"Oh!" Emmie got up and, with deeply injured looks, prepared to withdraw.
"If you haven't done your best, it's too late when you're dying to try to mend things. If youhavedone your best, there's no more to be said."
And no morewassaid for several hours. She lay quite peacefully, took the half-hourly restoratives from Val, but was visibly weaker on each occasion. Ethan went out and sent for the doctor. He came back in time to lift the half-unconscious form up in his arms, while Val held a glass to the pale lips.
"Enough," she whispered; "lay me down." And it was done. She opened her eyes and faintly pressed Val's hand. "Good girl," she said.
A slight spasm passed over her face. She turned her head away, clutched the sheet, and, with what seemed asuperhuman effort, drew it over her face. Ethan put out his hand to take it away, but Val arrested him.
"Don't! don't! She would never let any one see when she suffered." The girl fell sobbing at the bedside.
Some time after, Val drew the linen down. The suffering was over, so was the long life.
Venus and the "new" servant had taken turns to sit through the day in the long room, where the body lay. Ethan was to watch through the night, but Val had insisted that she should be there from ten till midnight while Ethan slept, before his watch began. He opposed her plan, but gave way at last and went to lie down—not to sleep. Just before twelve o'clock he came out of his room, down over the head of his old enemy Yaffti, and stopped outside the long room door. Again a remembrance of his childhood's awe, and the queer sense that he ought, in spite of all, to knock to-night before going in. He turned the knob and entered softly.
The long, straight outlines of the coffin set high upon a bier, the candles burning at the head, and in the shadow at the coffin's side a deeper shadow on the floor. As his eyes became accustomed to the light, he saw it was his cousin crouching there on her knees, with bowed head and hands folded straight before her, palm to palm. He went forward and tried to lift her.
"No, let me alone; I—I want to pray."
"To pray, Val?"
She bowed her white face.
"Not to God—I don't know about God—but there's some one else now out in the vague, and I—I have need of her."
Her face drooped out of sight, and the moments passed. The motionless figure with the folded palms might have been a mortuary marble on an ancient tomb, so rigid was it, so uninformed by life. Ethan sat at the coffin's foot and watched the candles flare.
What if this shock and jar were to send Val back to thefaith of her fathers? What was it in its lesser effect upon himself? What was it working in him? He looked at the long, dim outlines. Death! For the girl, too, with her joy of life, her greed of consciousness, and for him, this hour would come, of rigid quiet, and of watchers in the candle-light. He shivered involuntarily, glancing at the kneeling figure. Death! How much he had thought about it, and how little he had seen. Here it was beside him in a narrow box. He turned away his eyes, seized upon afresh by its horror and its fascination. That moment of dissolution, what had it been like? Even the brave old woman had covered up her face. He peered a moment into the pit, realizing for that instant the wrenching away of life's supports, the plunge, the sinking to the bottom. With an effort he reminded himself of the peace, too, awaiting all down there, and its being the only possible solution to the riddle of the world. But the end—the end! Earthquake and avalanche it is, for the one who lies a-dying; fire and flood and shock of battle, the true end of the world. For us the lamp of the sun was lit on the day of our birth, for us the stars will be snuffed out and chaos come again when we lie down to die.
Had it been like that with her—this dead woman at his elbow? He stood up; cautiously he came to the coffin's head, with parted lips, like one about to put an eager question. He laid back the white sheet. At sight of the tranquil features his own tense look relaxed. Ah, no; for that steadfast spirit the end had brought no terror, or if it had, the quiet face kept triumphantly its secret. A movement down in the shadow, and Val lifted her head, but not as high as the coffin.
"Ethan!"—she clutched his hand—"don't you feel how alive she is? Hush! in a moment she will speak. I've asked her for a sign."
They waited—in that silence that wraps the world. Then Val stood up, and gave a cry as she beheld the face for the first time since the "laying out." She caught up the candle, and held up the light before the dead, as shehad held it before the living woman on that evening long ago, when Ethan saw her first.
"Oh, Ethan, Ethan," said the girl, "she's smiling! That's her answer."
They had come back from the burial, and for the first time in their lives Val and Emmie were in the old house without that constant presence that had come to seem as much a part of the Fort as its very walls. Ethan was still there. Mrs. Otway had come to be with them through those first days; but since the dead body had been carried out of the house loneliness was lodged there like a bailiff, violating the sanctity and blessedness of home.
Ethan found Val in the long room the next evening, sitting on the floor crying, with head against the big empty chair.
"Even you can't make the awful loneliness go away," she said. "I must wait awhile before I can think about taking up life."
The next day she said to him: "You must go away now, and you must come back for me."
"You still think it possible?"
"For you to go away?"
"For me to come back."
"Possible? Inevitable!" She smiled up at him with an air of tender mockery. "No escape fromme. But never forget"—she was grave enough now—"we may escape paying the penalty—people do."
He studied her a moment. No; she was thinking only of the natural "chance." No idea of trying to control it had come her way. "Nor could she comprehend," he thought, "how, even if I am wrong in my inveterate mistrust, or if science should to-morrow carry us so far that we should be demonstrably beyond the reach of danger—she could not realize that no power on earth or in the heavens could make us fully credit our security, could carry us beyond the reach offear. Imagination is, by so much, mightier than reason. Trust imagination to keepthe fear alive, to work without ceasing, by day and by night, subtly to destroy the fabric of our lives."
But even when the strong contagion of his fear had reached and mastered her a moment, it was fear with another face.
