Produced by Suzanne Shell, Martin Pettit and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
file was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)






THE OPEN QUESTION

_A Tale of Two Temperaments_

_By_
ELIZABETH ROBINS
(_C. E. Raimond_)

AUTHOR OF "GEORGE MANDEVILLE'S HUSBAND"

[Illustration: Logo]

HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
1899


Copyright, 1898, by HARPER & BROTHERS.

_All rights reserved._




THE OPEN QUESTION




CHAPTER I


It is not always easy to trace the origin of an American family, even
when the immediate progenitor did not begin life as a boot-black or a
prospector, without so much as a "grub stake." The Ganos had been people
of some education and some means--clergymen, merchants going to and from
the West Indies, or home-keeping planters in the South--for the little
space of a hundred years before the Civil War. Further back than
that--darkness.

Whether the name was of Huguenot, Flemish, Italian, or other origin, the
Ganos themselves, like thousands of families of consequence in America,
never pretended to know. Only one of the race ever evinced the least
disposition to care.

In the family mind, to be born a Gano was of itself so shining an
achievement as almost to constitute an unfair advantage over the rest of
mankind. The name (which was rigidly accented on the final syllable) was
held to confer a distinction peculiar and sufficient, difficult as it
may be for the inhabitants of a larger world to realize on what the
illusion lived. The Ganos had never been enormously rich; they had never
done anything of national or even of municipal importance, unless
founding a religious paper and endowing a theological seminary to spread
a faith which they themselves speedily abandoned--unless these modest
achievements might be construed as taking some sort of interest in
public concerns. They held themselves aloof from politics, and
religiously minded their own affairs. The oddest thing, perhaps, about
their naïve veneration for the house of Gano was that so many of their
neighbors shared it. Generation after generation, it imposed itself upon
the community they lived in. To be able to say of a vexed question,
"Gano agrees with me," was to turn the scale at once in the speaker's
favor. A stranger would be told, "Smith married a Gano, you see," as
though that single phrase established Smith's claims on your
consideration.

The usual American fashion of that time of giving double or treble names
was not followed in the christening of the daughters of Gano, so that
after marriage each girl might retain her patronymic, writing it after
her Christian name and before her husband's. The eldest son of every
daughter was called Gano, and Gano was given to each succeeding child
for a middle name. This had been going on for some time, and yet neither
Maryland nor any more favored spot was populous with Ganos. They had not
been a prolific race, and but a single _mésalliance_ was set down to
their discredit. A Gano had once married a New England school-mistress
with a turn for preaching. This unpopular lady's offspring, John
Gano--the only son of an only son--died eleven years before the Civil
War, leaving a widow, two sons, and a daughter. These three survivors in
the direct line of male descent, Ethan, John, and Valeria, were
unmistakably delicate children. The neighbors had doubts if their mother
would rear them.

The widow, "one of the Calverts of Baltimore," held to be a very
retiring and religious person, soon discovered a force of character and
an energy not too common among women of her class in the slave-holding
South. She managed her husband's estate and the education of her
children with ability and judgment, albeit arbitrarily enough, save in
matters of religion.

Was it a breath wafted across the years of that old passion for
religious liberty that had carried her ancestors over perilous seas--an
echo of the Eve of St. Bartholomew, or of some Lollard wrong--that made
so strangely tolerant this autocratic woman, turned Baptist in her
strenuous youth, inclining now, through throes of spirit incommunicable,
to the Episcopacy her dead husband had abandoned?

The element of the grotesque in this battering in succession at the
different doors of heaven is more apparent to those never storm-tossed
souls that venture not from the haven, so content with being spiritually
becalmed that striving after truth and faring far in pursuit of it seem
childish and ignoble. Such people smile at Newman, and think themselves
magnanimous if they accept his "Apology." Mrs. Gano had gone
unflinchingly through those seasons of spiritual stress, common enough
among the thoughtful of that time, and so difficult for some of us
to-day even to imagine. In spite of her strong self-control and her
great practical common-sense, her passionately religious nature had
hurried her headlong through one doctrinal crisis after another. Her
youth and early maturity had been one wide spiritual battle-field. Not
that a moment of unbelief in revealed religion ever troubled her, but
questions of the true interpretation, questions of dogma and of form,
that might as well have been questions of life and death. And all the
while, up and down the highway of her youth, raged the ancient dragons,
renamed Election and Reprobation.

Whether as a result of enlightenment, brought her by her own honest
seeking, or a tradition in the blood, compelling her to give as well as
to demand perfect liberty of conscience in the affairs of faith, this
imperious mother let her tyrannously tended young brood wander whither
they would along the by-ways of religious experience. To look back a
moment upon the infantine struggles of these young crusaders in the Holy
War is to realize afresh how far the race has travelled since that day.
These mere children, with their fear of hell and of damnation, their
"changes of heart," conversions, and pathetic joy at being "saved," had
for their vividest remembrance of their father the abiding vision of his
kneeling down with them in the great dim parlor at Ashlands, praying,
with hands uplifted and with tears, that these "little ones" might not
be lost forever.

No one ever knew how much hold these religions ecstasies had taken upon
Ethan. But John was violently wrought upon; and most impressed of all
was the small but preternaturally precocious Valeria. At a time when she
should have been romping in the open air or reading fairy-tales in a
corner she was living through days of agonized doubt on the subject of
her soul's salvation, and crying softly in the night to think of that
outer darkness into which unbelievers were certain to be cast--a
darkness lit only by lurid flames from "the lake that burneth forever
and ever."

Little John had gone through a varied and, on the whole, triumphant
spiritual experience by the time he was ten. At that ripe age he was
baptized by immersion on public confession of faith. His mother, having
now maturer views on the subject, was not among the group at the
river-side; but she made no effort to divert the boy's enthusiasm from a
form of belief that for her was losing its significance. She would sit
on the long white veranda in those first months of her widowhood
re-reading D'Aubigné and Bishop Spalding's _History of the Protestant
Reformation_, sandwiching Wesley with patristic writings, balancing
Arian against Socinian, and drawing conclusions of her own, while her
eldest boy was writing hymns to Apollo instead of construing his Cæsar,
and John, the centre of an admiring crowd down by the river, was being
dipped instead of being sprinkled, which it presently appeared was the
only true and orthodox way.

If some of the Ganos had of late been mightily earnest in their
religious experiences, they had long been "musical" in a pottering kind
of way. They would have assured you more than half seriously that music
was a "pottering" pursuit--a pastime for boating-parties on the Potomac
or rainy evenings at home, not for a moment to be regarded as a
profession, except for long-haired foreigners. Mrs. John, or, as she now
called herself, "Mrs. Sarah C. Gano," accepted this point of view
cheerfully enough, as she had not a note of music in her. Her children's
passion for singing and playing came early under the head of "noise,"
and under the ban of her displeasure.

Therefore, when it was discovered that the eldest boy had done badly in
his third year at Dr. Baylis's Academy for Young Gentlemen, and that Dr.
Baylis accounted for his pet pupil's falling off by saying the boy
played the piano, and even wrote music, when he should have been doing
mathematics, great was the mother's disappointment in her son, and
renewed objection to the Art Divine. Ethan came home for his holidays in
disgrace. It was significant of the mastery Mrs. Gano had obtained over
her not unspirited children that, without being formally forbidden to
play at home, Ethan never dared touch the piano the whole vacation
through. It was this privation, he used to say later on, that drove him
into the Church. He had got beyond the banjo and singing with the blacks
down in the negro quarter. He longed for the coming of that day in the
week when he might hear the sound of the organ, and even such a choir as
they had at St. Peter's Episcopal Church in Catawbaville, where, the
Baptist phase having been painfully passed, the entire family now went
to church twice every Sunday, rain or shine. Ethan made friends with the
rector, and whether out of gratitude for the Rev. Mr. Searle's
permission to practise in the church, or from the reflection that Holy
Orders presented a means of combining a livelihood with an organ, the
upshot was that Ethan presently became a student of Divinity.

At the beginning of his last year at the Theological School at
Baltimore, he fell in love with a pretty Boston girl who had come South
on a visit to a school friend. For the first time in his life flatly
disobeying his mother's wishes, he married the little lady forthwith.
Under conditions of great privation, they took up life in Baltimore
till Ethan should be ordained. Ten months afterwards a son opened his
eyes upon the world, and the girl-wife closed hers forever.

The passive horror that falls on passionate young life laid desolate by
death, the hush that seems to lie shroud-like on the world, was rent and
blown to the four winds of heaven by the clarion note of war. In his
bewilderment and helplessness after his wife's death, Ethan had allowed
his mother-in-law, Mrs. Aaron Tallmadge, to take the baby home with her
for a visit to Boston. A few weeks before his appointed ordination,
young Gano joined the Southern army. About the time he was to have taken
the vows that should make him a man of peace and a priest, Ethan Gano
was rushing blindly with Kirby Smith's brigade across the fields from
Manassas Station, among the first to break and rout the Union ranks and
give his life for a Southern victory in the battle of Bull Run.

It was said in Catawbaville that none of the disasters other Southerners
were fearing could add much to Mrs. Gano's grief after the loss of her
eldest son. She had been a striking, although fragile-looking, woman,
tall, arrow-straight, and auburn-haired, just entering on middle life,
when she went to her own room and closed the door behind her that day
the despatch came after Bull Run. A few weeks later, when she came forth
again, it seemed to her awe-struck household that it was an old woman
who appeared among them, with stern, blanched face, bowed shoulders, and
abundant hair whitening at the temples. But what her altered looks
called forth of sympathy, her reticent manner either held at bay or
ruthlessly rebuffed. She went nowhere, received no one. Months
afterwards a neighbor, seeing her by chance, offered some conventional
but kindly meant condolence. The look of cold surprise that any one
should venture to come near her grief sealed up the fountain of
neighborly sympathy. The rumor going forth that Mrs. Gano was more
unapproachable than ever since Ethan's death, her friends left her to
the solitude she was rightly understood to demand. But vain for her to
shut and double-lock the great white gates of Ashlands--the tide of war
swept on and in, and overwhelmed the house.

It is no part of the purpose of this account to tell in detail the old
story of Southern losses, scenes of impotent indignation at the
quartering of Northern soldiers in Confederate houses, wanton violence
to property, and greater violence still to the old-fashioned Southern
sense of personal dignity. These were the commonplaces of the war.
Almost equally common were the lamentations in the negro quarters when
the word went forth that the slaves were free, that they were to turn
their backs on the patriarchal life and get them out into the world to
taste the bitter and the sweet of independence.

When Mrs. Gano found that her belated private proclamation through her
overseer, months after that of the President, had the inadequate effect
of relieving her of but one negro, she assembled her household servants
and plantation folk round the long veranda, and told them they were
free. Uncle Charlie, as the accepted mouth-piece of the Gano niggers,
stepped forward and pulled off his dilapidated hat.

"We done yeah somethin' 'bout dis 'mancyperation befo', but we don' gib
no 'count to it, Mis' G'no."

"But I tell you it's true, and you must go. I'll have a fair division
made of what's left in the quarter--of clothes and tools and food,
and--"

"Law, ma'am, don' go fur t' do dat," said Cæsar, the gardener, grinning
cheerfully, "we ain't gwine t' leab yo'."

"Yes, it is best you should," said the mistress.

"Bress yo' soul, ma'am"--old Charlie pulled his woolly white forelock
and bowed low--"de G'nos hab stood by us a po'ful long time, an' now we
gwine to stan' by de G'nos in dis yer trouble. We ain't gwine t' leab
yo' t' de mussy o' dem Yankees."

"No, no, nebber w'ile de blessed Lawd sabes po' sinners," Mississippi
Maria lifted up her voice and eyes and hands.

"The Yankees have given you your freedom," said Mrs. Gano, with wasted
scorn.

"I don' gib' no 'count t' what de po' white trash says dey'll do fur
me," said Uncle Charlie, loftily; "I b'longs t' de G'nos."

"Yah, yah, we b'longs t' de G'nos," the murmur went through the crowd.

"Of course you do, by rights," said the mistress, with a flash of fire.
"But we can't keep our rights, it seems. So just make the best of this
liberty, now you've got it; make the best of it, as young Jerry did."

She waved her hand, dismissing them. Sensation in the crowd, and some
whispering. Jerry senior created a diversion by pulling himself together
and venturing up one of the long, low steps of the veranda. He held out
two coal-black hands with pallid palms.

"Don' git mad, Mis' G'no, 'count o' Jerry. Jerry been a po' sort o'
chile eber since de Lawd made him," urged his earthly father, with a
comfortable sense of having no responsibility in the matter. "Jerry been
jes' dyin' fo' 'bout a year fur t' see dat yaller gal, Liza, yo' sen' to
yo' sister down Kentucky way. Dat's wha' he's a-gwine. Yo' won't catch
no G'no nigger gwine near de Yankees."

"If he's been dying to go so long, why didn't he set off in January?"

"In Janoowerry? Yo' only sent us word yes'day mawnin'."

"Hadn't Jerry heard of Lincoln's precious Proclamation at the New-Year?"

"Oh ye-es, ma'am, he done yeah."

There was a moment's pause, and then the father pulled his shambling
figure up.

"Jerry ain't much 'count, but he ain't clean gone crazy. He know it all
bery well fo' de Yankee Pres'dent fo' to say he wus free. But Jerry know
he jes' better hold his hosses till he yeah what Mis' G'no got t' say
'bout dat. Jerry been waitin' roun' since Janoowerry t' yeah wot yo' got
t' say."

"Well, I've told you."

Uncle Charlie stepped forward, pulled old Jerry off the step without
ceremony, and said, severely: "Yo' got a heap o' gab, but yo' better
tote yo'self down to de gyarden an' do yo' chores." Then, looking up at
the mistress: "An' 'tain't no use, ma'am, fo' yo' t' stan' up dah on de
po'ch an' tell us we all 'mancyperated, and yo' don' care nuthin' no mo'
'bout us. Dar's a heap o' cotton got t' be picked, and we got t' pick
it." He turned away to his companions: "Come 'long, yo' lazy black
niggers, jes' stir yo' stumps!"

"No, Charlie, no; the cotton must rot in the fields." Blank astonishment
swept over the dusky crowd.

"Golly!" said one or two under their breath, while the others stood
speechless, with mouths open and round eyes fixed and staring.

"Ef yo' thinkin' 'bout us bein' 'mancyperated an' 'spectin' to be
_paid_," began Jerry, while a ripple of contempt at the notion passed
over the bewildered throng, "well, we _ain't_ 'spectin'."

"You are expecting to be fed," said Mrs. Gano, more gently than they
were accustomed to hear their mistress speak, "and that's more than I
can do for so many any longer."

The newly emancipated lifted up their voices and wept.

"For Law's sake, don' sen' us away, Mis' G'no!"

"I reckon yo' can't git 'long widout me and Tom nohow."

"We don' want nuthin' to eat," said Mississippi Maria, sobbing, while
she cuffed the only completely happy person present--a youth of four or
five, who clung to her skirt with one hand, while with the other he
clutched a section of green melon. "Put dat down, yo' greedy gump!"--his
grandmother clouted him over the head till he, too, joined in the
general lamentation--"stuffin' yo'self wid watermillion fo' ladies."

"We gwine to wuk hard _dis_ time, Mis' G'no," said another voice from
out the general clamor, "and we don't need no bacon. Corn-pone and
'lasses is 'nough fo' any nigger."

"I'm sorry for you, but the Northerners have not only freed you, they
have crippled us. We can't afford to have you here any longer. You must
all go, except Jerusha and her children."

There was a lull of incredulity, and then a steadily rising storm of
dismal howling.

"'Tain't fair!" shrieked old Chloe. "I done come yer fust--long befo'
Jerusha. Missis! Missis! I done come to G'nos fo' yo' did yo'self."

"I _dassent_ leab yo'," Jerry persisted. "Massa 'd 'mos' 'a' killed me
ef he'd ebber thought I'd leab yo' and little missy to dem debbils o'
Yankees. 'Tain't safe, ma'am--'tain't safe."

It was not Mrs. Gano's way to show emotion. She turned abruptly, and
disappeared in the house. She had the well-earned reputation of being no
easy mistress. But she had treated her slaves justly, according to her
lights, and this hour of enforced setting them adrift was bitter on
other than political and economic grounds.




CHAPTER II


At the close of the war the Ganos were ruined. The rambling, verandaed
house was sold for a song to the Gano-Lees, and the question was, where
could John with his delicate health, his interrupted and insufficient
schooling, make a livelihood? Where could Mrs. Gano live most
inexpensively, and with least annoyance to sensibilities so outraged by
the issue of the war? Certainly not in Virginia--not anywhere in the
despoiled, prostrate South. Certainly not in the hated North. But the
West--

Far off in the wilds of one of the Middle States, Mrs. Gano's father,
William Calvert, had once held property, and in her early youth she had
been taken from Baltimore in a stage-coach over the Alleghany Mountains
to visit him during one of his long absences from home on business in
connection with these Western lands. He had bought a queer, grim house
in a little town on a river among the Mioto Hills, and made himself
there a temporary home or headquarters for these yearly Western
pilgrimages. The State where he had his interests was the first one
carved out of the great Northwestern Territory, and though later on a
much farther West robbed this mid-America of its early century
associations of adventure and of danger, it was far remoter from the
Atlantic seaboard then than the Pacific is to-day.

The house that Mrs. Gano inherited from her father had been built in
times of Indian warfare for a fortress and ammunition centre. With the
retreat of the Indians to the Western Reservation, the settlement's need
of a fort was less than the need of a school. The solid and spacious
rectangular building of stone on the height above the river was turned
into an academy for boys. A rival school sapped its prosperity in time;
it declined into bankruptcy, and came upon the market. William Calvert
bought it, made it into a dwelling-house, ultimately adding a wooden L,
and establishing his partner's family there. This house in the small but
growing town of New Plymouth was all that was left to his eldest
daughter when his shrunken estate was divided at his death. Through
former acquaintances of William Calvert, the position of teller in the
principal bank of the town was obtained for John Gano; and hither at the
close of the war came Mrs. Gano with her son of twenty and her daughter,
Valeria, nineteen.

New Plymouth was not looked upon by its inhabitants as at all beyond the
pale of a most advanced civilization. Founded by stout New-Englanders,
it was one of the oldest settlements in this part of the world. It had
its churches, its court-house, its excellent academy for boys and its
unparalleled seminary for young ladies, when the present capital of the
State was a wild unpeopled plain, crossed by winding cow-paths.

Mrs. Gano soon discovered that her own view of her exile among a ruder
people, and to a narrower and more primitive life, was not likely to be
shared by her neighbors, proud of their New England origin, and secure
in their honest self-esteem. This difference of view was a matter quite
unimportant to the new-comer, except that it made it easier to carry out
her plan of refraining from any share in the active life of the bustling
little community.

"I am an invalid," she gave out; "I neither pay nor receive visits."

She did not even go often to church. The Rev. Mr. Collins was "a person
of no education," she decided, "and spoke with a vile Western accent."
But she rented a pew, and with rigid regularity sent the children to sit
in it. Her children! As she called them, so she treated them--John, six
feet two, doing a man's work in the world, with a man's spirit, and the
tall, grave Valeria.

The girl was an enigmatic creature, silent, self-absorbed, shrinking
from the give-and-take of social life. It was not the cross to her that
it was to her more genial brother that their mother's craving for
solitude, and not too Christian contempt for her well-meaning neighbors,
precluded asking people to the house. But the young man, after the young
man's fashion, escaped to some extent the tyranny of home conditions. He
had come forth from his juvenile predilection for pious observances. He
had developed a passion for natural science, and yet was content to work
hard all day in the bank, and to spend his free evenings in a rapidly
acquired circle of new friends. In summer there were moonlight drives
and walks; there was boating on the Mioto, and singing songs and
discreet love-making on the "stoops" of the houses of the prettiest
girls. In the mild weather, too, sometimes combining a picnic with the
pursuit of knowledge, he would make up a party to go to Black Hand or
Cedar Rock, where the hills were rich in fossils, and sometimes he would
go farther afield to find specimens in the coal seams of the region. In
winter there were church sociables, "taffy-pulls," sleigh-rides, and
skating-parties. He was, in short, living an active and healthy life
under conditions not intrinsically inspiring, perhaps, except to the
inner vision of ardent youth.

His mother offered no objection to his amusing himself in New Plymouth's
somewhat crude society, but took quick alarm at a piece of chance gossip
repeated by the privileged factotum, Aunt Jerusha.

"Massa John done got a reel truly-truly sweetheart _dis_ time. He'll be
marryin' her berry soon, by all 'counts."

It came out that the lady in question was Miss Hattie Fox. Who _was_
Miss Hattie Fox? Valeria had seen her at church. She was very pretty,
and her father was senior warden at St. Thomas's on Sundays, and
attorney-at-law at 114 Main Street on week-days. To Mrs. Gano's evident
annoyance, nothing obviously objectionable could be urged against the
girl. The next Sunday, Mrs. Gano went to church. Coming out, the
impulsive John went forward, and had a precious whispered word with the
lady in question. As the young people reached the bottom of the church
steps, his mother touched him on the shoulder.

"Introduce Miss Fox to me," she said.

John performed the ceremony with the air of one who lights a
powder-train, and against all canons of prudence stands waiting to see
the explosion. But, behold! his mother was most gracious.

"Your family have been very hospitable to my son," she said. "I am an
invalid, and do not entertain, but if you will come to supper some
evening, my daughter and I will be glad to see you. Could you come
to-night?"

"Oh yes; _do_ come," urged the smiling and unwary John.

She came. She was certainly a beautiful and amiable creature, but
nevertheless John found himself fighting valiantly against the sudden
temptation to judge her by a brand-new standard. His mother's soft
Southern voice made Hattie's Western burr sound curiously common, and
the manners he had thought delightfully vivacious seemed boisterous on a
sudden. As he listened through his mother's ears, it dawned upon him for
the first time that the girl laughed too loudly and too constantly. He
set his acute discomfort down to his humiliating lack of discernment in
the past, and too easy conquest by mere good looks. He did not realize
that Hattie's gaucheries were intensified by her nervous awe of Mrs.
Gano. She had never known any one in the least like her hostess, and so
far from failing in respect, she was so deeply impressed that in her
wonder and veneration she was driven to adopt the juvenile device for
the working off of oppressive emotion--pretending to be extravagantly at
her ease.

One or two things in that evening of disillusionment stood out with
painful distinctness in John Gano's memory for years. Naturally, Hattie
answered "Yes" and "No" to John's mother, not as Southern youths said to
their elders: "Yes, ma'am," and "No, ma'am," or "Sir." But she also sat
down to the piano without being invited, and sang a song which it was
plain Mrs. Gano thought unrefined. Even John realized now that it
wasn't quite the song he had imagined.

At supper, when Mrs. Gano's covert but unsparing inspection of the girl
announced to her children, plain as words, that their visitor was
overloaded with jewelry, John thought to mitigate the enormity of the
huge frying-pan locket Hattie wore on her innocent breast by observing:

"Haven't I heard your sister say you have a daguerrotype of your father
in the locket you're wearing?"

"Right you are!" she said. "I never go without it." Then to Mrs. Gano:
"_My!_ I'm awful fawnd of my paw. P'raps you'd like to see him."

Miss Fox obligingly unfastened the frying-pan, and shied it, quoit-like,
down the table to her hostess.

There was a pause, a hideous silence.

"Pass me the crackers, Venus," Mrs. Gano said, presently, to Aunt
Jerusha's daughter. As she took the plate she, without touching it,
indicated the big bold locket. "Take that to Miss Fox," she said.

And while the maid was conveying the visitor's property back to her in
the middle of a large tray, Mrs. Gano had turned to Valeria and was
speaking of the morning's sermon.

Poor Miss Hattie put the finishing touch to her visit by departing
without taking leave of her hostess.

"Won't you come to the parlor a moment and say good-bye to my mother?"
said John, when Valeria brought their guest down-stairs into the hall,
hatted and gloved, and ready to go home.

"Gracious Peter! say good-bye?" The guest drew back in genuine alarm.
"You may just bet I won't say 'beans' before her from now till Gabriel
blows his trumpet in the morning. Did you hear the last thing she said
to me? _My!_"

"No; I was playing 'Dixie Land.'"

"Yes; and all through it she kept looking at the clock, and when you got
to the loud part she leaned over and asked me whether I expected my
father or a servant to come for me? My _gracious_!"

"Oh, but I--I--" stammered John.

"You--_you_? Not a bit of it. She said Jerusha should see me to my door.
The old hag's out at the gate now waiting for me. Oh _my_!"

And Miss Fox fled the premises.

No word ever passed between mother and son about the young lady. It was
wholly unnecessary to discuss her. John had been made to see, in a
ruthless light, the unseemliness of asking this raw little Westerner to
be his mother's successor in the house of Gano, even in these degenerate
days.

John's disappointment had no tragic issue, yet, in spite of the
consolation of other friends, in spite of the joys of experimental
science in the freedom of the woodshed, he was grievously unhappy for a
time, especially on Saturday evenings, which he had been used to spend
at the Foxes'. Partly in order to have an excuse for breaking through
that custom, and partly for a belated doctrinal reason, he occupied his
Saturday evenings in taking Hebrew lessons from the Principal of the
Boys' Academy. Young Gano had the inquirer's temper, and if he had not
had his bread to win, he would probably have been a traveller along many
of the roads of learning.

And Valeria--she had not been as successful as her brother in shaking
off the paralyzing fears and lulling hopes of the old religious view.
But a new passion had found its way into her secluded life, altering,
shaping, imperiously governing it. It was no sudden love for the hero of
a girlish dream, no dedication of dawning woman-life to the worship of
some man, made saint or savior by imagination's magic, no fairy prince's
coming, no Romeo calling under her balcony in the night, that wakened
this grave-eyed dreamer of dreams to a thrilling sense of life and
service. It was that most blessed or accursed summons to rise and join
the ranks of those who follow Art. Here in the Western wilds, among
conditions grotesquely unpropitious, barren beyond the telling, sordid,
if you like, this keen young vision, searching the horizon of a pent-up
life, had seen the signal from afar, shining and beckoning her on.

Valeria at nineteen was lamely, impotently following that
Will-o'-the-wisp which, under fairest conditions, may "lead to bewilder
and dazzle to blind," and of which you shall say in vain, "He lights you
to the swamps of death." The happy followers know the swamps of death
are waiting all, but many there be who travel thither without the
kind-deceiving light.

Valeria, in common with some other members of her family, had written
little verses, chiefly religious; but that was nothing. It had been said
long ago in Maryland that the Ganos were born with a pen in their hands.
Like the others, she had given some of her time to music, when her
mother was out of ear-shot. She had a smattering of French, a modicum of
German, and a few lessons in painting. In the home in New Plymouth there
were specimens here and there about the house of work done before she
left Maryland: a Melanchthon with a coppery face and a glimpse of
hair-shirt, two copies of the portrait of Raphael done by himself, a
"Beatrice Cenci," and a "Holy Family." But from the days of inarticulate
childhood, with no more than a handful of her native soil and a
watering-pot, or a precious lump of putty from the plantation carpenter,
she had tasted the tyrannous joy of the creator, fashioning beasts and
men.

And now, grown up, exiled to the West, living in poverty, and isolated
from all art save that in books, she said to herself that she had been
sent into the world to model beautiful forms, and express her restless
spirit in enduring marble.

In vain she prayed to be allowed to go away and study--not to Paris, not
to Rome: only to New York. She had a small legacy left her by an aunt.
The interest was so little, why not spend the capital in studying
sculpture? Her mother, amazed at the proposal, left Valeria no moment in
doubt of her determination to crush it.

Valeria's Aunt Paget was with them on a visit when the matter was under
discussion. Mrs. Paget was seldom admitted to family counsels, and felt
herself something of a stranger in her sister's house. She was the
worldly, the frivolous member of her family, who "dressed in the mode"
and "cultivated society." She was surprised when on this occasion the
topic proved too much of the "burning" order to be smuggled out of
sight.

"Study sculpture! Such a thing is unheard of!" ejaculated Mrs. Paget,
making wide blue eyes at her elder sister and her niece.

"So I tell Valeria," said Mrs. Gano. "She couldn't go to New York alone,
she couldn't live there without a chaperon."

"And even if she could afford it, you need her here. You are always ill
nowadays."

"It isn't that," said Mrs. Gano. "I'm thinking of Valeria herself."

"Of course; so am I. She ought to marry."

"I shall never marry!"

Aunt Paget smiled.

"Well, at all events, it won't help you to be chiselling marble."

"Help me to what?"

"To a suitable marriage, of course."

Valeria's dark eyes flashed, but before she could speak her mother said:

"I am not one of those women who are anxious for their children to
marry. I shall be more than content if Valeria remains single."

"Well, Sarah, forgive me, but I think it's a mistake. I said so before
we left Maryland, when she refused young Middleton. Every one of us was
married before we were Valeria's age, and none of us ever _dreamed_ of
wanting to go away from our home and study sculpture, or do _anything_
in the least unladylike."

Valeria gathered up her sewing as if to leave the room.

"You must admit," Aunt Paget went on, "there's something unfeminine
about sculpture. I'm not sure it isn't even a little irreligious."

"You don't know anything about it, Maria. You never had the least taste
yourself for anything but dress and going out."

"Well, you see, that's what makes it so surprising," said the younger
sister, in an apologetic tone. "You have always thought me so frivolous,
and yet I wouldn't _think_--no, not in my wildest moments--of being a
sculptor."

As Valeria left the room, Mrs. Gano looked with pride after the tall,
willowy figure.

"You must remember," she said, speaking unusually gently, "the Ganos are
more artistic than we Calverts. Valeria has great talents."

But having talent altered little. Valeria beat her wings against the
walls of the old Indian fortress all in vain. But she studied books, she
got clay for modelling, and tools, and in secret wrought rude images
that mocked her dreams. By-and-by she flung the tools aside, and the
plastic clay that she had meant to fashion into forms of beauty hardened
uncouthly into an unmeaning mass. An interim of aimlessness and despair
of life was followed by a gradual healing of the spirit and restored
activity of mind, through nothing more nor less than the power of
poetry. Saturated with Keats and Shelley, she took up again her old
childish habit of verse-making, but very seriously now, thinking of
herself as a poet. Some hint of the way she passed her time, some
whisper, through servants or others, of the reams of paper she engrossed
with verse, got abroad in the town. She was asked to contribute to the
_Mioto Gazette_, and was stopped on her way from church, by people she
scarcely knew, to hear that her fellow-townsmen were full of curiosity
and pride at having a poet among them. She was embarrassed, but not
altogether displeased. Not so Mrs. Gano, whose favorite remark about the
good people of New Plymouth was that they didn't know a B from a bull's
foot. _Of course_ they were impressed that any one in this benighted
place should write verse!

"Just tell them the next time they bother you that the Ganos do it by
the yard."

It was very difficult to impress this mother of hers, who took so much
for granted.

"I think," said Valeria, with dignity, laying down a volume of _Aurora
Leigh_--"I think I shall seriously devote myself to literature."

"Ah! then in that case be careful you don't adopt New Plymouth
standards."

"I am not likely to."

"I don't know. Nothing is more difficult than to avoid measuring
yourself by the people you live among. John is an ignoramus compared to
his father, but he tells me he is considered _here_ a highly educated
person."

"I think, mother," the girl said, gravely, "that you'll protect me from
having too good an opinion of my work."

But the conversation had set her thoughts in a new groove. There was
truth in this. She must guard against an ignorant satisfaction in her
poems. She must have better standards of style; she must know what the
masters taught and practised. She must learn to be more critical than
even her critical mother. "The great teachers of the world shall be my
teachers," she said to herself, and there sprang up within her a new and
fiery curiosity about the classics.

She asked her mother to let the Roman Catholic priest teach her Latin,
and the request was granted with but slight demur, as an alternative to
the pursuit of art away from home. Quietly and doggedly Valeria went on
with her studies, teaching herself Greek, and lying long mornings on the
floor in the Blue Room, getting by heart the wit and wisdom of men to
whom the existence of a creature like Valeria Gano, in such a world as
America, would have been harder to grasp than she, unaided, had found
the niceties of the historical tense, or tolerance for her masters'
morals.

While the girl up-stairs was patiently learning letters of the pagans,
in the room below the mother conned Church History and Biblical
Criticism, searching the Creeds and her own unquiet heart for
justification and for peace. And all the while about these two absorbed,
self-centred women surged the turbulent life of the little town. Gossip
was busy with Mrs. Gano from the first, albeit her face was unknown to
most of her towns-people--to nearly all who had not seen her in her rare
pilgrimages to St. Thomas's. They speculated, too, about the young girl
who dressed so severely, and whom one couldn't fancy at a party or a
picnic--who, though an irreproachable Episcopalian, learned Latin of
Father O'Brien, wrote verses about heathen gods and goddesses, if report
spoke true, and yet sat in church on Sunday with the rapt look of a
medieval saint.

It was universally agreed by the neighbors that John Gano was the flower
of the flock. He, at least, was an addition to New Plymouth society,
being a very rising as well as agreeable person.

There was more than one sore young heart in the town when, in the
following year, John Gano came back from a visit to his childhood's home
in the South, engaged to marry his cousin Virginia Gano-Lee, just
sixteen at the time. His mother, who had never ceased to fear that,
despite her vigilance, he might be beguiled into marrying some one of
these "ill-mannered Western girls," hailed the idea of further alliance
with the Gano-Lees. However, much too big as her house was for her own
use, she did not welcome John's natural proposal to bring his wife there
to live.

"No; wait till you can make a home of your own," his mother had said.

So it behoved the young man to better his worldly position as speedily
as possible. An opening in a bank in New York, with a little larger
salary, and prospect of a partnership, took him away from New Plymouth
the following year, and left his mother and sister alone in the old
house.




CHAPTER III


Naturally so clannish a woman as Mrs. Gano had not let the years go by
without much solicitude on behalf of her orphan grandchild. After the
death of her eldest son, Mrs. Gano wrote to his mother-in-law, Mrs.
Tallmadge, asking her to send the little orphan to his father's people,
or else appoint a time when Mrs. Gano might come to Boston and bring her
grandson home. The reply came from Mr. Tallmadge, showing how deeply he
and his wife had resented Mrs. Gano's behavior on the marriage of her
son. Mr. Tallmadge wrote that his daughter on her death-bed had
committed the infant to the care of her own mother, and that Ethan Gano
himself had sent his son North under the protection of Mrs. Tallmadge.
He had broken with his own family, and held no communication with them.
It was plain what his wishes were with reference to his son. And the
Tallmadges might be depended upon to make good their right to the
custody of the child. Several spirited letters were exchanged, and then
silence till the close of the war and the news of Mrs. Tallmadge's
death. Mrs. Gano then made another attempt to get possession of the boy,
but finding his grandfather as resolute as ever to keep him in Boston,
she proposed a journey thither. This apparent prompting of natural
affection could not decently be thwarted, although Mr. Tallmadge
understood perfectly the suspicion and anxiety as to the way the orphan
was being brought up, that secured the Tallmadges the honor of a visit
from Mrs. Gano.

She declined to make the house in Ashburton Place her headquarters,
"having already," she wrote, "engaged an apartment at the Tremont
House." Mr. Tallmadge smiled, understanding perfectly.

But if he contemplated with serenity the descent of Mrs. Gano upon
Ashburton Place, not so his unmarried daughter and house-keeper, Hannah
Tallmadge. With nervous misgiving she looked forward to the coming of
this hereditary foe, who, moreover, had the blackest designs upon her
darling Ethan. Still, Hannah Tallmadge was a most Christian soul. Short
of giving up Ethan, she would do all in her power to exhibit a
hospitable and forgiving spirit in the approaching trial. She would do
what she could to curb her father's uncompromising bluntness of speech,
and would keep him off dangerous topics. It occurred to her that the
mere sight of _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ on the parlor table might rouse angry
passions. She was in the act of putting that work into the bookcase,
when her father, observing her suspiciously, asked:

"What are you doing?"

"Just putting this away."

"Leave it on the table. It is the only work of fiction I have ever been
able to read. Leave it on the table."

Nevertheless, next day, in a moment of nervousness induced by the news
that a strange lady was getting out of a carriage at their door, Miss
Hannah dropped _Uncle Tom_ behind the horse-hair sofa-cushion.

"Where is Ethan?" said her father, turning suddenly from the window.

"I'll go and bring him," replied Miss Hannah, and she left the room with
haste.

A few moments, and the door opened again. Mrs. Gano came in with an air
that seemed to Aaron Tallmadge suspiciously gracious. She paused for
just that decisive but infinitesimal moment of first impression, as she
took the measure of the spare figure standing on guard in the middle of
his prim New England parlor.

"Mr. Tallmadge?" inquired Mrs. Gano, suavely.

"Mrs. Gano?"

He offered his hand, and then pushed a straight-backed horse-hair chair
a little nearer the fire. In the mere speaking of her name his twang
made instant attack upon the Southerner's nerves. It passed through the
man's mind presently that Mrs. Gano's voice was disagreeably reminiscent
of a runaway slave he had once befriended.

"I have just seen my grandson's face at an upper window." She looked
round eagerly. "Ah!"

The door had opened very slowly. One eye and half a little dark head
were put doubtfully in.

"Come here, Ethan!" said his grandfather.

The child disappeared altogether.

Mr. Tallmadge went out into the hall, and presently reappeared leading
Ethan in. He hung back, dropping his curly head, and shooting an
occasional look at the newcomer; but since she did not fly at him in the
objectionable way of visitors, he allowed himself to be brought by
degrees up to the strange lady's chair.

She did not even say "How do you do?" She stooped and kissed him
silently. He stared at her with great melancholy eyes, backed away, and
stood by his grandfather's side.

"I am afraid he is not strong," said Mrs. Gano, a little huskily.

"He has been singularly free from childish ailments--an occasional
cold--"

"Of course, in this trying climate."

"Oh, we find our climate does very well."

"No doubt, in the case of those to the manner born. This child is
singularly like his father."

"He reminds _us_ constantly of his mother."

"Is it possible? I assure you I feel, as I look at him, that I have
dreamed these twenty years, and that my son is standing there before
me."

"You don't say!" remarked the child's grandfather, unmoved. "Everybody
here considers him so like the Tallmadges."

Mrs. Gano, with unflattering eyes on the head of the house, gave an
incredulous cough. She seemed on the point of expressing more
indubitably some further thought, looked at the boy, softened suddenly,
and smiled at the grave little face.

"You know who I am?"

He shook his brown curls. A shadow crossed the woman's face.

"Is he never told anything of his father or his father's people?"

"He is very young yet to take an interest in folks he hasn't seen."

"He is nearly six."

"What say?"

"I should have thought an intelligent child of six might have been told
that his grandmother--"

"Not six _yet_, madam. Of course, when he is older--"

He made a gesture indicating a liberal policy.

"When he is older you will have no objection, I suppose, to his making a
visit to his father's people?"

"No objection whatever to a _visit_, madam."

"How soon should you consider such a move expedient?"

"Ah, that depends," replied the wary gentleman--"depends so much on
circumstances."

"What kind of circumstances?" she inquired, stiffly.

His look and tone said unmistakably, "Depends on your behavior, madam."
"Depends on the child's health and-- Run away and play, Ethan," he said.

As the little boy closed the door: "Then you do admit he is delicate?"

Mrs. Gano spoke more coldly than when Ethan had been there to hear.

"I admit the need to consider the health of _all_ children, and
secondary only to that, their education."

"What are your views as to Ethan's schooling?"

"I shall expect him to go through the regular mill, as I did: a good
primary school, then the preparatory at Andover, then Harvard."

The woman felt a certain fainting of purpose at the cut-and-dried
programme presented in that dry manner by the dry old man. It _was_ a
"regular mill," and who could tell if the sensitive, fragile little Gano
was the stuff to stand these machine-made processes?

"I don't believe, myself," said Mr. Tallmadge, with decision, "in
haphazard, shilly-shally ways of raising children, and leaving it to
them to see what they'll take to."

"I have little experience of shilly-shally methods," replied his
visitor.

"If you leave it to boys to decide, what they take to is mischief nine
times out of ten."

"I think you may make your mind easy about my grandson."

Mr. Tallmadge looked at her in silence for a moment; then suddenly:
"Yes, yes; _he'll_ turn out all right." He nodded, as if to say, "Trust
me to see to that!" "My experience is, if you want a boy to do a
particular thing, set that aim before him at the start. That's the way I
was raised; that's the way I propose to raise my grandson."

There was a slight pause.

"And in what form of religious faith?"

"We are all members of the Presbyterian Church." It was said as though
it had been in obedience to an edict of the Everlasting from the
foundation of the world. "You will appreciate the necessity of having my
grandson raised under my own eye when I tell you it is my intention
that, after he gets through Harvard, he shall succeed to the editorship
of my paper."

"My grandson edit an Abolitionist paper?"

Mr. Tallmadge blinked in a slightly nervous fashion, but answered,
steadfastly:

"Abolition is abolished, madam; it has served its end. Ethan will
naturally fall heir to my property and my profession."

"Ethan is his father's heir first of all--heir to a man who gave his
life at Bull Run for our rights, not for the abolition of them."

"Abolition _was_ right, and _is_ law, by the sanction of the God of
battles."

Mrs. Gano rose from her chair; the door opened, and in came Miss
Hannah. Whether it was chance, or whether she had been waiting outside
for the psychological moment, certainly her entrance was opportune. She
went through her greeting with a flustered civility that, by its own
extreme nervousness, made the situation she had broken in upon seem calm
to the point of commonplace. Mrs. Gano found herself trying to put Miss
Hannah at her ease.

The tall, thin spinster, with her smooth gray hair and anxious manner,
must have been more than double the age of Ethan's mother.

Supper would be ready in twenty minutes.

"Of course," she said, "you will stay? Ethan has just been asking if he
mayn't sit up a little later to-night."

"Ethan!" Potent conjuration! Mrs. Gano had not come all this way to look
after her grandson's welfare and be turned back by a fanatical outbreak
on the part of a bigoted Abolitionist. No, and if plain speaking was to
be the order of the day, Mr. Tallmadge should not do it all. He had it
his own way, however, in the long grace with which he prefaced supper, a
performance that sounded in Mrs. Gano's ears aggressively Presbyterian.
It appeared at that meal that Miss Hannah was disposed to be indulgent
to her little nephew, and that he was devoted to her. He talked very
little, and what he had to say he confided in a whisper to his aunt. But
as he ate, he stared unceasingly with great gloomy eyes at his
grandmother. She saw with deep misgiving that he was permitted to make
the same meal as his elders. He declined to share his aunt's decoction
of "shells," as she quaintly called cocoa, and joined his grandparents
in a large cup of coffee. He bolted down quantities of that moist and
leaden Boston brown bread which Mrs. Gano regarded with amazement and
alarm, and he seemed to share the New England taste for beans and bacon,
a fare which, in the visitor's mind, ranked with the "hog and hominy" of
the hard-working plantation blacks; but to place such food before a
little delicate child!

After supper his aunt took him on her lap, and, while Mr. Tallmadge and
his guest skirted dangerous topics with stately politeness, Miss
Tallmadge, in the corner by the fire, was softly repeating nursery
rhymes to the little Ethan. Others might have been struck by the picture
of the gaunt, childless woman and her ready assumption of the mother
rôle; Mrs. Gano was vaguely conscious of a kind of remissness in herself
in having omitted to tell her own children a word about little Nannie
Etticott or Cock Robin. In all her life of maternal solicitude she had
never once mentioned "Hey-diddle-diddle, the Cat and the Fiddle," or
even hinted at the existence of "the Little Man who had a little gun."
Presently, in the midst of Mr. Tallmadge's remarks upon the beauties of
Boston Common, Mrs. Gano caught the child's more and more insistent
demand for some joy which Miss Tallmadge was minded to withhold. In
spite of "Sh! sh!" more and more shrill came the iteration:

"Nwingy Tat! Nwingy Tat!"

In his fervor Ethan had dragged the stern, unyielding horse-hair cushion
off the end of the sofa, revealing two volumes hidden behind it.

Mrs. Gano seemed not to regret this diversion. Helping the child to
restore the sofa-cushion, she took up the books. As she read the title
her look darkened. She put the work down as if it burned her fingers.

"A great, bad book," she said.

"What is that?" asked Mr. Tallmadge.

Mrs. Gano jerked her head without answering.

"What say?" persisted the old man, with his hand to his ear.

"_Uncle Tom's Cabin_," said Miss Tallmadge, trying to speak lightly.

"A very uncommon woman, Mrs. Stowe," said Mr. Tallmadge, firmly; "very
uncommon, indeed."

"Let us hope so," ejaculated Mrs. Gano, half to herself.

"Eh?" inquired Mr. Tallmadge, with gruff suspicion. "What say?"

"I was granting her uncommonness, and hoping it wouldn't get commoner."

"H'm! It could hardly be expected, I suppose, that you should think well
of--"

"No; I can't be expected to think well of a woman who is not content
with getting a whole nation by the ears, but she must interfere between
husband and wife, and--"

"What say?" inquired Mr. Tallmadge, with corrugated brows and hand to
his deaf ear. "I'm talking about Harriet Beecher Stowe."

"So am I," said Mrs. Gano. "I only hope she'll be content with the
mischief she's done already, and not rush into print with her espousal
of Lady Byron's wrongs."

"I haven't heard that Mrs. Beecher Stowe had any such intention. As a
friend of the family, from Lyman down--"

"As a friend of the family, you ought to warn them in time to curb her
propensity for attending to other people's affairs. Uncommon! Yes, an
uncommon busybody."

"I think, madam, you are misinformed," said Mr. Tallmadge, with dignity.

"I know more about Harriet Beecher Stowe than most people--though she
never _has_ set foot in the South--and I know she's a busybody. I also
know she has less excuse than some women. The spring I spent with my
sister, Mrs. Paget, in Covington, before I met the Stowes, I used to
look out and see a man trudging about the hills in front of my windows
with a basket on his arm. 'Who is that?' I asked. 'That's Professor
Stowe,' they said; and we all wondered what he had in the basket. I said
he was botanizing; Mrs. Paget said the basket was too big for that: he
must be looking for kail, or dock, or dandelion greens for dinner.
By-and-by we heard he had twins in the basket, and was taking them about
for an airing. The Stowes were very poor, too, and what with that and
twins, Harriet B. ought to have found enough to do at home."

"Nwingy Tat! Nwingy Tat!"

"Sh!" said his aunt.

"_Mus'_ sing it," answered Ethan, in the only distinct words his
grandmother had heard from his lips.

"What is it?" she asked, more interested in Ethan's infant tastes than
even in Mrs. Stowe's enormities.

"It's that foolish little rhyme, 'The New England Cat,'" replied Miss
Hannah.

"I don't know it," said Mrs. Gano.

"Ethan likes it for some unknown reason. When he had scarlet-fever last
year--"

She stopped, seeing the sudden change in Mrs. Gano's face.

"We had an epidemic of it," said Mr. Tallmadge, as though that fact
lessened the danger. "Ethan came out of it famously--didn't you, my
little man?"

"Nwingy Tat!" said Ethan.

"Oh yes, he came out all right," said Miss Hannah; "but before the
crisis I sat up with him at night, and I sang 'The New England Cat' to
him till I nearly died of it. Through sheer exhaustion my voice would
get weaker and weaker, till it seemed to die too natural a death for him
to notice. But the moment I stopped he would start up and say
feverishly, 'Nwingy Tat!' It was the only thing that quieted him."

Mrs. Gano might have been supposed to regard this passion for New
England cats as a depraved taste on the part of a Gano, but she said,
graciously:

"Let me add my petition to Ethan's. I would like to hear his favorite
song."

Perhaps in the dim recesses of her mind she had some formless idea of
learning this lyric.

"It's not a song," said Miss Hannah, hurriedly. "Come, child, it's time
you went to bed."

"Nwingy Tat, first," said Ethan, firmly.

"Oh, hum it for the child!" said Mr. Tallmadge, impatiently.

Miss Hannah's face took on a dull-red hue, but obediently she began in a
thin, sweet little voice:


             "'There was an old New England cat,
               New England cat, New England cat--
     There was an old New England cat went out to seek her prey.

             "'She chased a mouse from house to house,
               From house to house, from house to house--
     She chased a mouse from house to house upon the Sabbath day.

             "'The parson so astonished was,
               Astonished was, astonished was--
     The parson so astonished was to see--the cat profanes!

             "'He took his book and threw it down,
               And threw it down, and threw it down--
     He took his book and threw it down, and bound the cat in chains.'"


Mrs. Gano was as "astonished" at this performance as "the parson." Ethan
nodded a grave encore.

"Nwingy Tat!"

Whereat they all laughed with the best humor in the world, and Ethan was
carried off to bed.

Mrs. Gano, under plea of weariness from travel, made her "good-nights"
at the same time, arranging to return to Ashburton Place the next day.

She wakened early the following morning. Reviewing the events of the
evening before, and having now dispassionate regard to the object of her
visit, she registered a vow that no provocation upon earth should induce
her another time to touch upon any vexed question. The opinions of these
Tallmadges were not apparently to be altered any more than her own were.
If she were going to wring any concession out of them with reference to
Ethan, she must walk warily, she must appeal more to their sense of
justice and family feeling. She was in their power. It was theirs to
dictate terms. A new situation for Sarah C. Gano, but she would make the
best of it.

When she arrived at Ashburton Place before ten o'clock, Miss Hannah was
just leaving the house.

"_Oh!_" she said, as nervous people will, as though you had pinched
them.

"Good-morning!" Mrs. Gano bowed urbanely.

"Good-morning! We understood you couldn't go out before the afternoon."

"Yes, I can never count on being fit for much in the morning; but to-day
I am abroad early. Shall I find the child?"

She made a motion towards the house.

"Ethan has just gone to school. Pa took him to-day."

"Oh! And you are going to walk?"

"No--y-yes--a little way."

Miss Tallmadge's embarrassment seemed to rouse in Mrs. Gano's breast a
sentiment to which it was commonly a stranger. She was curious. Ought
she not to know something about this woman who stood in the relation of
mother to Ethan? What was her life like? What were her interests?

"I have always heard," the visitor said, as they walked along Somerset,
and through Beacon to Tremont Street--"always heard what admirable
house-keepers the New England women are. Do you do your own marketing?"

"Yes; but always earlier."

"This is a good time for shopping, before the crowded mid-day. I must
look for a shawl of some kind."

"I would be glad to show you the best place for such things, but to-day
I--I have a most important engagement."

She paused near a stationer's. On the right a staircase led from the
street to the floor above. Several ladies bustled past, nodding
good-morning to Miss Tallmadge, and disappearing up these stairs. Mrs.
Gano's keen eyes explored the precincts. A small placard in the entry
stated in white letters on lacquered tin: "Ladies' Domestic
Philanthropic Society (Colored Registry Office)."

"H'm!" she said, not seeming to see the nervous hand seeking farewell.
"Colored! What color?"

"I suppose you would say black."

Miss Tallmadge had drawn herself up.

"I should probably say negro. But I've heard they like to call
themselves colored. Seems a curious taste. Always suggests variegated to
me."

"That is not how we mean it," said Miss Tallmadge solemnly, making way
for more ladies who swarmed up the staircase. "We are a little group of
people working on purely humanitarian principles, finding succor and
employment for the destitute, thrown out of work by--"

"Yes; we know by whom." Then, with a misleading geniality: "This idea of
restitution seems to me very right and proper."

Miss Tallmadge's face betrayed perplexity. A shivering little quadroon
girl crept up the stairs behind a coal-black old man.

"It is too difficult, perhaps, to make plain our point of view," said
Miss Hannah, with quiet dignity, "otherwise I should feel it my duty
while you are in Boston to show you--"

"Have you the right," interrupted her visitor, "to bring a stranger to
these colored meetings?"

"I have frequently brought a friend. Perhaps--" Miss Hannah's good face
brightened. "We don't discuss politics, and perhaps if you could see
something of the pains we take to befriend and find homes for these poor
creatures--"

"I am ready to attend the meeting," announced Mrs. Gano, tightening her
bonnet-strings. "It sounds like a sensible institution. We had the best
cooks, the only well-trained servants in America. They must be a godsend
here in the North."

She remembered, as she mounted the stairs behind Miss Hannah, that her
hostess had not provided 16 Ashburton Place with any of these "colored"
joys, and she reflected that she had not yet seen a darky since her
arrival except the old man and little girl on in front of them.

A clock struck ten as Miss Tallmadge hurriedly led the way up the second
flight to the registry-office. When she caught up to the old negro, the
domestic philanthropist applied her handkerchief to her nose.

The society's room was unexpectedly spacious, furnished with a desk
fronting a goodly assemblage of ladies seated in rows upon rows of cane
chairs. On the right a space was railed off, and set close with empty
wooden benches. Miss Tallmadge explained in a whisper that "the
candidates" were kept in an adjoining room till a later stage in the
proceedings. As for the domestic philanthropists, there were so many of
them that there was some difficulty in finding Mrs. Gano a seat. As the
late-comers settled themselves, a thin, hard-featured lady with a dogged
manner took her place at the desk. This action moved the D. P.'s to a
faint flutter of applause. The President laid down some papers, drew off
her gloves, folded her hands, and invoked a blessing.

"And now, ladies, we will proceed to business."

She read a report. At the end she characterized it as highly
satisfactory, considering the wellnigh superhuman difficulties in the
way of the object of the society. She gave an unflattering account of
the extravagance, filth, and idleness cultivated in servants by the
Southern régime. She told of thrifty New England housewives' experience
with highly recommended Southern cooks--stories that moved the domestic
philanthropists to open expressions of horror. No one denied colored
women knew how to cook, but they were lazy and dirty beyond measure, and
required the markets of the whole world to supply their inordinate
wants. As for what they threw away, it would feed a cityful! To Miss
Hannah's evident relief, Mrs. Gano nodded and whispered:

"True as Gospel--_that_ much of it."

"Still," the President pointed out, "philanthropy must bear with these
evils; philanthropy must find these outcasts homes. What can be expected
of poor down-trodden slaves? called on to suffer every ignominy, torn
from their children, quivering under the lash, bought and sold like
dumb-driven cattle! Out of compassion for these fellow-creatures who
are, like ourselves, children of God--His latter-day martyrs--we have
met here this morning to bring succor and to offer service. Daughter,
call in the candidates."

A young lady rose, wiped away a sympathetic tear, crossed behind the
wooden bar, and opened a door. The President meanwhile opened a
reticule, took out a bottle of lavender-water, and poured a few drops on
her handkerchief. Through the open door presently appeared the old
negro, the little quadroon girl (evidently ill), and a great strapping
mulatto woman. Mrs. Gano kept looking for the rest, while the trio
huddled together like sheep in the farthest corner, until "daughter"
indicated that benches were to be sat upon.

"Do they come in threes?" Mrs. Gano whispered to Miss Tallmadge.

"This is all there are this time."

The President opened a large ledger, dipped and poised a pen, and nodded
to "daughter." Daughter bent down and spoke to the old man. He got up
trembling, and followed the young lady out behind the bar to the little
open space in front of the desk. The look on his face was not the look
negroes commonly wore when mounting the block in Southern slave-markets.
It was more like the look that would come into their faces when they
were knocked down to some notoriously hard master.

"What is your name?"

"Jake, mehm."

"Jake what?"

"Jes' Jake, mehm. F'om Henderson's."

"Oh, I have a letter about you." She looked about among her papers.
"Yes, here; I will tabulate this and see what we can do for you. You may
come to the next meeting."

"Yes, mehm."

He hobbled a step or two away in a dazed fashion, when a piercing shriek
rang across the room. He started as if a lash had been laid across his
back. The little quadroon girl was standing up, holding out two shaking
arms to him. The old man blinked.

"I swar I ain't leabin' yo', Till. I gwine t' wait by de do'."

But the little girl flew forward, climbing benches and creeping under
the bar. She had nearly reached the old man when the President, leaning
forward, said:

"Are you not the girl I sent to Mrs. Parsons's as general servant?"

"Yes, mehm," said the candidate, taking tight hold of the old man's
coat.

"I have a very bad account of you."

"Yes, mehm."

"Mrs. Tilson says you are idle and good for nothing."

"Yes, mehm."

The old man took her hand.

"She ain't berry well, mehm, sence we come t' Bosting. Mebbe she'll be
better able by'm-by t' go where dere ain't eleben chillen and so much
snow ter shubbel."

"You look anything but strong," said the President. "I'll try to find
you an easier place. They all want easier places," she said, over her
shoulder, to the domestic philanthropists.

"Hush! Hush! I'll tell de lady, honey, ef yer don' take an' cry."

But the President was motioning the other candidate forward. The old man
stood hesitating, and then began shakily:

"It 'ud be mighty kin', mehm, ef yo' could get Till an' me de same
place."

"The _same_ place!" echoed the President, sharply.

"Y--yes, mehm," faltered the old man, backing timidly; "or anyways
places close togedder, mehm, please, mehm."

"That's seldom possible."

The little quadroon wept audibly. The old man patted her arm feebly.

"I--I disremember it myself, but Till, yere, _she_ says I tol' 'er down
Georgy dat up yere in Bosting dey didn't nebber make de chilluns go one
way an' de ole folks anudder."

"We'll do what we can."

"Thank yo', mehm."

And they went out.

The President made an entry in the ledger.

"The old grandfather is said to be an invaluable hand at polishing
plate," she said, with a sardonic look at her fellow philanthropists.
"Any one who wishes may see his credentials after the meeting. Daughter,
I called the next candidate."

"I _have_ told her, ma."

"Come forward!" commanded the President.

The big mulatto woman wriggled about, and then got up, frightfully
embarrassed, and by dint of kindly urging from "daughter" and the
President, she was finally landed in front of the desk.

"Now," said the President, fixing the woman through her spectacles,
"where have you resided?"

This question was repeated three times and in three forms.

"Oh, w'ere I libs? Up Corn Alley."

"But before you lived in Corn Alley, where did you come from?"

"F'om Jacksing's."

"Where did the Jacksons live?"

"On de hill."

"What hill?"

She thought deeply, and then looked up, grinning and silent.

"What State?" asked the President, with a haggard air.

"State?"

"Yes, Georgia or Alabama?"

"No, mehm. It was Keziah wus f'om Alabammy."

"What is your name?"

"Yellah Sal."

She squirmed with an elephantine coquetry.

"Your last name?"

"Las'?"

"Are you married?"

"Huh! Yes, mehm," she chuckled.

"What was your husband's name?"

"W'ich husbin?"

"Have you been married more than once?"

"Huh! Yes, mehm." She bridled and twisted. "Six or seben times."

"As Vice-President," said a white-haired woman, standing up suddenly
near the desk, "I suggest that it would be a more practical investment
of our time if we confine ourselves to finding out what the candidates
could do."

"Do you wish me to register this woman as Yellow Sal?" inquired the
President, severely.

"Put her down as Sarah Yellow," advised the Vice-President, and resumed
her seat.

This passage seemed to unhinge the candidate. The question of what she
could do found her relapsed into speechlessness. Even its repetition
elicited only twistings and spasmodic grins.

"Come, come," said the President, wearily. "You are a strong,
able-bodied woman; you at least can do a good day's work at something.
Now, the question is, what?"

Yellow Sal only moved her massive shoulders with an air of conscious
power.

"Did you cook?"

"_Cook?_ No, mehm."

She smiled in a superior fashion.

"What then?"

She twisted a piece of her calico gown.

"Were you the laundress?"

"_Me?_ No, mehm. Bet an' Sabina done de washin'."

"Well, and you? Were you nurse?"

The down-trodden one shook her head.

"Nebber could abide chillen."

"Well, what _did_ you do?"

The President leaned in a threatening attitude over the desk.

"Huh! Me, mehm? _Me_--w'y," speaking soothingly, "Lor bress yo' soul,
mehm, I done kep' de flies off'n ole missis."


Miss Hannah's hope of the possible good effects of the meeting upon her
guest was more than justified. Mrs. Gano returned to Ashburton Place in
a distinctly cheerful frame of mind.

Whether Mr. Tallmadge, too, had begun the day with vows of peace, he
certainly bore himself towards his unwelcome visitor with no little
consideration and courtesy. Mrs. Gano was forced to admit to herself a
growing respect, an unwilling admiration even, for her old enemy. The
only outward and visible sign of this change of heart was made manifest
after the departure of the one other visitor that evening brought to
Ashburton Place. Mr. Tallmadge had not only prevented Mr. Garrison from
speaking of the war, but he had headed the conversation off every time
it approached any topic of the day that bore upon the South. When the
door closed behind him Mrs. Gano turned to her host and said, formally:

"I appreciate your desire not to have these questions raised in my
presence; but I see that in one regard you misapprehend me. I agree with
your visitor as to the undesirability of slavery."

"You, madam?"

She bowed.

"My objection is almost solely on the score of its evil effects on the
superior race. Still, slavery was an institution we had inherited, and
in which our social and industrial life was rooted. One part of a free
country had no right to dictate to another part. The South would have
freed her slaves herself in due time."

Mr. Tallmadge was unable to repress an incredulous smile.

"Slaves were once held in the North," his guest reminded him, drawing
herself up. "If the African had been able to live in this terrible
climate, New England would not so soon have seen the iniquity of
slavery. The South, on wider grounds, was coming to the same
conclusion. The war only precipitated with bloodshed and disaster that
which, if left to right itself, would have been done without such awful
squandering of blood and gold."

Mr. Tallmadge shook his head.

"I cannot agree with you, madam. Violent uprooting is the only way to
clear the ground of certain noxious growths."

"Ah, you think you've cleared the ground--by inflicting the duties of
citizenship all in an instant upon a barbarian horde? You are more of an
optimist even than your friends."

"What friends are you quoting?"

"Your Harriet Beecher Stowe, for instance. Even in the full tide of her
romantic enthusiasm she can find no better use for the idealized
ex-slave than to ship him to Liberia. This, too, after educating
him--sending him for four years to a French university." She smiled.
"But since you and I may not meet again, all I wish to point out before
I go is that you need not count me as an advocate of slavery."

She rose.

"Before you go?" he began, hesitating.

"I am needed at home," she said. "I shall not remain in Boston longer
than is necessary to secure your agreement to Ethan's coming to us for a
visit."

"I have already said, madam--"

"I should not feel the object of my journey attained unless the date
were fixed."

They stood looking at each other.

It will never be known how much Mr. Tallmadge's readiness to restore
Mrs. Gano to the bosom of her family influenced his views at this
juncture. He turned away and considered, with one foot on the fender and
chin-whisker in hand.

"This next summer," he said, "I have promised to take Ethan to my
brother's place in the White Mountains."

"Then the summer after this."

"Yes; the summer after he could come, if he were well."

"If he were ill, I would come to see him."

"Ah--yes."

"When does his vacation begin?"

"About the middle of June."

"If he is well, you will send him to us the third week?"

"Yes."

They shook hands solemnly.




CHAPTER IV


It was when Ethan was seven years old that he was permitted to go to New
Plymouth to spend his summer holidays. He was brought by his uncle
Elijah Tallmadge, who, on his way to Cincinnati, satisfied his sense of
duty, if not his civility, by dropping the little boy on the platform of
the New Plymouth station, and watching from the window of the receding
train how a tall, grave girl in an old-fashioned bonnet, and with a
turbaned negress in her wake, went up to the little traveller and
greeted him.

"Are you Ethan Gano?" said the lady, gently.

"Yes," answered the child.

She kissed him. "I am your aunt Valeria," she said, and took his trunk
check out of his hand and gave it to the negro hackman, who departed to
claim the child's belongings.

When the boy had said he was Ethan Gano, he was startled by an
exclamation of uncouth joy from the negress who stood behind his aunt.
Jerusha showed her strong teeth in a smile of wide beneficence, and
rolled her great bulging eyes till Ethan quaked.

"Tooby sho'," she broke out; "didn't I tell yo' he'd got de Gano look in
his lubly face? He's jes' de spi't en image ob his paw;" and she held
out her motherly arms to embrace him.

Ethan fled, shuddering, not from fear alone, but from that sense, so
much stronger in the Northern bred than in the Southern, of physical
shrinking from the black. Ethan held himself to have escaped a dire
indignity, as he overtook his aunt at the edge of the platform, close to
a dilapidated carriage. He looked back, fearing the black woman was
following, and might be coming with them. But no, there she was,
shuffling down a side street with her heavy see-saw hip-motion. Ethan's
little trunk was put on the box, and he and his aunt got into the
dilapidated vehicle and drove off with a rattling and jingling of loose
windows and ancient brass-mounted harness. Presently they passed
Jerusha, who smiled in at them broadly, seeming to bear no trace of a
grudge. But Ethan colored and looked away.

His aunt did not seem to be a talkative person. She sat looking out of
the window almost as if she were alone. She did, however, point out the
Court-house, and when they rumbled and clattered over the great wooden
bridge, "Now we are crossing the Mioto," she said; "we live on the other
side. It's much nicer to live on the other side."

"Oh _yes_," said Ethan, as though he appreciated the advantage keenly.

His aunt had delicate aquiline features, and a singularly beautiful pale
skin. He did not know it, but the two occupants of the carriage were
curiously alike, even to the look of melancholy lurking in the eyes of
each. Ethan noticed that the ungloved hand that lay listless in her lap
was very long, and whiter than any hand he had ever seen.

They suddenly turned off the main street leading from the bridge.

"This is Washington Street," said his aunt. "If you lean out you'll see
our house." But the trees were too thick for one who didn't know where
to look to distinguish the glimpses of the gray-stone building. In a
moment the vehicle stopped. "Here we are," said Aunt Valeria.

Ethan looked up at the massive gray front above him on a terrace only a
little back from the street. Ampelopsis trailed over, but did not yet
hide the great blocks of hand-hewn stone that in those old days had been
set up for defence between the pale-face and the Indian.

Aunt Valeria opened the gate, and Ethan followed her up the half-dozen
stone steps and along the brick-paved path to the porch. There in the
doorway, between the big Doric columns, stood a tall, slim woman,
dressed in black, with masses of silvered hair nearly covered by a
white veil. Her face was furrowed, but she wore a look of welcome and a
light of unquenched youth in her smiling eyes that made the child smile
too, feeling himself no stranger, but as one who had come home. She set
her hands on either side his face and kissed him.

"But where is Mr. Tallmadge?" Mrs. Gano asked her daughter when they
were in the hall.

"Gone on to Cincinnati. He didn't get out of the train."

"_What?_ He never left this child to the chance of--"

Ethan had never seen any one look so angry. The eyes that had been
smiling flashed a steely blue fire. He shrank away to the neighborhood
of the more friendly umbrellas in the hat-rack.

"Oh, he knew we would be sure to meet him," said Aunt Valeria,
apologetically.

"One can never be sure of anything of the kind! Suppose either you or I
had been very ill! To drop a little child like that on a strange
platform, as you would a sack of corn--"

Ethan felt covered with shame at the conduct of his uncle. He had heard
Mrs. Gano herself criticised in Boston, but he felt now that her
standards, after all, seemed higher, and her eyes were certainly more
terrifying than any in the house of Tallmadge.

The hackman was struggling up-stairs with the trunk, Mrs. Gano bidding
him have a care of the paper and the balustrade.

Ethan noticed there was a big open door at the end of the hall and a
vision through of a veranda and green trees. In the hall was an oaken
hat-rack, with umbrella-stand and two carved oaken chairs on either
side, with high fleur-de-lis backs. While his grandmother was paying the
hackman, the child discovered that the seats of these chairs lifted up
in a miraculous manner. Unnoticed, he raised one a little and inserted
his hand--something prickly, even porcupiney! He withdrew precipitately.
Was it a beast in there, or only a brush? He resolved upon cautious
exploration at a more convenient season.

The hackman was going now, and Aunt Valeria was taking the boy up-stairs
to be washed.

"Don't be long," said his grandmother, smiling over the banister as he
went up; "supper is ready."

What a comfort that she seemed to have forgotten Uncle Tallmadge's
disgraceful conduct!

The one jarring note during that first meal under his grandmother's roof
was the apparition of the negress who had dared to offer to kiss him. To
be sure, when she appeared this time, it was with a plate of smoking
squares of Johnny-cake; but Ethan couldn't meet her eye, and shrank
under his blue serge jacket when she came behind his chair to offer him
that delectable staple of a Southern supper-table. He did not notice
that the meal was very plain, it was all so good, and the silver on the
table was much prettier than that Miss Tallmadge presided over in
Boston.

While his Aunt Valeria and his grandmother talked, he ate steadily, and
regarded with awe the immensely tall coffee-pot and other things that
were covered all over with trees and little pagoda-like buildings in
repoussé. Seeing Mrs. Gano behind this service gave him an impression of
her wealth and magnificence that no after series of meagre meals and
authentic knowledge of her poverty was ever able quite to efface.
Observing the child craning his neck to see the inscription on the
sugar-bowl, she turned it towards him.

"It is your own name," she said: "Ethan Gano. It will belong to you some
day."

"Oh!" said Ethan, feeling his prospects to be princely.

"Now you may come and walk about a little," she said, rising. "But fold
your napkin and put it in your ring."

He noticed the ring was marked "E. G.," and laid it down with a sense of
ownership. It wasn't like visiting in a strange place when you found
your own name on the things at supper.

Valeria brought her mother a shawl, and disappeared. Ethan put his hand
in Mrs. Gano's, and with great care moderating his child's pace to one
sedate and slow, he passed out on to the veranda at the back with his
grandmother on that first tour of inspection. There were heavy wooden
settees on the veranda against the wall.

"Oh, I shall sit here when I do my lessons," said Ethan, coming out of
his shyness.

"No; you must bring out a chair," said his grandmother; "these benches
are so black."

"What makes them black?"

"The soot. We burn bituminous coal here. You'll have to wash your hands
oftener than you do in Boston."

"Doesn't anybody ever sit on these benches?"

"Never. Why do you do lessons in holiday time?"

"Grandfather expects me to."

"Humph!" said Mrs. Gano.

They had come down off the veranda towards the terraces that sloped on
this side down below the level of the street at the bottom of the
property, which occupied an angle between Washington Street and Mioto
Avenue. They went down the first flight of stone steps, but stopped at
the top of the second.

"We won't go down there," said Mrs. Gano. "It is a perfect wilderness."

"Really?" said Ethan, making great eyes of wonder. "What's down there?"

