"Be still, my soul, be still; the arms you bear are brittle,Earth and high heaven are fixt of old and founded strong.Think, rather—call to thought, if now you grieve a little,The days when we had rest, oh soul, for they were long."Men loved unkindness then, but lightless in the quarryI slept and saw not; tears fell down, I did not mourn;Sweat ran, and blood sprang out, and I was never sorry:Then it was well with me, in days ere I was born."Now, and I muse for why, and never find the reason,I pace the earth, and drink the air, and feel the sun.Be still, be still, my soul—it is but for a season;Let us endure an hour and see injustice done."Ay, look! high heaven and earth ail from the prime foundation;All thoughts to writhe the heart are here, and all are vain:Horror and scorn and hate and fear and indignation—Oh, why did I awake? When shall I sleep again?"[A]
"Be still, my soul, be still; the arms you bear are brittle,Earth and high heaven are fixt of old and founded strong.Think, rather—call to thought, if now you grieve a little,The days when we had rest, oh soul, for they were long.
"Be still, my soul, be still; the arms you bear are brittle,
Earth and high heaven are fixt of old and founded strong.
Think, rather—call to thought, if now you grieve a little,
The days when we had rest, oh soul, for they were long.
"Men loved unkindness then, but lightless in the quarryI slept and saw not; tears fell down, I did not mourn;Sweat ran, and blood sprang out, and I was never sorry:Then it was well with me, in days ere I was born.
"Men loved unkindness then, but lightless in the quarry
I slept and saw not; tears fell down, I did not mourn;
Sweat ran, and blood sprang out, and I was never sorry:
Then it was well with me, in days ere I was born.
"Now, and I muse for why, and never find the reason,I pace the earth, and drink the air, and feel the sun.Be still, be still, my soul—it is but for a season;Let us endure an hour and see injustice done.
"Now, and I muse for why, and never find the reason,
I pace the earth, and drink the air, and feel the sun.
Be still, be still, my soul—it is but for a season;
Let us endure an hour and see injustice done.
"Ay, look! high heaven and earth ail from the prime foundation;All thoughts to writhe the heart are here, and all are vain:Horror and scorn and hate and fear and indignation—Oh, why did I awake? When shall I sleep again?"[A]
"Ay, look! high heaven and earth ail from the prime foundation;
All thoughts to writhe the heart are here, and all are vain:
Horror and scorn and hate and fear and indignation—
Oh, why did I awake? When shall I sleep again?"[A]
She looked up and saw her husband standing at the door. With a cry she let fall paper and candle, and fled into his arms.
"My dear, my dear!" he whispered, trying to soothe her. They stood there locked in each other's arms while the minutes went by. At last, "Help me to find the candle," she said, faintly, and as they both went towards the fireless grate, groping and stooping to feel about the floor, "Perhaps we should rather try to get used to the dark," she said; and he, with breaking heart, caught at her, crying hoarsely:
"Val! Val! I can't bear it!"
"I'll help you, dear."
"I can't let you die."
"Isn't it strange?—everybody's said that who has loved some one. And where are they all?"
"But you are so young." They had reached the sofa in the dark, and sat there locked together.
"Yes, thank Heaven, we're young." She pressed her face against his wet cheek. "Ah! don't be so terribly unhappy, dear. To die!—why, that's the most wonderful of all."
FOOTNOTE:[A]By permission, fromA Shropshire Lad, by A. E. Housman.
[A]By permission, fromA Shropshire Lad, by A. E. Housman.
[A]By permission, fromA Shropshire Lad, by A. E. Housman.
In her own room—Valeria's old blue room—she stood late the next evening, in her night-gown, before the fireplace.
"Well, Mazeppa, we've had a good run for it; but it's ill-going when one's bound—and when death follows." Only her lips stirred at the opening of the door. "That you, Ethan?"
He came in and shut the door behind him.
"These things I ordered for you in Paris came this morning," he said, speaking very low.
"What are they?" she asked, still staring at the bas-relief.
"A turquoise girdle for your beautiful white body, and a turquoise comb for your hair."
"Oh, beautiful! beautiful!" she said, as he, standing behind her, held the things across her shoulder before her eyes; "but beautiful beyondanything!" She took them in her hands. "It was dear of you—" She stopped as she glanced over her shoulder and saw the look in his eyes. Her own went down before them, and slowly filled, but no tear fell. With an effort she seemed to force the salt-water drops back to their deep well. When she spoke, it was in a tone deliberately quiet, even every-day: "You say I've always counted so serenely on being happy; you don't know how I've dreaded getting to be too old to wear pale blue." She fondled the stones of the girdle and laid the heart-shaped clasp against her cheek.
He watched her woman-joy in jewels with a look of hardness.
"It would take more than mere years to cure you of your passion for turquoise."
"That was what I've been afraid of." She was smiling. "I should never have been able to resist pretty blue things."
How young she looked in her straight white gown and loosened hair!
"What a baby you are, after all," he said, thinking that those eyes of hers seemed to have caught, or kept, no reflection of the glare of life. His own were hot and bloodshot, hers seemed always to have looked down on the pale cool blue of turquoises, or up to the blue of heaven.
She had nodded when he accused her of being a baby.
"And it's all very well to be a baby with brown hair and smooth forehead; but a gray-haired, wrinkled baby, dressed in baby-blue! It's just as well to be delivered from that."
"Upon my soul!" He stared at her with his strained, sleepless eyes. "You've no sooner wrenched your mind away from this joy in life, than you fall to setting up a new shrine where you may worship Death, and give him thanks and praise."
"You thinkImake a god of Death?" she said, very low. "If I do, it's only a new form of 'Thy gods shall be my gods.' If I've thrown away the old idols, it's not because they failed me, but because they failed you. I have more need of you than I have of them; I cannot leave you to go and kneel apart."
"Shall it be here?" she asked.
"Here? No."