"I see plainly"—she laid her hands on his shoulders—"you think that it will mend matters if you have the treachery to go the long journey by yourself, and leave me alone in the world. But it would only mean that we should die apart, and now, when we might have died later and together, and—and"—she laid her face against him—"after great joy." He stroked her hair with an unsteady hand. "Look at me!" she cried on a sudden, lifting up her face. "You aren't afraid? Don't you see that I'd keep my word?"
"Yes, you'd keep your word."
In his inmost heart it would have helped him at that moment to have found any softness of shrinking there.
"Then you'll come when I send—you'll come and take me away?"
Was it fancy, or had she lightly stressed the "me"? He thought of how he had come first of all and taken John Gano to the South to die; how he had returned to follow his grandmother to her long home. He had a sudden vision of himself in the guise of Death. "Each time I come," he thought, "I see some one of this house off on his last journey. Soon little Emmie will be left alone."
But Emmie was not left to the last, and Ethan, though he never knew it, was responsible for her, too, turning her back upon the Fort—upon the world.
The effect of Mrs. Gano's death on a clinging and dependent nature like Emmie's was painfully apparent. Val's new-born sense of tender guardianship over her younger sister was certainly not weakened by the younger girl's confession, after he went away, of her passion for Ethan.
"I always thought it might come right for me," she said, "till—till I saw the look on his face when he bade you good-bye. When will you be married, Val?"
"I don't know, dear."
"Some time during this year?"
"I should think so."
The younger girl bowed a meek head, and turned to her faith as a refuge, or, as Ethan would have said, an opiate. But the old helps seemed to have lost somewhat of their efficacy. She began to go to mass, and one day sought an interview with the Roman Catholic priest. A few months afterwards she was received into the Roman Church.
Val would not leave her sister while she was going through these phases, and forbade Ethan to come till she should send for him.
But Mrs. Gano had not been in her grave a year when Emmie herself made the final move that broke up the old home. How much religious fervor had to do with it, how much a sense of unfitness for the battle of life, how much a feeling in the gentle heart that she was delaying Val's happiness, no one ever knew. She bade her sister good-bye with many tears, turned her back upon the Fort, and entered the first year of her novitiate at the Convent of the Sacred Heart.
A week later, in early August, Val was married very quietly to her cousin, in the Church of St. Thomas. "But the real marriage was that evening on the river when we propitiated the Fates," she whispered, as they came down the church steps.
They went abroad at once. At first, in a rhythm of rapture and of terror, the time went by, now with flying, now with faltering feet. But albeit living on the volcano's brink is possible to men—living there with fear is not. The fire still rages under foot, but the terror must burn out, or else the life.
It had been to Ethan a standing marvel that happiness—forgetfulness—had visited them so persistently even in these first months. In vain he said to himself, "Fool! be sure Nemesis keeps the score!" Of what avail that a man should tell himself Nemesis would exact the uttermost farthing for every care-free hour, when life, in the guise of the woman he loved, was luring him on from one day to the next, and the next, and the next?
April found them at Nice. They had come back to their hotel one night after the play, and Val had gone out on the balcony that opened off their sitting-room, declaring the night too glorious to waste indoors. Ethan followed her, and while the town went to sleep, they sat there in the moonlight, and talked of many things. In a moment of protest against the anodyne of gladness that he felt stealing into his blood, he burst out with something of his wonder at their frequent and utter forgetting of the shadow.
"It's not wonderful at all—it's what all the world does without our good reason." She pressed closer to his side; then, as if feeling the sudden frost that had fallen on his spirit, she drew away, but smiling and unchilled. "Dear lord and master, I give you warning, I've done with fearing. I see that Life means well by us; I sha'n't doubt her any more."
"Unberufen"; and he smote the wooden balustrade with his hand.
"I tell you plainly"—she flashed a tender defiance in his face—"the Fates gave me a very small stock of fear to begin with, and I've used it up. It's"—she held up her little hands and flung them out to the right and left—"all gone!"
"Hush; don't jest about it, dear."
"Never was more serious. I'm warning you. Not all the king's horses nor all the king's men—"
"Hush, hush!"
"Not even"—with a disdainful toe she touched the yellow-covered book that lay on the balcony floor—"not even your old Dumas fils can frighten me."
"I never heard him accused of trying."
"Oh yes, and most insidiously, in those lines he wrote to go beforeDiane de Lys."
"The lines to Rose Chéri?"
"Yes. If I were going to be frightened— Ugh! I did have a black moment."
He drew her into his arms with a sheltering impulse.
"I had forgotten the verses were—"
"Oh, it wasn't the verses, it was the situation. He had loved her—"
"Yes, I remember; and she died."
"Isn't it queer that it should be left to poor Rose Chéri's lover to convince an American, with a very pessimistic lover of her own—left to Dumas toconvinceme of death? You know when Henri de Poincy came for you this afternoon?"
"I left you to rest and read upLa Dame aux Camélias; not meditate on mortality."
"See how you've corrupted me. I was just dropping asleep over the play, when the book slipped, and the leaves turned back to the dedication ofDiane. I read it. Quite suddenly"—she sat up, and her face was pale in the moonlight—"I realized Death. Not merely as a thing that might come to one's grandmother, but.... You see, Ihad considered it too much to realize it. But there was that dainty Rose Chéri before me.Shehad been loved—almost as well as I—"
"No, no." He pressed his lips on hers.
"All those kisses didn't keep the red on Rose Chéri's lips. They turned to evil gray ashes. Her jewel-bright eyes, back they sunk to blackness in their sockets. All that beauty and feeling—all thatfeeling, Ethan—wiped out." The living lovers clung together for a moment. "I suddenly saw," the girl went on, "for the first time in my life, reallysaw, that death wasn't a strange infrequent happening, but that everybody has the face turned that way. Yet, as I sit and tell you about it, the realization slips away—once more it's only words."