"What you see. Huge sunflowers, and reeds, and grasses--it's very damp
in the middle--and briers and wild roses, blackberries, great weeds and
bushes, dock and tall mullein, and up on that side where the ground
rises a little towards the lower terrace, there used to be a
garden--where you see the asparagus gone to seed."

"But it's a _real_ wilderness?" asked the boy, radiant.

"I should say so."

"Snakes, too?"

"I shouldn't wonder."

His heart beat hard. This was a wonderful place to come to for a visit.
It was almost a pity one didn't live here.

"Are those apple-trees along the bottom of the terrace?"

"No, quince. And that one big tree in the middle of the lower plateau is
a choke-pear."

"Isn't there a vine climbing up?"

"Yes. There are grapes down there in the autumn."

"How long do you think I can stay?"

"We'll see," she said, in a somewhat defiant tone, as they turned to go
up the terrace.

There were still some "snowballs" on the great guelder rose-bushes, and
the waxberries on the little one's gleamed like pearls.

"I like this place," said the child, suddenly.

"That's right, my dear."

They were up on the level of the house now, past the long veranda with
the banned black benches. It was growing dusk, a time that under all
conditions of this child's life made rude test of cheer. He drew nearer
to the tall, bent figure. She dropped his hand, and stooped over the
edge of clovered grass.

"What is it?" he asked, as she stood upright with something in her hand.

"A four-leaved clover--the third I've found to-day."

"Oh, do you think there are any more?"

He knelt down and examined the clump.

"You may have this," she said, presently, "and we'll come and look
to-morrow, when we have a better light."

"Oh, thank you."

He held the clover carefully, thinking of the fairy-tale.

Now they were passing the great, perfectly straight tulip-tree, that
went up and up like a ship's mast before the far-away boughs soared out
into the dim depths of evening air. A light breeze had risen. A bird
high up in the proudly waving branches twittered faintly. Except for
that, a hush was over the world; but in the child's heart there was a
mysterious sense of tumult, one of those periodic waves of excitement
that rush over sensitive young creatures, along with the vague
consciousness of the wonder of this strange thing, life, that is opening
out before their thrilling senses.

Ethan stood looking up till a kind of delicious dizziness seized him,
and he leaned his head lightly against his grandmother's arm. She smiled
down into his eyes, saying never a word, but when they went in-doors
there was understanding between them.

A large octagon-shaped lamp of debased Moorish design hung in the hall,
and the light came through the eight panes of parti-colored glass with a
cheerful, even festive, effect. The parlor on the left of the front-door
was dark. The great room opposite, which ran the whole length of that
end of the house, and had two windows at either extremity, was Mrs.
Gano's sitting-room in summer, and, by an arrangement of screens, her
bedroom as well in winter. There was a single lamp burning on one of the
pair of heavy old card-tables on either side the fireplace. Opposite,
along the wall separating the room from the hall, stretched a great
old-fashioned buffet, consisting of two mahogany cupboards, with drawers
above, and pillared porches below, and an arched and carved back
bridging them, and forming below a well-polished surface, whereon stood
empty cut-glass decanters and tall celery vases. The long drawer of this
middle part of the buffet, as well as those on the top of the cupboards
on either side, was opened by a big brass ring held in a lion's mouth.
The fireplace opposite was screened by an extensive landscape in oils,
framed in ornate and tarnished gilt. All the space on each side of the
mantel-piece right and left as far as the windows was filled with
bookcases and mineralogical cabinets built into the wall. Between the
front windows was an old-fashioned escritoire, reaching high up, nearly
to the ceiling, always locked, and equally always wearing the air of a
keeper of things secret and important. An engraving, grown brown with
age, hung in a faded gilt frame above the fireplace. It was the great
scene from "Measure for Measure," and above the buffet hung another from
"The Tempest," with "What is't? A spirit?" written underneath. On the
mantel-piece were two tall blue china vases, that had been old, Mrs.
Gano said, when she was young. She sat down by the lamp in a chair that
no one ever saw the like of before. Very big and very crimson, it was
rounded out in semicircular fashion on each side at the top, forming
well-padded cushions against which to rest the head; but no one ever saw
Mrs. Gano making such a use of them. The chair had arms and a foot-rest,
and was mounted upon short, strong rockers--altogether a structure of
unique device, that no one up to that time, except its proper owner,
ever dared dream of inhabiting for a moment.

Mrs. Gano handed Ethan a book.

"I suppose you know that by heart?"

"_Moral Tales?_ No; I've only heard about 'em."

"Is it possible? What do you read, then?"

"You see, I have to study a good deal."

"But when you aren't studying?"

"Well, then, you see, I read only the things I like."

"To be sure. But what kind of things?"

"Well"--he colored faintly--"I read Hans Christian Andersen mostly. But
I _like_ 'Horatius at the Bridge,'" he added, as though anxious to
redeem his character, "and _Henry of Navarre_, and _Paul Revere_."

"Well, now you may read _Moral Tales_. It was your father's book, and
you may have it if you'll take care of it. I'll cover it for you
to-morrow."

"Oh, thank you," said the boy.

She opened her own volume where a worked marker kept the place, and
began to read. But Ethan was too excited to follow suit. He sat looking
at her, and about the room. The pressed four-leaved clover presently
fell out of her book on to the footstool. He picked it up carefully and
handed it to her.

"Ah!" she ejaculated, smiling, and turning back to the beginning of the
volume, where she replaced the leaf. But Ethan had watched the discreet
turning of yellowed pages.

"Why, your Bible is _full_ of clovers," he said.

"This is not the Bible, it is Lockhart's Scott," she answered. "And as
for the four-leaved clovers, I find them as I walk about in the
evenings."

"I suppose you look for them because they're so lucky?"

"Nonsense! of course not. They just look up at me from the grass."

Ethan felt dashed a little, but he noticed how the long, slim fingers
held the book so that no more clovers should fall out. She must think a
good deal of them, he concluded.

Many an older person under the circumstances would have felt it
incumbent upon her to entertain the child; but while no doubt some young
people might have been made happier by being noticed more, there are
those, especially the shy and sensitive ones, who are all the better for
a little wholesome letting alone. It is evident that the officious
attempts of many well-meaning adults to amuse, even if it involve making
mountebanks of themselves, are ofttimes destined to humiliation. We have
all seen children solemnly regarding grown-up capers with the air of
philosophers looking down with scorn upon an antic world.

There was something in his grandmother's calm pursuit of her usual
routine that set the child at ease. If she had gone obviously out of her
way to make herself agreeable to him, he, with the perversity of his
type, would have been more on his guard against her blandishments.

His Boston relatives were evidently quite wrong in every respect about
his grandmother. His grandfather Tallmadge had sympathized with him
deeply at having to pay this duty visit. Even Aunt Hannah had evident
misgivings, and had put a seed-cake in his trunk. He felt a sudden
resentment against those estimable persons for their distrust and thinly
veiled dislike of his grandmother Gano. Already he saw himself her
champion and faithful knight, ready to do battle, if need be, for his
sovereign lady. It was not altogether strange that the conquest of the
child was so speedy, for the heart of the woman was full of a
passionate tenderness for this little Ethan come back again, so like the
one she had lost that he seemed to bring with him her youth and all the
sunny circumstance of those far-off Maryland days. She softened
wondrously to the child, yet it was so little her way to be
demonstrative that she neither alarmed nor bored the boy, but simply
took hold on his imagination. He, quick of spirit and keen of sense,
responded as the natural child will, to the reassuring spectacle of
beautiful and august age. What children suffer from sheer ugliness in
their elders is not to be written down. Partly in that many mercifully
forget, and partly in that others remember certain martyrdoms too
vividly to set them down without a blush. One is inclined to think,
looking back, that life has taught us nothing more successfully than
tolerance of these departures from a possible comeliness; for it is not
irregularity of feature or deepening furrows or whitening hair that
appall the child, but the unnecessary ugliness of dress and eccentricity
of demeanor, and, above all, the avoidable and indecent display of the
ravages of time.

With every desire to think nobly of women, it must be admitted that it
is chiefly they who offend against the canon childhood unconsciously
sets up, that old age shall not with impunity offend or affright the
young.

Mrs. Gano would have repelled indignantly the idea that her grandson's
affection had anything to do with her spotless neatness; the sober
distinction of her plain silk gowns, made before the war; her white lawn
kerchiefs, rolling up from her V-shaped bodice, fold on fold, voluminous
and soft about her neck; her full lawn undersleeves, that came so
daintily out from the silk, and fastened with a silver shell button at
the wrist, flowing out again in a fine ruffle, and falling over her
hands. As to that most distinctive touch of all, the veil of plain white
net that covered, and yet did not conceal, the thick silver hair massed
about the high shell comb, one cannot help thinking that if she had
quite realized its effectiveness, she would have considered it her duty
to discard it. She always said she disliked caps as "would-be
ornamental," and besides, she had "too much hair;" she "would be
top-heavy in a cap." So she had adopted the white net veil, fastened
just behind the heavy rings of hair on the temples with a pair of pearl
and silver pins of curious old design, and the veil fell down to the
shoulders behind, concealing the neck, masking a little the droop of the
bowed back, and falling softly down each side of the strong old face,
and dropping into her lap.

The child sat with the open book in his hand, but with big eyes roving,
reading as well as he could the more obscure but not less interesting
story incarnate in the great red chair, getting the details by heart in
the observant way of children.

"What time do you usually go to bed?" she asked, presently, turning a
page.

"When I feel sleepy."

"H'm! I think eight o'clock is a good time."

"It's pretty early," he said, wistfully.

"Your father, when he was your age, always went to bed at eight."

"Oh!"

"Aunt Jerusha will come presently and take you up-stairs."

"_Aunt_ Jerusha!"

He dropped the _Moral Tales_ on the floor. The terrifying black woman
was his aunt!

"Oh, oh! that's not the way to treat books. The Ganos are always very
careful of their books."

Ethan recovered the volume hurriedly, a prey to conflicting agitations.

"Where's Aunt Valeria?" he said, presently.

"Up in the blue room"--Mrs. Gano glanced overhead, and then looked out
severely into space over her gold spectacles, adding, meditatively,
"making herself ill with writing."

"Oh, if she's writing letters, I s'pose I mustn't 'sturb her."

"H'm! she's not writing letters."

"What is she writing?"

"Verses, most probably."

"Poetry verses?"

"Well, _verses_, at any rate," she said, a little grimly. It was noticed
that during Valeria's lifetime Mrs. Gano never spoke of her daughter's
work except as "verses;" after her death it was all "poetry." "It's high
time she was interrupted. Go up-stairs, child," she said, turning to
Ethan, "and knock at the door next your own, and say I sent you."

It was a possible escape from that other most awful "aunt." He laid the
_Moral Tales_ down as if they were made of glass, and departed with
alacrity.

Twice he had to knock upon the blue room door before a voice said:

"Who's there?"

"It's me, Aunt Valeria."

"Oh, run away, dear."

"But, please, I'm sent."

A little pause and the door was opened. A spacious bedchamber, where
everything--walls, curtains, carpet, and bedfurnishing--was a soft faded
blue, almost gray in this light. The floor was strewn with papers, books
and papers lay on the chairs, on the sofa, even on the preternaturally
high and massive bedstead, that looked quite inaccessible to all save
the athletic without the aid of a ladder.

"Did my mother send you?" asked Aunt Valeria.

"Yes, and--oh, are you awful busy?"

His voice faltered a little.

"Why?" she said, taking the child by the hand and leading him in.

The action of kindliness wrought upon the perturbed little spirit. His
eyes filled with tears.

"You see," he said, "I thought she was a servant."

"Who was a servant?"

"My other aunt."

"Miss Tallmadge?"

"No, the other one here. But I like you best. Won't you take me up to
bed? Of course I do everything for myself; it won't be a great trouble;
it's only just so my other aunt needn't come even as far as the door."

"What other?"

"Aunt J--J--Jerusha," he said, with an excited sob.

Valeria began to laugh, a thing she seldom did.

"My poor little boy!" she said, "Jerusha's the cook, and a very good
friend to all of us. People in the South call a good old servant like
that 'aunt' when they like her as much as we do Jerusha. She used to be
a slave; we brought her from Maryland."

"And she's not my really truly aunt at all?"

"Of course not, you foolish little boy! Didn't you see she was a
negress?"

"Oh yes, I saw _that_."

He shuddered.

"And didn't you see she waited on us at the table?"

"Yes, but so does Aunt Hannah in Boston on Sundays."

"_Does_ she?" Then seeing the child's anxiety was not quite dissipated:
"Didn't you notice when she'd finished waiting at supper Jerusha went
back to the kitchen? Now, if she'd been a real aunt--"

"Well, you see, I did think of that, but I thought perhaps aunts didn't
come and sit in the parlor here, and I remembered how she--she"--he
looked down and grew scarlet--"tried to kiss me at the station."

"Oh yes, she might do that. You see, she was very fond of your father."

"But my father didn't use to kiss her."

"Oh, I dare say--"

"No, Aunt Valeria; I should think he _never_ did."

"Perhaps not, then," she said, humoring him.

"Do you think," he began, in a half-whisper--"do you think when she
takes me up to bed she'll--she'll--"

"I don't know, but I'll take you myself, if you'd like that better."

"Oh, I would, Aunt Valeria."

"Very well, then. Come, we'll go down-stairs and say good-night."

He slipped his hand in hers.

"Of course, I didn't _really_ think she was my aunt," he said, with the
easy mendacity of childhood.




CHAPTER V


Although this visit was the only one Ethan was destined to pay to New
Plymouth before he came to man's estate, he carried back with him to
Boston at the holiday's end something more than an intimate
understanding with his father's people, and a vivid picture of the outer
aspect of life in the house of his grandmother.

Out of his fear of Aunt Jerusha that first evening grew the habit of
Valeria's visiting his room ten minutes or so after he had said
good-night. During those first evenings, when he was allowed a candle to
go to bed by, this small attention on his aunt's part was for the
ostensible purpose of putting out the light and opening his windows.
Later on she went for no better reason than that the child would be
expecting her. Absent-minded dreamer as she was, after the second
evening of Ethan's stay she never forgot what became her kindly custom.

On this particular evening, as she sat among the litter in the blue
room, her acute ears caught a faint sound of sobbing. She hurried into
the adjoining chamber, and found all dark and silent, Ethan breathing
regularly, apparently asleep. She bent over in the faint moonlight to
kiss him, and found his face wet with tears.

"My dear! Then it was _you_?"

"Me?" he inquired, in a steady voice.

"Yes. Why were you crying?"

After a pause:

"I thought the walls were so awful thick," he said, as if answering her
question with all circumstance.

"Shall I light the candle again?"

"No, thank you," he said, sedately; "I can see the moon through the
locust-tree."

She went to the window, and leaning her folded arms on the wide seat,
she repeated softly, as she looked out:


     "'And, like a dying lady, lean and pale,
     Who totters forth, wrapt in a gauzy veil,
     Out of her chamber, led by the insane
     And feeble wanderings of her fading brain,
     The moon arose up in the murky east
     A white and shapeless mass.'"


"Is that what you've been writing, Aunt Valeria?"

"No." She came back and sat down on the side of his bed. "No; Shelley
wrote it. What shall I do for you?" she said, wondering how women that
were used to children would meet the exigency, for the little voice was
plaintive in spite of itself.

"I don't want anything," Ethan said, stoutly, and there was another
pause. Then, by way of a delicate hint: "Grandmamma has been telling me
a story."

"Has she?"

"Yes; about when she was young. Tell me about when _you_ were young,
Aunt Valeria."

The innocent petition jarred. Valeria was the youngest of her family,
and had never yet been asked to think of herself as one who had left
youth behind.

"There's nothing to tell about me," she said.

"Didn't you ever cross the Alleghanies in a stage-coach?"

"No; all that was before my time."

"Didn't you ever go to visit your grandfather Calvert in the mountains
of Virginia?"

"No; he died before I was born."

"Then, you never got homesick?" His voice wavered a little, and then,
quite firmly, he added: "Grandmamma did, and she used to go off by
herself to meet the postman, who came only once a week, and she'd walk
and walk till she heard him wind his horn. How do you 'spose he wound
it?"

"He just blew a long blast."

"Did that make it wind? Well, anyhow, when he wound it, that used to
make grandmamma homesicker than ever. It used to echo all about among
her grandfather's mountains, and when she heard that she used to stop
running, and sit down on a rock and cry and cry. You see, she was so
afraid the postman wasn't bringing the letter to say Aunt Cadwallader
was coming to take her home."

"Did my mother tell you that story to-night?" inquired Aunt Valeria,
without enthusiasm.

"No; it was this morning, when I said I wasn't a bit homesick like Aunt
Hannah said I'd be. Grandmamma seemed to think it didn't matter if I
_was_ homesick. The Ganos nearly always are, but in the end they're
always glad they came."

This obscure saying seemed not to rivet Aunt Valeria's attention; she
moved as if she were going. Ethan sat up in bed and asked, a little
feverishly:

"Did you know about Aunt Cadwallader bein' in the war?"

"No; I never heard she was in the war."

"Well, she _was_. She was about four years old, and the British were
firing on Fort McHenry, and all the doors and windows in Baltimore were
shut, and nobody went out, and everybody was living in the cellar, so's
not to get shot, and bombs were exploding in the garden, and the fambly
missed Aunt Cadwallader--"

"Oh yes," said Aunt Valeria; "she was out in the garden, wasn't she,
picking up the bullets?"

"Yes; they were raining all about, and she was putting them in a little
egg-basket she carried on her arm." Ethan finished, a shade crestfallen
to find his scheme to entertain and, above all, to detain his aunt had
been forestalled. "I thought perhaps if I told you you'd remember
something that happened to _you_--when you were young, you know."

"I'm sorry I don't know any stories."

"Don't you know the one about the poor man over your fireplace?"

"What poor man?" she repeated, bewildered.

"The man without his clo'es on, tied to the wild horse."

"Oh, you mean the Mazeppa on the iron fire frame."

"Yes"--Ethan sat up again, with dilated eyes--"wolfs comin' after him,
wif mouths wide open."

"Oh, well, they don't eat him up; he gets away, and lives happy ever
after."

"I _am_ glad!"

He lay down, and she covered him up.

"I'd sing to you, but I'm afraid it would disturb my mother."

"Then, couldn't you say some more poetry or something?"

"I don't believe I know anything you'd like."

"Oh, I'd like anything--except the 'May Queen.'"

She sat silent a moment, and then began:


     "'Once upon a midnight dreary--'


"H'm!"--and she stopped.

"Can't you remember any more?" inquired the boy, eagerly.

"Well--a--perhaps something else;" and she made a fresh start:


     "'Ah, what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
       Alone and palely loitering?
     The sedge is withered from the lake,
       And no birds sing.

     "'Ah, what can--'


No, no; I must think of something a little less--"

Another pause, and then:


     "'Raise the light, my page, that I may see her:
     Thou hast come at last, then, haughty queen.'"


On and on the low voice chanted, whispered, verse after verse and page
on page, until the child slept sound. In this wise was the habit formed
of Aunt Valeria's prolonging her nightly ministrations till Ethan was
safe beyond the touch of homesickness, beyond the need of a doubtful
cheer. From most of her selections, it must be confessed, he derived
only the vague comfort of listening to the rhythmic rise and fall of a
friendly, sleep-wooing voice, that sent him softly to oblivion. But as
the days went on he developed tyrannous preferences, and would call for
"The Neckan" as regularly as he had been used in infancy to demand "The
New England Cat." He managed to keep awake longer as time went on, and
it took "The Ancient Mariner," or the solemn and somnolent-burdened
rhyme of the "Duchess May" to send him to the land of Nod. He came to
know these favorites by heart, and would prompt Valeria if she ventured
to skip or hesitated at a line. In after years he used to feel it odd to
realize how much English verse he knew by heart that he had never seen
upon the printed page. But Aunt Valeria's patience was sometimes sorely
taxed by his wide-eyed attention to the story. Then it was she would
unkindly lapse into German, against which no young wakefulness is proof.

"Now go to sleep," she would admonish, "or I'll say 'Kennst du das
Land.'" Notwithstanding it was a very dull poem, she would say it over
and over, and Ethan, vanquished utterly, would fall asleep with the
refrain, "Dahin, Dahin, Möcht ich mit Dir O mein Geliebter ziehn,"
sounding in his ears. He had his own view of what it was all about, and
classed it with such ditties as "Annabel Lee." "Dahin" he was satisfied
was the heroine, and he determined on his return to Boston to bestow the
name upon the least attractive of three terrier puppies, fresh arrivals
in his absence.

There was no one to play with, apparently, here in New Plymouth, but few
children could have felt the lack so little as Ethan. Nobody interfered
with him, nobody seemed to want him to study. The spectre of Grandfather
Tallmadge was still potent enough to make him carry about a French
grammar in the shallow jacket-pocket, that was always ejecting it upon
an indifferent world. Ethan, on its every _mal à propos_ appearance,
would hurry the book out of sight with an uneasy conscience, and betake
himself into the wilderness, where he owned an oasis under a
barberry-bush; or he would seek diversion from linguistic cares in the
sooty attic. Nobody seemed to mind, if only he were washed when he
appeared on the surface again. That same attic, however, was a place of
peril. You gained access to it by means of a ladder in a closet on the
upper landing, and you went up through a trap-door into a dim and
stifling atmosphere; not but what there were windows, but they seemed to
admit only heat and soot. There was an army of disabled or disused pots,
pitchers, vases, and so on, standing in the middle of the rough wooden
floor, and above them stretched a long table like a counter, on which
were ranged queer lamps and candlesticks, brackets, door-knobs, pewter
vessels and great platters, candlesnuffers and trays, and all manner of
household goods and gear that had then been long out of fashion, and had
not yet come back again. With grimy fingers Ethan poked about, taking
great care not to step off the middle aisle of flooring on to the lath
and plaster between the mighty hand-hewn beams. Sometimes, in more
daring moods, he would venture farther afield, balancing cautiously on a
beam to some remote cobwebby corner to examine nearer an object that had
lured him long with its air of the unattainable. In this way he made
acquaintance with certain pictures turned disobligingly to the wall, and
a great horse-hair trunk, into which he peeped with palpitating heart;
for all the world knew that such trunks were the abode of skeleton
ladies. But here were only dusty papers. The far corner he never
ventured into: it was there the great elk antlers shone, and the skull
and white teeth grinned and threatened. One had just to pretend it was
chained there, and strained impotently to get at little boys. Turning
over a lot of ancient rubbish in a box one day, he came across a heavy
old brass door-knocker with "E. Gano" on it. Down-stairs he rushed, all
black and beaming.

Mrs. Gano was sitting, as usual, very upright in the great red chair,
with Dean Stanley's _History of the Eastern Church_ open on her knees.

"My child, you're like a blackamoor!"

"But just look what I've found!"

"Ah, yes! I had that taken off the front-door the last thing before I
left Maryland."

"Why didn't you put it on the front-door _here_?"

"You see, it's 'E. Gano.' There was no 'E. Gano' then," she said, with
shadowed face.

"But there is now--I'm here."

"To be sure," she answered, smiling. "As your grandfather said, 'It's
necessary to have an Ethan in every generation to avoid re-marking
things.' We'll have the knocker put up, if you like. Venie will polish
it."

"Shall I ask her please to come to you as soon as she's done her work?"
he said, hesitatingly, for an interview with these black women was not
yet lightly to be faced.

"Tell her I want her at once," said his grandmother, a little brusquely.

He was struck with her peremptoriness.

"Sha'n't I say 'please'?" he inquired.

"Certainly not. It's not as my servants please, but as I please. Tell
her to come."

Ethan knew now that his manner to Aunt Jerusha and her daughter must
have appeared abject according to Gano standards. He secretly determined
to adopt a loftier demeanor. Vain ambition! Never once in his life did
he find the accent, let alone the conviction, of the superior, except
with persons of his own station. Of servants he asked service
unwillingly, and, to the end of his days, with an uneasy sense that
somebody was being abased--he inclined to think it was himself. The
wages question never in his estimation touched the heart of the
obligation. Any underlining of the relation of master and servant was as
irksome to him as if he had come of generations of communists, instead
of a race of tyrannous slave-holders.

Venie brightened up the knocker till it shone like gold, and Aunt
Jerusha, who could do anything on earth, apparently, promised to come
round and screw it firmly in its place at exactly the angle it had taken
on the great white door "down South."

It was over this business of the knocker that Ethan made friends with
Aunt Jerusha. He was still mortally afraid of her, but he had come to
that point where he was able to snatch a fearful joy in passing quite
near her without flinching, as though she had been any ordinary white
person, whose eyes didn't roll, and whose plaited wool didn't escape in
little horns from under a flaming bandanna. He had insisted on carrying
the tool-box and the hammer and the big screw-driver from the kitchen
round to the front porch. It was so that his intention to be lofty and
aloof had ended. At the front-door stood his grandmother.

"You've got a lazy man's load," she said.

And, as if on purpose to justify her, down dropped the screw-driver on
the gravel, and out jumped the French grammar on the grass. He recovered
the book, and as he reached after the screw-driver away slid the hammer
off the tool-box.

"Put down your book. Don't try to do so many things at once. That's how
your great-uncle Rezin put out his eyes at Harper's Ferry, and Shelley
lost his life trying to read and sail a boat at the same time."

Who was this Shelley who was always being quoted, and where did he come
into the family saga? Byron, too, and others he hadn't heard mentioned
in Boston. The appearance of Aunt Jerusha see-sawing round the corner
was a welcome diversion, and soon the glittering knocker was screwed
firmly into place. It was a triumph. Aunt Valeria was called down to
see, and admitted it was resplendent!

"Isn't it _delicious_ having our very own Maryland knocker on the door
again!" remarked the young gentleman, with as heartfelt satisfaction as
though he had watched the decline and fall of the old house in the
South, and now saw the family fortunes to be mending.

His grandmother patted his shoulder.

"We say 'delicious' of good things to eat, not of door-knockers, even
when they come from Maryland."

"Oh, you wouldn't limit such a word as delicious to things we eat,"
remonstrated Aunt Valeria. "That's a point where I've always differed
from Byron."

"Then I'm surprised to hear it, for it's one of the few things he got
right."

The younger woman withdrew into her shell, making no rejoinder, but
pausing at the bottom of the stairs on her way back to her work, with an
air of perfunctory deference, to hear her mother out. Ethan watched the
two with interest, feeling that he and his aunt were in the same boat.

"We can't be too jealous of guarding the purity and honesty of
language," Mrs. Gano said, firmly. "Any one who has the smallest
pretence to caring for letters or for accuracy, or for _truth_, must do
what he can to oppose the debasing of the current coin of speech. If you
use words loosely, you'll begin to think loosely, and in the end you'll
find you've lost your sense of values, and one word means no more than
another. You'll be like Ethan here, who tells me 'bonny clabber' is
perfectly splendid, and that he 'loves' Jerusha's Johnny-cake. After
that, he mustn't say he loves you and me. It would be like kissing us
after the cat."

"It's a _kitten_," said Ethan, feeling froward and very bold.

His grandmother laughed delightedly.

"Oh, very well, we'll be accurate, if it's only about a kitten that I
haven't so much as seen."

The child flashed out to the veranda and returned with a small basket,
in which lay a diminutive coal-black object.

"You said you didn't like animals," he observed, reproachfully.

"I don't--not in the house."

"This one's very little to stay out o' doors."

"Yes, it's too little to stay here at all."

"Oh no, it isn't so little as that."

He pulled out its tail that it might look as long as possible, but it
would curl under. He lifted the creature up, clawing and feebly wailing.

"Why, Ethan," said Aunt Valeria over the banisters, "it hasn't got its
eyes open."

"Not just _yet_."

"Can it walk?"

"Well, not much," said Ethan, guardedly; "but nobody walks as young as
this. The Otways' cat brought it over in her mouth. They're nice to the
Otways' cat _in the kitchen_."

There was judgment delivered in the phrase.

"Venus must take the thing home," said Mrs. Gano, eying the wailing one
with coldness.

"Oh, grandmamma!"

There bade fair to be a duet of lamentation.

"It will die if it's left here."

"No, no; I'll take care of it." He clasped it fondly.

"We don't know what to do for such a young creature."

"Oh yes, we do," interrupted Ethan. He came nearer, notwithstanding Mrs.
Gano's edging away from her grimy descendant, and from the small,
wailing, trembling, clawing object on his breast. The child took hold of
her gown, and said, with ingratiating, upturned, face, "Dear grandmamma,
_couldn't_ we buy it a cow?"

The suggestion apparently pleased his unaccountable grandmother too well
for her to persist in banishing the kitten. So "Duchess May," as Ethan
insisted on calling her, became an acknowledged member of the sooty
circle in the kitchen, and was well and safely brought up without the
immediate superintendence of a cow.

Mrs. Gano's refusal to admit the Duchess to other parts of the house
resulted in Ethan's spending a good deal of his time, too, in Aunt
Jerusha's society. She turned out to be a most interesting and
accomplished person. No wonder his father had thought well of her, but
as to--no, he never, never could have kissed her!

Aunt Jerusha sang the most wonderful songs.

The words were not very intelligible for the most part, but that didn't
matter: the effect was all the more exciting and mysterious. There was
one monotonous chant she used solemnly to give forth when she was
polishing the dining-room table--something about


             "... de body ob de Lawd.
     An' dat was wot He meant
     W'en He said He'd brought a sword,
     An' no mo' peace on de earf!"


Then a string of undistinguishable words, ending with something like--


             "Oh, mighty keerful
     All roun' de body ob de Lawd,
     We done been a wrappin'
     A w'ite linen napkin
     All round de body ob de Lawd.
     He said He'd bring a sword,
     An' no mo' peace on de earf!"


There was a wild melancholy in the air that made the child's heart
tremble in his breast. Particularly on wet days, when he couldn't go
down into the wilderness, he used to stand in the doorway with the
Duchess in his arms, listening with all his ears.

"An' Jerusha," he said, one morning during a thunderstorm, when she
polished the oak in persistent silence, "why don't you sing? Grandmamma
can't hear."

"No, Massa Efan, not to-day."

"Why not? This is just the day to, when the rain's makin' such a noise
you can sing as loud as you like."

"Yo' won't nebber ketch dis nigger raisin' no chunes on de twenty-firs'
ob July."

"Why not?"

"Don' you know, little massa, dis de day yo' fader died?"

"Oh-h, is it?" A silence of some moments, broken only by the dash of
summer rain against the window-pane. "Did you know my father when he was
quite little?"

"Law, yes, littler'n you--so little, he couldn't walk by hisself. De
firs' time I done lef' him, jes' fur a minute, standin' in de big
arm-cheer by de winder, he turn roun' w'en he see I wusn't holdin' on t'
him, an' he yelled like forty--" She chuckled proudly, stopped suddenly,
and held out timid arms and made a baby face. "'Ow! ow! Efan fall--Efan
_bake_!'" She relaxed into smiles again. "Break he meant, yo' see. He'd
seen pitchers and china dolls and sich like fallin' and smashin' ter
bits, and he wus 'feared dat's wot would happen t' him."

She went on chuckling a moment, and then fell unaccountably to weeping.
The thunder crashed and the wind blew loud. It lashed the great
tulip-tree with fury. Ethan laid his face against the velvet back of the
Duchess. Aunt Jerusha wept audibly. Ethan felt rather low in his mind
himself.

"Where does this door out here lead to?" he said, feeling the need of a
diversion.

"Unner dem front stehs."

"Oh, does it go under the stairs?"

"Yes; but don' yo' go dah, honey."

"Why not?"

"It ain't a berry cheerin' kin' ob a place."

"Dirty?"

"Spec's so."

"I've noticed Venie always _runs_ past that door. It can't be 'cause
it's dirty."

"No, honey; no."

"An' Jerusha, Venie told me yesterday when grandmamma first came here
she couldn't get any servants to sleep in this house, and that was why
she had to send for Venie."

"Don' yo' min' Venus; she's misleadin'."

"Well, but I asked Mr. Hall while he was cutting the grass, and he said
_he_ wouldn't like to live here, and he looked at the house in such a
funny kind o' way."

"Huh! yo' mus'n't listen to po' w'ite trash."

"Then you'd better tell me, or I'll ask everybody."

"No, no, honey. Yo' grandma would be hoppin' mad ef yo' should git dem
iggorant pussens t' gabbin' agin."

"Then you'd just better tell me, and it'll be a secret, please, An'
Jerusha."

"Well, dey _do_ say, Massa Efan, dis yer house am hanted."

"Hanted? What's that?"

Aunt Jerusha rolled her eyes cautiously over her shoulder and lowered
her voice.

"Got ghos'es."

"Under the front stairs?" whispered Ethan, quickly withdrawing from that
proximity.

Aunt Jerusha nodded.

"Did you ever see one?"

"Law, yes; oncet or twicet."

"What was it like?"

"Like de debbil in a night-gown. Hark! Yo' heah dat?"

"Yes; oh, what was it?" Ethan was nearer Aunt Jerusha in his alarm than
he had ever ventured before.

"Dat's de bad ghos' under de stehs. De fust fall we come heah he done
groan and _gro-o-an_ like dat all de time. He been mighty still now fur
a spell. Hark! yo' heah dat?"

Ethan was horribly conscious of a hideous noise somewhere in front of
the dining-room.

"_I_ think he's in the parlor," he whispered, when he could command his
emotions sufficiently for speech.

"No, no; I used t' 'spect he was dah, but dat's jus' his being so cute,
he didn' want nobody to know he was unner de front stehs. Come into de
kitchen, Massa Efan, and I'll gib yo' a cinnamon roll."

It is useless to pretend that Ethan was a stout-hearted young gentleman.
From infancy he had been a prey to a thousand unseen terrors having for
the most part quite respectable Christian name and origin, such as the
"worm that dieth not," "the thief in the night," the "great red dragon"
of the Revelation, and "the beast with seven heads." But there are some
terrors that need no inculcating. It occurred to him now that the ghost
under the stairs was called Yaffti. Why "Yaffti" he could not have
told, or what suggested the name to him; but Yaffti was angry when
people, especially little boys, walked over his head without saying:


     "Yaffti Makafti, here I am, you see;
     I'll be good to you, if you'll be good to me."


His worst form of nightmare was forgetting to use this formula, and
daring in his purblind sleep to stamp on the stairs directly over
Yaffti's head. He realized by-and-by that the restless spirit underneath
was soothed when the stairs were not used, and his young friend made the
descent astride the banisters. This pleased all parties, except Mrs.
Gano. Next best, from the Yaffti point of view, was walking on the
narrow green border of the stair carpet, instead of in the fawn-colored
centre. Little by little Yaffti enlarged his jurisdiction, and ruled the
porches with a despotism as secret as it was potent, permitting no child
to walk on the cracks between the boards. Yaffti was pleased, too, if in
going about the town you steered clear of the cracks between the
flag-stones. But all this attempt at a friendly understanding was at
bottom a mere daylight truce, and with the coming on of night the hollow
mockery stood exposed. Ethan, like many another, went through his
childish terrors with a silent endurance that would have earned him the
name of hero had he been a man, and had Yaffti boasted another name,
though not necessarily a more demonstrable existence.

Nevertheless, these were wonderful and beautiful days, having in them a
rapture of freedom from human interference incompatible with life under
the same roof with Aunt Hannah and Grandfather Tallmadge, who seemed to
have nothing better to do than to look after Ethan and spoil his fun
from morning till night.




CHAPTER VI


In spite of Ethan's somewhat heathen faith in the power of Yaffti, and
the efficacy of rites and spells, he was a true Gano, in that he early
developed a deep concern about Christianity. During the stately strolls
after supper with his grandmother, he propounded many a question which
so taxed that practised theologian that she was fain to turn the
conversation by quoting a question-begging beatitude, or saying loftily
the subject was beyond little boys. But if, like Dr. Johnson on the
immortality of the soul, she sometimes left the matter in obscurity, she
had a Bible quotation ready for every conceivable emergency in life. Her
ingenuity in wresting from the stern old Scripture humane and cheerful
counsel, fit for the infant mind of a conscience-plagued Gano,
discovered how true was her comprehension of his fears, and how much
wiser her teaching all unconsciously was than that of the creed she
would have died for. Her own spiritual development had never for a
moment been arrested. She had travelled farther than she was quite
aware, since the days when she had allowed her young children to be
tormented by the fears of a fiery hereafter. She soon discovered that
the Presbyterian Tallmadges had done their best to plant the Calvinistic
evil in the sensitive mind of her grandson, and, without misgiving, she
proceeded to root it out.

"I don't see how anybody can feel _sure_ they're going to be saved," the
child said, with deep anxiety, one Sunday evening.

"Such thoughts are a temptation of the Evil One. 'O thou of little
faith, wherefore didst thou doubt?'"

"But how do I know I'm not one of those He meant when He said, 'Ye
serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of
hell?'"

"Because our Saviour distinctly says it of _that_ generation--centuries
ago--of rebellious and unbelieving Jews."

"Oh-h!" He was only half reassured.

She paused on the gravel walk and looked down at him. His little grave
face was upturned in the twilight, his great eyes darkened by a world of
care, but he looked so very fragile withal, such a tender little baby,
that she felt her lips twitching at his anxiety lest he should be the
viper of the Lord's denunciation. In another moment her unaccustomed
eyes were strangely wet, and she walked on with averted face.

"I can't help wondering often," the child pursued, with evident
heaviness of spirit, "how I shall manage to be a profitabubble servant."

"A what?"

"Well, not like the _un_profitabubble servant that had to be cast into
outer darkness, where there was weeping and gnashing--"

"Nonsense! all that has nothing to do with you! He said, 'Suffer little
children to come unto Me.'"

"You think, if I died now, I'd go to heaven?"

"Of course you would. _All_ little children go to heaven."

"All children who aren't too wicked," corrected Ethan, gravely, with
misgiving.

"There is no such thing as a wicked child," interrupted his mentor,
impatiently; then, catching herself up--"They may be foolish and
wayward"--she looked down on him sternly--"and they may have to be
severely punished on this earth, but they don't know enough to be
wicked, not enough to deserve being shut out of heaven."

"I've heard Grandfather Tallmadge say somebody--I think it was some
saint--had seen"--he lowered his voice--"had seen an infant in hell, a
span long." He shuddered.

"Nonsense!" retorted Mrs. Gano, angrily. "No saint ever saw anything of
the sort--nor no sane creature. It was that John Calvin."

"Oh! and you think perhaps he--"

"He didn't know what he was talking about. He had a black, despairing
mind, and is the only human creature who ever had any valid excuse for
being a Calvinist."

"Oh!"

"I suppose they've not neglected in Boston to tell you there is such a
thing as 'the unpardonable sin'?"

The ironic intonation was lost on Ethan.

"Oh no," he said, with the animation of one who recognizes an old
friend; "Grandfather Ta--"

"Now, never forget that the only unpardonable sin is to doubt the mercy
of God."

"Then you think that when the end of the world comes--"

"I think," she interrupted, with a lyrical swell in her voice as she
remembered the prophet's vision--"I _know_, that 'the ransomed of the
Lord shall return and come to Zion with songs and everlasting joys upon
their head; they shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing
shall flee away.' And now we've had enough of that for to-night," she
ended, with an abrupt change of voice and style.

Oddly enough, she was not so likely to close the subject in this summary
fashion if the evening talk fell upon Ulysses, or Peter the Great, or
General Lee. It was sometimes Aunt Valeria who had to remind them of
Ethan's bedtime, if the topic had chanced to be the Civil War, or any
one of the legion of family stories of Calverts or Ganos and their
doings in the South. There was Ephraim Calvert, who had fought for the
King in 1774, and when he died had left his curse and his red coat for
"a sign" to his rebellious sons, who had fought for independence. There
was that cousin Ethan Gano, who had lost his right hand, and yet was
such a famous shot and swordsman with his left that no man dared stand
up against him. He had made a fortune in the India trade, by chance, as
it were, for he never really cared for anything but sword and pistol
practice, and would be always talking of feats of arms, even to parsons
and Quakers. "Just as that other boaster, Byron," Mrs. Gano would wind
up, "was forever telling how, like Leander, he had swum the Hellespont,
and took more credit to himself for being able to snuff out a candle
with a pistol-shot at twenty paces than for being able to write _Childe
Harold_. But that was not only because he was a poet," she would add
meditatively over Ethan's head: "it was the direct result of inordinate
vanity and a club-foot. Just as Ethan Gano would never have been a crack
swordsman if he hadn't been one-armed as well as worldly."

Among the minor advantages of life in New Plymouth was that a boy didn't
come in for a scolding here if he went without his cap. In common with
many children, Ethan hated head-gear of all kinds, and yet fully
expected to be scolded, on strict Boston principles, the first time he
was discovered hatless out-of-doors. Valeria, wearing a wide shade-hat,
and Mrs. Gano, with a green-lined umbrella, came unexpectedly upon him
one hot noon-day as he sat reading bareheaded in the scorching sun on
the terrace steps.

"How like his father that child is!" said Mrs. Gano, stopping and
looking at him as though she saw, not him at all, but another boy.

"Don't you want your hat?" asked Aunt Valeria.

"No," said Ethan, gathering courage. "I--I like the hot sun."

"Isn't that like Shelley?" said Aunt Valeria in the same way that Mrs.
Gano had remarked on the likeness to Ethan's father. "If his curly hair
wasn't cropped so close, his little round head would be exactly like--"

"What are you reading?" interrupted his grandmother.

"I'm studying," answered Ethan, self-righteously, and he held up his
French grammar.

"Don't you do enough of that in school?" said Mrs. Gano, with what
seemed strange lack of appreciation in a grandmother.

"They expect me to do some work in the holidays."

"Oh, they do, do they?"

She turned away indifferently, as if to continue her walk, glancing
sharply down in that familiar way of hers at the clover fringing the
path.

"Do you think I needn't study?" The child had jumped up and joined them
as they walked round the house. "You see, I hate doing it most awfully."

"Not 'awfully.'"

"Yes, really, especially _être_ and _avoir_; but grandfather says--"

"I notice you use that word 'awfully' a great deal. Do you know what it
means?"

Ethan preserved an embarrassed silence.

"Awful means that which inspires awe. Now, your feeling about French
grammar does not inspire awe. French is all very well, but it's a good
thing sometimes to consider your English. You couldn't have a better
task than _that_ in the holidays."

"Shall I carry your coat?" said the child, willing to change the topic,
and laying his hand on the thin wrap she had on her arm.

"This," said his grandmother, with the Tallmadge insistence on French
still rankling, apparently--"this is not a 'cut,' as you call it; and
that person approaching is not walking in the 'rud.' You are losing some
of your twang, but thy speech still bewrayeth thee. Perhaps learning to
talk like a Gano, since you are one, would be a fitting task for the
holidays here. Say 'co-o-at.'" He repeated the word in a shamefaced way.
"Now 'road.' Yes, that's right." She drew back suddenly and faced about.
"Some one's coming in!" she whispered, hurriedly, as who should say "An
enemy is at the gate."

She stalked behind the house with Ethan at her side, while Aunt Valeria
went forward and greeted the visitor.

"Why, it's the same gentleman who has been here twice before," Ethan
observed, looking back.

"Are you _sure_?" said Mrs. Gano, stopping short. "Was that Tom
Rockingham _again_?"

"I don't know his name," answered Ethan, wondering what awful sin Tom
Rockingham could have committed.

"Little, insignificant-looking man?" demanded his grandmother.

"He wasn't very big," admitted the child. "It's the one that walked home
from church, as far as the corner, with Aunt Valeria and me last
Sunday."

"Upon my word!" she ejaculated. "Has Tom Rockingham begun that?"

"I didn't hear his name."

"A man"--she made a gesture of contempt--"very careless about his
linen?"

"I didn't notice."

"--without gloves? Hands rather grimy--"

"Aunt Valeria said he was a great scholar."

"A great fiddlestick! Of course it's Tom Rockingham."

This was evidently a most exciting character, and in any case it was
pleasant to have a visitor who didn't merely leave cards and go away, as
all the others did.

"Aren't we going in to see him?"

"No, certainly not, unless he stays too long."

She threw back her head in that way of hers. They walked up and down the
back veranda in silence, Ethan as well aware as if she had poured forth
torrents that his grandmother's ire was growing with every moment.
Presently she dropped his hand, and going to the door, she called, in an
unmistakable tone:

"Valeria!--_Valeria!_"

"Yes, mother, in a moment," came from the direction of the parlor.

Mrs. Gano waited for some seconds with sparkling eyes, then:

"Valeria, I have called you!"

Ethan was hot and cold with excitement.

"Run away and play," said his grandmother, her gleaming eyes falling on
a sudden upon the child. She turned sharply and went in-doors, leaving
Ethan to wonder which she was going to kill--Tom Rockingham or Aunt
Valeria. He stood quite still, waiting for developments. At last,
unable to bear the combined suspense and solitude any longer, he pulled
the Duchess out from the cool shade under the veranda, and sat down with
her on the step.

Presently Aunt Valeria came out of the parlor and went up-stairs. He
didn't see her face.

With a vague, frightened feeling, he got up with the Duchess in his arms
and walked away.

Mr. Rockingham never came again, and the only reference ever made to him
was weeks afterwards, when the summer was waning, and he passed by the
house one evening without a word, without a pause, taking off his hat to
the ladies who sat in the dusk on the front porch.

"Who is that?" Mrs. Gano asked her daughter.

"Mr. Rockingham."

"Humph!" remarked Mrs. Gano.

Aunt Valeria said nothing.

Ethan laid his cheek against her slim, white hand. But she didn't seem
to him to know or to care for a little boy's sympathy. It was natural,
he thought, that he should care so much more for these relations than
they did for him. The holidays were ended--so Grandfather Tallmadge had
written--and a French boy, a kind of cousin, had come to live at
Ashburton Place and go to school with Ethan. "So now he would have a
playmate," Aunt Hannah had added, as a postscript. Ethan didn't want a
playmate, and he was horribly shy of a boy who knew French by a superior
instinct. But to-morrow he was to go back to Boston. No help for it.

Many letters on this subject had been written; it was all no use. He had
to go, and his grandmother's eyes were angry when the subject was
mentioned, and his own heart heavy and sore in his breast. Aunt Valeria
had never said anything, but she was even kinder to him after the
decision, especially at dusk, when one felt dreary. Mrs. Gano would
seldom allow even the hall lamp to be lighted in the summer evenings,
probably from motives of economy; but this reason was never given for
any mandate except under great pressure. The ostensible end served by
sitting in the dusk and groping one's way up-stairs, or being beholden
to the moon for acting as the domestic candle, was that if darkness
reigned mosquitoes and miller-moths were not attracted into the house;
neither were those great winged things with horns, that one never saw in
Boston, which fact would have compensated Ethan for endurance of the
dark if anything could. In the moments preceding bedtime, the firefly
had been a distinct consolation. That very morning he had hid Aunt
Valeria's empty cut-glass camphor-bottle under the syringa-bush, and now
was the time to try the experiment of bottling a few fireflies and
seeing how they lightened their captivity. He sallied forth into the
scented dusk, whistling softly. His plan worked wondrous well. With each
new victim his spirits mounted higher, he thinking--poor deluded
soul!--that he should never again feel downhearted in the dusk. He had
caught and imprisoned over a dozen of these winged lamps, when Aunt
Valeria came through the bushes, calling softly:

"Ethan! Ethan!"

"Yes; here I am."

He concealed her camphor-bottle as well as he could under his jacket,
but the bottle was big and the jacket was small.

"Bedtime," called the voice.

"Just a few more fire--I mean minutes."

"No; your grandmother says it is past the time."

"Oh, dear! then I s'pose it is." He came out of his covert, and on a
sudden impulse added, hurriedly: "Aunt Valeria, do you _care_ about your
camphor-bottle?"

"Care about it?"

"Yes; do you mind if there's fireflies in it instead of camphor?"

He held it up, and the captives lit their pale lamps and fluttered
despairingly.

"Oh, my dear! they'll die."

"No; they like it. It's such a beautiful bottle."

"But you've got the glass stopper in; they can't breathe."

In spite of his entreating, she took out the stopper, and put the end of
her lace scarf over the opening.

"You won't take it away from me?"

"No, no," she said, gently leading him back to the front porch,
repeating as she went:


     "'The shooting stars attend thee,
           And the elves also,
           Whose little eyes glow
     Like the sparks of fire, befriend thee.'"


"It isn't their little eyes that glow; it's their little tails," said
Ethan, with his nose flattened against the camphor-bottle.

When they got near the porch, the prudent young gentleman took off his
coat, and wrapped the bottle from the too inquiring gaze of his
grandmother. Aunt Valeria was in a kind of dream, and didn't seem to
notice.

"What a perfect evening!" she half whispered, looking up through the
trees.

"Good-night," said Ethan to his grandmother, trying to get through the
ceremony and hold his coat round the bottle on Aunt Valeria's arm at the
same time.

"Forty-eight years to-day," she went on to her mother, "since Shelley's
body was burned on the sands at Viareggio."

"Ah, yes," returned the other, speaking very gently. "Good-night,
child."

"What! Is he _dead_?" said Ethan, feeling a double shock.

"Yes, dear; he's dead."

And he and Aunt Valeria went up-stairs in the dark.

"You never told me," said the child, when they had passed Yaffti in
safety. "I s'pose Byron's all right," he added, remembering allusions to
that person's physical prowess.

"Byron's dead, too," said Aunt Valeria, sadly, "and Keats--poor Keats!"

"All _dead_!"

They had been referred to as if they lived in the next street. If it had
been Shelley who had come to make them a visit, it would have seemed as
natural--more natural than the apparition of Tom Rockingham or the
objectionable Uncle Elijah.

"I'll get a piece of net to put over the bottle while you undress," said
Aunt Valeria.

When she came back Ethan was in bed.

"What relation was Shelley to me?" he asked, welcoming the
camphor-bottle to his arms.

"Relation? None."

"Oh-h!"

These things were obscure. The Tallmadges, for instance, weren't related
to Grandmamma Gano, so she had said with emphasis.

"Then what relation was Shelley to _you_?"

"No relation at all, dear. He was an English poet."

"You mean he wasn't even born in America?"

Ethan sat up straight in his bed.

"He was born far away in England," said Aunt Valeria, dreamily.

"An' dead an' _burnt_?"

"Yes."

"And never was no relation to _any_ of us?"

"No."

"Oh-h!"

He lay back on his pillow, conscious of a new loneliness--of being
bereft of something he had counted his. Yes; it was just as if some one
belonging to him had died.

After Aunt Valeria had told him why they had burned Shelley's body, and
even after she had repeated all his favorite poems, a sense of loss
remained.

She thought he was asleep when she kissed him good-night. But he stirred
and gave a little sigh.

"Well, I'm glad I've got my fireflies, anyhow," he murmured.

His leave-taking next morning was extremely harrowing to his own
feelings, however austerely the rest took it. He wept freely after
breakfast down under the barberry-bush, but he promised himself he would
get it all done down there in the blessed privacy of the wilderness, and
not cry another tear after he got back to the house. He had made a tour
the moment he was dressed, saying good-bye to everything. Now there was
nothing left but An' Jerusha and the family. Uncle Elijah might come any
minute. He dried his eyes, and crept back through the rank undergrowth
to the terrace, went heavily up the two flights of stone steps, saying
good-bye again to the flag lilies and the crooked catalpa and the
tulip-tree, and so on sedately round the house to the kitchen. On his
appearance, An' Jerusha rushed towards him with wide-spread, motherly
arms, but observing his involuntary recoil, she stood still, looking at
him with unlessened affection.

"Good-bye, An' Jerusha," he said, holding her hand tight in both his
own.

"Good-bye, honey. Be suah you come agin soon."

"Yes, I mean to; and thank you for all the songs and the cinnamon
rolls."

"Law, honey! jes' listen to de chile."

She turned away to Venie with an attempt at a chuckle, but the tears had
started down her cheeks.

"Good-bye."

Ethan shook hands with the smiling Venus.

"Maw and me done put yo' in a Johnny-cake," she said, an outsider might
have thought enigmatically.

"Thank you," said Ethan, tremulously--"thank you both, awfully."

"Dat's de do'-bell, an' Massa Efan's knocker," said Aunt Jerusha,
sniffing violently. "You go, Venus; I ain't 'spectabel."

"Oh, it's my uncle," said Ethan, rather relieved at the interruption;
and he hurried after Venus, feeling, however, deeply dissatisfied with
his leave-taking of An' Jerusha.

She had been so _awfully_ kind--it was useless to pretend there was any
other way of putting it--and she had cared so much for his father.
_Ought_ he to have kissed her? It was plain she had expected it. It was
all very uncomfortable and heart-achy.

Now he was in the hall, and Uncle Elijah was there, and so was
grandmamma, being very stiff to poor Uncle Elijah. Aunt Valeria came
down-stairs, and the good-byes were said. Uncle Elijah's hack was at the
door, and Ethan's trunk was being carried out.

Suddenly, at the very last, "Come here a moment," said his grandmother,
retreating into her own long room.

Ethan followed, quaking. Had he been doing something wrong? And yet she
had just kissed him good-bye so kindly. As she turned and faced him, he
saw her eyes were full of tears. He could hardly believe his senses, but
he began to cry, too.

"I _do_ wish I was going to stay with you," he said, breaking down and
forgetting his fears.

"You will come back to me," she said; and she put her arms round him,
and held him close to her for a moment, while he cried silently against
her white veil, thinking the while she wouldn't like it when she
discovered it was wet.

"Don't you think," he faltered, as she released him--"couldn't _this_ be
my home?"

"Of course, it _is_ your home. Isn't your name on the front door?"

"Oh yes," he said, smiling through his tears; "I forgot that," and the
remembrance seemed to give him confidence in the future.

Mrs. Gano was looking hastily about for some excuse for bringing him
into the room.

"Here is a book that belonged to your great-grandfather, called
_Plutarch's Lives_. You will read it when you are older, and remember it
was my parting present after your first visit."

"Oh, thank you," he said, brushing his sleeve across his eyes; and they
went out, and Ethan got into the carriage. "Oh, dear me, my fireflies!"
he shouted, suddenly, as the driver was closing the door. "I shall need
them so awfully--I mean so pertickly--in Boston"; and he scrambled out
and rushed up to his bedroom.

"What does the child mean?" asked Mrs. Gano.

"It's all right," said Aunt Valeria; "something I gave him. I'll tell
you afterwards."

Ethan came tumbling down-stairs in the buff middle of the
carpet--anywhere, indifferent for once to Yaffti and his possible
revenge.

"Good-bye," he called back from the carriage-window. "Thank you, ma'am,
for _Plutarch_."

"Keep him covered," was Mrs. Gano's unemotional rejoinder as they drove
away.

Ethan sank back breathless, clutching the camphor-bottle under his coat.

"Tired?" asked Uncle Elijah, looking at the flushed little face. Ethan
nodded "Yes, sir."

"You needn't have hurried so; there's oceans of time. But I thought we
could wait just as well at the station."

They were not going the way Ethan had been driven that day of his
arrival, so long, long ago, at the beginning of the summer. He leaned
forward excitedly.

"Why, he's taking us round by the Wilderness!"

"The what?" Uncle Elijah looked out. "Moses! they do let things run wild
here."

Ethan's quick eye had sought out the spot where, hidden in that tangle,
was a little clearing and a "heavenly secret-house," with a
barberry-bush for a roof. But no hint of such a matter to the profane
passer-by!

What was that? His heart gave a great jump. Why, it was An' Jerusha on
the lower terrace watching to see them go by! She stood there alone, and
now she was putting her apron up to her eyes. Nobody else was looking
after the carriage from this side. It was plain, for all his
grandmother's momentary melting, it was An' Jerusha who had felt the
parting most, and he had refused to kiss her!

"Uncle Elijah," said the child, hurriedly, "do you mind, if we've got
such a lot of time, I'd like to get a barberry leaf for my fire-flies.
Please stop!" he called out of the window to the coachman.

And while Uncle Elijah was saying, "What--what?--barberry leaves,
fire-flies? What nonsense is this you've been learning?" Ethan had
jumped out of the slowing vehicle, made a frantic sign to An' Jerusha,
run up to the fence, pushed aside a loose picket of his acquaintance,
and dashed into the wilderness. There was nothing for Uncle Elijah to do
but to wait. The child had vanished without a trace; by the time Mr.
Tallmadge had adjusted his spectacles on his nose he couldn't even find
the place where his nephew had disappeared. The eminent Bostonian sat
fuming while Ethan was feverishly making his way to An' Jerusha.

"Come down!" he called, when he got near the bottom of the terrace.
"Come towards the barberry-bush, An' Jerusha--quick, quick!"

Her eyes rolling wildly with amazement and concern, Jerusha penetrated a
few paces into the jungle.

"Wha is yo', honey? Wot's de matter? Air yo' hurt, my honey? Jes' wait;
An' Jerusha's comin'."

"Oh, here I am," gasped the child, and he precipitated himself into her
arms. "I forgot to kiss you good-bye, An' Jerusha, and I had to come
back."

He shut his eyes and held his breath while she kissed him, muttering
prayers and blessings.

"Good-bye, An' Jerusha," he said. "I sha'n't ever forget you;" and he
tore his way back through the rank grasses, the mulleins and sunflowers,
catching his feet in the briers, and saying to himself: "Oh, I'm quite
sure my father never, _never_ did. But for me it's different; I'm glad I
went back."

He stripped a handful of leaves and coral berries off the barberry-bush
as he passed, pushed back the loose picket, and reappeared all over
burrs and pollen before Uncle Elijahs' astonished and unapproving eyes.

"I've got plenty of leaves for my fire-flies," was his greeting, as he
clambered into the hack, "but I must get some water for them at the
station. How many years should you say a fire-fly would live, Uncle
Elijah, with plenty to eat and drink?"




CHAPTER VII


Ethan was not allowed to repeat his visit, and life went on for several
years without incident at the old Fort. Yet, since "it is in the soul
that things happen," these were stirring times. One shrinks from
inquiring too closely into what the years held for the two eager-hearted
women shut up there with those perilous companions, thwarted hope,
stunted ambition, and pent-up energy. Well had it been for Valeria had
she not possessed that small, cramped competency. If the girl had had to
earn her living, she might have found peace, if not great gladness, in
wholesome grappling with the material things of life. But in saying so
one forgets that all this was thirty years ago, when a penniless
Southern woman who had a brother, or even some distant relation, to
support her, no more dreamed of getting her own bread than she does
to-day of going before the mast.

Meantime, with John Gano things for a while went better. At the end of
four years of uninterrupted toil, such years of all work and no play as
only an American will put up with, he was able to offer his cousin the
kind of home he had set his heart on. They were married in the South,
and after a brief visit to Mrs. Gano, John took his bride to New York.
Ten months' happiness, followed by the birth of a daughter, whom they
named Valeria, and called Val; then protracted ill-health and a yearly
baby for the young mother, money troubles and killing work for John
Gano.

The distance between New York and New Plymouth was too great to admit of
much visiting back and forth on trivial grounds for people of limited
means. But young Mrs. Gano was not expected to live after the birth of
her fourth child, and her "aunt-mother-in-law" was sent for. The elder
Mrs. Gano stayed till the danger was past, and, as she wrote home to her
daughter, "to relieve Virginia a little of the pressure of existence,"
she had made up her mind to bring back Emmeline with her to the Fort.
Emmeline was the younger of the two little girls, and that was the
reason given for her having been chosen instead of Val, since, with a
new baby in the house, a child of fourteen months was more of a charge
on its mother's mind even than an enterprising young person of four. But
it was presently revealed that Emmeline was by far the more attractive
child, gentle, charming, and very beautiful to look upon; rather like
her cousin Ethan, whose loss was still mourned silently at the old Fort.
There was no further visiting between the two houses until the following
winter, when Valeria's health broke down. Mrs. Gano would not hear it
said that her daughter was dying of consumption.

"I've had a cough myself for half a century. Consumption? Nonsense!
Valeria had undermined her constitution by too much study and a too
sedentary life. What was to be expected when one remembered the hours
she kept! But there! no Gano could ever do anything with moderation."

However, the jealous mother was alarmed at last, and admitted that what
Valeria needed was a change.

"No," said the old-young woman; "I have reached the end."

A journey to the Adirondacks was proposed. Valeria refused to fall in
with the plan.

"You wouldn't let me go away when it would have been some use," she
said; "leave me in peace now."

A horrible fear clutched at the resolute heart of the mother as she took
fresh and sudden note of the wasted frame, the languid, long,
transparent hands, the far-away vision of the eyes.

"No, I _wouldn't_ let you go alone and unprotected. But now that John
and his wife are settled in New York it's a different story altogether.
You can stay with them, and--and study sculpture for a while," she
added, with a visible effort.

Valeria shook her head. But there was a new light in the hollow eyes.
Little by little she was seen to be in reality feverishly bent on
availing herself of her mother's late concession. Mrs. Gano was as good
as her word. She put no further obstacle in the way, and, though it was
the depth of winter, took the long journey with her daughter, arriving
at her son's house much exhausted, to find Mrs. John ill in bed, a
mutiny among the servants, and a scene of inexpressible confusion and
disorder, in the midst of which stood Val, turbulent and triumphant. Nor
did she budge upon the usually subduing apparition of Mrs. Gano. Dirty
and neglected, an impudent little face with bold gray eyes looking out
from a wild swirl of tawny hair, there she stood in the middle of the
untidy dining-room, aided and abetted in some unspeakable enormity by
the mere presence of her faithful ally, a huge St. Bernard dog.

"My patience!" exclaimed Mrs. Gano, surveying the scene.

"Why, it's my dear little namesake," said Aunt Valeria, with a kind of
gentle incredulity, as she moved forward.

Her dear little namesake retreated, dragging the great dog back with her
by the collar.

"_That_ my granddaughter!"

Mrs. Gano spoke with mixed emotion, and hurriedly put on her spectacles.

"My darling," said Aunt Valeria, watching the dog with the tail of her
eye, "come and kiss me."

The child stared solemnly without moving a muscle.

"Come, my dear, and speak to your grandmother."

Mrs. Gano advanced with majesty till she was arrested by a low growl
from the St. Bernard.

"Don't be afraid of us," urged Aunt Valeria, somewhat superfluously.
"I've brought you a pretty toy in my trunk. Come, darling."

The child kept a suspicious eye on the ingratiating stranger.

"She has very pretty hair," pursued Aunt Valeria, amiably.

"She hasn't pretty manners," retorted Mrs. Gano.

"Oh, she's shy. Don't be afraid of us"--she ventured a step nearer.
"Come here, my sweet little one."

Never taking her eyes off her gentle aunt, the sweet little one said,
with a charming childish lisp:

"Ef yer don't be thtil, I'll thick my dawg on yer."

The two ladies fell back appalled.

"Turn that great animal out of doors," said Mrs. Gano, in awful tones,
to the cook. But Katie O'Flynn shrank visibly from availing herself of
this kind permission.

"Sure, mum, he'd have the heart out of me; and that's just what Miss Val
would like, be the Howly Mother!"

"This is beyond everything," said Mrs. Gano, more nonplussed than she
had often found herself. "The child must be out of her senses. We will
go up to your mistress," she said to Katie O'Flynn. "If you were _my_
daughter," she added, solemnly, looking back at the immovable one, "I
should know how to deal with you. As it is, I'll leave you to your
father."

But leaving Val to her father proved a less drastic measure than Mrs.
Gano anticipated. Whether because of his sentiment about the
first-born--offspring of that only year of happiness and hope--or merely
because her wildness was a distraction in his brief moments of respite
from crushing cares, at all events, he looked upon the child with a
lenient eye. He had her much about him when he was at home, smiled at
recitals of her escapades, and called her his amiable firebrand, never
in the least realizing that the overflow of animal spirits, which in
rare hours of ease were his diversion and delight, might be to others a
chronic bewilderment, and a not infrequent torment.

"Her mother," said the elder Mrs. Gano, not thoroughly understanding the
situation--"her mother has utterly spoiled the child."

"No, no," said John Gano, smiling. "Val was born like that. I've never
known anybody with such high spirits."

"'Spirits?' Nonsense! _Fever._ And you, every one of you help to
aggravate her unnatural activity of mind and body. Meanwhile, my advice
to you is: Don't make an idol of your eldest daughter. It's bad enough
in the case of a boy, but no girl survives it."

Mrs. Gano returned home with little loss of time. Her daughter-in-law's
higgledy-piggledy house-keeping, the "slackness" that was not all
ill-health, coupled with the ubiquitous and unquiet presence of Val,
made the elder lady long for her peaceful home in the West. Her going
left behind a memory of awe and a vivid sense of relief.

Valeria the elder, with improved health, or else strung up to a
semblance of it by the potent ghost of a dear ambition, began her
studies in art. She took out a course of lessons in modelling at the
Cooper Institute.

The story of those months may not be written here. We will not dog her
through her days of disillusionment, her shrinking from the curiosity of
the students, her amazement at their facility, her heart-sinking at
their youth. As the weeks went on the teacher, an Italian of fine and
gentle countenance, looked at her far more often than he looked at her
work; and yet it was observed by the merciless young crew in the studio
that her blundering attempts were inspected with an interest and
frequency not bestowed on their more creditable efforts.

Signor Conti leaned over her one day, speaking kindly phrases in broken
English about the new attempt she was making.

"Don't! don't, please!" she said, on a sudden impulse. "Understand that
at least I _know_ it's bad."

"Oh, it will be better," he answered, gently.

"No," she said, very low, "it will never be much better. I've waited too
long."

"You must not feel discouraged." He leaned lower and spoke under his
breath. "You may yet find great happiness by means of your art."

She shook her head, and when she could steady her voice said:

"I'm going home."

The man's face changed.

"You will not do that!"

"Yes."

"It would be another mistake, I think."

"Another?"

"Yes. The first was for one of your temperament to come to a great noisy
class like this. You cannot do your best work here. This is not the
place for you."

"What could I have done?"

"You can work under some artist alone, some one who can give you more
time. I tell you, you have talent, a _bello ingegno, signorina_."

She looked up with a gleam of hope shining through tears.

"You--_you_ are too busy. I'm afraid you don't receive pupils at your
own studio," she said, timidly.

"No, I do not receive pupils as a rule; but I will receive you,
signorina."

That was the end of lessons at the Cooper Institute, and the beginning
of the brief, but best, happiness Valeria's life was to know.

Some indiscreet allusion to the change in a letter Valeria or her
brother had written to their mother brought Mrs. Gano in hot haste to
New York again. She found Valeria a different being--but she also found
Signor Conti and a lonely studio in a side street, where her daughter
worked alone with this foreigner, modelling "the members of the human
body," while the sculptor worked on his "Lady at the Bath." It was all
unspeakably objectionable and un-American. This was no fit _milieu_ for
a Gano. It wasn't a seemly place for any lady. Valeria must come home.
She told her so the same night. No, Valeria could not do that.

"Why? Are you so attached, then, to this Italian image-maker?"

Valeria went home to the West the next day. The following winter she
died.

Little Val was nearly seven when she woke up one morning and was told
that the baby had died in the night. Then it was true, this thing she
had heard about people dying. Her excitement and curiosity were
infinitely greater than her sorrow. Had he gone to heaven yet? No, he
was in the cold, uninhabited "best" room, where nobody but
strangers--guests and grandmothers--had ever slept. She made Nanna hurry
through the bath and dressing. The nurse was crying. Val observed her
critically.

"Isn't heaven a nice place?" the child asked; and a vague uneasiness
seized her with regard to this much-vaunted reward of merit.

"Av coorse, av coorse--the most beautiful place ye can think av. The
streets are all gowld," said the woman, with quivering face.

"I must go and see mamma," the child said.

But she had to pass the "best" room door. She couldn't get by, but stood
there rooted before it. She listened, advancing her small ear nearer and
nearer. No sound. Then she put her eye to the key-hole. But the key-hole
did not command the bed. She glanced over her shoulder--nobody near; the
house silent. She turned the knob softly and went in, shutting the door
behind her; then quickly reopening it, and leaving it prudently ajar.
She tiptoed to the bed. Behold, the coverlid lay smooth, and no little
dead child there at all. Then he _was_ gone to heaven. If she'd got up a
little earlier she might have seen the angel flying off with him. He
hadn't left the window open; the very blind wasn't drawn up. What was
that on the table? Something white, laid over something strange,
and--two little sandalled feet stuck stiffly out!

_On the table!_ It couldn't be the baby lying on the hard marble slab!
The cruelty of the idea made her cold. Slowly she came nearer. She
circled, fascinated, round to the other side. Yes, a gleam of the baby's
yellow hair. The white cloth over him was a little awry, but it covered
the body and hid the face. Horrible to have the air shut out; she felt
stifled at the thought. He was lying on a pillow, she could see. But
there was something inhuman in leaving a baby like this. And they had
been so irritatingly careful of him before, never left him alone a
moment; neglected her on his account; wouldn't even let her hold
him--oh, _so_ carefully; and now--this! Nothing, perhaps, in all the
strange circumstance--not even the subsequent burial--impressed the
child so painfully as this fact of the baby being laid unguarded on a
table, as though he had been no more than a book. This it was that by
one stroke seemed to cut him off from fellowship, that suddenly degraded
him from his high estate of life and lordly consideration. This "death"
was evidently a far stranger thing than going to heaven.

A feeling of intense commiseration for the little brother swept over
her. She came nearer, crying. "Poor! poor!" she whispered. Why had they
shut out the air? She lifted her hand and turned the linen down from the
waxen face. Her tears dried on her cheeks as she stood staring. He might
be only asleep. How had they come to be so sure, and lay him unguarded
on a table, when he might wake and-- She saw in a flash how she would
earn the gratitude of the family. She would wake him, and she, who
hadn't been allowed to hold him, would carry him to her mother. And how
glad they'd all be! And it would be _her_ doing.

