren't a bit ill"—she was trying to laugh—"even lets you go through the bookcases and take out anything you like."
She glanced down at the book in his hand. He made no rejoinder. A side glance at his face showed him with brows knitted and abstracted eyes.
Suddenly the dark face lit up; he had caught sight of a charming apparition over the way. Julia was crossing the street "just in time to meet Ethan," thought Val, although her friend was coming from her Sunday-school class, at the usual time, and by the usual route.
"Good-morning," Ethan called out with a cheerfulness that made Val's heart drop in an instant, down—down.
"You two pious ones off to church?" asked Julia, as she shook hands with them.
"Not me," answered Ethan; "it's too fine a day to waste in church."
"Just what I think," said Julia, wistfully.
How bewitchingly pretty she looked in her field-flower hat and leaf-green gown! Val felt dowdy and dull in her mourning; it was an insult to the fair summer weather to go about in such clothes. No wonder cousin Ethan had brightened as he looked at Julia.
They were all walking on together now to the Otways' gate. Val breathed a silent prayer of thankfulness that Julia was a Presbyterian.
"What are you going to do, Mr. Gano, if you don't go to church?" asked Miss Otway, leaning across Val, who walked in the middle.
"Find a comfortable place under a tree."
"And read that very un-Biblical-looking book?"
They were at the gate now, which Ethan opened; but Julia lingered, in spite of Val's "Heavens! is that the church-bell?"
"Mightn't it pass for a hymnal?"
He laid the book open on the top of the gate, very willing to prolong the interview, as it seemed, in spite of Val's disingenuous interjection, "I'm afraid I'll be late."
"Too cheerful for a hymnal," said Julia, shaking her head and smiling up into his eyes.
"Cheerful only on the outside, I'll be bound," said Val, suspiciously. Then turning to the title-page: "'An Anthology collected by—' What makes you like reading poetry?"
"Why, don't you?" said Ethan to them both.
"Yes, indeed," responded Julia.
"Not a bit," said Val.
"Why not?" laughed Ethan.
"Too sad," said Val, firmly.
Julia looked pensively away from Ethan up to the blue sky, over the line of hills.
"I love sad things," she said, sympathetically.
"Oh yes,youlike 'em blubbery. I don't. That's why I hate poetry. It's all sobbing and groaning, and 'Oh!' and 'Alas!' or else the silly scenery."
"Oh, not all," said Ethan.
"Well, most of it is. Now, see! I'll shut the book and open it at random:
"'O star, of which I lost have all the light,With hertë sore well ought I to bewail,That ever dark in torment, night by night,Towards my death with wind in stern I sail.'
"'O star, of which I lost have all the light,With hertë sore well ought I to bewail,That ever dark in torment, night by night,Towards my death with wind in stern I sail.'
"'O star, of which I lost have all the light,
With hertë sore well ought I to bewail,
That ever dark in torment, night by night,
Towards my death with wind in stern I sail.'
That's Mr. Chaucer. Now try again:
"'My days are in the yellow leaf;The flowers and fruits of love are gone;The worm, the canker, and the griefAre mine alone!'
"'My days are in the yellow leaf;The flowers and fruits of love are gone;The worm, the canker, and the griefAre mine alone!'
"'My days are in the yellow leaf;
The flowers and fruits of love are gone;
The worm, the canker, and the grief
Are mine alone!'
That cheerful gentleman is Lord Byron!"
She shut the book with a vicious snap and opened it again:
"'Out of the day and nightA joy has taken flight:Fresh spring, and summer, and winter hoar,Move my faint heart with grief, but with delightNo more—O, never more!'
"'Out of the day and nightA joy has taken flight:Fresh spring, and summer, and winter hoar,Move my faint heart with grief, but with delightNo more—O, never more!'
"'Out of the day and night
A joy has taken flight:
Fresh spring, and summer, and winter hoar,
Move my faint heart with grief, but with delight
No more—O, never more!'
That's Shelley's account of things. And here's Keats's:
"'The weariness, the fever, and the fretHere, where men sit and hear each other groan;Where but to think is to be full of sorrowAnd leaden-eyed despairs.'"
"'The weariness, the fever, and the fretHere, where men sit and hear each other groan;Where but to think is to be full of sorrowAnd leaden-eyed despairs.'"
"'The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs.'"
"Oh, but aren't there any ballads and pretty stories?" asked Julia.
"Well, here's the 'Pot of Basil' and 'Waly Waly'"—Val turned the pages vindictively—"and all the rest of the desperate and deserted. Now, the man that made this anthology"—she turned sharply to her cousin—"I suppose he got together all thebestthings, didn't he?"
"I suppose he thought he did."
"Do you think he succeeded?"
"Very fairly."
"H'm! You see, when they do their best they are bound to be moaning and groaning, these poets. Now, the man that chose these things, was he a jaundiced kind of person, very sad and sorry?"
"Quite the contrary. I should say he's as cheerful as a man may be who isn't a fool."
Val looked at him a moment.
"Then, I say it's a good thing there are women in the world." She had forgotten the third person for the moment, forgotten that Julia, too, professed to like things "blubbery." Even when she remembered, she only clapped the book to and said: "Oh, I shall besolate!"
"I envy you your walk." Julia tilted up her round chin, catching in her loose golden hair the sunlight that filtered through the fresh green maple leaves.
"I'm going up on the Hill; you'd both of you better come."
"Gracious! we'd be killed if we did."
"Yes,indeed," agreed Val, with conviction. It would be too dreadful to have Julia tacked on to them to-day. WhatwasEthan thinking of?