"Yes," he said, "that's part of Nature's colossal imposture."
At the word "imposture" she seemed to try to recapture the revelation of the afternoon.
"Dumas is dead," she murmured, looking across the bay from under knitted brows. "He felt all that, and yet he's dead. The beautiful woman and the strong man, they are now as if they'd never been here. Nothing availed them. His genius, her faith, her beauty, their love—futile, futile—they had to go. Were they alive as I'm alive?" She turned suddenly on her lover, in a kind of panic. "Did they feel life so keen a thing as we?"
"No, no; he hadn't you to love."
"Surely it was not like this, or theycouldnot have died." She lay back in his arms and looked up at the full white moon. Presently she smiled. "As I sit here to-night I simply do not believe one little bit in this rumor of death—not as touching me. Other people—yes—only not me."
As she lifted her head from his shoulder and sat up so straight and sure, the man's nerves shrank under a sense of desertion. In a sudden access of physical pride and joyous sovereignty, she seemed to have cast him off, along with Rose Chéri and the rest of that great "nation that is not."
"No one was ever truly alive before," she was saying half to herself, her wide shining eyes turned upward to the stars. "That was why they died. But me—"
"Oh, my darling!" he said, bending towards her, "you are quick in every fibre and in every sense. The wild taste of life has stung your palate, and I sit and wonder how long—how long—" What need to finish, she must understand. But her thoughts were turned another way.
"How long?" She laughed low and joyously. "I've enough life to last as long as the sun has heat to warm the world. I shall go on and on and on." She turned to him with a quick, free movement, and stopped at sight of his face, as though she had been smitten into stone. After a moment she bowed her head down on his knees. They sat motionless. When she raised her head, it was to say: "Never mind, we've come safely so far;" but her face was bright with tears.
"O life," she said softly, looking upward to the stars, "don't let me die!"
"Are you so happy?" he said, hungering to hear it was for what he brought her she would stay.
"Yes, yes," she said, grasping his hand; "and I'm so hungry for thisbeing alive."
He drew his hand away.
"A thousand years," he said, with a kind of anger, "wouldn't quench your curiosity, or weary your quest for joy; but a little sorrow may."
She shook her head dreamily.
"I think my soul must have waited long about the gates of life begging to be let in. I'm so content to be here, so willing to take the rough with the smooth, so grateful for the good—"
"So patient with the wrong," he added, with tender self-reproach, and he gathered her up to his breast.
She laughed, a low laugh, with her face pressed close to his, and he felt forgiven, but the girl was only saying to herself, "To think that I've bothered about—why, it would be grotesque formeto die. There'd be no meaning in it—a kind of violence against Nature and probability that reason revolts at. Everything matters so to me. It's for my sake the sun shines, it is for me the moonlight is mysterious, and the ways of life so many, and so thickly set with adventure."
"You'll admit," she said aloud, at last making ready to go in, "most people have never suspected how good and wonderful the world is—so, plainly, it must be for me (and one or two besides) that it's so fine and terrible a thing to be a dweller in it. Poor world!"—she stopped on the threshold and looked back at the night—"when men rail at you so dully, no wonder you stop their mouths with dust. But for me, I love you. Even when you hurt me I love you—I love you! You'll not get many to bear so good-humoredly with all your wild moods as I—make the most of me. Let me stay a long, long time." And again she went blithely to face death, after the manner of women.
In London and Paris Val made her husband renew his old friendships, and show her that picturesque and holiday side of life so charming to the American woman. Dressed for Lady Eamont's garden-party one day at the end of June, Val stood radiant in her pretty clothes before the long mirror in the drawing-room of her house in Bruton street, waiting for the carriage.
"I feel like a lady on a Watteau fan," she said, rejoicing frankly in the dainty elegance of her Paris frock. "It's all so airy and so cobwebby. Don't breathe hard," she cried, as Ethan bent over her; "a breath will blow me away."
"Are you as happy as you look?" he asked, smiling.
"Happy! I think nobody was ever so happy before. I believed I knew how beautiful life was, but I didn't."
She looked out of the open window. It was one of those peerless summer days with which England repays her months of gloom. The white silk curtains waved in the soft air, bringing in wafts of mignonette from the window-boxes. Val threw back her head with the old movement,smiling. "Yes, it's easy to see," said Ethan to himself, "easy to see what she's thinking."
"I'm glad you're so happy. I was afraid you didn't sleep well last night; you were so restless."
"Was I?" She laughed. "Oh, I suppose I grudge the time I waste in sleep. There's the carriage."
As the days wore on he lost his fear of pricking the bright bubble of her gladness. The life they led left little time for meditation, and Val's enjoyment of balls, races, and kindred festivities, gave him an interest in the old round that surprised no one more than himself. He saw it all in a new and tender light, this mask of fair women, leagued in their age-old conspiracy, gliding across ballroom floors, trailing flower-like fabrics over velvet lawns, decorating the tops of coaches, and making of boats up the river floating gardens. There was much art in this determined turning of life into a festival; there might be philosophy, too, in woman's light-hearted begging of the "Question."
If the men tried here and there to wile Val's heart away, why, that was part of the game, and the women certainly did not neglect Val's husband.
"You are so different to most American men," said a certain smart lady who had shown him frank preference.
"Oh," said Gano, "have you known many?"
"Well, several; and you're quite different."
"I am sorry to fall below the standard."
"You don't fall below; you do the opposite."
"You make me wonder about the others."
"Oh, they were all right, but I don't like American men as a rule."
"You must try to keep the awful knowledge from crossing the Atlantic."