"Baby," she said; "baby, wake up!" She put her hand on the body, and
withdrew it quickly. He felt so strangely unlike life and tender
babyhood. An evil dread took hold on her. She strove some moments,
battling with new suspicions and vague fears. "Poor little baby! poor
little baby!" she whispered, tiptoed up, and kissed his cheek. Violently
she started back. Who that ever, as a child, has felt that first chill
contact with the mysterious enemy--who does not remember the formless
horror it conjures up in the unprepared young mind? This, then, was
death. She walked backward to the door, staring at the dead face,
feeling that cold touch on her lips spread like a frost through her
body. She must go quickly and get into her mother's lap. With her hand
on the door, "Poor! poor!" she repeated with a sob, still looking back
at the face. "You can't come and get warm in mother's lap any more;
_you've_ got to go to heaven." Had they any idea how cold the baby was?
Should she go and get his quilted travelling-coat? Was it any use? A
faint dawning of the hopelessness of any earthly service to the dead
made her resolution waver, and, with that, a horrible weight descended
on her heart. She drew a hard breath, ran back to the table, and knelt
down before it with folded hands and trembling lips. "Forgive me, baby,"
she whispered, "'bout the yellow ball. If I'd known this I wouldn't have
taken it away." She scrambled to her feet and ran out as fast as she
could, leaving the door ajar.

She was going up to bed that same evening, full of excitement and
speculation, when her father called to Nanna over the banisters to come
and help to find the smelling-salts--her mistress had fainted.

"Go to your room; I'll come presently," said the woman; and they shut
her mother's door.

They hadn't let her go in since morning. Her mother was ill, they said,
but that was a pretence; she was always ill. The reason Val was shut out
to-day was because her grandmother had arrived that morning, and her
grandmother was her enemy. She was in there now.

On every-day occasions Val would have contested the matter; but,
grandmothers apart, there was a great deal to think about and consider
just now.

She sat down on the stairs. She had seen her father crying that day, and
the very foundations of all stabilities seemed tottering. Men could cry,
it seemed--cry like little children. It was very strange; she had
supposed it a thing to be outgrown. For her own part, she had nearly
overcome the childish habit. The baby, of course, had cried a great
deal; but one's _father_!

Somebody was coming up-stairs behind the servant--a strange man. What
was he carrying? Something big, and as shiny as the new musical-box.
She hugged the banisters as the two passed.

"What's that?" she said to Matilda.

The servant didn't answer. She and the strange man went by. As Val was
in the act of following, her grandmother appeared. She looked at Val a
moment, and then called the nurse in a whisper: "Put that child to bed."

To-morrow was the funeral. She should go, she had said.

"No, certainly not," said her grandmother; and Val set her firm little
mouth.

After breakfast the next morning, her father went into the room where
the baby was, and stayed a long time. The doctor was with her mother.
The doctor was a rude man, with a long yellow-white beard; he had spoken
as sternly as if he'd been one's grandmother when Val had said she
_would_ see her mother. She lingered now by the "best" room door. Would
she hear her father crying again? She hoped she would. There was
something so horribly exciting in it; it made her feel as if she should
die, and yet she listened eagerly to find out if he were doing it again.

No sound. He came out after a long, long while, and kissed her; his face
was wet.

"Run to your nurse, my dear," he said.

She didn't tell him Nanna had been sent out. He smoothed her hair, and
then went into her mother's room.

She was thinking a great deal about the baby. Nanna had been telling her
more about heaven. The nurse hadn't liked it when the child had asked
leading questions about the grave. But Nanna herself had said dozens of
times before, "I've buried me husband and three childer." What a curious
idea to put people in the dirty, black ground! And the baby! It must be
very bad for his pretty white clothes. How awful to have earth on one's
face, all over the ears and mouth! She choked a little. But one wouldn't
feel it, of course; the real baby was in heaven. He would have
everything there. "Yellow balls, too?" she had asked Nanna.

"He won't want the likes of that," the nurse had said. Nanna was very
stupid; as if the baby had ever wanted anything in his life so much as
that yellow ball! Conscience pricked cruelly. She _had_ been selfish and
horrid to the poor baby. She fell a-crying. Very likely they didn't have
yellow balls in heaven, and wouldn't know how much the baby loved them,
and he mightn't like to ask; besides, the poor baby talked such a queer
language, strangers never understood him. A sudden inspiration. It was
rather confusing about the real baby in heaven, and the real baby in the
"best" room. Wouldn't it be better to be on the safe side? Anyhow, there
was that business about Gabriel and the Last Trump and the Resurrection.
They had talked about that in church, and Nanna and mother had said it
was true. The dead would surely rise; the baby in the "best" room there
would one day come alive. It looked as if there'd be two real babies in
the end; but never mind. She flew up-stairs, rummaged the cupboard in
the nursery, and came flying down with something wrapped in her apron.
The doctor was in the lower hall talking to her father; she peeped at
them through the balusters, then softly on to the "best" room.

She shut the door this time, though more frightened than the day before.
She stopped short in the middle of the room. Too late! the baby had
gone. But there was something she'd never seen before. She went close.
How pretty and shiny it was; it smelt like the piano. Why, this was what
the strange man had brought up-stairs behind Matilda last night. It was
bigger than the musical-box--much bigger. What was in this beautiful,
shiny, new thing? She dragged a chair to the table, climbed on it, and
looked down into the coffin.

She stood some time motionless; then, hearing a noise in the hall,
hurriedly lifted a corner of the baby's frock and pushed a yellow ball
down against the padded white satin side.


In spite of the continued "riling" presence of a grandmother in the
house, Val made up her mind to be very good now the baby was gone, and
be a comfort to her mother. No more fights with Nanna, even over the
hair-combing; no defiant refusals to say her prayers. Standing by the
cot in her nightgown the evening of the funeral, "I shall say three
prayers," she announced, sternly; "and you mustn't interrupt, Nanna."

"Three!" said the nurse, suspicious of such overwhelming piety.

"Yes; I shall say, 'Our Father,' and 'Nower Lamy,' and then one of my
own--one I can understand as well as God. Now! Sh!" She knelt down and
recited the two accustomed petitions, and then, still kneeling there,
poured forth some stringent directions to the Lord which horrified the
good Christian woman not a little.

After that, Val insisted on going to church, rain or shine. She read her
Bible with vigor and astonishment, belaboring Nanna with difficult
questions. Nanna was so ill-inspired as sometimes to appeal in her
perplexity to the elder Mrs. Gano. But this lady found to her cost that
the course so successfully pursued with little Ethan was doomed to
failure here. When she thought to curb the excessive Gano concern about
Biblical interpretation by saying, "It is not a book for children," she
was met with:

"My Bible says, 'Suffer little children,' and people 'mustn't despise
the little ones.'"

Her father began to laugh; she felt encouraged to proceed:

"And says, 'Search ye the Scriptures,' too; nothin' 'bout waitin' till
you're old."

"You are too young to understand, even if I should try to explain."

"Why, I understand it nearly every bit," she answered, indignantly, "all
except the mizz--I can't find where it says about the mizz."

"The mizz?" repeated Mrs. Gano.

"The mizz?" her father echoed, uneasily. "I haven't read about that
myself."

"Well, you've heard about it in church. Didn't you go to church when
you were young?"

"Yes," said her parent, meekly, feeling the full force of her implied
criticism. "But I don't recall the--what is it?"

"The mizz. Mr. Weston says every Sunday in the Commandments: 'The sea
and all that in the mizz.'"

The elder Mrs. Gano could have put up with these crude evidences of a
share in the family bias, but not with her granddaughter's growing
unsubmissiveness, her chronic mutiny against the smallest restraint. The
child had been taught early to look upon herself as a very potent factor
in the family life. She observed that arrangements that failed to meet
with her approval were often altered. Her mother's sternest form of
discipline had been to argue with her. More than one servant had been
dismissed in obedience to Miss Val's demands. There was the case of the
lady house-keeper from Boston, who, in addition to regular duties,
undertook also to teach Val--a learned maiden lady with shaky nerves and
a passion for history. It was supposed she left so suddenly because of
illness in her family, until Val admitted that she had threatened the
lady with the carving-knife after dinner one day.

"What on earth made you do that?" said the child's father, horrified.

"She talked too much about the British," replied Val, calmly.

"What!"

"I said the Americans were just as brave. I could see she didn't think
so, so I got the carvin'-knife and--well, you know, she just caught the
three-o'clock train."

The June of that year was intensely hot, but young Mrs. Gano was too ill
to be carried out of the stifling city. Val was sent into the country to
some cousins "for a change"--for whose change was not insisted upon. She
was not brought back till the day after her mother's funeral. It was a
strange and terrible time. For once she was passive and subdued. If the
servants had not already remarked on her hard-heartedness, she would
have cried herself ill. But she was full of a dull resentment as well as
pain. At the time she was sent away she had gathered, as a quick-witted
child does--Heaven knows how!--that her mother was dangerously ill.
During that time in the country she had prayed for her recovery as she
never prayed before or after, as none but the passionate-hearted ever
pray. Night after night, when the light had been put out, and the others
had gone to sleep, Val would get out of bed and kneel down at the side
beseeching God to save her mother's life, and making solemn compacts
with the Lord of Hosts. She would be so good, and build a church, too,
in memory of this answer to prayer; she would be a nun, and serve God
all her days, if He would spare her mother. She pointed out how easy it
was for the All-Powerful to do this little thing. She wasn't waiting
till it would require a Lazarus miracle, she was asking Him in good
time. He had only to let the doctors know what would cure her. But she,
Val Gano, would recognize in the recovery a direct answer to prayer, and
she would keep her vows. She remembered a sermon she had heard on
mountain-moving faith. Hers should be perfect and unfaltering. She knew
God would answer this one prayer; she saw herself already in her nun's
black habit, and began to say her last farewell to the world, to the
prince that she knew was coming later on, to all her children--she
called them by their names, "five brave sons and five beauteous
daughters." She turned her back on them all, cut her long hair, and
heard the convent gates clang to--all this was an accomplished destiny
in her mind, when the telegram came to say her mother was dead. Her
father was ill, too, now; there was nothing but sickness and death in
the world, and the child was to stay where she was. The telegram was
from her grandmother to cousin Nathaniel. Four days later, when she was
permitted to go home, the funeral was over, and her grandmother was in
charge of her mother's house. It was very awful. What did God mean by
it?

The following week John Gano returned to his post at the bank. As he
was leaving the counting-room, that first and last day after the death
of his wife, he was seized with a violent hemorrhage, and was carried
home, it was thought, to die.

Mrs. Gano nursed her son back to something faintly resembling health,
and urged him to come home with her. No; he would stay where he was,
till--

"Nonsense! you must rouse yourself for your children's sake. Here is
Val, left to servants, and running wild. She must go to school. None
better than the New Plymouth Seminary for Young Ladies."

"Oh, time enough for that. I can't let the child go just yet."

"There _isn't_ time. That child is going to wreck and ruin. And you
don't suppose I'm going to leave you here alone? You must come and get
well and strong."

"It's no use," the invalid said, adding, half under his breath: "I'm
done for."

"Hush!" she interrupted, frowning. "Anybody is done for who has made up
his mind that he is."

John Gano shook his head.

"You know we all go like this. It's not a matter of imagination."

"Nearly everything's a matter of imagination," she said.

The gaunt man put his handkerchief to his lips.

"This is imagination, too, I suppose," he said, as he turned the bright
spot in and out of sight--"a case of seeing red."

"That small stain means very little in itself," she retorted, seeming
scarcely moved; "its effect on your mind is the only thing to be afraid
of."

"You speak as though I hadn't inherited the blessed business."

"Oh, inherited--inherited! I'm sick of that white feather showing all
along the line. Look at me!"

He did look at her. She seemed suddenly taller and thinner and grayer
and more defiant than any being he had ever beheld.

"Look at me!" she repeated. "I have been given up by the doctors half a
dozen times. My mother was told when I was sixteen that I had only a
piece of a lung left--that it might last me through the winter. It has
served my purpose for half a century since. But I didn't worry about the
color of my handkerchiefs, and I didn't admit for a moment that I could
possibly be induced to die--that is, of course"--she put on a sudden
aspect of resignation that was almost funny--"unless it was the Lord's
will."




CHAPTER VIII


Nothing seemed to matter now that her mother was dead. It was plain Val
would never be happy again. Leaving her home, to which she was devotedly
attached, was hardly a misfortune, any more than going to live with her
grandmother. What did anything matter? God hadn't heard her prayers; He
had mocked her faith, and she was motherless. She hadn't enough interest
in life even to be "owdacious," as her grandmother called it. She was
passive, almost "good."

Her father, observing her settled depression on the journey West,
gathered her into his arms, and whispered:

"We have each other, you know."

And she lay with her face hidden, and cried a long time, so quietly that
her grandmother thought she was asleep.

It was the reunion with her little sister that first roused her out of
her unchildlike apathy. Not the genial warmth of family affection, not
the diversion of having a playmate, but the tonic of a vigorous
antagonism, as unexpected as it seemed unnatural.

"Where is my room?" Val had asked, on the evening of their arrival at
the Old Fort.

"You are to sleep with Emmeline," said her grandmother.

"But, grandma, I've never slept with any one."

"Haven't you, my dear?"

"No, and I've always--"

"That will do now. Go up-stairs and wash your face and hands. Emmeline
will show you the way."

Val went off quietly enough, but it might have staggered Mrs. Gano
could she have known the rage and rebellion that seethed in that small
female heart.

It was dusk up in the little girls' room.

"Why haven't they lit the gas?" asked Val.

"We don't have gas here."

"Lamps, then."

"Gamma thinks lamps are too esplosive."

"Do you live in the dark?"

"No; we have candles, but it ain't dark enough yet. I'll show you where
everything is."

"I'll find 'em myself."

Val had espied the candles on the bureau. She lit them.

"Oh, we never have more'n one," admonished Emmie, gently.

Val went on calmly with her toilet. Presently Mrs. Gano looked in.

"Come to supper, little girls, as soon as you're ready."

She was going away without more words, when Emmie called out excitedly:

"Just look, gamma--two candles a-burnin', 'and no ship at sea!'"

Mrs. Gano smiled.

"Yes, my dear; one is enough."

She put the extinguisher over the nearest, and went down-stairs.

"Skinflint!" observed Val.

The supper was on this occasion a late and hurriedly prepared meal.
There were soft-boiled eggs. Val helped herself to two, and broke them
into a tumbler; then mixed in salt, and pepper, and butter, and bits of
bread.

"Just look at what Val's doing!" said Emmie, with innocent excitement,
while her elder and more accomplished sister stirred the agreeable
compound round and round.

"Never do that again," said Mrs. Gano, suddenly aware of the enormity.
"I don't like people to make puddings in their tumblers at my table."

"T'ain't puddin'," said Val.

"That will do." Mrs. Gano ended the matter according to her usual
formula. "Will you have some corn bread?"

"No, thank you; I don't like it."

"It is enough to answer, 'No, thank you.' Never say you don't like
anything you see on my table."

Val wished her father had not been too tired to come to supper. She had
observed that she was never so much corrected in his presence.

The full moon was shining in the gloaming as they passed the open
veranda door coming from their belated meal.

"Let's go out a minute," said Val to Emmie, in a whisper.

"No; it's too late. I'd catch cold."

"Oh, nonsense! Come along."

And she dragged her little sister off. But they stayed out only a few
minutes.

Emmie came in crying.

"Gamma, she made me fall down on the g'avel."

Val, without explanation or apology, flushed angrily and ran up-stairs.
She knocked at her father's door.

"Come in," he said, and she went over in the dim candlelight and stood
by his bed.

"How you feel, father?"

"Little tired," he answered. "Are you come to say good-night?"

"I 'spose I mustn't stay?"

"Oh, a minute or two."

She perched on the side of his bed. She had come in with the express
intention of making complaints. Some vague notion of sparing him because
he was ill kept her tongue-tied.

"Isn't this a nice old house?" he said, presently.

"Y--yes," she answered.

"In the daytime you'll see what capital places there are for you and
Emmie to play in."

"Is it true I mustn't swing on the gate?"

"Well, I dare say--"

"Emmie says so. Is it true I mustn't roll down the terraces?"

"H'm--well--"

"Emmie says so. What are terraces for, anyhow? I thought," she added,
with a sigh--"I thought it was going to be like the country."

"Oh, wait till you see it by daylight. It's a great deal more like the
country than New York."

"She doesn't keep a horse?"

"No."

"Nor a cow?"

"No; there's no stable, you see."

"There isn't any pig, father!"

"Oh no; she wouldn't like a pig."

"But there isn't a single smallest kind of a dog here. There isn't," she
wound up, tremulously--"there isn't even a chicken."

"You just wait till to-morrow, and I'll show you heaps of nice things.
There isn't a finer tulipifera rhododendron in the world than the one
out by the back veranda. And there's a beautiful old crooked catalpa on
the terrace you can make a house in."

"Emmie says she only lets cousin Ethan climb trees."

"Oh-a, well--a--I dare say there are plenty of other things. Aren't the
peaches nearly ripe?"

"I don't know."

"Have you seen my Indian arrowheads and stone hatchets down-stairs in
the cabinet?"

Val shook her head despairingly.

"They're in _her_ room."

Her father seemed not to notice.

"And to-morrow I must show you the great slab of stone at the back door.
The oldest inhabitant of this place told me when I first came to New
Plymouth that he remembered cracking nuts there at recess in 1800, when
he went to school here. There aren't many little girls who have such a
wonderful old house to live in."

"N--no. I liked the little trees and houses in the silver at supper."

"You'll like lots of things. I've got an old fiddle somewhere about--"

"_Have_ you? Oh, _that_'ll be fun!"


She crept up under his arm and nestled down against him.

It is no part of the office of this plain chronicle to attempt to
justify any person in it. Mrs. Gano herself was too little touched by
other people's opinions for one who sets about reporting her to dare
belittle her robust errors, or omit the defects of her qualities. Few
things would have bothered her so much as "being universally beloved,"
as the phrase goes; and yet, or perhaps because of this, her family
affections struck such deep root that plucking them up was like tearing
asunder the very fibres of her life. Even now, even to her son, she
could not speak of Valeria. Her long hands shook when she touched the
dead woman's books. When chance would bring to light a scrap of the
familiar writing, she would look away hurriedly, that she might not
break down utterly and lose herself in that ocean of agonized regret
that had threatened to sweep her, too, out of the world after Valeria's
death. It could never have occurred to her as possible that she should
set about winning anybody's affections. She would probably have regarded
it as a slavish and far from upright procedure. Affection was not a
thing to set snares for. It was the duty of children to love their
parents (she would probably have said to "honor" them); it was the duty
of parents to train the children in the way they should go. That was
"the law and the prophets." She could never have quite realized the
impression she made on the young or guilty-minded, but she would not
have denied that she belonged to a generation disposed to treat healthy
children on more or less Spartan principles. She had from time to time
obtained a sufficiently all-round view of the spoiling process that had,
to her thinking, wellnigh ruined Val Gano.

She had come quickly to the conclusion that she would say nothing more
to the child's nervous and ailing father, but was quite definitely
minded to set to work quietly and vigorously to correct in Val's
upbringing the pernicious mixture of sentimentality and neglect that had
made the child a _révoltée_ and a household terror. Already in New York
there had been a battle royal on the subject of the proper bedtime for a
little girl. Val had announced herself in no uncertain note as mortally
opposed to retiring at eight, or even nine. If there was one thing more
than another that she objected to utterly it was this going to bed at
all. Her mother had been helpless to prevent her from ranging the house
till remorseless sleep struck her down in the midst of her delights. If
she could manage to keep her eyes open, or to wake up after a brief
oblivion, she had made no bones about descending during the evening in
her night-gown, entirely prepared for the rapturous reception she knew
awaited her from her father. Val had early, then, come to associate her
grandmother with tyrannical designs on the liberty of the free-born
child after the hour of eight. She also had cause to know her repulsive
opinions on the value of a milk and cereal diet for the young. These,
and a general sense of radically opposed interests, not unmixed with
astonishment at, and fear of, the alarming old lady, made up the sum of
Val's dismay when she came calmly to consider what life was going to be
like here at the Fort.

She woke up on the morning after her arrival with a vague sense of a
duty to perform. She rubbed her eyes and kicked Emmie. Ah, yes, that was
it--her grandmother had not understood. She had condemned Val, who was
accustomed to her own room, with all her "things" about her, just as she
liked them, and no one to interfere--she had put Val in "another
person's room," with a single big bed in it, and condemned her to sleep
with Emmie. Her grandmother must be brought to a better understanding.

The child made no further announcement of her frame of mind till she
sat down to a barren breakfast with the despised Emmie. There was no
coffee. There was tea going up to her father, as usual. The silent Emmie
quaffed her mug of milk serenely. For a year now Val had demanded and
been given her morning cup of coffee.

"Ask for some for me, please," she said, after making inquiries of
Venie.

"Gamma says cawfee will make you an old woman before you're a young
one," said Emmie, showing her milk-white teeth in a pleased smile. "You
can't have any cawfee."

"Tell the cook, please," said Val, in a loud voice, "that I'm waitin'
for my coffee."

An' Jerusha put in a turbaned head.

"Lordy, missy! don' yer yell like dat, an' I'll make yo' some cambric
tea."

"I won't drink cambric tea. I'm the oldest of the famerly, and my father
always let me have coffee."

"Yo' father ve'y ill, missy. Yo' mustn't worrit yo' father."

"I _never_ worry my father--I settle everything for myself. Are you
going to get my coffee?"

"Can't do dat, missy, widout leab."

"Isn't grandma coming to breakfast?"

"No; she always habs it in her own room since Miss Valery died."

The child pushed back her chair and marched out. The two women called
remonstrance after her, but a mighty indignation swept her on. She
halted before her grandmother's room, knocked loudly, and opened the
door without further waiting.

Midway in her valiant advance upon the enemy she stood still. Mrs. Gano
was sitting propped with huge feather pillows in an ancient four-poster.
She wore a small shrunken cotton nightcap awry on her wonderful thick
hair, which tumbled out in a tangle of silver and lay dishevelled over
the white flannel jacket that was buttoned crooked over her night-gown,
the sleeves hanging loose and armless. In her long taper fingers she
held an open letter. Envelopes, notes, the _Baltimore Sun_, and other
papers were strewn thick over the silk patchwork quilt. A breakfast tray
stood on a table by the bedside. It wasn't her attire, it wasn't even
the shrunken, rakish nightcap (self-conscious and uneasy at its obvious
shortcomings), that made the old lady's aspect so arresting. She had not
said a word at the child's irruption, but she lowered her chin and
looked over her heavy gold-rimmed spectacles with a strange cold stare,
singularly disconcerting, even slightly paralyzing. But Val's was a bold
heart. And she realized that a blow must be struck for liberty.

"They haven't given me any coffee for my breakfast," she announced, with
equal directness and warmth.

The piercing eyes bored into her, but the stern mouth uttered no word.
The child began to wish she'd waited till her grandmother were properly
dressed and looked more human.

"I'm in my eighth year," she went on with dignity, "and I'm
accustomed--"

"'Good-morning!' is the custom in this house," said the old lady.

"Oh! Good-morning!" Slight pause. "The servant says you told her I
wasn't to have coffee."

"Well?"

"I always have it at home."

"You're not at home now."

"But I can't eat breakfast without--"

"There's no need for you to eat breakfast if you're not hungry."

"_Why_ can't I have coffee?"

"Because I think it injurious"--the keen old eyes caught the swift
disdain of the child's glance at the half-empty cup on the tray--"very
injurious for children," she added.

"My mother didn't think so," Val said, feeling her throat swell.

"But I am your grandmother, you see."

She had lowered her chin again; her eyes were shooting out over her
spectacles, her eyebrows terrifically high. This grandmother of hers
could move her eyebrows about as easily as other people moved their arms
and legs. It was a fearsome accomplishment.

"In _my_ house," she went on, after the awful pause, "the thing to be
considered is what _I_ think. Among other matters I consider your way of
entering a room might be improved. Now, you may see how quietly you can
go out."

Seldom has a child been more surprised at an unexpected turn in affairs
than was this one when she found herself on the outside of the door. She
stood irresolute a moment. Why had she obeyed? She gritted her little
white teeth in self-contempt. Should she go back? There were loads of
things she had forgot to say. The idea of being sent out like that! She
went slowly up-stairs and angrily tumbled some of her clothes out of her
trunk. There were three cookies, a cruller, and some chocolates in a box
near the bottom. Oh, wise precaution of provident childhood! Still, her
present lot was a most unhappy one.

"No breakfast! How angry my poor sainted mother would be!" She shed two
tears. "No mother, no coffee, nothing but a cruel grandmother."

She revelled gloomily in the tragic picture till she heard Emmie coming
up-stairs. She hid the "remainder biscuit" and hurriedly dried her eyes.
There had long been a theory in the family--even her mother had shared
it--that Val never cried, and hadn't any heart to speak of. She was
intensely proud of this reputation for stoicism, and wouldn't for worlds
have undeceived any one. She brushed past Emmie now with lofty looks and
ran down-stairs and out-of-doors. She ranged about the grounds, finding
that her father was right--there were great possibilities of enjoyment
in these neglected haunts. She was not long in discovering the
grape-vine climbing the pear-tree in the wilderness, and satisfying
herself that "peaches were ripe." The osage orange-trees that grew
along the fence behind the drying-ground had dropped their rugged globes
on the grass, and one could play ball with these oranges till their
tough fibres grew soft and yielded grudgingly, like rubber. Presently
one that she had sent flying over the trees into the adjoining grounds
came mysteriously back. Val parted the fringe of lower undergrowth and
peered between the fence rails, but could see no one. She shied another
orange, and this time she saw a boy dart out from behind a tree and send
the orange swiftly through the sunshine over her head. Val leaped up,
and by a fluke caught it firmly in her hands.

"Hooray!" came involuntarily from the next-door neighbor; and they went
on playing ball in ambush till curiosity prevailed over shyness.

When the next-door neighbor drew near the osage barrier, he revealed
himself as a boy about Val's age, with a freckled face and a queer
little knob of a nose.

"Wot's your name?" he inquired.

"Val Gano. What's yours?"

"Jerry--I mean, Jerningham Otway."

"That your house?"

She climbed upon the fence and distinguished glimpses through the bushes
of an imposing place beyond.

"Yes," he answered; "and we got a bank over the river."

This eliciting nothing, he went on, genially:

"You can fire a ball 'bout as well as a boy!"

"I should hope so."

"My sister can't, and she's a year older 'n me. Most girls can't, and
they're all awful mad they wasn't born boys."

"That so?"

"Yes. I know a girl over the river--awfully jolly girl--she's got a
monkey--nicest girl I ever knew!--and Geerusalem! don't she want to be a
boy!"

"She _must_ be a ninny," observed his next-door neighbor.

"Hey?"

"Can't think why any girl in her senses should want to be a _boy_!" as
who should say: the least of created things.

Jerry widened saucer eyes.

"If a girl likes," his neighbor continued, "she can do all the jolly
things a boy does without the bother of _being_ a boy."

"Ho! ho! Don't find it much bother."

"Well, but it's a little dull, ain't it?"

"Hey?"

"Not now exactly, but don't you ever think about the future?"

Jerry looked vaguely alarmed for a single instant, and then strutted off
with his hands in his pockets, whistling defiantly all across the lawn.
He stopped at the barn door, and whistled his way back, in time to catch
a friendly ball.

The feminine wile that eventually won the young gentleman's heart, and
"did for" the girl with the pet monkey, was Val's gift for turning the
most surprisingly rapid somersaults all across the drying-ground. A
small contorting ball, she rolled head over heels, without stopping,
from one side to the other, and came up smiling, in spite of a crack on
her crown against the pump.

"Gee-_rusalem_!" observed Jerry, when he saw she was laughing. "I say,"
he added, with a child's fine disregard for preface or preliminary--"I
say, come over to Bentley's Pond and let's be pirates."

It seems highly probable that Val would have closed with the offer if
Emmie had not made a timely appearance.

"What you doin'?" she asked, Jerry being invisible.

"None o' your business," said her polite sister.

"Oh-h," purred Emmie. "Gamma don't let us--"

She paused.

"Don't let us what?"

"What you're doin'."

"What am I doin'?"

It was difficult to say. She seemed to be just sauntering about,
occasionally kicking an osage orange. But Emmie, not without reason,
had got it into her law-abiding head that whatever this sister of hers
might be engaged in it was pretty sure to be something taboo, and Emmie,
as an older inhabitant here, and one who never made these mistakes, was
bound to keep the new-comer from transgression. Her sister had gone back
to the house now. Emmie followed her up-stairs to their room. Val found
her trunk gone from the upper hall, and its contents disposed in drawers
and wardrobe with Emmie's belongings.

Who had done this thing?

"Venie," said Emmie.

The new-comer anathematized the officious servants of the Fort. Emmie
stood looking on with growing consternation, as Val flung forth from the
wardrobe to the middle of the room a shower of pinafores and petticoats,
books and toys. They lay on the floor in an indiscriminate mass. What
was this daring person about? Emmie stood shyly by the door, her face
flushing with excitement.

"I won't have my things mixed up with other peoples'!" Val announced,
severely. Then, after a moment: "What are you standing there for?"

"I--I don't know," responded Emmie.

"Haven't you got any place of your own, where you belong?"

Emmie looked bewildered, as well she might.

"I've got a little rocking-chair down in gamma's room--used to be cousin
Efan's."

"Humph! rocking-chair's just the thing for _you!_ Why don't you go and
sit in it?"

Val was clearing out the bureau now at the other end of the room. It was
Emmie's things this time that were being flung out with disdain. Val's
harsh question, coupled with the moving spectacle of Emmie's best hat on
the floor, brought ready tears to the soft brown eyes.

"What you got in this?" demanded Val, shaking the rattling contents of a
well tied-up box.

"B'longs to cousin Efan. Gamma don't let us open it."

Val untied the cord and revealed the forbidden spoil--marbles, a
jack-knife, a broken whistle, and at the bottom a little drawing-book
and a French grammar.

"I'll take care of the marbles and the knife for cousin Ethan," said
Val, "but you can have the other things," and she flung the treasured
box to the opposite side of the room. The vandalism widened Emmie's
trouble-clouded eyes. "Now my clothes are going in the bureau."

Val was sorting and folding away her own belongings with a deftness
characteristic of her thin little hands. Emmie watched the process
tearfully.

"And _my_ books and things like that go on this side," she went on,
busily bringing order out of chaos. "Now, do you understand?" she said,
sternly. "This half o' the room is mine. You can't _ever_ come here."

The little girl at the door nodded, speechless.

"Perhaps I'll help you afterwards to put your things away in the
cupboard. First go down into the hall and bring me a piece of chalk out
of the lift-up chair where they keep the brushes."

"Chalk!" What _was_ she going to do?

"Yes, chalk, goosie gander! Chalk! chalk!"

Emmie fled. She had serious thoughts of never returning, but curiosity
and the memory of her best hat sitting on the floor got the better of
her fears.

"That's right," said Val, on Emmie's reappearance. "Don't come over
here!" she shouted. "_Stop_, I tell you!" She stamped violently as the
child advanced, bewildered, holding out a piece of yellow crayon.
"Didn't I just say this part of the room is mine?"

"Y-yes."

"Well, it _is_, just as much as if it had doors, which it ought to have,
and locks and bolts. Don't ever come here till you get my permission.
Understand?"

"I--I--" Emmie dropped the crayon, and retreated slowly. "I was only
going to say we oughtn't to use that chalk. It belongs to Aunt Valeria's
painting things."

"Look here!" Val waived such puny scruples aside. "See this seam in the
carpet?"

"Yes," answered a small, scared voice.

"Well, I'll make it plainer, so's there's no mistake." She stooped and
drew a yellow line down the seam from wall to wall. "Now," she said,
getting up and striking a threatening attitude, "you're younger than me,
but I give you all that side for your room. This side is mine. If you
ever cross that line without my leave, I'll kill you--yes, I'll kill you
dead with cousin Ethan's knife!"

She turned her head and beheld her grandmother standing in the doorway.




CHAPTER IX


This was the beginning of the Four Years' War.

But although Val was worsted in this encounter, the race _was_ sometimes
to the swift and the battle to the ingenious. For instance, that very
night in bed she discovered a way of reducing Emmie to submission
without resorting to physical violence. Val began to tell out loud a
terrible and harrowing tale, which nearly threw the younger child into
fits. Emmie would do anything for her dear, dear sister if only darling
Val would say the black figure wasn't a ghost. Darling Val complied,
after a thorough understanding that whenever Emmie was too unbearable
that black figure, which was a ghost only on certain nights--that black
figure should be introduced into their nocturnal amenities. Val was not
always as good as her word. She did once or twice in the comfortable
daytime make the sinister threat, "If you do that again I'll tell you a
scary story when we're in bed to-night"; but in the morning the night is
almost as far away as being grown up or dying--at all events too far off
to seem very real or important. Experience proved that Val would forget
the menace by the time it was dark, or else would be too sleepy to live
up to it--so sleepy, in fact, that she could do nothing but kick Emmie
in a desultory way, or lie like a log in the middle of the bed, leaving
the younger child to find her half on the outer edge of both sides;
whereupon Emmie's long-suffering patience would suddenly break down, and
she would go crying to her grandmother's door, and stand there wailing
till she was taken in. After some weeks' trial the plan of making the
two sisters share the same room was abandoned, and Emmie had a cot at
the foot of her grandmother's four-poster.

Val was made to realize that now she had crossed the Rubicon. Up to that
hour she had been on probation, but this change once effected, she was
"beyond the pale." Not that she was harassed, nagged, scolded; that she
would have understood and known how to meet; she was ignored, not spoken
to, not even seen. For days she might have been thin air, so little did
her grandmother seem able to realize her corporal presence. There had
been no doubt in Val's mind from the first but what Emmie was the
favourite here. The very servants, she saw, were under the spell of
Emmie's pretty ways, and in any time of trouble took it for granted that
the imperious Val had been the aggressor. Natural and inevitable as was
this attitude of the entire household (for Mr. Gano was spared all
details, and did not count), it was not calculated to make the sisters
better friends, or win Val to a more amenable mind.

Nobody, from Val's point of view, could care much about what Jerusha and
Venie thought, but her grandmother's good opinion was somehow, even at
this stage, a secretly coveted honor. Yet there was no blinking the fact
Emmie was her pet. This form of putting the hard underlying fact was the
more satisfactory in that one could as soon imagine Mrs. Gano dancing
the Highland fling as having a pet. Gran'ma! who wouldn't let a dog or
even a bird into the house, and whom no one could fancy nursing or
caressing anything on earth! There was a suggestion of the ludicrous, a
faint ironic aroma, in the phrase, which aroused angry passions. It
fitted in, too, with all manner of exigencies. In any event it was
apposite to remark, "Of course Emmie's the pet." This could be said with
such effect of scorn that Emmie found no refuge save in tears.

"What's the matter?" inquired Mrs. Gano.

She had happened on the twain as they were loitering in the hall before
going off to church.

Emmie wept on. Val set her little red mouth doggedly. Her grandmother
glared.

"Now what have you been doing to this poor child?" she demanded.

Gran'ma's eyes were very strange when she was angry, as Val had
frequently confided to the cobwebs in the wood-shed--unlike anybody's on
earth--piercing, glittery; made you cold down your back. Servants shook
and scuttled when she looked at them like that. Val herself was always
reminded of


     "Tiger, tiger, burning bright
     In the forests of the night,"


and braced herself by saying, internally: "I ain't 'fraid o' tigers and
I ain't 'fraid o' gran'ma"--this, too, with a fine sense of climax.

"What is it, Emmie? Stop crying. I can't have this noise."

"V--Val says I'm your p--pet."

"Nonsense! I have no pets. You are not to worry Emmeline. Never say that
again. Understand?"

Val was silent.

Gran'ma's eyes were awful.

"Are you going to promise, or do you prefer to spend the day alone?"

That had been tried, and proved a great waste of time and opportunity.

"Yes, I promise."

"Very well; now go to church; Venie is waiting."

"Aha!" said the victorious Emmie when they were out of earshot. "Now you
see what you get for teasing me."

And she crowed over her comrade with restored vivacity, till Val said,
with suspicious geniality:

"Oh, well, I s'pose I was mistaken. I knew you were either her pet or
else--"

"What?"

Emmie fixed her beautiful soft eyes expectantly on her sister.

Val turned on her with suppressed fury:

"Or else a creepin', crawlin' little woo--er--er--m."

Floods of tears, and Venus to the rescue.

The Four Years' War did not always rage round Emmie, although it was the
innocent little sister who was the means of forcing upon Val the
conviction that her grandmother was not, and never could be, her friend.
It is true she cherished a dream at first of earning her gratitude and
admiration by some splendid heroic deed that should cover her
grandmother with shame at the memory of the way she had misunderstood
and undervalued her descendant. The house would be on fire some day, and
Val would "save all their lives"; or a robber would get in in the night,
and by a series of thrilling adventures Val would entrap and lock him up
in the closet under the stairs, where that silly old Jerusha said there
was a ghost; or the ancient nag that sometimes came from the
livery-stable to take her father and grandmother out for an airing--this
steed would unexpectedly run away some fine day. Val saw herself dashing
out of the bushes at the road-side, seizing the bit, and hanging on to
it till she brought the frantic animal to a stand-still. Then her
grandmother would say: "Dear, brave child, we owe you our lives," etc.
"How I've misunderstood you!" etc. Val would be magnanimous, and forgive
everything. She had a fixed intention of saying in reply: "Gran'ma, let
the dead past bury its dead." Her grandmother would feel that. But until
that day came, how was she to endure all this injustice and oppression?
Emmie was her grandmother's--well, she took Emmie's word about
everything, and Emmie counted on that. She didn't play fair, and she was
an awful cry-baby; couldn't climb trees, or even run hard without
falling down and hurting herself and saying it was Val's fault. Then for
the rest of the day her grandmother would treat Val like an outcast, and
dock her of Jerry's society. How sickening it was to be told Emmie was
the littlest, and delicate! Val herself had at one time been "only six,"
but she hadn't been a sniveller; she had always played fair and never
cried. Ask anybody. They'd all say Val Gano _never_ cried. Whereupon she
would steal away to the wood-shed, or climb up high in the
catalpa-tree, remind herself she had no mother, shed a private tear or
two, and tell herself a story.

After all, the only serious blemishes in the scheme of creation were
grandmothers and Sundays. Now that Val had renounced religion, she could
not but look on the day of rest as an interruption and a time of
bondage, when grandmothers and grandmothers' views pervaded creation to
creation's cost.

On the third Sunday after the arrival at New Plymouth she announced that
she was not going to church.

"I don't want to, either," whispered Emmie. "Let's pertend we're very
ill."

"No; let's just say we won't go."

"Better not," admonished the cautious Emmie. "I think my throat is going
to be sore."

So Emmie was duly cosseted by Aunt Jerusha, and given delicious
black-currant jelly.

Mrs. Gano, hearing rumors of rebellion, had sent for Val. She was
dressed and sitting in the big arm-chair before the fire with a book on
her knees. It was quite warm, but she couldn't apparently do without a
fire and a shawl. She was seldom seen about the house in these days
without a shawl. She must have had hundreds--white and black and gray,
striped and dotted; silk, cashmere, canton-crêpe. Her gowns all seemed
to be made of rusty black silk. They were so exactly alike that Val
thought for long she had but one. There was always, too, the inevitable
and spotless lawn at the throat; no frivolous ruffle or after-thought of
tie--nothing set on, extraneous, but smooth white folds that seemed to
grow up out of the dress--an integral part of the plain and changeless
uniform that was the outward and visible sign of one's grandmother's
severe, uncompromising spirit.

"What's this I hear? Why are you not dressing for church?"

"I--I don't feel like going to-day."

"Are you not well?"

"Ho yes"--very contemptuous. "I never get ill."

"Then you must go to church. It's the custom in this house."

"Venie says _you_ go only twice a year. I'll go when you do."

The old lady's eyes blazed behind her gold spectacles.

"You'll go when you are told." Awful pause. "When you are my age you may
suit yourself."

"Father hasn't had to wait all that time; he doesn't go now."

"Your father is very ill."

"Didn't go when he was well; that is, _hardly_ ever," added the explicit
young person.

"He went regularly as a boy, before he had a house of his own. But I'm
not accustomed to arguing with children. Go and get dressed."

Val wavered a moment, then faced about gravely. She planted herself
before the old lady, with the wide-apart legs and tense look of one who
braces herself to bear the crack of doom.

"I'm sorry to hurt your feelings," she said; "but I'm a infidel."

"What!"

"Yes; father and I are both infidels."

"Hush! you don't know what you're saying."

"Oh yes, I do. He says, 'Damn it!' when you're not there."

"How dare you!"

"I don't, but father does, so you see--"

"I see that you talk wildly and ignorantly, as well as too much. Go and
dress for church."

She had half risen, her eyebrows had risen wholly. She looked singularly
alarming. Val retreated backwards to the door, and Mrs. Gano resumed her
seat.

"I ain't so igorunt as you think," the child persisted. "The reason I
stopped going to church was because my conscience wouldn't let me join
in."

Mrs. Gano turned and looked at the child over the back of her
arm-chair. There was a gleam of amused tolerance in the steely eyes. Val
was quick to detect it.

"You see, it's not worth while to waste the whole morning nearly when
the only thing you can join in is a piece they don't do every Sunday."

"Which is that?" asked Mrs. Gano, in an odd voice.

She had turned away again, and Val couldn't see her face now.

"That long piece about the weather."

"The _weather_?"

"Yes--lightnings, and whales, and things. Don't you know that one? It's
like this." She put her hands behind her, and shrilly intoned: "'O ye
green things, angels and fowls of the air, praise Him and magnify Him
for-r-rever. O ye--'"

"That will do," interrupted Mrs. Gano, in a stifled voice.

Val felt snubbed; there was a lot more that, with encouragement, she
would have endeavored to do justice to. She felt for the door-handle,
but paused again on the threshold.

"Mayn't I go and sit with father?"

"Certainly not; you are to go to church."

"Gran'ma." There was a renewal of courage in the clear little voice.
With a bound she planted herself in front of the old lady's chair. "I
_oughtn't_ to go. It's pertending; it's wicked. For I can't say the 'I
b'lieve' any more."

Mrs. Gano rose in her wrath and towered. Val stood to her guns, looking
up with determined, excited face.

"I used to join in when I was younger: I used to bow, just like mother.
Father never bowed. _I_ don't any more, neither."

Mrs. Gano seized her by the shoulder and propelled her to the door. Wild
thoughts of dungeons and burned martyrs flew through the child's mind.
Still clutching the infidel, Mrs. Gano opened the door. In an awful
voice she called:

"Jerusha! Venus!"

Venus appeared with perturbed countenance, out of which all genial
companionableness had fled. Yes, that was the kind of face an
executioner might wear.

"Take Miss Val up-stairs and get her ready for church."

Venus took hold of the child none too gently, and pulled her, wriggling
vainly, up the long staircase. It was no use to cling feverishly to the
banisters; it only hurt her hands. Half-way up Venus stopped for breath.
Val looked back to see if her grandmother was still there. Yes; leaning
exhausted against the frame of the door, with her handkerchief to her
lips. Now Venus was dragging her on again. In a fresh access of rage the
child put her chin over the banisters and screamed:

"All the time they're doing the 'I b'lieve,' I shall go like this." She
shook her head with such passionate dissent that her shock of wild hair
swirled madly back and forth in a cloudy circle, completely hiding the
mutinous, flushed face of the infidel.

Very soon after the formal removal of Emmie and her effects to her
grandmother's bedroom, Val gave up the last lingering shred of hope that
she might ever, while these misunderstood days of childhood lasted,
propitiate the powers that be. She was always feeding her imagination in
secret with stories of the ultimate love and adoration, not only of the
suitors and heroes who should line her path later on, but of her family,
too. They and the entire community should adore her one day for
something wonderful and noble that she was going to be and to do in that
fair future when she should be grown up and great and good.

Meanwhile there were moments when this sense of present outlawry brought
with it a fierce and splendid joy. It endowed even a down-trodden child
with a superhuman courage. Such a one might even go and plump herself
down in the great red chair of state, and rock violently back and forth
in a wild abandonment of wickedness, while Emmie stood transfixed and
gran'ma's awful eyes made lightning. An outlaw so brave, she could
narrate unmoved that she had taken a ride in the milkman's cart. And he
had been "so perlite as to ask me how was Grandmother Gano." This
horrible insult on the part of the milkman was duly punished, but Val
had a momentary sense of having "got even." In the South--in any
civilized community, Mrs. Gano would have told you--you did not call
people "old"; it had foolishly enough come to be a term of reproach, or
at least of scant respect, fit only for "any old thing" of no account.
Therefore, let alone the "owdacious" familiarity of asking after a lady
as "Grandmother" So-and-so, you couldn't even with decency distinguish
the elder lady from her daughter-in-law by asking after old Mrs.
So-and-so. In the South, where manners were still understood, you said
"senior" and "junior," or, among the better class, you called the son's
wife "Mrs." So-and-so, and you called the head of the family "Madam."

"Grandmother Gano, indeed! I'll grandmother him!"

It was a great score, too, when Julia Otway, Jerry's nearly two years
older sister, assured Val that that common term of reproach "Grannie,"
was a corruption of the ancient and honorable title Gran'ma. Inseparably
associating the word with the drunken rag-picker, "Ole Granny Gill," and
the scathing juvenile satire, "Teach your granny to suck eggs," etc.,
Val determined on the next provocation to introduce the subject at home.
She found occasion to dilate on the virtues of Julia Otway's
grandmother. This was a shrunken and timid old lady, who sat unnoticed
in the corner, clicking her knitting-needles, and usually saying
nothing. When she did speak it was found her speech was odd, and the
children laughed.

"Nearly everybody else's gran'ma knits stockens," Val observed one day,
with critical eyes on the eternal book open on Mrs. Gano's knees.

"You know very few grandmothers," said the lady.

"I know Julia's. She's _so_ nice. I don't wonder Julia and Jerry like
her."

This elicited nothing.

"She's the _kindest_ person. She keeps a little chest o' drawers
chock-full o' doughnuts and winter-green candy."

"Very strange use for a chest of drawers. Is the lady right in her
head?"

Val, very indignant: "Goodness gracious! mercy me! I should think so!"

"I've told you not to use those exclamations."

"No, you didn't say--"

"Do I understand you to be contradicting me?"

"You said I wasn't to say 'Oh, Lord!' nor 'Gee-rusa-lem!' nor 'Dear me
suz!' nor 'Holy Moses!' I don't see what there's left to say."

"I said let your speech be 'Yea, yea,' and 'Nay, nay.' You are not to
bring sacred names into common talk. The Jews of old had a proper
instinct for these things. They never uttered the name of Jehovah even
in prayer. No Jew would step upon a piece of parchment, for fear it
might be inscribed with the name of God. It is impious to call upon the
mercy of the Most High on trivial occasions."

"I don't call on Him--never."

"Yes, you do, when you use those expressions. God is 'gracious'; He
alone is 'goodness.'"

Silence; then Val, recovering and returning to the attack:

"Jerry's grandmother--"

"Jerningham Otway's grandmother knows as well as I do that this is a
turbulent and stiff-necked generation, without fear of God or reverence
for authority. _Her_ remedy seems to be effacement for herself and
bribes for her young barbarians. But"--she had risen, and was
towering--"I'd have you know, my lady, _I'm_ not a doughnut
grandmother."

Val thought it time to depart. She moved briskly to the door, sending
over her shoulder a Parthian shot:

"Julia calls her gran'ma "Granny," and so do lots o' people. It seems
it's the reg'lar name."

Thereupon she took to her heels, for even outlaws know limits.

At a safe distance she would speculate darkly: "I wonder if she knows I
hate her. Oh yes; it would be a waste of breath to mention it. She
knows, and she doesn't care--she's that hardened."

It was clear at such times that this Ishmaelite's hand must be against
every man, and every man's hand against her. All consideration of decent
restraint had been flung to the winds. She had turned her back on the
hallowed customs of society, and joined the iconoclasts of earth. She
would even at times plant her elbows on the dinner-table before
everybody, with a wild, despairing sense that nothing mattered forever
any more. Nobody loved her. Even her father didn't want her about him
since his relapse. He said she came in like a whirlwind on the rare
occasions when she was admitted to his room. She should never forget
that day when he said: "Why can't you be quiet and good like Emmie?"
_Like Emmie!_ Val fled to the wilderness, and in the neighborhood of the
barberry-bush flung out her arms and apostrophized the heavens. She
talked a great deal to herself in those days--arraigned society, and
used long words with vague meaning, but studied accent and overwhelming
effect. However, in spite of the difficulty of life, Val found it an
exhaustless mine of interest. Being naughty alone was full of
palpitating excitement. Besides, she was much better than her family
realized; that of itself was curious, and at times sufficient. At any
rate, she was not, as she frequently observed to the scarlet
barberries--she was not a sniveller. Fortunately, it did not occur to
her that the circumstance might be less creditable to her than she
fondly imagined.

Her quarrel with domestic conditions lent a fine tragic interest, in her
own mind, to a life that was deep-rooted in joy. It was impossible not
to be happy, such a splendid world as it was--a world with
skipping-ropes and a stolen jack-knife in it; a world where an awful
jolly boy lived on the other side the osage-trees, and liked you better
than that favorite of fortune who had a pet monkey; a world with wild
tracts below its terraces where grandmothers ceased from troubling, and
hard-pressed heroines could hide and talk out loud. A new house
building in the next lot, with ceilings open to the sky, and instead of
common floors, great beams where a child who "never was 'fraid" could
walk up and down with its heart in its mouth; blocks to be picked up,
and a kind workman to talk to when it was cold and gran'ma wasn't
patrolling the north side of the Fort. Even for rainy afternoons there
were the beloved _Scottish Chiefs_; there were jack-stones, and a family
next door who owned a barn. Oh, a _splendid_ world, where you got twelve
winter-green drops for a cent, and could play on your father's fiddle in
the back hall! Hooray! it was a good plan this being born.




CHAPTER X


One peculiarity of life at the Fort was that although visitors in
general were in high disfavor, everybody, from Mrs. Gano down to
Jerusha--especially Jerusha--was always hoping for a visit from cousin
Ethan. And he never came. The last vacation before Val's arrival Emmie
said he had had to go with the Tallmadges to Bar Harbor. This June he
couldn't come, because his aunt Hannah had died, and his grandfather was
alone; but he thought he might come "later on." Now that the maples were
scarlet and gold, he wrote regretfully, saying that, after all, he had
to go back to Harvard without any holiday. He sent his love to his
cousins, and the annual photograph--which she had commanded to be taken
each year--to his grandmother. She had a row of them on the mantel-piece
in her room. When the new one came like a falling leaf each autumn, she
spent anxious days deciding which of the old ones should go in a drawer
to make room for the latest. There were three that never yielded to any
new-comer, however beguiling. Ethan's cousins, it must be admitted, who
were ardent admirers of the more recent pictures, thought little enough
of Mrs. Gano's favorite three.

The first was of a child about three years old in his night-gown--a
dreamy little face framed in a halo of curling hair. Yes; it was more
like an angel than a flesh-and-blood boy, but it was yellowed and faded,
and not taken at an interesting age, so his two cousins thought.

The next was a very solemn little chap with a tiny pail in his hand,
dressed in a kilt, and wearing a wide white collar, seeming to labor
hopelessly with a wooden spade in a world of unmitigated woe.

The third had been taken in Paris with his school friend Henri de
Poincy, and he had on "funny French clothes," but he held his slender
figure very easily erect, and without seeming to remember he was having
his photograph taken. He had written from Neuilly to his grandmother:

"I always think of my summer at the Fort when I go to have your picture
done."

If that were the case, this time the remembrance must have been a
gracious one, for his dark little face was lit, expectant, beautiful.

"Why did he go to France?" Val had asked.

"Oh, some nonsense about accent, as if the only accent to be considered
was the French." Mrs. Gano threw back her head. "And then a cousin of
the Tallmadges married a Frenchman, a man called De Poincy. The mother
died, and left a boy--"

"That awful little ape in the pho-- I mean Henri?"

"Yes; Henri, a _very_ nice boy."

Mrs. Gano would not have prolonged the conversation, but Emmie said:

"I'm sure he's nice. Cousin Ethan's letters always say beautiful things
about Henri. _Do_ go on."

"I've told you scores of times."

As if that were not the flimsiest reason for not repeating a stock tale,
half of whose charm is its familiarity.

"Didn't cousin Ethan find Henri at the Tallmadges' when he got back?"

"Yes, after that summer he spent here." The old eyes were mild. "And
although Henri was a couple of years older, the two boys set up a sort
of David and Jonathan league. And when Henri's father sent for him to
come back to France--they said--humph!"

The mildness vanished in a sudden blaze.

"What did they say?"

Again Mrs. Gano threw back her head.

"Ethan _had_ been coming here. We had his room all ready for him, and
Valeria had bought pink wax-candles for his dressing-table--a most
unnecessary extravagance for a boy, as I told her. And as for Jerusha,
she wasted half her mornings brightening up Ethan's knocker on the front
door, and the rest of the time she was making cinnamon rolls. And, after
all--humph!" she said, with something rather near to a snort.

"Then those Tallmadges wrote, didn't they?" said Emmie, gently applying
the spur.

"Ho, yes, the Tallmadges wrote. The children were heart-broken at the
idea of separating, and so they had to let Ethan go to Neuilly with the
De Poincy boy."

"To improve his accent!" added Emmie, with borrowed scorn.

"Oh yes; I admitted in my reply that Ethan's accent was no doubt again
in need of improvement, but it had not been necessary to send him so far
afield as France."

"How long did he stay?" asked Val.

"Three years. He came back the summer you were born. He was nearly ten."

"Well, it's a good thing he came back. He does look a gump in those
French clo's--I mean"--Val caught herself up hurriedly, seeing how
unpopular the observation was--"I mean, I like him best in proper
American things. This last picture's scrumptious!"

After this, it was not only gran'ma and An' Jerusha who held the Fort in
readiness for Ethan's coming, eager to capitulate at the first blow on
the door; but two little girls as well, in their different ways, set
their faces towards the day when E. Gano's big brass knocker should be
lifted by E. Gano's own hand.

School had been postponed, partly because Mrs. Gano was too anxious
about her son's health, and too absorbed in the task of convincing him
indirectly that life was worth living, to take the necessary steps for
entering her granddaughter in the Primary Department of the Plymouth
Seminary for Young Ladies. But, besides this preoccupation, it was
recognized that the fall term was already far advanced, and it might be
as well--it was certainly more economical--to wait till after Christmas.
However, the growing discomfort and complication of having so
objectionable a child about hastened the beginning of Val's school days.

With great misgiving, and full of suspicion, Val took her place at a
little hacked and initialed desk in the down-stairs school one fine day
towards the middle of November.

But we are forever being disappointed of our direst fears, as well as of
our dearest hopes. She found that she soon got the "hang" of the
lessons; that her next-door neighbor, Julia Otway, was the nicest girl
in school, and very soon her "best friend"; that Val herself could run
faster than anybody in the games at recess; and that she had fallen
blissfully under the spell of pretty Miss Matson, the primary teacher,
who, strange to say, seemed to like Val.

The bustling life at the Plymouth Seminary for Young Ladies, full,
varied, delightful, would perhaps be considered by the professional
biographer of vital importance in moulding a young person's character;
for was this not the time and the place of her education? One is
inclined, in Val's case, at any rate, to say no. She learned by rote, at
that excellent institution, certain more or less useful things, and,
more important still, she made two or three dear friends, who taught her
much of value about the human heart; but for the most part she was
_educated_ at home. There, and not at school, she, in common with many
young people, found the influences that made her what she ultimately
became.

Her father, if he understood the matter so, naturally did not so express
himself. Perhaps he thought this child of his had too little of the Gano
love of books, and was over-fond of running breathless races, and
playing ball with the neighbor's boy.

"You came here to go to school, you know. You've played all your life up
to this. Now you must begin to work. This is a very important time in
your life."

"Is it?"

Val sat up very straight, with shining eyes and an air of pleased
responsibility.

"Oh, very important, indeed. For now you have still time to decide what
kind of a woman you're going to make of Val Gano."

"Oh, have I?"

He nodded.

"You can make up your mind you won't be a dull, ignorant person, all
your life bound in shallows and in miseries."

"No, indeed," she said, with vigor.

"It's in your power now to take the necessary steps towards some better
fate. By-and-by it will be too late: you'll be like the crooked catalpa
in the terrace, grown awry and too old to straighten out."

"No, I shall be like the tulipifera rhododendron."

He laughed.

"You are ambitious, my dear"; and then he sighed. "Few come up to
tulipifera. Now, I am far enough from being a rich man, and I can't give
my daughters a fortune; but I can give them something far more
valuable."

"Now?"

"Yes, I've begun giving it. I mean an education."

"Oh!"

This was a blow.

"See that you make the most of it. It will put a key in your hands that
can unlock a hundred doors to happiness. I am doing with you--only a
little more helpfully perhaps--what the Swedish peasant did with his
eldest son."

"What did he do?"

"He took the boy up to the top of the highest hill in the country, and
said, 'You are young, my son, but I am about to give you your
inheritance. Look abroad'--and he stretched out his arms--'behold, I
give you the world! Go forth and take what portion you will.'"

Val drew a quick breath.

"Ha! I know what _I_ want."

"What do you think you want, little girl?"

"I want to be loved--oh, but tremendously! And I want to do some one
thing awfully, awfully well."

It was the most old-fashioned, unchildlike speech of which Val had ever
delivered herself.

"Well, my dear," her father spoke, dreamily, "to be greatly loved, and
to do well some one piece of work, isn't a bad destiny. Older heads than
yours would be at a loss to better it."

Even to her father, even in that moment of great outgoing, she had not
liked to particularize what it was she wanted to do so "awfully, awfully
well." But there was no doubt in her own mind that she was going to be a
dancer. She practised every rainy day, and sometimes when it didn't
rain, down in the dark parlor, where it smelt so solemn and musty. There
was a huge oil-painting on the north wall, of Daniel Boone and his dogs
and other friends "Discovering Kentucky." Although their eyes were
turned ever towards "the dark and bloody ground," they were Val's
audience. To the burly hunter and his raccoon-capped and shaggy
companions she bowed and pirouetted, waved her arms and tossed her
heels. She did not dare touch the old rosewood piano after one or two
rapturous attacks upon the yellow keys had brought swift retribution out
of her grandmother's chamber; but dancing was not only a glorious and
heady excitement, but, unlike most of this young person's pastimes, it
was noiseless; it could be carried on by the hour without rousing any
one's suspicions, unless perchance a vague uneasiness as to "what keeps
that child so quiet." When discovered, she was usually found to be
breathlessly examining the gilt-edged annuals and gift-books on the
centre table, or else staring into the "stereopticon," though what view
was visible in that dim light remained a marvel.

Perhaps the most memorable crisis of her childhood had found her in the
twilight of that musty parlor. It was a pale-gray, teeming spring
morning, after a night of rain--Saturday, and yet she had been forbidden
to go and see her friends next door.

"When _I_ was a little girl I didn't live at the neighbors'."

Val had been learning lessons, perched in the high window-seat of her
own room, looking out now and then with a glad sense of coming summer to
the early red of maple blossoms, and off to the blue Mioto Hills, that
rose on the other side the river, shutting in her world. Presently, down
below the rain-soaked terraces, in Mioto Avenue, a street-organ began to
play.

She dropped her book and leaned farther out. A watery gleam of sunshine
fell on the warm, dripping world. The smell of earth came up fresh, and
full of a mysterious promise. The "grind-organ," as the children called
it, sang and clanged. Val beat the swift time with her fist on the stone
sill, and her dangling feet moved staccato to the tune. She half closed
her eyes. Ah! now she could see better. She was gliding through a
brilliant scene at a ball. She was just sixteen, and dressed in blue and
silver, and there was a throng about her--all lovers! There were no
women, save those that looked enviously on from a far background of
flower-festooned wall. The faces near the blue-and-silver maiden were
chiefly strange, but all noble and beautiful. All these the generous
future would provide, but one or two she recognized as having followed
her out of the present. There was cousin Ethan as he looked in the last
picture, Jerry--and, well in the foreground, Jerry's handsome elder
brother, and certain other less-known young townsmen not to be spared
from the gay group of gallants; but they were destined, every man Jack
of them, to break their faithful hearts. She smiled and waved her
geography--her fan, of course--and each young gentleman took courage.
But wait! In a minute she would be carried off by the tall, dark,
fierce-eyed hero, who lived somewhere--somewhere--not in ballrooms,
except as the eagle may swoop into the valley--not in cities, but in
some mountain fastness in the kingdom at the end of the world.

Many a time she had wondered how they were to meet, how he was ever to
know that she lived with a cruel grandmother in New Plymouth. Ha! now it
was plain. The organ had ground out the truth. She would run away
by-and-by. He would see her somewhere dancing, and he would say
"Eureka!" "Ah!" she would say, "but I'm half engaged to my next-door
neighbor, or to the Duke of Daffy-down-dilly." "What does that matter to
me?" Whiff! he would carry her off, and say she should love him, whether
she liked it or not. Oh, it was wonderful!--it was palpitating to lie in
the dark, or in the pale spring sunshine, with shut eyes, and think
about this king of men, who would not be denied. Val couldn't remember a
time when she had not told herself stories with this fruitful theme for
inspiration. The proud, dark figure had come dimly out of the fairy
world, and had grown more human and distinct day by day. He began by
being a prince, and for some years he wore a gold-embroidered velvet
robe. By degrees he adopted a less and less striking attire, which,
however, had never yet degenerated into mere modern evening dress. The
noble gentleman could not be expected to put off his romantic melancholy
along with his royal robes, for a large part of the excitement of this
game of the imagination lay in the lady's proud rejection of his suit,
and flight from the fortress where he thought to hide her--his hot
pursuit--his being baffled, disappointed, and reduced to wild despair
before his ultimate victory. And this final triumph (oh, strong survival
of the savage in the female breast!) was invariably a triumph of arms.
Not even to a hero who was handsome, and tall, and strong as a giant;
not even to a hero half bandit, half blameless knight, that every other
girl in the world pined for, that every man envied and must needs
honor--not even to such a one will the untutored dreamer yield herself a
willing bride. A willing bride! The very phrase offends some ancient
canon fixed against self-abandonment in the very blood and bone of
womankind.

Can it be that in the ages unrecorded, before men going hence left
behind them laws on stone, or testament on papyrus, the women of that
far-off time had inscribed a legend on the hearts of all their sex,
graved it so deep and plain that a little girl of the nineteenth
century (casting about for stories to send herself to sleep) may read it
in the dark after all those æons have gone by? Can it be that, reading
and understanding this language, which being dead yet speaketh, knowing
the ancient mother-tongue better even than her father's own, she takes
the legend for a text, obeys it as a natural law, and thrills to it as
did her old ancestress of the cave and tent, smiling covertly, and
deliciously afraid?

The fresh wind blew the child's wild hair across her face; the sun shone
down more golden; the organ jangled through its tunes. Now, with a jerk
of restlessness, it abandoned "Il Trovatore" and struck into a waltz.
Ha! the window-seat was too cramped. She slid down and began to dance.
Gran'ma's voice. The little girl stopped suddenly, opened the door, and
went sedately down-stairs, with her lesson books conspicuously in
evidence. At the bottom she stopped and listened. Cautiously she opened
the parlor door and closed it behind her. She flung her books down and
coursed wildly round the centre table, as one sees a dog just let out of
the kennel celebrate his liberty. Suddenly she stopped and bowed
solemnly to Daniel Boone, saying under her breath:

"Now I'm the greatest dancer on the earth. Now they're all applauding.
Now I make three courtesies. They clap and clap till I begin again. This
is the most wonderful dance of all."

She started afresh, curving her arms above her head, fantasticating
steps, some graceful, some grotesque, whirling faster and faster to the
rhythm that was beating in her brain. Suddenly a dark face looked out of
the throng in that theatre of her imagination, and she knew it was the
face of her fate. There was the Duke of Daffy-down-dilly, too, leaning
out of a box and applauding as hard as he could. The dark man sat quite
still, but his eyes gleamed.

After the last great dance, which was called "The Filigree Finale" (all
the dances had beautiful names), the Duke threw her a bouquet of roses,
and held out his arms.

"I spurn the flowers." She kicked out a scornful foot. "I turn my back.
Oh, it's _deafening_ the way they're applauding!"

Suddenly, in the heartless process of dancing away from plaudits and a
duke, she stopped short as if she had been shot. The color fled out of
her face, and her thin hands dropped limp at her side. There was a kind
of terror in her eyes as presently she moved forward, dragging her
wings, so to speak, to the opposite end of the room, where, over a
marble-top table, an old-fashioned mirror reflected Daniel Boone. The
child peered into the glass, but it was dark, and the marble-top table
held her at arm's-length. She could only see dimly the top of her head.
She dropped down in a miserable little heap between the claw feet of the
table. Perhaps she alone of all the heroines of earth was not, never
could be, beautiful! It had never occurred to her before. A thousand
recollections seemed to rush at her at once to fasten the fear in her
heart, to make it hideous certainty. If she had been going to be
beautiful, would not some one have mentioned it? Emmie had heard a
thousand times how pretty she was. Cousin Ethan was known to be the most
beautiful of boys. As to Val's looks, why, she was so little a credit to
a handsome race that nobody could be got to own her. Hadn't her mother
said, "Emmie is like me; but Val--I suppose she's more like you"? and
her father had hurriedly disclaimed the faintest resemblance between his
eldest daughter and himself. Her grandmother had said: "You are not like
my side of the house, and I don't see a trace of the Gano in you. I'm
sure I don't know where you came from." Ah, it was clear she had not
referred to mere wickedness. She was repudiating her descendant's
plainness. The child put her hands over her face. But it was incredible
that this blow at the root of joy was meant for her. She dropped her
hands, taking heart of grace. Katie O'Flynn, the cook in New York, had
said, in some interval of truce, that Val had "rale Oirish oyes," and
she had said it with no accent of condolence. If only she hadn't added,
"They're put in wid smutty fingers, me darlint!" Even at the time Val
had felt the last remark tactless, and had changed the subject, but
now--

"Oirish oyes!" It was meant well, but it had a horribly common sound. It
was another way of saying, "You look like the cook." And yet--and yet no
one had ever cared so much about being beautiful before. She would have
submitted gladly to letting those "rale Oirish oyes" be torn out and the
poor quivering little body be hacked in pieces if only it might be put
together in a truer harmony. But there _were_ ugly people in the world,
who began ugly, and went on being ugly to the bitter end. How had she
come to take it so for granted that beauty belonged to her as a right?
There was Miss Tibbs, who lived near by in Mioto Avenue. Think of being
like that! with taily hair, and little, little eyes, and teeth that--
No! no! no! She struggled to her feet, storming up into the high
window-seat, and straining till she opened the near window, and could
force back the heavy shutter, letting in a flood of light. But it was
not the sudden glory of the day that made the child blink and draw back
so suddenly. Miss Tibbs was passing the gate.

"Good-morning," said that lady, looking more appalling than ever.

"It's like that--like that I'll be," thought the child, tumbling to the
ground.

Feverishly she swept the card-basket and the books off the table. Then,
drawing up a chair, she climbed up on it, clinching her teeth and
setting her jaws to bear the shock that perhaps awaited her. And still
there was hope in her heart as she leaned forward on the marble top and
looked into the mottled glass with imploring eyes. Slowly the tears
gathered. In mute agony she turned away, climbed off the table, and hung
limp over the back of the chair.

"Oh, God, I'm ugly!" she said, and clung there with shut, hot eyes. The
moments passed. "I can't bear it, God. Let me die!"

The strained voice was muffled in her clinched little jaws, and with
her fists she beat helplessly on the back of the old-fashioned chair.
Presently she slipped down to the floor, and wandered aimless about the
room. When she came near the glass again she glanced with a sharp
conviction of intolerable shame at the top of a shaggy head, which was
all that she could see. Even that was too much. She flew to the window
and drew the shutters to, feeling she should never be able to bear the
light again.

"What did You make me for?" she cried, arrested an angry instant, facing
sharply about, as though confronting an enemy. "I didn't want to come if
I had to be ugly!" She slid down off the window-seat, and walked quickly
to and fro with rising anger. "It would have been so easy, too, for
_You_. Just think what it means to me!" She stopped and looked
heavenward. The "Oirish oyes" were blazing. "I should think You'd prefer
things pretty for yourself. But if You don't, why do You go and spoil it
all for me?" And so on, in frantic young fashion, she beat her wings
against the old prison-house. For between the origin of evil and the
origin of ugliness there is no great gulf fixed in the female mind.

Looking back long afterwards on this hour of anguish, she could not
laugh, as philosophic grown-up folk are pleased to do, at the sorrows of
childhood. She knew that that morning in the musty parlor was one of the
bitterest experiences life had brought her, simply because it had come
to her as a child, for whom beauty was as yet a conventional physical
perfection, and not the high soul of things.

After the one-o'clock dinner, she had shaken Emmie off, and gone out to
walk up and down in the warm wind behind the house. She had come out
bareheaded, and her shock of wild hair was blown about almost as if some
one were saying the "I b'lieve," and the Windgeist, or some other "der
stets verneint," had borrowed Val's form of dissent.

She was a thin slip of a girl, and no one seeing her would have much
wondered that this young worshipper of obvious red-cheeked, dimpled,
yellow-haired, picture-book beauty, had been bitterly disappointed with
the thin little face, its irregular lines and faint coloring, the
good-sized mouth in lieu of the heroine's puckered rosebud, the tawny no
color, all colors, hair, that merely waved distractingly instead of
curling; the black eyebrows and lashes, too well defined--yes, "smutty";
the long, deep-set gray eyes, that no wishing could make blue before the
glass, but that sometimes, out in the sunshine, changed to turquoise,
and sometimes in the dusk or lamplight were limpid, gleaming black.

"Hello!" said Jerry, through the osage-trees.

"Hello!"

"What's the matter?"

"Nothing."

"Been getting it?"

"Don't be an idiot!"

"Come and fish!"

"Can't."

"Does Mrs. Gano make you stay here?"

"She can't _make_ me do anything."

"Then come. I'm going to Bentley's Pond."

Val wavered. She might fish even if she was ugly. In fact, as she came
to think of it, it was one of the few things left to do--that and
disobeying gran'ma.

"All right; wait a minute."