"I've come back from Sunday-school to take my motherto church; but there might be time for alittlewalk afterwards." Julia's air was charmingly wistful.
"Well, come towards Plymouth Hill," said Ethan.
If it was anybody else, thought Val, angrily, it would have to be called flirting. Julia, too, was undoubtedly "making eyes." Oh, it was disgraceful!
"I don't believe, after all, there'll be time before dinner," Miss Otway was saying.
"She knows perfectly well she's going to make time," thought Val, and then—oh, dear! oh, dear! what was becoming of her old affection for her friend?
They had said "Good-bye," and walked on in silence for a few moments. She noticed with a passion of resentment that, since leaving Julia, the cloud had settled again on her cousin's face.
"Since I'm going away so soon, I think I ought to say—" he began presently, and stopped.
"Say what?"
"That Harry Wilbur has taken me into his confidence."
Val turned away her head.
"First-rate fellow, Wilbur." Another pause. "Fact is, he is one in a thousand."
"He's very good, but he isn't interesting."
"I think he is, you know; and so did Uncle John. I believe your father would have liked—"
"Doyoulike talking like this to me?" Val demanded, darkly, "or"—with a ray of hope—"are you being a martyr?"
"Something of a martyr, perhaps," he said, smiling in spite of himself.
"Oh, well, that's all right, just for once."
"For once?"
"Yes; please don't do it again. I can admire it—once, but I can't be of any help. I suppose it's because of what my father told you that you said that—about—love."
"What did I say?"
"That it was the saddest of all."
"I'm afraid the reason is deeper than any your father gave."
She looked up baffled.
"At least, it's because of what my father said that you—that you—began about Harry Wilbur."
"Well, perhaps."
"I'm very much disappointed in you."
"I'm very sorry."
"I thought you were more—understanding. If you had known my father better," she continued, with all-unconscious irony, "you wouldn't have minded him a bit. It was just a theory."
"Ah, my child, it isn't a theory that we're first cousins."
The note of finality in the low voice pierced her through and through.
"But plenty of people—" she burst out; and then one by one her father's arguments and menaces, like curses, came back to roost. "If we rebel against that law, we and our innocent children are punished," she seemed to hear him say.
They walked on some time without speaking. Twice Ethan glanced down at the face beside him. For all its profound trouble, it was not the face of one defeated. He drew a perverse pleasure from the observation. Curiosity had from the first played no small part in the charm his cousin cast about him. What would she do under such and such conditions? And, meanwhile, what new longing, what new pain, that mutinous little face had planted in his heart! "I have never kissed her," he kept thinking as he looked at her mouth. "Has Wilbur ever kissed her?" The idea was revolting. He put it from him. He thought of the people that never have children. Suppose— He looked down at her again. This time he caught her eye, and she flushed hotly. He had no need of speech to assure him they had been thinking along the same lines.
"Of course," said Val, with an obvious effort, "I ought to behave as if I didn't understand what's involved. Anynicegirl would pretend she—" Her voice got tangled and lost in a dry little sob; but she burst out again under her breath: "Oh, they aren't likeme—the nice girls.Nobody ever cared so much as I do. Everything's different when you—when you care like this."
His heart contracted sharply. Had this come into his life only to go and leave him stricken in poverty? Under the girl's extravagance of speech was a richness of nature that gave her fierce young words authority. This primitive, unfaltering passion, naked and unashamed, was not only beautiful in his eyes with a kind of pagan splendor, but it soothed and satisfied his weary, doubting spirit. For the moment it carried his questioning down its swift current, making of his fears a mock, and whirling his heavy doubts like straws. And yet he kept a vigilant watch upon himself. With a man's abiding fear of being ridiculous, he was uncomfortably conscious of the little group of belated church-goers turning into St. Thomas's from Market Street, not so hurried but they might notice Val's excited face. To his companion, in her absorption, these acquaintances had been thin air.
"I dare say my father knew that, to many a girl, it wouldn't really matter much whether she married Harry Wilbur, or any other nice convenient person; but tome—"
"Come down this street," Ethan said. "You don't want to get into that mob."
He felt himself to be in one of those positions where to turn left or right, to go forward or go back, is equally to find offence and suffering. "It doesn't matter about me; I must think of her," he said to himself. At all hazards he must not forget that the girl at his side was little more than a child. He could neither explain to her why he was bound in honor to leave her, nor must he leave her with any haunting memory of the pain this going cost him. She had turned obediently when he suggested the side-street.
"Oh, I'm certain of it"—she brought one tight-clinched hand with a quick movement to her breast—"nobody ever cared like this before. Just look at their faces."
She stopped on the corner, eying, with a kind of impersonal disdain, the people that passed up the church-steps.
"You can see from their faces they've never cared—like this."
"Come," said Ethan, nervously, "they'll wonder why we are hanging about."
"Most people are only half alive," she said, walking on; "they don't feel, they don't hear, they don't see, they don't even smell."
Ethan began to laugh almost hysterically.
"They can't turn such unexpected corners, anyhow," he said.
His laughter seemed a little to clear the atmosphere.
"You don't believe?" she inquired. "No, I suppose peoplewouldn'tbelieve. But I've felt quite dizzy with joy at smelling hay after a rain. Heliotrope makes me want to laugh and sing. Violets make me feel meek and wistful; but they alldosomething to me. You, now, simply dislike the pungent smell of marigolds. I feel it stick into me like a kind of goad. But I oughtn't to tell anybody." She sighed.
"Why not?"
"Even you laughed."
"Forgive me, dear."
For the "dear" sake she smiled up at him, thrilling.
"Oh, I forgive you, though I don't much like the idea of having told you—even that much."