"I think I'd rather it were here—where for me it all began."
"No, no; not whereshelived."
"You think she'd come back and interfere?"
He studied her face, wondering a little. "She might interfere without coming back, if we stayed here."
"Besides, to stay here would be to waste time. We must go and see countries we have never seen before."
"Yes, and the journey's end must be far away from any place where we are known."
"Why?"
"Why should we shock people?"
"But it's bound to shock people."
"No, that's a popular fallacy. If I hear a stranger in the street saying that some one, a stranger to us both, took his life a little while ago in the opposite house, I am slightly disturbed, perhaps, at having the mask men wear pushed away for a moment; but I continue my walk, I eat my dinner as usual."
"How shall it be, then, so that our friends shall continue their walks and eat their dinners?"
"Somewhere a long way from here—"
"Yes, yes; we'll go to the Far East—we'll go to the end of the world."
"Yes, to the end of the world."
"And then it will be quite easy, when we've come to the end, just to step off."
"Quite easy."
Val busied herself unceasingly in the preparations for going the long journey. Ethan looked on at her calmness and activity with growing wonder. His first sense of revolt and horror was little by little merged in mere incredulity, then rank suspicion.
"Is her acquiescence genuine, complete?" he tormented himself with thinking, and then scourged his doubting spirit for foul unfaith.
Still, no self-reproach could rid him quite of his mental attitude of jailer watching, argus-eyed, over a prisoner whose resourcefulness might any day or night find suddenly a way to freedom.
Life during these days of setting her house in order went on with a regularity, an outward tranquillity, that would have made a less sceptical soul than Ethan's pause and wonder. It was not Val who refused to see their few friends.
"Ethan is very busy." "Ethan is writing." "He's so sorry he can't join us to-day; but I'll go with you," etc.These were the fragments that floated up-stairs from the hall, or through his curtained windows from the gate. So little did Val seem unnerved or pain absorbed, he was sure that she was more friendly to her friends than ever, more mindful of them. He watched with wonder her childish pleasure in making little farewell presents.
"Nobody is forgotten, I think," she said, looking with outward content at a table piled with labelled packages.
Ethan in his heart was saying: "All this looks like a genuine leave-taking, all but her own face, her even, unjarred voice, her unfrightened eyes."
"This is what I'm best pleased about." She took up the long envelope with the papers referring to Venus's cottage, which had been settled on that faithful servant for life, and was afterwards to go to the twins. "Grandma would have been glad about this."
"What are you doing with allherthings?" Ethan asked, with restless dark eyes searching her face for weakness or for subterfuge. "Those things you are giving away seem all to be yours."
"Yes, all yours and mine."
"And what of hers?"
She shook her head vaguely.
"You'll have to sell them."
"Never! never!"
His eyes gleamed. Was he on the track?
"Other people will sell them if you don't."
Her face clouded.
"I've already given away a great many household things, to Emmie's poor people, and others Venus has told me about."
"And the rest?"
"I hear Julia."
"She won't come up here."
"She may."
He hastened to secure the door. Val ran out and met Julia at the top of the stair. Ethan listened to the greeting, and heard Julia say:
"Why,Val!"
"What is it?"
"It's true, then?"
"What?"
Val's voice rang quick and anxious.
"You are nicer to me these last few days."
"Oh, do you think so?"
Relief breathed through every syllable.
"Don't you realize that, until just now, you haven't kissed me since—"
"Sh! Let's go down; we mustn't disturb Ethan."
That evening, while Ethan sat smoking and writing letters in his room, Val got up from the sofa where she was lying.
"Where are you going?" he said, without turning round.
"Down-stairs. I'll be back by-and-by."
"Come here."
She stood beside him. He leaned back in his chair looking at her till she put her hand over his eyes.
"Don't! don't!" she whispered, leaning her cheek on his hair.
He put his two hands round the little waist, touching the turquoises in her belt.
"Who is to have this—afterwards?" he said.
She stood up straight.
"You didn't think I would give that away?"
"Well—" His air puzzled her.
"Would you be content," she said, "to think of any one else wearing it?"
"Content! But sometimes it's hard to believe you are facing the thought of laying it aside."
She flushed under his look.
"I don't know that Ishalllay it aside."
While he stared she went out of the room, shutting the door.
He sat for a moment, following up first one train andthen the other suggested by her speech, till he had convinced himself finally that the explanation of these last days lay in the fact that she wasnotfacing the compact. She would elude it. He started to his feet. It was as if he had been brought face to face with proof of wifely infidelity.
He found her in the long room kneeling before the open escritoire.
"What are you doing?"
"Getting ready," she said.
He sat down in the great chair and watched her. She carried handfuls of yellowed papers and bundles of letters, and heaped them on the bed of red coal in the grate. She tore the morocco binding off old diaries and burned the manuscript leaves.
"What are you doing?" he reiterated, starting up like one shaking off a dream.
"She always said she'd rather things were burned than pulled about by careless hands, by strangers."
"I remember." He sat down. This did not look like evasion, for Val shared his own strong sentiment for family things. "I remember, too," he said, with dull regret, "she used to tell me 'the whole history of a family is locked up in that escritoire.'"
"It takes a long time to burn."
She stirred the slow-smouldering papers to a blaze.
"It took a hundred years to make," he said; "and many hundred agonies—and joys," he added, watching her dim smile—"yes, and joys."
He helped her with the next load, looking at the writing on the outside of the letter-bundles as he undid them.
"Grandfather Gano," he said, throwing a handful on the fire. "Your father"—another handful. "Aunt Valeria"—another. "Grandm—"
"Don't," cried Val, with quivering face; "you mustn't call their names!" He looked back at her. "It's like calling them to look at the way we treat the things they left us."
He went on silently with his task. There was no doubt she felt it keenly; why do it, then? Only out of shrinking from those "stranger" hands. Then she was facing the compact, after all.