She went in-doors for her hat. A sense of returning life came warmly
over her. She could still fish. Fishing alone was a career. She had a
panoramic glimpse of herself through the future years--fishing morning,
noon, and night; in all weathers and in every clime; as a young lady,
fishing; fishing as a woman; as an old bent crone, still
fishing--fishing forever and forever, her head tied up in a veil. She
planted a Tam o' Shanter on her wind-blown hair, thinking: "I won't
begin with a veil to-day. I don't mind Jerry--he's ugly, too."




CHAPTER XI


Close as was her relationship with her father, there was more than one
thing she never told him. She never spoke of her grandmother's
brutality. She sympathized with him silently for having such a mother,
and felt that they were fellow-sufferers under her iron rule. Did she
not make him, too, do things he didn't want to do--make him go out and
walk when he preferred to sit still, reprove him for trying his eyes by
the waning light, and even at times pass severe strictures on his
clothes and his opinions? He was much better and stronger after a couple
of quiet years at the Fort; but it was cruel of her grandmother to speak
in that way about his "yielding to lassitude and inertia," and hint that
he was "quite as well now as many of the men who were carrying on the
work of the world."

"Health," she would say, "is a comparative term. No one is perfectly
healthy, any more than any one is perfectly good."

But this innocent-sounding platitude was evidently annoying to John
Gano. It was after one of these painful talks about his rousing himself
(of which Val heard only the concluding phrases) that he had tried to
get back into the bank. It wasn't his fault that Mr. Otway couldn't make
an opening for him. John Gano had even been urged into making visits to
Cincinnati and New York to see if he could find something. He came back
from these quests depressed and ill, not mentioning in Val's hearing
having found anything but an unusually fine specimen of the _Ardea
herodias_, or something of the sort, on the far Atlantic coast. But for
long after these expeditions he would talk vehemently to his mother of
the fierce competition of the great cities, of the growing costliness
and cruelty of civilization, and speak darkly of the coming social
revolution, when the poor should learn their power. But Val realized,
and felt miserably certain her father realized, that Mrs. Gano did not
much concern herself with the large historic outlook, that she would
have preferred knowing her son had secured a clerkship, even under some
bloated bondholder, rather than hear that the doom of capital was nigh,
and that Henry George was revolutionizing opinion about the land-tax.

But this particular difference of view was a delicate matter, not seemly
for a daughter to mention. Her father, being a kind of hero, of course
never complained; neither would Val. His sense of loyalty even led him
to excuse his mother when only her own misdeeds arraigned her, as when,
after Emmie began to go to school, she was allowed to stay at home
whenever she cried, whenever it rained, whenever she liked--and Val
never on any pretext whatsoever.

"She thinks Emmie has a delicate chest, you see," her father had
explained. "You are such a hard little nut--no danger of your cracking."

However, her grandmother, who seemed, oddly enough, to have some faint
glimmering of justice, appreciated Val's superiority in some things. If
she lost her spectacles, she would say to Emmie, hunting about with big
blind eyes:

"You are good only at losing things, my dear. Call Val."

Or if a parcel was to be tied up, or something carefully lifted down
from a height, she would trust Val rather than anybody in the house.
This recognition of deft-handedness, small claim on consideration as it
might seem, was still a balm to the child. She was wicked, she was
hideous, she was unloved, but she never broke things as did the adored
Emmie. No, Val was at least clever and quick in her movements; it might
not be much out of the wreck of a heroine, but it was something. One
other quality was admitted as time went on. If something questionable
happened in the house, something that had to be inquired into, it came
in time to be Val's privilege to be called in to give a faithful and
veracious account of it. Emmie was no keen observer, and she was prone
to spare other people's feelings if her own were not too much engaged.
Besides, Emmie had a high character to sustain; Val, having none, could
brace herself and tell the horrid truth, even about herself. One proud
day there was a great difference of opinion as to the exact
circumstances attending the breaking of one of the coffee-mugs of
great-grandfather Calvert's wonderful and priceless service of thin
white china with the broad gold key. It lived in the mahogany buffet,
and was washed once a year--_used_, never! Val was called in before the
assembled household to give her version, the summons being solemnly
prefaced by "I've never known you to tell me a lie." That was what made
it so proud a moment, in spite of the uneasy sense that the tribute was
not deserved. When Miss Brown had required the girls in her class to go
over the arithmetic lesson four times, no matter if they were sure they
had got the sums right at first, Val had instructed the entire
Preparatory Department to lay their books down on the ground and hop
across them. This might next morning be reported as "going over" the
sums as many times as Miss Brown liked.

"You are superficial," Professor Dawson said, detaining Val one day
after the Latin lesson; "your oral translations are too often mere happy
guesses instead of accurate knowledge. You must spend three-quarters of
an hour at least on your Latin alone."

After the first fifteen minutes' application in the evening at home, Val
would place her grammar and her little square red-edged Cæsar on the
chair, and, sitting uneasily on them for the remainder of the prescribed
time, she would look at the pictures in Don Quixote, and read bits here
and there. But she might not have reported this as having "spent a whole
hour on Cæsar," had she known that she was building up a reputation with
her grandmother for incorruptible truth. The commendation quickened
conscience.

As time went on, it became apparent, too, that if Mrs. Gano loved her
more beautiful and amiable granddaughter the best, she took more
interest in the school-work of the elder child. She looked over the
lessons with what Val considered surprising understanding, helping her
more and more as time went on, and revealing unexpected possibilities in
topics hitherto barren. She scanned the reports with eagle eye, and gave
special attention the following week to the study that had had the least
satisfactory marks before. John Gano took only a broad general interest
in the result, but it came to seem that there was one person, at any
rate, to whom it mattered step by step if one did well or ill. _She_
never forgot to inquire on Monday afternoon, "Have you the medal?"
although the usual "Yes, ma'am"--it must have been an easy
honor--elicited no further word.

There was no surprise in Val's mind at overhearing a certain colloquy
between her grandmother and the Principal of the Seminary. A state visit
was made to the Fort once a term, and Miss Appleby was one of the few
people Mrs. Gano conceived it her duty to see.

The Principal, as Val, playing "jack-stones" in the entry could faintly
hear, was complimenting Mrs. Gano rather fulsomely on the extreme and
wonderful cleverness of her grandchildren. Val could feel through the
wall how bored her grandmother was becoming.

"I had to ask at the end of the last term," Miss Appleby's mincing
little voice went on, "if there was only one girl in the Preparatory
Department, since I seemed always to be giving the medal to Valeria
Gano. Ah, how proud--how _very_ proud you must be of your clever
grandchildren!"

"No," said Mrs. Gano, "we expect these things of our children. If they
did not do them, then we might give the matter some thought."

But Val wagged her head wisely and tossed the jack-stones in the air.
Even Emmie, with her weak chest, when she _did_ go to school, was
expected to come home wearing, on a narrow pink ribbon, the Primary
medal--a golden shield, with "No Pains, no Gains," graven on its face.
Val, being "Preparatory," now wore the one inscribed "Perseverantia
omnia vincit" on a ribbon of pale blue, that most adorable of shades.
Emmie loved green, but also bore with red; Val would have nothing of her
"very best," if she could help it, that was not blue. It was not that
she had quite recovered the shock of that discovery in the parlor
mirror, although she had made up her mind, not having read _Jane Eyre_,
that biographers rightly suppressed the fact that many a heroine had
been in childhood not only wicked, but ugly, too; it was not that she
realized then that blue was "her color," as the ladies say; but
something in her responded to the hue. It made her happy just to open
the drawer where her blue sash was kept. In visions of the future, she
had never in her life seen herself clothed in anything but pale blue.
Sometimes the satin was broidered with silver wheat, sometimes with
pearls, but the blueness of it never faded or lost favor.

It was the rule of the house not to discuss the price of things. Money
was not mentioned, except in a wide impersonal way. It was difficult to
believe for a long time, but it came out by implication, that they were
poor; otherwise Emmie would never have begged in vain for the charming
green hat with plumes in Mrs. Crumbaker's millinery window. The "not
suitable for a little girl" was too thin an excuse; besides,
unsuitability could not be the ground of gran'ma's displeasure at the
purchase of a new microscope, after the shock of seeing what the amount
of her son's book bill was at the New Year. Very little was said on
these occasions, but Val was angrily conscious that her father was made
to feel uncomfortable. A grown man, and a hero to boot! It was strangely
short-sighted of him to let his mother keep his money for him--as
apparently he did--for he evidently didn't much relish asking for it,
and he might have learned from Val's experience that she didn't like you
to spend your pocket-money, except at long intervals, in miserable
driblets. There was only one occasion when her father seemed more
unwilling to open his purse than his mother did. It was when the
doctor's bill of two years' standing was left at the door. It was
addressed to John Gano, Esq., and when he opened it he said,
"Damnation!"

Val, who was doing lessons in a far corner, nearly dropped her slate.
Mrs. Gano, instead of reproving her son roundly, looked over his
shoulder and said, quietly:

"Very moderate indeed;" and she tried to take the paper out of his hand.

But he got up hastily, and paced the long room with knitted brows.

"I don't see how it's to be met," he said, presently.

"No trouble about that," she answered, calmly; "I've written Mr. Otway I
wish to realize on some Baltima' and Ohio bonds."

He turned sharply in his restless walk, and looked at her with curious
emotion. Then, quite low:

"This is about the last of them, isn't it?"

"Oh, there is my share of Valeria's still left."

He turned away, and continued his walk. His mother watched him covertly.

"The waste of it, the futility," he muttered, "bolstering up a wreck,
instead of launching new ships. The very savages are wiser. _They_ don't
stint the young to feed the useless, the dying."

"Don't talk nonsense."

She looked very angry.

"It's the rotten place in civilization," he went on, with some
excitement--"skin-deep sentimentality, and a careless cruelty reaching
down to the core of things. Devices of every kind to keep the unfit
here, while the young and strong starve in the streets. Hospitals for
the hopeless, not even bread for the ambitious--"

"Where is Emmeline?" interrupted Mrs. Gano, looking down the long room
towards Val.

"I don't know."

"Go and find her, and don't make her cry. I'll call you both when I want
you."

The next time that Emmie wept because she couldn't have something she
saw in a store window, Val realized it was time that she should be taken
into her confidence. When they were alone:

"Now, can you keep a famerly secret?"

"Yes."

"Cross your heart, and hope you may die if you ever tell."

Emmie complied with these requirements.

"Well, we're pore, all of us--gran'ma, too--awful, awful pore, and you
mustn't hurt their feelin's askin' for green hats and things."

"'Tain't so. Gamma ain't pore."

"I tell you she is."

"Why"--Emmie laughed her silvery little laugh, and showed her small
white teeth bewitchingly--"she's got a ole hair-trunk full o' money."

"_N-o-o-o!_"

"Yes, she has. I found a dusty ten-dollar bill in the fat blue china
vase, and I 'minded her of it when she said she couldn't get me the red
cloak at Alexander's, you know."

"Yes, yes, yes; what'd she say?"

"Said the little trunk in the pack-room was full of bills like that, but
all the same, I couldn't have the red cloak at Alexander's; that's why I
_always_ cry when I see it"--Emmie wound up with the air of one who
takes a lawful pride in accomplishing a mission--"'cause with a trunk
full o' money there's no excuse."

Here was news. Was she a miser, then? The very thought was enough to
make one spin with excitement, and the growing belief that it was so
kept Val "going," so to speak, for many a cheerful week.

There came a day when, after taking oaths of the most binding and
blasphemous character, Julia Otway was let into the "famerly secret."

She was obviously disappointed that all this preparation led up to so
little.

"Why, every human bein' in Noo Plymouth knows your gran'ma's a miser.
My father says she was awful cute, sellin' out her negroes in the nick
o' time, and she came here with heaps o' money; but she don't trust much
of it to the bank, and she lives so close and never spends a cent, so o'
course she's got a hoard som'ers."

Val was not pleased at the tone of this corroboration. The joy of having
a real live miser in the "famerly" was clouded. She determined not to
let her father be the only inhabitant of the town who was still in the
dark on a subject touching his comfort so closely. The next time they
were alone together she told him how much he was deceived as to the
"famerly's" finances.

He laughed till the tears came into his eyes, and he fell to coughing,
and then his mother appeared with the inevitable bottle of tolu,
capsicum and paregoric, and compelled him, between his paroxysms of
amusement and choking, to swallow an extra large dose.

When he told her the news, she laughed too, but a trifle grimly, and
turned on Val with:

"I am surprised to hear that you discuss family affairs with the
neighbors. It's not a Gano habit."

And she went back to her own room without vouchsafing the smallest
defence or explanation. But Val's father took her in his lap, and told
her a long consoling story, beginning, "In the year 18--" This
communication, bristling, as usual, with dates, was to the effect that
the "hidden hoard" was composed of worthless Confederate notes, and it
was just because they had that trunk full of money that they were poor.

Nobody ever heard of a bill going unpaid or having to be presented twice
at Mrs. Gano's door; but Val was very conscious as time went on that her
"frocks," as her grandmother called dresses, were old and ugly and out
of fashion. They had been lengthened, and turned, and dyed, and when
they simply refused to hold together any longer, instead of getting a
new one like Julia Otway's, as she had dreamed, Val had the humiliation
year by year of wearing her way, moth-like, through her aunt Valeria's
entire antiquated wardrobe. There were all kinds of objections to
drawing on this family reserve. The things in themselves, to Val's eyes,
were hideous, _hideous_--barèges unpleasant to the touch and sight, ugly
reps, ancient bayadere silks and flowered organdies that tore if you
looked at them hard; and the inhabitants of New Plymouth looked at them
very hard indeed, and sometimes rubbed their eyes. Then, as if their
being so out of fashion were not cross enough, these fabrics were
fabulously precious to her grandmother's heart, and had to be worn, so
to speak, with fasting and prayer. Woe to Val if she spilt milk, or
dropped maple syrup, on Aunt Valeria's things, for these objectionable
garments never to the bitter end became Val's own. The dead woman seemed
to stretch a hand out of the grave to keep her hold on them, never for a
moment remitting her claim. Spoiling your own pretty blue sash, that
your mother had bought in New York, was naughty, but hurting anything of
Aunt Valeria's was a crime of darker hue. Each time a new garment was
required, Mrs. Gano, with set face and faltering hands, would open Aunt
Valeria's trunk, and, with the air of one dealing out purple and fine
linen, or like a monarch conferring orders of the Garter and the Cross,
she would say to the dark-browed child:

"There! you shall have that!"

And Val would perforce disguise as well as she could her loathing of the
gift.

The child's passionate hatred of the ugly and uncouth was an unending
pain to her. She would shut her eyes tight as she passed old Mr.
Thompson, with his great wen, conscious of the same sensation of
sickness that would come over her at the malodorous neighborhood of a
dead cat. She would jerk her head away in the street as if she had been
struck when she met the idiot boy "Jake," more shaken and afraid than if
she had seen a ghost. She would grit her teeth morning after morning
with unabated rage and detestation as she put on a certain green poplin
of Aunt Valeria's, with its pattern of yellow ochre palms. There was
something about the sad and faded green of this frock, something about
the fat and filthy-colored palms, that made the wearer long to smash
everything within her reach. Some of Val's wildest misdeeds could have
been traced to that green poplin. While the abhorred garment held
together, even her pretty, slim bronze boots were powerless to cheer a
heart so deep bowed down.

Emmie's clothes seemed never to wear out; it was part of her almost
invariable advantage over Val. Mrs. Gano more than once pointed out that
Val succeeded in working her toes through three pairs of boots while
Emmie was carefully wearing one.

"Emmie isn't the captain at prisoner's base," the accused would say, in
self-defence, "and she doesn't walk miles and miles with father on
Sunday afternoons."

Val was very proud of these same walks, even if the conversation did
usually begin with:

"Now that you are learning history, no doubt you can tell me what was
happening in Paris 273 years ago to-day?" or, "This is the anniversary
of a battle that settled the fate of an empire; of course you remember,"
etc.; or that less easily eluded form: "Whose birthday is this?" And
while the child, innocent of a notion, seemed to be diving down into
profound deeps of information after the required fragment, he would help
her on with a hint--"One of the _real_ benefactors of the race; did more
for the good of humanity by his discovery than all the saints in the
calendar. I recollect speaking of him just a year ago, later in the day
than this, about five o'clock, as we stood with Professor Black by the
pyrus japonica."

"Oh yes," Val would cry out with delight at having a "glimmer," though
not of what he asked; "I remember perfectly, and I asked you if the
pyrus was the kind of burning bush Moses saw."

"_Ex_actly."

And the best feeling prevailed, it not occurring to John Gano that even
now his daughter had not the dimmest notion who the great man was who
thus unseasonably intruded on their Sunday _tête-à-tête_.

She was very sensitive to his disapproval, and suffered acutely when he
showed how he despised a person who forgot the difference between a
sycamore and a balsam poplar.

"What's the use of your having eyes if you don't use them?"

And she silently determined to be more observant, and win back her
father's respect.

"You should greet these good friends by name when you walk abroad," he
would say. "You wouldn't pass a woman every day in the street, as
beautiful as that silver birch, or a man as magnificent as the Otways'
copper beech, without asking his name; and you wouldn't be content with
knowing his intimates called him 'John.' 'What family does he belong
to?' you'd say. 'What is his history?' Now, here have I taken the pains
to introduce you to these desirable acquaintances, and yet you--"

"I shall know 'em next time," she would protest, humbly.

By-and-by her father didn't need to interrupt the main thread of his
discourse more than to pause with pointed walking-stick for a second,
while his little companion would interpolate briskly: "_Ulmus
Americana_," or "_Tilia_." And if, instead of his instantly resuming
story or homily, he still stood pointing, she would proceed: "Also
commonly called bass, lime, or linden; bark used for matting and ropes;
wood for sounding-boards; sap for sugar, and its charcoal for
gunpowder."

He would nod and walk on, finishing his broken sentence as though
nothing had intervened between subject and predicate. Although he was
severe with her constitutional forgetfulness of dates, her father, at
least, did not obtrude upon her the disgrace of extreme youth. He talked
the gravest matters to her with an air of conferring with an equal. They
discussed religion with no little openness, and, by dint of diligent
inquiry, she heard, amazed, the extent of his unbelief. He had at first
meant to be reticent, but as she got older and yet more inquiring, he
had said:

"One thing, at least, a child has a right to expect from its parents,
and that is truth. I am bound, as I see the matter, to give my child as
faithful an account of the world as I am able. I am the traveller coming
home, of whom the young one setting forth asks the way. Shall I advise
him to go in the wrong direction because the old sign-posts misled
_me_?" He would shake his head gloomily, and go on as if communing with
his own soul: "Not consciously to mislead, that is the basic human
obligation." Then he would look down on a sudden at the little
school-girl trotting solemnly along by his side, and resume with a kind
of severity: "I don't owe my child money"--he used to revert to this as
if it were a sore point--"I don't owe my child worldly position or
honors, or houses or lands, but I owe him honesty. I shall never
consciously deceive him."

And so Sunday by Sunday she heard the Gospel preached at St. Thomas's in
the morning, and in the later day the new tidings of science, and a sort
of sublimated socialism, preached among the lanes and hills. She heard
the story of the making of the world (not according to Genesis), and was
invited to observe in "Nature's Workshop," as her father called the
hills, how the making and transforming still went on.

"In these high places," he would say, with enthusiasm, "you may detect
Nature in the very act."

Val was shown how busy the little brooks were, and the wide river as
well, ever making "sedimentary deposits," still carving out its channel,
wearing down the fire-born rock as surely as the chalk cliffs in its
"ancient ineradicable inclination to the sea."

She saw for herself how the wind and the weather worked away day and
night disintegrating, tearing down, until even to a child it was clear
that one day the proud upstanding hills would be brought low, and lay
their heads in the plain. There was a tragic element in the story and
its ocular proof. It made the solid earth waver under the feet as in an
earthquake. Her father had pointed out how even the old Fort that had
so stoutly withstood the fierce Red Man could not hold out against this
subtler foe. He had shown her where even the great corner-stones were
exfoliating; with his finger-tip he could flake off the loosened bits,
but regretfully, and only as an object-lesson. No child must lift a
finger to help this insidious enemy; and yet, rightly comprehended,
Nature and Nature's laws were our best friends, Val was given to
understand. It was the theologian who had spoiled man's legitimate
satisfaction in the world. Christianity had been the greatest curse of
Time (this came as a lightning-flash); Christianity had killed art,
discouraged learning, and set back the clock of Progress 2000 years; had
turned man's thoughts and energies from the righteous task of making a
heaven on earth; had filled him with foreboding, and forbidden him
natural joys.

John Gano had no need to tell his daughter not to convey to her
grandmother any inkling of this indictment of the holy faith. It was a
thrilling secret. To be a sharer in it was a proud distinction which led
to Val's being permitted to remain in the room when Professor Black, a
contributor to her father's favorite periodical, the _Popular Science
Monthly_, came on flying visits, and they sat and talked of these real
dark ages of the world--Pliocene, Eocene, and the rest.

Mrs. Gano did not shrink from reading Darwin, and Spencer, and other
books her son left about. As time went on she came to entertain the
clearest views as to science being the handmaid of religion. In these
later days of her own development, she had no quarrel with those
"orthodox scientists," who regarded the Mosaic story with respect as
"symbolical"--symbolical of what was not inquired. The vaster age of the
world, the true story of the rocks, gave Mrs. Gano only a fresh and more
passionate sense of the wonder and majesty of the ways of God. She
corroborated and supported her new friends among modern historians and
men of science as vehemently as of old she had upheld a favorite
preacher, poet, or Biblical commentator. She objected vigorously to
much she found in Buckle and Lecky, and to certain Germans whose names
she disdained to utter, and bestowed her unqualified approval upon some
of the lesser lights whose Theism was sound.

After Professor Black was gone, or that other wise man from the East,
the handsome and distinguished-looking editor of the _Engineering and
Mining Journal_, Mrs. Gano would agitate the great red rocking-chair
into an abortive rock, and lifting her chin with an air of disdain:
"Humph!" she would say, "a mighty superior person!" Then, seeing her son
would not respond to this obvious irony: "Who is he, to quarrel with the
Bridgewater Treatises!"

"Black is too accurate a thinker to accept the theory of design carried
to the highest perfection." And, hoping to stem the tide of further
objurgation of his friend, he would demolish the _Treatise on the Human
Eye_. "So far from its being the nicest adaptation of means to an end,
the eye of man is a clumsy and pitiful production."

This was the kind of irreligion that in these days excited Mrs. Gano's
ire more than any other. So hot would the argument grow, that sometimes
her son would utterly lose sight of his determination never to disturb
his mother's faith. He would turn upon her with all the enthusiasm of
the passionate amateur.

"One glance through the magnifying-glass at the infinitely superior eye
of the common house-fly is enough to--"

"Enough to make any Christian thankful, I should say, that his eyes are
what Providence made them."

"The fly's eye is a far finer instrument."

"Humph! A pretty sight we'd be with protruding goggles bigger than all
the rest of the face!"

"I assure you the fly has a beautiful eye! And then the way it is
placed! Magnificent! A group of powerful lenses mounted on rods,
controlled by delicate muscles that turn the eye about so that without
moving his body he can see all round him. _There_ was an invention if
you like!"

"I shouldn't have liked it in the least."

"Ah, that's because you don't realize that to examine certain insects
through the magnifying-glass is to dispose at once and forever of the
notion than an omnipotent Providence did His level best by man. As a
mechanical contrivance the human eye is merely an intricate failure."
Then, perhaps perceiving that these intricate failures in his mother's
head were shooting lightnings, he would shield his audacities behind a
foreign authority. "Helmholtz says he would be ashamed of any novice in
his laboratory who should design so poor an optical appliance."

"Just like his German impudence! A nation of boors and atheists!"

John Gano would always end by pulling himself up, and accepting these
strictures on his authorities and his friends (and by implication on
himself) with a silent tolerance.

Val felt a fine superiority in thinking that _she_ understood. The
grandmother, who was such an autocrat, and thought so highly of her own
judgment, was in reality very bigoted and lamentably behind the age. But
Val and her father bore with her, not even exchanging covert glances
when, with shining eyes and sibylline aspect, she would burst into Old
Testament denunciation and prophecy. Her father was really a miracle of
forbearance. His behavior to his mother, in spite of her shortcomings,
was beautiful. He would sit and read Ruskin aloud to her by the hour,
and would give her his arm of an evening and slowly pace the gravel
paths, instead of going any more interesting and inspiring tramps with
his brisker companion along river or over hill.

On the occasions when Val tagged after the pair, she was firmly
convinced that the tone of her grandmother's conversation was adjusted
to young ears. It made her long to shout out: "Oh, he tells me a great
deal more than ever he tells you!"

Mrs. Gano would sometimes interrupt her son with scant ceremony and say,
glancing back at the child: "Great is the mystery of godliness. There is
a point at which the finite mind must stop," and so on.

Val's contempt for this was profound; she felt it was not in alignment
with what they had been saying before she came up with them. She would
slip her hand into her father's, and squeeze it gently, to restore the
sense of secret understanding. They would often, when she was there,
talk about the stars, perhaps as being "safe ground," if one may so
speak of the plains of heaven.

Did John Gano say, dreamily, "The Polar star is dim to-night," she would
as likely as not answer with significance: "Is _it_ dim, or our eyes?"

"No fault of our eyes this time, for we can see Mars well enough. He's
in a warlike mood to-night, flaming angrily."

Mrs. Gano would pause, and half to herself repeat:

"'The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth His
handiwork.'"

"Can you find the Scorpion, little girl?" her father would say.

And if she wasn't quick with eye and answer, her grandmother would stop,
lifting her shawled arm with curious unmodern largeness of movement, and
point the constellation out, half chanting:

"'By His Spirit He hath garnished the heavens; His hand hath formed the
crooked serpent.'"

As if gently to divert her attention, the son would perhaps face about,
and, walking slowly back with her to the house, would do a little
quoting on his own account:


     "'Many a night from yonder ivied casement, ere I went to rest,
     Did I look on great Orion sloping slowly to the West.'


Ah! the music--the sheer music in that man!"

"There was music before _his_ day. And Tennyson is one of them that hath
ears to hear, as well as tongue to speak. Small doubt but from his ivied
casement in the West he heard the voice of the Lord from out the
chambers of the South. 'Canst thou bind the secret influences of
Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion? Canst thou bring forth Mazzaroth
in his season? Or canst thou guide Arcturus with his suns?'"

"I can see Cassiopeia," Val would observe, just to show that she was not
quite out of it.

And she would grasp her father's hand tighter, to remind him of their
agreement that the straggling W stood for "We"--Val and her father. Then
he would find Lyra and the Little Bear, and tell how the Milky Way,
instead of being, as Hiawatha and Val had thought, "pathway of the
ghosts and shadows," was really star-dust, the scattered nebulæ of other
suns and systems.

Mrs. Gano would look back before going in-doors, and say, with solemn
upward gaze:

"Yes, yes! 'An undevout astronomer is mad.'"

Then they would go in silently to bed.




CHAPTER XII


A letter by the late post from cousin Ethan! It would be the last before
he himself would appear. Emmie watched, with luminous eyes, her
grandmother's opening of the envelope. Val, in banishment, waited
impatiently outside in the dusk on the stairs to hear the news; but the
face of the reader in the long room darkened as she read. She dropped
the letter in her lap at the close, speechless.

"Oh! what is it, gran'ma?" quivered the sympathetic Emmie.

The old lady merely turned away her head.

"Gran'ma, he isn't _dead_?"

"No, not exactly dead," she said, very low.

"He is very ill?"

"No. He is gone again to France."

"But I thought he was coming here for _sure_ this time?"

"So did I; not so Aaron Tallmadge!"

The name swept out like a sudden gust, scattering to the winds her
unnatural calm.

"But you said he was nearly of age, when he would be his own master."

"Aaron Tallmadge remembered that." Her lips trembled with anger, and the
big chair seemed to share her agitation. She held on to the red padded
arms, as though she rocked on the high seas in a gale. "When Ethan comes
of age he'll be five thousand miles away."

"But can't you stop him? Let Venie take a telegwaf."

"No, no!" The high wind, in which the great chair rocked, died down, the
angry animation faded out of the old face, leaving it older still and
very weary. "No, no; these things are not to be forced. It's natural. He
has been with Aaron Tallmadge all his days; he is his heir. He lives in
a world where men think much of the bond of money, and little of the
bond of blood. I shall not write again."

She folded up the letter and put it in its envelope. Her head drooped
over the task.

"I thought cousin Ethan loved being here?"

"A long time ago. He was very little."

"But he never forgot?"

"It used to seem so."

Lower the old head sank, till the folds of white veil, falling on either
side, met like two drawn curtains across her face.

"But you could see in his letters he was terribly sad and sorry to have
put off coming--just to please his grandfather."

"Ah, well! it was a long time ago, and he was very little."

Mrs. Gano lifted her head--and, behold, her face was wet with tears. She
found her pocket-handkerchief, and wiped them away angrily, as if she
resented the salt-water drops more than her grandson's defection.

"Natural enough, I suppose," she said, with an assumption of
half-scornful indifference. "Ethan's a man now, with wide means and the
world before him. Why should he come to this dull, smoky town, when he
can 'improve his accent' under brighter skies? There's no fortune here
for him to inherit, and nothing new for him to see."

"He hasn't ever seen _me_," said Emmie, "nor Val."

Her grandmother drew her close and held the beautiful little face in her
hands, looking down with unaccustomed tenderness, while again the tears
gathered. A sudden movement of "This will never do." She cleared her
voice and rose hurriedly.

"Good-night, child; go to bed. I must tell your father we needn't look
for Ethan after this."

Emmie kept on going to bed at half-past eight, even when she was old
enough to have struck for another hour's freedom. But Emmie had not so
much to get into her day; in fact, she was constantly going about saying
she had nothing to do, and begging her grandmother to find her some way
of getting through the hours. This frame of mind was, like godliness,
one of the mysteries to Val. How anybody found the day long enough, and
what being "bored" meant, were matters equally impenetrable. Her father
was right. The world was a beautiful and absorbing place to one whose
pleasure in it was unjaundiced. Val reflected with pride that _her_
capacity for enjoyment was not blighted by too great early piety. It was
no doubt because she was so singularly enlightened and advanced that, to
her, just being alive, was so rapturous a joy. There was Emmie, now.
With all her advantages, she wasn't happy; and she was as religious as
her grandmother, if not more so. The inference was plain. People who
were worried about their souls could not be expected to relish the
selfish joy of being first in the games at recess. They probably didn't
even eat their meals with the immense relish of the unregenerate. They
didn't feel their hearts swell up with unaccountable gladness, at mere
waking in the morning, to receive a broadside from the sun straight
between the eyes. But it was just the same if the wind blew, or the rain
fell. For no discoverable reason beyond lack of piety, Val would feel
herself filled from crown to toe with tingling delight at this mere
"being alive." There were, alas! other times when, for reasons partly
patent, partly obscure, she was sore oppressed; but never did any hour
find her so bowed down that the wild tumult of a storm would not
stimulate her like strong wine. She would run about the house with
flying hair and wide, excited eyes, when she couldn't manage to escape
out-doors, and feel the rapturous buffet of the winds and dash of the
rain in her face.

"She is like an electrical eel when there's a thunder-gust," she once
overheard her grandmother say.

"Some affinity between the child and the elements," her father had
replied, half seriously. "She came into the world during the wildest
and most destructive storm that ever swept over the State."

After hearing that, Val felt no apology was needed for her desire to go
out and romp with the winds. It was all very well for other people to
shut doors and windows and sit in the middle of non-conducting
feather-beds (as her mother had done), but how should Val be afraid of
thunder and lightning? They had come forth in their splendor and their
might to welcome her into the wonderful world. Dangerous to others? Oh,
very likely. They were friends and allies of Val Gano.

But not only through these more or less usual avenues did gladness reach
her, but through some of the thorny by-ways before which men had set up
the warning signal, "Pain!"

There was that affair of the hornet's sting. How lustily she had howled
when, stepping into the ash-gray nest down by the choke-pear-tree, she
found herself surrounded by an army of angry enemies, darting little
poisoned knives! How frantically she had run back to the house, rending
the air with shrieks, and yet queerly conscious, after the first shock
of surprise, that this was a curious experience and a great discovery,
not alone of the power of hornets, but a discovery, too, of the power of
pain in herself! Before she reached the house, and leaving a lusty yell
only half finished in her throat, she had stopped to notice, with an
excitement akin to pride, how the back of her hand and arm had puffed up
to an enormous size, and was stinging still, as if a thousand knives
were being turned about in the flesh. Here was something quite new.
While it agonized her, it kept her sense of curiosity in a tumult of
painful pleasure. She stood still, watching the hand swell, while the
tears poured down her flushed cheeks, absorbed in noting the action of
the poison, wondering how much more the uncanny power of the sting could
swell her poor little distorted hand. Was there any pain more horrible
than this? Was it possible human beings could endure anything worse? And
if so, what? She shut her wet eyes, dizzy with suffering, and yet in
the dim background of her mind almost avid of that intenser pang, if any
such there were in the arsenal of Nature's weapons against man.

Later came the memorable attack of diphtheritic sore throat, that made
them all so kind. _That_ was one of the most diverting things that had
ever happened to her, not merely because her father sat by her nearly
all the time, when her grandmother was or wasn't there; not only because
her unwary elders fell into discussions that, no matter where else they
led, could not terminate in Val's being ejected from the room, just as
they got to the interesting crisis; not because of the thrilling tales
of her grandmother's old acquaintance, Betsy Patterson, of Baltima', her
marriage with Jerome Bonaparte, and her journey, alone and friendless,
half across the world, to meet her mortal enemy and brother-in-law, the
great Napoleon. Not in these obvious delights alone lay the whole
advantage of the diphtheria incident, but in the discovery that there
was a sensation, in or under the actual pain itself, that was new,
exciting, almost agreeable. It was touching experience at a fresh point,
and was far from being altogether regrettable. This sharp pain when one
tried to swallow was only a keener way of feeling alive, a new
accomplishment of the alert, responsive body. As if with foreknowledge
that her experience in this direction was going to be limited, or as
though she had heard Sir Thomas Brown say, "There is some sapor in all
ailments," Val showed every inclination to make the most of this one.

"Now, you've got to behave, Emmie," she would say, if her sister seemed
likely to forget that here at last her customary privileges must for the
nonce give way. "You've only got a weak chest, but _I've_ got a
diphtheritic throat!"

It was during the agreeable time of convalescence that her grandmother
showed her the faded samplers that she and her sisters and Aunt Valeria
had worked as children. She got out the little boxes of old trinkets,
too, and told the "story" of each and every one. There were volumes in
these simple rings and mourning brooches, watch-chains of hair,
badly-painted miniatures, enamelled hearts and charms. She seemed to
have literally dozens of gold and silver pencils. One was to be Val's
and one Emmie's, when they were "old enough to take great care of them."
But all the best ones seemed to belong to cousin Ethan. And there was
that priceless and magnificent possession (that was also to be Ethan's),
Grandfather Calvert's gold snuffbox, presented by the Burns Club, of
"Baltima'," and inscribed with a verse of good-fellowship. This was the
ancestor that Val took most interest in, even before the revelation of
the snuffbox. He had been a merry gentleman, who amused himself so well
in the "Baltima'" of his day, that he had to be sent when only nineteen
as "supercargo," whatever that meant, to the West Indies. It was evident
paternal punishments in those times were slight, for he had loved
"supercargoing." He came home with a store of stories and a fortune,
and--as it presently leaked out, to Val's and Emmie's delight--he ran
away with his wife when he was only twenty-one and the little lady
barely fifteen. Mrs. Gano had been betrayed into admitting that she was
born before her mother had reached her sixteenth birthday.

"Why, then, our great-grandmother had a daughter when she was fifteen!"

"No, no; she was very nearly sixteen--one may say she _was_ sixteen."

But Val and Emmie preferred the other form. A baby of your own to play
with when you are only fifteen! Ha, _that_ was the way to begin life!
People in these times shilly-shallied so wastefully. This
great-grandmother hadn't missed anything by her promptitude in marrying.
After she was a wife and a mother, she used to call her girl friends
into the high-walled garden, and stationing a slave on the gate-post, to
keep watch and give warning when the husband could be seen coming home
from his counting-house, this real, proper kind of a great-grandmother
would tuck up her long skirts and have a rousing game of hide-and-seek,
stopping breathless in the middle when Sambo cried from his
watch-tower, "Massa comin'!" She would let down her gown and pin up her
curls and go demurely to the gate to meet her lord, and tell him the
baby and she had had a good day. Ah, it was plain they had been a
frivolous pair! Theirs were the mahogany tables with slender, twisted
legs and baize-lined folding tops, that in these serious days never
caught sight of a card. Instead of reading Blair's "Sermons" and
Baxter's "Rest," this agreeable ancestor had accumulated all those
French romances down-stairs, and even when he left gay youth behind, he
had sat in his counting-house, not like the King of Hearts, counting out
his money, but revelling in the novels of the Wizard of the North. And
when it was noised about at home among his growing daughters that he had
nearly finished the latest one, and would bring it back that evening,
the three girls would start fair and even from the bottom step, at his
coming-home hour, and race to meet him. The lucky one who reached him
first got the new _Waverley_.

To the adaptable eye of youth "all things are possible," with parents as
with God. It never occurred to Val and Emmie as a subject for surprise
or inquiry how such a person as their grandmother had come to find
herself _dans cette galère_. Mrs. Gano would usually wind up her Calvert
stories with a half-humorous, half-reverent smile.

"Your great-grandmother"--she never said "my father" or "mother," but
with a detached, impartial air--"your great-grandmother was the best
woman I ever knew; and your great-grandfather lived a useful life, and
died, after receiving extreme unction, in all the odor of sanctity."

"He wasn't a Pisspocalian, like us?" Emmie asked.

"No; Roman Catholic. We had all gone different ways by that time, but he
would say, 'Ah! wait till you're as old as I: you'll all come back into
the bosom of Mother Church.'" She would smile at this. "He was not a
thinker--he had lived all his best years in the active world of work and
pleasure, and when he saw his end in sight, he looked about him for a
priest." She would smile again--less tenderly, more ironically. "This
was priests' business; best leave it in their hands."

It was interesting to the children to observe that not even for the
benefit of the young was family history falsified.

"Oh, he was consistent enough. Even before he embraced Roman
Catholicism, he never spoke of religion except with the greatest
reverence." She would glance sharply at the children's father, if he
were present when she reached this point in that or any similar
narrative, seeming for the moment to lose sight of the younger
generation in her desire to point the moral for the benefit of her son.
"I never heard of a Calvert who questioned revealed religion; and as for
the Ganos, any one who has a mind to look, may read in the family record
that they were all eminent for piety in their day and generation."

"Does that little record go further back than 1760?" her son once asked,
meditatively.

"No: but that's quite far enough to show what's expected."

During this illness in particular, there were times when Val was drawn
unaccountably to the strange old woman. If the child had had more
encouragement, she could have loved her well and openly, renouncing for
her sake domestic heresy and schism. The secret passion for loving and
being loved had grown in the girl with every year. It was not only the
strongest current that swept through her being--that is true of
many--but even in this young and sheltered life it rose betimes to
freshet and to flood, hungry, devouring, unappeased. The girl led three
lives--the gay, triumphant surface one at school, the checkered
existence at home, and that deep heart life apart in the sunlit valley
of imagination, whither, when the wind of destiny blew bleak on the
uplands of domestic life, she would retreat with all the honors of
war--rally and "captain her army of shining and generous dreams."

The intensity of the craving for approbation, the love-hunger in the
child's heart, would be called morbid by those who find that epithet a
ready one to apply to heights and depths from which they themselves are
debarred by a niggard nature. It was true (even if, like many another
fact about this young creature, it is not to be approved) that she had
had an affair of the heart in New York--princes apart--when she had
attained the ripe age of seven. It had been a kind of infidelity to the
dark-browed hero of dream, for the gentleman in question was not a
nobleman, not even a Nimrod, and he had red hair. But, nevertheless, he
was a peril to the peace of mind of a diminutive maid, and all
unconsciously to himself "brought her acquainted with" a more thrilling
joy and a more poignant pain than some women can look back upon from the
height of fifty years. Oh, these strange stirrings of the too eager
heart!--the sharp rapture and the sharper pain, the whimsical, bitter
pathos of them read by the light of later "exultations, agonies!" Who
that has had this window opened for him into the virginal chamber of
awakening woman-life can look through it without tears? But this
particular window is not for our eyes. After that premature romance had
come to an untimely end, or, rather, when its hopelessness was comforted
and covered by the quick-growing ivy of new affections, there was peace
for a time in the camp of love, or only border skirmishing. Not, of
course, for any lack of enterprise, or any dearth of heroes, for almost
any passer in the street will serve for a peg to drape the gossamer of a
dream upon. He is perhaps the unrequited lover--he is some one in
disguise; not Mr. Ernest Halliwell, the son of the local doctor, but
heir to an earldom over the sea. You are sorry you can never love him;
he must break his heart in vain. It is almost _too_ sad, for his hair
curls prettily over his ears, and his smile is gentle and haunting. But
high above all these little "foot-notes," as it were, to the great main
text of the romance, ran the radiant "continued story" of that one who
cometh--he with swift, unfaltering feet, he with the sheltering
arms--bearing the great gift in his bosom, and his face, still for a
little space--still hidden.

Meanwhile, eager friendships at school, and devotion to her father at
home, and to Jerry's handsome brother in the promised land beyond the
osage hedge--not all these and hope besides could fill the foolish,
hungry heart. Nobody else in the world but a few novel-writers and
herself seemed in the least concerned about the chief business of life,
which was plainly loving and being loved. It did not appear to be a
subject of conversation with grown persons. Not only at the Fort, with a
grandmother who plainly could know nothing of such matters, and a father
who, besides his children, loved only rocks and trees, but in the homes
of the other girls as well, the supreme topic was neglected, ignored,
except when considered covertly among the young, as conspirators whisper
treason. It was very queer. Evidently her absorption in the subject was
part and parcel of her perverted nature, her "low curiosity." It was, at
all events, a weakness to be hid except from that very best of all her
"best friends," Julia Otway. Not that Julia even was told of the Great
Romance, but the two girls wondered and surmised together, bringing day
by day to their common store every new scrap of knowledge or conjecture
that came their way. Val was the more adventurous, the less fastidious.
She it was who would speculate most boldly, sketching out certain
chapters, certain scenes even, in that great coming drama, that are
currently supposed not to enter the imagining of maidens. Yes, yes; it
was all wrong perhaps to think about these things; but why, then, were
they so interesting? It wasn't her fault. But at last one day, when the
more modest-minded Julia said, "I want awfully to hear, but I don't
think we'll tell these stories any more. I don't feel somehow as if it
was quite right," then Val knew that indeed she was "low-minded," and
was as humiliated as the sternest moralist could desire.

She admired Julia more than ever for her rigid asceticism. Ah yes! there
was no blinking the fact. _That_ was the kind of strength of mind it was
fine to have, but the richly merited rebuke of herself made her wince
with shame. The very memory of the moment was like a dagger-thrust for
years.

And still there was a buoyancy in her that was always lifting her
mountains high after these deep descents into the pit. One potent device
for the recovery of self-respect was to name a day from the dawn of
which she should start a new life, absolutely different from the past,
which was by this act cut off and dropped into oblivion. Monday mornings
began not alone a new week, but a new era. Her great fresh start of the
year was taken annually at Christmas, or if one made a slip--one always
did--the New Year was the time, or else Easter, or, after all, one's
birthday was a fitting moment for such regeneration. The girl who had
been only eleven was inevitably a poor creature, but the person of
twelve! Ah, when the clock struck that complete and significant number a
new and quite perfect existence was inaugurated! The next year, to be
about to enter one's teens, was discovered to be, after all, the
psychological moment for starting a new life. Then fourteen! Ah, _that_
was the true age of understanding, besides being twice the sacred number
seven! If she was much happier than other people for the most part--as
she knew she was--she had also moments of being much nearer despair.
There were all the times when people hurt her feelings, and when her
only consolation was the old one of pretending she hadn't any feelings
to hurt. If life ministered to her more than it did to most, it bruised
her too from crown to sole.

There were those hours of reaction, after long expectation of some
birthday-party, or the Fourth of July fireworks, or the school
Commencement, when a blank wretchedness fell upon her. It hadn't been
what she had hoped. How or where it had failed was partly a mystery, but
there was a strange bitterness left behind. She refused vehemently in
her own mind to accept for truth the rumor abroad in the world, "Nothing
ever comes up to expectation." Oh yes, things would by-and-by come up to
and exceed anticipation. It was only now, and through some fault in
her, that they fell short of perfection. As she grew older she developed
a pitiless self-criticism--of her speech, her manners, her looks, her
attainments. This creature, among certain girls that were awkward, and
certain others that put on airs and graces, this profoundly egotistical
little person, was actually commended for being "perfectly
un-selfconscious"; the fact being that she was far _too_ "aware" of
herself, saw herself far too vividly in her mind's eye, to go on making
the current mistakes of affectation or of clumsiness. She knew
unerringly when she giggled with embarrassment, when she had been
"making eyes," when she was in danger of seeming superior, or what her
grandmother called "toploftical." She was keenly, quiveringly
self-conscious, and conscious too of other people; feeling their moods
as an Æolian harp feels the light wind, brightening under their
unspoken, their merely looked approval, and shrinking beneath her
careless exterior at their unuttered blame, wearing her reputation for
hardness like an inversion of the magic suit of mail, seeming stout
armor, and yet letting every arrow through. Still, it served its
purpose, since no one dared say, "See! that struck home!"




CHAPTER XIII


After several years' supremacy as "the greatest dancer on the earth,"
that brilliant career was suddenly abandoned. It was evident that a
mistake had been made. Val's true destiny was to be Queen of Song. It
was difficult to illustrate the fact in your unmusical grandmother's
house, but you could do a good deal in that direction at the New
Plymouth Seminary for Young Ladies. You could roar down several hundred
girls in the morning hymn, and you could even have occasional
surreptitious performances in the gymnasium, or at home in the kitchen,
where whole cycles of impromptu operas were given in a season. For the
rest, you sang to yourself in lonely places and exulted. Sometimes you
trembled, shaken to the verge of tears by the beauty and pathos of your
own voice.

There had been a brief interval when the sum of achievements in the
drawing-class seemed, in Val's mind, to point to her becoming a second
Rosa Bonheur. It was certain that her copy of Landseer's "Rabbits" was a
work of extreme merit. Even her grandmother, who usually said "Hum!"
when she looked at Val's original designs for wall-paper or carpet,
remarked on beholding the rabbits: "I'll have them framed."

If that were not distinction, where shall it be found?

But it was grasping to set more than one snare for greatness--let Emmie
be Rosa Bonheur, Val would be the great singer of her time.

"Let me have music lessons," she prayed. "I'll practise at school and at
Julia's."

"It is out of the question," said her grandmother.

Val knew "out of the question" meant it was a question of being out of
pocket.

"I'll give up drawing."

"Drawing is much less expensive; and even so, you and Emmie must give it
up after this term."

"Then, what on earth are we going to learn besides common lessons?"

"I'll teach you botany and gardening," said her father.

"I don't care about botany," said Val, hotly, "and"--unmasking the
hypocrisy of years--"and as for gardening, there isn't _any_thing I hate
so much."

"_What?_"

Her father couldn't believe his ears.

"Yes. I'm sorry. It's very kind of you to offer so often to teach me;
but I really quite hate flowers."

Her father looked at her with a severity she had seldom seen in his
face.

"Then, in that case"--he spoke as though originating a punishment fit
for a new unnatural crime--"in that case you should learn cooking."

After such a blow, there was nothing for it but to remember that for
weeks Jerusha had wanted her to take some household sewing to poor old
Miss Kirby up on Plymouth Hill. Val would run all the way to the Dug
Road and there, in the deep cut in the hill-side, or in the even more
lonely ravine above, she would sit with the bundle of sewing on her
knees, raging solemnly over it at fate, and devising spirited revenges.
In a wood on the farther side there was a place deep hidden in bush and
brier, where a wild grape-vine made a swing between two old forest
trees. It was a distinct source of comfort to Val that she didn't know
the names of these trees. She would shut her eyes tight, and swing high
out in the free air, with a sense that she was flying from two calling
voices, afraid the accents should reach her clearly, afraid lest by an
unwary peep something in bark or leaf should press back upon her
impatient memory "their ugly names," cheered and strengthened after each
escape by finding her ignorance intact.

Out, far out, on the wild grape-vine, swinging till she forgot the
importunate trees, forgot all threatened ignominy, forgot everything but
the ecstasy of living and swinging and singing, and looking
forward--looking out past home perplexities and wild wood tangles, out,
far out, towards the secure beauty and the certain wonder of the coming
years.

Emmie came home from school earlier than usual one memorable day, and
told Mrs. Gano with frightened eyes that Val had done something awful.
She couldn't make out what, for all the Academic and Collegiate girls
whispered about it secretly at recess. But Val was locked up in the
Principal's room, and it was considered doubtful if she'd _ever_ be let
out, so angry was Miss Appleby. But even the Principal's wrath was less
than the wrath of her niece, Miss Beach, the new teacher of the primary
school and of gymnastics.

Emmie had naturally felt humiliated at her sister's disgrace. She
thought she could never, never go back to school again. By the time the
miscreant got home, Mrs. Gano was properly worked up to receive her.

Val saw at a glance from Emmie's cloudy eyes and her grandmother's, cold
and gleaming, how her story had been forestalled. She held up her head,
and said, carelessly:

"Well, I've got myself into a scrape."

Her grandmother fixed her silently for an instant, and then said:

"'Scrape' is not the word. You've heard that expression from Jerningham
Otway. _We_ don't get into scrapes."

Emmie seemed to Val's overheated imagination to sit and plume herself.

"All the members of your family have been well-mannered and
well-conducted people. We leave 'scrapes' to others."

Val fell a sudden prey to the old loneliness in the midst of so much
family rectitude.

"I am waiting to hear what has happened."

Mrs. Gano folded her blue-veined hands across the open book on her
knee.

"Well, I think they mean to expel me."

"Expel you!"

She shut the book with a snap.

"Oh, Miss Appleby's coming to see you," said Val, with overacted
indifference. "She'll tell you everything that Emmie hasn't told you
already."

"I don't choose to ask Miss Appleby for details that I ought to hear
from you."

Val looked at Emmie's curiosity-lighted face and kept silence. Her
grandmother understood.

"Run out and play, child; you sit too much in the house," she said to
the younger child.

"I've got nobody to play with," came from Emmie, not budging.

"Then go and get me some jonquils and narcissuses."

"I've hurt my finger."

"Then take a book and sit in the porch."

"I've read all the books on the juvenile shelf."

"Leave the room!"

Val's heart swelled up in gratitude. It was considerate of her judge not
to hold the court of inquiry before Emmie.

"Well," said Val, plunging into the unhappy business the moment the door
was closed, "you know how we hate and despise--I mean how we don't like
Miss Beach."

"Humph! I dare say Miss Beach doesn't like all her pupils."

"I should think she didn't! She hates us!"

"I don't want to hear such strong expressions. I've nothing to do with
the other girls; but it's a bad lookout for you if you haven't earned
the respect of an estimable woman like Miss Beach."

"You wouldn't call her that if she gave _you_ unfair marks, and said and
_looked_ spiteful things at you."

"Looked! What nonsense are you talking?"

"Well, she"--Val dropped her eyes and crimsoned--"she laughed at my new
gymnastic dress." There was a pause. "It _is_ unlike the others."

"Beyond a doubt. Far too good for the purpose. That broché came from
Baltima'. Your aunt Valeria never wore it but once. It was as good as
new."

"Well, all the other girls wear blue serge, but they never laughed. Miss
Beach _did_. Perhaps she didn't mean me to see, but I did."

"Humph! Well?"

"Well, she invents new marches--in-and-out figures, you know--and she
only does them once very quickly, and makes me lead off afterwards, and
blames me if there's the least mistake. So I--I--just thought the next
time she invented something new I'd see if I--I--couldn't make her do it
slower. So--well, I collected parlor-matches for a week."

Mrs. Gano's quick movement said, "_That's_ where the matches have gone."

"And I cut off their heads, and I gave some to--three of my friends, and
I had a lot myself; and as we marched we threw 'em little by little
under Miss Beach's ugly fat--I mean under her feet."

"I'm amazed at you--simply amazed!"

Mrs. Gano's eyebrows had shot up to the middle of her forehead. Val
studied for the hundredth time the hairless bony arches above the
piercing eyes, and the strange look of the patches of eyebrow sitting up
on her forehead in that amazed fashion.

"Well, she _did_ do that new march very slow, stopping and looking round
surprised when the matches exploded, and at last she gave up marching
altogether, and kind of exploded herself. She _was_ angry, and red
too--_purple_, all over her ugly podgy--over her face."

"I don't wonder she blushed for you. I am very much ashamed of you
myself. It was the action of a ruffianly street-boy."

"_She_ wasn't ashamed. She was just mad--I mean angry. She asked who had
done it, and nobody said--"

"I'm not surprised you wanted to hide it."

"Then she said she should get her aunt to suspend the whole class; so I
had to tell her it was me, and they shut me up in Miss Appleby's room."

"Quite right," said Mrs. Gano, backing up the authorities as usual.

"Oh yes," said Val, bitterly, "that's what Miss Beach thought too; she
_said_ it was the only thing to do with a wild beast."

"She didn't use those words!"

The eyebrows suddenly shot up again.

"Yes'm, she did. Ask Julia Otway. Miss Beach'd say _anything_. Why, she
was educated at a mixed school."

"You don't mean blacks and whites together?"

"Yes'm--Oberlin."

Mrs. Gano had some ado to recover her rigid attitude of respect for
those in authority over her grandchild; but she relaxed the upward
tension of her eyebrows and was studying Val straight through her
spectacles.

"You can learn manners at home. Miss Beach is quite competent to teach
Emmie spelling and you dancing and calisthenics, and her manners are not
your business. It is only the young people who are quite perfect
themselves who can waste time criticising their elders."

"Yes'm," answered Val, meekly. She was surprised that her crowning
misdeed and public disgrace were taken so calmly. "Please, who's going
to tell my father I'm expelled?"

"Nobody is to tell him anything of the sort!" she fired up. "Now that
things have come to this pass I must try to make you understand. We
can't go on like this. What you have done to-day would disgrace a street
urchin; and yet you are old enough to be a comfort to your father."

Val fidgeted miserably.

"You have given us more trouble than all the other children of the
family put together; and yet I have discovered there is a kind of
reasonableness in you when it's deliberately appealed to."

Val looked up quickly. She felt there was a new note in these remarks.

"I should be very sorry to go to your father with this miserable story;
he has enough to trouble him, and he is ill; he does not get better."
She had laid convulsive hold on the red-padded arms of the great
rocking-chair, and the purple veins started up on the long hands. "I
sometimes think--I sometimes think he gets worse." Her voice had sunk
very low. There was a look in the waxen features that made the girl's
heart grow chill. "I have noticed your impulse to be considerate towards
your father, to spare him the knowledge of your antics. I have been glad
you had this instinct. _You_ will be glad when you are older--when you
are alone."

There was a long silence. Neither looked at the other. Presently, with
lowered eyes, Val came closer, and on a sudden impulse, kneeling, she
laid her cheek on the long left hand that still clutched the chair-arm.

"You'll see," she said, fighting down her tears--"you'll see I shall be
better."

She felt the other hand laid softly on her head, and neither of the two
spoke or moved for a long time.

A sharp ring broke the spell, and the quick following clatter of "E.
Gano's" knocker sent all gentle influences flying.

"Miss Appleby!" Val sprang up. Yes. They could hear her voice. Before
Venus had time to come and say she was in the parlor, Mrs. Gano had
opened her own door and closed it behind her. Val stood looking out of
the window, trembling with anxiety, registering vows that if she were
let off this time, if by some miracle she were not expelled, she would
be such an honor to the family, such a comfort to her father, that he
would be encouraged to live practically forever.

Emmie presently opened the door very softly, and crept in.

"She's just goin', I think," whispered the little sister, who seldom
bore a grudge. "Oh, she _has_ been getting it!"

"Not gran'ma?"

Emmie squirmed with suppressed merriment at this notion.

"I should think not! Miss Appleby's been getting it. Gran'ma said they
were making a mounting out of a molehill--and expelling people did the
school no good. Said you'd tell Miss Beach you were sorry, and that was
a good deal, 'cause you didn't like beggin' pardings."

"_Did_ she say that?"

"Yes. An' Miss Appleby said she was very grieved, but she had promised
her niece not to take you back this term."

"Her niece! Her sneaking Black and White Oberlin woer-r-r-rm!"

"_Gran'ma_ didn't call her that," whispered Emmie, with an air of gentle
reproof. "She just said, 'Unless your niece is very foolish'" (Emmie
could mimic astonishingly well), "'and unfit for her post, she will be
glad to reconsider.' Miss Appleby got mad at that, and seemed to be
going away, so I ran into the dining-room. When I got back gran'ma was
saying, if they expelled you, I should be taken away too."

"Gracious!"

"And they were both _awful_ mad then, an' gran'ma said, Oh, she'd _just
as soon_ take us away, and she wouldn't hesitate to say why. 'We don't
send our daughters to school to be called wild beasts by young women
from Oberlin.'"

"Hooray! hooray!" Val spun about the room, waving her arms victoriously.
"We've got a oner for a grandmother after all!"

The room door opened and the hall door banged.

"What _are_ you doing?" said Mrs. Gano, stopping short.

"Oh, nothing," replied Val, composing herself expeditiously; "only I
_do_ love you, gran'ma," and she held up her face to be kissed.

"If you love me, keep my commandments," said the lady, without
enthusiasm, and equally without sense of irreverence. "That will do. Now
go."

She was turning away, when some sudden thought occurred to her. She
gleamed at Val through her glasses in an enigmatic way, and said:

"Is this true about the trouble you've given your preceptors over the
Bible verse every morning?"

"I don't give trouble _every_ morning; but it's so tiresome, gran'ma, to
begin exercises every day the same way."

"I should think so, if several hundred girls _will_ go on repeating
exactly the same texts year in and year out."

"Well, when they scolded us for never learning new ones, I tried to
oblige them--I did, indeed."

"Hum! Miss Appleby tells me you appeared next day with 'Jesus wept.'"

Val grinned, and then grew grave.

"They are very hard to please. They want something we hadn't all said a
thousand times, and something longer than--"

"Naturally."

"You can't _think_ how furious they are now if we happen on the same
thing. I do my best to oblige them. I suppose a--Miss Appleby--"

Val tried to find out from the non-committal face whether the principal
had entered upon this. If not, so much confessing all in one day was
perhaps overdoing it.

"Well," said her grandmother, "Miss Appleby _tells_ me--I can hardly
credit it--that you stood up in your place yesterday morning and
recited, 'Comfort me with apples, for I am sick of love.'"

"Well, it wasn't _me_ that laughed; and I told Miss Appleby it was in
the Bible right enough."

"Yes. Well, I'll pick out your texts for you in future." She spoke with
charming geniality, and a glint through her glasses. "Now go and get
your lessons for to-morrow."

After the failure of Miss Beach to have Val disgraced and expelled, the
girl felt that though her grandmother might herself abuse her, she would
not permit any one else to do so. The early years of warfare merged by
degrees, and in spite of lapses, into a less lawless scheme of life.

The reason of it was not in any great measure regard for her father. He
lived too much apart from the din of daily events for their remote
effect on him to be much present to the preoccupied mind of youth. The
change came about through a growing, albeit unwilling, admiration and
sense of friendship for her grandmother. She was entertaining, this old
lady, in spite of her terrible faults. One was never dull with her. She
told delightful stories, and she laughed at yours when they were good.
Indeed, no matter how abandoned had been your conduct, if you could make
her laugh you were saved. It was not in child-nature not to lay traps
for that pardoning gleam of the fierce eye, that involuntary twitching
of the judicial mouth. An exchange of anecdotes tends inevitably to a
good understanding. But more than by any other means, perhaps, the
perverse school-girl and the autocratic old woman were brought together
by a mutual recognition of a common regard for justice. When Val found
out that her grandmother was not as arbitrary as she had supposed, the
battle was half over. Mrs. Gano had been overheard advising her son,
"Don't try to coerce Val. If you can convince that child's reason you
can do what you like with her, but you can't drive her an inch." The
girl felt that she was being understood. Perhaps the truth was they were
both changing, both developing, the old no less than the young.

Certain it is they became better and better friends, and had
surprisingly much in common. Still, Val had struggled so long against
owning to herself that any good could come out of this Nazareth, that it
was some time before a belated sense of fairness led her to avow
guardedly to her old fellow-sufferer her new view of the autocrat. She
must try, little by little, to convince her father that, contrary to
appearance, and despite many sore experiences, his mother had her good
points.

"Gran'ma's been real kind to me and Julia to-day."

"Has she?"

"Julia thinks she's awfully nice."

This rather in the tone of "there's no accounting for tastes."

"Yes," said her father, not seeming enough impressed.

"She says I may read _The H---- Family_ and all the Frederika Bremer
books now that I've finished the _Waverleys_."

"H'm! I never looked at them myself."

"But do you know why she was so nice about _The H---- Family_?" It was
one thing to do justice to her good deeds, but it was no use setting up
a false ideal and pretending she was better than she was. "You see, we'd
read all the horrid silly little Harry and Lucys and Sandford and
Mertons and _Moral Tales_ and things, and I'd begun Bohn's _Wilhelm
Meister_."

"Oh, ho!"

"I put down the book while I tied my shoe, and when I looked up she was
putting it into the fire."

He laughed.

"But it wasn't _her_ book at all; I got it out of your room underneath
the big Brande and Taylor's _Chemistry_. It had your name in it."

"Yes"--reflectively--"I bought it on April 9, 1870."

"Well, it's burnt now."

He was still smiling and stroking his ragged beard.

"I hope she isn't going to keep the big bookcases locked up forever,"
sighed Val.

"She will never like to see Valeria's books knocking about."

"Gracious, no! She _refused_ to lend Mrs. Otway _Helen Whitman's Poems_,
because she said it had Poe's notes in it; but I knew it wasn't a bit on
account of Poe. It had some of _Aunt Valeria's_ notes in it, and that
was why she wouldn't let it go out o' the house. I was awfully ashamed,
and Mrs. Otway looked so snubbed."

And still he only smiled.

"She isn't a bit like other people, but sometimes I'm not sorry."

"Never be sorry, my child. Never be so dull as not to realize that the
woman who stands at the head of our line gives us our best title to
honor--and to hope."

Val opened astonished eyes. Her father was indeed
forgiving--fantastically generous. He was gazing off into space now, and
his look was strangely lighted.

"She belongs to the heroic age," he said, with a kind of worship in his
face. "She was born before we began to split hairs, and have nerves
instead of nerve."

Val couldn't stand it. Her father was worth fifty grandmothers.

"I should imagine she _thought_ she was a pretty fine sort of person."

"She hasn't a notion how utterly she stands alone. I've gone up and down
the world for over forty years, and never seen her equal. Her _equal_?"

He laughed derisively, and began to talk of her as he might have talked
of Semiramis or Boadicea, only more vividly. It was very annoying. _He_
had come to care about her too, "only more so." But the real blow fell
when it came out that he had felt like this all along. Appreciation,
fairness were all very well, but this besotted heroine-worship was a
little pitiable. All these years that Val had been so sure he was
silently nursing his injuries and modestly contemplating his own
superiority, he had been on the side of the oppressor.

"H'm!" mused Val. "I s'pose she was different, then, to her _own_
children."

"Ah yes; I've often observed the softening of late years."

"The _what_?"

"The growing tolerance, the forbearance with my children, that she never
showed Valeria and me."

Val's imagination reeled at the thought of what her grandmother could
have been like when she was more intolerant than she was to-day. And it
was all forgotten and forgiven! Here he was now leaving glittering
generalities, and telling story after story of his mother's courage and
her wisdom. She did seem to have been a useful kind of parent, and it
appeared she had been more generous in money matters than Val had
thought.

"And what she did that time she has always done. She never failed
anybody who depended on her. I always think of her when I read the
lines:


     "'Oh iron nerve to true occasion true,
     ... that tower of strength
     Which stood four-square to all the winds that blew!'


Try to understand your grandmother, my child," he wound up; "she is the
Pallas Athene of our line."

Val did not know that an American is never so happy as when he is
vaunting his womenkind. But in her estimation Pallas does better over
your chamber door than in an arm-chair looking at you--through you--with
a grandmother's spectacles. You forget what a heroine she is when she
criticises the way you sit--"A lady never crosses her legs;" and the way
you walk--"I used to swing my arms too--very bad habit; you should study
repose." And when wrought upon by your too generous-judging father, or
by some private discovery of her worth, you burst out: "Oh, I _do_ love
you!" it chills you to get for all response: "You _don't_ love me, or
you'd behave differently. 'By their fruits ye shall know them.'"

It was no better later on, when, with growing freedom of speech and
warmth of feeling, you would ask in an engaging way: "Why don't you love
me?" and get for answer: "It's a mistake to think your relations owe you
love; you have to earn it from them as you do in the world outside."
Worst of all, and most humiliating to the eager spirit, was it to be
"warded off" if you came to kiss her oftener than good-morning and
good-night. "We are not a kissing family," she would say; and you
cringed under the blow.

No; Pallas Athene was not an unqualified success--as a grandmother.

There were times, indeed, when her shortcomings nearly drove her
granddaughter into considering an elopement with Harry Wilbur, the
eighteen-year-old son of Judge Wilbur. With mental apologies to her
ideal hero, Val had kept up a vigorous correspondence with Harry,
pending the time when the superior suitor should carry her off, and save
her the trouble and ungraciousness of breaking the pleasant chains that
bade fair, as the days went on, to bind her to her gallant young
Hercules. Harry Wilbur was captain of the base-ball team, and the
darling hero of the entire New Plymouth Seminary. Most of these studious
young ladies thought more of manly strength and of that particular grace
that is born of bodily vigor than they did of the qualities of the mind.
It was as if, all untutored, they had the improvement of the physique of
the race at heart. Julia Otway, for instance, would descant almost daily
upon Harry Wilbur's "splendid figure," and how he held his shoulders;
how he walked from the hip, and how _easily_ he played the hottest game.
She would give as adequate reason for despising some more wealthy or
more intellectual citizen, that she hated men who did uninteresting
things for a living or did nothing at all. Val shared this spirit of
Julia's to an extent that gave her a pleasant sense of victory when
young Wilbur showed her more attention at dances and archery tournaments
than he showed the other girls. Besides, this open devotion made Ernest
Halliwell sad, and Jerry Otway "mad," and that was highly agreeable. But
Harry didn't "care a fip," as Jerusha said, about music, and music was
the supreme affair of life until--until--


Every year saw the resources of the Ganos lessening, the problem of life
more difficult to solve.

"You see," Val would say, radiant, "it just shows the _need_ for me to
study singing and make money."

"You? Ridiculous and most improper! No woman of your family has ever
dreamed of taking money for anything she has done."

The following summer--or "on June 18," as he would have said, taking
care to add the year, and even the hour--John Gano received a shock. A
kindly letter had come to him from his old flame, Mrs. Otway, to say
that, although he seemed to have forgotten her, still, for old
friendship's sake, and out of affection for Val, she felt it a
neighborly duty to tell him in confidence that his eldest daughter was
making preparations to run away and be a chorus-girl in New York. Mrs.
Otway's own daughter had been so oppressed by the enormity of the
secret, that she had told her mother. Julia had broken open her bank and
given all her savings to "the cause." It was understood, too, that Val
had other sources of revenue not revealed. However, merely to deprive
her of the money might not be sufficient to head her off, as she had
been heard to say she was going to New York, if she had to walk there.

John Gano did not break the awful news to his mother. He betrayed
nothing unusual in his aspect, as he said to his daughter:

"It's a glorious afternoon! Shall we go for a walk?"

Val was not as enthusiastic as she had been wont to be, but after the
fraction of a moment's preoccupied hesitation she answered, brightly:

"I should love it!"

"Come, then."

He caught up his blackthorn stick, and they set off. Val chatted about
the school Commencement, about the new archery club, and how "horrid
much" the bows and arrows cost.

"I dare say I could make you a set," said her father. "I always made my
own cross-bows as a boy."

"I know. And when you were only eight you cut and carved and glued
together a perfect model of a stage-coach. You are wonderful about
making things; but these big bows have to be of orange-wood, tough and
limber, you know."

"Hickory would do."

"No; they _have_ to be all alike. That's what parents never realize.
Gran'ma was just so about my gymnasium dress. But Jerry Otway's going to
bring a piece of orange-wood back. He traded with another boy at the
Military Institute, swopped an old racket for it. He's going to see if
he can't do a home-made bow, so's you can't tell the difference, varnish
and all."

"When does Jerry get back?"

"A week from to-morrow, in time for Julie's birthday-party."

They had gone a mile or so along the old turnpike road. The sun was
still very hot and the dust ankle-deep. Mr. Gano stopped meditatively,
and struck his blackthorn into the gray "MacAdam" powder.

"Yet, in spite of all this to occupy and amuse you, you want to turn
your back on it all."

"I--what?"

"I understand you are thinking of running away."

Val gave a little gasp, and prayed the dusty road might gape and swallow
her.

"I--I--"

"Don't be frightened, and don't be sorry that I know," he said, gently.
"I think you ought to have told me before."

She ventured to lift a pair of very anxious eyes.

"I don't blame you. You are an unfortunate child."

"Child? I am in my sixteenth year," she interposed, with dignity.

"You are an unfortunate child," he repeated, firmly, "with a great deal
of surplus energy. It must go somewhere. It's a law of nature; only I
hadn't quite realized how it was with you. You never seemed at a loss."

"You knew I was just dying for want of proper music-lessons."

She could not keep the excited tears out of her eyes.

"Well, well!" her father muttered, leaning with both hands on his stick
and scrutinizing the dust. "I wonder if a few music-lessons couldn't be
managed."

"A few? I don't want a _few_: I want months and years! I want to act and
sing in grand opera, and--be famous," she said, to herself, but
aloud--"make heaps of money."

Her father turned to walk back to the town, saying, calmly:

"Oh, as to acting and singing, _that_ of course--"

She opened her eyes wide. Did he understand? Was he going to relent?

"A young person's wanting to go on the stage and astonish the world with
her genius--that's natural enough."

Val began to shrink. She hadn't mentioned genius.