"Oh, they know we don't care much for the men."
"I'll tell you what we'll do"—he spoke as one having an inspiration—"we'll kill off all our men if you'll kill off all your women."
She laughed good-humoredly.
"We'd spare the Southerners for your sake; besides, the English have always had a weakness for Southerners. You're more like us.Youdon't make little set speeches, and you are delightfully quiet and grave."
Ethan burst out laughing.
"One has to come to England to be praised for one's blemishes," he said.
"Blemishes! Do you know the most objectionable thing in the American manner is excessive cheerfulness?"
"You surprise me."
"I've already said I didn't mean you."
Whereat Ethan laughed again with more amusement than he often showed.
"Say the most obvious, commonplace thing, and an American will laugh," she said, reproachfully.
"Ah, you see, our national sense of humor—"
"Nonsense; it's just uneasiness and excessive desire to please."
"Ah yes, we are very simple-minded."
"There's nothing so maddening as a constant smile. That girl over there in the pervenche silk, an old school friend of mine, was condoling with me before you came upon having a brother-in-law whose habitual expression is a fixed frown. I said it didn't trouble any of us in the least. Both my sister and I had long ago agreed, if we had to choose between a man with a perpetual laugh or a perpetual scowl, we'd take the scowl and be grateful."
"Ah, I begin to understand your ladyship's tolerance for me."
"Come, now, be honest; don't you realize how much more Americans laugh than other people?"
"If it is so, it's because we're the saddest race under the sun."
Still he smiled.
"Saddest—"
"Yes; in proof of it our feverish activity, and ourfrequent laughter. You remember the boy who whistled in the dark? The American laughs on the same principle."
It was early August, and they were in Scotland. A letter came from Emmie saying that she had been ill, and was a little better; but there was a settled sadness in the few lines that roused Val out of her engrossed delight in her first experience of country-house life.
"I'm so sorry, Ethan—when we're having such a good time, too; but I almost think— Emmie has no one in the world, you know, but me."
They took the next steamer back to America.
The news they found awaiting them at the Fort was in the shape of a letter from the Mother Superior, saying that Emmie was certainly better, but that she refused to see her sister. She was for the moment immovable in her resolve to hold no personal communication with the outside world. This, from the clinging and affectionate Emmie, was a great blow to Val. She shed the first tears since her marriage over the letter. But until Emmie relented, or was quite well, she wanted to be within call.
"You think you'll like staying here?" Ethan looked about the faded room.
"Yes; I love the Fort. I belong here."
"I must have it freshened up for you, then."
"No, I like it assheleft it."
The first person to call at the Fort was Harry Wilbur. He appeared to be laboring under a suitable depression, and never addressed Val without Mrs. Gano-ing her. She said, at last:
"You mustn't be politer than I am, and I can't possibly call you anything but 'Harry.'"
He flushed and laughed.
"All right;" and he presently gave himself up to an undisguised satisfaction in Val's return.
It was from Wilbur she heard that Julia Otway was engaged to be married to Mr. Tom Scherer, Judge Wilbur'snew law partner. The late-comer was reputed to be tremendously clever, and to have written a very "modern" and highly successful novel.
"Scherer'sgreat," Harry said, in his good-natured way. "He does and is all the things my father's been bothering so long to make me."
"And do you like him—this Scherer?"
"Course; he's taken a frightful responsibility off me. Besides, he's a capital fellow."
Val and Ethan were going over the river one morning soon after their arrival, when, on the bridge in the narrow footway, they met Julia and Jerry face to face. Val shook hands with them both, and as she talked to Jerry she heard Ethan saying they had expected to see Julia before this—when was she coming to the Fort? Julia made plausible excuses for not having called before, and Ethan laughingly blamed Mr. Scherer.
"Bring him to see us," he said, as they parted.
The next morning, Julia passed by while Ethan was giving some directions to the gardeners. He called out to her, and they talked awhile at the gate. Val, at an upper window, wondered what she could say to her husband that would not betray the ground of that old quarrel, and that yet would relieve her from pretending she had shaken off the effects of it. As she stood there the bell sounded. Julia glanced up and saw her. Ethan, seeing a change in the face, looked up, too, and called out:
"Oh, Val, here's Miss Julia; make her come in and lunch with us."
Val went down and seconded her husband's invitation. Julia declined, but Ethan insisted. In the end she came. Twice in the following week Ethan went over to play tennis at the Otways'. The last time he brought Julia and Mr. Scherer back with him.
Val was sitting on the back veranda with Ernest and Sue Halliwell.
When the Halliwells had gone, and Ethan and Mr. Scherer had strolled off to see how the newly rolled andsodded croquet-ground was looking, Julia said, with a slight embarrassment:
"Your husband justmadeus come back with him."
"I'm very glad."
"I told him you didn't want to see me."
Val looked up quickly.
"He must have thought that strange."
"He did. So then I knew you had never told."
"Told what?"
"Oh, about that old school-girl silliness of mine."
"You must have known that I would never—"
"Yes, yes—especially now that I'm engaged."
"I don't see how that affects the situation," said Val, a little haughtily.
Julia was looking after the men.
"You've never forgiven me," she said, "and yet I should think you'd been happy enough to—"
"To what?"
"Not to harbor ill-will."
"I don't see what my being happy has to do with it."
"Why, everything. The one who has got what she wants hasn't much ground for complaint."
"Muchground for complaint?" Val's eyes sparkled. "What do you mean? What have I to complain of?"
"Nothing, of course, really. But I've thought the few times we've met that you—that you didn't particularly like—" She stopped.