"Ethan?"
"Yes."
"Why do you stay here?"
"Because the time's so short."
"Dear one"—she came and leaned against him—"go and finish your writing; I'll come back in an hour."
"No, I'll stay here till you've done."
"Oh, I sha'n't have done all for several days," she said, pleading.
But she knew that look in his face. No use to urge. She turned away, and scattered the charred paper down on to the hearth among the journal bindings. He made the fire up again for her. Then, one by one, she took from the mantelpiece all the old photographs of her husband, and laid them on the flame—all but the one of the baby Ethan, which she thrust in her dress, keeping her face hidden from her husband. Then she went over to a pile of pictures he had not noticed before, lying by the buffet.
She took a little hammer with a claw handle out of the drawer, and bent over the frames, loosening the nails, taking out the pictures and tearing them up.
"What are those?"
"Aunt Valeria's—"
"Why do you bother with them?"
"I don't want people to be smiling at them. Oh, Ethan," she cried out with the sharpness of intolerable pain, "I—I can't bear it, if you sit there watching me! I can do it alone almost callously, thinking very little ofthem, thinking about you and me, till all these poor reminders are just old paper; but you—" She hid her face.
"Theyarejust old paper, dear."
He went over to her, and she turned from him, trembling.
"No, no; when you are here, they all come alive in myhands. Oh-h-h!" She lifted her tear-wet face, and held up clasped hands like one praying pardon. "You were right; they are a hundred agonies, they cry out while I tear and burn them."
"No, dear, no; the dead are done with crying."
"But these people—" She looked up and down the long room with misty eyes, like one dimly descrying a throng. "Theyaren't dead, Ethan."
A sharp fear seized him that the strain had been too much.
"Come—come away," he said.
But she clung to the great brass ring in the lion's mouth on the buffet drawer. "They won'treallydie till we have destroyed all their work—and destroyed ourselves."
"That's true in a sense," he murmured.
"Of course it's true. Does anybody think my grandmother died when the breath went out of her body? She won't really die till the last person dies who remembers her. And the others; here they've been all these years, kept tenderly alive, in letters, in wills and certificates, diaries, poor little pictures!" Her voice wavered and recovered itself fiercely. "Shall I tell you what it's like, destroying these things?" She broke into wild weeping. "All these are like hands clinging on to life. I wrench their fingers away; I force them down. The glimpses I have of them—it's like the last look on drowning faces."
"Val," he said, hoarsely, "there's time yet. Suppose we don't shirk our trust. Suppose we hold the Fort for the Ganos as long as ever we can."
She took his handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped away her tears, but they flowed and flowed afresh.
"An understanding like ours," he said, hurriedly, "may be superseded—wiped out by a better understanding." With an eagerness that seemed strange to himself, he tried to soothe and reassure her.
His heart shrank at her unlighted look.
"Do you hear, Val? We are not so primitive that we must make a fetich of our compact."
"I'm very primitive, dear; you told me so yourself."
He loosed his hold upon her with a sinking sense of having done something he could never quite undo. Feeling his arms no longer about her, she looked up.
"Poor darling!" she said, framing the dark face in her two hands; "I didn't mean to cry and unnerve you. But it wasn't for me I cried—not even for you. You ought to forgive me that a few tears fell, just this once, over those other graves that nobody will ever remember any more."
He stared down at her, seeing how unmoved his words had left her.
"Haven't you heard what I've been saying to you, dear?"
"What was it?" she said, wearily, putting out her hand to take up another of the faded water-colors. He caught the hand, lifted her in his arms, and carried her to the big chair. He sat, holding her against him, thinking how he should put it to her—this new, this growing sense of his, that the family will to live was stronger than his individual will to die, and that there was justification in this realization for a different compact. He sat weighing the chances of the new life, trying for Val's sake to find loop-holes of escape from the prison he himself had builded, for Val's sake coercing himself to face payment of the long penalty of life and guilty fatherhood; in Val's name even trying to think all might still be well.
He looked down at the face on his breast, and saw that for the moment all was well without his troubling. Val had cried herself to sleep.
Instead of being glad, he was conscious of an absurd irritation. She could sleep, then!
Covertly he watched her the next morning, thinking with surprise:
"Yes, even in the broad daylight and away from the haunted long room, I'm of last night's opinion still. It doesn't matter about me—for her sake I must go on."
"Come and sit on the terrace," he said, when she was leaving the breakfast-room.
"Oh, dearest, not now."
"Why not?"
"I—I'm a house-keeper, you know. I have many things to do in the morning."
"I give you ten minutes by my watch to order dinner."
"Ethan, if you never leave me to myself, I—I can't get ready."
He put his arm through hers, and led her out by the veranda down to the second terrace. The servant was spreading a Navajo blanket on the ground, under the catalpa-tree. Val sat down on the barbaric colored rug, and watched Ethan walking to and fro on the edge of the terrace. When they were alone—
"Did you misunderstand me yesterday, that you talk again to-day of getting ready?"
"No, I understood—I understood that because I cried you were ready to let me break the compact if I wanted to."
He had never heard such contempt in her voice. He stopped and looked at her. Her face was strangely hard.
"Not because you cried, but because I see the matter from another—I think better—point of view."
She shook her head.
"You're deceiving yourself because of me."
Her words angered him unaccountably.
"I should have thought it natural that any woman, especially one of your temperament, would have welcomed the suggestion."
"As if I didn't know it!"
"Know what?"
"That you've been looking out hour by hour, minute by minute, to see if I wasn't showing the white flag."
In his sense of being convicted, he was ready to curse her keenness.
"Do you know, it strikes me you have no inkling of the mother-sense?"
"That's part of my luck," she said, doggedly.
"You don'twantto keep to the first compact?"
"Of course I do; Ishallkeep to it."
"No," he said, quietly.
She started, clasped and unclasped her hands.