"What nonsense! You must tell me everything."
"Must I?" She moved closer to his side. "Only I should like you to have a good opinion of me—and—well, to care so much about smell, I'm afraid, is very vulgar."
"Oh, I don't think so."
"Novelists do. They are ready to tell you her hearing was 'most sensitive,' and all about his 'eagle eye,' that nothing escaped, but they are too refined to say nothing escaped the heroine's nose. Your friends the poets, too, have a very low opinion of smell. Of course, if I could always remember to call it 'fragrance,' it would be better, but I don't always mean fragrance."
"No, no," he laughed. "I admit that smell used to bethe poor relation of the senses, and was kept decently in the background; but over in Francenous avons changé tout cela."
"Oh, well, that's all right, then."
"You aren't going to church?"
"Of course not."
"It's so ugly here. Shall we turn back and go up on the Hill?"
"No. Yes." (They could come down before the Presbyterian Church was out.) "Let's walk very fast."
They talked little on the way, but neither of them noticed the fact. They were approaching that point wherenur das reine Zusammenseinwas interchange enough. From the Dug Road they turned into the ravine. Ethan caught her by the hand, and they scrambled breathless to the top.
"Let's rest here," he said.
Val sat down under the elder-bush that grew in the cleft of the Hill. She looked up at him smiling, and then turned away her conscious eyes. Instead of sitting down, he stood with his hands in his pockets, looking at her with a sense of vague uneasiness behind the tingling in his blood.
"I suppose you know that I ought to have taken you home after your flat refusal to go to church?"
"You aren't my master—yet."
"Yes, I am."
The blood flew to her face obedient to the call.
"Yes," she said, slowly, "you are."
He turned away, cursing his traitor tongue.
"I've imposed upon you," he said, after a moment, flinging himself down on the grass a little distance off—"imposed upon you frightfully, if I've made you believe that. I'm far enough from being even master of myself."
"Too late to try to patch it up now," she said; "the murder's out."
He studied her.
"I suppose you think you know me?"
She smiled confidently.
"You don't. I'm compounded of all the things that are most abhorrent to you."
Still she smiled. The unconscious passion in the young eyes warmed his blood like wine. He moved a little nearer to her, and the mere movement broke the spell. The physical obviousness of the action stung him into self-criticism, self-contempt; and then as he turned his face away from his cousin's magnet eyes, he fell to criticising his self-criticism. Why couldn't he take things simply, naturally, as Val did? Vain ambition! He must submit to seeing, always and always, the skeleton under the fair flesh, the end from the beginning.
"You are mistaken about me," he said. "I look out upon a world eternally different from the world you see."
"What's it like?"
"I hope you'll never quite realize."
"Oh, I shall; but I sha'n't mind."
"I might be doing you the best service in my power if I gave you a notion of howmuchyou'd mind."
"I give you leave."
He looked into the tender, happy eyes, and, "I haven't the heart," he said. "After all, it may not be necessary for you to lower your opinion of the world. It will, perhaps, do if you merely modify your opinion of me."
"Don't you see I can't do that?"
"Oh yes, you can." He pulled himself together and sat up. "You're at bottom such a rational creature. You've only to realize I'm a dreadful fraud. I've talked about—you'd be sure to find me out some time, so I may as well make a clean breast of it—"
"It isn't anything you've eversaid, that I depend upon."
"Oh, really!"
He threw back his head and laughed.
"It's partly just the look of you, but it's most of all just—just that I'm certain no one in the world is so kind and brave—"
"I brave! You poor child!"
"Yes, and kind, deep down to the core," she said, with beaming eyes. "I know it by your voice, and by the wayyou feel everybody else's feeling. That's something like me: I feel, too, but it doesn't make me kind."
"Neither does it me. I'm a mass of deception. I put on a solemn look, and you think I'm sympathizing. I'm not: I'm actively engaged in despising the universe."
"That's because your standards are so high."
He laughed out an ironic "Exactly!"
"You make other people seem about so high." She held an out-stretched hand a few inches above the grass, dropped it, and, leaning forward upon it, said, with a quick-drawn breath: "It's been so exciting for us all here, knowing you. It's been like knowing Robert Bruce or Richard Cœur de Lion—"
"Oh, very like Richard CÅ“ur de Lion especially."
"Just whatIsay, particularly when you put on that black look and your eyes burn. I know then you'd have the courage foranything!"
The whimsical amusement died out of his face.
"I told you I'd taken you in. I'm a mortal coward!"
"You?"
He nodded, looking off down the ravine.
"I'm afraid of death. I'm even more afraid of life."
They were only obscure phrases in her ears.
"I know you're afraid of the dark," she said, smiling gently, "but only when I'm not there. You see—I must be there."
"Poor little cousin! Lucky for you that Fate and your father have settled that you can't be 'there.'"
"I settle things for myself," she said, hotly; "anddon'tcall me little cousin."
"Why not?"
"It seems to cut me down to childhood. Besides"—she stood up—"I'm really very tall, and I've heard enough about being a cousin."
"You hardened optimist!" He lay on his back with his hands clasped behind his head, and looked up at the tall, slight figure of the girl. "You're actually ready to pit yourself against the laws of the universe, and expect not tosuffer for it. Do you know that your invincible belief thatyou, at least, were meant to be happy, is the most pathetic thing I've found in the world?"
"I'm not in the very least pathetic," she said, with deep indignation.
"Shouldn't wonder if it would be always like that with you," he went on, unmoved. "Stark inability to comprehend personal misfortune! Ruin will rattle about your ears—you'll believe blindly it's somehow for the best. How like life's diabolical ingenuity that just the man I am should have come across just the girl you are!"