"When I don't like things I change them," said Val, privately congratulating them both that Julia's sentence was left hanging in the air. Pride was working strongly upon her. "It's true enough that I've got what I want; but haven't you?" The two men came back round the L, crunching the new gravel under their feet. "The Halliwells said you are to be married next month."
"Other people always know what I'm going to do so much better than I do my myself."
"It's not true, then?"
"It's not settled."
The men were within ear-shot.
"You and Mr. Scherer must stay to supper," said Val, with a deliberate cordiality, as the men rejoined them, "mustn't they, Ethan?"
In the evening old Mr. Otway and Jerry came over. Julia played, and herfiancésang student songs.
Julia noticed that Mr. Gano made no effort to get Val to sing, and she fell to imagining what his feelings had been when he found that he had silenced that wonderful voice. She went home full of secret pain and irritation—irritation at Tom Scherer because—well, because he was not Ethan Gano; pain at finding how the old feeling she had thought dead had sprung up quick, tormenting, under the careless glance of those sombre eyes.
Almost every morning she resolved to go no more to the Fort; almost every evening saw the resolution broken.
If, in the days that followed, Julia's odd footing in the house was not discouraged by Val's proud tolerance, it was maintained by an attitude on Ethan's part, entirely friendly, sometimes even flattering. With Scherer, too, he was on the best of terms. Scherer, immensely pleased at Gano's liking for his society, was ready to smoke and talk politics or literature till two in the morning. He could sit in court all day, play tennis or sing songs in the evening, and again sit up half the night.
"Do men always need outsiders? Is a wife never enough? Still, it isn't Scherer I mind," Val said, honestly enough, to herself, "although he is beginning to echo and imitate Ethan absurdly."
The real trouble was that they went almost nowhere without Julia. It was Julia and Ethan who one day, when Val was confined to her room with a cold, arranged the steamboat excursions up and down the Mioto.
Val, lying in bed in the blue room, heard them laughing down on the back veranda.
Ethan came up-stairs an hour or so later.
"Oh, you're awake!"
"Well, yes; it isn't likely I'd sleep with all that noise."
"What noise?"
"Why, Julia and you laughing."
"Oh, I'm sorry. It was stupid of us to leave the door open."
The answer jarred.
"Does Julia know my cold's worse?"
"Yes, she wanted to come up and see you."
"She did!"
"I wouldn't let her disturb you. But she's got a plan—rather an amusing plan. Julia is full of ideas."
"What kind of ideas?"
"Oh, plans for passing the time. This, for instance: going one of these fine days with hampers and some good fiddlers on an absurd flat-bottomed steamboat, that stops every time a passenger comes out of the virgin forest to the water's edge and waves an umbrella to the man at the wheel."
"Going an excursion on the steamboat is an idea that every man, woman, and child in New Plymouth has had for the last century."
Ethan smiled.
"Shall I read to you?"
"You don't want to talk?"
She had some ado not to cry, but she kept saying to herself: "Silly! silly! silly!"
"I don't mind," he answered; but he walked about the room looking at Aunt Valeria's atrocities, and naturally, Val said to herself, growing grave. How he had laughed down on the veranda!
In a couple of days she had shaken off her cold sufficiently to go on the river with Julia's party. Although it was little pleasure to Val, she offered no slightest objection to this excursion or to the second "up river."
But although no one noticed anything amiss, the days were bringing her an acute disquiet. She saw clearly that Julia was not in love with Tom Scherer, and she saw further. A new sense came to her, not altogether depressing, of life's fecund possibility for unhappiness. So many waysof going wrong, only one of going right! Well, it was very exciting.
"Is this what the story-books mean? Am I what's called jealous?" she asked herself. "Am I secretly afraid of Julia? Was Ethan right? Does even joy like ours change and pass? No, no; it will be all right to-morrow."
Although she called herself a thousand fools, and guilty of vulgar suspicions into the bargain, she presently could not rid herself of the feeling that Ethan was a little cold to her; the mere fancy that this might be so made her shrink from him, lightly evade his caress, first frustrate and then deny his tenderness.
"You are tired of being kissed?" he said, one morning.
As she only smiled and made no answer, he did not for thirty-six hours offer to repeat the offence, and went with lowered looks, silent, impenetrable, when they were alone.
"Is it really so?" she burst out that second evening, after Julia and the rest went home. "Is it only when others are here that you are happy?"
"It's only when others are here that I can forget that there's a rhythm even in such love as ours."
"What do you mean by a rhythm?"
"A rise and a fall. A winter because there has been a summer."
"No, no, Ethan." Her voice rang piteously.
"I'm not blaming you, dear."
"Blamingme? I should think not." She spoke almost cavalierly.
"It's the same with the fortunes of love, I suppose," he went on, "as it is with the fortunes of families, of nations, creeds, crops." He laughed a little ironic laugh. "The very planets have a time of prosperity, a point of ascendancy reached, a time of failing, an ultimate—"
"Ethan, Ethan, what are you saying!" She stopped him as he paced the parlor from Daniel Boone to the mirror. She remembered the evening that her father, in that very room, had "forbidden the banns." "You know I don't let you talk like that of our dear love."
"I only say it to myself, child, as a kind of comfort."
"Youneed comforting, too?"
He nodded, smiling in his grave way.
"I tell myself it's not my darling that is to blame. We've been almost too happy. The old leveller, Nature, is at her eternal work of rotation, turning the big wheel round. By so much as we've been on the top we must go under for a little."
"Ethan, that may be good science, but it's very poor love."
"It's the best apology I can invent for you."
"Forme?" Her voice rang along an indignant circumflex.
"It's certainly not I who was tired."