"You are only tempting us," she said. "It may look for a moment like a possible thing—it isn't."
"It is perfectly possible if we are not superstitious. The new claim brings a new insight, a new wisdom."
She shivered.
"Think of founding a new existence on broken faith, on cowardice."
"You know you are talking sheer superstition."
She seemed not to hear.
"Do you realize," he went on, "that many people, enlightened enough to admit we have a right to do as we like with ourselves, would deny we had a right to deprive another—"
"You talk as if you didn't know a girl 'deprives' a whole possible family of life every time she says 'No' to a man who asks her to marry him. No use to talk to me, I'm a hardened criminal."
She made a nervous, mocking motion to get up and cut the colloquy short. Ethan stopped her with a gesture of grave rebuke.
"Do you know that, if you had committed all the crimes in the calendar, a capital sentence could not be executed upon you now."
"Think of it!" she said, with indignant eyes. "They'd not only keep the sword hanging over a poor wretch all that time—they'd let her horror and shrinking stamp itself on an innocent creature. Oh, man's justice is an odd jumble!"
"If public justice falls short, what of mine to you?" He walked a few paces up and down. "I've never seen you like this before, Val."
"I've never before lived through such days," she said, very low.
"You deceived me with your calmness."
"You see how necessary it was—you wouldn't have understood that I didn't want to break my oath."
"I understand now." He stopped before her with haggard face. "I come here into a girl's happy life—I take away her content, I snuff out her ambitions, I give her nothing in return. For years I bar the way to marriage—for all time I've shut the door on music. It ismyfault you were allowed no outlet for your energies. I force you back on a barren love for a life-interest, and saying, 'There is only this,' I add, 'Accept it at your peril.' I am filled with horror at the thought of the way I've marred and broken a beautiful life."
"Oh, dear one, don't, don't! It's not true, you know. It wasn't really beautiful till you came."
He shook his head.
"Do you want to make it possible for me ever to think of myself without intolerable loathing?"
"Dear, dear!" She held out her hands.
"Promise me to forget the old evil compact."
"Ethan, you'll regret this," she said, dropping her hands; "it's not you who ask it of me—it's all those others." She nodded towards the dark mass of shadow made by the Fort against the gay autumnal background of scarlet maple and golden elm. "It's the Ganos—it'sshemost of all. I might have known. If you live under her roof, you come under her law."
She knew him too well to imagine she could stand out successfully against his resolution that the compact should be abandoned. What little by little helped to heal her spirit was presently her belief that he not only willed the new course, but desired it. Of that he had fully persuaded her—he had almost persuaded himself.
They were still discussing plans of travel, or, rather, as the days went on, plans of avoiding travel.
"Italy is a long way off," Ethan had said; "we'll go there another year."
Val fought hard and long against abandoning her darling scheme of spending the winter abroad, not giving her persistency its right name. To Ethan's "Why?" she would answer, coaxingly, "I am so amused abroad."
"Dear child, you're amused everywhere."
"It's unfair to take advantage of that."
He did not say so, but he dreaded for her the fatigues of protracted travel. Still, he saw it was imperative they should winter in some warm place. Val's series of colds and threatened delicacy were instinctively avoided in their discussion of plans; but these considerations were seldom out of her husband's mind. As he visualized the coming months, Ethan thought, man-like and naturally enough, "Val will have plenty to occupy her, but I—I must find work to help me through the time." He cast about for the saving grace of hard labor. "I will write my Political Confessions," he said to himself; "just my case has never been put." And he set about sifting his books and notes; ordering government and party reports; indulging freely in the beguiling pastime of "collecting material." About this time he was deep in correspondence with a group of young men who had formerly rallied round him in Boston and New York, but whom, as he now saw, he had too much neglected since his marriage. He felt anew that these men, organized, led, supplied with the sinews of war, had it in them to render America a sorely needed service.
"Val," he said, one day, "how many people can we put up comfortably here?"
She opened her eyes.
"Guests?"
"Yes."
"I thought we were going away ourselves."
"So we are in a fortnight or so, if we can decide where. I should like to have some men here for a few days, if you don't mind."
She turned her head, and looked out of the window.
"Who are the men you want to ask—relations?"
"Relations! No. What made you think— Besides, you know I haven't any but De Poincy."
"Y—yes. Still, I couldn't imagine, just at first, that you'd want a lot of strangers here—now."
"Not if you object, of course. But, since you seemed quite ready to set off to Persia or China at any moment, I couldn't be expected to know you objected to strangers."
"Whom did you want?"
"Oh, it doesn't matter. I was thinking of the two Careys, and Williams and Dunbar."
"The men who are trying to make you get up a Labor paper?"
"The men thatI'mtrying to make devote their great talents, their lives, to saving the country."
There was reproach in his tone, even a kind of hardness that had come into his manner more than once of late. His usually quick-following fit of remorseful tenderness never quite healed the hurt.
"Of course, ask your friends if you like."
She got up and went out of the room. Back and forth under the big tulip-tree she walked in the crisp October air, commanding her face to a pale incommunicativeness, but clinching and unclinching her hands.
A deep discouragement had been growing upon her at Ethan's feverish eagerness to get to work. "You don't seem to have any time at all for play nowadays," she had said to him, half laughing, more than once. He sat overhis writing-table all day, and he read late into the night. For days and days they had not been alone in the old idle blessed way of lovers, and never had she needed him so much. "How shall I be able to go on," she said to herself, "unless he keeps close beside me?"
It was at a garden-party at Julia's that Val went across the lawn to Ethan at the end of a game of tennis, and said:
"I'dlike to give a party at the Fort before we go. What do you think?"
"What kind of a party?"
"A ball. We could light up the grounds and make it look lovely. There's never been a big party at the Fort."
"Well, I don't mind. But you haven't much time now to get it up."
"Let's go and find Julia and Mr. Scherer, and talk it over."