"It's a very usual sentiment, I believe, among young people," he went
on, in the same calm voice. "It's a ferment natural to their time of
life--not very serious, any more than first love or measles."

Val grew stiffer and more dignified with each word he uttered.

"Anybody would think from what _you_ say, father"--she was holding
herself down with difficulty--"that people all gave up music when they
arrived at years of discretion. There _is_ such a person as Patti after
all, and there may be somebody somewhere _better_ than Patti, just"--her
voice began to shake--"just waiting for a little help."

"Ah, better than Patti!"

He smiled. The look of tender amusement fell like a lash upon the spirit
of his child.

"Oh yes, it's all very well to laugh, father. _You_ don't care. Nothing
matters any more to you. I dare say, even when you were young, you
didn't know what it was like to feel that you'd be chopped up into
little fine pieces rather than go on in the old dull way that most
people do."

A quick, dim look, like the ghost of an ancient pain, flitted over the
worn face of the man; but he walked on, saying nothing.

"You don't know what it's like to look over there for years and
years"--she flung out a hand to the horizon--"and say to yourself, day
in and day out, 'Beyond that blue line is the world! Oh, when shall I be
seeing the world?'" She stopped, and so did her father, turning now to
look at the excited face. "Some people _never_ do," she said, with a
kind of incredulous horror. "I can't sleep sometimes for thinking of
how, here in New Plymouth, there are all these people, with all their
senses (so far as you can see), and arms, and legs, and money, and _yet_
here they sit, just where they happened to be dumped--sit and wait till
they die! Oh, it's like a nightmare, thinking of them! I feel if I don't
run away quick while I'm awake and able to move, I shall freeze fast in
my hole, too, and never be able to reach all the beautiful things that
are waiting--out there!" She nodded over to the encircling hills.
"_Think_ of it!" and the bright tears tumbled out of her shining eyes.

"I don't want my little girl to miss any good thing," he said,
presently, as they were nearing the town.

"Then help me, father. Be kind to me."

She came closer, and touched his sleeve.

"But the things waiting for those who venture out there"--he turned a
look full of foreboding on the blue horizon--"they aren't all, or even
most of them, good things."

"No, no. I've heard that; but I'll make the best of them."

He shook his head.

"You haven't a notion what a hard world it is for women--and for men, my
dear. I want to save my little girl from--"

"What does it matter if I _do_ have a hard time? I expect a hard time.
Nobody could invent a time so hard that I couldn't bear it, and come out
of it! Oh, you'll see--"

"Perhaps, when you are older--"

"Older!" Her face flashed quick alarm. "I'm dreadfully old already. I
ought to have begun when I was twelve. There's little enough time to
learn all I have to. If I don't run away quick--father, I feel it in my
bones--something will happen; I shall _never_ go, I shall stick here
like the rest, till--till the end."

He glanced sideways at her. She met his eyes with a look he had never
seen in them before.

"Val--" he cleared his throat as they neared the Fort.

"Father!" she interrupted quickly. "Don't ask me to say I won't run
away. I couldn't keep such a promise."

"That was not what I was going to suggest," he answered, completing a
sudden mental readjustment. "I have nothing more to say against your
plan, only I think it must be rather dull to run away alone. Suppose we
run away together?"

"Together, father?"

"Yes; I--I think I'm on the track of a valuable discovery, and I must
follow it up."

"Oh--what?"

"Well, you needn't speak of it to--a--to any one, just yet."

"No, no, father." She was strung up to the great romantic revelation.

"Well, I believe--indeed, I am sure--that all the hot gas and blinding
electric light in use in most houses are very injurious to eyesight."

She stopped and stared at him. Was he going mad? Had she heard aright?
The great romantic revelation that wasn't to be spoken of to any one--

He struck his blackthorn energetically on the ground and went on:

"The increase of eye troubles is appalling. What the world wants"--he
looked up suddenly with enthusiasm, and Val took heart--"what the world
wants is--is a safe and soft-burning reading-lamp at a moderate price. A
whole family shouldn't depend on one or two; every man his own lamp. I'm
inventing it. I shall take out a patent next winter, and--well, it might
make a fortune."

"How nice!" said his daughter, slowly.

John Gano seemed to hear no hint of disillusionment in the tone. He
straightened himself up.

"I'm giving Black a share in it," he said, with a magnanimous air, "for
a mere nominal sum, which I am spending in inspecting all the new
burners and contrivances; they're all failures, not worth house-room.
I've promised to see Black in New York next November, and he and I are
going on to Washington for the patent. All anybody need know is that I'm
taking you East with me on a little visit, and you can look over the
field."

"Father! _Father!_" she felt for his hand. As they went up the
tumble-down steps to the porch, two pairs of eyes were bent on the blue
horizon.


What helped a little to reconcile Val to waiting till November was not
only the simplification of the money question, but also the fact that it
gave her time to carry out a daring scheme that had been suggested by
the contents of the last foreign mail. No letters; but addressed in
cousin Ethan's hand, a French magazine with a queer mystical kind of a
story in it, marked, and a London _Pall Mall Gazette_ with a poem signed
"E. G." It was not the first time Mrs. Gano had received matters of this
sort in lieu of a letter, and when she did she was always angrier, Val
thought, than if she had got nothing at all.

But the poem in the _Pall Mall_ set Val thinking. It was no part of her
scheme of life to have a pleasure trip to New York and return with a
mere "look over the field." She must lay her plans carefully and not
trust to luck. No stone should be left unturned in her endeavor to make
the most of this glorious opportunity. Cousin Ethan! Could he, perhaps,
be turned to account? If there were any influence or advice he could
offer, of course he would be most happy. Val would be intensely grateful
to him; but all the same, it would be the crowning pride of his life
that he had helped to launch his cousin on the tide of fame.

She sat down and wrote to him surreptitiously, made a score of drafts,
and finally evolved this copy:


     "THE FORT, _June 20_.

     "MY DEAR COUSIN ETHAN,--I have never written to you but once since
     I was a child. I have never told you anything except that I wished
     you 'A Merry Christmas,' or was glad you were coming--which you
     know you never did. I don't think you ever will, and, besides, I
     can't wait for you. It may seem funny that, not knowing you any
     better, I should write you now about a matter of the deepest
     importance, but you are my cousin, and, after my father, you are my
     nearest kinsman, and I am in need of help. I want to be a
     singer--not a mere parlor warbler, but a Great Singer. I have a
     tremendous voice. I am obliged to tell you this, since you can't
     hear it. I practise every day by myself, though I can't use the
     piano much on account of grandma. I have always led the singing at
     school; all the rest, nearly three hundred girls, follow. But I
     have never been able properly to study music. I was going to run
     away and be a chorus girl till I could earn enough to study for
     grand opera, but my father has induced me to wait--just a little.
     He is going to take me East in the fall, and says I may 'Look over
     the field.' He says, too, it will give me an opportunity of seeing
     how difficult it is to do what I mean to do. But I don't think it's
     a good plan to take all that trouble (his cough is very bad) just
     to show me the thing is difficult. What I want to be shown is the
     way--no matter how hard--that it may be done. The trouble is, that
     my dear father, who knows many great scientists, and a few
     politicians, doesn't know any famous singers, and nobody about here
     does, and nobody seems to know any one who ever _did_ know an
     opera-singer, much less a manager. My grandmother has often told me
     that you have artistic tastes, and now comes the _Pall Mall_ of
     London with your 'Song for Sylvia.' I've made up five tunes to it,
     and I think you would like them, since, unlike my family, _you_ are
     artistic. I've been thinking a person like you must have great
     opportunities. You probably know singers, managers, musicians, and
     all sorts of delightful people. I wonder if you would help me to
     find out how a girl with a very exceptional voice can get it heard
     and get it trained? I know there are people who do these things,
     and when they discover a great voice they make their fortunes; so
     it is not a favor in the end on the part of the manager. But if you
     showed me the way, and could lend me five hundred dollars, it would
     always be a favor from you, and I would be grateful to you for ever
     and ever. If you will send me a letter of introduction to a
     manager, I think that would be best--that and five hundred
     dollars--and perhaps you would be so very kind as to send me the
     lives of Jenny Lind and Patti. It would help me to know what steps
     they took. I don't mind any hardship or any labor--I mind _nothing_
     but not getting my chance. Don't be afraid of encouraging me to do
     something the family has not been accustomed to--my father is on my
     side; and, anyhow, they would have to kill me before they could
     keep me back now. So you will not feel any responsibility. I would
     rather be helped by you because you are my relation, but if you
     won't, I must find somebody else. I remain, your affectionate
     cousin,

     "VAL GANO.

     "P.S.--I am a good deal over fifteen; strangers all think I am
     twenty.

     "P.S. No. 2.--Of course I will pay back the five hundred dollars,
     principal and interest. I will send you a promissory note, like the
     arithmetic says."


This document was conveyed to the mail with secrecy and despatch. The
days went by like malicious snails; she had never known time drag
before. The slow weeks gathered into monotonous months, and still no
answer. Never mind, she would do everything just the
same--better--without his help. Her future triumphs took on more the
aspect of a judgment on cousin Ethan than a mere reward to Val. She made
up scenes of the coming encounters, when, from the vantage-ground of
being "better than Patti," she would overwhelm her cousin with scorn.
She would meet him as a perfect stranger, declare her surprise at his
claiming her for his cousin. He would find his chief distinction in this
kinship. He would lay his millions at her feet. She would spurn them. "I
have my own millions now. Had it been earlier, cousin, it had been
kind."

September was drawing to a close. Everything was merging now in the
excitement of the Eastern trip, fixed for the end of November.

Idling in the autumn sunshine at the front door after breakfast one
morning, Val and Emmie had a friendly scuffle as to who should take the
mail from the postman. The little heap of letters and papers was soon
sown broadcast in the fray, and still no sign of either yielding, till
Val was arrested on catching sight of the addressed side of one of the
envelopes--"Mrs. Sarah C. Gano," in cousin Ethan's hand. But the real
significance lay in the stamp. Not this time the scantily-clad gentleman
and lady, clasping hands over a mauve world, of the République
Française; no goggle-eyed, mustachioed Umberto, in blue, with his hair
on end, and _Poste Italiane Centesimi Venticinque_ round him in an oval
frame; it was not even the twopenny-half-penny indigo head of Queen
Victoria; but their own rosy two-cent Washington, risking his health in
a low-neck coat, but saving his dignity by the queue. This was the first
letter from Ethan in five years that did not bear a foreign postmark.
While Val stood staring, Emmie had whipped up the letters and carried
them in to her grandmother.

Val, in an agony of suspense, remained in the hall. Presently Emmie
came flying out, clapping her hands. Mrs. Gano followed briskly with the
open letter.

"All those old Tallmadges are dead!" cried Emmie, jumping up and down
behind her grandmother. "He's been back in America over two months, and
he's coming here next week."

Mrs. Gano was hurrying up-stairs to tell her son the great news.




CHAPTER XIV


Despite the distractions of a host of wandering fancies, Ethan Gano had
been kept fairly closely at his studies till he had passed his twentieth
birthday. To be sure, there had been a threatened interruption the
spring before, when he seemed suddenly to lose interest in his work, and
went about with vacant looks and airs of profound preoccupation. Old Mr.
Tallmadge, observing him narrowly, decided that his grandson had got
into debt, and that he was nervous about confessing. Ethan had never
shown a proper regard for money. This was one of the many
un-Tallmadge-like qualities developed by the years. It was a matter of
paramount importance to counteract this flaw in Aaron Tallmadge's sole
surviving heir, since of late years the old man's affairs had prospered
more than ever. About the time of his brother Elijah's death, he had
financed a manufacturing enterprise which, starting on a modest scale,
had turned out fabulously successful. He was one of the "moneyed men" of
the State. In addition to this piece of shrewd speculation, he found the
income from his newspaper doubled in the last few years. Ah, yes!
nothing was of so much importance now as Ethan's fitness to gather in
and husband the golden harvest. If he had been further exemplifying his
unthrifty proclivities, if he needed to be told that borrowing dulls the
edge of husbandry--Mr. Tallmadge, not trusting to any unperceived
facilities for impromptu speech, rehearsed mentally the lecture he would
administer. Ethan mustn't run away with the idea that the Tallmadge
accumulations were only waiting for a lavish hand to redistribute. The
first lesson a young man with his prospects must be made to learn was
the value of a dollar. But Ethan wore a gracious kind of reticence
wrapped like a mantle round his young life. His grandfather knew very
little about him, but the old man had himself belonged to the
inarticulate ones of earth, and he never realized that, to this quiet,
non-committal grandson of his expression of some sort was a master
passion. How should Aaron Tallmadge have suspected such a thing? Some
time before this Ethan quietly, alone, without making a sign, had gone
through a religious crisis not uncommon to his age and era. "No use to
upset the family," he said to himself when he found he had come out on
the other side of Tallmadge-Presbyterianism; and he went regularly to
church with his grandfather without comment and without misgiving. There
were still grave problems to be faced--too grave, in fact, for him to be
beguiled into fancying this was one.

Now, in the midst of a perturbation not greater, but less easily
disguised, he held his peace as a matter of course. Some early developed
quality of aloofness in him held inquiry at bay. Then suddenly the
clouds lifted. He was radiant and full of covert smiling.

Mr. Tallmadge resented this phase more than the former gloom.

"He's paying heavy interest, the young fool! and can't realize that that
way damnation lies."

But all the old man's clumsy efforts to bring about an explanation were
unavailing. Ethan declared with some surprise that he was not in need of
funds. Mr. Tallmadge began to scrutinize the letters that came. Three
mornings in succession a business-like envelope addressed in the same
clerkly hand! Alone, before the fire in the dining-room, waiting for
breakfast that third morning, the old man solemnly deliberated, glanced
at the clock, and grumbled to himself that Ethan would certainly be ten
minutes late as usual these days. "Perhaps he doesn't sleep." He
examined the suspicious envelope. The flap was not securely gummed down.
Mr. Tallmadge glanced again at the clock. He had not the least doubt as
to his right--"duty" he would have said--to open the letter of this
unconfiding minor, who was his ward and grandson--an unpractical youth,
moreover, of absolutely no business capacity whatever. Still, although
Mr. Tallmadge would never have admitted it, he was a little in awe of
this grandson, with so little "Tallmadge" in him. It was essential to
open the letter--no doubt about that; but it would be well to have the
business over before Ethan appeared. Mr. Tallmadge's desire not to be
interrupted in the act might have enlightened him as to its
defensibility; but he was no casuist. He took up the letter, adjusted
his spectacles, and walked to the window. Inserting a long finger-nail,
he easily pried up the flap.


     "MY DARLING ETHAN,--Your last poem is the most beautiful thing I
     ever read in my life. It is far more wonderful than anything
     Shelley ever did. I shall be in the Beech Walk at five.

     "Your wife, ALMIRA."


Aaron Tallmadge clutched the red damask curtains, with a stifled groan.
The breakfast-bell clanged loudly. Its echoes had not time to die before
Ethan appeared, with shining morning face.

"Good-morning," he said, lightly, looking down at his plate. "No
letters?"

"Yes, sir." Mr. Tallmadge turned his ashen countenance round. "There
_is_ a letter."

Ethan stared at him and ran forward.

"What's the matter? Are you ill?"

Mr. Tallmadge warded him off with a shaking hand.

"You scoundrel!"

Ethan drew himself up arrow-straight, and his warm brown eyes grew cold.

"I knew there was some devilry afoot. I never dreamed it was as bad as
this."

The old man flung the open letter down on the nearest chair.

Ethan colored, catching sight of the hand.

"So you've been reading my letters?"

"Yes; I only wish to the Lord I had exercised that right before. I
might have saved you from this ruin!"

"You couldn't have saved me, sir, if that's any satisfaction."

"It's no use to think what might have been--" The old man sat down,
almost fell into the chair by the window where he had thrown the letter.
"Was she a decent woman?"

"Was she a--" Ethan repeated, bewildered.

"Who is she?" thundered old Tallmadge, with renewed rage.

"Almira Marlowe."

"Marlowe! Any relation to--"

"Daughter of the new Professor of Physics."

"Ha! _might_ be worse, I suppose. But--Marlowe? Marlowe? He's the new
man, isn't he?"

"Yes."

"Marlowe? Why, it isn't a month since he was installed."

"Six weeks."

"And all this happened in six weeks?"

"Yes."

Mr. Tallmadge's lean face worked, speechless; then, finding a
fury-choked voice:

"Tell me the circumstances, and let me see if anything can be done."

"Nothing can be done. It's irrevocable."

"But it isn't legal. You haven't a penny. You're under age."

"We can wait."

"Just what you couldn't do, apparently. You--you--"

After he had worked off his fit of incoherency, he resumed:

"Well, you've succeeded in wrecking your life pretty thoroughly. And
only nineteen! How old is the girl?"

"Twenty-one."

"I see," muttered the old man. "Well, I suppose now that it's
'irrevocable,' as you say, you'd better take me into your confidence."

"I don't see that you've left me much choice."

"Where is she living now?"

"In Cambridge," said Ethan, with some surprise.

"With her father still?"

"Yes."

"You saw her there?"

"Yes."

"When?"

Ethan grew scarlet, and then, frowning doggedly:

"I saw her first in her garden one morning as I was going to Hall."

"Well?"

"I've answered your question."

"No, you haven't. I must know the facts of the case before I can-- You
made acquaintance with her that first day?"

"I didn't _speak_ to her."

The old man stared with mystified little eyes at his grandson's flushed
face.

"She was there every day when you passed by?"

"Yes."

"H'm! Of course she would be there. When did you speak to her?"

"Not for three weeks."

He half turned away.

"Good Lord! Barely a fortnight ago!"

Ethan didn't deny it.

"How did you come to know her?"

The young face grew dark. He was writhing under the catechism.

"Charlie Hammond showed her a poem I had written for the _Harvard
Oracle_. She sent me a message about it."

"Well?"

"Then I went to call with Hammond."

"Well?"

"Then--then I met her in the Beech Walk."

"Ah! The Beech Walk."

"Yes; twice."

"And then?"

"That's all."

"Don't tell me lies, sir!"

Ethan stood before him cold and rigid on a sudden. No flush now on the
clear-cut features.

"You've no right to speak to me as you're doing, not if you were fifty
grandfathers."

"Where did these other meetings take place, sir? Did old Marlowe
countenance them?"

"There were no other meetings."

Ethan turned away.

"Now, look here!"--the old man arraigned him with a shaking hand--"you
can't undo the bitter disappointment you are to me, but you can and you
owe it to me to tell me fairly and squarely the details of this wretched
business. I can't proceed in the matter if I'm in the dark."

"_You_ proceed in the matter?"

Ethan wheeled about and faced him.

"It's quite plain that you were merely a yielding fool in the
matter--girl older, and you--"

"Grandfather!"

"--and you easy to convince that you ought to make reparation."

Ethan seemed to have ears only for the first part of this accusation. He
spoke through Mr. Tallmadge's last words with a passionate shake in his
voice.

"It's quite plain, at all events, grandfather, that I love her, and that
nothing in heaven or on earth can part us."

"Of course--of course. A fortnight--a girl you barely knew by sight!"

"I know her absolutely. There isn't another like her on this earth."

"And you want me to believe you've spoken to her only three or four
times in your life?"

"I don't specially _want_ you to believe it, but it's true."

"Who could you find to marry you?"

"Who could I--to marry me?" He looked as if he had begun to doubt the
old man's sanity. "Why, I've never asked anybody but Almira."

"Yes, yes, yes. Who could you find to overlook the age question? Who
performed the ceremony?"

"_Ceremony?_"

"Oh, ho! Registry-office performance, eh? and perjury! Monstrous
irreligion! _My_ grandson!"

"What _do_ you mean?" But a light was beginning to dawn.

"Who were your witnesses?"

Ethan laughed and flushed, and then grew serious again.

"Of course, it's exactly the same as if we _were_ married, _exactly the
same_." He flashed a broadside of defiance out of shining eyes. "But we
know we can't well be married while I'm a minor, and--"

"You _aren't_ married?"

"Oh no. But--"

"Then, what in the name of Jehoshaphat is all this damned--what's all
this disturbance about?"

"I'm sure I don't know."

Mr. Tallmadge mopped his brow, and looked about distractedly, like one
who has lost his thread in a labyrinth.

"However, it's exactly the same as if we were--"

"Exactly tomfool!"

The old man got up and walked a few shaky paces back and forth. Turning,
he caught sight of the letter he'd been sitting upon.

"_Wife!_" he exclaimed. "What the d---- What does she mean by calling
herself your--" and he stopped suddenly with a look of contemptuous
comprehension.

"Does she?"

Ethan, with a start forward, had clutched the letter greedily. He
couldn't, perhaps he didn't even try to keep the great gladness out of
his face as he read. Mr. Tallmadge watched him with equivocal eyes.
Then, dryly:

"If I were in your shoes that signature would alarm me."

"I think it very beautiful of her," said Ethan, softly.

"And not alarming?"

"Alarming?" He knitted puzzled brows. "I begged her to think of me
as--like this."

There was a pause.

"It's not _her_ doing," he resumed, hastily, striking out at some
indistinct enemy lurking behind the old man's looks. "No ceremony could
make us surer of each other. That's why we're not unhappy. It's exactly
the same as if we were married."

"_Exactly?_" He eyed the young face shrewdly, and then, a little baffled
by its mixture of sensitive shrinking and frank defiance: "You will
oblige me by not keeping this appointment"--he motioned to the letter.

"I'm sorry I can't oblige you, sir."

"Reflect a moment."

"I can't even reflect about it. She's going away to-morrow to spend
several months with her sister. After that she goes back to Vassar. I
may not see her again till next summer."

"You don't mean she's going back to school this fall?"

"Yes. She lost a year. They couldn't afford-- But now she's going to
finish her course."

"Good Lord!"

"I beg your pardon."

"There's no reason why she shouldn't go back to school?"

"Reason why--? No."

A light broke, or rather a darkness spread, over the young man's face,
wiping out the grace, stamping it fiercely with detestation of him who
had dared think insulting thoughts of Almira. But the old man was
smiling and rubbing his parchment hands.

"Tempest in a teacup! Come and have breakfast," he said, walking to the
table; "everything's getting cold."

But Ethan put the letter of the clerkly hand into his breast-pocket, and
went towering out of the room.

Aaron Tallmadge chuckled genially as he rang for hot buckwheat cakes.

"Romantic! absurd! Great baby!" he muttered, and opened the morning
paper--his paper--Ethan's by-and-by.

Ethan had not needed his grandfather's recommendation to abstain from
mentioning in any letter to Mrs. Gano that her more and more irregular
correspondent had been ill that last severe winter before he came of
age, or that he considered himself engaged to be married to a girl older
than himself and penniless. Mr. Tallmadge persistently affected to put
this last achievement aside as sheer youthful nonsense. But those
letters in the misleading hand came to Ashburton Place with irritating
regularity. He began secretly to await with no small anxiety Ethan's
view of the moral as well as legal liberty conferred by the distinction
of being twenty-one. Before that moment arrived, the doctors were
agreeing that the young man must not, till his health should be
established, spend another Christmas in New England.

"At the end of the Indian summer away with him."

"By all means," said Mr. Tallmadge. "Why wait even for the summer? All
he needs is a thorough change."

The old man was thinking--thinking not alone of the health, but
ambitiously of the future, of his grandson.

"Where shall I send him?" asked Mr. Tallmadge.

"It doesn't much matter where he is in the summer," the doctors agreed;
"but get him south of Mason and Dixon's line next winter."

These insensate _medicos_ had no bowels of political compassion. They
must have known well enough that the region indicated was not a part of
the world lightly to be recommended to Aaron Tallmadge.

"I'll go and visit my Gano relations," Ethan had said, promptly.

"You'll do nothing of the kind," returned his grandfather. "It's no
reason, because you feel the cold here, that I should send you where
you'd catch yellow fever and malaria."

From the Tallmadge point of view, Mason and Dixon's line did no less
than divide habitable from uninhabitable America. Voluntarily to cross
the kindly boundary was contrary to reason. There was no difficulty in
deciding that Italy or the South of France would be more advantageous
for the young man's conversance with modern languages, as well as
farther away from Almira Marlowe, and more tolerable to his grandfather
and guardian than Virginia or Florida.

Mr. Tallmadge's capable junior partner was able to relieve his chief of
all active concern in the conduct of business till Ethan should be ready
to assume command. To this latter end, a few years' foreign travel, and
a thorough re-establishment of the young man's health, were next in
order. The plan worked well on the health score. A summer in England and
a winter on the Riviera seemed to have set Ethan free from the family
infirmity, but also to have whetted his appetite for foreign life, and
increased his indifference to the proud post of chief proprietor of the
greatest Republican organ in New England. But this might be merely the
first effects of Miss Almira's having thrown over her first love and
married a lawyer in Poughkeepsie, New York.

After all, Mr. Tallmadge reflected, his grandson was still very young,
and intimate knowledge of life in other lands might not come amiss. So
the energetic old man went to and fro, joining Ethan, now in Paris, now
in London, travelling about with him during the summer, and returning
alone to "the great Republican organ" in the autumn, leaving his
grandson to new friends, new pursuits, and warmer winter haunts.

The young man was not all this time merely seeing life, he was recording
it in desultory fashion. Some of his verses appearing in English
periodicals raised a little dust of praise among a set in London calling
itself critical. But it was the French point of view that most appealed
to him.

He was under that spell which France knows so well how to cast round the
young man of artistic instinct. Her tongue was the peerless language of
letters. Through no medium less supple, less subtle, could the
complexities of modern life and thought hope for adequate literary
expression.

And so the pleasant facile days went by in idly roving, idly writing,
meeting interrogatively his predestinate experience and setting the more
presentable answers down. Where answer there was none, he aped the older
men, whom he called "Masters," and made shift with more or less cynical
guesses. It was these last that brought him his little meed of
precocious success. He had not originality enough to see that the
cynicism was not his own. He was not, and seemingly was not to be, of
the stature that can wear simple sincerity in the grand manner. That
writer, young or old, must have something of true greatness in him who
can hold out long in these days against the flattering temptation of
hinting that he is laughing in his sleeve at all solemn persons. And yet
no doubt seriousness was the dominant note in the young American's
character, a seriousness that still looked askance at itself, and smiled
oftener at its own gravity than at any other wrinkle in the tragi-comic
mask of humanity.

He had seen something of what people in London and Paris called
"society," had been very well amused, but not enamoured of it. When men
who made letters a profession--perhaps one should say trade--admonished
him: "Never refuse a swagger invitation. Your opportunities, considering
you're a foreigner, are simply unheard of. Go everywhere, see
everything. You must know life before you can write about it," Ethan
would say, half impatiently: "As if you could escape from life! As if
art kept her treasures in the jewel-cases of the aristocracy, and never
displayed them except at social functions!"

Even in indulgent Paris he was a good deal chaffed about his success
with the fair. It is a thing other men reconcile themselves to with
difficulty. Some one said once to Ethan's old school friend, De Poincy:

"No one but a woman has any business to be as good-looking as that
fellow Gano. I couldn't trust a man with a face like that."

"Oh, you may trust him right enough," De Poincy answered. "And as to
his face--look at that jaw of his."

"Anything the matter with his jaw?"

"There's 'man' enough in that to relieve your mind. Oh, he's a stubborn
brute, Gano is; but you can trust him." And people did trust him.

But not only did he tire presently of the gay and flaunting aspect of
social life, his fastidiousness by-and-by turned aside as well from
those less presentable experiences that dog the rich and idle youth of
capitals.

At first with a dull old tutor, and presently without him, he had for
headquarters a tiny _appartement_ in Paris. It was there, or with the De
Poincys in Nice, that he felt most at home. Something over two years had
gone by in this agreeable fashion when his grandfather addressed to him
a temperate but very serious letter inviting him to return, either to
complete his interrupted studies "on American lines," or to enter at
once on his initiation into the practical duties of editorship. Ethan at
first temporized, and then, being pressed, declined to pursue either
course. He "liked living abroad." This fact, thus stated, greatly
irritated old Tallmadge. He ordered his grandson home. Ethan wrote,
still very politely, but quite definitely, refusing to come just then.
Mr. Tallmadge, angrier than ever, cabled, "Is it on account of health?
Are you afraid of climate?" Ethan cabled back: "Perfectly well. Prefer
Paris."

This lack of patriotism on the part of a grandson of his seemed to Aaron
Tallmadge nothing short of revolutionary. It was no use Ethan's quoting
to him, _Tout homme a deux pays, le sien et puis la France_. The more
Mr. Tallmadge pondered the matter, the more he felt convinced that this
incredible preference for Paris was the shameful mask of some other
preference. "Some woman's got hold of him again," he decided. "I'll soon
settle that." Whereupon he wired: "Come right home, or I stop
allowance."

Then was his grandson most unreasonably angry. He sent back, in a blank
sheet of writing-paper, the recently received check for the next
quarter, which he had neglected to cash, and he looked about for
employment. Henri de Poincy, who had recently passed into the diplomatic
service, was now in Russia; but young Gano started out on his quest of a
living with no foreboding. He went to see various men of affairs, firm
friends of his, he felt convinced, and stated the case; in fact, a
cooler head than Ethan's might have suspected he overstated it. It was
true he had received a "final" letter, which he thought most insulting,
full of a crudely expressed conviction that Ethan was in the toils of
some foreign woman, and saying that unless he returned instantly his
grandfather would know this suspicion was well founded, in which case
the young man had nothing to expect from him in the future.

Those persons of influence whom young Gano had consulted in his dilemma
all promised to keep him in mind and see what they could do, and most of
them thereafter forgot even to invite him to dinner. He began to realize
that being a young American of leisure, with no axe to grind, with an
absurdly large income for a man of his years, and known to be sole heir
to one of the big fortunes "in the States," was an altogether different
matter from being a person suddenly bereft of these advantages. He gave
up his charming _appartement_ in the Champs-Elysées, and presently found
that he couldn't keep even the single room he had taken in the Rue de
Miroménil. He moved to the Rue de Provence.

He was in low water--very low water, indeed--before he got the post of
Parisian correspondent on a London paper. With this diminutive buoy he
managed to keep afloat; but his former position as an independent young
gentleman with large expectations was blown upon, and no one more
hypersensitive than he to the outward and visible signs of people's
appreciation of his altered circumstances. He withdrew more and more
from the swim. Smart Parisian society and the rich American colony knew
him no more. After a while his English editor complained that his news
was becoming too exclusively "literary and artistic; we expected
something about the races last week. Give us more society."

To this the Parisian correspondent replied: "I never yet wrote about
society unless indirectly, and I do not propose to begin."

"There was formerly," persisted the editor, who knew quite well what he
wanted, "a flavor of the fashionable world about your Parisian notes,
which our readers miss. French art and Bohemia are overdone."

Gano sold some valuable books, and went over to London with the proceeds
to have it out with the editor. The upshot of the interview was that he
declined to furnish any more "Notes." The editor seemed perfectly
resigned. However, after the struggle in Paris, Gano was convinced that
London was the likelier place for him to find a footing. In the
background of his mind he had already, when he sold his books, foreseen
and accepted the result of the further discussion of his "Notes." He
would at all events be on the spot in London, and would quickly find
some opening. Talent was not the drug in the market here, he told
himself, that it was in France.




CHAPTER XV


And day after day, week after week, while he sought an opening, he very
nearly starved. In a couple of months he had arrived at the conclusion
that the fight in London was more sordid and more dispiriting than the
direst poverty in Paris. About this time he came in for a distasteful
piece of hack journalism, that brought him a disproportionate loathing
and an inadequate reward of five pounds. He was strongly tempted to
invest a part of this sole capital in returning to France. A couple of
days later a letter arrived through the London branch of the Paris
bankers from Henri de Poincy, back in the South of France on a holiday.
He asked for Ethan's private address, and said if he did not hear
something satisfactory by return he would conclude the beastly English
climate had made him ill; in which case he was straightway coming over
to look Ethan up, and persuade him to return to his friends in Nice. If
he did not hear by wire or letter in three days, De Poincy would come to
London and see what was the matter. They were all anxious at his
silence.

This determined the matter. Gano was not going to have his old friend
find him in his present plight. Besides, he already owed him money, and
had sworn to himself that he would not meet De Poincy again till he
could go to him with the sum in his hands. Henri was far from well off,
and, since his father's death the year before, had helped to support his
sisters. Ethan wired: "Leaving London; quite well; remembrance to all;
writing," and took the night-boat to Dieppe. He delayed further
communication till he knew Henri would be back in Petersburg, and by
that time he was able, by living on next to nothing, to return a part
of the loan, and to represent himself as intensely glad to be in his old
haunts again. These haunts were in reality very new, albeit in Paris;
but he did not enter into details further than to say he was
rediscovering the fact that he could write French much more easily and
much better than he could English, and was doing some book-reviewing for
the _Lendemain_.

He might have added, but did not, that he was getting at first-hand a
very considerable knowledge of the darker side of life, but had no
impulse to make artistic use of it. It did not stimulate, it did not
even interest--it paralyzed him. "If I'd had the makings of a genuine
poet in me," he admitted to Henri de Poincy afterwards, "those years
might have buffeted some good work out of me. But _my_ muse was a
miserable time-server, like the rest of my fine acquaintance. She left
me when I wanted bread. The fact was, I was _feeling_ life too keenly to
write about it. Poetizing in the face of such suffering as I saw and
shared seemed a drivelling impertinence. Life was more terrible, more
tremendous than anything any poet had said about it, or _could_ say."

Gano was unconsciously making of himself an obscure example of the fact
that a man's temperament will find him out upon the removal of the
artificial ballast. This removal so seldom takes place that the vaguest
notions abound as to any given person's specific gravity. We go through
life unconsciously floated, balanced, by family, by inherited friends,
inherited pursuits, inherited opinions, inherited money--by a thousand
conditions not made by ourselves, but found ready-made to our hands, an
expression of other people's energy, supporting or neutralizing our own.
Gano's inclinations, not being volcanic or epoch-making, had been, up to
the time of the break with his grandfather, dutifully filtered through
environing circumstance. Even so, Mr. Tallmadge had had occasion to
condemn his grandson's "queer tastes," his "visionary notions," his
girlish compassion for suffering, his hypersensitiveness to blame, his
even greater shrinking from hurting the feelings of others. The tough
old New Englander's contempt for "sensitiveness" had at least done Ethan
the service of giving him an exterior self-control, which seemed so far
to deny the feelings it only masked, that he was able to pass
comfortably in the crowd as a person more impassive, if anything, than
the majority. But as soon as he was left to himself, and followed no
longer by critical eyes, his natural bias announced itself. He felt less
and less drawn to the insouciant artist life of the town; the
happy-go-lucky ways lost their first fresh savor; the suppers, the
orgies, the endless comment, quite as eager as any of the work and often
more brilliant; the short, merry life of the happy little flies that
buzz so busily about the flower-garden of art, and that vanish with the
vanishing of day--they all ended by striking some note of discord in
him, and making him feel out of place there. "Was he getting too old for
this kind of thing?" he asked himself, with modern youth's morbid
consciousness of the value certain people set upon one time of life to
the exclusion of any other, forgetting that "to travel deliberately
through one's ages is to get the heart out of a liberal education," and
the heart out of enlightened satisfaction as well.

But Gano was, perhaps, only following the unwritten law that rules such
haunts and their frequenters, for these gay Bohemians are all young--and
very young indeed. No one knows where they go when their short hour is
done. Their laughter lags a little behind the rest one day, and the next
they are not there. A new face is in the old place, a younger voice is
screaming theories and outlaughing the laughers who are left.

Gano knew whither one of these superannuated revellers of twenty-five or
so had retired. This was a great good-looking Irishman, with an
unaccountable French tongue in his rough, tawny head, the hardest
worker, deepest drinker, and wildest theorist in the particular little
circle that Gano had of late frequented. Dick Driscoll and he had got
into the habit of coming away together from the modest café where the
circle met. Now and then the older man would drag Gano off on some wild
adventure, or they would scour Paris with no definite end in view,
arguing, disputing, catching effects, till midnight met the dawn. From
living in the same quarter they came by-and-by to live under the same
roof, as a direct result of the Irishman's being as ready to discuss
theories of life in general, or even Gano's work in particular, as he
had been to harangue "the painter fellows" about brushwork and values.

He pronounced those early poems "most awfully good, you know," and
prophesied great things for the future. But for all this, deeper and
deeper the conviction cut into Gano that he was not of the stuff that
"makes its way in the world." This without any of the feeling that
usually accompanies it--of contempt for those who were differently
constituted. He sometimes soothed his harassed spirit, and consoled
himself for his failures, by an odd inversion of common hopes. He bade
himself realize that success would not bring him happiness, so why join
the thoughtless chorus condemning poverty, obscurity, and hard work?
These last were not the heads of his indictment against life. At other
times he would shut his eyes to this revelation of himself to himself.
"Skin-deep! skin-deep, like yours!" he burst out at Driscoll's
observation on his friend's growing dissatisfaction with the scheme of
things.

The Irishman was rather proud of his Schopenhauerism. It represented to
him a mere mental gymnastic. This, too, although hard work, hard living,
and hard drinking had injured his health, and the fact was more and more
apparent. However, it is something behind experience that determines
whether a man shall be an optimist or not. Gano shrank from an
imputation of pessimism, as people do in whom the tendency is inborn and
inveterate. "I tell you, Driscoll, if we weren't sharing it, we would
think there was some good served by the ugliness and pain in the world,
just as our betters do. If we took our place again in the holiday-making
class, we should be as diverted as the rest, with all the games and
make-believes. We, too, should forget the essential cruelty of things."
But behind the boast was a heart-sinking, and a sense that it was a lie.

He would try again: "Because life has treated me cavalierly I think I
have little zest for it. If I weren't bruised from crown to toe, I'd
think the world a bed of roses." And then he would remember that that
was far from being the account he would ever have given of his
consciousness of things.

Before he betook himself to Bohemia, Gano had spent no small portion of
his time in the brilliant circle Madame Astier's grace and wit had
gathered round her. The young American not only cherished an enthusiasm
for his middle-aged hostess, but he discovered a deep admiration as well
for the lady's husband, a distinguished advocate, whom she obviously
adored. Gano's sensibilities did, it is true, shrink at first before the
man's pitiless cynicism, which spared few persons and fewer ideals. But
although merely dazzled at the beginning by his brilliancy, Gano came in
time to be proud of his friendship, and to recognize in his point of
view a wholesome, bitter tonic, a corrective to certain ills that young
flesh is heir to. This man of fifty-four, who would have shrugged
derisively at the notion of "teaching" anybody anything, was still in
many young eyes the very type of the modern philosopher: believing
blandly in the scientific point of view, unmoved by sentimentalities,
unblinded by enthusiasms, keen-witted, farsighted, practising with
eminent success, in the most highly civilized society in the world, the
most difficult of the arts--the art of living.

Gano was very much shaken by the terrible story of the double suicide of
this brilliant pair, whose marriage had been so romantic, whose life
together had seemed the one ideal of the old kind that they admitted
into their smiling existence.

M. Astier, as all the world was being told, had returned home as usual
on this particular afternoon from the Palais de Justice. His wife had
been holding a reception. One lady remained after the other visitors had
gone. When at last the door closed upon her, too, Madame Astier went to
her husband's library and told him that the last visitor had outstayed
the others to say that her husband was going to fight a duel on her
account the next day with M. Astier, with whom she (the visitor) had an
intrigue of three years' standing. She had come to Madame Astier to
prevent the men's meeting.

A violent scene between husband and wife.

"The end has come!'" exclaims Astier.

"Yes, yes; we can't go on living after this!" cries the distracted wife.

She flies to her dressing-room and attempts to swallow poison. Astier's
secretary rushes after her. While he is wrenching the poison away, the
report of fire-arms. Both rush back to the library, where they find M.
Astier bathed in blood, dying. The wife, before she can be hindered,
puts the smoking pistol to her head, fires another fatal shot, and the
tragedy is done.

Gano had talked to Driscoll from time to time of the Astiers, of
Clémenceau, and the other habitués of those delightful soirées, and of
the regret he sometimes felt that he had not told his friends frankly of
the change in his fortunes, and the reason he did not any longer
frequent the Faubourg St. Honoré.

"But I couldn't, somehow, talk to them of a thing we couldn't either
laugh at or satirize. Still, they'd be among the first people that I'd
go to if I had a stroke of luck."

And now, out of that atmosphere of gayety and _blague_, this! No sky
apparently so cloudless but from its blue a bolt may fall. Ethan had
rushed out and bought the _Justice_. He read Clémenceau's article aloud,
translating hurriedly as he went on for a compatriot of Driscoll's, who
had happened to drop in for a pipe and a crack:

"'This pitiless scoffer, Astier, this despairing sceptic, who spoke so
slightingly of women and love, is now discovered to have been a man of
soft and sentimental nature, without any reserve of appliances against
woman's wiles or surging passion. The so-called libertine, cauterized
by Paris against Paris, was upset by an event which could have been
easily foreseen. In a situation of the most commonplace kind, he so
thoroughly lost all self-control that he could hit upon no other remedy
than self-destruction.' How contemptuously he writes of his old friend's
'losing self-control' and the rest of it," said Gano, angrily, "as if
the double death was the real tragedy!"

"What then?"

"Why, the moment when that nice woman discovered that the husband she
had married so romantically, and who had been so devoted to her all
those years, had turned round and betrayed her in the last chapter. I
agree with them both: it wasn't much use to go on living after that."

"Oh, as to going on living," observed Driscoll, shortly, "it would
puzzle most people to tell why they think that much use."

"But _these_ people--" began Gano.

"More like the rest of the world than they pretended, that's all," the
visitor summed up, as he knocked the ashes out of his pipe. "I've once
or twice come near to some tragedy, as Gano has to this. It does feel a
bit odd to realize we're all living our peaceful lives on the edge of a
volcano. But, bless you!"--he clapped on his hat with a rakish air--"we
get so used to it we forget all about it till our turn comes."

"Meanwhile, we're all in the conspiracy to pretend that tragedy is dead
and buried in the works of the great dramatists," said Driscoll.

"Good job, too," commented the departing visitor, nodding to the two
friends as he went off.

"Your cheerful compatriot is right," said Ethan, shaken suddenly out of
his rôle as Nature's apologist. "Life simply doesn't bear being thought
about."

Whereupon they proceeded to talk about it for hours on end. They uttered
a deal of raw philosophy in those days, often with passion, sometimes
with hope. Driscoll, for all his profession of pessimism, had moments
of splendid confidence that he had stumbled upon the Perfect Way. Gano
would shake his head, repeating:


     "'Myself, when young, did eagerly frequent
     Doctor and saint, and heard great argument
     About it and about: but evermore
     Came out by the same door as in I went.

                  "'... Their words to scorn
     Are scattered, and their mouths are stopped with dust.'"


Through a young painter from Basle, these two were among the first
outside of the German circle to have some realization of the magnitude
of Friedrich Nietzsche as a force to be reckoned with. But Gano shrank
from the sound and fury of the iconoclast as much as from his more
coherently expressed doctrines. It was as abhorrent to his new doubts as
it was to his old faiths to hear that Nietzsche had said (speaking of
Germany), "Nowhere else has there been so vicious a misuse of the two
great European narcotics--alcohol and Christianity." Driscoll, knowing a
good deal more about the first than he did about the last, professed his
withers to be unwrung. What was there in the utterance that Gano should
gibe at?

Almost from the beginning they wore their rue with a difference.
Driscoll raged at concrete mistakes and injustices in the scheme of
things as presented to Richard Driscoll. The other, seeming to think he
had fewer personal wrongs to complain of, capable of too keen a
self-criticism to imagine himself a genius to whom the world owed
special privileges, was coming rapidly to a more serious indictment of
life on the basis of "the dread irrationality of the whole affair."

It is not a happy subject for contemplation, perhaps, but it is possible
to ignore too absolutely that this is the attitude of mind of a vast
number of the young people of the time. No one with his classics in his
mind, no one even who has not forgotten Montaigne and Shakespeare,
thinks that this desperate guessing at "the riddle of the painful
earth" is an exercise peculiar to our day. What is perhaps new is the
commonness of the interrogation among young men, rich and poor,
industrious and idle, who have not genius wherewith to clothe and deck
their failure to produce the answer. Such men have not the distractions
and rewards of genius to take their minds off the fact of failure.

What does it matter if you, in common with all the laboring earth, are
feeling in every fibre the force of the Duke's bitter exhortation to
Claudio? what does it matter if you can turn life's discords into music
such as this? Even a less lofty strain is reward sufficient for the
singer, reason enough to reconcile the monstrous egoism of genius to the
presence in the world of great sorrows that can be transmuted into
little songs. But to those whose music is shut up within them all their
days, what shall help them bear the deafening discord of the jangling on
and on of things that hurries them towards silence? There is an answer
to this question, but it is not found among those usually given, which
are for the most part variations of the philosophy of the ostrich.

Gano used to tell, laughing, of the way a great English lady met her
son's shrinking confession of some deep, intellectual difficulty: "Do
rouse yourself, St. John. Low spirits are such bad form."

"What was cultivated society?" Gano demanded of the Irishman. "A device
for preventing people from serious thinking. Acceptance of this view was
implicit in the very roots of language. You had to 'divert,' to
'distract' a man from the peril of looking facts in the face before you
could expect him to be moderately happy. Games for grown-up children,
the puerilities of country-house parties, what are they? Sage devices
for preventing people from thinking, traps to snare and cage the
intelligence--civilization's harmless anæsthetics. Oh yes, no mistake
about our diversions being more wisely chosen in these 'scientific'
times than in the days when the one escape was into the wine-cup's
_cul-de-sac_. What were they all--drinking, opium-eating, and the
rest--but simply forms of that protest most thinking creatures find
themselves making at some stage of their too-conscious life?"

Driscoll accepted this view of his excesses with equanimity, reminding
Ethan in turn that there are in all ages bystanders at the board while
the cup goes round--old ladies of both sexes ready to ask, "What
pleasure can men take in making beasts of themselves?" and there is not
always a philosopher at the objector's elbow to answer, "He, madam, who
makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man." The great
moralist knew from personal experience what he was talking about. He had
the sincerity to admit that his own long-abandoned drinking had not at
any time been from love of good-fellowship. Away with the genial lie, "I
drank to be rid of myself!"

But Gano's point was that these old childish ways of hiding the head
under the bedclothes to keep out of the dark no longer comfort so many
of the grown-up children of the world. "They are afraid," he said, "not
only of the night, but, with a surer wisdom, of the morning. It is not
so easy to keep to-morrow at bay. Men need less and less the warning of
the taverner's wife: 'They one and all regret it in the morning.'"

Said Gano to himself, summing up his survey: "We should not depend on,
but keep in reserve, some draught with no such menace in the dregs. What
one surer than that which brings a good-night and no morrow at all
forever any more?"

Not, he felt, as a result of his own hard knocks, but out of unbiassed
observation of the common lot, again and again, without personal
resentment and without passion, he found himself reverting to the
thought of the unlivableness of life, unless a man should carry about a
conviction of freedom in his soul--a freedom that should be not a phrase
but a potent fact, conferring sovereignty over life and death, and so
lifting men above the meaner tricks of chance.

If solving the riddle in "high Roman fashion" did not "make Death proud
to take us," which he felt to be beside the mark, the more intimate
realization that escape is possible seemed to rob life of her more
intolerable menace. It was not food for fear or brooding, but for
exultation, this recognition that, should other remedies fail, one might
still do


     "That thing that ends all other deeds,
     That shackles accidents, and bolts up change."


If the sovereign remedy had not been discovered in the past, the
Nineteenth Century would have invented it. Never before had life been so
hard for the many, never before had its value been so impugned. It might
be true that every one should make a good fight. It could not be
recommended to any but the craven that he should accept a degrading
captivity in addition to defeat. Yet those were the terms upon which
more than half the world lived. As for himself, it grew plainer and
plainer that he should bear as many buffets as he could take like a man,
but no one had a right to ask him to accept the disgraceful terms on
which many of the excellent of earth were given their dole of bitter
bread. As for the women, the power of human endurance was in them not
glorified, as the foolish had thought, but debased, brutalized, a thing
for scorn and pointing. It was this side of the subject that ultimately
roused him out of the apathy that had threatened him. He had the sense
of being secretly a lantern-bearer, of carrying under his coat a
wonderful sort of Aladdin's lamp, and feeling it a selfish monopoly not
to cry out his discovery in the streets. For this light, that had been
so gallantly upborne, so well honored, of old, had been put out in the
more effeminate times, and fallen to utter discredit in these new "dark
ages." It was degraded to the uses of the vile, instead of shining
beacon-like upon the hill of honor, a guide less to the fallen than to
those who would keep from falling. Men had so many new inventions to
make, they had clean forgotten this. It was one of the lost arts, and
had need of rediscovery and new proclaiming with the accent of our time.
A strange ardor of proselytism fell upon him as he looked upon those
about him in whom he traced his own old fear of life: delicate women
toiling in terror and incommunicable agony of spirit, or those others,
more horrible still, accepting dully, or in the devil-may-care French
fashion, an existence incredibly vile. Why were they not told


                 "Ye have no friend,
     But resolution and the briefest end."


It would be absurd to say not one would listen. He couldn't take up a
paper without seeing that some desperate soul had made the discovery
alone, unprompted, and with all the weight of Society, Law, the Church,
and ignorant human shrinking against the anarchy of the act. It should
be made less horribly hard, more admittedly honorable. Illogically
enough, perhaps, these were not thoughts he felt it possible to share
with a man in Driscoll's state of rapidly failing health. Gano would
drop any questions in their later discussions that tended too much that
way, and the conversation showed in this a curious alacrity. If Driscoll
pursued the matter, Gano would even go the length of cutting the
interview short. The intellectual barrier thus raised was the first
check to the deepening friendship. For himself, from the day that Gano
realized that life was voluntary, it became sweet. He found himself
growing more light-hearted than he had thought it lay in him to be. He
worked with a new zest. Poverty, hunger, they couldn't cow him now. He
had the whip-hand of them. "I haven't forgotten," he said to himself,
"what it's like to be well housed, and fed, and friended, and to listen
without misgiving to the world's fairy-tales; but, remembering the
gladdest day the old life had to give, I know it never brought me such a
surging, God-like joy as the burst of that revelation, _We are free!_ If
we endure the worst evils in this life, it is because we are willing to.
Even the meanest of mankind are not caught like vermin in a trap. Man's
best boast and inalienable patent of nobility is that he holds in his
hand a key to all the prisons of the earth. He may open the door of
escape for himself. How curious to feel anew the solace of the old Roman
boast: In this the gods are less to be envied than the beggar or the
slave; the high gods must live on, but man may die if he will. Oh, glad
tidings of great joy! oh, the sweet, fresh air of liberty, the sense of
power, the exaltation of the crushed and stifled spirit!" In his bare,
ill-lighted room the man who had so long been the spoiled favorite of
material good fortune, now with empty pockets, dinnerless, nearly
friendless, would, nevertheless, lift up hopeful young hands in a
defiant gladness, whispering to himself: "They taught me many things in
many schools for many years, but no man ever whispered I was free! I had
to find that out for myself."


In these latter days, when he went up-stairs to sit with Driscoll, he
sometimes found a woman moving quietly about the room. When she had
gone, there was always something there for the invalid's supper, and
Gano would suppress the fact that he had brought a double provision in
his pocket for an impromptu meal.

The woman wore one of those feature-destroying veils that made it
impossible to judge much of her appearance, but Gano had a vague
impression of slim middle age and unimpressive looks, soft ways, and a
sort of "mother-tenderness" about her. But she was so colorless, so much
more an influence than a person, that he did not realize he had never
heard, or at least never noticed, her voice, till one evening she said
_Bong soir_ in an amazing accent.

"English!" commented Ethan, involuntarily, as the door closed.

"Australian," corrected the sick man.

"She's rather neglected you lately," remarked Gano, as a kind of apology
for the unmistakable bulginess of his pockets.

He unloaded on the rickety table.

"I say, why do you bring all that truck in here?" Driscoll demanded,
ungraciously.

"You keep quiet! You've got to have somebody to do your marketing for
you, I suppose. I thought your Australian friend had thrown up the
post."

"So she had," grumbled the invalid. "Women are damned selfish."

"Well, they repent sometimes; there's that in their favor."

Gano set about making coffee.

"She didn't repent," mumbled Driscoll.

"Oh, is this the last of her?"

"No; I only meant I had to send for her." And then they talked of other
things.

The next time Gano saw the woman was after Driscoll got worse. He went
up one night, and found him pallid, speechless, wrestling with one of
his worst attacks of pain. The woman was bending over him.

"Please go and get that filled." She held out an empty bottle, hardly
looking at Gano.

He hurried obediently down-stairs. Behind his anxiety for the man he had
come to feel so much liking for, was a sense of surprise that the
Australian was not so middle aged as he had thought. "She's not
thirty-five," he speculated in between his wondering how Driscoll could
get on without a night-nurse; "and she's not bad looking." He was back
again, two steps at a time, with the medicine. Driscoll was quieter. The
woman motioned the bottle away. She was taking his temperature.

"Hospital nurse," was Gano's mental comment upon the air of usage and
competence. He sat there awhile, and then whispered:

"I'm in the room on the left at the bottom of the first flight, if you
want me."

She nodded, and he went down to his work.

When he looked up from his writing it was a quarter to one. Had the
woman gone and he not heard her pass? How was Driscoll? It was awfully
quiet overhead. With a tightening of the nerves he took his lamp and
hurried up-stairs. He knocked softly. No answer. Noiselessly, so that
the invalid should not be wakened, if indeed he were not ... he opened
the door. Driscoll was asleep, and breathing audibly. The woman was
asleep too, sitting on the floor, her head leaning against the side of
the bed, Driscoll's hand in one of hers. She looked still younger in the
peace of sleep, though obviously older than Driscoll, softened out of
her customary wooden immobility. Gano felt that he was seeing her real
face for the first time: the mask had fallen. She could never have been
pretty, but there was something in her face of nobility that prevented a
man from coming to an easy conclusion about her. Her black hair was
sharply silhouetted against the white sheet. The hand that held
Driscoll's wore a plain gold marriage-ring. She seemed to feel the light
or the scrutiny of a strange glance, for she stirred and opened her gray
eyes. Gano was momentarily embarrassed--she not in the least. She turned
quickly to look at the sleeper.

"Wait!" she whispered, as Gano seemed to be turning away.

She put her finger on the sick man's pulse, and, still kneeling there,
counted the beats with absorbed, unselfconscious face. Gano was struck
again with the "mother" quality in the woman. It gave all she did a
definite modesty. She was getting up.

"Can you spare the light?" she whispered. "I forgot to bring--"

"Of course," interrupted Gano.

He set the lamp down, and turned to the door.

"Wait a moment."

She hung the _Figaro_ over the back of the chair between the sleeper and
the light, then, quietly and without haste, she took her brown cape and
hat off the peg and put them on. She leaned a moment over the sleeper,
and then, "Come!" she signed rather then said, and they went softly out.
At the foot of the stairs she stopped.

"Can you get a candle and a piece of paper?"

"Yes; this is my room," said Gano, opening his door.

The moonlight came palely in at the single window. Without hesitation
she had followed him. He lit the candle by his bed.

"I want to leave you my address," she said. "I think he'll be all right
now, but if he should be worse don't leave him; send some one to this
address--send a _fiacre_."

She scribbled on the piece of paper, and laid it by the candle.

"Do you think I ought to sit up with him?" Gano asked, watching her
intently.

"No need to sit up; you can sleep on the sofa, can't you, or--"

"Or on the floor?" he asked, smiling a little at her matter-of-factness.

"Or on the floor," she repeated quietly. "Good-night."

She went out.

"Sha'n't I get you a cab?"

"No; I shall walk. Good-night;" and she was gone.

On the paper was written:


     "_Mrs. Mary Burne,
                 21 Rue Blanche._"




CHAPTER XVI


Driscoll was better next morning, and able to eat breakfast. Gano had
got into the habit of making coffee in the invalid's room in the morning
as well as at night. Driscoll had waked with an appetite.

"Ha! cream! Did Mary bring that?"

"Mary?"

"Yes; Mrs. Burne."

"No; I got it. I thought we deserved cream to-day."

"How long was Mary here?"

"Oh, pretty late, I should say."

"H'm! That woman's had a damned hard time," Driscoll said, ruminating
between his sips of coffee; "does those colored things for the _Semaine
Illustrée_. She's drawn ever since she was a baby. Never had a lesson in
her life till two years ago. I met her at Julien's. She was working like
the devil."

"Making up for lost time?"

"Yes, poor girl! Married a brute of a Melbourne ship-builder when she
was seventeen. Stood him till three years ago, and then--Lord! the
audacity of these women--came to Paris to study art, if you please.
Thirty, and never had a lesson in her life!"

He laughed, and held out his coffee-cup.

"Ship-builder dead?" asked Gano, filling it up.

"Dead! No! alive and kicking, or I'd have made her marry me."

"Lord! the audacity of these men," laughed his friend.

When Driscoll got definitely worse, Mrs. Burne stayed with him through
the day, and Gano sat up with him at night.

"If you _can_ do it, it's best so," she said, simply.

"Of course--of course," agreed Gano, hastily, his Puritan mind
involuntarily considering the proprieties, even in these haunts.

"You see, while you sleep I can look after him, and do my work too if I
have daylight. You can write by lamplight."

And the practical sense of the arrangement shamed his first
interpretation of her plan. He found himself during their brief
meetings, morning and evening, watching the woman with a deepened
interest.

"Am _I_ in love with her, too?" he wondered, as he caught himself
following with something like envy her ministering to his friend.

But all she did was strangely lacking in any hint of the supposed
relation between Driscoll and herself. There was infinite gentleness in
her, but no happy confusion. Gano never saw in her quiet eyes that look
he was always dreading to surprise.

"She doesn't care about him in the way he thinks, poor devil!" he said,
at last, to himself.

The only time he ever ventured to speak of her goodness to the sick man,
"Oh, Mr. Driscoll has been kind to _me_," she said. "He got me my place
on the _Semaine Illustrée_."

Why, it was a sheer case of extravagant gratitude! Gano was conscious
this explanation pleased him.


"How's the club getting on?" Driscoll asked her one evening, as she was
leaving.

Gano was spreading out his writing materials on the rickety table.

"Oh, all right," she said, pinning her brown hat firmly on her coil of
black hair.

"_You_ haven't had the honor of being admitted to the club," said
Driscoll, laughing and nodding over at Gano. "_You_ aren't considered
worthy."

"_You_ weren't considered worthy," said Mrs. Burne, smiling faintly,
"but you would come."

"And if I adopted the same tactics," suggested Gano.

"No, no," she said, hastily; "it's really only for women."

She hunted about for her gloves. It was the first time Gano had ever
seen a look of embarrassment on the calm face.

"What kind of a club?" he asked.

"A--debating club," she answered. "Good-night."

"Ha, ha, ha! I like that."

But she was gone with a look of pleading cast on Driscoll as she went--a
look that was like a prayer.

Gano felt absurdly piqued to know more, not of the foolish club, but of
this fellow-being.

"You say you've been?"

He fitted a new pen in the holder.

"Oh yes; but they didn't do anything very remarkable the night I was
there. They meet in Mary's lodging. There were only three then. She says
there are sixteen now, two or three of 'em men, in spite of it's being
'only for women.' Can't think where she puts 'em."

"What did they debate?"

"Oh, some rot about social duties. They really go to sit by a fire and
get a cup of hot tea. But it's a very good thing," he added, with a
sudden rush of loyalty. "It's grown out of Mary's keeping one or two
women from going the primrose path to the everlasting bonfire."

His desire to "guy" the club seemed to have gone out with the founder's
going. The same thing had happened before.

"Lots of English and Americans let loose here, you know, without a
_notion_--"

He made an expressive movement of his big hands.

"I see. The club's a rescue party."

"Something of the sort. She doesn't say much about it."

"Funny place, Paris."

"Yes; all kinds here."


Gano knew to the hour when the tide of his ill-luck and apathy had
changed. His new interest in Mary Burne did not blind him to the fact
that life had suddenly grown endurable, even attractive, _decent_ in his
eyes, from the moment he had fully realized and fully accepted the fact
that he was under no nightmare of obligation to go on with it. It was as
if the noisome prison-house of his soul were flung open once and forever
to the blessed life-giving air. No more misgiving, no more shrinking
from the deep insecurity of things. He began to write with a new vigor
and resiliency. There came into his work not only buoyancy, but a fine
temper it had lacked before. The love of literature took hold on him
again as it had done in those first years of awakening abroad. He came
to care again about his own little performances, and by degrees did more
and more work for the paper. The editor had several times complimented
him warmly. Presently he was offered a regular position on the staff. He
paid back Henri de Poincy in full, and would have moved into better
quarters but for--but for--Driscoll, he would have said. Driscoll was
still very ill--worse, indeed, than ever.

"Never could do anything well in a hurry," he repeated his dreary old
quip. "Have patience, and I'll make a thorough job of this."

Gano felt more and more that whatever had been their relation in the
past, Mary Burne was absorbed now, not by Driscoll, but by Driscoll's
illness and dire need of her ministry. If she had not exactly
encouraged, she certainly had not repelled, Gano's growing devotion. Her
demeanor was perfect, he said to himself. How could she give her new
lover a sign by the death-bed of the man who had adored her for years,
who had befriended her, and who was in such need himself of befriending?
Gano schooled himself to keep the growing assurance and victory out of
his face and manner. He would follow Mary's lead, and when in the gray
unpromising life of the sick-room they found some dumb way of
communicating, some unasked aid to give, some slight unnoticed contact
in the common service rendered, Gano would school his thrilling nerves
to keep the secret of his gladness as calmly as Mary Burne kept hers.

As he grew worse, Driscoll grew more exacting, and more variable in
temper. He had less and less compassion on his friends, and demanded
Herculean labors of wakefulness--watching, reading aloud, etc. No
invalid had ever a more comfortable confidence in the boundless strength
and amiability of those who are well. Gano tried with scant success to
save Mary from bearing the brunt of the sick man's exactions.

He hurried up-stairs to relieve the watch a little earlier than usual
one evening.

"Once more I _appeal_ to you," he heard Driscoll saying, with raised
voice, before the door was opened. The turning of the knob had either
drowned or prevented the reply. Driscoll lay breathing heavily, and
Mary, with impassive face, was drawing on her gloves. She looked up and
nodded to Gano.

"Good-bye," she said, after a moment. But on the threshold she stopped.
"Dick," she said, without turning to face Driscoll, "I think I won't
come to-morrow."

"Yes, you will," he shouted. She turned and looked at him.

"Good-bye," was all she said.

"Damned selfish women are!" Driscoll growled as the sound of her steps
died.

"I shouldn't call her exactly a case in point," observed his friend.

"Well, she is. She sees how hopeless this is, and how damnably I'm
suffering, and she won't help me to get out of this cursed hole. _You_
won't either," he added, defiantly, and yet with a gleam of hope, almost
lunatic in its cunning and its greed.

"I won't what?" said Gano.

"Get me some morphine, or fetch me a pistol, or light some charcoal."

"Lord, no! You'll be better yet, old man."

"Rot! and you know it; and so does she. But _she_ pretends to care, and
yet she won't help me. Damned selfish--damned selfish!" He turned over
in bed, and went on cursing under the bedclothes.

Gano wondered how long the idea had been in his head, and how long
Driscoll had worn a beard, and whether there was a razor in the
dressing-case. He shuddered as he glanced surreptitiously about. Wasn't
it a little odd that he should find the notion so ghastly? Ah yes, the
ugly violence of it! When the sick man got to sleep his friend rummaged
his room from end to end, finding nothing to confiscate; and, after all,
Driscoll had a fair night. The morning was gray. A fine drizzle shot
spitefully down out of a leaden sky. Mary did not appear at the usual
hour. Towards noon Gano went down to his own room, worn out, and flung
himself on his bed without undressing. He was waked by the noise of a
dull fall overhead. He sprang up in a horror of apprehension, broad
awake on the instant. He rushed up-stairs and burst in on Driscoll, to
find him angrily pushing books off the table on to the floor, as a
summons to his friend below.

"You sleep like the dead," was his greeting. "Where's Mary?"

"Great Cæsar! I don't know."

"My watch has run down," Driscoll went on, querulously.

Gano set it by his. It was five o'clock.

"Don't go to sleep again; let's have some coffee."

"All right," answered Gano, yawning. "I believe I'm hungry. I'll go and
forage."

When he came back with the provisions he brought up some letters and
papers. He tumbled everything down on the table. There was nothing for
him but some proof from the office, and two letters from America, sent
on by Monroe & Co.

"Birthday greetings from New Plymouth," he said to himself, as he
recognized the familiar old-fashioned hand, the violet ink, and the
brown five-cent stamp that had grown to seem foreign to him. He hadn't
the curiosity to read birthday commonplaces till the impromptu meal was
finished, and Driscoll had become a bore, asking him to look out and see
if Mary wasn't coming, the only variation being, "Hark! isn't she on the
stairs?"

It was only then that, turning the letters over, it occurred to him to
doubt if the second was a cousinly salutation.

"No, by Jove! Boston postmark!"

He tore it open. A brief note from the legal firm of Bostwick & Allen,
announcing the death of their client, Aaron Tallmadge, and the bare fact
that his entire estate was left to his sole surviving heir and grandson,
whose instructions they awaited. The letter had been to Nice and back.
It was nearly two weeks old.

"By Jove!" Gano dropped the letter on the table among the coffee-cups
and bits of _brioche_.

"What! is she here?" Driscoll sat up in bed.

"No, no; I don't know. Listen to this." He read the letter aloud.

"_That's_ all right! _Mille félicitations!_ Look out, like a good
fellow, and see if she isn't coming across the court."

Gano went over to the window and looked out with an ironic consciousness
that, even in the face of such news, he was scarcely less concerned than
Driscoll for the coming of that enigmatic woman across the lamplit,
reeking court. The drizzle had turned into long gray rods of rain; they
streaked the gaslight and pricked the shallow pools unceasingly. And he
had all that money! and it was just as he had always known it would be.
The essentials of existence were unchanged. Was she never coming? It's
the child surviving somewhere in most men, he argued with himself, that
gives a woman like that a charm beyond beauty. But she's beautiful, too,
he protested silently. Aloud he said:

"No, I don't see her."

"Look here, Gano; do me a favor, old man! Go and fetch her."

"Oh, I hardly think--"

"I tell you I must see her! Only for five minutes. Tell her that. If I
don't see her, I'll have a hell of a night. I'd do as much for you,
Gano."

"Oh, all right." He turned on his heel.

"Hold on! you don't know where she lives."

Gano knew perfectly, but he said, "Oh-h."

"Going off like that without--you're full of your millions! Small
blame--small blame!" Driscoll wrote down the address and handed it to
his friend. "Bring her back with you, if you can; but it'll do if she's
here by ten."

Outside the court Gano hailed a _fiacre_ and drove barely five minutes
before he was set down at a door in a tenement not conspicuously
different from his own. A shabby man with long hair, wearing a velveteen
jacket, had just stopped, closed his dripping umbrella, and rung.

When the door opened he passed in without question.

"Madame Burne?" asked Gano.

"Au quatrième. Encore de la boue dans mon escalier!" muttered the
_concierge_. "Faudra qu'elle s'en aille à la fin."

Gano ran up two flights, passing three girls in the dim light, who were
coming down. He almost overtook the shabby man, who seemed in feverish
haste. Gano slackened his pace at the foot of the third flight. The
shabby man hurried up without looking back, fled round the passage to
the left, and knocked at a door facing the banisters. Without pausing
for permission, he turned the knob and went in, letting out a gush of
light and the confused sound of voices. Gano was conscious of a glow of
comfort in the assurance of his heart that the room entered by such a
creature, with ceremony so scant, was certainly not Mary Burne's. The
shabby fellow had flung the door to, but the worn-out fastening didn't
catch. The door rebounded and stood partly open. Two-thirds of the way
up this last flight Gano turned his head in the direction of the voices,
and saw through the banisters and the open door Mary Burne shaking hands
with the man who had just entered. Gano stopped dead. He didn't hear
anything she said; he wasn't conscious of trying to do so. He stood
staring, incredulous. Presently she passed out of his range of vision.
He could see some of the others now, and caught here and there a single
unenlightening word. He wondered vaguely at hearing a room full of
persons speaking English again. Should he go in, or should he go back?
He felt an indescribable shrinking from meeting Mary among that shady
lot. Men, too--more than one! What was a woman like Mary Burne doing
with such disreputable-looking-- He had lately been killing time for
Driscoll by reading aloud that original story, _Beggars All_. It came to
him like a form of nightmare that their Madonna Mary was a confidence
woman. This gathering was a grim kind of thieves' tea-party, but they
had left the door open! As he gave up straining to catch a glimpse of
Mary, and looked closer at those nearest the door, he saw there were one
or two women he would not have thought suspicious under other
circumstances. Then one of these moved away, and revealed a creature
with raddled cheeks and pencilled eyes, wearing her dingy finery with a
clumsiness not French, and speaking now to Mary Burne, who had come to
her side--speaking with a cockney tongue, and eying her hostess with
mixed suspicion and curiosity. A man, as obviously American, looking
like a broken-down billiard-marker, stood behind, and sitting by the
door was a well-dressed gray-haired woman, with frightened, shifty eyes.
Obvious tramps and beggars would have fitted better into any
preconceived scheme of benevolence. But these were people of some former
decency, some present alertness of intelligence, like the dregs of the
foreigner class in any land, lower than the outcast born, because these
aliens had once ambition, had initiative enough to venture forth to
better their estate, and had not fallen so low without desperate
clutching at foul means to keep afloat. On each face that undefinable
stamp of failure. What is it? Where is it? Not always in the eyes or on
the lips, not always expressed in dress or even bearing--in no one thing
that one may lay a finger on and say, "I know him by this mark!" There
is no name for that elusive, eloquent, yet indelible sign life sets upon
the faces of the lost. Yet all men know it when they see it, and
instinctively turn away their eyes.

In the group that closed about Mary, some one was protesting about
something.

"Perhaps Jean Latreille was right," said a man Gano couldn't see.

"Of course he was. _You_ need not to blame him."

Some one was speaking with a strong French accent.