"Oh, Ethan, I was never tired for the smallest little bit of an instant. Kiss me! kiss me!" She clung about his neck. "It was only that I was tired of Julia's high laugh, and—and tired of her altogether!" she burst out.
"Then why do you have her here?" he asked, without a moment's hesitation.
"Oh, only because you like her so much," Val said, with her old childish frankness.
"As to that, I like her well enough. She's provincial, but she's lively and good-tempered. However, if she's got on your nerves, I don't want her about."
"It would be very selfish of me—" Val began, with reluctantly righteous air.
"Nonsense. How long do you want to stay here, anyhow?"
"Do you mean you're ready to go away?" she asked, her lips parting and her white teeth gleaming in a half incredulous smile.
"I do call that ingratitude."
"Of course I know it was for my sake at first—"
"First and last, Mrs. Gano; though what good it does Emmie—"
"Oh-h!" She leaned her head against him with a happy sigh. "You're thinking of Emmie!"
"As to Julia," he said, reflectively, "I didn't know enough about women's friendships to be able to tell—"
He looked down at the face on his shoulder considering.
"Yes," she said, smiling, "let me in—tell me the worst."
"You see, Julia"—he hesitated—"it won't be easy to make you understand without hurting you."
Val stood suddenly erect, the smile gone. But very gently he pressed her head down on his shoulder again, and rested his cheek on her hair.
"You see, Julia is like a game of tennis, or a pleasant picture of the anecdotic kind. She doesn't give one cause to think; she is mildly amusing and agreeably irrelevant."
"What is there in that to hurt me?" said the suspicious voice under his chin.
"There is nothing that ought to hurt you. But such a person may at times be a sort of—a sort of—"
"Distraction—refuge; just what I used to be."
"As if any one ever could be what you used to be!"
He held her closer.
"You're saying what Iusedto be, as if—"
She struggled to get out of his arms, but he kept her prisoner.
"Hush! Listen. It's only this, dear: In sharing my life you have come a little—a little under the shadow. No, you aren't what you used to be—a gay little cousin that one could laugh with, and, as I thought, leave behind. You are something so much nearer that you are a dearer self. You give hope a new gladness"—she looked up with happy eyes—"you give fear fresh poignancy."
"No—no," she said lightly, concerned only to lift him out of his grave mood. "No, Ethan, I'm sorry to disappoint you, but I have not found it dull or gloomifying to be with you. You invent sad things to say, but we've had a heavenly time—till just lately."
"Yes, we found happiness if ever two people did!" But he looked at her with so strange a passion of questioning that she kissed his eyelids down.
She longed more and more to go abroad again.
"As soon as ever you please," said Ethan.
How good he was to her! How he indulged her! How wonderful it was to be loved by such a man! Soon they'd be off again on their travels, seeing the beautiful Old World. Oh, Life was keeping her promises every one!
Five days after the talk about Julia came a letter from Mother Joachim, saying that Emmie's health was quite restored, but that she was inflexible about not seeing her sister. Mother Joachim herself thought it best that, for a year or so, nothing more should be said of the proposed meeting. Perhaps the girl would be willing to see her friends before taking the black veil.
With a joy, for which Val, thinking of her sister, reproached herself, she and Ethan had begun to lay their plans for a winter in Italy. Suddenly, without reason as it appeared to her, his interest seemed to falter, his good spirits to flicker out.
Although even Val would not have denied that her husband could, if put to it, produce at any moment of the day or night the blackest charges against the order of the world, he had not hitherto proved a depressing person to live with. Like certain other unsanguine souls, he was a pleasanter companion than many an arrant optimist.
This was more certainly the case when politics were a little in the background. Val longed to see the subject banned. It seemed the one thing that took Ethan quite out of her sphere, and kept him in some world of scorn and indignation, at whose borders her smiling jurisdiction stopped.
"No more politics!" she said to Tom Scherer when he appeared after breakfast the morning after the letter had come from Mother Joachim. "I've come to the conclusion that it's bad for the digestion to talk bribery and corruption night after night till the small hours."
"Yourdigestion ought to be all right. You deserted us at eleven o'clock."
"I? Oh yes; but other people—"
"Never know when to go home?"
"It's not the people who go home that I am concerned about, if you'll forgive my saying so. Ethan's in one of his moods this morning."
"What sort of mood?" asked Scherer, looking into the cloudless face of the young wife. "Not very grim, to judge from its effect on yours."
"Oh, very grim indeed." As Ethan came in she waved her hand and made a little mock bow. "You knew him yesterday as His Serene Transparency, to-day Don Inscrutable Furioso of Grim Tartary; smokes like a chimney, and won't say a word."
Ethan laughed and threw his cigarette into the fire.
"Morning!"
"Good-morning! I thought before I went to the office I'd come and have a little talk with you about that piece of property out by Ely's Farm."
Val glanced through the window.
"Hi there! Jack and Jill, where you off to? Wait!"
The men looked out, and saw two small chocolate-brown infants precipitate themselves upon Val. She sat down on the grass with the two small creatures in front of her, and soon had them rolling about and squealing with merriment.
"Where on earth did she find those pickaninnies?" asked Scherer.
"Offspring of Venus; little sunburned, that's all."
Val's dog-cart came to the gate, and she called out:
"Ethan, come and mind the twins while I get my hat."
He came out, and the children scuttled at sight of him.
"Do smile and reassure them," Val said, reproachfully. "Thereareways of looking black that darkies don't mind, but— Oh, forgive me!" She caught up his hand and smiled tenderly at him. "I was only making fun, but it was stupid fun. I don't make light of your political anxieties, but life must go on, you know, and we must smile—just alittle." She ran into the house and came out with hat and gloves. "Put the babies into the cart, Ethan. They're coming for a drive."