Mrs. Otway told them that Julia had gone into the house for an ice, and they must do likewise. As they passed through the parlor they noticed a group about a portrait of Mrs. Otway, taken in her youth. Some of her neighbors were discussing in discreet undertones whether it was credible that their rotund hostess ever looked like this daughter of the gods.
"I'm sure she did," said Val; "my father has often told me."
"She ought to have died young," said a stranger standing by. "To have looked like that was a great achievement, but the dear lady has cancelled it."
As they moved away Val tried to throw off the impression the speech had made upon her by whispering to Ethan:
"Men seem to forget women have any reason for living except to please the masculine eye." Winning no response, she looked up, laughing. "One comfort of not being a beauty is that people aren't forever remarking how you change."
"Oh, we can do wonders in the way of change without being beauties."
They found Julia, and arranged that she and Tom Scherer should come over in the evening and discuss the ball. The rumor of it went abroad, and little else was talked of in New Plymouth for the intervening days.
Val and Julia sat on the veranda at the Fort the evening after, making out lists of invitations. After all, some of Ethan's friends had been telegraphed to, and were coming from a distance. Mrs. Ball was expected, with all her circle. Val was asking even Baby Whittaker, of abhorred memory.
Ethan, with Scherer and Harry Wilbur, was walking up and down the gravel-path, smoking and talking. Ethan suddenly called out:
"You'd better go in-doors, Val."
"Go in! Why?"
"The dew is falling. You'll take cold."
"Oh no."
He urged the point.
"Don't drive me in this heavenly Indian-summer night!" she pleaded.
They all exclaimed against his barbarity, and he went to get her a shawl. There was nothing in the hall. He rang; no one answered. He went up-stairs.
In vain Val called after him: "I've got my scarf."
Scherer was teasing Julia for not being able to think of anything but the ball.
"You're just as bad."
He protested.
"You men were talking about it, I'll be bound," Julia said.
"No, we weren't, feather-brain," replied Scherer, with a patronizing air.
"Something very far removed from balls," Harry Wilbur put in, with a laugh.
"What?"
"Oh, we were cheerfully considering the ethics of suicide," said Scherer, stretching himself comfortably in a long wicker-chair.
Val started, but no one observed her.
"Pleasant topic," said Julia.
"Quite, if looked at rightly," responded Scherer. "Gano was saying how curiously illogical people are. We've all heard Christian people who shudder at the word 'suicide'—tender women, mothers—who hasn't heard them say, looking back to the early death of a child, 'I've come to thank God for taking him unspotted from the world.'"
"Yes," remarked Julia, "I'm sick of hearing the saying that's always trotted out, 'Our loss, but his gain.'"
"Ah, but don't think it's insincere," said Scherer. "Even the simple-minded may appreciate the safety and dignity of death when the deliverer is introduced by cold, or fever, or ghastly accident, by inherited weakness, even by neglect—inanyway but by the calm and steadfast will of the one chiefly concerned."
Val sat up and stared. Ethan's very intonation had got into Scherer's voice.
"If a fellow's trapped into death," he went on, "it's a blessing; if he goes voluntarily, a disgrace."
"Disgrace or not, it's on the increase," said Wilbur, "and fellows like you had better be careful how you go about advocating—"
"No; I agree with Gano about that. Even when public opinion is more civilized, natural cowardice will keep the death-rate down.Certainto, if social conditions are improved. But even if the number who go that way should be much greater, are you so certain that a voluntary exit is such a mistake? Isn't it the great question that each man should answer for himself?"
"No!" roared Wilbur, excitedly; "he should satisfy a public functionary that he's paid his debts and provided for those who are dependent on him."
"Accepted!" cried Scherer, delighted, "although we'd be establishing an aristocracy of the dead. But, seriously,isn't it for social reformers first to make life less of an indecency for the masses before they insist that each man should hold his life as sacred? Society degrades and brutalizes a man, and yet, forsooth, for thesakeof society he is to hold his insulted life as sacred."
Val leaned back in her chair, wondering if Julia was annoyed at Scherer's aping of Ethan. Was it conceivable that the others didn't see it—didn't hear it?
"Why, the world is overrun," he was saying, in a travesty of Ethan's manner—"overrun with superfluous myriads who are freely allowed to groan, travail, starve. Only, society insists, they must die slowly, and not shock our sensibilities. Or they may turn over a new leaf, and live prosperously by selling their bodies and their souls—anythingrather than reproach us and arraign life by taking themselves off. But cheer up, Wilbur; we can always bring in the usual verdict. Oh, more blessed than Mesopotamia are the words 'temporarily insane'!"
"That's what such people usually are," said Harry, unmoved.
"Of course; don't we read it in every paper?" jeered Scherer—"this woman, that man, starved to death, a paragraph of sentimentality. A suicide gets his column of calumny. The same society that cheerfully permits a man to starve, that supports the system under which hemuststarve, is outraged if the victim doesn't die with decent slowness. Starvation is 'a sad case,' suicide is 'punishable crime.'"
"I used to hear my father," said Val, in a low voice, "wondering at the great sums devoted to the use of hospitals full of idiots, cripples, incurables, and people whowantto die, while the streets of all the cities of the world are full of the young and strong and poverty-stricken who need bread, and are filled only with a passionate desire for life on almost any terms."
Ethan came out with a shawl and a rug. As he was putting the wraps round his wife, he chanced to touch her hand.
"You are cold as ice!" he exclaimed.
"No, no; this is lovely!"
"You mustn't stay out another minute." As he saw she was about to protest again, he cut her short. "If you want to argue, come inside and argue. If you don't, I'll have to carry you."
After their friends had gone, Ethan said something half jocular about Scherer and his new political enthusiasms. "But Scherer will rise. You'll see, he will help to accomplish some of the reforms I've only talked about."
"I dare say; still, I think I prefer your theories at first hand."