"Thank you, most particularly. Life and I are both obliged."
"Of course, you've read that last will and testament—the one your father wrote—"
"No; haven't asked for it. Grandma hasn't mentioned it."
"Ah! She probably would if she knew—"
"You may be sure," Val interrupted, "my father doesn't think those hideous black thoughts now."
"Ah, yes, I'm sure enough of that."
"You are?"
"Oh yes—he's done with all that now."
"Then why on earth shouldwego on—"
"We're not dead, my dear."
"You don't mean—"
She looked at him with horror-filled eyes.
"What's the matter?"
"You—" But she couldn't bring the awful doubt to birth. That any one in her own range of experience should be heard to hint that the dead were done with thinking! Not that a mythical person in a book, but some one she knew, should be found saying calmly that he had abandoned hope of the life to come! "My father," she whispered, coming a trace nearer, "did he ever say he didn't believe in immortality? No! no! he couldn't. But did he ever tell you he wasn'tsure?"
"How can any one be sure?"
"How can you bear to live if you're not sure?" she cried.
He stared at her in astonishment, forgetting Mrs. Gano's saying, "The one Christian tenet I am satisfied Val holds is the doctrine of the Resurrection."
"I thought you said your father talked quite freely to you."
The girl grasped the slender branches of the elder-bush.
"Then therearepeople, and I know them, who don't believe in immortality."
The world seemed to swim. As she lifted up her dazed eyes, she saw a green-clad figure lingering disconsolately along the brow of the hill. Another instant Julia and she had recognized each other.
"Not to believe in immortality!" she repeated, as though she had never heard of the idea before. "Then, for such people it's all this life—thislife. They can't afford to miss anything here; it's their only chance. Do you hear, cousin Ethan? This life—this life may be all."
On an uncontrollable impulse he seized her hand to draw her down beside him.
"Julia's coming," said Val, hurriedly, and advanced to meet her friend.
"Oh, here you are!" called out the new-comer. "I didn't get to church, after all. And I've a message from my father," she said to Ethan, as he came forward. "He wants you to come to supper to-night to meet Senator Green."
When Val and Ethan got home late for dinner, they were met in the hall by Mrs. Gano.
"Lo! she comes, 'with high looks like the King of Assyria,'" Ethan quoted.
Mrs. Gano levelled an unmistakably cold stare at the culprits.
"Emmeline tells me you were not in church."
"No; we were late," said Ethan. When Val had run up-stairs to take off her things: "You must forgive methis once," he added, speaking low, "for I'm going away to-morrow."
He had no word alone with his cousin till the next morning. Nothing further had been said about his going, but his trunk was packed and the carriage ordered. He found Val sitting alone in the parlor, in a corner of the sofa by the window.
"What are you doing here?" he said, shutting the door.
"Just thinking."
"Don't do that, such a bad habit."
"Oh, I'm just trying to get accustomed to realizing there are people who believe"—she spread out her hands and let them fall—"this is all."
"Don't bother about such people," he said, sitting down.
Val, usually so ready of tongue, was seized upon by silence. Ethan, too, sat speechless, struggling with the sense of keen-edged wretchedness that pressed knife-like on his heart. How was he to say good-bye? and—with a long look down the road—how was he to live afterwards? She—oh, she would console herself; she was very young. But for him ... the immense dead weight of life pressed intolerably hard. The futility of it extinguished the very sun. Presently, as they sat there so silent, Val bowed her head, hiding her face in her hands. It shot through him that some realization had come to her of the unseen forces that make of us their sport—some vision of the bitter absurdity of the pigmy human lot we make such a pother about.
The sense of a vision shared, of a common pain, merged swiftly into physical yearning. The physical yearning cried aloud for assurance that it, too, was "common." He looked down upon the bowed head and the little white nape of her neck. He noticed how out of the upturned swaths of firm-bound hair the wild love-locks were falling—locks so fine that they looked like faint wavy shadows falling over the ears.
Had she any faintest notion of the hunger in him that would not let him sleep? As he bent over her the whiteneck was suffused with rose. Ah, she knew! The traitor blood had signalled him behind her back.
"Kiss me, dear," he whispered. Had she heard? The little ears glowed scarlet. "Dear—" He slipped his hand under her chin, and turned her face to him. The curtaining lids still hid her eyes, but the lashes quivered, and that odd little pulse in her upper lip, that was beating, too, "piteously," he said to himself. "Look at me, dear. Val, open your eyes, I say."
She did.
It was like a shaft of sunshine; the rapture of the look startled him. He would have been prepared for tears, but this cloudless joy—
Ah, she was very young!
"Kiss me, child."
He did not bend towards her. She should come to him for this last greeting that was the first as well.
The radiant face, flushing, paling, came closer. He felt the breath from out her parted lips.
But the sweetness of her nearness could not for him wipe out the fact that before them lay parting and long heartache.
"Good-bye," he said, brokenly.
She drew back before the kiss was more than inhaled.
"Good-bye!" she echoed. "No; I will never kiss you 'good-bye'" She freed herself from his prisoning arms. "Never, never, never!" She sprang up. "To get that kiss from me you must be lying dead."
And she fled out of the room.
A little later he made his farewells to the assembled household in the hall. Having kissed Emmie, he turned to Val.
She grasped his hand as she averted her white face, whispering:
"I will kiss you when you come again."
After Ethan had gone, life seemed to stand still for a long, long time. The only real events were his letters, not to Val, although she had written him the very night after he went away. His letters were all addressed to her grandmother, and yet every syllable seemed to the girl's mind to be meant for herself—to be charged with subtle meaning, intelligible to no one else.