The black children, preternaturally solemn while Ethan and Scherer lifted them in, grinned and squealed with excitement the moment they were landed by the side of "Miss Val."
"Miss Val" had been in wild spirits since she opened her eyes. The reaction had set in. After those days of vague, jealously hidden pain, she saw at hand a speedy freedom from the burden of Julia's presence.
She drove the fleet little Arab madly about the town "doing errands," she called out to the Halliwells and others, as she clattered by them in the dog-cart, with her grinning little guests breaking into shrieks of laughter at each jolt and every sudden turning of a corner. Val bought them oranges and sticks of candy. One of her "errands" was to call at the bank for Jerry, who, she said, alone understood how to make the perfection of a swing. Shemusthave a swing. She was dying for a swing. It was so silly to give up delightful things just because children found them delightful too. And old Mr. Otway was coaxed to let Jerry come back in the cart.
On the crooked limb of the catalpa-tree they rigged up a splendid swing, and Jerry stayed to luncheon.
"I won't keep you after three," his old playmate said. "Ethan and I are working at Italian from three till four. But come back this evening, and receive the thanks of the assembled community."
After Jerry took himself off, Ethan and she went into the long room and began their reading. Usually this hour over their books was a time that Ethan seemed franklyto enjoy. To-day, in spite of Val's gay good-humor, he was sometimes languid and sometimes nervously alert. He scolded her a little for forgetting a rule he had told her the day before.
"Yes, I'm stupid; forgive me," she said.
Again, towards the end of the hour, her attention wandered, remembering joyously that she was going abroad again.
"You are thinking of something else," he said, looking at her almost angrily.
"Oh, well, I won't."
"Yes, but you do. You lose half the good of learning a new language if it doesn't teach you to concentrate. Shut out everything else," he said, gravely. "It's the only way."
"Yes, yes, I'll be much better next time. But are you loving me to-day?"
He dropped the book like one whose strength is spent. Then he leaned over the arm of the great red chair and kissed her, holding her close, clinging to her.
"In spite of my sins, are you loving me more than you did yesterday?" she said, smiling.
"Twenty-four hours more," he answered, seeming to fall in with her mood.
"All that much more?"
"All that much."
"What are we going to do to-day after lessons?" She got up and stood before him with her finger in her book.
"Scherer and I are going to ride out to Ely's Farm a little after four, to look at that property. You had better come, too."
"All right. But what makes you look at me so—so—" She dropped her book and perched herself on his knee. "What are you thinking about?"
"I was thinking about this bit of Dante."
"No, no; it's wicked to tell lies. You don't smile to-day except when youmakeyourself. What—are—you—thinking—about?" she demanded.
But she waited in vain. He seemed to forget herquestion—forget her presence. She put one arm about his neck, and lifting her other hand doubled, she knocked at his forehead.
"Let me in—let me in," she said.
His answer was to crush her against him, and hold her so, in a silence that was broken only by the loud, insistent ticking of the tall gilt clock. When Val spoke again it was subdued and dreamily:
"Isn't it odd how much we sit in this huge old chair of hers whenever we're here alone?"
"It's a friendly old chair," he answered, putting out his foot and setting it in motion. "Ever since the far back times when I was rocked to sleep in it, and made to forget Yaffti and all the spectres and the hurts of childhood"—his voice was sweet and lulling—"the old chair has been a haven."
"It was more of a judgment-seat to me," she said, and it crossed her mind that it must be near the anniversary of the day her grandmother had died.
She mustn't forget that date as she did all others; her whole life long she meant to remember that day, to keep it holy with special remembrance and with flowers, and some little deed of the kindshewould have liked—done in memoriam. She lifted her head from Ethan's shoulder and looked for the calendar. It always hung on a brass nail beside the fireplace. It had been there three or four days ago, she was sure. She sat thinking this, with her head turned away from her husband, and then, while she speculated as to the calendar's whereabouts, another portion of her brain was thinking idly:
"Why doesn't he draw me back into his arms as he always does, and say, 'Don't be such a restless creature'? He sees I'm looking for something; why doesn't he ask for what?" And then a sudden, formless presentiment seized her. "It must be because he knows. Why should he have guessed just that? Had he taken the calendar away himself? Why should he? What was the date?"
Like a blow between the eyes came the knowledge andawakening. As if it had actually come in the form of a blow from a fist, she shut her dazed eyes, and saw the blackness sown with stars. But for that closing of the eyes, no muscle had she moved. She had indeed lost track of time. Her ineradicable failing there had made forgetfulness possible; the time of painful preoccupation about Julia had made it easy; the last days of all-absorbing gladness had made it sure. She did the mental sum again and again. Yes, it was September 16. To-morrow was the anniversary of Mrs. Gano's death. Yesterday was the last day of the old life for Val. To-day the bolt had fallen. But had it—had it? Had she not lived through moments like this before? In those first months—yes; but then she had taken Time and Fear by the forelock. To-day she was far behind.
It was strange to herself how all her dreads—physical shrinking and mental anguish—focused in the fear of reading Ethan's consciousness in his face. If blindness could only come upon her, if only she could escape seeing the knowledge in the face she loved, she would, she knew, escape the sharpest pang of all.
What was he thinking now of her long immobility? Why didn't he speak or move? What need? Why should they look each other in the face? She felt his eyes on her back, and a shiver ran between her shoulder-blades. Those eyes of his, how she dreaded them! They pierced through to the brain. They looked into her heart and watched it as it shrank, showing her the while that, whatever she endured, his agony was more.