"What theories?"
"He kindly continued your conversation after you went to hunt for a shawl."
"Damn him!"
He damned him to his face the next morning.
"What!" said poor Scherer, with open mouth, "not a subject for conversation?"
"Certainly not; the world's not ready for it."
"No, no," said Scherer, rapidly reconstructing; "perhaps not. If the theory were widely accepted it would bring about many avoidable disasters."
"How so?" demanded Ethan, ready in a minute to defend his faith against all comers.
"It might," said Scherer—"might sap the energy and courage of people who, but for its teaching, would go on bravely to the end."
"It is itself 'the brave end.'"
Three days before the ball, Val, coming in from a drive with the Otways, found that Ethan had had a Mexican hammock put up between one of the locust-trees and the giant tulip.
"What a good plan! People who are tired dancing will be glad to find this."
"I wasn't thinking of the ball, oddly enough. What ahorribleracket those men have been making all day putting up the pavilion!"
He leaned his head on his hand. His face looked worn.
"I'm so sorry they disturbed you, but I'm glad the hammock's just for me." She ran out as soon as supper was over to contemplate her new toy. "Ethan!" she called, presently.
He came on to the veranda wearing a hat and carrying a walking-stick.
Her countenance fell.
"Aren't you coming to have a swing?"
He laughed.
"Not for me, thank you!"
"Where are you going?"
"Just for a little walk. It's not good for you to be out after sundown!" he called back as he went off.
She lay in the hammock very still a long while. The frogs far off were iterating their hoarse melancholy. Was it a belated firefly that flickered dejectedly in the chill air? An oppression settled down on her chest, but she never felt it for the greater weight on her heart. She pressed her two hands tight over her face, that the servants might not hear her crying.
"To think that this should beme," she said to herself, in a kind of excitement, "when I meant to be so happy! After all"—she sat up and steadied herself as she swayed—"it's very wonderful to have found life so much better, and so much worse, than anybody ever said. If only Ethan and I could go through the hard places by ourselves, if only there were no one else—oh, God, if only there were no one else!"
She lay back again in the hammock. By-and-by a noise in the house: Ethan putting quick questions, several servants speaking at once, then Ethan's voice, sharp with anxiety, calling:
"Val! Val!"
"Yes, out here."
Hastily she dried her face.
He came out.
"You surely have not been out here ever since—"
"Yes; ever since you went away and left me."
But she spoke almost brightly.
"Well, I must say I think you might have remembered—"
"Can't remember but one thing at a time. I was thinking about something else."
"You're not to be trusted," he said, gravely.
"Not a bit," she agreed. "I'm an eye-servant. The minute your back's turned— Oh, I require a great deal of looking after—and"—with a laugh that broke suspiciously—"I don't get it."
She had stood up, holding fast to him, as she freed herself from the hammock and the rug. He drew her hand through his arm and went with her to the house.
"No, no," she said, stopping at the veranda, "Iwant a little walk, too."
Demurring, he put the rug round her and they went on.
"I've been thinking it would be a good idea to go to California for the winter," he said, presently.
"You've seen California."
"Butyouhaven't."
"No, and I don't want to."
"Is that true?"
"Well, it's true that I want to see other places more—queerer places, farther off, that I can't imagine for myself."
"Don't flatter yourself that you can imagine California. I was thinking I ought to look after my ranch there. And, besides, the place in Oakland is really beautiful. I could make you very comfortable there."
"Could you?" she said, wistfully. "But, after all, 'comfortable' is for ninety."
"It is curious that I should have to remind you we mustn't think now only of ourselves."
How stern the eyes could look—the mouth, how hard! They walked on in silence, down the first terrace, and along the second. No wilderness rioted below, all waspruned and trimmed and primly smiling. In the middle of what Mrs. Gano had been used to call "the Lower Plateau" stood the dancing pavilion, finished that day, all but the outward trappings of flags and lanterns.
"I believe you'd like the house at Oakland." He spoke more gently than before. "There's a garden and a little orange-grove, and the land slopes down to the sea."
"Do you look out on the Golden Gate?" she asked, quickly, and then added, involuntarily: "But, after all, what do I care about that? I want to see people in other lands, and find out what life looks like tothem."
"You can do something of the sort later, if you like."
"Oh, later! later! Everybody's said 'later' to me ever since I was born. Who knows whether I'llevergo at all if I don't go now?"
"Ha!" he said, with a flash, "now we have therealreason."
She lowered her eyes and was dumb.
"Will you tell me why, just lately, when you have greater incentive than you ever had before, you seem to have less hope, a weaker hold on life?"
"All imagination," she said, evasively. "Listen to that woodpecker." Her head drooped, dreamily. How pale she looked in the gray light! "He's tapping the old locust-tree under my window, just as he used to—hundreds of years ago—when I was a little girl."
"Val," he said, "you are not like yourself."
"No," she answered, vaguely.
He took her face between his hands as if to catch and concentrate the wandering spirit.
"Where is the old Val gone? I want her back."
The slow tears filled her eyes. "You mustn't mind, dear; she went away, I think, one of those days—"
"What days?"
"When, with all that pain, everything was made ready."
He dropped his hands, but she caught them. "I wishwecould go away, too. But far, very far from here, where everything is new and strange."
"Oh, my dearest," he said, brokenly, "surely, surely, with so much at stake, we can readjust ourselves to the changed conditions."
She drew one hand across her eyes. "You call yourself weak," she said, "but it's no surprise to me to find how much stronger you are than I.Youcan make yourself face about, manfully enough."
"Well, and so can you." He searched the sensitive white face that gave no sign. What strange and unsuspected enemy had that not unvaliant spirit encountered in her path? As he looked at her, something born of their nearness—terrible offspring of true marriage—spoke to him out of the silence, telling him how each time this woman went straying in thought along that way of promise that is wont to smile so benignly upon young expectant wives, each time, before she could taste any of the natural joy and pride in her estate, came crushing back upon her the dead weight of their long fear, the gathered momentum of all their long terror-stricken fleeing.