"Well, well," said the woman with the gray hair. "I don't feel sure it
ought to be encouraged _openly_."

"Zen, ought you not to belong to zis club?"

The woman turned up an anxious face.

"I've sent the girls away, Mrs. Pitman," said Mary, gently. "I think
those of us that are left here, even the new members, have borne so much
that they are able to bear the truth." There was a rustle and a noise of
sitting down. "M. Pernet is right, I think, although I'm sorry Jean
should have deserted his wife and child. It would have been manlier not
to buy his liberty at the price of others' suffering."

"That's what _I_ say."

The gray-haired woman nodded at some one out of sight.

"But who can decide the problems of another soul?" Mary Burne's white
face grew weary. "We have enough with our own."

"Parfaitement."

"You may be sure," she went on, nodding gravely at her dingy audience,
"a young man in vigorous health doesn't wrench himself out of the world
without good cause. It's grown too common to be any longer a
distinction"--she smiled bitterly--"and yet it's not common enough to be
any easier, or any less reviled." Her eyes travelled from one forlorn
face to the other with a kindling compassion. "But let us take courage,
friends; we who have done without bread can do without approval--except
of one kind." She paused an instant; a look of fanaticism leaped into
the white face. "No matter what we have done in the past, we will not
live, from this time on, without self-respect. Two or three of us have
talked a good deal here about our duties to each other. Let us think
to-night of the ultimate duty we owe ourselves. You know already how
some of us cannot find courage to live till we have first assured
ourselves of courage to die, if need be. I've told you, one or two of
you, that it was like that with me; that when hideous things drove me
away from home, things I'd borne for years, and should never have borne
a moment"--she flung up her head with swelling nostrils--"when my
awakening came, I said to myself, 'I'll go away and work; I'll go to
Paris; and if I can't live there decently, I shall die there.' All
through the long voyage I kept thinking that I was probably going, as
fast as the ship could carry me, towards my grave. When one has lived
days like that, life doesn't daunt one any more, nor death either."

"No, no!" murmured a voice behind the door.

"How shall any of us justify the desperate clinging to life for the mere
sake of living?" She asked the question as if she were addressing a
drawing-room full of prosperous people who had the merest speculative
interest in the inquiry. "How many instances do we see of men and women
who have outlived not only their usefulness, but their satisfactions?
And yet they drag along their gray existence, a dreary penance to
themselves, and a menace to those who still can hope. There are those
who cling to the pleasant fiction that every one is of some good use in
the world. If that is so, it is equally true that every one does _some_
ill, stands in somebody's light, and bars his way to progress. But it is
not with the real or imaginary 'helpers' we have to deal, but with those
who through misfortune have lost their grip on circumstance, and whose
whole remaining energy is absorbed in an animal-like clinging to
existence. Many of the world's sick and wounded are capable of feeling
the attraction of the idea of suicide, and are held back from freedom by
two superstitions. One was made current by the people who lacked the
courage to 'go and do likewise,' and who, therefore, have branded all
suicides 'lunatics' or 'cowards.' The other superstition was given the
world by the priests, who would have been less zealous and less astute
than history shows them if they'd not barred this escape with mighty
threats and penalties."

"Bah!" "Priests!" "Oh yes!"

A little undercurrent from the crowd crept through her words.

"Many a gentle soul in the past," she went on, "has endured years of
needless agony rather than buy release at the price of public
execration--being denied decent burial, and flung into a ditch at the
cross-ways with a stake driven through the body. We don't treat these
refugees quite that way now, but in being less violent we are not less
cruel. When we hear of a suicide, the first insult we offer him is to
ask, 'Were his accounts right?' Next, 'Was he a victim to bad habits?'"

"Exactly!" cried the voice, in broken English. "What Babin said of
Jean--"

"Sh! sh!"

"If it is found the dead man was a defaulter or an opium-eater, the most
aimless cumberer of the earth experiences a certain sense of
justification. If a man is a villain, he must _want_ to get out of the
world; but for honest folk life cannot be too long. Consequently, to
support existence (or let some one else do it) seems in some way a
tribute to a man's personal worth or mental poise. If it is found that
the suicide had the audacity to leave the world without the urging of
some vulgar misdeed to account for his unpleasant independence, then up
goes the universal cry, 'He was insane!' Without doubt! The world is
good enough for his betters, why not for him? 'Oh, the fellow was
crazy!' And that settles it. As a proof _we_ are mentally sound, we will
live on at any cost, be it our own souls or our brothers'. No, no. I
tell you this thirst for life cannot be proved so worthy an instinct as
some have hoped to show. It is the instinct that makes the brute world
one vast slaughter-house. 'One must live' would be the motto of the
shark, if he had one. 'One must live' is in the roar of the Bengal
tiger, and the jackal's cry. I do not see but the greed of life is the
strongest survival in man of primitive animal instinct. But it is not
the noblest of our legacies. Over many an unworthy page of human history
is that legend, 'One must live.'" She stretched out her hands, crying,
"_It is not true!_ One must live _worthily_, or one can die! I feel a
passionate sense of the wrong and ruin wrought by the general view. I
feel it"--she dropped her eyes--"when I hear that a man steals to keep
from starving, when"--her voice was heavy with shame--"when I see wide
thoroughfares full at night of young girls and brazen women 'who must
live.' 'Why don't they see there is an escape?' I think." She threw back
her head with a quick movement, and just as suddenly the look of courage
dimmed. "Then I realize that some of them, even if they could rise above
the animal instinct to prolong life at any price, would remember
priestly warnings, and fancy their chances in the hereafter brighter if
they lived on--vile scavengers on the highways of the world!--than if
they were brave enough to disdain an evil heritage, and wise enough not
to fear death. Those who are so lustful of life"--far beyond the little
company she gazed, as one gathering in a survey all the peoples of the
earth--"they are like beggars at a feast. They glut themselves
indiscriminately, afraid to let a single dish go by. They sit stupid and
gorged, still mechanically taking of everything passed them, with dulled
taste and jaded appetite, eating and drinking, with sense left to think
only, 'Who knows? we may never be at such a feast again.' I tell
you"--she was back now with her dingy guests--"it is the beast in us
that clings so fiercely to life. In the case of the unfortunate, the
hard-pressed, the ancient instinct often outlives hope, principle,
innocence--all that's best in humanity."

"But there are a good many--" interrupted the gray-haired woman, feebly.

"Yes, yes, thank Heaven!" Mary Burne agreed, in the old gentle voice.
"For those happy ones who have found, or think they have found, a chance
of doing some service, or to those who for any reason find the world or
themselves an interesting and compensating study, there are only
congratulations, and a plea for fairer judgment of less fortunate, maybe
not less sane or noble, men."

"Like ze poor Jean Latreille," lamented the Frenchman behind the door.
"No work; only me for friend."

"Yes, yes," assented Mary Burne, as if she knew the story, and others to
cap it. "No one who is in sympathetic touch with his kind can honestly
affirm that every man and woman has something worth living for, and can,
if he and she choose, make an honest livelihood. It is frankly untrue!
Life is becoming more and more difficult to the majority; worldly
success is more and more bought at the price of personal dignity. Mere
existence for the million is secured only by a warfare in which he who
does not slay is slain. But it is idle to enlarge upon the results of
our civilization; every one with eyes sees how the conflict rages, and
how the weak and often finer-natured go to the wall. It is not for me to
urge that it is sad, or wasteful, but only that it _is_. My plea, as
some of you know, is that more should realize there is honorable retreat
this side moral overthrow."

The gray-haired woman moved uneasily. The speaker, glancing at her,
seemed to answer an unuttered protest:

"Let no one say God would have a man yield bit by bit his faith and
charity, accepting any terms, so that he may be allowed to draw his
coward breath a little span the more. There is a kind of spiritual
cannibalism among us, more appalling than the simpler sort we shudder to
think is practised in Darkest Africa, or the islands of the South Sea.
It flourishes on our fairest hopes, and fills its witch's caldron with
the consciences of men and the honor of our women. 'We must live!' the
victims cry, and give up all that makes life worth the living. Maimed,
stripped of grace and dignity, they wander forth into the world, to
deaden the public sense of moral decency by the spectacle of their
shame. The people who are shocked that one should think of suicide
permit themselves a mild enthusiasm that long ago a blind King of
Bohemia could care so much for his cause that he gathered a sheaf of his
enemies' spears in his breast rather than face defeat. We are told there
was once a Brutus, too, and many another in the brave old time, who
showed there was a refuge this side dishonor. But the world has
forgotten, and ancient valor is renamed modern cowardice."

Her scorn-filled eyes dropped an instant on the gray-haired woman's
fingers fumbling feebly under her mantle. Below it the end of a rosary
could be seen twitching against her gown. Mary Burne lifted quiet eyes
from the dangling crucifix.

"Looking at the question from the religious standpoint," she said, "it
is impious to suppose we can take the Creator by surprise or defeat His
ends. If He sent us into the world, He knew just what weapons He put
into our hands, where the weak spots in our armor were, and what foes
would meet us. In the case of the suicide, He knew just how many hard
blows he could meet like a soldier and a man, as well as He knew there
would some day come a stroke that would cut him down. Does God sleep
while the battle rages?" she cried, with swelling but uneven
cadence--"while the wounded man drags himself away from the dying,
pursued by visions of captivity and the loss of all he fought for?" She
shook her head with slow, pitying solemnity. "Believers must think the
eye of God is on this child of His, as he creeps wearily out of the
strife and turns into a dark by-way, groping along to the little gate at
the end. The fugitive looks back an instant"--into her own clear eyes
came a curious filminess--"he is too calm to seem heroic, and the pain
is fading out of his face. 'Good-bye, my enemies'"--she made the
faintest little gesture of farewell to some world without her
walls--"'good-bye, my friends'"--she nodded to the dingy crew within,
and lifted haggard eyes above their heads--"'temptations, ghosts of
failure and of grief, good-bye!' Silently turning, he passes out through
the little gate and shuts it fast behind him. Wherever he goes, no
believer can suppose he has defeated God, or strayed outside the limits
of His mercy."

As she ended she came forward. Gano, forgetting the dusk of the
staircase, and thinking on the spur of the moment that she had caught
sight of him, turned and made his way noiselessly down the three
flights. He reached the street before he realized that Mary's motion
forward had been to the gray-haired woman with the crucifix. But why had
he been so afraid she should speak to him? He leaned against the lintel
of the open door watching the rain. What strange thing had befallen his
tender interest in this woman? It was gone. Simply wiped out. In its
place a shrinking of his very soul. He had thought her so "womanly,"
full of protecting tenderness and steadfast cheer; and, behold! this
abyss of hopelessness, this dark, iron resolution, this unshrinking
acceptance of the tragedy of life.

The opinions she had given out, to be sure he shared them more or less;
but it hurt him to think women shared them, above all the woman he-- A
woman without hope--better she were without heart! Away, away with this
unfeminine acceptance of the worst. It made the underlying horror of
things more real, more unescapable! Away with such views, except for the
occasional philosophic mood of man. Who wanted to have them daily,
hourly brought to mind? He knew he should never see Mary Burne again
without seeing that dingy circle of the lost, and the look of
unshrinking despair that hardened and whitened in her face.

Her old sheltering mother-gentleness, where was it? _His_ old tenderness
for the tenderness in her, where was that? Gone, gone, and in its place
this staggering dislike! He tried to think that, unselfconscious as she
had been in manner, she had been theatrical in thought; he recalled some
of her sentences--she was a phrase-maker! She liked standing up there,
even before such an audience, listening to the sound of her own voice,
and airing views that she no doubt thought original and bold. He did not
for a moment realize that just because he in the main agreed with her
"beyond refuge," he shrank from hearing himself echoed back to himself
from the imagined haven of a woman's heart. It was a situation meet for
wry, ironic laughter that the woman he had been drawn to for her
supposed embodiment of man's soothing ultra-feminine ideal should be
caught playing the part of a dingy nineteenth-century Joan of Arc,
urging men to battle and to death.




CHAPTER XVII


The _concierge_ appeared, angry and shivery, and bade him either come in
or go out. He was in the act of doing the latter when he remembered
Driscoll. He turned back and faced the angry woman.

"Go up to Madame Burne," he said, giving the woman a franc, "and tell
her--wait!" He searched his pockets, and finally drew the envelope off
Mrs. Gano's birthday letter, and wrote on the back:


     "Driscoll unable to sleep without some word from you. Please send
     down a message for him."


"Give her that and bring me the answer."

The woman shuffled up-stairs. He stood there in the dingy passage,
waiting, cogitating. Suppose Mary were to send word that after all she
would come when that infernal club broke up, what should he do? He would
certainly have to protect poor old Driscoll against her pitiless
fanaticism. That much was clear. It took her a long time to scribble a
line. He paced back and forth from the foot of the mud-tracked stair to
the open door, where the rain fell ceaselessly. With a sudden elation he
thought of the change in his fortunes, and how soon he should have
turned his back upon all this squalor. A millionaire! Yes, it had a good
ring. It took the sound of Mary Burne's voice out of his tortured ears.

Suddenly he paused, hearing with relief the shambling footsteps of the
returning _concierge_, a relief rudely dashed with fear of the message
she might be bringing.

A quicker figure slipped before the square, slow-moving woman; it was
Mary Burne, running down the stairs, dressed to go out.

"I am sorry to have kept you," she said. If she noticed Gano's changed
manner, she put it down to anxiety for his friend. "Come, I've brought
an umbrella," she said, almost sharply, as Gano stood an instant looking
out for a _fiacre_; "it's nearly as quick to walk, and I--I--"

He took the umbrella from her silently, and they hurried on side by side
in the rain. Gano, with growing agitation, searched for some way of
letting her know that he was in possession of the situation, and meant
to remain in possession.

As they turned into the Rue de Provence she stopped, breathless.

"Are you quite sure he wants to see me only for a minute?"

"So he says."

"He understands that just at present I can't sit up with him any more?"

"He doesn't expect you to stay to-night, at any rate," Gano answered, in
a determined voice. He began to walk on.

"Mr. Gano." She laid an arresting hand on his arm. He looked down coldly
at the white face. "You've shown too plainly in these last weeks to what
lengths your friendship for Dick can go. I don't pretend to apologize
for asking if you can spare the time to take him away for a few weeks as
soon as he gets a little better."

The man hesitated. She misunderstood.

"I've just got some money from the _Semaine_," she went on, "and I can
anticipate my next payment. I've told you how I owe it to Mr. Driscoll
that I have the money at all. It's his in a sense, anyhow."

"You want to get him out of Paris?"

"Yes, _anywhere_ for a change."

"I might do that if he can be moved."

"Oh, thank you, thank you. Dick can't say he hasn't got friends. You
_are_ good about it." They splashed on a few steps in the downpour, and
she slackened her pace again. "But since you are going away alone with
him--and, anyhow, I ought to tell you. He's developing a kind of
monomania. He doesn't want to live--wants--" Her voice choked.

"I know," said Gano.

"You know! He's ventured to say it to you?"

"Yes."

"Then, you see, it's serious." She was clinging to him again. Gano
nodded. Before he could help himself he was trying her.

"You see, he'll never get well."

"How can you say that? and say it so--so--"

Indignant tears stood in her upturned eyes, and she took her hands off
his arm.

"Surely you know it's true."

"I only know that he's still alive, and that I love him."

They walked on--they were nearly at the door.

"You know how he suffers," began Gano.

"Everybody suffers," she interrupted. "He knows nothing about the worst
pain. And he has his art; he has you to care about him, and--he has me.
Oh, Mr. Gano"--she turned on him suddenly--"help me to take care of
him--help me, for God's sake--help me to keep him in the world!"

"Yes, yes; I give you my word."

A great weight was lifted off them both. They went up-stairs together,
but Gano left Mary at Driscoll's door. He wrote some letters in his own
room, then he went softly up-stairs, heard the low, pleasant sound of
voices, and came down without interrupting them. He went to bed, and
slept soundly till the morning.

"I shall cable Bostwick & Allen first thing after breakfast," he said to
himself.

When he was dressed, he went up-stairs as usual to Driscoll, knocked
lightly, and, without waiting, went in. Mary Burne was still there,
kneeling by the bedside. It flashed over Gano that it had been something
like this very picture that had first set him thinking about Mary
Burne. But the spell had lost its potency; something had happened; some
chord of sympathy had snapped. He could think of his friend
whole-heartedly now, without a woman's thrusting her face between them.
Driscoll was asleep this morning, just as he had been that other time
when Gano had found Mary Burne worn out with watching by the bedside;
but his face was hidden. Mary stirred and turned round. Gano started. No
sleep weighed down her eyelids; her eyes were wide and quick-glancing,
but seemed unseeing; the agonized face was pinched and gray-white, like
chalk.

"What is it? What--"

Gano sprang forward to the bed. Driscoll's face was no longer in the
shadow now.

"He's gone," said Mary.

"Not dead?"

"Yes, dead."

She got up slowly, staggering a little. Her cloak was round her. She
went unsteadily to the opposite side of the room and picked up her hat.
She seemed to forget to put it on, and stood with it aimlessly in her
hands, those strained, bright-glancing eyes moving uncannily in the
drawn white mask of a face. Gano had flung himself down by the bed. He
laid his hand over Driscoll's. It was cold.

"When did it happen?" Gano asked; and as the word "happen" left his
lips, he started up and stared at the woman.

"About four o'clock," she said, going in that blind way to the table.

He had the impulse to rush forward and seize her by the shoulders. He
would force those restless eyes to meet his steadily for once, and give
up their secret; but she was counting some gold pieces out of her purse,
doing it by the instinct of touch, while her roving, animal-like glance
seemed to dash itself against window, wall, and door, seeking an escape.

"How did it come?" Gano demanded.

"Quite quietly; no pain--no pain at the last."

Her muffled voice seemed to reach him from far off.

"Why didn't you call me?"

"No good," she said, tonelessly; "and besides, he held fast to my hand.
I am leaving some money here." She motioned to the little pile of ten
and twenty franc pieces on the table, and moved towards the door.
"You'll see to what's necessary." And, without waiting for his
assurance, "I've enough to pay for everything," she said, and went out.

Gano found his first impressions weakened by Mary Burne's clear and
convincing official account of the death. The doctor accepted it without
misgiving. Why should a layman have a doubt?

Driscoll was buried, and his few effects were bought in by Mary Burne at
the sale. When Gano went to say good-bye to her the next day he was told
she had given up her old lodging, and left no address behind.


Gano's original reluctance to return home had not been so very serious.
Had his grandfather been a little forbearing, he could have had the
young man back in Boston in six months; but now, too much had been
sacrificed on the altar of an impetuous resolve for Gano to consider
kindly going to America at once. There was plenty of time for that. He
had sent instructions to Messrs. Bostwick & Allen, and he allowed the
"great political organ" to remain in the experienced hands that had done
so well by it in Aaron Tallmadge's declining years.

He went to Nice, and brought the De Poincys back with him to Paris,
where he had taken a house. Henri de Poincy, even when little by little
he learned something of those years of struggle, could not see that his
friend was essentially changed by their rough lessoning. Ethan had
never, even in the ignorant and care-free days, been either very
outgoing or very light of heart. De Poincy, as the elder, had long ago
recognized his friend as one of those unexpected, but not uncommon,
products of luxurious modern life--a young man whose vivid perception
of the underlying tragedy of the common lot had seemed out of all
proportion to his possible experience. If any difference appeared in him
now, it was that his old easy faith in concrete human nature, as opposed
to his deep mistrust of life in the abstract, had been somewhat
corrected--and that was well, Henri de Poincy thought. The young
diplomat did not discover that, of all the faith-destroying spectacles
his friend had looked upon, not the least, to just his cast of mind, was
the hot haste made, in that same city where he had walked wanting bread,
to court and fête the new millionaire. But Gano had left this phase of
life so far behind him, he had got so out of touch with it, that he was
obliged to learn over and over again that inevitable lesson taught
affluent young America by the sage Old World--that money-bags are less
easily and quickly filled in Europe, and the man who carries one that
overflows will lack little that the craftier civilization can lay at his
feet. Gano's particular kind of self-love revolted at some of his
experiences at the hands of certain elegant and well-born adventurers,
male and female, who, the American had fancied, liked him and sought him
for himself. He was very young in many ways, for all his hardships and
his twenty-six years. Still, he was not so much of a fool but that in
time he learned his lesson. His fault lay in taking it too seriously. So
it was that, despite his renewed literary activities and successes, and
the need impressed on him of studying _les moeurs_, he yielded more and
more to his fondness for camping out, for fishing, and for cruising
about the Mediterranean with Henri de Poincy.

"I never knew a fellow," that amiable young Frenchman would say--"never
knew a fellow so much at his ease in the world, who seemed so anxious to
be rid of people as you are."

"I'm not at my ease in the world."

"Ah, I should have said in drawing-rooms."

"Another matter. The drawing-room is the best place I know to avoid
knowing people. I should like to spend all my days that aren't spent
with a rod on a river-bank, or lying in a boat with you, in
drawing-rooms. I'd like"--he stared up into the high-piled clouds
sailing across the intense blue--"I'd like the big Engine-driver up
yonder to look down through the white steam-puffs, and say: 'My boy, I
give you my word of honor that I'll never run you into any closer
quarters with life than you are in now.'"

"I see," laughed De Poincy, "lovely woman has pursued you till you fight
shy. But don't lay it all to your looks and your winning ways, my
friend; you're known to have dollars."

"Yes." His dark face flushed under some quick wave of feeling. "The most
surprising thing I've found in Europe is the dominance of the money
motive, that quality that they had told me distinguished the American."

He laughed a little bitterly.

"Well," said De Poincy, "you know you do hear more in America about
money than you do anywhere."

"Exactly. Money's talked about with childlike and damnable iteration;
but, by all the gods! if decent people with us want it, they work for
it; they don't cringe and angle for it; they offer labor in exchange,
not _themselves_. They don't, as a nation, make it the basis of
friendship, of marriage."

"If you don't, it's because American women are too self-willed to hear
prudence."

"Yes, thank God! And yet we have the intelligent foreigner saying the
climate makes our women sexless." He stopped and laughed. "I admit les
Américaines don't so universally look on love and marriage as a
profession, their only means of settlement in life. But I'll tell you
what it is, my friend: the American, with all his outward frankness and
_naïveté_, cares more, like men of other nations, for the thing he
doesn't talk about than for things he's always flinging in your face.
With people on this side, it's money which is too sacred to be mentioned
except on solemn occasions"--he made the slightest possible
grimace--"but which is the supreme consideration. With us, the thing we
don't talk about, and yet care for the more, is the relation between the
sexes, the ideal of a chivalry that the elder world has lost, or, more
truly, never had, I think."

"The truth is, you've been long enough away from America to begin to
idealize it. By the way, I thought you were of the _élite_ asked to the
Château d'Avranchéville this autumn."

"This is better than Normandy," he said, shortly.

"Ah, but think of the dear creatures gathered there?"

"I'd rather think about 'em."

"Mademoiselle Lucie this time, _hein_?"

"Oh no--only that I don't love my kind."

De Poincy shook his head.

"That you don't love _that_ kind shows you're getting _blasé_."

Gano sat up, and fixed his dark eyes on his friend's face.

"You know you're talking nonsense. You'll allow I met her under peculiar
circumstances."

"After helping you to fish her out of an Italian lake, I will allow the
circumstances were romantic."

"I thought she--"

"Of course, love at first sight. Just the thing to fetch you."

"I thought she liked me as a girl at home might have liked me, who
hadn't heard that my grandfather--"

He thumped out an oath as he thrust his hands deep down in his
yachtman's jacket.

De Poincy smiled.

"She's so young," Gano went on--"probably less sophisticated, I thought,
than our American girls."

"To be sure, a ravishing _ingénue_."

"And here she was, ready to throw over poor Parthenay like that"--he
tossed his cigarette overboard--"caring for him all the time, as
Parthenay showed me. Then this _ingénue_, after turning the Tallmadge
dollars into francs in her pretty baby head, was calmly arranging to
help me to spend them here in France. How the devil they knew on such
short acquaintance--before the settlement question came up--"

"Oh, her brother asked me that first day."

"What?"

De Poincy nodded.

"And when I thought they didn't so much as know that I was American!" He
laughed with that excessive bitterness of youth perturbed, and pretended
to speak apologetically. "You see, I've plumed myself on my French since
I was seven, and my name tells nothing."

"Your French is all right, but you don't imagine people like that would
put themselves out for the _premier venu_ as they did for you from the
start."

Gano shrugged.

"My mistake was that, even without my banker's reference, I didn't look
upon myself as the _premier venu_."

"I must say I admired the charming way they conveyed the idea to you
that Mademoiselle Lucie--"

"Shut up."

"My dear fellow, you would never have dreamed of Mademoiselle Lucie,
enchanting as she is, if it hadn't been for their tact in pointing out
that--"

"And you looked on!"

"To be sure, and envied you your damned good luck. She's an adorable
creature, and would spend your money with distinction."

"Thanks. I needn't have come so far to find a woman who could manage
that."

"I'm in the enemy's camp," De Poincy went on. "I want you to settle in
France."

"And I--I want--"

Gano looked out over the dancing waves, face to face on a sudden with
something so new and unexpected as to be almost incredible.

"What do you want?" asked De Poincy.

"I want to go back to America by the first boat."

"You're joking."

"I'm in dead earnest. It sounds sudden, but it isn't. Something's been
the matter with me for a deuce of a long time. I haven't known what it
was. I do now. I'm homesick."

"Doesn't it strike you you've postponed it a bit?"

"Dare say. We're offered every inducement to postpone it. We Americans
are as pleased with Europe as children at a fair. We run up and down
your marts with our purses out, delighted, astonished at your wares, at
your ways; we want a souvenir from every booth, we want a peep at every
side-show, we think it impossible ever to tire of the merry-go-round."
His voice dropped. "When the night comes we're ready to go home."

"Night? _Niaiserie!_"

Gano jumped up and paced the deck.

"I say, Henri, do you mind going back to Marseilles? If you do, mind, I
must--"

"Of course I don't mind. It'll give you time to recover on the way."

He laughed good-naturedly.

His companion paced silently up and down in the fading light.

"I've known other fellows," De Poincy went on, after a long
silence--"plenty of others, get rather feverish about the U. S. A., but
I didn't expect it of you."

"Oh, I'm just like the rest."

"Hadn't observed the likeness before."

"I've found the Old World life a good enough game to play at; _I've_ got
no reason to complain."

"Thanks, I'm sure, in the name of France, not to mention England and
Italy."

"Oh, you understand me well enough. It's wonderfully attractive, this
charming Old World, but from our point of view it isn't life."

"Pretty good imitation."

"That's just it," he laughed. "It's pretty and it's good, but it's
_imitation_. It copies, with Chinese fidelity, old originals that were
once, long ago, alive and quick; but to-day--"

"You're taking a leaf out of your old governor's book," said De Poincy,
with smiling malice. "I hear cousin Aaron now." And he caricatured him
mercilessly. "'To an American, sir, Europe is either a museum or a scene
out of a comic opera.' Now, if one said anything like that of America
you'd declare war by return of post. But we"--he lit his cigarette and
threw away the match with a flourish--"we are amused; we give you
exactly the license you demand--that of the child at a fair."

"Well, look here, old man"--Gano laid his hand on De Poincy's
shoulder--"this child wants to catch the first boat home."




CHAPTER XVIII


He was really coming this time; in less than an hour he would be at the
Fort. They were all sitting in the parlor, waiting, in festal array.
Late as it was in the year, the clear autumn afternoon was steeped in
warm sunshine. An occasional golden dogwood leaf fluttered past the open
windows, like a lazy yellow bird.

"It reminds me of October in Maryland," said Mrs. Gano, looking up from
the book she was not reading. It was, at all events, mild enough to
afford Emmie the extreme satisfaction of wearing her white Confirmation
dress in honor of the momentous occasion. Emmie called the new frock her
"Confirmation dress," although she had not been confirmed in it, and was
not expecting to be till next spring. When it had been decided before
Julia Otway's party that Emmie must have a new frock, she had not needed
to be told that, by a system of tucks and turnings in, it would have to
serve for high days and holidays for a long time. It was characteristic
of the child that, looking into the future, the day of her Confirmation
should loom so large.

Her dark curls were tied to-day with apple-green ribbon, and a
green-and-white sash lent an air of festivity to the simple frock, and a
snow-drop look to the pale little girl.

There was nothing new in Mrs. Gano's appearance as she sat in state
between Daniel Boone and the centre table, nothing save the light in her
eyes. Her veil, her lawn sleeves, and kerchief could not be whiter, even
in Ethan's honor, and her rusty black silk wore resolutely its air of
changeless age. But An' Jerusha, very rheumatic and tottery, went brave
as an autumn sunset. She was peeping in at the parlor door now, her head
done up deftly in a purple and orange bandanna.

"I jes' think I'll go, mehm, en wawtch fur Marse Efan f'om de terrus."

"You are sure everything's ready?"

"Yes, mehm. It wus po'ful short notice, en I kin tell you it's been nip
and tuck. No onery niggers could 'a' done it; but me and Venie, _we_
done it." And Jerusha carried her splendid turban off down the terrace
with the air of an aged generalissimo.

Even John Gano had made his toilet with care to-day. He joined the
others in the parlor a few minutes before setting off to the station to
meet his nephew. Mrs. Gano's sharp eyes travelled over him for once
without protest.

"You do look nice, father," said Val.

John Gano was prematurely old. His untrimmed beard, his bent head with
its leonine mane of iron-gray hair, lent him an almost patriarchal look.
And yet this man was still in the forties. Such forestalling of old age
is no unfamiliar phenomenon in America. He stood by the window drawing
on the well-worn left-hand glove; the right, carefully folded, and good
almost as new, had been much carried, but never worn.

"I must thin out these maples and dogwoods," he said, with critical eyes
on the abundant gold and scarlet foliage in front of the house.

"No, no," protested his mother; "I like something before my windows.
Your pruning is too ruthless."

"I can't have the symmetry of the maples interfered with," he said, with
great decision.

"Don't be too late to meet Ethan."

"... grown astonishingly!" he ejaculated with pride, as he went off;
"and only planted in the fall of '81!"

Val had put her hair up. But there was too much of it; it overweighted
the small head. The shifting lights in the unruly waves, and the blue of
the eyes, were brought out by the particular shade of navy cloth that
she wore--so plainly made that it had the effect of a cunning artifice
to show off the lithe figure.

But it was less art than necessity and scarcity of cloth that governed
the design. Aunt Valeria had worn it, remodelled to the flamboyant
fashion of her day, but it was the identical blue travelling-habit of
family legend in which Mrs. Gano, as a girl, made that journey across
the Alleghanies in a stage-coach. It was the first time Val had worn it.
She was saving it up for New York. The tiny silver disks down the front
of the bodice found themselves again, after half a century, buttoning up
an eager young body, panting, impatient to cross the mountains from this
side, with back to the westering sun, and with bright silver buttons,
like bosses on a shield, ready to receive the first dart from out the
east.

The party in the parlor were weary enough waiting before An' Jerusha
hobbled into the front hall with a negro lad in tow, who brought the
news that:

"Dey's bin a accidunt on de line; nobuddy hurt, but the train'll be
seberal hours late. Mr. Gano reckons he'll stay ober at de station till
it gits yere."

"Isn't it just like cousin Ethan!" Emmie burst out, when the two blacks
had gone. "I don't believe he'll ever come--I don't believe we've got a
cousin Ethan!" she wound up, with exasperation.

Partly to reassure herself, partly to kill time, she went into her
grandmother's room and brought back her cousin's latest photograph.

"Don't you sometimes think this is the crossest-looking of any?" she
whispered to Val.

"I don't think it's cross--just grave. I hate grinning men."

"I don't want him to grin; but his mouth looks--looks---- Still, I _do_
like his mustache brushed that way, so you can see his lips a little.
And his eyes!--oh! his eyes are beautiful!"

They studied the picture for some moments held between them.

"Do you quite like his chin?" pursued Emmie.

"I like that best of all except his nose," said Val, firmly.

"Oh, what makes you like his _nose_?"

"Because it isn't too little, and because it's rather bony, and because
it's got a bridge."

"Oh, well, I think I'd prefer it quite straight instead of aquiline. But
he's very handsome. It's nice having him look like that."

Emmie held the photograph off, and tilted her head from side to side.

"Grandma says cousin Ethan and me used to be rather alike as children."
She smiled contentedly. "I hope he'll go to church."

She took the picture back presently, but before she replaced it on the
mantel-piece she looked round over her shoulder. Reassured, she kissed
the pasteboard fervently, and put it down with shamefaced, fluttering
haste.

The sun set and the light faded. Still no Ethan. A brief interval for
supper at six, and the three returned to the parlor. Mrs. Gano
manifested a hitherto unsuspected leaning towards illumination. The
branch candlesticks, for the first time within the memory of man, held
each its triple flame, and a shaded lamp shed a crimson glow over the
centre table. She made an excursion into the hall, and complained that
the Moorish lamp burned faint and insufficiently. She came back, saying:

"It will seem cold after France," and with her own hands she lit the
ready-laid fire in the grate. Later, she went to the front door and
objected to the absence of the moon.

"It's really dangerous coming up those steps in the pitch-dark,
especially since the second stone was broken."

At half-past eight she shut her book suddenly.

"Val, couldn't you get your father's new-fangled lantern--that patent
incandescent contrivance--and set it lighted at the top of the steps?"

"Y-yes, ma'am, if you think it won't look funny. It's like the
head-light of an engine."

"Funny? Not at all. There's nothing your cousin Ethan dislikes so much
as the dark--unless he's greatly altered."

So Val got the lantern, and set it where the wide diverging rays flared
out across the street, as a fan of zodiacal light opens gaudily across
the Milky Way on arctic nights, leaving travellers on the ways of this
world but little illumined, for all the glory of heaven.

So with the patent incandescent lantern. It picked out the whitewashed
hitching-post with an ostentation of good-will, flooded the farther side
of the street, and fell with a kind of fierce satisfaction upon the ugly
new wooden tenements opposite. But this side, gutter, and gate, and
little flight of worn and broken steps, were left in denser darkness.

Val came in, complaining for the first time at the delay.

"I hope poor father isn't waiting all these hours for his supper."

"Oh, he'll go to the hotel, you may be sure."

Mrs. Gano did not speak as if the thought brought her particular
satisfaction.

"It's getting cold; I just wish he'd come home. I don't believe there's
the least use expecting cousin Ethan before to-morrow."

But when Emmie, half an hour later, asked for serious advice:

"Now, _do_ you think I'd have time to eat another apple before he
comes?"

"I wouldn't risk it," said Val; "we'll tell fortunes with the seeds
you've got already."

The two girls sat on the moth-eaten velvet sofa. Emmie had spread her
apple-seeds out on last evening's _Mioto Gazette_, and rubbed her fruity
fingers on a diminutive pocket-handkerchief.

"Now I've named them," she said, in a whisper.

Val pointed at random:


     "One I love, two I love, three I love, I say;
     Four I love with all my heart, five I cast away;
     Six he loves, seven she loves, eight they both love;
     Nine he comes, ten he tarries,
     Eleven he courts--"


"Oh," sighed Emmie, "only one more needed."

She rumpled up the paper, and with a glance towards her grandmother she
thrust it behind the sofa.

"Pig!" remonstrated Val, under her breath, for once on the side of law
and order.

"Ain't a pig. I shall see what my new shoe-buttons say," Emmie
whispered. "Rich man, poor man, beggarman, thief, doctor, lawyer,
merchant. Ha! going to be a chieftess. Now what shall I wear? Silk,
satin, calico, cotton," and on till she was able to announce, with dark
eyes glancing and full of glee: "Satin!"

"You cheated. You haven't any right to count the one that's off."

"Course I have. They're brand-new shoes, and the buttons haven't any
right to come off first time. And it's _goin'_ to be satin--green satin,
bright, beautiful grass-green satin. Now I'll tell _your_ fortune," she
added, amiably.

But Val sprang up, crying:

"He's come."

There was the rattle of wheels, at all events, in the quiet side street.
The two girls rushed to the door and down to the gate. A carriage
stopped. Their father got out with his usual air of weary haste. He was
saying something disparaging of that Europe he had never seen,
applauding his nephew's return to his native land. Val, her
grandmother's warning fresh in mind, caught up the lantern and held it
high above her head, slanted slightly, so as to catch within the radius
of light the tall, slight figure that followed her father so lightly up
the broken steps.

"Your own country has need of you," John Gano was winding up; "she is
waiting for just such a man."

He paused under the red-bud tree.

Val still stood with the lantern conscientiously held up, lost for that
first moment in her own absorbing impressions. Young Gano looked at her
with quick realization of the eager, buoyant attitude, the uplifted face
on which the strong light streamed, the wide, earnest outlook of eyes
with so much more in them of question than of welcome, they might have
been accustomed to sweeping far horizons from the watch-towers of the
world.

An infinitesimal pause, and then:

"How do you do, America?" he said, smiling, and took his cousin's hand.

Val felt instantly he was laughing at her for a kind of travesty of
Liberty Enlightening the World. She drew back quickly, lowering the
lantern.

"I am Val," she said, "and this is Emmie."

The younger girl held up her pretty face, and her cousin kissed her.

"Where's grandmamma?" he said, eagerly, as he looked up.

She stood at the door. In the cross lights of lantern in front and
Moorish lamp behind, she seemed to be in all the animate world the thing
least changed since she had stood there to receive the boy nineteen
summers before. Only a little frailer, a little whiter haired, subtly
fined down by the years. With an impetuosity that made Val tremble for
the fragile watcher at the door, Ethan sprang forward and up the two
steps of the porch. He stopped before her with a curious reverence, and
took her gently in his arms. Her head drooped on his shoulder. Val saw
she had drawn the veil across her face. His arm still round her, Ethan
turned with her into the hall.

"What!" he said, seeing the parlor lit, "am I company this time?"

"Tell Jerusha to serve supper," said Mrs. Gano, tremulously, to Val.

"Jerusha! Fancy her being still alive! But no supper, thank you; there
was a dining-car on my miserable train."

The others went into the parlor, while Val took the lantern and the
message to the kitchen, and then hurried back.

Emmie was beaming beside her cousin, sitting as close to him as she
could get on the old velvet sofa. Opposite sat Mrs. Gano, animated,
smiling. John Gano stood with parted coat-tails in front of the fire.

"And how does life abroad compare on the whole with life in America?" he
was asking.

"Well, outwardly it is very different, of course."

"Different! I should think so," said Val, impulsively.

"_Outwardly different_," repeated John Gano. "I should think the spirit
as well--the point of view utterly alien from ours."

"I believe _I'd_ like Europe," said the sympathetic Emmie, "but Val's
been wondering a great deal how you could bear it so long, especially
after your grandfather was dead, and you could do as you liked."

Mrs. Gano sat very straight, not joining in the conversation at this
point, but succeeding to admiration in conveying her opinions.

"I dare say," explained John Gano; "there has been some not altogether
unnatural fear that the Old World might infect even you, as it has done
other good Americans."

"How is that?"

John Gano shook his lion locks ominously. Ethan looked at his
grandmother. Her slow head-shake set the white veil waving. Evidently,
whatever the danger might be, it was something too hideous for words. He
looked at Val. She turned away her eyes. The infected one began to smile
involuntarily. His youngest cousin alone of that patriotic company
looked at him with no shadow of misgiving.

"There's a young man belongs to this town," she said, beginning in
gentle explanatory tones, but waxing indignant as she went on, "and his
name's Jimmie Battle--used to be quite a nice young man. Grandma knew
his father's father--"

"Certainly, I knew all about the Battle family, from A to Izzard."

"Let _me_ tell, grandma. Well, Jimmie Battle went to Paris for a week,
and when he got back to America he called himself James Battelle.
Everybody loathes and despises--I mean, doesn't like Jimmie any more."

The tension gave way at this point, and they joined in Ethan's laughter.

"I'm afraid, like the abhorred Mr. Battelle, I didn't object to the
French variant of my name; but I did mind the English persistence in
calling me Eth-an Gáy-no."

"Quite ridiculous," said his grandmother.

"But did they go on speaking of you in that horrid way?" asked Val,
incredulously.

Ethan nodded.

"I wouldn't have stayed with such people a minute," she said--"at least,
only long enough to see how ridiculous they were, and then come straight
home."

"Miss Hills, she's my Sunday-school teacher," remarked Emmie, "she's
been abroad, and she says all English people call cake _cyke_."

"Ah, let us hope Miss Hills is more conversant with the manners and
customs of the ancient Hebrews."

"We _thought_ you'd be standing up for Europe," said Val, with a
commiserating smile. "Perhaps you'll say all the English don't say
_militree_ for military."

Ethan only laughed, and began to talk of Paris. Val found herself
listening, not to the words, but to the tones of her cousin's voice,
with a sense of rising excitement. Of all kinds of beauty, and of all
forms of fascination, that which found the girl most defenceless was
harmony in sound. It is doubtful if any eloquence could have reached her
through a cracked or raucous voice. But this one, with its vibrant,
searching resonance, that yet held no effect of harshness, its pliancy,
its command of half-tones, its haunting timbre--this was a voice that,
no matter what it said, made music and uttered charms. No one in New
Plymouth, no one Val had ever heard before, spoke like this. Yet the
accent was frankly Northern, and the diction free from any obtrusive
elegance or trace of pedantry. It was the voice that gave the words
their quality.

Before to-night Val had judged of speech and matter critically enough,
being an even uncomfortably observant young person; but this sound went
thrilling along her nerves, setting up so strange a tumult as to shut
out sense. After all, he was only talking about France. What did France
matter? It might as well be Mars. The important fact was that in the
grave, dark face, great wonderful eyes were shining, deeper, gloomier
than Emmie's. But his smile made generous amends. It made the heart beat
to look at the mobile mouth. And Emmie had dared to kiss him! Something
caught in Val's breast as she thought of such boldness. But speaking of
boldness, it was to this person she had written for help to get her into
opera. How had she dared? Did he have the letter in his pocket? Would he
take it out presently, and bring her to confusion before the family?

"This room's exactly the same," he said, suddenly, breaking away from
the discussion as to whether Republicanism suited the volatile,
spectacle-loving Gaul. "My old friend Daniel Boone's still at his post,
I see; and, why, the very silver paper on the walls is the same!"

"No, no," protested Mrs. Gano. "This is new. It hasn't been up more
than"--she reflected.

"Nine years ago, this coming May," said John Gano.

"Oh, really!" Ethan passed his slim, brown finger-tips lightly over the
wall behind the sofa. "It's just as nice as the old kind was," he said,
smiling; "it comes off on your fingers, shiny and metallic."

"Yes," said Val; "just like the dust off a butterfly's wings."

"So it is." He nodded across the room at her. "I remember what fun I
used to think it to rub it off--just a little, grandmamma."

"If you remember that," said Mrs. Gano, indulgently, "you remember I
always reproved you for it."

"No, no." He jumped up, and stood very tall and smiling in front of
her, with his hands behind his back, like a guilty urchin. "You've
forgotten. When you caught me with silvery fingers, I used to be awfully
alarmed. I always tried to disarm you by saying 'I was _afraid_ you'd
scold.' Then you would say, 'I never scold. I point out your
defects--it's what I'm here for.'"

They all laughed, the two girls with some misgiving.

This repartee still did service on occasion.

"Oh, but those were good times!" Yet even as he said the words the gay
look faded out of his face. "It was a long while ago."

"It's nineteen years," said John Gano, who was wrestling with a fit of
coughing. These attacks were such a commonplace in the family life that
the rest were aware of this one only when Ethan said:

"What a frightful cough you've got, Uncle John."

"No--nothing unusual. It begins like this when the cold weather comes
on."

"Oh, father, you don't call to-day cold!" said Emmie.

"Your uncle is much better than he used to be," said Mrs. Gano, rising
with her habitual every-day decision, and glancing at the clock. "You
must be tired, Ethan?"

"Do you think you're _too_ tired--" Val began, and hesitated, seized
again with an unaccustomed shyness.

"I'm as fresh as possible."

He turned and looked inquiringly at her.

"I was just thinking how excited An' Jerusha's been about your coming,
and--"

"Why, of course; I'll go out and see her a moment."

"May I come, too?" asked Emmie.

"Yes, do." He glanced towards Val, but she turned away an indifferent
face. "Come."

He went off with Emmie, leaving Val behind, consumed with longing to go,
but feeling as if she were chained to her chair.

"I don't like to see him looking delicate," said John Gano.

"Delicate! What an idea!" remonstrated his mother.

"He is young to have that slight inclination to stoop."

"Mere habit. You see, he is so tall. A man of six feet can afford to
stoop just a little. It's hardly perceptible."

John Gano shook his head.

"Thinner than he ought to be."

"My patience, but you're hard to please! As if a fat man weren't an
abhorrence."

"I didn't say I wanted to see him porpoisical."

"A man of Ethan's age ought not to have an ounce of superfluous flesh."

"Well, I should say he hadn't."

"All of us have invariably been thin."

"Exactly what I have in mind. Ethan has all the physical characteristics
of our family."

Out in the kitchen An' Jerusha was expressing similar sentiments.

"Law sakes! I's tickled t' death you's come home. Jes' de same as ebber;
spit en image ob yo' father. I monstus glad t' see yo', Mars Efan. Been
ve'y jubous 'bout yo' gitten back fo' I done kick de bucket," and she
laughed to keep from crying outright.

Emmie brought him back in triumph to the parlor, and they all said
good-night.

When Val got into bed and began the inevitable story where she left off
the night before, behold, the hero's face was the face of her cousin,
and the hero's voice was the voice of Ethan Gano.


Val woke next day with a flashing sense of something wonderful having
happened. She sat up in bed. Ah, yes! A bound, and she was out on the
floor, pushing wider open the heavy shutter.

Ah! how good the air smelled, a little frosty, and yet golden, with
something in it aromatic, tingling. She raced through her toilet, but
after it was finished she stood a long while in front of the glass.
Suddenly she threw back her head and snapped her fingers in the air.
Then she ran down-stairs. Going out by the veranda, she saw her cousin
standing at the farther end, where the wisteria hung down in festoons.
He was looking out through the loops and tangles. He turned, hearing the
suddenly arrested step.

"Good-morning, America," he said, coming forward with that easy swinging
gait of his.

"Good-morning," said Val, half laughing, half offended.

She stood a little awkwardly, seeming not to see his hand. He only
smiled, and leaned his tall figure in the fawn-colored clothes against
the pillar.

"Tell me, America, do you have much weather as fine as this?"

"We have Indian summer in this country, if that's what you mean."

He looked so well against the pillar. Val longed to take up some
nonchalant attitude by the one nearest her, but she remembered it was
black with the all-pervading coal-dust, and forbore being picturesque at
the price.

"Of course," Ethan assented. "I'd forgotten you had a fifth season in
your calendar. Naturally, the old regulation four wouldn't content you."

"I can't think why you talk as if you weren't an American yourself. You
might be some poor foreigner--"

"Just what I am, I'm afraid."

"_You?_"

He nodded.

"That's the worst of living abroad a lot," he said: "you are always a
foreigner there. But it's only when you come home, and find that you are
more of a foreigner than ever, that you begin to mind."

"You don't look as if you minded much."

"Ah, that's the good face I put on."

("Horrid, sneering French ways," she commented to herself, not really
thinking so, but feeling it a duty and a kind of instinctive defence to
pretend she did. Something rueful in his laugh was not lost upon her.)

"Still, I do appreciate your Indian summer," he added.

"I should think so." She threw back her head and drew in the sweet,
sun-laden air. "It's the very best time of all the year." He didn't
answer. "Don't you think so?"

"I think it a little melancholy, for all it's so beautiful."

"How curious! It's the time that makes me happiest."

"Is it?"

"Perhaps you prefer spring?" She spoke as one condescending to
childishness. "A good many people seem to."

"Yes, all the old, and all--"

"All what?"

"All foreigners."

The breakfast-bell rang.

No trays went up-stairs that morning. Everybody appeared, and the two
girls couldn't remember when so gay a party had assembled in the dingy
dining-room. But the pleasantry was of that strictly family character
whose special savor is withheld from the outsider.

As Ethan was taking his place by Mrs. Gano, he stopped suddenly,
catching sight of the preternaturally tall silver coffee-pot, and made
obeisance.

"Sir or madam," he said, "I've travelled far since we parted, but I've
never seen your equal."

Mrs. Gano laughed with the rest.

"That means the Mioto air has made you readier for your morning cup than
you've been since you were here before. Or perhaps you agree with
Frederika Bremer's old woman, 'When I see a coffee-pot, it's the same to
me as if I saw an angel from heaven.'"

"She must have meant this one."

"Emmie has another name for it," said John Gano, also unbending.

"Father!" remonstrated his little daughter, blushing, "it's a great many
years since I called it anything but coffee-pot."

"But before that?" persisted cousin Ethan.

"Possi-tot!"

And everybody but Emmie laughed as if it were the finest jest in the
world.

After breakfast they all walked about the grounds in a body, John Gano
pointing out the superiority of his trees, and Ethan indicating his
best-beloved old haunts, the two girls exchanging looks of amazement
that he should know their playground so intimately. Ethan was much
struck by the general dilapidation. If Uncle Elijah--peace to his
ashes!--had found cause to remark nearly twenty years before that the
place was going to ruin, there was good ground for the assertion to-day.

Ethan remembered the wilderness as being inexorably confined to that
vast region (pitifully shrunken to the older eye) below the second
flight of stone steps. But "Mr." Hall, who had mowed and clipped and
gardened the upper region, having joined the ghosts, for whom he had
felt so little fellowship here on earth, the wilderness had risen in his
absence and howled, mounting terrace after terrace, and was now laying
open siege to the very Fort itself. To be sure, there were garden
borders under the front windows, where John Gano lingered with a tender
solicitude, lamenting for the Eschscholtzia's sake the lack of sun. But
the flourishing and carefully tended pansy border marked only the more
definitely the surrounding desolation.

"There's a strange dog!" said Mrs. Gano. "Some one has left the gate
open."

"He may have got in down there where there's a picket missing in the
fence," said Ethan.

"Oh, that picket hasn't been there for ages," Val answered; "but the old
hundred-leaved rose-bushes are so thick in that corner, and so thorny,
nothing can get past."

As she ran forward to eject the strange dog, she caught her foot in the
dry, tangled grass, and, but for Ethan's quick hand, would have fallen.

"_Oh!_" she said, flushing and looking confused; then, without any
proper acknowledgment, she darted off after the dog.

"If _I_ did that, father, you'd say I was clumsy," said Emmie, smiling
up into his face in the prettiest way in the world.

"The grass is very long," said John Gano--"long and matted."

"It grows with great rapidity," said his mother. "It seems only
yesterday we had a man here cutting it."

"It was the 29th of June."

"Oh, you must be mistaken."

John Gano shook his head.

"I remember quite well. It was the anniversary of Clay's death."

Val joined them again, breathless from the chase. Ethan had paused
absent-mindedly near the corner of the wooden L, where the
weather-boarding was hanging loose. It wasn't in the best taste, Val
felt, that he should stare so at that strip of rotten wood, that refused
any longer to hold the rusty nails. She longed to touch his arm, to
rouse him.

"All this needs renewing," admitted John Gano, as though in answer to a
verbal observation.

"A--yes," said Ethan, and they went on.

It was odd how the unsparing sunshine and a new pair of eyes in the
party revealed the wide-spread dilapidation of the place to its old
inhabitants. Val had hardly noticed it before.

John Gano picked up a blackened, weather-worn shingle off the grass.

"The equinox brought down a fresh crop of these," he said, tossing the
old shingle into the wood-shed.

"Comes off the L, I suppose," said Ethan.

"No, the main roof."

"Doesn't it leak, then?"

"A little," answered his uncle, cheerfully.

"That must be bad for the house."

"We shall be roofed with slate next time," said Mrs. Gano; "it lasts
longer."

"Oh, we can't complain of the way a shingle roof has lasted, that's done
duty more than a quarter of a century," returned her son.

"Whenever it rains we have such fun," said Emmie. "We carry up an army
of buckets and basins and washtubs to catch the rain in the attic. Last
week it came through into father's room in the night, and Val--"

"Emmeline," said Mrs. Gano, "walk on; the path is narrow here."

As they passed the kitchen-window Ethan glanced in.

"Good-morning, Aunt Jerusha! Morning, Venus!"

"Mawnin'!"

"Mawnin', Marse Efan!"

The old woman hobbled delightedly to the window, avoiding a broken place
in the flooring.

"I see you don't neglect my knocker--shines like gold."

"Go long, Marse Efan!" Her rich chuckling bubbled over. "Tooby suah I
ain't disremember dat ar knocker o' yourn--not oncet in twenty yeah."

"Why do you have those little squares of zinc nailed all over your
kitchen floor, Aunt Jerusha?"

"Law sakes alive!"--she rolled and shook--"dey's a despit lot o' rats
down sullar, an' I can't b'ar 'em up yere nohow."

Ethan was the only one of the party outside to join her cheerful
laughter. But the ruinous state of the property was too obvious for him
to realize that he could possibly be expected to overlook it.

When they went in-doors Ethan followed his grandmother to her own room,
where he had sat with her that first evening so long ago and heard that
Jerusha was his aunt. They had a long and eminently satisfactory talk
until, towards its end, Ethan straightforwardly introduced the subject
of the evident need of repairs, and the pleasure it would give him to--

He was "quite mistaken," she interrupted, drawing herself up, and, to
his amazement, receiving the suggestion at the point of the sword. There
was nothing wrong with the place. He had his head full of châteaus and
palaces. Of course, this was quite an ordinary--

"No, no, it's not the least ordinary. It's picturesque and beautiful;
but it--you must see for yourself it's falling to decay."

"Like ourselves, it doesn't get younger; but it naturally suits us
better than it can hope to suit you."

He gave up his point for the time being, finding a sudden flaw in his
own taste, that could so soon after his arrival suggest that anything
here could be changed for the better.

"Come to the upper hall," he said to Val after the mid-day dinner; "help
me to unpack, and see if anything I've picked up in my travels will do
for a present to Aunt Jerusha."

Val followed him up-stairs, into the seventh heaven. She knew she ought
to call Emmie; but why spoil it?

"You never answered my last letter," she said with lowered voice as they
reached the landing.

"Didn't I? I'm so sorry. I thought I had. But it's so long ago."

"Not so very."

"About three years. You've rather neglected me of late." He smiled down
into her lifted eyes.

"Perhaps I didn't know your new address."

"'Monroe et Cie, 7, Rue Scribe, Paris,' always finds me."

"I thought you told grandma to write direct to the Rue de Provence."

"Ah yes, at one time. I left there a long while ago."

He was unlocking his trunk. Should she tell him about the letter that
had evidently got lost? It somehow wouldn't be so easy as she supposed.
And what was the use? Anyhow, here was Emmie trailing up-stairs with a
rather downcast face, saying:

"Grandma thought I might come too and see Aunt Jerusha's--"

"Of course; and why not, I'd like to know?" said Ethan, with a welcoming
look, as he tumbled his clothes out on the floor. It was awfully
interesting--embarrassing, too. What a lot of things he had, for a man!

"I hope he isn't a dandy," thought Val, with a moment's misgiving. As a
top-heavy pile of linen and flannel fell against her arm, she was
conscious of an odd sense of pleasure, under her shrinking from the
contact. It was as if he himself had touched her. Emmie knelt down and
gathered up the things, and folded them with her characteristic clumsy
helpfulness. These mechanical offices were as far from her limited range
of dexterity as the wish to be of service was ever present in her
amiable soul.

"Now, this was what I thought might do." He opened a box and took out an
Indian silver necklace.

"Just the thing!" cried Val; "how she'll love the dangles!"

"And these for Venus, eh?" He laid down two bangles.

"Yes, yes."

"Think of Venus havin' 'em _both_," murmured Emmie, hanging over them,
fascinated.

Val saw there were more silver ornaments in the little box, but Ethan
was diving into the trunk again.

"This is what I've brought you," he said, still on one knee over the
trunk. He turned and handed them each a little morocco case. A murmur of
surprised thanks, a click of opening clasps, and before each girl's eyes
gleamed a tiny watch, round which lay coiled a fine little chain.

"Oh, oh, oh!" Emmie dropped a pile of shirts on the floor and danced
about. "My initials on the back in pink coral!"

"Mine in turquoise! Oh, how _did_ you know blue was my color?" But Emmie
had precipitated herself upon Ethan's bosom and was hugging him wildly.

He was laughing, and crying "Help! help!" And when Emmie desisted, "Help
me to throw those clothes back."

They put everything away in wild disorder, except one small package,
which he had pocketed.

"Let's go and show our watches to grandma," said Emmie; and they all
went down to the long room.

Ethan had his hand on the door-knob.

"Oh, we always knock," said Emmie, not too excited even by a gold and
coral watch but what she could supply so alarming an omission.

"Come in."

Ethan paused a moment on the threshold while his cousins rushed in. He
was thinking how that particular "Come in," aided perhaps by the
preliminary formality of a discreet knock (how could he have
forgotten!); the unchanged aspect of the big room and its occupant in
the queer red chair--how it all gave him back his childhood; gave him
back, too, in some indefinable way, his old feeling of being "in the
Presence." All the adulation of which he himself had been the object at
home and abroad had not changed this. In Paris he was a personage; in
the press of two continents he was a respectfully mentioned millionaire;
in the select circles of half a dozen capitals he was courted and fawned
upon as a great _parti;_ but in the long room he was a vassal, if not
still a child. It amused him to think that he humored the notion. Mrs.
Gano had received the deputation smiling, and had put on her spectacles.
But as she examined the watches, while the girls chorused, and Ethan
walked about, hands in pockets, looking at the browned engravings, the
old woman grew grave.

"These watches are very handsome," she said; "too handsome for little
girls."

"Oh _no!_"

"I'm not a little girl," said Val; "I'm--"

"They won't be in keeping, but they are very beautiful."

She was shrivelling up in some unaccountable way.

"I couldn't think," said Ethan, coming forward, "what souvenir I should
bring _you_ of France." He drew the package out of his pocket and opened
it. "Do you remember how I used to ask you about the French Revolution
when I was a child, and all the stories you used to tell me, and how
sorry we were for Louis and poor Marie Antoinette? You remember telling
me how, when she heard the people were dying for want of bread, she
asked, 'Why don't they eat cake?'"

He had opened a box and taken out an enamelled crucifix, from which
hung a long chain of small but exquisitely chosen pearls fastened with a
jewelled clasp.

"This is something Marie Antoinette wore. I thought you'd like to have
it."

"Oh no!" drawing back quickly.

He stared at her. She added, almost nervously:

"I--I never wear jewelry."

"But--but this!" he protested, not a little dashed.

"Why, grandma, you're wearing pearl pins in your veil this very moment,"
said Val.

"They--oh, they are little old seed-pearls; they are nothing. I couldn't
think of wearing a costly thing like this." She waved her long fingers
towards the chain with an air of distaste. "Such things are not suitable
here."

"But why--why not?" exclaimed Ethan.

"You have only to look about," she said, gravely. "That is a beautiful
and costly toy, my dear. Keep it for your wife."

"Let's go and give Jerusha _her_ necklace," suggested Emmie, by way of
carrying off a trying situation.

"Ah yes," said Mrs. Gano, with an air of relief; "I'm glad you've
remembered Jerusha," and she gave the silver collar praise unstinted.




CHAPTER XIX


The next afternoon Mrs. Gano and her son took Ethan out driving in
state. Val and Emmie watched them off with eyes of envy. Ethan looked
back at the young people with something of the same expression. The hack
was old and fusty, and was drawn by a single sorrowful beast, but there
was an air of ceremony about the whole proceeding not lost on Ethan. His
uncle pointed out the sights, and, in the intervals of bouts of
coughing, discussed town and national politics. Mrs. Gano, in excellent
spirits, planned a series of drives to points of interest, in every
direction, as long as the fine weather should last. Ethan began to quail
inwardly at the prospect, and yet these odd relations interested him
infinitely more than he had expected. And as soon as that cough of his
uncle's became intolerable he would have urgent business in Boston.
Meanwhile, apropos of these drives, he realized that he would never dare
to offer to pay for the carriage hire. He turned the problem over in his
mind, and after they came home he went out and had a conversation with
the liveryman. A telegram was despatched to a Columbus carriage
manufactory, and an appointment made with the liveryman to go next day
to a neighboring farm and inspect some horseflesh.

Before the week was out, a brougham and a well-conditioned pair of grays
stood daily before the Fort, when the weather was clement. Mrs. Gano,
less enthusiastic over this new arrival than any one else, nevertheless
drove about day after day in the lovely mild weather, with the top off
"Ethan's newfangled coach," and a look of extreme satisfaction upon her
face. But her son decided that, mild as was the autumn air, it came to
him in too great draughts behind the flying grays. After that first
august apparition of the three elder Ganos in Ethan's equipage, John
Gano declined to sustain his part in the daily triumphal progress
through the streets of the appreciative town. Naturally, in a place of
that size, Mrs. Gano's millionaire grandson was the talk of the hour,
and Val and Emmie sunned themselves in his reflected glory. Such is the
callousness of youth, that it was a moment of scarcely clouded rapture
to the younger generation when John Gano decided to stay at home and
prune the dogwoods.

Val and Emmie accepted the proffered places on the front seat with an
excitement not to be conveyed to those souls deadened by the luxury of
"keeping a carriage" all their lives.

Ethan had tried to insist that one of his cousins should sit by Mrs.
Gano.

"Nonsense!" said that lady; "children always sit in front."

Aunt Jerusha and Venus peeped discreetly round the corner of the house,
as usual, to see them start.

"My! Miss Emmie's growin' beautifler and beautifler," Venus had said, as
the younger girl smiled and blushed her soft "Thank you, cousin Ethan,"
for his helping hand.

Val, who had already hopped in, turned and waved excitedly to the
servants.

"My _dear!_" remonstrated her grandmother, while old Jerusha nodded her
bright turban and whispered: "Yah! Miss Emmie's awful handsome, but she
ain't wavin'; dose chillens tickled to death. Why, Miss Val's face is
like a lamp."

As the grays leaped forward, and the two young hearts leaped responsive,
Emmie had a flashing realization of what Elijah felt like, going to
heaven in his chariot of fire.

To Val the rapturous excitement of the thing was just another proof of
the infinite possibilities life afforded for being ecstatically happy.
She would not have admitted there was even a heavenly comparison
wherewith to match this blissful flying along with cousin Ethan
opposite, he talking mostly to grandmamma, of course, but sometimes
meeting his cousin's eyes, and smiling in a way that made the breath
catch in the breast.

Julia was coming out of her gate that very first day that the four drove
by. Val sat up very straight, and made her a sign, subsiding quickly
upon a look from Mrs. Gano. But Ethan turned round and looked back.

"What a pretty girl! Who is she?"

"My best friend," said Val. "You know, I've shown you her house."

"Ah yes--Julia--"

"Otway. Such lovely people, all the Otways."

"A most estimable family," admitted Mrs. Gano; "rather free-and-easy in
their ways. As Emmie said when she was five or six, 'They's the kind of
people that sits on beds.'"

Emmie smiled a pleased smile at this recollection of infant
perspicacity.

"That was when the Otway children were too little to know any better,"
Val said. "You wait, cousin Ethan, till you know Julia. You just ought
to hear her play the piano! She's coming to supper to-morrow, and, oh!
she wants to know if you like tennis."

"Yes. Has she got a court?"

"A splendid one. Haven't you noticed? Just behind the osage-trees."

"Oh, we'll go and play some morning."

"There! you see, grandma, he _doesn't_ think he's too old or too busy to
play games. But I can't go in the mornings. I have lessons with grandma,
you know, till one o'clock, and Julia's at school till half-past two,
except on Saturdays."

"So am I," said Emmie, sadly. "I wish I were going East, and needn't
begin a term that I couldn't finish."

Val was conscious of something like a qualm at not having thought about
the East, or even the opera, for days. But wait! she would find an
opportunity of taking cousin Ethan into her confidence. Then the great
scheme would resume its former gigantic proportions. Hitherto, whenever
she had been alone with her cousin, she had been seized with a strange
shyness, an excitement that put everything else out of her head except
that here was she, and here was he. It was very queer and very
disconcerting, but it was a heavenly feeling, all the same.

"Here's Miss Tibbs coming," said Emmie, wishing to acquaint their guest
with all the leading characteristics of the place. "She's quite the most
hideous--ahem!--well, she's a very plain lady. And _oh! do_ you see that
man going into the red-brick house?"

"That's Jimmie Battle," said Mrs. Gano.

"Yes. Val, show us how he talks when he tries to be English, and then
forgets."

"Oh yes," said Val, nothing loath. "He was telling something funny that
happened: 'I laahfed and I laahfed, and, oh _golly!_ how I laffed!'"

"Val, I'm amazed at your language!"

"It's Jimmie's language--of course, we're all amazed."

"Look, Val, there goes Harry Wilbur," said Emmie.

Yes, it was Harry, pretending not to see them. Val had not answered his
last letters, and since he had not called all these days, he must be
"mad."

"Who is Harry Wilbur?" Ethan asked, perceiving the interest taken in
this citizen.

"Son of our old friend, Judge Wilbur," said Mrs. Gano.

"We _used_ to say he was the handsomest man in New Plymouth," said
Emmie, looking reflectively at Ethan.

"And he's the best bat in the West," added Val, loyally; but, oh! how
insignificant blond men were in comparison with--

They passed Miss Appleby taking a _posse_ of her young lady boarders out
for a walk.

"They all know _you_, cousin Ethan, and they're just _dying_ to turn and
look back. We talked about you all recess."

"Did you?" he laughed.

"Girls chatter too much," said Mrs. Gano; "they were more discreet in my
day."

But Emmie knew this was a time of privilege.

"The girls at the Seminary are nearly every one Presbyterians. They
don't like being Presbyterians at all."

"Why not?"

"'Cause they can't come to _our_ church on Sunday."

Now they were going up the hill. The young people must get out and walk.
Delicious moment of being helped to dismount. The unskilful Emmie, for
all cousin Ethan's hand, had stumbled and twisted her foot. She was
lifted back, to a sympathetic chorus. Ethan had taken off a glove to try
the catch on the carriage door, which did not work easily. He held the
glove in his hand as Val and he trudged up the cinder road. Why, that
was like her father! And now that Val thought of it, cousin Ethan had
several little ways that recalled her father. Both indulged in fits of
gloomy, absolute silence "all about nothing," when they might be
discoursing pleasantly to their fellows. She glanced at her cousin
sideways. Certainly he and John Gano were very different, too, in a
sense. The elder man seemed hewn out of wood, Ethan was cut in ivory.
Why did he say nothing? He began to draw on his glove, absently, with a
preoccupied air.

He was thinking to-day of Mary Burne. Where was she? Had she solved the
enigma? He tried to shake her out of his thoughts, but she came back and
back.

Val snatched a mullein leaf from the hill-side as she passed.

"Don't you love these velvety things?" she said. "Just feel before you
put on your glove."

"N-no"--he looked suspiciously at the silver-gray leaf--"no, thank you."

"Why not?"

"I don't like touching things like that."

"But why?"

"Oh, just an absurd notion of mine."

"But is it a notion, or is it a real feeling?"

He laughed.

"Now I know what reality is to my cousin Val."

"But this isn't prickly. It's soft as velvet."

"I know--too much like velvet."

"Do you hate soft things?"

"No, but I hate things that catch my nails." He gave a little comic
shiver.

"Is _that_ why you won't take a peach in your fingers?"

"You've noticed?"

He turned his head and glanced down at her. She looked away.

"I wonder what makes you like that?" she said.

"Can't imagine."

"It must make you shiver inside just to _look_ at our velveteen
jackets."

"I don't so much mind looking at them."

"But you'd hate to touch them?"

He laughed.

"Yes, fair catechist, I would; and if the murder must out, it's because
of Emmie's velvet jacket that Emmie's ankle's hurt. She wouldn't have
fallen if I had lifted her down instead of giving her my hand."

"Well, you _are_ funny! I don't think much of velveteen myself, but I
like real velvet. And all of us girls simply love the feel of mullein,
and when we want to have nice pink cheeks," she said, in a burst of
confidence, "we do like this."

She rubbed the leaf hard first on one cheek and then on the other, till
each one flew a scarlet flag.

"Most effective," said Ethan, with deliberate eyes on the girl; "but for
my part, I'd rather my cheeks were white, or even pea-green, than have
that thing touch me."

Val threw the mullein away.

"I'm afraid I haven't any fine feelings," she said. "I like everything."

"I don't believe it."

She couldn't bear that compelling look of his.

"It takes so long like this," she said; "I'm going to run to the top,"
and she raced on before him. But even so he reached her again before the
slow-moving carriage, going the long way round.

When he, too, got to the top, he saw her standing some little distance
from the road on the brow of the hill, looking down upon river and town;
her dress blown well back from the firmly set feet, the old velveteen
jacket following--more from long habit than from excellence of cut--the
slim young outlines, the shabby little hat held down upon the
wind-roughened hair with one hand, the other hand thrust in a
side-pocket. It was an unkempt picture of no great prettiness, and no
thought of prettiness, but it gave a curious impression of eager life; a
kind of dauntlessness and good faith that hit upon the heart.

"Well, America, what do you think of the prospect?" said his voice
behind her.

She turned round with a bright look.

"Much more than I'm going to tell you, to be laughed at for my pains."

"Oh, well, I can see it for myself--a smoky valley, a muddy river with
many bridges, some stormy-looking clouds--"

"Oh, _that's_ not what I see."

"What then?"

"Well--" Her eyes sparkled, and then she pursed her mouth as one
determined not to let out secrets before the fulness of time.

"Yes?"

"I hadn't noticed the smoke in the valley, or the mud in the river, and
_certainly_ wasn't thinking about the scenery at all. I never do."

"What's your objection to scenery?"

"So horrid dull. Not just this--_all_ scenery."

"You think so?"

"Oh, dreadful! And it's just the same with birds and trees, and all the
things the poets make such a time about. _I_ can't be bothered."

"Really!" Ethan was laughing at her harassed, overdone look.

"Oh, do forgive me! I quite forgot you were a poet, too."

"I'll forgive you on condition you tell me what you'd write about if
_you_ were a poet."