At Christmas he wrote the two girls a single perfunctory page of cousinly greeting that arrived with his presents, a couple of Russian silver belts. But this letter was addressed to Val, and she would not open it till she was alone. Inside was an enclosure in a separate envelope:
"Dear Cousin Val,—Forgive me for not answering your letter. It would be nice of you to send me a line, now and then, to tell me how things go on at the Fort, and whether I can do anything for anybody there. I enclose cheque."Your affectionate cousin,Ethan Gano."
"Dear Cousin Val,—Forgive me for not answering your letter. It would be nice of you to send me a line, now and then, to tell me how things go on at the Fort, and whether I can do anything for anybody there. I enclose cheque.
"Your affectionate cousin,Ethan Gano."
"'Cousin!' 'cousin!' forever 'cousin!'" ejaculated the girl; and she answered him the same day:
"Dear Ethan,—Thank you for the beautiful belt, but I do not forgive you for not answering my letter. Still, I will do anything in reason that you ask me if you don't ever call me cousin again."
"Dear Ethan,—Thank you for the beautiful belt, but I do not forgive you for not answering my letter. Still, I will do anything in reason that you ask me if you don't ever call me cousin again."
And then followed an account of her surreptitious household expenditures. He answered early in the New Year:
"Dear Val,—I obey your mandate, and will not hereafter own you for a cousin. I believe that by strenuous wishing you could almost think yourself out of the relationship."
"Dear Val,—I obey your mandate, and will not hereafter own you for a cousin. I believe that by strenuous wishing you could almost think yourself out of the relationship."
"I am very sure I could" [she wrote back] "if you would let me."
"I am very sure I could" [she wrote back] "if you would let me."
That letter, and several to follow, elicited nothing. She ate her heart out with humiliation and with longing, and then salved the hurt with dreams. Her best times were when she was quite alone, in the dark of the night or early in the morning. Regularly as she rose up, or lay down to sleep, she kissed the face of the little watch he had given her. Sometimes, under the spell of an old and long-abandoned habit, she would slip to her knees by the bedside. But instead of any prayer, old or new, she would fling wide her arms, crying under her breath: "How long, O Lord—how long?" Never in her blackest hour did she believe there was worse in store for her than waiting.
In a quiet way people came and went at the Fort more than ever before. Julia and Jerry, when he was home for the vacations, Ernest Halliwell, and Harry Wilbur in particular, after he had thrown up the fine position in Boston that Ethan had put in his way—they, and others, trooped in and out, carrying Val off riding, sleighing, dancing, boating. Harry Wilbur proposed to her on an average of six times a year, and took her smiling and affectionate refusal for mere postponement. It was to Val a life of waiting, but not of inaction.
Mrs. Gano, growing feebler and feebler, had allowed her eldest grand-daughter (as a special mark of favor, be it understood, and merely to "teach her how") to take the reins of household management. Yet from the royal elevation of the great four-poster, where she now spent most of her time, did Mrs. Gano rule the house as absolutely as before. Val, however, was not content to do merely the necessary, the expected. To Mrs. Gano's quiet satisfaction, the girl developed a passion for careful household government. Not only were none of Mrs. Gano's directions slighted with Val at the helm, but she bettered her instructions, discreetly not taking credit. Privately she kept expense books, learned cooking—yes, and laughed to think of her old detestation of it. With Venie's help she made cretonne covers for the furniture, and seemed to renew all things by the magic of her industrious hands, for most ofEthan's money had to lie at the bank out of very fear. She brought down old lamps and ancient household gods from the attic and made "effects" with them. She did not care about gardening, any more than she cared about cooking, but she hated the neglected, weed-grown borders under the windows. So she cleared and made them blossom again, filled the house with flowers, and thought a thousand times: "If he comes to-day he will find it beautiful."
It would not be true to suppose that this quest for beauty in such a barren field was satisfying. It filled in the time. It was part of the endless satisfaction of life that the world was full of so many things to do "by the way." She had her days of fierce anger at the delays, the vagueness of the future, the fear of the new interests that must be filling Ethan's life.
After nearly a year had gone by, he answered one of her letters. She acknowledged the civility in such caustic fashion that he was piqued to reply by return of post. And so started on its uneven course that interchange of letters that was soon the greatest joy of her existence and the permanent stuff of her dreams. It gave her a feeling of having a fresh hold on him. She knew where he was now, and something of what he thought and did. Her own days were lived twice over, that he might share them, only the time she re-lived on paper was more vivid, more significant than the actual hours as they sped. Life took on such an edge in the process of being presented to Ethan that the girl wondered sometimes to find she enjoyed telling about the dance or picnic a thousand-fold more keenly than she had cared about the thing itself. At first she wrote flippantly, touching chiefly on the humors of the New Plymouth life; and when he took to sending her books, she bade him keep all the improving ones to himself. A certain English novel very much in vogue she promptly returned.
"If I want to read political economy, I've got my father's books. I like a story to be about love, and to end happily. If you think of sending me another novel,rememberI like plenty of orange-blossoms, not little bits of brain." But oddly enough, she had no rooted objection to reading aloud to her grandmother any non-religious book, however serious. Val found that many of these dignified tomes were not as dull as you might think; but for long she laid the credit to Mrs. Gano's door. It was an old story that that lady had a way of making things seem interesting. Val was always privately grateful, even touched, at being let off from the religious readings. Once when Mrs. Gano was recovering from an illness, Val, sitting at the bedside, was visited by a fresh sense of her growing comradeship, even her growing dependence upon that alert and sympathetic mind. In a softened mood she fell to thinking how ready her grandmother had always been to put the worked book-marks in her Church histories and doctrinal treatises, and listen to Val read biography and travel aloud, all the while letting the girl feel that she was not only adding to the "common stock of harmless pleasure," but was sparing the older eyes.