The sudden change in his face showed her that her secret was no longer her own.
"Oh, what is it like?" she cried out, suddenly. "What is it like to have hoped and longed all these months, instead of dreaded?"
"Hush! hush!" he said, shrinking.
"I, who was so eager to know all that womencanknow, I shall never know that."
He sank down on the terrace-steps in the twilight, and buried his face in his hands.
"Did I ever tell you"—her voice sounded faint and far above him, like the voice of some disembodied spirit—"did I ever tell you how proud I used to be to know my father once said that I was the symbol of my parents' single year of perfect happiness, the inheritor of the best moments life had brought them? Ethan"—she bent over him, whispering hurriedly and panting a little like one pursued—"the thought clutches at me in the night, it won't let me go—"
"What thought?" said the muffled voice.
"That for a child of fear and shrinking there isn't much place in this world."
No answer.
She sat down beside him. Like a frightened child she crouched up against him. "All those times of dread come back, their evil faces frowning. Bad fairies! they wait for—for the new-comer with sinister gifts in their hands."
"Don't think such thoughts." He seized her arm roughly.
"No, no; help me not to," she said, shuddering. "But I wish I knew what it had been like to my mother—that first knowledge."
"You may be sure she was glad."
"Yes, yes; not like that hour in the long room, not aswewelcomed our—"
"You shall not talk so! to think of it so is a crime." He leaped to his feet. "Do you hear?—a crime."
She seemed to cower there below him on the step.
"And yet," she whispered, "whenever we look at the child we shall remember that hour. He'll wear my shrinking in his poor little face. Oh, what shall I do? In that hour, it may be, I branded my child!"
He sat beside her all night long while she tossed and dozed, and in her sleep pressed both hands to her breast, moaning faintly now and then. The doctor had been sent for at midnight, and came again in the early morning.
"He's frightened!" said Val, watching the door as he went out after the second visit. "So are you." She smiled. "You're forgetting how hard we Ganos are to kill."
"You'll soon be all right."
She studied him. "You're only frightened on top." He wondered if she were wandering. "Underneath," she went on, "you're thinking this would be a solution."
"Hush, hush!" He put his arms round her. "You must remember me, dear."
She nestled in his arms. "She used to say we Ganos weredreadfullyhard to kill. We have to face that."
"Don't think of having to face things; forget it all."
She scanned his face eagerly. "Where shall I begin?"
"Begin?"
"Yes—to forget."
Did she mean to ask whether she was to forget the old compact, or its new annulment?
"Begin to forget where the pain begins," he said, evasively.
"That would carry us back a long way. But anyhow, I won't do it. Pain or no pain,Idon't mean to forget."
"Yes, yes," he said, soothingly.
"But I don'twantto."
He looked down at her perplexed.
"I don't mean to forget anything, not even the sad things. I don't want to letanythinggo."
"Well, well." He smoothed the wild brown hair.
"To forget is to lose a bit of your life," she said, catching at his hand. "What was it you said once? it was a first victory for that spectre Annihilation that dogs us all. I didn't believe in your Annihilation then. Not very sure I do now."
She laid his hand, for comfort, over the ache in her breast.
Worn out towards morning, and yet afraid to undress lest the doctor might have suddenly to be brought, Ethan stretched himself on the sofa under the east window. He was scarcely comfortably relaxed, when Val, who had not spoken for hours, said:
"Why do you stay so far off?"
He was up in a moment.
"Do you want something?"
"Yes; I want you near."
"Oh, very well; I was afraid of waking you."
Heavy with sleep, he threw himself across the foot of the big four-poster. She pushed herself down in the bed till her feet under the covers felt his body through all the clothes, then she lay quite still. Ethan dozed and dreamed.
He awoke suddenly with the impression Val had called him. He raised himself on his elbow. She seemed to be asleep. He leaned his tired head against the bedpost, turning his face to the east. The gray dawn was coming in faintly at the window. The things in the room looked spectral.
Dimly through the window he thought he could see the shadow of the encircling hills. As he lay looking out, a little voice, so faint and far it might have come with the dawn from behind the hills:
"It is no superstition that oaths are binding."
He held his breath to listen.
"If we deny them with our lips, our nerves are loyal still."
Then silence. The light grew clearer.
"Our lives were set to the key of our oath," said the little voice. "When we denied it, discord came."
He tried to speak; a kind of paralysis held the muscles of his throat.
"It's like the one lie that calls for a thousand, for a life of lies. We don't lie well, we Ganos."
Another longer silence; then a fluttering sigh as of one eased from a mighty burden.
"Oh, I'm so glad the morning's come! You haven't kissed me, Ethan."
He rose up without a word, kissed her, and went out.
Of course, the ball had been postponed—"only for a week," Val insisted, and Ethan had agreed. Later this same day, he, still sitting there in the blue room, wondering against his will at her recovered spirits, refusing to understand, asked her if the pain was gone. She made the motion "No," moving the brown head from side to side on the pillow.
"You are suffering a great deal?" he faltered, as he bent above her.
She was evidently not thinking of the kind of pain he meant.
"If I were partly paralyzed, as lots of people are," shesaid, with something of the old defiance, "it would hurt less, I suppose. When I feel like shrinking, I just remember it's a sign none of me is dead yet, that I can suffer from my head to my feet as horribly as this."
"Val!" He sank down on his knees and buried his head in the coverlet.
"But I'll have all eternity for being free of pain. When I remember that"—she pulled herself up and spoke in a clear, practical tone—"it brings me to my senses."
"What can I do for you, dear—what can I do?"
"Don't go away."
"I won't."
"I'm afraid you will."
"Don't be afraid."
"Not to collect material for 'Confessions'?"