"Why, people, of course. People are the only things that matter. I
_always_ skip the scenery. Everybody does, only they don't tell." She
had lowered her voice, as if the very faded grasses and the sunburnt
golden-rod might gossip of the heresy. "It's been rather hard on me that
my father, who is so interesting and wonderful to talk to about
everything else, should waste so much time on trees and things. I've
thought more than once that some day, when he's in better health, I'll
just tell him." She nodded portentously.

"H'm! How will you put it?"

"Oh, I should tell him just honestly the beauties of Nature make me
sick."

A pause of satisfaction at finally unburdening her soul, and then a
little start. She studied Ethan's face with some anxiety.

"I'm forgetting again that you-- Do you mind if I don't care much
about--" She made a vindictive gesture towards a small, wry-growing
oak-tree clinging desperately to the side of the hill below them. "Do
you mind?"

"I don't know that I do."

"Why should you? I don't mind that you hate my jacket--at least, not
much. I tell you what, we'll make a compact. I'll never wear velvet or
mullein leaves while you're here, and you will never mention the
scenery."

"Very well; it's a bargain."

They shook hands. A sudden impulse made him loath to loosen his grasp.
As he did so:

"Now tell me," he said, "what _were_ you looking at with such a rapture
of expectation. What interests you in that dirty little town?"

"It's only dirty because it's so enterprising," she said,
apologetically. "You can't stop to trouble about your looks if you've
got a lot to do."

"Quite true, America. But still, what is there besides enterprise in
that dirty little town that makes you--"

"_Little!_ Why, my father says there are 35,000 inhabitants."

"Ah, there's safety in numbers. I fancied from your expression you had
forgotten 34,999 of them."

"There's the carriage," said Val, not looking in his face.

"How long is he going to stay, grandma?" asked Emmie, as the two figures
came towards them.

"I don't know, my dear."

"I think he means to be here a long while."

"What makes you think so?"

"Well, he said something to Val about hating Christmas, 'cause it always
made him miserable. Val said: 'Stay here with us and you won't be
miserable.' He said: 'No, I don't think it would be easy to be miserable
with you.' And he looked so pleased. Let's ask him to stay."

Mrs. Gano watched the advancing pair with grave eyes. It was rare to see
Val with such a heightened color.


It rained the next day, and there was no driving. But Val, in any case,
had an old engagement of much importance. Jessie Hornsey, a cousin of
Harry Wilbur's, was giving a "tea-fight." Miss Hornsey had "graduated"
that June, and was, in spite of her great age, a particular friend of
Val's, who had been much honored by her condescension in the past, and
by the special mark of favor in the present invitation. At the last
moment came little pink note No. 2, to say that Miss Hornsey had heard
that Miss Gano had a cousin staying with her: would she bring him? Val,
already dressed and ready to go, precipitated herself down-stairs to
find her cousin. He was stretched out comfortably before the parlor fire
reading an old battered book.

"Here, read this instead." She spread the blushing sheet triumphantly
over the yellow page.

He looked up, smothering a yawn behind his even white teeth, stirred
lazily in the depths of his arm-chair, and then dropped his eyes upon
Miss Hornsey's note.

"Well?" asked Val, impatiently.

"Well?"

"What you think?"

"That this is a very handsome proposition."

"Will you come?"

"Ah, that's another matter."

"But do."

"What for?"

"She's awfully nice--she's Harry's cousin--and all the _older_ girls and
boys will be there. You'll like it. I should think there'd be hardly
anybody else as young as I am."

"Won't you feel your inferiority?"

"I think it's _very_ nice of Jessie Hornsey to ask me."

He could see she had been proud of the distinction.

"Well, you go and tell them I--I've got rheumatism, and have to sit in
an arm-chair."

"Oh, do come!"

"Just look at the rain!"

"We can take the horse-cars."

"Ugh!" he shuddered.

"What's the matter?" she said, suspiciously; "you too grand for
horse-cars?"

"Not too grand, too cold."

"Put on an overcoat."

"Don't you think it's very comfortable here?"

"Yes, but Jessie Hornsey--"

"Do you know"--he laid the old book on the floor by his chair and
stretched out his shapely hands to the blaze--"do you know, I think this
is _much_ nicer than tea-fighting at Jessie Hornsey's."

"What if _I_ don't go, either?" said Val, with a sudden inspiration.

"Why should you?" returned Ethan, smiling.

She whipped off her hat and jacket and flung them on the sofa.

"And you're all alone," she said, in extenuation of her sudden change of
front.

"Exactly."

"Do you know, you are not at all what I expected?"

"I'm very sorry."

"I used to imagine what you were like, and it wasn't at all like this."

He sat up with a look of amusement.

"How do I fall short?"

"You don't; this is _much_ better." She was staring into the fire with
great gravity.

"You don't give me a flattering idea of your anticipations," he said.

She ignored the opportunity to reassure him.

"I used to wonder so if we were never going to meet; I was so tired
waiting," she said.

"Oh, then you thought on the whole you'd like to know me?"

"Well, it's a very queer feeling--the feeling I mean. I have it about
Patti, too."

"Oh, Patti, too."

"You've heard her sing?"

"Yes."

"Of course, you've heard everything!" she sighed.

"What's the 'queer feeling'?"

"Well, if I've heard and thought a great deal about some one, and if
they sing wonderfully, or if they write beautiful songs, and travel and
do interesting things, I feel--not so much that I want to meet them as
that it would be nice for them to meet me. No, you aren't taking it the
way I mean. It's that I know I should appreciate them, and it must be
rather nice to be _awfully_ appreciated, even if it's Patti or you. Of
course you go about meeting all kinds of people, but there aren't many
among them that take such an interest as I do, that know all about you
when you were little, how you blacked yourself all over in the attic and
brought down the door-knocker; about the Tallmadges and Henri de Poincy,
and all your photographs and letters to grandma. Naturally, nobody
_could_ take such an interest in you as your own cousin, and it used to
seem such a waste that you shouldn't know us."

"I quite agree; it would have been losing a golden opportunity."

"Oh, here she is!" said Emmie, putting in her head. "I told grandma
you'd gone to the party."

"No, I'm not going. It's cold; shut the door."

Emmie was proceeding to perform this operation on the inside when Mrs.
Gano called "Val." With a gesture of impatience the girl got up and went
out. Mrs. Gano was standing on the threshold of the long room.

"You'll be very late for the party."

"I'm not going."

"Why not?"

"It's raining so."

"Well, I never in all my days heard you make that excuse before!"

Val traced an invisible design on the back of the hall-chair.

"Cousin Ethan was asked, too. It strikes him as being a very bad day."

"_Ethan?_ Preposterous! Why should he bother with the Hornseys?"

There was a pause. Suddenly she asked:

"Was there not an Archery Club meeting yesterday?"

"Yes, but I--I thought I wouldn't go when we had company."

"My dear child, the company need not be so much on your mind. Your
father and I are quite capable of entertaining Ethan."

"Oh yes, of course."

"You are a mere child in the eyes of a man of the world, don't forget
that."

Val went on making patterns. It did not escape Mrs. Gano that this was
only the second time in all her days that Val had not furiously
contested the injustice of looking upon her from so mean a point of
view. The girl stood quite meek and reflective.

"Don't miss your party because of Ethan," added the old woman, more
gently. "You have not understood. Your cousin has a great deal to occupy
him in a world we do not belong to. It's of no use for us to disarrange
our lives for a person who pays us a visit once in twenty years--here
to-day, gone to-morrow."

"Of course not," said Val.

"There is one thing in particular that we must all be careful about."
Mrs. Gano sank her voice, although the heavy parlor-door was shut.
"Emmie has just told me that Ethan has some plan of giving you children
a dog-cart. Now, I can't have that."

"I thought you would object. I said so."

"You were perfectly right. Of course Ethan doesn't realize; he offers
these things out of sheer amiability and carelessness. It's a bagatelle
to him. To us"--she laid her hand on Val's arm--"it is a question of the
principle. We must guard against nothing so carefully as a habit of
accepting things from a rich relation. It is a situation full of peril
to personal dignity, to continuance of esteem."

Thank Heaven, thought Val, that shameless letter asking for money had
the sense to go and lose itself! What a disgrace to have brought upon
her family! She felt a spasm of nervous relief go down her spine at the
thought of that guilty secret having escaped detection.

Mrs. Gano had gone and opened the front door.

"Make haste, and you won't be so very late."

Val went with lagging steps to the parlor, and came hurrying out with
her things. Ethan had not even looked round. He was laughing at
something Emmie was saying.

"We haven't seen Harry Wilbur lately; ask him if he can't come in
to-night," said Mrs. Gano, as she saw Val off.

Oh yes, a great deal of water had flowed under the bridge since her own
daughter was young.


It was plain that Ethan was a great success in New Plymouth. Not that
any of the neighbors knew him as yet, not that he had gone anywhere
except to St. Thomas's that first Sunday; but such glimpses as the
inhabitants had of him, whether at his rather absent-minded devotions or
driving about with Mrs. Gano, had roused a fever of interest. The fact
of his great wealth, combined with his somewhat glowering good looks,
his slow transforming smile, ran away with hearts by the score, and made
the tumble-down Fort a centre of seething gossip and excitement. Harry
Wilbur was known to look upon the new-comer with open suspicion.

"Can't say I've much use for an American who _isn't_ an American," said
the florid Westerner to Julia Otway at the Hornsey "tea-fight."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, look at him."

"Where--where?"

Her unblushing excitement seemed further to annoy the usually equable
Wilbur.

"I don't mean he's here. But you've seen him, haven't you?"

"Oh yes, but only at a distance. Have you?"

"Quite near enough. He's like a Spaniard, or some kind of foreigner, and
goes about looking as if he owned the earth."

"Well, he does own a good slice of it, and as to his looks, he's very
much like all the rest of the Ganos except Val."

Julia had put great pressure upon herself not to rush over at once and
make the new-comer's acquaintance. But there was a general feeling that,
however much one naturally yearned to meet the attractive stranger, Mrs.
Gano's house was not the place that one could run in and out of without
invitation. Julia's patience was rewarded by the bidding to supper, to
which she had responded by the suggestion of tennis.

Her presence made a great difference in the family evening at the Fort.

John Gano's form of contribution to the entertainment of his guest was
to play chess with him after supper, or else engage him in conversation
on the subject of State Rights _versus_ Centralization. Several nights
of such frivolity had satisfied Ethan.

"I hear that you play," he said to Julia Otway, as they came out from
supper.

She, nothing loath, and seeming magnetized into forgetfulness of her
usual restraint in Mrs. Gano's presence, followed him to the piano.

"Locked. Where's the key?" Ethan asked.

"In my dressing-case," said Mrs. Gano, nodding to Val.

As the girl came back into the parlor with the key, she caught sight of
the expression of demure coquetry with which Julia, seated on the
piano-stool, was looking up into Ethan's face. He was leaning against
the piano, talking and laughing. Why, he hadn't looked as amused as that
since he came! What _could_ Julia have said? With a sudden chill upon
her spirit Val came forward and handed Ethan the key.

"Ah, here we are!"

He opened the piano, and Julia began to play. Ethan went over to the
window and watched her.

Val sat by her father. Julia was distressingly pretty; there was no
disguising the fact. Evidently cousin Ethan thought so. How absorbed he
was! He was quite angry at the clatter some one was making at the front
door. He knitted his dark brows impatiently. The interrupter must be
Harry Wilbur; nobody else approached door-knockers in so athletic a
spirit. Yes, it was Harry.

"How do you do? I'm _so_ glad to see you," said Val, with an overflowing
cordiality that surprised her visitor quite as much as it gratified him.

He went and spoke in an undertone to Mrs. Gano, and then came back and
sat on the other side of Val.

"You haven't told me yet why you were so late at the Hornseys to-day,"
he whispered.

"It just happened; everybody's late sometimes."

"Why didn't you come to the archery party yesterday?"

"Had something else to do."

"Had to go driving with cousin Croesus, eh?"

"If you saw me, why didn't you bow?"

"Why have you got your hair up? In honor of cousin Croesus? Don't look
at me like that or I shall cry." His frank face wore a broad smile. "I
_like_ your hair up; you look scrumptious."

"Hush! and listen to the exquisite playing."

"I ain't musical like cousin Croesus. _Your_ singing's the only music I
care about."

"You don't care about it; you only pretend."

"I assure you, on my honor--"

"Sh! cousin Ethan's looking at us."

"What if he is? Great Cæsar's ghost! Not that I blame him for looking at
_you_. Specially lately, you--"

"Hush! and don't talk nonsense."

But cousin Ethan had lifted his head impatiently, and was making her a
little sign for silence.

She shrank together as if at a blow. Ethan went back to the piano when
Julia finished, and bent over her, speaking thanks and praises. He was
asking for something of Brahms'. Julia began again. This was another
success. Cousin Ethan was really impressed; no doubt about it. Emmie
went over to the piano in the midst of the general conversation, and
said in her clear treble:

"Me and Val can sing 'Maid of Athens.'"

He seemed not to hear; he was talking so earnestly to Julia. _She_ heard
plainly enough. She was only pretending to be oblivious. But Emmie was
not to be done out of a share of the festivity.

"Cousin Ethan, do _you_ know 'Maid of Athens?'"

"Eh? What? 'Maid of Athens?' Yes."

"So do Val and me. Let's sing it."

"Very well. Will you accompany?" he asked Julia.

She nodded, and began the prelude.

Val didn't budge.

Emmie beckoned. Val studied the long, narrow, heelless silk shoes on her
grandmother's feet, and made no sign.

"Come, Val," said Ethan, in an off-hand way.

"Go and sing when cousin Croesus calls," murmured Harry Wilbur.

"I don't care about 'Maid of Athens,'" said Val, out loud.

"Oh yes; come," Ethan urged, good-humoredly.

"Go and sing when our guests ask you," said Mrs. Gano, in a reproving
undertone; and then, as Val got up to obey, she said, in her usual clear
accents: "Not too loud. You know I don't like boisterous singing in a
parlor."

Val began with the others, in a voice quite depressed enough to please
Mrs. Gano. Even Emmie's faint fluting came out more effectively, and Val
could easier have wept than gone on singing. Emmie sang two more songs,
Julia laughing and coquetting with Ethan over prelude and interlude; and
then Julia played a nocturne.

Harry Wilbur made a despairing grimace at this last performance. He rose
presently with a determined manner, and quietly bade Mrs. Gano and her
son good-night. Val went with him to the front door. They stood talking
about her approaching departure, and how Wilbur, too, hoped to get
something to do "in the East," so that he might be a witness of Val's
triumphs. The conversation pleased her, but her grandmother would be
"making eyebrows" if she stayed so long.

"Good-night, then. Look here, Val"--he took her hand warmly in both his
own--"I've been awfully cut up lately. I was beginning to be afraid"--he
nodded his yellow head towards the parlor--"afraid you might be--"

"Don't be a great silly;" and she ran back to the family circle.

After Julia finished, she got up while Ethan was still talking to her,
and made her good-nights all round very prettily.

"But it's quite early," Ethan had said.

"They always send for me at nine."

"Send! Don't you live next door?"

"Not exactly. I have to walk half round the block to get to our gate. We
aren't allowed to climb the fence," she added, in a confidential
undertone, with a sly look back at Mrs. Gano as she gave Ethan her hand.
"Good-night."

"Sha'n't I see you to your gate?" he said, coming out into the hall. "My
uncle ought not--"

"No, thank you. I think by the time I get my things on some one will be
here for me."

He had refused to go to the Hornseys with Val, but he was quite ready to
face the elements in order to take Julia home!

Critical eyes marked the unusual haste of the guest's hat-pinning and
jacket-donning.

"Mrs. Gano always sends for Val," Julia said to Ethan, accounting for
the origin of the repulsive custom.

He held her jacket for her.

"You haven't told me yet," he said, "how you learned to play like this?"

Julia laughed, too much pleased to venture on words.

"She has taken lessons," said Val, "ever since she was seven."

"You were sent away to study?"

"No," said Julia, tying her scarf with an effective air.

"But she's had _private_ lessons," Val explained, "besides the music
classes at the Sem."

"You really mean"--he was ignoring Val and looking down upon the happy
Julia--"do you mean you've learned to play like this in New Plymouth?"

"Yes; of course I practise a good deal."

"As much as ever she likes, and nobody to say 'Not so boisterous,' and
then go and lock the piano."

"Well, I must say I think it a very creditable result--with only
provincial masters."

As he reached for his hat, he caught sight of Val's face.

"America, thou wear'st a threatening aspect. Mustn't I say provincial?"

At that moment a knock resounded loudly on the door. Julia carried off
her disappointment discreetly enough, departing with the servant.

The young people went back to the parlor, but a gloom seemed to have
fallen on the party. Mrs. Gano was closing the piano with her son's
help.

"Emmie tells me," she was saying, "that Miss Julia complains my piano is
out of tune. I wonder, that being the case, she is so fond of playing on
it."

"It is out of tune," said Val; "but I suppose she thinks it better than
nothing. Isn't she pretty?" Val asked her cousin, in a dogged tone.

"Extremely--most charming little person."

"She _usually_ has rather nice, retiring manners," remarked Mrs. Gano.

And then they said good-night.

Ethan looked inquiringly into his cousin's face. "It isn't late; come
out on the veranda while I smoke a cigarette."

"I thought you objected to going out such weather as this."

"But we won't get wet on the veranda."

"No, not _on the veranda_"--but seeing Julia home was a different
matter.

"It's your bedtime, Val," interposed Mrs. Gano--"and long past yours,
Emmie. Ethan, you must not demoralize the children."

He laughed, and went out by himself.

"Ethan forgets himself," said Mrs. Gano, with low-voiced indignation.
"Imagine his asking a French girl, or a young Boston lady, to come out
at this hour--_while he smoked_!" If it had been while he did a little
murdering, she could not have looked more horrified. "He must not think
manners are superfluous here!"

Val undressed by the open window, where she could smell the ascending
smoke, and then she cried under the bedclothes for what seemed to her a
long, long time.




CHAPTER XX


Val's unwonted silence and aloofness the evening before had not been
lost upon her cousin. He recalled these unaccustomed manifestations the
next morning, smiling to himself, and promising his jealous little
relative amends. The day, scarce well begun, beheld him on the way to a
discovery that he kept on making for years: while you were occupied in
realizing that Val Gano was hurt or disappointed, she was apparently
getting over it with such despatch that, as you approached with suitable
looks of sympathy, lo! she would advance to meet your condolence with
banners flying and trumpets blaring, so to speak, obliging you hurriedly
to readjust your expression, in order fitly to greet a person so
entirely pleased with the course of affairs.

But to think Val miraculously expeditious in "getting over things" was
hardly to go to the root of the matter. She did not get over
disappointments; she remodelled them in her imagination till they were
strokes of luck in disguise, or, at the very least, stepping-stones to
some dazzling victory. As she lay in bed in the early morning, she
redressed the unequal balance of the night before. After all, Julia
wasn't going to have the world-resounding triumphs that awaited Val.
Poor Julia! let her enjoy her little hour of drawing-room success; and
Val sailed away into a realm of glory, carrying cousin Ethan in her
train, and making her toilet to the sound of cymbals and hosannas.

As the breakfast-bell rang, she burst open her bedroom door and went
flying down-stairs three steps at a time.

"What's happened?" said Ethan, as he came down behind her, reminded
suddenly of his old friend Yaffti, the patron demon of the stair. All
that had "happened" apparently was that Ethan had grown decrepit, else
why not go toboganning down the banisters to breakfast, or turn a few
somersaults along the hall by way of beginning the day? "In honor of
what saint is that?" he called after her, as Val cleared the last three
steps with a leap and a bound.

"In honor of St. Sunshiny Morning," answered the girl, turning a radiant
face over her shoulder, and waiting for Ethan to overtake her.

"Thought you told me yesterday you didn't take any interest in the
weather. Oh dear, no! never noticed it at all."

"I don't care a bit whether the old sun shines or not; can't think what
people mean, to go bleating about the bad weather as they do. As if it
_mattered_?"

"And yet it's 'Hurrah!' and three steps at a time for a sunshiny
morning."

"Only said that for an excuse--not to tell you the real name of my
patron saint."

"But do. Tell me what's your pet superstition, and I'll tell you mine."

"Honest Injun?"

"Yes."

"Well, my pet superstition--only it's _not_ a superstition--is, that I
was born lucky."

"Oh! what's the sign?"

"Sign? Nothing outward and visible, just an inward and spiritual grace.
You needn't jeer; it's quite true. I'm _sure_ I'm lucky. Now I've told
you my great article of faith, what's yours?"

But Emmie appeared at that juncture, and Val was secretly pleased that
Ethan postponed his answer. Breakfast was already late, and still they
waited some time before any one else came down.

Presently Aunt Jerusha appeared with a coffee-pot and a smoking plate
piled high with something brown and golden.

The girls received her with a round of wild applause.

"Hi! flannel-cakes--flannel-cakes!" and they executed a war-dance round
the popular favorite, who "took her call," so to speak, as pleased as
any star-actor at having brought off some noble appeal to the great warm
heart of the populace, which ever beats true, etc.

"Law sakes! de way dey goes on!" The black woman stood laden and smiling
like some ebon effigy typifying plenty and good cheer. Evidently loath
to stop the popular demonstrations in her honor, she still urged feebly:
"Shucks! go 'long, Miss Emmie, wid yo' teeterin' up and down! Law sakes!
look de way Miss Val kin jump Jim Crow. Yo' gran'ma 'ud be hoppin' mad
if she cotch yo' doin' dat ar 'fore folks. He! he! Sakes alive, chillen!
stop dem monkey-shines, and eat up dis yer firs' batch fo' dey spile."

"Yes, yes." Val cut "Jim Crow" suddenly short.

With a lightning change, taking the place at the head of the table, and
adopting a dignified and official air, she poured out the piping hot
coffee.

"Nobody waits for anybody on flannel-cake days," said Emmie, drawing in
her chair with a chastened satisfaction.

"Did they give you flannel-cakes in 'Gay Paree'?" asked Val, as she
passed Ethan his coffee.

"No, they didn't."

"I suppose," she said, incredulously--"I suppose it's much gayer in
Paris than it is here?"

"It's not gayer than this so early in the morning."

He looked at the confident, shadowless face, and instead of comparing it
with Mademoiselle Lucie's _ingénue_ countenance or any beauty of the
_salon_ or the stage, memory unfairly conjured up Mary Burne and her
despair-whitened features as she harangued her dingy followers. "Not so
early in the morning!" Even when the lamps were lit there were places in
Paris not so gay as this.

To speak by the card, there were people everywhere, rich and poor, a
good deal less pleased with the world than Val Gano. Ah yes! this was
why she specially interested him. It was a satisfaction to have
stumbled on the explanation, for she was surprisingly much in his
thoughts, this untutored child, with her bland belief in the world and
in Val Gano. She was a kind of pleasant anodyne to a mind over-full of
misgiving, overcharged with fear of life's panther-like capacity for
quick-leaping revenge.

It was the first morning since Ethan's arrival that his uncle did not
appear.

No, he had not had a very good night, Mrs. Gano said, when at last she
came in. She changed the conversation abruptly, and went up-stairs when
the letters were brought, having scarcely tasted breakfast. French
postmark! A letter from De Poincy; not very long, and not much news. He
wrote chiefly to ask when Ethan was coming "home" to France.


     "I am wondering if you had the courage to carry out your bold
     design of hunting up your poor relations in the West. If you did,
     I'm sorry for you. I see it all from here. The provincial setting
     which all your democracy won't prevent from getting on your nerves,
     the fervor of the poor relation's devotion, the bottomless pit of
     his need, the unblushing designs on every single woman's part to
     marry you, will, I fear and trust, send you back to us with a
     chastened spirit and a decent regret for your folly in taking
     exception to Mademoiselle Lucie's charming way of playing the
     universal game. She, by-the-way, is lost to you forever, having
     just married a wealthy English brewer. But there are other Lucies
     over here, ready to hold out their pretty hands in welcome as soon
     as you weary of the crudities of the New World."


Ethan looked up with a smile at his poor relations, thinking how badly
they played their parts.

"What conspiracy are you two hatching?" he said.

The two sisters, who seemed not, as a rule, to have much in common, were
whispering with great animation.

"Let's tell him," said Emmie.

"No," said Val, getting red.

"Yes, tell me."

"No," repeated Val.

"Why not?" urged Emmie. "He'll never tell."

"Never."

"Well, we're talking about the _Comet_," confessed Emmie. "You don't
know about it, do you?"

"No."

"Of course he doesn't, silly. I'll be very angry if you tell."

"Isn't a comet a difficult thing to keep quite to yourselves?"

"Not ours. It's a paper."

"_Emmie!_"

"Well, he knows now. It's an awfully nice kind of magazine. Val and me
write it. It's our secret."

"Pretty kind of secret now!" said Val. "But _I_ don't care; I'm going
away. I said I wouldn't do another."

"But finish this one. Oh, do it, just a single solitary last time,
_dear_ Val."

"Do, dear Val," echoed Ethan, smiling.

The quick blood flew into the girl's face. "Dear" on his lips seemed not
only a new word in the language; it called into being something that the
wide world lacked before. It struck Val into silence. She sat and looked
in her plate.

"We do the printing in father's room when he's well enough to be out
digging and fussing with flowers," said Emmie.

"It's a thing we started ages ago, when we were young," Val explained.
"It amuses Emmie."

"But there's _no_ reason to give it up _now_," urged the younger girl.
"We thought we'd have to once for lack of paper," she said to Ethan.
"Grandma gave us only half-sheets. Then Val discovered great-grandfather
Calvert's old counting-house books."

"How did you do that?"

"They were in the closet under the stairs," said Val.

"An' Jerusha and Venie and most everybody thought there was a ghost
there," added Emmie, with a certain reverence in her voice. "Val said
she was goin' to see, and that was how we found all that jolly paper for
the _Comet_."

"Emmie writes most of the poetry and all of the stories; I do the
illustrations," said Val.

"_And_ the conundrums _and_ the 'Advice to Parents' column. Oh, Val,
what would happen to you if grandma ever saw--"

She began to laugh.

"Miss Val," said Jerusha, putting her head in at the door, "yo' kin run
so fas', honey, an' Miss G'no say de doctor's kerridge is a stan'in' at
de Tibbses do'; will yo' say de doctor's wanted yer fur Massa John." Val
was off like an arrow from a bow before the old woman had finished.


Dr. Wharton was some time up-stairs. Mrs. Gano and Ethan were both in
the sick-room. The verdict was that Mr. Gano was not, after all,
dangerously ill, but ought to go South before it was too cold for him to
travel, and that, at all events, the idea of going to New York in
November was absolutely out of the question--"sheer madness."

The first keen edge of Val's anxiety wore off in an hour or so. Her
father sent for her. He wasn't really even so ill as the doctor made
out. Still, it was very sadly, and with a misgiving foreign to her
experience, that she agreed to put off their joint expedition till the
spring.

"And meanwhile," said her father, "since you are ambitious to be of use,
it would be well if you took a more active part in the care of the
house. Jerusha is very, very old, and--"

"I _do_ take care of my own room."

"Ah yes, but there are other things--"

"Before cousin Ethan came I used to help Venus on Saturdays with the
parlor."

"_Before_ Ethan came?"

"Yes; I can't do it while he's here."

"Why not?"

"Oh, it looks so odd. None of the other girls do. Head in a dust-cap,
and horrid black hands! Grandma wouldn't like it at all, not while we
have company."

Val seized the opportunity afforded by her father's fit of coughing to
consider her audience at an end.

When she came down-stairs from this interview, she found Emmie wandering
about disconsolately. Ethan closeted with grandma. No lessons this
morning.

"Come," said Val to Emmie, clutching for diversion at their one common
interest, "we'll do the magazine."

Emmie got the red and black ink, the fine and the broad nibbed pens, a
pile of paper oddments tied with string, and a gigantic ledger, with one
of its massive calf-skin covers torn off, revealing the pages, blank at
this end, coarse like drawing-paper, and tough, like nothing one sees in
these flimsy times--a fabric that, besides never wearing out, had been
found to take kindly to the refinements of ornamental printing.

The girls established themselves in the dining-room. After executing the
title of Emmie's story in florid Old English lettering, Val did a
pen-and-ink sketch of the hero. That gallant individual had started out
rather like Harry Wilbur. In this final issue he appeared with Ethan
Gano's marked and clear-cut profile, having borrowed from that gentleman
not only his tall elegance, but the slight droop of the shoulders and
the even more elusive characteristic by means of which, despite the
occasional droop, he never lost the air of carrying himself well in some
indefinable way.

"Now," said Val, bestowing a finishing touch.

Whereupon, with much gusto, Emmie began to read the last instalment of
"The Brown House on the Hill," Val printing at dictation in a rapid,
clear italic. The minutes flew. Venus would be coming in presently to
set the dinner-table. The clock, chiming the hour, masked the sound of
footsteps approaching from the opposite direction. Emmie raised her
voice to be heard by the printer above the dozen strokes of noon:

"Ever--and--anon--Archibald--Abalone--murmured--in--Editha's--ear:--
'Angel--I--adore--thee.'"


"What nonsense is that you are reading?" said Mrs. Gano, in the sudden
silence.

The two girls started like criminals. Not only was their grandmother
standing at the door, but cousin Ethan was looking in at their
discomfiture over her shoulder.

Val obscured the _Comet_ with the blotter. Emmie, grown very pink, had
thrust Editha and Archibald Abalone under the table.

"What is it you have there, Emmeline?"

"Just a--just a thing I was reading Val."

"Let me see it."

"No, grandma, please."

"Let me see it."

She came towering into the room.

"Grandma," said Val, turning at bay, "it isn't _meant_ for you."

"Emmeline, hand me that paper."

Trembling, the younger girl brought up the manuscript.

"It isn't honorable to read things that aren't meant for you," said Val,
starting up and displacing the blotter.

"_Read_ it!"

Mrs. Gano caught "The Brown House" out of the child's hands with strange
excitement, and tore it across and across.

"Oh, oh!" wailed Emmie, with fast-flowing tears, while Val and Ethan
stood transfixed.

There was "the magazine" in full sight, flaunting on its cover a
splashing red comet with a fiery tail. Mrs. Gano blazed back at it
through her glasses as she threw down the fragments of "The Brown
House."

"Whose is this?" she said, opening the stitched and folded sheets of her
father's ledger.

"_Mine_," said Val, laying determined hands on the folio.

"I perceive part of it to be unmistakably yours," said Mrs. Gano, with a
cutting inflection: "'_Vale_, a ballad sung at the Grand Opera House by
the world-renowned diva, Signorita Val Gano.'"

Val's hands had dropped from the paper as if paralyzed.

"Now, this verse-stringing is one of the things I will _not_ have,"
said the old woman, with a curious tragic intensity. "I've seen enough
of young girls ruining their figures, and their eyesight, and their
prospects, bending over stuff like this, till it becomes a craze, and
they're fit for nothing better."

She took the _Comet_ in her hands and tried to tear it up. The ancient
paper would have held out well against less fragile fingers, but Ethan
did not realize the toughness of the Calvert ledger. He hurried forward.

"Oh, don't tear it. Really, really, a little scribbling isn't so fatal."

"I don't expect you to think so, my dear Ethan, when you do it yourself
in two languages, having nothing better to do in either. But if I'm any
judge, we've had enough of it in _this_ family." She turned upon the
hushed, awed Emmie. "_Go out and play_," she commanded, but with an air
of saying, "Off with your head! So much for Buckingham." "As for
_you_"--she flashed back a look at Val as she went towards the
fireplace--"never let me find you wasting your youth in this pernicious
fashion again as long as you live under _my_ roof."

She put the _Comet_ in the fire, and with the poker she pushed it down
among the red-hot coals. She waited grimly while it burned, then,
without another word or look, she went back to the long room. Ethan had
been perilously near laughing at the total rout of the two malefactors.
No sooner had the guardian of the family virtue disappeared, and it was
possible openly to relieve one's feelings, than Val began striding back
and forth with clinched hands and a look of concentrated rage.

He was rather startled at the transformation in the sunny face. It was
convulsed, ugly with passion.

"I won't stand it; no, I wouldn't stand it from the Angel Gabriel!" She
took a turn up and down the room and burst out afresh: "_She_, Pallas
Athene! She, patron of the arts! It's this sort of thing"--she stopped
before her cousin with tragic eyes--"it's this sort of thing that has
embittered my youth!"

"What!" he said, holding fast to his gravity. "Has she done this
before?"

Val shook her head, and then, in a stifled voice:

"The _Comet_ has been kept dark, but there are other things--things I
really care about."

"Is there something you care about more than about writing?"

"_Writing?_" she echoed, with limitless scorn. "I don't care _that_
about writing. It just does to fill in. But the way she behaves about
the _Comet_ is just a sample. I really thought she was getting to be
more liberal-minded. It's a long time since we've had a terrible scene
like this; but it just shows you." She turned away and strode up and
down. "The only thing she ever let me do was to take drawing lessons;
and the only thing she ever took my part about was in defending me from
learning cooking. But do you think _I_ ever had piano lessons? No! Do
you think _I've_ ever had a private singing lesson in my life? No! Do
you know what that means to me? No--because the piano's kept locked, or
else I'm made to sing as if I were ashamed of myself, and you haven't a
notion that I've got a voice that would make a singer's fortune. Now,
have you?"

"N--no."

"Course not. How should you?"

"I suppose," he said, "they naturally don't want you to face the
hardships of--"

"As if we didn't face hardships at home. Have you any notion how poor we
are? I don't mean holes in the kitchen and rain through the roof--who
cares about that? We're so poor"--she advanced upon him step by
step--"that we can't have proper clothes, we can't have proper fires,
and, except when you're here, we don't have proper food. And me with a
voice of gold!--so people say. What's the good of a voice of gold with a
grandmother like that?" She pointed a shaking finger of scorn in the
direction of the long room. A black face was put shyly in at the
opposite door. "Here's Venus to set the table."

Val tumbled down from her climax and stalked miserably out. Ethan
followed her.

"Come to the drawing-room," he whispered, in the passage.

"Parlor, I suppose you mean."

"Yes, parlor."

"What for?"

"We can talk there."

They pushed open the door.

"She's left the key!" cried Val, springing towards the piano.

"So she has," he admitted, with less enthusiasm.

"That's for _your_ sake. Cousin Ethan, you could try my voice if you
liked."

"Of course," he said, with misgiving.

How was he to let her down from the dizzy height of her illusion without
hurting her cruelly or stultifying himself? The voice that had joined in
"Maid of Athens" had been so unremarkable, he could not recall anything
about it save that, unwillingly, she had sung. She opened the piano. He
saw with pitying amusement how her fingers shook upon the ancient
rosewood.

"I am a mezzo-soprano," she said. "I'll show you my range first."

And she proceeded to do so, her voice as shaky at the beginning as her
hands, but steadying itself on the second note, rising slowly, with a
kind of conscious pride, swelling audaciously rich, mounting higher and
clearer, leaping at the top notes like some spirit of delight sounding
silver trumpets to the sun.

Ethan stood staring when she finished.

"Either something's wrong with my ears, or else you _have_ got a
wonderful voice!"

"Oh, cousin Ethan, cousin Ethan!"

She caught his hands, and pressed them in an ecstasy of relief and
gladness. He was moved himself when he saw her happy eyes were wet.

"I didn't hear one of those notes last night. What did you do with your
voice then?"

"Grandma--she'd put down her foot--soft pedal--she's done that all my
life."

"Sing something--I'll play for you."

He swept her off the piano-stool.

"I don't know much but ballads."

She pulled the yellowed sheets out of the stand, wondering as she turned
them over which, if any, of these songs he had heard sung by great
artists. She was on the point of asking him, when, "Oh," she said,
jumping up, "here's this from 'Trovatore,'" and she set the music before
him with the firm intention of rivalling that Patti people made such a
fuss about. She sang the English words, "Ah, I've sighed to rest me,"
and not without a certain largeness of effect intensely satisfying to
herself.

"There's no doubt," he said, at the end, "that you have a voice. You,
naturally, don't in the least know how to use it; but it's there."

This was not what she had expected--in fact, it was a blow; for, in
spite of her old desire to be taught, she looked towards a
singing-master chiefly as a personal influence to help her into the
operatic field. She felt it a grievance against her family that she had
had no early advantages, and yet she had thought it more than probable
that genius could do without them. But what if cousin Ethan was right?
All the more need not to lose time.

"The question is," she said, "What's to be done?"

"Done?"

"Yes."

It flashed over her in the pause that he might think she was hinting
that he should defray the expense of her training, and this suddenly
seemed as repulsive to reason and to dignity as if five months before
she had not calmly suggested it herself. It was Heaven's own mercy that
letter had got lost! She must have been crazy when she wrote it.

"Of course," she said, "my family can't do much, and"--looking at him
half apologetically, and feeling the necessity to forestall him--"I
couldn't allow any one else to do more than give me advice and letters
of introduction. I have my plans all laid--but now my father's ill."

"What plans?"

"I was going to New York with my father next month to look over the
field"--at his look of incredulity, she added: "operatic field. As I
haven't any money, and can't possibly borrow, I must find a way to be a
chorus-girl first."

"What an idea!"

He got up from the piano, and walked the length of the room and back.

"A very good idea."

"My dear Val--"

He stopped.

"No, cousin Ethan"--she motioned away his imaginary offer--"the Ganos
don't borrow money, they do without."

He smiled a little.

"Did grandmamma approve of this chorus-girl plan?"

"Of course she wouldn't. It's only father who knows."

"Does he approve?"

"Well, not to say approve, but he knows it's no use objecting."

"Do you know, I don't approve of it either."

She sat down on the piano-stool, looking at him doubtfully. Was this an
offer of a million in disguise? or could it be--

"You don't mean," she said, "that you won't give me any letters of
introduction?"

"I mean, little cousin, that I'll do all in my power to keep you from
the hardships and the hurts of public life."

He put a hand on her shoulder, and was looking down upon her. She opened
her lips, but no sound came.

"There won't be any lack in _your_ life of beautiful and worth-while
things; don't spoil it all--don't spoil yourself by being too eager."

"Y--you don't understand," she faltered, with a suffocating sense of
throbbing in her throat.

"Oh yes, I do. I understand a lot. Promise me you won't take any steps
about this without letting me know."

She shook her head, and tried to draw from under the thrilling touch of
his hand.

"I shall not let you go till you promise."

The other hand had fallen on her other shoulder. It was as if chains
were being hung upon her. But why wasn't she struggling? Why--why was
bondage so sweet?

"I'm waiting. Promise!" said the masterful voice.

"I--promise."

The tumult in her heart made the clang of the dinner-bell sound as if it
were ringing in some far-off place.

"What--what was it I promised?" she asked herself again and again.




CHAPTER XXI


It struck Mrs. Gano the next day, as they were out driving, that Val was
unusually subdued. She seemed to see nothing that they passed, hear
nothing that was said. But it could not be said she looked unhappy. And
Ethan was in excellent spirits. Emmie was bowing right and left, bowing
with that air she had rapidly acquired, and was sedulously cultivating,
a royal-condescension-to-the-crowd kind of bow.

"Who is that?" asked Mrs. Gano, seeing Emmie's pantomime, and seeing,
too, that Val had made no sign.

"Mr. Peter Hall."

"What! Not the young Pete Hall that I recommended to Blakistons?"

"Yes'm," said Emmie, meekly.

"Why do you bow to him?"

"Oh, I know him."

"We all _know_ him, but that's no reason you should recognize him out of
the store."

"I don't see why--" began Emmie.

"I've told you before, you do not know such persons except in their
capacity of salesmen."

"He bowed to me, grandma."

"Impertinence! Teach him a lesson next time. Don't notice him."

Mrs. Gano's point of view not only seemed to Val quite natural, but this
very same conversation, with some immaterial variation, had taken place
too often to merit notice. Cousin Ethan, however, was looking from one
to the other in frank amazement.

"'Tisn't as if Peter Hall was a servant," said Emmie, appealingly.
"I've given up bowing to the Otways' coachman."

"Isn't all this very undemocratic?" Ethan asked.

"It's a most essential consideration in a democracy."

"But do you realize that it shows a degree of class prejudice that
doesn't exist in the older, the monarchical countries?"

"Quite possible. Where the differences are broadly and indelibly
stamped, there's no need to remind anybody that they exist."

"Three months ago," said Ethan, meditatively, "I should have called such
considerations absolutely un-American. However, a season at Newport, not
to speak of glimpses of life in the Boston clubs and on Beacon Hill,
have helped to readjust my views. Still, I didn't think I should find
out here in the West"--some quick look in Mrs. Gano's face made him
modify--"out here in the Great Middle States--"

"You forget your father's family are Southerners, root and branch. But
as to that, you will leave distinctions behind when you reach heaven,
not before. And even there we are told one star differeth from another
star in glory."

"Well," said Ethan, smiling, "I only wish I'd brought Drouet."

"A friend of yours?"

"Well, yes, if I may be so bold. A more necessary friend than most. I
rather missed him at first. Drouet is my valet."

"There would have been accommodation for him."

"You see, I didn't know. I thought you would have been scandalized."

"I don't see why you should think that. My father never travelled
without his body-servant. You must have had the Tallmadges in mind.
They, you know, thought themselves wiser than the prophets. There was no
need of hewers of wood and drawers of water. Every one would be free and
equal once black slavery was abolished. Childishness! Three-fourths of
the human race is in bondage to the other fourth. Whether your servant
is a Frenchman and white, or an African and black, the root of the
matter is the same. We exact menial services of our inferiors, being of
the dominant race."

The carriage drew up before the ruinous Fort, and "the dominant race"
got out, while two black faces and a colored turban went scuttling back
to the rear. John Gano, in a shabby old coat with a tear in the sleeve,
was standing on a step-ladder, lopping off twigs with a huge pair of
garden shears.

"John--John! What a mad proceeding! You will take your death!" cried his
mother from the carriage window.

The gentleman so addressed climbed carefully down the step-ladder, while
Emmie tumbled out of the carriage and ran to meet him.

"What do you think, father?" she said, confidingly. "Cousin Ethan's got
a valet."

"A what?"

"A valet," whispered Emmie.

"Valet! What does he want a valet for?"

In vain Emmie squeezed his arm. He spoke in a loud, astonished tone.

"Ah ha! I felt it wouldn't do to produce Drouet in New Plymouth," said
Ethan, who was conducting Mrs. Gano to the porch.

"Well," answered his uncle, dryly, "if you were too old or too ill to
wait on yourself, I should understand it."

"Do come in out of the draughts, John, and don't stand talking nonsense.
Your father had his body-servant before he was either old or ill, and so
did my father."

"That was in the antebellum days, before men realized they couldn't
oppress their fellows with impunity."

"What _do_ you mean?" asked Mrs. Gano, turning sharply on her son.

"I mean that if our forefathers had realized what an awful inheritance
they were laying up for their children in the negro problem, they would
have gone without their valets and left the negro in his native wilds."

"Oh, if you only mean that the initial mistake was in having the
shiftless creatures here at all, I agree. The negro enslaved was a care
and a drag on the South; the negro free is a menace to all America."

She opened the door of the long room and rang for Venus to take off her
shoes.

"Yes, the Color Question," said John Gano, sitting down heavily on one
of the fleur-de-lis chairs--"the Color Question is just one of the forms
of ferociously usurious interest one generation has to pay on the debts
incurred by another. The world learns its lessons with infinite pains.
The same thing happens over and over again, and no one raises a finger."

He sat gazing at some impending peril with prophetic gloom.

"What is happening over again?" asked Ethan, divesting himself of his
outer coat.

"The importation of ignorant debased foreigners to do the work that the
American born not only won't do himself, but won't, in his haste to get
rich, allow to remain undone. Why do the offscourings of the earth flock
to America? Not because it's any longer the New World. They don't go to
Australia or South Africa in the same numbers. They come _here_ because
the American born is more of an arrant fool and snob than any creature
God permits to breathe. Hardly any one so poor but he will pay the
highest wages for the worst alien service."

"Father!" Val, half-way up-stairs, came running back to her country's
rescue. "Cousin Ethan won't understand you are just arguing. Father
doesn't really think Americans are snobs."

"Yes, snobs of the worst kind! What respect have we for the laboring
man? What do we know or practise of healthy German industry, of the
thrift of the French?"

"I thought our industries were our strong point."

"Industries, yes--not our industry. We can establish mills and
manufactories, and then get ship-loads of Teutons and of Irish to come
over and work them."

"If they'd only be content with that," said Ethan, "but they end by
working our municipalities too and running our country."

"They always do," said John Gano, shaking his forefinger in the air.
"They always _have!_" With that he brought his clinched fist down on his
knee. "If you can't hoe your row yourself, don't call in a man to help
you. He'll end by helping himself. You'll have saved the hoeing and lost
the row. But the average American won't do anything himself that he can
get another man to do for him."

No wonder, thought Ethan, that the foreign visitor to these shores has
such difficulty in classifying American opinion. Here, under the same
roof, within the bonds of the closet kinship, were to be heard the old
views of "the dominant race" from Mrs. Gano, and here was her own son
railing.

"Nobody is content any more to work his own land or learn a trade;
everybody must scramble for the big money prizes, the privilege of being
an _employer_ of labor."

It was a deed of some daring to interrupt the flow of masculine talk,
but Val sat down on the bottom step of the stairs, saying firmly:

"Americans can't help being ambitious. They know there's a great deal to
do."

"There _is_ a great deal to be done; but the American has mistaken
notions as to what. The American artisan thinks his son must aim at
being a boss, if not being President. The farmer thinks he's doing his
share when he hires hands and sends his own boys to swell the stream of
clerks and town-strugglers. The infection seized on the women about
thirty years ago."

"Stick up for us," whispered Val's voice behind Ethan.

"The result is," her father went on, "it's harder to find in America
to-day a good cook or chambermaid than to find a woman musician,
novelist, linguist, or painter."

"Say something," admonished the low voice from the bottom step.

"I imagine," the perfidious Ethan remarked, "that there are accomplished
persons on both sides the sea who are ready to excel in any art except
the art of being of use."

"Exactly. These people no doubt exist everywhere, but they should be
swept off the face of America." Val looked out anxiously past the
sheltering form of her cousin. "Farmers', tradesmen's daughter's all
over the land are giving up house-work"--Val withdrew her head and sat
in obscurity--"giving up field and dairy work. Their foolish fathers buy
them pianos, buy them novels; and able-bodied young women idle away
their days in rocking-chairs, breeding discontent and disease."

Val appeared to be making preparations to retire.

"You think," asked Ethan, "there is any application in the fact--to--a
people of another class?"

"Most assuredly. What the ignorant ignorantly despise, we must elevate.
We must show them the bottomless vulgarity of their view." The restive
movement on the bottom step augmented his ire. "I assure you the market
cries aloud for house-keepers, nurses, laundresses, sempstresses. We are
not in need of any more poetesses, department clerks, _singers_."

He had got up and was glowering unmistakably at the girl who had risen
from the bottom step.

"It's too bad, father, your going back on my singing, just because I
forgot to mend your coat. I thought you were an invalid in bed. I didn't
expect you to climb trees to-day."

"To-day has got nothing to do with it, although I _am_ surprised and
disappointed that you want your grandmother to engage some raw Irish
girl--"

"Only while we have company."

"Company!" he said, bristling more than ever. "What can 'company' get
but profit out of seeing that _we_ think nobly of work; that we're ready
to do our part towards turning domestic and industrial service from an
ugly slavery into a beautiful and noble privilege."

"Come, Emmie," said Val, "let's get our things off."

The two girls simultaneously took to their heels. John Gano leaned back
in the chair, coughing feebly, all his animation spent.

"She has set her heart on my taking her East to learn singing," he said,
in a low, dispirited voice. "I've been feeling to-day I may never go
East again."

"You are not strong enough just yet," began Ethan.

"I wish Val would get over this craze about opera, especially if I'm not
here. I've been thinking a great deal about it to-day. If she could take
up some of the duties here--" He looked round helplessly, as if to find
something she might with advantage begin upon.

"Oh, we must get the opera idea out of her head. I am quite of your
opinion there."

"Ha, really?" said John Gano, with a relieved, almost incredulous air.
"You think there's something in what I say?"

"Indeed I do."

"_Most_ assuredly." He got up with renewed energy. "I'll tell her that
the women who take up the despised craft of home-making and home-keeping
will be not only the true artists of the future, they'll be the only
order of working-women, never in want of a place."

As Ethan went to his room he indulged the cynical suspicion that his
uncle had some definite vision of the particular home that Val was to
labor for and ornament, and it was not the Fort. Well? He smiled. Pshaw!
"Am I growing old, that a little school-girl should get hold of me after
all my escapes?" For so much had his social experience warped him that
he seldom thought of marriage now, save as of something others plotted
and which he must frustrate and elude.

Val! He laughed to himself. Absurd! But his face had little amusement in
it, and less irony than he would have credited. "The older men grow," he
said to himself, "the more the fainter-hearted among them shrink from
age, the more they worship youth. Now, if I were fifty I might be in
danger."

Going down, after writing some letters, an hour or so later, he heard
"the little school-girl" coming behind him, and then stopping suddenly.

"That you, Val?" He stood waiting. No answer. She had gone back into her
room. He stood stamping his letters under the hall lamp.

Val's head presently peered down from the top of the stair.

"Yes, I'm here," said Ethan, provokingly.

"I'm looking for one of the servants," Val said, descending with
dignity.

Ethan looked up, laughing at her over the banisters.

"What makes you look so solemn?" he asked.

"My sister's got a sore throat, and I can't find the stuff for a
compress."

"No use telling me you're such a sympathetic sister as you make out.
What's the _real_ matter?"

Ethan had come down-stairs, intending to be more discreet than ever in
the future. De Poincy was no doubt right--even here it was necessary to
be _en garde_. With this idea dragged well into the foreground again,
what demon of perversity made him lift a hand above the banisters and
hold the girl's fingers fast to the polished rail? It was the first time
he had touched her. He was rather startled at the commotion set up in
his own nerves by the trifling action, but it was mainly, he assured
himself, the reflex of the evident agitation of the girl. She had
dropped her eyes, and he saw her upper lip tremble.

"What's the real matter?" he repeated, letting go her hand, not all of a
sudden, but drawing his own across it lingeringly; "I thought you were
always happy."

"Happy!" she said, making a gallant effort to recover her usual manner.
"Well, it's nobody's fault if I am."

"Now that I come to look at you, I believe you _are_ happy, all the
same."

"Course I am; but it's only because I was born that way and can't get
out o' the habit." She came on down-stairs.

"Your father was quite right, you know, in what he said this afternoon."

"Oh, he didn't really mean it. It was partly just arguing--father does
so love arguing--and partly because Emmie told on you. I've been saying
she deserved to have a sore throat."

"Told on me?"

The supper-bell rang.

"Yes," said Val, when she could make herself heard; "let out that you
had a valet. Emmie's so indiscreet. It was all right to tell grandma,
she _likes_ splendor, but Emmie might have known father would shy
awfully at a valet. Sh! here he is!"

Ethan went and sat by Emmie a little while after supper that evening.
They were great friends, these two; but somehow Ethan's conversation
flagged. For no discoverable reason he had fallen into the clutch of one
of those fits of gloomy silence that before he came to the Fort had been
growing in frequency and in power to cripple and to numb his spirit. He
had just given Emmie an old silver pounce-box that had belonged to some
dead and gone Tallmadge, and that Ethan for years had carried in his
pocket. Emmie was to keep menthol in it, Ethan said, and to sniff the
aromatic remedy through the open-work inner lid of gold. Emmie was
delighted at this attention on the part of her cousin, but she glanced
up now and then from her occupation of crumbling the menthol into the
tiny receptacle, keenly conscious of Ethan's black-browed preoccupation.

"Why do you think so much?" she said.

"Heaven forfend! I never think."

"Oh yes, you do--unless Val's here. Grandma has often said," she
continued, with her little air of superiority, "no one can think when
Val's in the room."

"Ah," said Ethan to himself, "that's at the bottom of my affection for
Val."

If he was unconscious of any change in her enlivening influence in the
days following, it did not escape Mrs. Gano that Val's humor was more
capricious than her family had been accustomed to find it. The old
on-looker at the game could not, of course, know that alone with Ethan
the girl was embarrassed, breathless, almost terrified, and yet
deliciously happy. She was no sooner alone with him than she wanted to
run away--no sooner had she run away than she wanted to go back. When he
was present, she was often in the wildest spirits; when he went out of
the room, he seemed to take her soul away with him. She sat silent,
helpless, till he came again. She seemed to have lost her hitherto
unfailing gusto for games and outings. She saw as little as possible of
Julia and of Harry Wilbur. She did her lessons absent-mindedly, and was
not much heard from in the general family talks. Val! Who had never
found it possible before to realize that young people should be seen and
not heard! Mrs. Gano had not lived seventy years in the world for
nothing. She saw enough of the state of affairs to feel sore at heart
for the poor foolish little girl, who was groping her way through her
first great initiation into the mystery of mysteries.

For all Mrs. Gano's pride in, and affection for, Ethan, she felt scant
patience at his lingering on at the Fort, amusing himself with Val's
oddities and adorations, carelessly absorbing her generous capacity for
hero-worship, building himself a shrine in her imagination before
turning his back upon the Fort, perhaps for another twenty years. It was
plain to Mrs. Gano that Ethan was a person exercising no little
fascination upon womankind; equally plain was it that the school-girl
worship of his little country cousin was in the nature of a smiling
incident that could not arrest him long.

"What an absurd infant you are!" she had heard him exclaim.

"I'm not in the very least like an infant," Val had retorted.

"Well, you are _quite_ the youngest person I've ever known," he assured
her.

As Val sat at her lessons in the long room of a morning, Mrs. Gano had
no need to look out herself to see, or to ask, who was passing under her
windows. If, at the morning's end, the door behind them opened, she saw
in Val's face if it were Ethan coming in. Old Jerusha was right--the
face was like a lamp, and like an open book the young heart underneath
its light.

"John," said Mrs. Gano, at the beginning of the next week, "has Ethan
told you how long he means to stay?"

"No."

"H'm! Well, I think you should talk to him about taking life more
seriously. He ought not to idle away his youth as he's doing."

"We can't complain that he's idled much of it away here hitherto."

"Why doesn't he prepare himself for some profession?"

"He's done a good deal of preparing. He tells me he's going into
politics."

"Humph! politics. When?"

"Well, I dare say when he goes East again."

"I don't approve of idle men."

"No," said John Gano, with some asperity, "I know you don't."

Body-servants and "splendor" were all very well, but it was not pleasing
to Mrs. Gano that her only grandson should be regarded even temporarily
in the light of that character, looked at askance even in the old
unenterprising South, "the gentleman of leisure." In her heart she
thought it undignified that Ethan should spend so many mornings playing
tennis; that he should laugh and sing with Julia Otway (another victim,
plainly) as though amusement were the end of existence. Harry Wilbur,
too, who had begun with a good honest detestation of the visitor at the
Fort, was at the end of three weeks one of his most ardent friends.

"The Wilburs want cousin Ethan to go and dine with them on Sunday,"
Emmie reported. "They simply love him. I don't wonder. He's going to get
Harry Wilbur something to do in Boston."

"Humph!" ejaculated Mrs. Gano; "when is he going to get himself
something to do?"

Emmie and her cousin continued the best possible friends. No cloud upon
that relation, at all events. He had promised to teach her to ride, but
Emmie was not strong enough for violent exercise, her grandmother
thought, and Emmie herself thought riding must be "awfully scary." Val,
in what her elders took to be some unaccountable mood, had also declined
to ride, saying, mendaciously, that she had enough riding on Julia's
pony. This resulted in Ethan's going out several times with Julia. She
was nearly two years older than Val, and "quite the young lady." People
began to smile and speculate, and the Otways took to asking Ethan
"over."

"Change your mind, Val, and come out with us this morning," Ethan had
said, before going off with Julia for that second ride.

"I can't; I have lessons."

"Not to-day," said Mrs. Gano.

"No, it's Saturday. Come, I'll get you a mount."

"No, thank you, father's better now. We're beginning algebra again
to-day."

"_Algebra!_ What on earth do you want with--"

"She must keep up with her classes," said Mrs. Gano, answering for her,
as Val went out of the room.

But it was a good hour before the algebra lesson. Val went up to her
father's room and climbed into the window-seat. There, with judicious
arrangement of blind and the curtain closed in round her, she watched
for Ethan to mount and ride away. Julia must have grown impatient
waiting. She called for him to-day. How beautiful she
looked--_beautiful_ in her new habit! Away they went laughing in the
sunshine. Val opened the window; now they were turning into Mioto Avenue
at a hard gallop. She drew her cautious head in out of the sweet keen
air and buried her face in the musty old red moreen curtain.

"Why didn't you go, child, if you wanted to so much?" She uncovered
startled eyes. Her grandmother was standing there, looking strangely
gentle. "Your father would have postponed the algebra for once."

"I haven't got a riding-habit."

"The cashmere skirt you wear when you ride out with Julia does quite
well."

The girl shook her head. "Besides, I've only got the skirt."

"What's wrong with your nice velveteen jacket?"

"Hideous!"

They were silent for a space. Then Val:

"Oh, I don't care, I've got lots to do."

She slid off the window-seat and went down-stairs. Val had her full
share of the young heart's passionate instinct to keep its aching to
itself. She had no idea that her grandmother had seen her standing
outside the parlor door when Ethan was there alone, hesitating, trying
to go in, trying to go away, and in the end succeeding only under strong
inward compulsion in compassing the latter. It was well she never
dreamed how much the old eyes saw. She was sure that the world she was
dwelling in was a place no mortal foot had ever trod before. The girl
felt herself a solitary way-breaker through a virgin forest; if she
should tell the thousandth part of the magic and the mystery of this new
world of her discovery, no mortal would believe such travellers' tales.

She listened fascinated the night Ethan said, in answer to his uncle's
platitude about "the common experience":

"There's no such thing! Experience is no more reduplicated than faces
are."

"Of course, I don't mean down to the smallest detail," John Gano had
explained.

"Oh, as to that, we have birth and death in common, if that's all."

"There's a wonderful family likeness in the other facts of life," his
uncle persisted.

"Yes," said Mrs. Gano; "it is when we are young that we think there
could never have been anything to match our experience."

"Then do you think now that your life has been a replica of Mrs.
Otway's?"

Mrs. Gano smiled.

"Oh no," said Val, with a pleased confidence, "there was never anybody
just like _us_ before."

They all laughed.

"No doubt we are 'the peculiar people," said Mrs. Gano, calmly deserting
her first postulate, and seeming quite equal to facing "the comic
laugh."

"I mean," said Val, "that if there never was any 'me' in the world
before, the world's a different place now there's 'me' in it."

They laughed with less misgiving.

"You have Goethe on your side, my dear," said her father. "Goethe says
Nature is always interesting because she's always renewing the
observer."

"I like my way of putting it best," the girl maintained--"sounds more
interesting."

"I've found out, Val," said Ethan, "that most people who make believe
that human nature is everywhere the same, and that we're all as alike as
pins in a row, usually except themselves. That shows they're wiser than
their theories."

"No one denies," said John Gano, "that a slight difference in the
conditions makes some difference in the result. We were speaking broadly
of the main outlines of life. They are curiously common to us all."

"I don't see those 'common outlines,'" Ethan answered, "any more than I
see the same pattern twice in a kaleidoscope. I see the same boundary
walls--birth and death--and all between the two, endlessly different for
each."

"Yes, yes; I believe it's like that," said Val.

"It would be much pleasanter to agree with you, uncle," Ethan remarked,
as he got out the chess-board. "It's more comfortable--more
companionable. I think there are few thoughts so overwhelming as what
John Morley calls 'the awful loneliness of life'--the loneliness that
there's no help for, that no one can reach, no one can ever share. Each
one of us"--slowly, absently, he set the chessmen in their places--"each
man sits apart, with his own soul and its unique experience forever
incommunicable, forever different."

"No; not even incommunicable, if he have genius," returned his uncle.
"The odd thing is that in that case what he has to communicate is
something we all recognize. We expect him to be different; we are amazed
to find him just like ourselves, with the trifling addition of being
able to say what the rest of us have only felt."

"You have more faith in the capacity and the veracity of genius than I
have. In my opinion, not one of those who have tried to reveal
themselves has been able to give us more than shreds and patches of
reality. And they've discounted the fragments of truth by romancing,
consciously or not--making themselves better, or making themselves worse
than they were. The real revelations are the unconscious ones."

"St. Augustine," suggested John Gano.

His nephew laughed and shook his head.

"Well, Rousseau," he amended, looking in the table-drawer for a missing
bishop.

"Rousseau, too--exactly a case in my favor. You can't see the forest for
the trees, nor the man for his confessions."

John Gano shook his lion's mane.

"If you could project your notion of Rousseau, uncle, and I could do the
same by mine, do you suppose they would be alike?"

"Possibly not; we are not in agreement about Rousseau."

"Exactly; and do you think if we could summon him from the shades he
would own either your Jean Jacques or mine? Not he. And he'd be right.
There's more bound up in men than they've ever been able to liberate.
Even genius can do no more than make signals over the prison wall."

"Shakespeare, of course, never tried."

"No; think of it." Instead of beginning the game, Ethan stretched out
his long legs under the table, and leaned back reflectively with his
hands in his pockets--"think of it. Shakespeare, with all his knowledge,
and his miraculous gift of expression, his vocabulary double that of the
Bible, and greater than that of the Bible and Milton put together--even
Shakespeare was too wise to try to do more than give a hint here, a
little signal there, just as people do in real life." He looked up
suddenly and caught Val's eye. She nodded faintly. "Reminds me of a talk
I had with a fellow from Bengal who came over on the same Cunarder with
me. He was telling me about the murder of the manager of a tea-garden in
the Dooab--police a long time utterly at sea, till somebody discovered
that, rummaging among his victim's belongings, the murderer had smudged
a Bengali atlas with his thumb. This atlas was forwarded to the bureau
where the thumb impressions of criminals are kept, and it was discovered
that the impression on the atlas corresponded with the thumb recorded of
a noted criminal then at large. The man was arrested on this fact alone.
Other evidence was brought to light, and when the game was up the
murderer confessed."

"Oh yes," said John Gano, quite unimpressed, "it's a good many years now
since Galton--"

"Exactly, but when it comes to verifiable differences in our thumb
whorls, who shall guess at the hidden differences in our brains and
nerve ganglia? No, no; we are not alike. We are terribly and wonderfully
and forever different, and it's your first play."


The next afternoon Emmie, warmly tucked up on a sofa by the fire, had
fallen asleep while her father read aloud. Mrs. Gano made her son a
sign, and they went up-stairs to his room. Without preface she began to
urge him to take the money he had been going to use in his journey to
New York and go instead to the far South, as the doctor advised. She
could put a little to it--enough to serve. No, no; he wouldn't. Why not?
At last he said it was because of Val. He had promised her they would go
East in the spring. He doubted if he would ever be strong enough to
carry out the plan, but Val must not think he had gone back on his word.
If he spent the money this winter, there would be nothing when the warm
weather came.

"John," said his mother, "it is partly out of consideration for Val that
I urge this."

John opened his eyes.

"I want you to go away for a change, and I don't want you to go alone. I
want you to go with Ethan. I've already mentioned it to him. He knows of
a place near Savannah."

John Gano seemed to be considering in a bewildered way.

"I must go back," said his mother, uneasily. "Emmie may wake and want--"
She seemed oddly nervous. "Pity Emmie should choose this particular time
for one of her colds."

"Yes, poor child! she's missing all the festivity."

"Festivity!" echoed his mother. "Hump! Anyhow, it leaves those two young
people a great deal alone."

John Gano blinked.

"Ethan and Val?" he said, absent-mindedly.

His mother nodded.

"Oh, I wouldn't worry about that. He might be left to less entertaining
people than Val."

"Precisely."

They looked at each other in silence for a moment.

"You don't mean--Val? Why, she's a child."

"She is older than my mother was when I was born."

"You don't think that Ethan--"

He was suddenly alert, anxious.

"No, no; I don't think it's his fault. He, too, looks upon her as a
child. But it would be better if he went away."

"Ah! Ah, indeed; I wish I'd realized. We'll get him away as soon as
possible."

His air of sudden energy seemed perhaps over-anxious.

"Don't do anything to excite suspicion. He is quite ready to go away
with you at the end of the week."

"Where is he now?" demanded her son.

"In the parlor with Val."

They came down-stairs together, Mrs. Gano going back to Emmie. Her son
laid his hand on the parlor door with something both anxious and
inflexible in his manner. It might appear that the little scene on the
other side was easily interrupted by a less extravagant expenditure of
energy. So little may we know the people we spend our lives with, that
the not unobservant old woman at the opposite door thought there was no
more in her son's mind than in her own--a wish to save Val the pain of
an unrequited devotion.

The talk with Ethan to which Mrs. Gano had just referred had taken place
less than an hour before. Although it had been a most discreet
interchange, beginning and ending with John Gano, it had left the young
man in a state of acute discomfort and vague rage at fate. Why had he
not gone away before? Why should his lingering be punished by this awful
infliction of the care of his uncle, or at best his escort hundreds of
miles away, and his establishment in Georgia? It was too much. He had
been ready to deal generously with these queer relations in the matter
of money. But to refuse his help to keep a whole roof over their heads,
and then calmly to demand this of him! It made him laugh, but it made
him angry too. He cursed his folly and inertia, as he called it, in
staying on. Why, he might have been at Tuxedo at this moment! He had
wasted enough time here to have gone to the Riviera. But as he thought
of the dozens of things he might have done, a sharp realization came to
him of the inner dulness of these outwardly glittering ways of killing
time. He had tried them all; he knew them for what they were worth.
Whether work or play, they were just so many devices for shortening the
spun-out tale of days. He knew of old where such thoughts would lead
him. He walked up and down from Daniel Boone to the mirror, glowering
out from time to time at the rain. Beast of a day! Where was everybody?
Suddenly he opened the door. Val started back.

"Oh--a--oh!" she said, confused. "I was just coming to see if--"

She stopped, obviously at a loss.

"And I was just wondering where you were all this time."

She came in smiling and flushing, and shut the door.

"What an awful day!" he said, drawing up a chair for her to the
neglected fire.

"Is it?" she inquired, blandly.

"_Is_ it?"

He walked to the window.

"I hadn't noticed." She looked after him and beyond him, through the
blurred window-panes. "Yes, it is rather rainy and blowy."

"Hardly four o'clock, and dark as a wolf's mouth."

"Yes, the sun sets early these days. I love the long evenings."

She poked the low-burned fire till a feeble flame sprang up. He turned
and looked at her through the twilight.

"What do you do, little cousin, when you want to kill time?"

She glanced over her shoulder with sudden gravity, shovel in hand.

"Do you know, I think to 'kill time' is the most hideous, murderous
phrase in the language. I wish you wouldn't use it."

"What do you propose as a substitute?"

"Just remembering how little time there is for all there is to do with
it." (No coal left in the scuttle--she must go and tell Venie.)

"Ah, yes," Ethan said, coming back and sitting down. "But suppose you
haven't got a mission? Suppose nobody and nothing has any particular
need of you?"

"Oh, I wasn't thinking of missions and needs. I was just thinking of how
much there was to see and--to--to feel--to _find out about_! Enough to
last a million years, and we aren't given (in this life) a hundred."
Gloom settled down upon her face. "I think it's simply awful that we're
allowed so little time. Even elephants and ravens are better off."

He looked into her woe-begone countenance, and began to shake with
laughter.

"Well, well, this _is_ the other side of the shield."

Val was disconcerted at his mirth.

"I'm glad to see you so cheerful about it," she said. "_I_ think it's
simply tragic."

"You observe that even such optimism as yours has its dark side too."

"Dark? Yes, coal-black, but never dull." She spoke with great solemnity.
"No matter what comes, it can't help being frantically interesting."

"How can you be sure of that? You may be--"

He stopped.

"How can I be sure? Why, just because, don't you see, it will be
happening to _me_. That makes it quite new--makes it tremendous." She
studied the dark enigmatic face, and her radiance paled a trifle. "You
said so yourself the other night."

"_I_ said so?"

"Don't you remember?--about everybody being different."

"Different? Yes."

"Oh, that made me so happy." She bent towards him, beaming again. "I so
love thinking that none of the dull old rules hold for me--that I'm the
first one of this sort. What did for other people won't do for me--what
happened to them needn't make me afraid. Oh, it's splendid to think it's
all new and different because of me!"

She pressed her hands together, and her face, yes, it was like a lamp in
the gathering gloom.

"I wonder what you'll do with your life?" said the man, with something
very tender in the low voice.

"Do with it? I shall love it so, it will _have_ to be good to me. I
shall sing, and I shall travel--go everywhere, do everything. I mustn't
miss a single thing--oh, dear no! not a single, single thing." Silence a
moment, and then, "There's just one thought troubles me," she said.

"Ah yes, there's always one--when there aren't more."

"Less time than a silly old elephant's got--and here my father's had to
put off starting till the spring. I hope I shall be able to wait all
that time for him; but sometimes I feel as if I shouldn't."

"Ah, but your promise to me!"

"What was it I promised, cousin Ethan?"

Sharply, in the silence, a cry rang out. Ethan leaped to his feet.

"It's only the ghost," said Val, quietly.

"Of course--Yaffti. But what on earth--"

"Yaffti?"

"I heard it as a child, and called it 'Yaffti.' What the devil is it?"

"Only the clumsy old lightning-rod shrieking in its rusty fixtures when
the wind blows."

"How do you know?"

"I lay on the rug here and listened, and then walked round and round the
house in the wind till I found out what it was made the crying sound."

"Weren't you frightened?"

"Oh yes, dreadfully."

"H'm! So Yaffti turns out to be the spirit of the blast!"

"I was awfully disappointed. I hoped it was a real ghost. Why did you
call it Yaffti?"

"Oh, well, what would you call it if you didn't call it Yaffti?"

She laughed.

"I'm forgetting you hate the gloaming. I must go and tell Venie to bring
the coal, and--"

"Don't go!" he said, suddenly, holding out a hand.

She laughed, a little nervously.

"I believe you're afraid of the dark."

"Yes, little cousin, I've always been afraid of the dark."

She moved away towards the door.