"You are very good to me," Val said, leaning her head against the "painted calico" coverlid. It made her happy to feel the long, thin hand upon her hair. She had never got over the old childish sense of its being a proud thing to receive a mark of favor at those hands.
"Shall we read?" said the girl, presently.
"If you like."
In a flush of generous feeling, she reached out and took upLiterature and Dogmafrom the table at the bedside.
"What's that?" asked Mrs. Gano, narrowing her eyes.
Val told her.
"Oh no"—she sat up and looked round—"I sent to the library after Chevalier Bunsen for you and me."
"Let me read you this. You mustn't always think about what I like."
"Nonsense, child; Arnold's book would bore you, and you'd read it so it would bore me. Find Bunsen."
"You let Emmie read you this."
"Emmeline's different. Find Bunsen. You'll like Bunsen."
"Why do you suppose I have such a rage for biographies?" Val demanded, a shade anxiously.
"Partly because you're young."
"Emmie's younger still."
Mrs. Gano smiled and shook her head enigmatically.
"Young, and more interested in people, as yet, than in ideas."
"That has a very poor sound—like the personal column of a newspaper."
"Oh, it's natural enough. The walls of your own room tell the same story—all faces."
"Yes, but to hang up in your bedroom, what else is there?"
Mrs. Gano smiled, and then half whimsically:
"I don't say there's any special advantage in it, but I've always had a liking for the 'flower pieces' we painted in our youth, and for landscapes and marine views."
"Oh,those—"
"Exactly!" and the older woman laughed outright.
"Well, I'm sure," said Val, eager to defend herself, "cousin Ethan says that to the American, to the unjaded mind the wide world over, it is the 'life' in any picture or description that interests and fixes itself in the memory. A vast amount is said and written about St. Mark's in Venice. But in how many minds does it stand a beautiful and stately background for flights of pigeons to wheel and circle against, or to settle down before, on friendly terms with the populace? Not the glories of architecture, but the brief and gentle life of doves, makes the picturevitalin the mind."
"Ah, and when did Ethan say all that?"
"When—while you were ill I had a letter from him."
"Oh, indeed!" She turned with an indescribable look and settled down among the pillows.
"Shall I get the letter and read it to you?" said Val, to her own surprise and most unwillingly, but acting under a sense of strong coercion.
"As you please," said the wily old woman. "Have a look for Bunsen, too."
Val absented herself long enough, looking for Bunsen, to adapt Ethan's letter for a grandmother's ears. It had been no love-letter even in its original form, but it unconsciously paved the way for one and more to follow. Val wrote to her cousin that night:
"I have usually read your letters to the family, and think it would be better to go on doing so. It's not that my grandmother tries to make me. When I offer to, she says, 'As you please, my dear,' but I have a horrid, uncomfortable feeling if I don't. She seems to be looking through me into the back of my spine, to see why I want to keep the letter to myself. It's funny, but when I don't show it to her she makes me think she has divined not only all there was in it that I didn't want to show her, but agreat deal more. It's that I resent most. So, if you want to say something you don't want her to see (about the money, you know, and things like that), just put a tiny check opposite the stamp-corner, and I'll know there's an enclosure meant only for me."
"I have usually read your letters to the family, and think it would be better to go on doing so. It's not that my grandmother tries to make me. When I offer to, she says, 'As you please, my dear,' but I have a horrid, uncomfortable feeling if I don't. She seems to be looking through me into the back of my spine, to see why I want to keep the letter to myself. It's funny, but when I don't show it to her she makes me think she has divined not only all there was in it that I didn't want to show her, but agreat deal more. It's that I resent most. So, if you want to say something you don't want her to see (about the money, you know, and things like that), just put a tiny check opposite the stamp-corner, and I'll know there's an enclosure meant only for me."
It was these "enclosures" that worked the mischief. They were a standing invitation to say things too intimate for other eyes. Brief and discreet at first, and dealing with figures, they expanded as time went on, till they had to be written finely on foreign note, that the discrepancy between the letter's bulk when brought to the front door, and the letter as it appeared in the family circle up-stairs, should not challenge attention. Mrs. Gano's confinement to her room made the matter easy. Only the blind and unobservant Emmie ever saw the letter when it came. If it bore the significant check, it was opened alone; if not, the seal was ostentatiously broken under the vigilant eye. It was sure to be an exciting hour. Great preparations preceded: a propping up of pillows, and mending of the fire, if it were winter, that the reading and inevitable discussion might be uninterrupted; a proper arrangement of light and general careful "setting of the scene." Emmie, with soft eyes shining, sitting demurely by in the little green chair that had been hers—her father's, too, when a child—and Val close to the bedside, reading with beatingheart and a careful emphasis (for she was scolded else) the accounts of Ethan's varied life—accounts punctuated by comment, laughter, and sometimes by scathing disapproval.
"I'd tell him, if I were you," Mrs. Gano would say, sitting up with sudden vigor; and the opinion she would express seemed frequently too provocative and "pat" to be dispensed with. Val would unblushingly annex it, and reap her reward in Ethan's spirited rejoinder, which in turn never failed to "draw" Mrs. Gano. That lady was, perhaps, not a little diverted at playing a part in the game; conscious, too, beyond a doubt, that with a girl like Val to deal with it was probably a question of accepting the correspondence and sharing in its entertainment, or knowing that it went on without her having power to direct or color it. It was so the correspondence (all save the "enclosures") came to be family property, for Val would bring in her reply, that she might be approved for her line of argument, and that she might hear the keen enjoyment of that laugh which, unconsciously, she "played for" as much as any comedian ever did.