She bowed her head down over her knees. He gathered her up as if she had been a little child, and rocked her dumbly in his arms. They sat so for a moment, each hiding the face from the other. A loud resounding blow upon the knocker made them start apart.
"The summons!" he thought.
And that morning in the attic came back to him when, as a child, he glowed with excitement and pride to find the old brass knocker bearing his own name.
Val had kept her back turned when she started up, andwas standing now before the window looking into the street. The horses were at the door. Ethan went out. She heard him speaking with Scherer, and Scherer's voice saying:
"Julia will be round in five minutes."
Val fled up-stairs and locked the door. She heard her husband coming up, and listened breathless—Scherer, too! A light knock on her door as they passed, and Ethan's voice:
"Don't be long getting ready, dear."
He never said "dear" to her before people.
"No; I won't be long," she heard herself answer.
She tore off her house-gown and hurried on her habit. She must be down first. If she were not, she felt she couldn't go, and since he was going—
When she got down to the gate the only person in sight was Julia, drawing rein by the new white mounting-block at the gate. Calling to the gardener: "Tell Mr. Gano we've gone on before," Val mounted her horse. "I'll race you to the Maple Grove," she cried, and set off at a gallop, Julia following.
Val reached the goal first, and rode back nearly half a mile to propose a shorter contest. Then another and another, till the men caught them up. They, too, seemed to have a fancy for hard riding, and when they reached Ely's Farm the four horses were in a foam.
They went over Scherer's property while it was light, and had a nondescript meal afterwards at the farm.
On the way home she heard her husband telling Scherer he must come back with them and get a book Ethan had promised him in the morning. They left Julia at her gate. When Ethan lifted Val down from her horse he whispered:
"I may walk back with Scherer after we've had a smoke. Don't wait up for me ... go to sleep, darling."
She clung to him an instant in the dark, and then went in-doors. Her maid was waiting for her up-stairs.
"A bath," said her mistress; "I'm very hot and dusty."
The warm water refreshed and revived her. She put onher long blue dressing-gown of soft unrustling silk. She saw with the old pleasure how white and shapely her arms showed when she lifted her hands to her hair, the wide open sleeves falling back almost to the shoulder. She uncoiled the long brown braids, and let the hair flow loose.
"Something to read, ma'am, before I go?" asked the prim foreign maid, placing the shaded lamp on the table by the fire and drawing up the arm-chair.
"No; that's all."
Val sat there alone, before the fire, till twelve o'clock; then, lighting a candle, she went to the head of the stair and listened. No sound. He had gone back with Scherer; he must surely come soon. A sudden noise, a sound like the shutting of the gate. She flew back to her room. On an uncontrollable impulse she shut and locked the door, and put out candle and lamp. Had he come that moment she would have feigned sleep. But it was a false alarm. Presently she relit the candle, opened the door, and stood listening. Slowly she went down-stairs, peering over the banisters, trailing her blue draperies from room to room, her hand about the candle-flame and her wide eyes intent.
"Looking for what? God knows. It must be Ethan I'm looking for. Why doesn't he come? I'm to 'sleep'—tosleep!"
She went to the front door and opened it. The night smelt fresh and pungent. The scent of the first falling leaves filled the air.
"Yes," she said to herself, "it's the time of the year when things happen."
The heavy burnished knocker caught the candle gleam, and she laid her hot forehead against the cool brass.
"He came, first, on such a night. Andshewent away from us two years ago to-morrow—no, it's to-day."
She came in and shut the door, but some one had entered with her. Val stood a moment in the silent hall, quite still. The dead woman seemed to have come back from her grave. The quiet house was full of her. Val stood before the long room door, and almost before she realizedwhat she was doing, she had lifted her hand and knocked. Smiling faintly, she went in. In that dim light it was all just as it used to be. The only reason she couldn't see the figure in the great crimson chair was that the high back concealed the judge and comforter sitting there.
Val set the candle down, and, for the first time since the blow had fallen, she felt the rush of tears filling her wide strained eyes. They blurred the dim outlines of things, but, with hands out-stretched, she went towards the empty chair like one praying help and succor. At the side she knelt down and laid her cheek on the arm, crying noiselessly, remembering other days and other pains, but never before this stark denial of all comfort. How good it had been, as a child, to feel the light hand on her hair! Ah! the hand was lighter now. "Well, and so will the hearts of her children be, whenthey'redust," she said to herself, and rose up. She looked into the parlor. Daniel Boone, his hunters and his dogs, and before the big painting a picture etched on the air of a wild little girl with long flying hair, dancing in the dusk, until a fear fell on her that struck the quicksilver out of her veins and hung her limbs with lead. On the other side of the room was the new grand-piano that had come too late.
The Ethan of ten years ago stood in the corner with his hands on a girl's shoulders, saying "Promise!" And the girl sang no more.
She went on from room to room as if still looking for that something she had lost. Up-stairs again—into the room that had been her father's long ago, her husband's now, and full of the impress of his spirit. His pictures, his books—it was the one room in the house wholly, utterly changed, in atmosphere and outward seeming. In the corner of the red damask lounge by the fire, a little old book. She picked it up. Seneca! She hadn't seen it since that day two years ago on the river, when he refused to translate the passage he had marked. She would take it away and spell out for herself those things in the marked book that had marked the soul of the man sheloved. A large empty envelope, folded double, had fallen out. It bore the stamp of the Navy Department, and the Washington postmark. A memorandum in pencil in Ethan's fine handwriting: "Army contracts—fight corruption." On the other side some verses.
Ah! he was beginning to write again. No; there was an unfamiliar name at the end. Still, what was it that he had taken the trouble to copy?