"No," he said, smiling dimly.
"Not even to write to the Saviours of America?"
"No."
"I hate those Saviours! America doesn't need 'em."
"She has only to say so," he said, his old sensitive vanity a little stung.
"Oh, America is all right."
"Very well, America."
He drew up the chair again and sat closer to the bedside.
"I shall love being ill, if you don't go away," she said, smiling.
"I sha'n't go away any more, even when you're well."
"Really?"
"Yes."
"You sure you're an honest Injun?"
"Injun of flawless integrity."
"Then I shall be well to-morrow."
And to all appearance shewaswell two days afterwards. When she came down-stairs she was protesting gayly that she was really quite ill, and must have all an invalid's privileges.
"Is it a bargain?" she stopped half-way down the stair. "If it isn't, I'm going back to bed."
"Yes, all the privileges," he agreed.
"And you won't go away and write for the 'Saviours'?"
He laughed, took her down, and established her in the long room.
"I shall be very particular, or else what's the fun of being an invalid? And I know what to expect. I was ill once before. Grandma gave me a delicious glass of sangaree."
"You shall have sangaree." He made it himself. "Now, what else did she do for you?" he demanded, like one put upon his mettle.
Val glanced up at him slyly.
"Grandmaused to read suitable selections from the Bible."
He leaned against her chair, looking down into her face, smiling as she hadn't seen him smile for many a day.
"Ican give you suitable selections," he said, with shining eyes. "'Behold, thou art fair, my love; behold, thou art fair; thou hast doves' eyes within thy locks: thy hair is as a flock of goats that appear from Mount Gilead.' 'Thy lips are like a thread of scarlet—'"
The voice that to her was different from all the voices of earth went thrilling along her nerves as it had done the first night she heard it at the gate, when in ignorant girl-fashion she had known no more than, "I must follow, follow, follow, wherever it may lead."
That night she whispered passionately, "You are loving me more than ever you did."
"Yes," he said, holding her close; "the old Val has come back to me."
"There's another reason," she said in her heart.
Val had at last agreed to go to California.
"Are we sure to be ready to leave the Fort on Thursday?" she asked.
"Why Thursday?"
"Because of the ball."
"I should think we would be quite ready; but does it matter?"
"Very much."
"Why?"
"Oh—a—there'll be a kind of lull after the ball, and I'd rather—a—"
"Go out with flags flying? I understand."
She had laid even New York under tribute for herfête. With the help of achef, a florist, and a decorator, a good deal of money had been spent to astonishingly effective ends, considering the smallness of the space at command. It was hard, even with tons of flowers, to make the old Fort anything but simple and grim; but the more gracious garden, and above all the terraces, lent themselves kindly to flower aisles and arches, and a fairyland scheme of lighting.
The maid was putting the last touch to her mistress's ball-dress.
"That's enough. Now go and ask Mr. Gano to come here a moment."
Val turned a moment later and saw him at the door. The dead black and white of his evening dress gave the fine ivory of his face an added pallor. She looked at him with quickening pulse. No wonder women had found the haunting beauty of that face a troubling memory. As he leaned against the door, fastening a flower in his coat, smiling in at her in the old enigmatic way, she felt suddenly what it would be to her to lose her empire over that restless, homeless spirit. If they were meaning to go on and on, as other people did, how could they hope to escape other people's ending? And she smiled back at him suddenly in a fierce, triumphant fashion. He came forward into the room.
"What is it? Why do you look like that?"
"How do I look?"
"As if—as if—well, I should keep out of your way if I'd done you any wrong."
She laughed as she pulled on her long white glove.
"Am I such a gorgon in my new gown?"
His eyes went slowly over her with a kind of worship in them. She trembled slightly. "Not one pretty word for all my pains?"
He knelt down before her, bent the dark head, and kissed her little white shoes.
As they met a moment in the lancers, Val said: "I wishshecould have seen the old Fort to-night.Sheloved splendor, too." She laughed up at him like a delighted child.
"I've been amused," he whispered back, "to hear people saying it's the most beautiful ball that's ever been given in the State."
"Well, of course, I meant it to be"; and she was whirled away.
It was about two o'clock in the morning that Ethan made his way out of the pavilion, with a feeling of unsupportable weariness. He must get away from all those noisy, irrelevant people; above all, he must get away from the sight of Val's unthinking joy. He walked on to the far corner of the osage-orange thicket, and stood there in the deepest part of the shadow. Down below the terraces the music clanged and jarred. The round Japanese lanterns, festooned from tree to tree, were like strings of giant gems, yellow topaz, rose and scarlet coral, lapis lazuli, turquoise, and opal. The late Indian summer night was not cold; every one had been saying, "What wonderful weather!" but to Ethan there was more than a hint of winter in the pungent air. There was that obscure menace, that sense of melancholy lying behind all, and round all, like the sea. Autumn had brought this message to him since his childhood. It was the time when Nature seemed to pause a while in her ceaseless masque of the seasons to whisper her one honest word into the ear of man. "Be warned!" she seemed to say; "be warned!"
Then he remembered—without reassurement, rather with displeasure—that Val's pulses beat time to a brisker measure. To her the mysterious message had translated itself into a breathless sense of something new and strange on its way to her, "something wonderful going to happen, that never happened in the world before." Fresh realization of this "difference" that spread through all their life made to his harassed sense a clear line of cleavage down between their souls; and he felt himself alone. He remembered her merry look as he passed her and Wilbur on the way up the terrace, her mocking whisper, "Not one of the 'Saviours' can dance. Oh,poorAmerica!" Even while he smiled at the remembrance, he was saying in his heart, "At this moment she can laugh and jest, and give a ball!" Then he reproached himself. Bah! woman is a grown-up child. How should sherealizeexistence! She has no system of faith or of philosophy. Her life is a string of moods—white pearls and black upon a thread of hazard.