"I corresponded with several gentlemen when I was young," Mrs. Gano once said. "I hear the fashion is going out. It is a pity. A good letter is too good a thing for the world to lose."
Val burned with a wild desire to show the "enclosures," for they were the best of all. Her grandmother would rage, but she couldn't help appreciating them, the girl said to herself, with a mixture of terror at the thought, and of longing to make the confidence. It had come to be such a habit to share things, to "try" them against the steel of that wit and judgment, that she was conscious of an incompleteness of enjoyment in keeping any specially good thing to herself. If it were a book—"No," she would say, "I'll save this for our evenings"; and even if in a dull or mediocre page some one phrase or happy word shone out, she would fly up-stairs, and at the foot of that four-posted throne lay down the treasure-trove, getting in return a finer zest and a truer value.
If, as the time went on, Ethan had hours of feeling that his continued absence from the Fort was a piece of fantastic self-sacrifice which he would end by boarding the next train, Mrs. Gano no less was minded, more than once, to yield to her hunger for a sight of him. The thought of the little boy Ethan who had begged that the Fort might be his home, even more than the thought of the man, tugged at her heart-strings. Would she die before seeing her only grandson again? If in one of these moments Ethan had himself suggested coming, she would have welcomed him with open arms. Meanwhile she waited for the news that must be on the way—the news of his marriage.
Even in "enclosures" to her cousin, Val's only reference to that "barrier," which she would not admit, was characteristically by way of a gibe.
"We were talking the other day at the Otways'" [she wrote] "about its being rather funny to think my grandmother was my great-aunt and my father was my cousin—my mother, too, and my sister as well, all cousins. Emmie and I gathered that, according to the popular superstition, we ought by rights to have very few wits, or only one arm or a piece of a leg. Emmie and I assured each other on the way home that no reflection can be cast upon our arms and legs, but we agreed that we must takegreatcare that we are not idiots; so you may, after all, send me a few improving books."
"We were talking the other day at the Otways'" [she wrote] "about its being rather funny to think my grandmother was my great-aunt and my father was my cousin—my mother, too, and my sister as well, all cousins. Emmie and I gathered that, according to the popular superstition, we ought by rights to have very few wits, or only one arm or a piece of a leg. Emmie and I assured each other on the way home that no reflection can be cast upon our arms and legs, but we agreed that we must takegreatcare that we are not idiots; so you may, after all, send me a few improving books."
It was at the end of a brief visit to Cincinnati that Ethan's strongest temptation assailed him. It came in the commonplace form of a photograph in a forwarded letter from Val. Partly the picture, but, even more, something of the girl's eager spirit that had got between the lines of the letter, something unsaid, yet eloquent, of her unexpected power of holding out, took sudden hold on him, made his nerves tingle as if by a bodily contact. There she was, vivid as she had been for so many yesterdays, to-day triumphant, irresistible. He must go—he must go to her! He had been attempting more than he had strength to carry through. He flung some things into a valise and went down to the station. Train just gone—another in anhour and ten minutes. He got his ticket and bought papers and magazines. In theEnquirerthe report of an address before the Medical Congress caught his eye. The famous Dr. Gage had been haranguing his colleagues upon the supposed deterioration of the American race, because the birth-rate among the well-to-do classes was lamentably low, the reason being that more and more the women of these classes shrank from motherhood. In the course of his address Dr. Gage made a passing reference to his forthcoming work onConsanguineous Marriage.
In the next column, among the hotel arrivals, it appeared that the great doctor was registered at the Burnet House. Ethan took out his watch. "Why not? There's time." He jumped into the nearest carriage and drove to the hotel.
In something over an hour he returned, gave up his New Plymouth ticket, and got one for the afternoon express to New York. Nobody at the Fort ever knew how near Ethan had been to taking them by surprise.
The Otways always went away in the hot weather. The summer that Val was twenty-two, Julia and her family went to the Jersey coast for their holiday. There, at Long Branch, they found Ethan. Both he and Julia mentioned the fact in their letters, and Val tried to think the meetings as casual and unimportant as they looked on paper; but it was the hardest summer she had known.
Besides the fact that Julia was enjoying opportunities of seeing Ethan denied to Val, there was matter in her letters even more disturbing—references to Mr. Gano's constant appearance in the train of a young and wealthy widow who had a house at Long Branch. This lady, Julia wrote, was known to have been one of a party Mr. Gano had taken yachting before coming to Long Branch. Val had heard about that party from her cousin, but no mention of Mrs. Suydam. The lady was much in Val's thoughts. At last, upon an exasperated reference in one of Julia's letters to Mr. Gano's "Circe," Val wrote to him: "Tell mesomething about this Mrs. Suydam, whom you have never once mentioned, although you see so much of her."
Ethan answered with a brief biographical sketch of the lady, carefully edited; for, in truth, Adelaide Suydam had led an eventful existence, albeit keeping her hold on society by virtue of her money and her good old Knickerbocker origin. Of other virtue she was held to have no embarrassing amount. But she was a highly accomplished person, handsome, daring, and obviously determined to make life interesting to Ethan Gano.
Her added and special attraction for him lay in his discovery that she had no design to marry him; but he was presently made aware that she meant none the less to absorb him. A little puzzled, and a good deal intrigued by her, he returned from the yachting trip very much under her spell. She had skilfully arranged the Long Branch episode for the crowning victory.
It may have been the mere act of writing about her, however discreetly—seeing her perforce through Val's eyes for a moment—that brought about the recoil. The very discretion he found himself obliged to employ convicted him, and opened wide a window on the future. A glimpse of Val through it—however distant, unattainable—brought the prospect into truer perspective for him. He saw less of the Suydam, and went to the Otways to hear about Val.
"Circe" herself, not understanding the situation, and being far too adroit to underline her temporary defeat by putting questions, believed the handsome Julia Otway was the distracting influence. She arranged an exodus to Mount Desert. A friend had lent her a house there. "Long Branch was getting stupider and vulgarer every year—it was intolerable!" She found to her dismay that Mr. Gano was not inclined to take this view. It was then she realized that she was tired, run down, even a little ill. "Would Mr. Gano take her in his yacht to Bar Harbor? He needn't stay if he really preferred Long Branch, but it would be a charity," etc. Well she knew he was the kindof man to find just the appeal she made a hard one to withstand. Before he quite realized the full significance of the scheme, he had promised she should go round by sea. By the time he "understood," she had practised her arts with such success that he no longer wanted to alter the course she set. "Circe" saw herself on the point of being the captain's captain.
They were to start the next day, accompanied by Mrs. Suydam's very amenable half-sister. Ethan was going over the yacht to see that all was in readiness. Rummaging through one of the inconveniently full drawers in his cabin, he threw out on the floor a number of superfluous things to be carried away. In impatient haste he tossed out some old novels, caps, a blazer, a roll of moth-eaten bunting. "Wait a minute—isn't that—" He stooped and picked the bunting up. It unrolled—a blue flag, bearing the name "Valeria" in white letters. He stood with the end in his hand, staring at it. It had been in the bottom drawer since the day, four years before, when he had thrust it out of sight after getting that letter from Mrs. Gano: "I do not wish you to call your yacht 'Valeria.' There are plenty of other names without using that of an unmarried girl."
He remembered his old satisfaction in thinking how, under the new paint as well as in the cabin drawer, the boat still bore the forbidden name, faithful to the first allegiance. He had encouraged Val to call the yacht hers in her letters, and the habit had clung to them both. And now to-day, of all days, this blue flag comes out of hiding and goes flaunting along the floor! It was as if Val herself had walked into his cabin, to reassert her right, to keep "her" ship—that she never yet had sailed in, and most likely never would—to keep it, notwithstanding, free from profanation.
He went direct to Mrs. Suydam's. She had gone for a drive. Mrs. Ford, her sister, was also out. Only Mr. Ford was at home. Ethan found that gentleman in the billiard-room, and explained that he had a sudden need togo to California—was, in point of fact, taking the night train. Mr. Ford was an experienced yachtsman; would he look after the ladies, ask whom he liked? etc. It was all arranged in ten minutes, and Ethan was on his way to the Pacific Coast before Mrs. Suydam had heard of the failure of her plan. Had it been the sudden effect of looking at the little drama through Val's eyes that had made him sicken and shrink from the dénouement? Or was he simply once again (as had happened before in that first year after parting from Val) taking flight from a temptation that would have interposed an evil memory between him and—the marriage that he had determined should never be?
For the first time in her life the New Plymouth gayeties seemed to Val insignificant, even irritating. She rejoiced that Mrs. Gano was so much better that she let Val drive her out almost daily. They were more than ever together, Emmie being absorbed by her church and charity work. One day, driving back into the town, Val was laughing delightfully at her grandmother's caustic remarks upon the "flabby philanthropy" of a certain local society. They passed some soldiers on parade, and a military band playing "Marching Through Georgia." Mrs. Gano's face changed, and, to Val's amazement, she began to weep. Her grandmother! who, since Val was a child, had said at times when other people cried and marvelled that Mrs. Gano sat dry-eyed, "My tears lie very deep, and most of them I shed before you were born!" This sudden gust of sore weeping that shook her to-day stirred the young girl's pulses with a shamed excitement, an obscure gladness.Shecould feel, too, then, even yet, with passion and unrestraint. But the girl looked away, and presently the shaken voice said:
"The poor old South! Did you see the ragged flag, my dear?"
"Yes, I saw. We must have made a good fight that day."
The "we" on the lips of one born after the war, who never had had her foot in the South, forged a new link. Mrs. Gano had put her hand through the girl's arm and leaned lightly against the strong young shoulder.
"One may be proof against a good many things and not be proof against a tattered flag," she said, half apologetically, and she pulled the flapping veil across her face.
The old woman and the young one had drawn together in friendship absolute. Not that Mrs. Gano developed an angelic complaisance, or Val a superstitious reverence for the head of the house. They were not merely the elder and the younger of the same race, but two human beings who, side by side for many years, had struggled with themselves and with each other, striking on the flint of character, each knowing at last exactly when the sparks would fly, and each content to feel that the fire and the flint were there.
But if Val Gano were not the most irrational of her sex, how was it she could live year in, year out, this narrow life, refusing without misgiving the only apparent ways of escape, waiting for an event that even the eye of faith might well have wearied looking for, while summer passed to autumn and winter waned to spring?
The girl believed, or made herself pretend she believed, that the longest conceivable term of her waiting was the term of Mrs. Gano's life. But the truth was even simpler. Val, unfortunately, was one of those persons who do not easily accept whatever Fate chooses to lay at their door. She was rather of those who stand ready to turn away the blind bringer of gifts with the rebuff: "I will have nothing at your hands but the thing I asked."
Vain, apparently, for Harry Wilbur, vain for the dashing new-comer, Mr. Lawrence O'Neil, to think time was working the will of each. Time was doing nothing so sensible.