"Val!" The voice seemed to fall on her naked heart, and made it shrink
deliciously. "Val!"

"Yes," she said, hardly above a whisper.

Was anything else said? She never knew. She remembered nothing but
groping blindly two or three steps, and then suddenly realizing that she
was going towards him in the dusk with shaking, outstretched hands. For
what? "Oh, God! what am I doing?" She wheeled about with a sharp inward
twist of mortification. Blessing the kindly dark, she made for the door.

"Don't go!" said the voice.

"Only to get the light," she said, clinging to the door-knob, shaken
into trembling from crown to toe.

"It's not dark, little cousin, while you're here."

She did not stir--nor he. The clock ticked loud. The wind had risen and
was howling like a beaten hound. How curious, thought the man, vaguely,
that the natural sounds of wind, or sea, or falling inland waters, or
the voices of night creatures, are all sad or else discordant. Surely,
surely the spirit of the world is the spirit of plaint and dole.

"Val!"

"Yes, cousin Ethan."

"You are too far off. Bring the light nearer."

She heard steps creaking down the stair. Or was it only that Yaffti
turned and strained in his rusty fetters? The door was hurriedly opened.

"Why are you two sitting in the dark?" said John Gano.

"We've been telling ghost stories," said Ethan, as Val slipped out.




CHAPTER XXII


Mrs. Gano sat with Emmie that evening in the long room. The little girl
had been having restless nights, and had fallen asleep just before
supper. Val went alone into the parlor after that meal, and waited for
the two men to join her. They were smoking in the dining-room--a thing
unprecedented. They stayed a long time. Eight o'clock--nine
o'clock--nearly ten. Val lay down on the sofa in the shadow behind the
big arm-chair, so worn out with emotion she fell asleep. By-and-by,
through the mist of her dreaming, the low sound of voices broke: her
father's, with that familiar note of weary cheerfulness, and now
another, deep, vibrant, full of mutiny and music. She lay a moment with
shut eyes, her half-awakened senses luxuriously steeped in the sound,
careless of the meaning. Now her father answered. Ah, how long his
insistent staccato kept striking the troubled air. It was plain he was
in one of his talking moods, when there was no stopping him, just as for
days--sometimes for weeks--there would be no such thing as getting more
than "Yes," or "No," or "Thank you," across his tightened lips. She was
dropping off to sleep again when suddenly Ethan's voice stabbed her
broad awake, saying:

"The world is a cruel place, the world is an evil place, _ergo_, I hate
the world."

"No, no, you're wrong," said John Gano. "You're blind if you don't see
the world is beautiful, is rooted in triumphing good."

Val sat up in the dark corner behind the chair, ready to cry "Hear,
hear!"

"I admit," her father went on, "that man has defiled it and made it a
den of thieves."

"Comes to the same thing in the end, although I don't agree--"

"It does _not_ come to the same thing. There's all the difference in
what it "comes to" between the curable and the incurable. You and I may
not live to see it, but the world will one day be a fit habitation for
better men than we."

Val, peering out, saw Ethan shake his head.

"When men are truly brothers, when we have worked the ape and tiger out,
when we may be fortunate without blood-guiltiness. Even _you_," his
uncle went on, a swell of enthusiasm lifting up his voice--"even you may
live to see men realizing that Science is the great Captain, the true
Redeemer. I should envy you your chance of hailing the beginning of that
bloodless revolution, except that I am as sure of its coming as my
neighbor's children's children will be when they have ocular proof and
daily profit of it."

"I wish I were as sure of it as you."

"My boy, you've only to look about you. Mind, I don't say _within_. No,
no"--his voice dragged--"one sees there one's own failures and defeats,
and one is blinded to the larger good. I'm no sentimentalist, either."
He flared up. "I'm not saying I shall reap any, or even you much, of
this harvest. But come!"--he pulled his shambling figure out of the
chair and stood before the fire almost erect--"life is nobler than men
thought. Some men's share is to see, before they stumble into the dark,
the light that other men shall walk by--see it, and tell the
shorter-sighted to be of good cheer, for the light is at hand."

"And those who stumbled before the light came near enough?"

"Oh, well, at most they 'fell on sleep.'"

"Ah-h-h!"

"Such men are no worse off than Plato, and Christ, and Buddha. The great
thing was to know there was light."

"I wonder the memory of those old hopes doesn't lessen your faith in the
new."

"Why? Progress isn't a passing fashion; it's the _life_ principle,
another name for the power that makes for righteousness, the impulse
towards the light, the force that pushes the acorn sprout out of the
mould, and goads man night and day towards some ultimate good. As long
as there's life, my boy, it will be better and ever better life. _It's
the law._"

As he stood with arm extended, girt about with sudden authority, Ethan
had a vision of Moses on Mount Sinai. This was too old an aspect of her
father for Val to be much impressed. She watched the effect on her
cousin, however, with feverish interest.

"You're an incurable optimist, uncle," he was saying.

"Ah, don't mistake me. I'm not one of those who drug themselves with
dreaming." No Hebrew prophet now; it was the keen, practical-minded
American who spoke. "The new order won't be brought about by idle
optimism any more than by prayers, or politics, or private
magnanimities."

"How, then?"

"It will be the direct result of a higher standard of public health."

He spoke briskly, as one making a business proposition.

"_Health!_" echoed Ethan sharply--"health of the public conscience, I
suppose you mean."

"Health of the body first of all," growled the prophet. "Health mental
and moral as the natural result. But since the Maker of the world
established the physical basis æons before he bothered about the soul,
the first thing _we_ have to do is to make strong our foundations, since
for ages we've systematically neglected them, when we haven't occupied
ourselves in actively undermining them. The halt, the blind, the
diseased, are not for this New Jerusalem. Its first condition of
citizenship will be _mens sana in corpore sano_. And the beauty of it is
that, to attain this health, no one man's welfare will avail. All men
must share it, or all men are menaced. It means a perfect Socialism."

"Ah, Socialism!"

"Not the travesty that masquerades with banners and brass bands, and
issues pamphlets against property; but the Socialism that is the true
science of life, and that will make possible the men I see in the
future."

Ethan regarded the rapt look of the seer with a kindly cynicism. The
absent eyes of the elder fell upon the critical young face with a gleam
of suspicion. Again and again since his arrival something in Ethan's
easy, lounging attitudes had not only roused an obscure antagonism in
the older man, but had seemed the most irritating expression of his
nephew's habit of mind. His nonchalant grace seemed to say with smiling
superiority: "What's your hurry? Why should _I_ exert myself? Let the
other man walk." John Gano, looking at him now, felt, in addition to the
unreasoning rage at Ethan's _laissez aller_ way of taking life, a kind
of half-morbid, half-fanatical desire to prick the young man into
action, into some likeness to that desperate American strenuousness that
had died so hard with John Gano.

"The men I'm thinking of aren't grown in arm-chairs or under glass, any
more than they are made in filthy workshops or in thieves' alleys; they
are the sons of happy, voluntary toil, and pure air, and honest
dealing."

"Ah," said Ethan, "very likely."

"Not very likely--_certain_. It's one of the few things a man may be
dogmatic about. It ought to be the prime article of faith. Now, you're a
rich man, and you say you're going into politics--you're going to help
prescribe for this sick old world. Very good. You have the more need to
mark well how man's oppression of his brother recoils upon himself. It
is accounted prosperity--'getting on in the world'--to be able to have a
horde of grown-up, hardy men and women about you in your hot-house homes
to wait upon you, to prevent you from doing any part of that work which
alone will keep you whole. Why, as I think of it"--he tossed back his
lion's mane with a fine contempt--"it sounds incredible this should be
the rich man's _own_ desire. It's like some cunning artifice practised
by a nimble-witted slave upon an imbecile and cruel master, a slow but
certain process of undoing. You not only pay another man to take away
your means of health, you usually maltreat him. _Think_ of it from the
point of view of economy, you who are going into politics. The precious
contrivance spoils two constitutions, not to speak of possible heirs.
One man dying for lack of physical exercise, another killing himself by
doing two men's--ten men's--share. You don't believe me. You are sitting
there hugging some mental reservation."

"No, no," said Ethan, "I was only turning it over."

"I assure you I know whereof I speak. These men who grind the faces of
the poor; these railroad magnates, manufacturers, corn kings, bankers,
toiling day and night in stuffy offices--oh, I saw them in New York; I
lived among them; I see them still"--his eyes blazed--"toiling,
oppressing, cheating, to lay up riches. What have they in reality left
to their children--a hoard of yellow gold? More than that; more than an
inheritance of strained nerves and bending backs. They have left them
the means of gratifying their sloth and their gluttony."

He took a turn up and down the room, shaking his head. He stopped
suddenly before his nephew with a look of grim pleasure.

"It's poor comfort, but let the beggar in the street know himself
revenged. The rich man, who has just refused him a dime to buy a dinner,
goes home, and what he overeats and overdrinks, that would feed and
revive the beggar, provides your rich man with his gout and fifty fine
disorders unknown among the poor. When he refuses to share his dinner
with the hungry, your Dives gets not only curses, but diseases of the
digestive organs."

Ethan burst out laughing at the vindictive satisfaction of the climax.

"Come, can you deny it?" his uncle urged. "Drugs, kurs, baths--these are
needed only to repair the waste of stupid living; they are substitutes
for the right kind of labor and of fare, but they only patch the breach
that simpler living would make whole."

"You make me think of James Benton. You know him by reputation?"

"Specialist?--nerves? Yes, very good man."

"Well, he'd been attending a fashionable woman in New York--for about
ten years, he told me. She'd paid him enormous fees to run over from
Boston and 'keep her going.' He was rather sick of it, and one day he
said: 'Oh yes, I can vary the tonic and bolster you up for the season;
but I _could_ cure you, you know.' 'Brute!' she screamed, 'then why
haven't you in all these years?' 'You won't take my medicine.' 'Which
medicine?' 'Six months' service as housemaid in a farm-house in the
White Mountains.'"

"Well," said John Gano, with interest, "and the woman?"

"Oh, she only laughed. However, there are a certain number of people, I
find over here, who do care about physical culture. Fellows at the
universities think a lot more about athletics than they did in my time.
Girls' colleges pay tremendous attention to that sort of thing. Haven't
you noticed? Our women are finding out it touches the 'beauty question.'
That's done more than all the books and doctors in creation. Oddly
enough, our society women in particular, as I saw at Newport--"

"Yes, yes," interrupted his uncle. "We're moving in the right direction,
but slowly--very slowly. Even health is little more with us as yet than
a newly discovered prerogative of the prosperous. They're finding out
it's the condition of survival. Oh, give us time, and it'll come all
right."

"Perhaps. But even in the Old World, where you'd think they'd had time
enough, they've got at only one aspect of the evil. They're alive to the
need of mere exercise, especially in England. Oh, the devices!" laughed
the young man, "by which the idle well-to-do may, in default, as you
would say, of trees to fell or coal to dig and bricks to lay, develop,
notwithstanding, their biceps and their chests! I've seen many a fellow,
with a quite ludicrous absence of enjoyment, doing dumb-bell whim-whams,
or shouldering his golf-clubs, or going off to play rackets, with the
stern resolve to get his quantum of exercise, whether it amuses him or
not."

"Yes, yes, yes," John Gano broke in, "mere cultivators of muscle don't
interest me much, though they go a step in the right direction. A man
must face and overcome hardship, _real_ hardship, before he's good for
anything. Man is like the good wheat, he flourishes where it's cold
enough to give him a good pinching frost once a year. Your
finest-flavored fruits are grown where man contends with Nature, not as
in the tropics, where she drops her insipid increase into his idle lap.
Those games that men play at while their brothers starve are well enough
for those who like 'em, but the great majority of average boys and
girls, and even, to some extent, perverted men and women, too, are never
so well amused as when they're _making something_. If every one had some
bit of manual labor to do, something he could do with love, studying to
bring it to perfection--"

"Ah yes," said Ethan, with a livelier interest, "that might bring men
back a sense of beauty."

"At all events," said the elder, sturdily, "it would bring man back to
the bed-rock of wholesome endeavor; and while he was strengthening his
muscles and his morals, and laying up a fit inheritance for his
children, he would be helping to solve the industrial problem of the
world. The vulgar stigma would be lifted from the laboring class."

"Ah--h'm--yes," murmured Ethan, with a somewhat lackadaisical air.

John Gano studied his nephew's long, careless, lounging figure with a
growing disapproval.

"In the time to come," said John Gano, significantly, "the only idle
will be the few, and ever fewer, sick, and the very old. Chronic disease
will be looked upon as the only lasting disgrace. The evil will hide
their complaints as carefully as to-day they hide their crimes. They
will be more ashamed of an attack of indigestion or of gout than a man
is to-day of being seen drunk in public, or caught robbing a till. He
who passes a disease down the line will be looked upon as a traitor, the
only criminal deserving capital punishment."

Ethan looked up quickly, scrutinizing the grim face for a moment, and
then, unaccountably to himself, his own look went down.

Val had lost the sense with which she awoke of overhearing something not
intended for her, and of being under the necessity of making her
presence known in the first pause. The talk was just an amplification of
views to which her father had accustomed her from childhood. She would
have gone to sleep again, or come out and said good-night, but for the
interest of seeing their effect on Ethan, who had already been wrought
upon to the extent of saying that he "hated" the beautiful world. Why
was he looking so black-browed and forbidding now? She must pay
attention and follow this.

"There'll be fewer hospitals," her father was saying, with staccato
emphasis, "and less vapid sentimentalizing over those who suffer from
violation of the plain laws of health."

"Well, it strikes me," said Ethan, "that if the poor devil has got his
weak digestion, or his gout, or what not, from some unenlightened
ancestor--"

"It must strike you that in that case he's in the position of the man
whose father died in debt, in disgrace. The loyal son must wipe out the
score."

"It's devilish hard on the son. He'll say he has his own debts to
pay--an obligation to himself."

"As a man of honor, or"--with a gesture of impatience--"of mere sense,
he will know he has no obligation so binding as to end the evil with his
life, leaving no offshoot to sow the seeds anew. It is civic duty,
it"--the stern voice wavered--"it is fatherly pity. When I see my little
girl's eyes bright with fever--with this old fever that's been wasting
me these forty years--do you suppose I find much comfort in thinking I
had it from my father, and have by foolish living only augmented a
little my inheritance?"

He shook his lion's head fiercely. The break in her father's voice, even
more than the words with their dimly comprehended menace, brought back a
quick realization to the girl that her father had no notion of her
presence. Should she come out now? It would be embarrassing to them all,
for he was strangely moved. If she waited a few moments he would get
back to generalities, and then she would come out and say good-night.
But under this playing at expediency was an eager curiosity to hear
more, to understand better.

"What do you mean by 'this old fever'?" Ethan asked.

"Well"--his uncle turned his rough head slowly to the door to assure
himself it was shut--"I mean something that my mother and I agreed not
to talk about. There is a word that no one ever hears mentioned under
this roof. We don't mention the word because"--he sunk his voice to a
whisper--"because the thing itself is here."

"What is the word?"

"Consumption."

Ethan sat looking at him in silence. Val half rose. She must let them
know she was there. But--consumption! She sank down. Was it true _that_
was the ghost that haunted the Fort? Certainly it was true that she had
never heard the word on the lips of her elders.

"My father and my wife died of it," John Gano was saying. "My mother has
the old lingering form of it. It was 'galloping consumption' that
carried my sister Valeria out of the world at thirty. I am dying of it.
My children--"

A curious hoarse sound tore its way out of his throat, and he buried his
head in his hands. When he looked up his eyes were wild and bright. Val
held her breath, and the nails of her clinched hands dug into her palms.

"I have just one hope," her father said, "that my innocent children will
go out as painlessly as may be, before the great battle begins."

Val drew back, crouching behind the chair-back with blanched face.

"It is too late to hope that," said Ethan.

"No, it's not too late; the enemy is still in ambush."

"The enemy?"

"Yes. The battle won't begin till sex finds them out."

"What then?"

"Then they will have to be told what I was not told in time."

"What would you say?"

"I"--the hoarse voice shook--"I'd tell them how full of holes their
armor is."

"Uncle John, you'll never be so cruel."

Val, behind the big chair, lifted her scared face in the shadow, looking
on as a woman might at a duel fought for her.

"It is the only kindness. When I thought I shouldn't live to see them
old enough to know, I wrote the matter down. Ha!"--he laughed
wearily--"in the form of a last will and testament; a legacy from a
father who will leave them nothing else except--" He got up and turned
away, coughing. He walked up and down the room again, with dragging step
and bent head. He stopped suddenly and laid his hand on the young man's
shoulder. "I see too plainly the lesson of the past not to hand my
knowledge on. It's all I'm good for now. This fair future for the race
that I've believed in, that I've foreseen so long--" He was interrupted
by the painful cough, but conquered it an instant. "Not only have I
always known I could have no personal share in it, not even through my
children--"

The cough gripped him again, and he turned away with handkerchief to his
lips.

Ethan watched him, unmoved, with a kind of unsympathetic fascination.

"I think," said the young man, before his uncle found his voice again,
"you are going on to say something I had to try to disabuse my mind of,
years ago, when my own health smashed up before I went to France."

John Gano dropped into the rocking-chair by the fire, and lay back a
moment with closed eyes and laboring breath.

"I didn't know," he said, faintly, "that you'd had your warning, but I
see"--he opened his eyes suddenly--"I see that your New England blood is
too thin, too office-stricken, to save you. You've nothing--absolutely
nothing to hope for from the Gano side." His voice was strong. It rang
like a challenge. "My mother is wrong! Our fathers _have_ eaten sour
grapes."

Ethan leaned forward about to speak, but his uncle broke in harshly:

"I tell you you belong to a worn-out race. _We_ are among those who are
too remote from the soil--'there is no health in us.'"

"Oh come, Uncle John, don't talk as if we were Aztecs, or an effete
monarchy."

"We _are_ effete, and we deserve to die out root and branch."

The little movement over in the dark corner passed unnoticed in Ethan's
attempt at protest.

"Or perhaps you think," said John Gano, "because we are not of noble
descent, that being an old or rather a long dominant and idle race,
doesn't count."

He smiled with a tinge of superior pity.

"How do you know we're so old a family?" demanded his nephew.

"I feel it in my bones; they ache--_they ache_." He had begun the
sentence with a hoarse laugh, and at the end his haggard face settled
into lines of pain. "But whether we're an old family in the paltry
social sense is beside the mark. Nature doesn't care a continental
copper," he went on fiercely, "whether you're a king or a bankrupt
cotton-planter, or any other cumberer of the earth. What people don't
realize is that a peasant or a rag-picker may come of an idle, worn-out
stock, and if so, be sure Nature has marked him down. If purple and fine
linen don't deceive her, neither do rags. No sickly sentimentality about
_her_. She'll find her enemy, the unfit, through any and all disguise.
As for your aristocrat, she won't distinguish him even by her revenge.
She has nothing to do with that figment of the pompous mind, 'belonging
to an old family.' Families are _all_ old. The question is: How closely
are you related to--well, to use the ready-made phrase: How near are you
to the soil?--to the fountain-head of blood made sweet by denial and
swift by strenuous living? Ah, my boy, our fathers sat too long at their
ease in houses that the building and the tending of made muscle and
brawn for others. We lounged in arm-chairs by our fires of fat Southern
pine, but the men who got the vital warmth were the men who hewed the
tall trees down. We've blinded our eyes over books, and blunted our
humanity in a petty concern about our souls, while our bodies were going
to destruction."

There was dead silence for a few minutes.

"And those more fortunate ones," his nephew said, in a dull, resentful
voice, "who are they? How is it possible to be _sure_? How shall your
elect be known?"

"As of old, by their fruits. They and their children have broad
shoulders; they haven't chests like ours--they haven't hands like mine."

He held his up, and both men (the girl, too, in the far corner) saw the
fire glow red behind the thin, transparent fingers. He dropped them with
an air of one who throws up a desperate game. Val pushed aside the rug
that still partly covered her, and slid to the ground, arrested on the
sofa's edge by Ethan's saying more angrily than she had thought that
voice could sound:

"I tell you straight, Uncle John, I don't accept this paralyzing
doctrine of yours, still less do I think your children will. I tell you
frankly I rebel against--"

John Gano's wax-white hand caught him by the shoulder in a grip that
made the young man wince.

"So did _I_ rebel, and I've been paying for it these sixteen years. Oh
yes, I knew very little, but I rebelled against the little I knew. I did
worse--I married. I did worse even than that--_I married my first
cousin_."

He drew off, as if the better to watch the effect of his words. Ethan,
looking at him darkly, felt there was a devilish ingenuity in his
uncle's ignoring the possibility of any further mixing of Gano blood,
and yet holding up his own misdeed as a hideous warning to the world in
general, a thing of unmitigated evil.

"These matters were not understood in my day," he went on, "but happily
the men and women of these times are not left in darkness."

"Oh yes, they are," said Ethan. "The men and the women are new, but the
darkness is the old darkness."

"No; science has put it to rout. I had no one when I was young to tell
me the things I'm telling you."

Ethan's face was undisguisedly satirical, but his uncle was oblivious.

"The Ganos have all been well-intentioned people, and yet they went on
down there in Virginia and Maryland, generation after generation,
marrying their own cousins, breeding in and in, till--well, you, for
instance, and my children are more like brother and sister than cousins.
You are even nearer than some brothers and sisters are. You each have in
you the concentrated essence of a single family's strain. As I've told
you, when I look at my innocent children, I could curse the eternal law
that will not let me pay my debt alone. If we rebel"--he fastened his
lean fingers on Ethan's shoulder again, and spoke with growing
excitement--"if we rebel against _that_ commandment, we and our wretched
children are punished." He released his grip, but with eyes bloodshot,
menacing, he stood over the young man still: "If we rebel, instead of
dying out calmly and gently, we'll have to be stamped out."

"What do you mean?"

No lounging now; the young man sat arrow-straight and eagle-eyed.

"I mean that certainly in _this_ race the weakest go to the wall. We
Ganos can't compete."

"I wouldn't if I were Hercules. I loathe competition."

"Exactly--exactly. It's the very cry of the unfit."

"I deny it. It's the cry of the man willing to work without ignoble
spurring, who doesn't want his comrades' disaster to sweeten victory,
who wants to be fortunate, as you say, without blood-guiltiness."

"When that sentiment comes of strength, my friend, it means one thing;
when it comes of weakness, it means another. There's hard fighting
ahead, and Hercules will be to the fore. He'll be needed. The Ganos will
be occupied in hating competition."

Ethan gave vent to a sound of stifled indignation. Val watched him with
suspended breath. His uncle watched him calmly, and then he said:

"A Gano can inherit money. I doubt if he can make it. I doubt if he can
even keep it. I doubt if he can lose it like a man."

Ethan winced, recalling the days of the lost allowance, and his impotent
railing at destiny while he starved in the streets of Paris.

"There isn't the shadow of a doubt what the end of our family history
will be," the hoarse voice ended. "Those of us who aren't ground under
the heel of poverty will be snuffed out by disease."

"My God!" Ethan broke out; "and to think I called you an optimist! Why,
you're just such another as Job, crying out: 'Let the day perish wherein
I was born.' 'Oh, that I had given up the ghost, and no eye seen me'; or
the Genevan confessing: 'Ma naissance fut le premier de mes malheurs.'"
He would have been ready to swear that he was writhing, not under the
sense of an impassible barrier raised between him and some concrete
coveted good, but at being confronted, where he least expected it, with
a new aspect of the ugliness and pain and helplessness of the human lot.
"It doesn't seem to matter which way one turns," he burst out; "the
sound loudest in one's ears is the lament of all the generations that
have gone up and down hunting happiness, till, as you say, they fell on
sleep. Whether I go to the classics or read the new philosophies,
whether it's Socrates or Seneca preaching the dignity of death, or the
volcanic Nietzsche trying gloomily to exalt self, and losing himself in
madness--whether I wander the Old World, or fly for better things to the
New, it's the same thing. You began by telling me life was beautiful and
good; you have ended by showing me afresh that it simply doesn't bear
being thought about. Why, _Val_!"

He had risen and caught sight of the white, tear-drowned face looking
out behind the chair.

"Val!" echoed her father; "I thought you were in bed!"

"Oh, I wish I had been!" She came out of the corner with her plumage of
brave looks crushed and broken, all her young brightness tarnished.
"Father," she said, while the tears rained down, "I'm sorry you're so
sad about the world, and about all us Ganos, but you needn't try to make
cousin Ethan sad too, and me--and me--"

Ethan made a gesture forward, as if to take the girl in his protecting
arms. John Gano's angry eyes flashed warning. He tried to hush his
daughter's sobbing in his breast.

"You are my wise little girl, and you--"

"Wise! Yes; a great deal too wise to believe all this. I don't know
_why_ I'm crying so." She looked up, smiling miserably through her
tears. "Why, it's just nothing but arguing. When cousin Ethan's with me
he never has such awful, awful notions. He's a little sad sometimes, and
has to be cheered up, and you oughtn't to argue with him like this--"

The heaving sobs clutched her voice, stifling the last words.

"Come, come, child; you're over-excited. There--there!"

"When _I'm_ old"--she flung back her head with a poor little travesty of
her common gesture--"I'll tell my children--_all_ of them--that it's
been a good world to be in, and that they're not to be afraid, and--and
not to be any sadder than they can help."

"Come, come; dry your eyes and go to bed."

She turned away with her handkerchief over her face.

"Good-night, little cousin," said Ethan, steadying his voice and taking
her hand.

"Oh, good-night," she faltered, and with a movement full of exquisite
young tenderness she lifted her little handkerchief and brushed it
lightly across his misty eyes. "Father was only arguing," she said.

But the tears flowed down her cheeks afresh as she opened the door and
went out.




CHAPTER XXIII


Two days later Ethan was on his way South with John Gano.

He stayed with his uncle for a month, and then sent for the despised
Drouet, who was an excellent nurse. As he grew weaker, John Gano
developed not only a tolerance, but a liking, for the alert, amusing
Frenchman, and stayed contentedly in the quarters Ethan had found, until
the spring, making a herbarium of the flora of that region. At the
beginning of May he was to return home. Early in April, Drouet wired to
his master in Boston to say that the doctor was alarmed at the patient's
condition. Ethan went South at once, and three days after his arrival
his uncle died in his arms.

"Don't drag me back to the North," he had said; "bury me where I fall."
And it was done.

Mrs. Gano was too ill to travel, and telegraphed that Ethan was to come
back afterwards to the Fort.

It was a very different arrival from the last. The little cousins,
dressed in black, looked more than ever like snow flowers on the fringe
of winter.

Mrs. Gano was profoundly moved on seeing Ethan entering alone. She
motioned the children out of the room, and had one long talk with her
grandson about the end. Afterwards, in her fashion when she was
suffering most, she shut herself up, and no one except the servants saw
her until the following Sunday, which was Easter.

It struck Ethan as curious, and unexpected, that even the girls should
put such restraint upon their grief. Emmie, it was true, was often seen
in tears, but the most she ever said of her father was, "He knows
there's a heaven now." Val conducted the household in default of her
grandmother, and Ethan caught himself smiling surreptitiously at the
old-fashioned decorum she imposed upon herself in playing the
unaccustomed rôle.

Emmie was to be confirmed this Easter. She was going through a very
devout phase, and, when Val was not there, she talked to Ethan about the
coming consecration with a curious religious fervor. There was a strain
of unconscious mysticism in the girl that struck Ethan oddly, against
the bare American background. It was to him more of an anachronism than
any manifestation he had yet encountered, even at the Fort, that
stronghold of the past.

"I love to talk about these things to you, cousin Ethan," she said; "Val
doesn't understand."

Learning something of these confidences, Mrs. Gano took the first
opportunity of saying, privately:

"I do not know quite where you stand, my dear Ethan, in matters of
religious faith--" and she waited.

"I don't know quite where I stand myself," he had answered.

"You used to have a fine perception for things spiritual."

He smiled.

"I _once_ thought I might find Rome at the end of my wandering."

"Ah!" she said, quite calmly, "my father used to say, 'You will all have
to come back to Mother Church.'"

"I do not mean that I felt like that long," Ethan said, hurriedly,
realizing that he was sailing under false colors, "or that I think now
as I suppose you do. It's probably little more with me than that 'I was
born in the wilds of Christianity, and the briers and thorns still hang
about me.'"

"You got that from your Uncle John," she said, coldly.

"No; it was said the century before he was born."

"To me, God is the great fact of life. To be without God is to be
without hope in the world."

Ethan shaded his lowered eyes with one hand as he answered:

"Yes, I've thought that, too."

She looked at him reassured.

"Ah! I have ceased to be troubled at minor differences of creed; but
when we are young, we are less--catholic," she smiled, and then grew
grave. "I hope you will never say anything to unsettle the faith of the
little girls."

"Oh, I shouldn't dream-- But Val has not been confirmed, I understand."

"No; I don't believe any longer in pressing these things."

"She would have required pressing?"

"She has not developed any great concern about spiritual matters. And
yet, as a child, she was much occupied about religion. Not as you and
Emmie were. With Val it was all the wrong way up."

"Wrong way--"

Mrs. Gano nodded, reflectively.

"Her interest in the Bible seemed founded upon the large opportunity it
gave her for the exercise of rank unbelief. I was always hoping to
overcome the tendency. But"--she shook her head--"if, as a treat, I
allowed her to choose what portion of the Scripture should be read
aloud, it was always the Revelation."

"Oh, I don't think that so depraved."

"Neither did I, till one Sunday, as I got to the words, 'And I, John,
saw,' I was arrested by a movement from the child sitting at my feet. I
looked down and saw the small face puckered with the concentrated
essence of suspicion. 'Who saw it 'sides John?' she demanded. And that,
briefly, has been her attitude ever since. I lament it, but I don't talk
to her about it any more. The one Christian tenet that I am satisfied
Val holds is the doctrine of the Resurrection. Strange--strange! Now,
Emmie is like all the rest of the Ganos."

Ethan nodded. "Yes, Val is a stranger among us. Poor Val!"

Emmie was certainly a vision of innocent loveliness, as she went up to
the chancel that Easter morning, to be received into the communion of
the faithful. There was something poetic, something not wholly of this
world, in her fragile beauty, her rapt and lighted look. Ethan
recognized in the sweet face--never so unclouded as to-day--the subtle
ecstasy of the devotee. Something in him stirred painfully, regretfully,
answering to it with a sense of unwilling sympathy, of kinship that
would not be denied. People in the church that day whispered to each
other:

"Emmie Gano and her cousin are more alike than most brothers and sisters
are."

Very different was the mutinous face of the elder girl, sitting beside
Ethan in her mourning, looking neither at bishop nor white-robed brides
of the Church, but with unreconciled, tear-filled eyes at the white
cross, in memory of her father, that hung among the Easter decorations
in the chancel. The wreath upon the lectern, that all the town knew to
be the annual "In memoriam" to that Valeria Gano who had been in her
grave these twenty years--for that, only Ethan of the dead woman's
kindred had eyes and tender remembering.

"Father's cross looked very beautiful," Emmie said, in a hushed voice,
to her grandmother that afternoon.

Mrs. Gano inclined her head.

"I am glad we chose calla lilies; he loved them," murmured Emmie.

"He didn't love to hear them called calla lilies," said Val, without a
particle of feeling in her voice.

"Yes," said Emmie, "I mean those great--"

"He would be very angry to hear you call them lilies."

"Angry?" Mrs. Gano looked up.

"Yes, angry," said Val. "Callas are not liliaceæ, they are araceæ, and
belong to the Jack-in-the-pulpit family. If he hears us, he'll hate to
think we've forgotten so soon." Her defiant eyes suddenly filled up. "He
taught us not to be so ignorant as to call them lilies, just as he
taught us not to say 'wisteria.'"

"What are you to say, then?" asked Ethan.

"Wistaria."

"Not really?"

"Yes, it _is_ wistaria, and we must all _say_ wistaria, because he told
us to, and because it's named after General Wistar."

"Why have you put these fine linen doilies on the arms of the chairs?"
asked Mrs. Gano.

"Because the arms are covered with velvet," Val answered, without
thinking, and then shot a shy look at Ethan.

"Velvet? Of course. What then?"

Val looked in her lap and said, mendaciously:

"I don't like velvet arms. Please let the doilies stay."

Mrs. Gano was satisfied in her own mind that Val was ashamed of the
condition of the ancient covering. The difficulty plainly was that it
_had_ been velvet. She forbore to pursue the question before her
grandson.

The days went on; Ethan refused to count them.

One late afternoon a deluge of rain brought down a part of the ceiling
in the old red room that had been John Gano's. Ethan took his courage in
both hands, and described to Mrs. Gano, in forcible terms, the extent of
the damage and the danger of leaving the roof as it was.

"I don't propose to leave it as it is."

He studied her.

"Do you remember telling me when I was a little chap that this was my
home?"

"H'm--did I?"

"I haven't any other _now_. Let me think of the Fort as my home." He
paused, but her aspect was not encouraging, was hardly hospitable. He
went on: "Let _me_ look after the roof, and--"

"Certainly not. I have looked after everything for half a century. When
I'm dead some one else may do it--not before."

"Ah, you know what I mean. You've lost your only son. Give me some of
his privileges." She jerked away her head, as she did when she was
moved, and wanted not to betray the fact. "I am tired of being
homeless," Ethan said.

"You will make a home of your own, my dear."

"I want this for my home."

She turned suddenly, and looked at him with eyes that were keen and
intent under their film of tears.

"No," she said, slowly, "this does for us. It is not the kind of home
for you."

"It is the kind I want."

He smiled in that sudden, radiant way of his.

"No; the Fort is here to shelter and protect other people. You don't
need it."

"But I do; and it's _my_ Fort. Why, you've never even taken my name off
the door."

The old woman recalled a glimpse she had had the evening before of Val
laying her cheek against the graven name.

"I'm not sure but I _shall_ take it off," she said, half smiling, half
threatening.

"You don't want to get me out of the habit of thinking of the Fort as
'home'?"

"You've never really been in the habit--you belong elsewhere."

He studied her in perplexity.

"Do you realize that at this moment the rain is coming in floods into
Uncle John's room?"

"The rain won't trouble your uncle John." She had turned away again.

"But there are others here--"

"It is those others I have to consider. Your uncle John's insurance will
mend his children's roof."

"And you won't give me the happiness--"

"My dear boy," she said, with some impatience, "your happiness doesn't
lie here."

She began to rock back and forth with lowering brow.

"You want to get rid of me."

She stopped rocking, and turned to him with a moved and gentler aspect.

"Personally, I very much want you to stay; but there are many things to
think of. I am not alone here. You bring an atmosphere of--of unrest
from out the world you belong to. I see the danger that you may import
some of it into our quiet lives."

"How little you realize! The young life here is seething with unrest."

"That is what I am realizing."

"But I found it like that."

She shook her head.

"You must go away, my dear."

She was of the same mind, then, as her son had been. Go away! Go away!
That was all the welcome they had here for Ethan Gano. A feeling of
bitterness took hold on him, of such loneliness that it was as if,
without warning, he had heard pronounced a sentence of perpetual exile.
"For that's what it is," he thought: "she will never ask me to come
again." And he was right--she never did.


He had got up after a moment or two, and gone out to the veranda, where
he walked up and down, with the noise of the rain in his ears.

Presently Emmie looked out.

"Where's Val?" asked Ethan.

"Up-stairs. Ever since supper she's been seeing if the tubs and things
are under all the leaks."

"Ask her to come out here when she's finished, will you?"

"Yes," said Emmie reluctantly, and turned away.

Ethan had no eyes for the sudden shadow on the sweet face. He began to
stride up and down again, angrily, eagerly, looking out through the
tracery of the wistaria as an animal might through the bars of its cage.

"Well, here I am!"

Val stood smiling as he turned.

"Oh, good! Let us sit down."

"On the black benches? Never!"

She gathered her skirts round her with a gesture of comic horror.

"Here, then"--he spread out a large white handkerchief--"sit on this."

"And you?"

"Sit down!" he commanded.

She took the place meekly, with hands crossed in mockery, and laughing
eyes, but her pale cheeks flushed.

"Now, you are to promise me something," he said, standing before her
with folded arms.

"Oh, I've always got to promise you things. What have you ever promised
me?"

His moody eyes caressed the upturned face.

"What do you want me to promise?" he said, more gently.

"Will you do it?"

"I--a--"

"You _see_!"

"I only want to know what it is."

She looked away.

"Tell me what _you_ want first," she said.

Instead of answering, her cousin turned and walked to the end of the
dripping veranda, where the wind had blown the rain in several feet
across the boards. She watched him furtively, biting her upper lip the
while, catching it cruelly with her sharp white teeth to still its
trembling. She watched him turn slowly, come back a few paces, raising
his eyes as he was passing the first of the long room windows, and stop
short with a queer, guilty start. He nodded gravely to the watchful eyes
within and continued his walk, only more rapidly, muttering to himself,
"The old lioness!"

Val had an impulse to go and look through the window nearest her, but
something held her where she was. Presently, as Ethan paced back and
forth, a pale shine came through the panes, mixing uncertainly with the
evening light. Venie must have taken in the big bronze lamp. Yes, one
could hear her now letting down the blinds. Val was glad she had
resisted the impulse to look in. Ethan had stopped his restless pacing,
as soon as the blinds were drawn.

"I have asked her," he said, with a motion of the head towards the long
room, "to let me attend to the roof, and a few little things like that."
He paused, and looked sharply at the shrouded windows.

"She says you take a great deal upon yourself," Val smiled.

"Oh, she does! Well, I shall take more. I am going to take the liberty
of giving you five hundred dollars, to do what you can here without her
knowing; and when's it's gone I shall give you as much again, and you're
not to tell anybody. Promise."

"I couldn't do that."

"Why not?"

"Simply, I couldn't. I know so well what she'd say--'It's against all
our traditions.' And the money you are offering--"

"Well?"

"You see, _it's Tallmadge money_!" Val resented a little his whimsical
look. She drew herself up. "You can't expect us Ganos--" She broke off
as he took a letter out of his pocket and unfolded it. "Oh!" She turned
a sudden scarlet and grasped at the incriminating document.

"No, no," he said. "I was defrauded of this letter a long time by an
imbecile postal system. But I'll take good care of it now I have got
it."

"I--I was very young when I wrote it."

"--a little over a year ago," he completed her sentence, laughing.

"Please don't think I'm wanting you to help me now."

"Well, that's a good thing," he said, with an unexpected hardness, "for
I haven't the smallest intention of doing so."

Val's eyes were angry and bright with drops of humiliation.

"I wouldn't take it if you begged me to," she said.

"Don't you see, dear Val"--he leaned nearer, but she averted her face
from him--"don't you see that, at all events until Emmie is older, you
can't desert the Fort?" No answer. "Don't be angry with me, little
cousin. Don't you feel how much your own people need you?" Still no
answer. "Seventy-five!" he went on; "you mayn't have long to wait."

She turned on him sharply.

"As if I grudged--as if I wanted to shorten the time!"

She swallowed a little sob.

"No, no; of course you don't. I understand you quite well."

"The last thing father said to me was, 'Take care of her, she's growing
old.'"

He nodded.

"That's all I mean by putting this money into your hands."

"Oh, but I _can't_ take five hund-- I understand better than I did when
I wrote that stupid letter; she'd half kill me!"

"She's not to know, and I"--he glowered down at her with a
laugh--"_I'll_ half kill you if you don't do what I tell you."

She looked in her lap. Her eyelids fluttered.

"You must write me regularly, and tell me all that's happening."

She lifted her head as if she had been stung.

"You--you aren't going away!"

"Yes."

"When are you coming back?"

"I don't know."

The dull rain poured, the defective spouts at the eaves played gray
fountains, the great tulipifera rhododendron waved answering arms to the
signals of the storm.

In the momentary lull, An' Jerusha in the kitchen could be heard
quavering out wild notes, among which Ethan recognized the words:


     "No mo' peace on de earf."


"I don't _believe_ you'll go," said Val.

He couldn't see her face so well now in the gray light.

"What makes you believe I won't go?"

She clasped her hands and wrung them unconsciously.

"Val--"

"Or, if you go, you'll come back?"

"Don't you know that's what I must not do?"

"No," she said, in a muffled but resolute voice.

They sat silent, motionless, for some time. She turned at last with
wide, shining eyes, putting her face close to his in the uncertain
light, and saying, with a quick-drawn breath:

"Why, cousin Ethan!"

"What is it?"

"Why do you look like that?"

"Like what?"

"So--so terribly unhappy."

He didn't answer.

"What's the matter?"

He tried to say something, moved his lips faintly, but no sound came.

"Oh, what is it?" she cried; "something new?"

He nodded, echoing: "Something new, and something very, very old."

"And sad?"

"Saddest of all sad things."

"What is?"

"Haven't you ever heard? Love is the saddest of all."

A ray of light fell like a sword between them, and a sharp rap on the
window at their backs made them fly to their feet. Turning, they saw
Mrs. Gano's face against the pane. She had lifted a corner of the blind,
and was beckoning with imperious hand.

"I must go," whispered Val; and she vanished.

Ethan walked up and down till the early bed hour, listening to the rain
and to the sound of An' Jerusha's crooning.




CHAPTER XXIV


Emmie had begun to teach a class in the Infant Sunday-school. She would
go off soon after breakfast, the others following an hour or so later,
and meeting her at morning service.

"I don't think I'll go to-day," said Ethan the subsequent Sunday. "Why
don't you take a holiday, too?"

"No," answered Val. "If I stay at home grandma will-- But you might walk
part way with me, mightn't you?"

"Yes, I don't mind a walk. I'll take a book along and go up on the Hill
after I leave you."

As they set off, Mrs. Gano stood at the window looking after them. Ethan
made her a little half-mocking bow, whereat she smiled grimly.

Val, glancing back at her, said, "Though you do pretend to be so gloomy,
you always put other people into better spirits. I haven't seen her
smile since--not since.... She cares more for you than she does for
anybody."

"She won't be sorry when I go."

Val flashed a side look at him, and the brightness dimmed in her eyes.
But here was Miss Tibbs, hurrying by with a sharp glance and
"Good-morning," and other people passing on their way home from
Sunday-school. She mustn't cry in public.

"You oughtn't to say that she won't be sorry. You ought to be
gratefuller to people for caring so tremendously for you--as she does."
Her heart seemed to be beating high up in her throat. "Emmie and I often
notice how she lets you do all the forbidden things--pick the myrtle and
narcissus, play as loud and as hard as you like on the piano, have
sangaree and julep when you aren't a bit ill"--she was trying to
laugh--"even lets you go through the bookcases and take out anything you
like."

She glanced down at the book in his hand. He made no rejoinder. A side
glance at his face showed him with brows knitted and abstracted eyes.

Suddenly the dark face lit up; he had caught sight of a charming
apparition over the way. Julia was crossing the street "just in time to
meet Ethan," thought Val, although her friend was coming from her
Sunday-school class, at the usual time, and by the usual route.

"Good-morning," Ethan called out with a cheerfulness that made Val's
heart drop in an instant, down--down.

"You two pious ones off to church?" asked Julia, as she shook hands with
them.

"Not me," answered Ethan; "it's too fine a day to waste in church."

"Just what I think," said Julia, wistfully.

How bewitchingly pretty she looked in her field-flower hat and
leaf-green gown! Val felt dowdy and dull in her mourning; it was an
insult to the fair summer weather to go about in such clothes. No wonder
cousin Ethan had brightened as he looked at Julia.

They were all walking on together now to the Otways' gate. Val breathed
a silent prayer of thankfulness that Julia was a Presbyterian.

"What are you going to do, Mr. Gano, if you don't go to church?" asked
Miss Otway, leaning across Val, who walked in the middle.

"Find a comfortable place under a tree."

"And read that very un-Biblical-looking book?"

They were at the gate now, which Ethan opened; but Julia lingered, in
spite of Val's "Heavens! is that the church-bell?"

"Mightn't it pass for a hymnal?"

He laid the book open on the top of the gate, very willing to prolong
the interview, as it seemed, in spite of Val's disingenuous
interjection, "I'm afraid I'll be late."

"Too cheerful for a hymnal," said Julia, shaking her head and smiling
up into his eyes.

"Cheerful only on the outside, I'll be bound," said Val, suspiciously.
Then turning to the title-page: "'An Anthology collected by--' What
makes you like reading poetry?"

"Why, don't you?" said Ethan to them both.

"Yes, indeed," responded Julia.

"Not a bit," said Val.

"Why not?" laughed Ethan.

"Too sad," said Val, firmly.

Julia looked pensively away from Ethan up to the blue sky, over the line
of hills.

"I love sad things," she said, sympathetically.

"Oh yes, _you_ like 'em blubbery. I don't. That's why I hate poetry.
It's all sobbing and groaning, and 'Oh!' and 'Alas!' or else the silly
scenery."

"Oh, not all," said Ethan.

"Well, most of it is. Now, see! I'll shut the book and open it at
random:


     "'O star, of which I lost have all the light,
         With hertë sore well ought I to bewail,
     That ever dark in torment, night by night,
         Towards my death with wind in stern I sail.'


That's Mr. Chaucer. Now try again:


     "'My days are in the yellow leaf;
         The flowers and fruits of love are gone;
     The worm, the canker, and the grief
         Are mine alone!'


That cheerful gentleman is Lord Byron!"

She shut the book with a vicious snap and opened it again:


     "'Out of the day and night
     A joy has taken flight:
       Fresh spring, and summer, and winter hoar,
     Move my faint heart with grief, but with delight
       No more--O, never more!'


That's Shelley's account of things. And here's Keats's:


     "'The weariness, the fever, and the fret
     Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
     Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
     And leaden-eyed despairs.'"


"Oh, but aren't there any ballads and pretty stories?" asked Julia.

"Well, here's the 'Pot of Basil' and 'Waly Waly'"--Val turned the pages
vindictively--"and all the rest of the desperate and deserted. Now, the
man that made this anthology"--she turned sharply to her cousin--"I
suppose he got together all the _best_ things, didn't he?"

"I suppose he thought he did."

"Do you think he succeeded?"

"Very fairly."

"H'm! You see, when they do their best they are bound to be moaning and
groaning, these poets. Now, the man that chose these things, was he a
jaundiced kind of person, very sad and sorry?"

"Quite the contrary. I should say he's as cheerful as a man may be who
isn't a fool."

Val looked at him a moment.

"Then, I say it's a good thing there are women in the world." She had
forgotten the third person for the moment, forgotten that Julia, too,
professed to like things "blubbery." Even when she remembered, she only
clapped the book to and said: "Oh, I shall be _so_ late!"

"I envy you your walk." Julia tilted up her round chin, catching in her
loose golden hair the sunlight that filtered through the fresh green
maple leaves.

"I'm going up on the Hill; you'd both of you better come."

"Gracious! we'd be killed if we did."

"Yes, _indeed_," agreed Val, with conviction. It would be too dreadful
to have Julia tacked on to them to-day. What _was_ Ethan thinking of?

"I've come back from Sunday-school to take my mother to church; but
there might be time for a _little_ walk afterwards." Julia's air was
charmingly wistful.

"Well, come towards Plymouth Hill," said Ethan.

If it was anybody else, thought Val, angrily, it would have to be called
flirting. Julia, too, was undoubtedly "making eyes." Oh, it was
disgraceful!

"I don't believe, after all, there'll be time before dinner," Miss Otway
was saying.

"She knows perfectly well she's going to make time," thought Val, and
then--oh, dear! oh, dear! what was becoming of her old affection for her
friend?

They had said "Good-bye," and walked on in silence for a few moments.
She noticed with a passion of resentment that, since leaving Julia, the
cloud had settled again on her cousin's face.

"Since I'm going away so soon, I think I ought to say--" he began
presently, and stopped.

"Say what?"

"That Harry Wilbur has taken me into his confidence."

Val turned away her head.

"First-rate fellow, Wilbur." Another pause. "Fact is, he is one in a
thousand."

"He's very good, but he isn't interesting."

"I think he is, you know; and so did Uncle John. I believe your father
would have liked--"

"Do _you_ like talking like this to me?" Val demanded, darkly,
"or"--with a ray of hope--"are you being a martyr?"

"Something of a martyr, perhaps," he said, smiling in spite of himself.

"Oh, well, that's all right, just for once."

"For once?"

"Yes; please don't do it again. I can admire it--_once_, but I can't be
of any help. I suppose it's because of what my father told you that you
said that--about--love."

"What did I say?"

"That it was the saddest of all."

"I'm afraid the reason is deeper than any your father gave."

She looked up baffled.

"At least, it's because of what my father said that you--that you--began
about Harry Wilbur."

"Well, perhaps."

"I'm very much disappointed in you."

"I'm very sorry."

"I thought you were more--understanding. If you had known my father
better," she continued, with all-unconscious irony, "you wouldn't have
minded him a bit. It was just a theory."

"Ah, my child, it isn't a theory that we're first cousins."

The note of finality in the low voice pierced her through and through.

"But plenty of people--" she burst out; and then one by one her father's
arguments and menaces, like curses, came back to roost. "If we rebel
against that law, we and our innocent children are punished," she seemed
to hear him say.

They walked on some time without speaking. Twice Ethan glanced down at
the face beside him. For all its profound trouble, it was not the face
of one defeated. He drew a perverse pleasure from the observation.
Curiosity had from the first played no small part in the charm his
cousin cast about him. What would she do under such and such conditions?
And, meanwhile, what new longing, what new pain, that mutinous little
face had planted in his heart! "I have never kissed her," he kept
thinking as he looked at her mouth. "Has Wilbur ever kissed her?" The
idea was revolting. He put it from him. He thought of the people that
never have children. Suppose-- He looked down at her again. This time he
caught her eye, and she flushed hotly. He had no need of speech to
assure him they had been thinking along the same lines.

"Of course," said Val, with an obvious effort, "I ought to behave as if
I didn't understand what's involved. Any _nice_ girl would pretend
she--" Her voice got tangled and lost in a dry little sob; but she burst
out again under her breath: "Oh, they aren't like _me_--the nice girls.
Nobody ever cared so much as I do. Everything's different when
you--when you care like this."

His heart contracted sharply. Had this come into his life only to go and
leave him stricken in poverty? Under the girl's extravagance of speech
was a richness of nature that gave her fierce young words authority.
This primitive, unfaltering passion, naked and unashamed, was not only
beautiful in his eyes with a kind of pagan splendor, but it soothed and
satisfied his weary, doubting spirit. For the moment it carried his
questioning down its swift current, making of his fears a mock, and
whirling his heavy doubts like straws. And yet he kept a vigilant watch
upon himself. With a man's abiding fear of being ridiculous, he was
uncomfortably conscious of the little group of belated church-goers
turning into St. Thomas's from Market Street, not so hurried but they
might notice Val's excited face. To his companion, in her absorption,
these acquaintances had been thin air.

"I dare say my father knew that, to many a girl, it wouldn't really
matter much whether she married Harry Wilbur, or any other nice
convenient person; but to _me_--"

"Come down this street," Ethan said. "You don't want to get into that
mob."

He felt himself to be in one of those positions where to turn left or
right, to go forward or go back, is equally to find offence and
suffering. "It doesn't matter about me; I must think of her," he said to
himself. At all hazards he must not forget that the girl at his side was
little more than a child. He could neither explain to her why he was
bound in honor to leave her, nor must he leave her with any haunting
memory of the pain this going cost him. She had turned obediently when
he suggested the side-street.

"Oh, I'm certain of it"--she brought one tight-clinched hand with a
quick movement to her breast--"nobody ever cared like this before. Just
look at their faces."

She stopped on the corner, eying, with a kind of impersonal disdain, the
people that passed up the church-steps.

"You can see from their faces they've never cared--like this."

"Come," said Ethan, nervously, "they'll wonder why we are hanging
about."

"Most people are only half alive," she said, walking on; "they don't
feel, they don't hear, they don't see, they don't even smell."

Ethan began to laugh almost hysterically.

"They can't turn such unexpected corners, anyhow," he said.

His laughter seemed a little to clear the atmosphere.

"You don't believe?" she inquired. "No, I suppose people _wouldn't_
believe. But I've felt quite dizzy with joy at smelling hay after a
rain. Heliotrope makes me want to laugh and sing. Violets make me feel
meek and wistful; but they all _do_ something to me. You, now, simply
dislike the pungent smell of marigolds. I feel it stick into me like a
kind of goad. But I oughtn't to tell anybody." She sighed.

"Why not?"

"Even you laughed."

"Forgive me, dear."

For the "dear" sake she smiled up at him, thrilling.

"Oh, I forgive you, though I don't much like the idea of having told
you--even that much."

"What nonsense! You must tell me everything."

"Must I?" She moved closer to his side. "Only I should like you to have
a good opinion of me--and--well, to care so much about smell, I'm
afraid, is very vulgar."

"Oh, I don't think so."

"Novelists do. They are ready to tell you her hearing was 'most
sensitive,' and all about his 'eagle eye,' that nothing escaped, but
they are too refined to say nothing escaped the heroine's nose. Your
friends the poets, too, have a very low opinion of smell. Of course, if
I could always remember to call it 'fragrance,' it would be better, but
I don't always mean fragrance."

"No, no," he laughed. "I admit that smell used to be the poor relation
of the senses, and was kept decently in the background; but over in
France _nous avons changé tout cela_."

"Oh, well, that's all right, then."

"You aren't going to church?"

"Of course not."

"It's so ugly here. Shall we turn back and go up on the Hill?"

"No. Yes." (They could come down before the Presbyterian Church was
out.) "Let's walk very fast."

They talked little on the way, but neither of them noticed the fact.
They were approaching that point where _nur das reine Zusammensein_ was
interchange enough. From the Dug Road they turned into the ravine. Ethan
caught her by the hand, and they scrambled breathless to the top.

"Let's rest here," he said.

Val sat down under the elder-bush that grew in the cleft of the Hill.
She looked up at him smiling, and then turned away her conscious eyes.
Instead of sitting down, he stood with his hands in his pockets, looking
at her with a sense of vague uneasiness behind the tingling in his
blood.

"I suppose you know that I ought to have taken you home after your flat
refusal to go to church?"

"You aren't my master--yet."

"Yes, I am."

The blood flew to her face obedient to the call.

"Yes," she said, slowly, "you are."

He turned away, cursing his traitor tongue.

"I've imposed upon you," he said, after a moment, flinging himself down
on the grass a little distance off--"imposed upon you frightfully, if
I've made you believe that. I'm far enough from being even master of
myself."

"Too late to try to patch it up now," she said; "the murder's out."

He studied her.

"I suppose you think you know me?"

She smiled confidently.

"You don't. I'm compounded of all the things that are most abhorrent to
you."

Still she smiled. The unconscious passion in the young eyes warmed his
blood like wine. He moved a little nearer to her, and the mere movement
broke the spell. The physical obviousness of the action stung him into
self-criticism, self-contempt; and then as he turned his face away from
his cousin's magnet eyes, he fell to criticising his self-criticism. Why
couldn't he take things simply, naturally, as Val did? Vain ambition! He
must submit to seeing, always and always, the skeleton under the fair
flesh, the end from the beginning.

"You are mistaken about me," he said. "I look out upon a world eternally
different from the world you see."

"What's it like?"

"I hope you'll never quite realize."

"Oh, I shall; but I sha'n't mind."

"I might be doing you the best service in my power if I gave you a
notion of how _much_ you'd mind."

"I give you leave."

He looked into the tender, happy eyes, and, "I haven't the heart," he
said. "After all, it may not be necessary for you to lower your opinion
of the world. It will, perhaps, do if you merely modify your opinion of
me."

"Don't you see I can't do that?"

"Oh yes, you can." He pulled himself together and sat up. "You're at
bottom such a rational creature. You've only to realize I'm a dreadful
fraud. I've talked about--you'd be sure to find me out some time, so I
may as well make a clean breast of it--"

"It isn't anything you've ever _said_, that I depend upon."

"Oh, really!"

He threw back his head and laughed.

"It's partly just the look of you, but it's most of all just--just that
I'm certain no one in the world is so kind and brave--"

"I brave! You poor child!"

"Yes, and kind, deep down to the core," she said, with beaming eyes. "I
know it by your voice, and by the way you feel everybody else's
feeling. That's something like me: I feel, too, but it doesn't make me
kind."

"Neither does it me. I'm a mass of deception. I put on a solemn look,
and you think I'm sympathizing. I'm not: I'm actively engaged in
despising the universe."

"That's because your standards are so high."

He laughed out an ironic "_Exactly!_"

"You make other people seem about so high." She held an out-stretched
hand a few inches above the grass, dropped it, and, leaning forward upon
it, said, with a quick-drawn breath: "It's been so exciting for us all
here, knowing you. It's been like knowing Robert Bruce or Richard
Coeur de Lion--"

"Oh, very like Richard Coeur de Lion especially."

"Just what _I_ say, particularly when you put on that black look and
your eyes burn. I know then you'd have the courage for _anything_!"

The whimsical amusement died out of his face.

"I told you I'd taken you in. I'm a mortal coward!"

"_You?_"

He nodded, looking off down the ravine.

"I'm afraid of death. I'm even more afraid of life."

They were only obscure phrases in her ears.

"I know you're afraid of the dark," she said, smiling gently, "but only
when I'm not there. You see--I must be there."

"Poor little cousin! Lucky for you that Fate and your father have
settled that you can't be 'there.'"

"I settle things for myself," she said, hotly; "and _don't_ call me
little cousin."

"Why not?"

"It seems to cut me down to childhood. Besides"--she stood up--"I'm
really very tall, and I've heard enough about being a cousin."

"You hardened optimist!" He lay on his back with his hands clasped
behind his head, and looked up at the tall, slight figure of the girl.
"You're actually ready to pit yourself against the laws of the universe,
and expect not to suffer for it. Do you know that your invincible
belief that _you_, at least, were meant to be happy, is the most
pathetic thing I've found in the world?"

"I'm not in the very least pathetic," she said, with deep indignation.

"Shouldn't wonder if it would be always like that with you," he went on,
unmoved. "Stark inability to comprehend personal misfortune! Ruin will
rattle about your ears--you'll believe blindly it's somehow for the
best. How like life's diabolical ingenuity that just the man I am should
have come across just the girl you are!"

"Thank you, most particularly. Life and I are both obliged."

"Of course, you've read that last will and testament--the one your
father wrote--"

"No; haven't asked for it. Grandma hasn't mentioned it."

"Ah! She probably would if she knew--"

"You may be sure," Val interrupted, "my father doesn't think those
hideous black thoughts now."

"Ah, yes, I'm sure enough of that."

"You are?"

"Oh yes--he's done with all that now."

"Then why on earth should _we_ go on--"

"We're not dead, my dear."

"You don't mean--"

She looked at him with horror-filled eyes.

"What's the matter?"

"You--" But she couldn't bring the awful doubt to birth. That any one in
her own range of experience should be heard to hint that the dead were
done with thinking! Not that a mythical person in a book, but some one
she knew, should be found saying calmly that he had abandoned hope of
the life to come! "My father," she whispered, coming a trace nearer,
"did he ever say he didn't believe in immortality? No! no! he couldn't.
But did he ever tell you he wasn't _sure_?"

"How can any one be sure?"

"How can you bear to live if you're not sure?" she cried.

He stared at her in astonishment, forgetting Mrs. Gano's saying, "The
one Christian tenet I am satisfied Val holds is the doctrine of the
Resurrection."

"I thought you said your father talked quite freely to you."

The girl grasped the slender branches of the elder-bush.

"Then there _are_ people, and I know them, who don't believe in
immortality."

The world seemed to swim. As she lifted up her dazed eyes, she saw a
green-clad figure lingering disconsolately along the brow of the hill.
Another instant Julia and she had recognized each other.

"Not to believe in immortality!" she repeated, as though she had never
heard of the idea before. "Then, for such people it's all this
life--_this_ life. They can't afford to miss anything here; it's their
only chance. Do you hear, cousin Ethan? This life--this life may be
all."

On an uncontrollable impulse he seized her hand to draw her down beside
him.

"Julia's coming," said Val, hurriedly, and advanced to meet her friend.

"Oh, here you are!" called out the new-comer. "I didn't get to church,
after all. And I've a message from my father," she said to Ethan, as he
came forward. "He wants you to come to supper to-night to meet Senator
Green."


When Val and Ethan got home late for dinner, they were met in the hall
by Mrs. Gano.

"Lo! she comes, 'with high looks like the King of Assyria,'" Ethan
quoted.

Mrs. Gano levelled an unmistakably cold stare at the culprits.

"Emmeline tells me you were not in church."

"No; we were late," said Ethan. When Val had run up-stairs to take off
her things: "You must forgive me this once," he added, speaking low,
"for I'm going away to-morrow."


He had no word alone with his cousin till the next morning. Nothing
further had been said about his going, but his trunk was packed and the
carriage ordered. He found Val sitting alone in the parlor, in a corner
of the sofa by the window.

"What are you doing here?" he said, shutting the door.

"Just thinking."

"Don't do that, such a bad habit."

"Oh, I'm just trying to get accustomed to realizing there are people who
believe"--she spread out her hands and let them fall--"this is all."

"Don't bother about such people," he said, sitting down.

Val, usually so ready of tongue, was seized upon by silence. Ethan, too,
sat speechless, struggling with the sense of keen-edged wretchedness
that pressed knife-like on his heart. How was he to say good-bye?
and--with a long look down the road--how was he to live afterwards?
She--oh, she would console herself; she was very young. But for him ...
the immense dead weight of life pressed intolerably hard. The futility
of it extinguished the very sun. Presently, as they sat there so silent,
Val bowed her head, hiding her face in her hands. It shot through him
that some realization had come to her of the unseen forces that make of
us their sport--some vision of the bitter absurdity of the pigmy human
lot we make such a pother about.

The sense of a vision shared, of a common pain, merged swiftly into
physical yearning. The physical yearning cried aloud for assurance that
it, too, was "common." He looked down upon the bowed head and the little
white nape of her neck. He noticed how out of the upturned swaths of
firm-bound hair the wild love-locks were falling--locks so fine that
they looked like faint wavy shadows falling over the ears.

Had she any faintest notion of the hunger in him that would not let him
sleep? As he bent over her the white neck was suffused with rose. Ah,
she knew! The traitor blood had signalled him behind her back.

"Kiss me, dear," he whispered. Had she heard? The little ears glowed
scarlet. "Dear--" He slipped his hand under her chin, and turned her
face to him. The curtaining lids still hid her eyes, but the lashes
quivered, and that odd little pulse in her upper lip, that was beating,
too, "piteously," he said to himself. "Look at me, dear. Val, open your
eyes, I say."

She did.

It was like a shaft of sunshine; the rapture of the look startled him.
He would have been prepared for tears, but this cloudless joy--

Ah, she was very young!

"Kiss me, child."

He did not bend towards her. She should come to him for this last
greeting that was the first as well.

The radiant face, flushing, paling, came closer. He felt the breath from
out her parted lips.

But the sweetness of her nearness could not for him wipe out the fact
that before them lay parting and long heartache.

"Good-bye," he said, brokenly.

She drew back before the kiss was more than inhaled.

"Good-bye!" she echoed. "No; I will never kiss you 'good-bye'" She freed
herself from his prisoning arms. "Never, never, never!" She sprang up.
"To get that kiss from me you must be lying dead."

And she fled out of the room.

A little later he made his farewells to the assembled household in the
hall. Having kissed Emmie, he turned to Val.

She grasped his hand as she averted her white face, whispering:

"I will kiss you when you come again."




CHAPTER XXV


After Ethan had gone, life seemed to stand still for a long, long time.
The only real events were his letters, not to Val, although she had
written him the very night after he went away. His letters were all
addressed to her grandmother, and yet every syllable seemed to the
girl's mind to be meant for herself--to be charged with subtle meaning,
intelligible to no one else.

At Christmas he wrote the two girls a single perfunctory page of
cousinly greeting that arrived with his presents, a couple of Russian
silver belts. But this letter was addressed to Val, and she would not
open it till she was alone. Inside was an enclosure in a separate
envelope:


     "DEAR COUSIN VAL,--Forgive me for not answering your letter. It
     would be nice of you to send me a line, now and then, to tell me
     how things go on at the Fort, and whether I can do anything for
     anybody there. I enclose cheque.

     "Your affectionate cousin, ETHAN GANO."


"'Cousin!' 'cousin!' forever 'cousin!'" ejaculated the girl; and she
answered him the same day:


     "DEAR ETHAN,--Thank you for the beautiful belt, but I do not
     forgive you for not answering my letter. Still, I will do anything
     in reason that you ask me if you don't ever call me cousin again."


And then followed an account of her surreptitious household
expenditures. He answered early in the New Year:


     "DEAR VAL,--I obey your mandate, and will not hereafter own you for
     a cousin. I believe that by strenuous wishing you could almost
     think yourself out of the relationship."


     "I am very sure I could" [she wrote back] "if you would let me."


That letter, and several to follow, elicited nothing. She ate her heart
out with humiliation and with longing, and then salved the hurt with
dreams. Her best times were when she was quite alone, in the dark of the
night or early in the morning. Regularly as she rose up, or lay down to
sleep, she kissed the face of the little watch he had given her.
Sometimes, under the spell of an old and long-abandoned habit, she would
slip to her knees by the bedside. But instead of any prayer, old or new,
she would fling wide her arms, crying under her breath: "How long, O
Lord--how long?" Never in her blackest hour did she believe there was
worse in store for her than waiting.

In a quiet way people came and went at the Fort more than ever before.
Julia and Jerry, when he was home for the vacations, Ernest Halliwell,
and Harry Wilbur in particular, after he had thrown up the fine position
in Boston that Ethan had put in his way--they, and others, trooped in
and out, carrying Val off riding, sleighing, dancing, boating. Harry
Wilbur proposed to her on an average of six times a year, and took her
smiling and affectionate refusal for mere postponement. It was to Val a
life of waiting, but not of inaction.

Mrs. Gano, growing feebler and feebler, had allowed her eldest
grand-daughter (as a special mark of favor, be it understood, and merely
to "teach her how") to take the reins of household management. Yet from
the royal elevation of the great four-poster, where she now spent most
of her time, did Mrs. Gano rule the house as absolutely as before. Val,
however, was not content to do merely the necessary, the expected. To
Mrs. Gano's quiet satisfaction, the girl developed a passion for careful
household government. Not only were none of Mrs. Gano's directions
slighted with Val at the helm, but she bettered her instructions,
discreetly not taking credit. Privately she kept expense books, learned
cooking--yes, and laughed to think of her old detestation of it. With
Venie's help she made cretonne covers for the furniture, and seemed to
renew all things by the magic of her industrious hands, for most of
Ethan's money had to lie at the bank out of very fear. She brought down
old lamps and ancient household gods from the attic and made "effects"
with them. She did not care about gardening, any more than she cared
about cooking, but she hated the neglected, weed-grown borders under the
windows. So she cleared and made them blossom again, filled the house
with flowers, and thought a thousand times: "If he comes to-day he will
find it beautiful."

It would not be true to suppose that this quest for beauty in such a
barren field was satisfying. It filled in the time. It was part of the
endless satisfaction of life that the world was full of so many things
to do "by the way." She had her days of fierce anger at the delays, the
vagueness of the future, the fear of the new interests that must be
filling Ethan's life.

After nearly a year had gone by, he answered one of her letters. She
acknowledged the civility in such caustic fashion that he was piqued to
reply by return of post. And so started on its uneven course that
interchange of letters that was soon the greatest joy of her existence
and the permanent stuff of her dreams. It gave her a feeling of having a
fresh hold on him. She knew where he was now, and something of what he
thought and did. Her own days were lived twice over, that he might share
them, only the time she re-lived on paper was more vivid, more
significant than the actual hours as they sped. Life took on such an
edge in the process of being presented to Ethan that the girl wondered
sometimes to find she enjoyed telling about the dance or picnic a
thousand-fold more keenly than she had cared about the thing itself. At
first she wrote flippantly, touching chiefly on the humors of the New
Plymouth life; and when he took to sending her books, she bade him keep
all the improving ones to himself. A certain English novel very much in
vogue she promptly returned.

"If I want to read political economy, I've got my father's books. I like
a story to be about love, and to end happily. If you think of sending me
another novel, remember _I like plenty of orange-blossoms, not little
bits of brain_." But oddly enough, she had no rooted objection to
reading aloud to her grandmother any non-religious book, however
serious. Val found that many of these dignified tomes were not as dull
as you might think; but for long she laid the credit to Mrs. Gano's
door. It was an old story that that lady had a way of making things seem
interesting. Val was always privately grateful, even touched, at being
let off from the religious readings. Once when Mrs. Gano was recovering
from an illness, Val, sitting at the bedside, was visited by a fresh
sense of her growing comradeship, even her growing dependence upon that
alert and sympathetic mind. In a softened mood she fell to thinking how
ready her grandmother had always been to put the worked book-marks in
her Church histories and doctrinal treatises, and listen to Val read
biography and travel aloud, all the while letting the girl feel that she
was not only adding to the "common stock of harmless pleasure," but was
sparing the older eyes.

"You are very good to me," Val said, leaning her head against the
"painted calico" coverlid. It made her happy to feel the long, thin hand
upon her hair. She had never got over the old childish sense of its
being a proud thing to receive a mark of favor at those hands.

"Shall we read?" said the girl, presently.

"If you like."

In a flush of generous feeling, she reached out and took up _Literature
and Dogma_ from the table at the bedside.

"What's that?" asked Mrs. Gano, narrowing her eyes.

Val told her.

"Oh no"--she sat up and looked round--"I sent to the library after
Chevalier Bunsen for you and me."

"Let me read you this. You mustn't always think about what I like."

"Nonsense, child; Arnold's book would bore you, and you'd read it so it
would bore me. Find Bunsen."

"You let Emmie read you this."

"Emmeline's different. Find Bunsen. You'll like Bunsen."

"Why do you suppose I have such a rage for biographies?" Val demanded, a
shade anxiously.

"Partly because you're young."

"Emmie's younger still."

Mrs. Gano smiled and shook her head enigmatically.

"Young, and more interested in people, as yet, than in ideas."

"That has a very poor sound--like the personal column of a newspaper."

"Oh, it's natural enough. The walls of your own room tell the same
story--all faces."

"Yes, but to hang up in your bedroom, what else is there?"

Mrs. Gano smiled, and then half whimsically:

"I don't say there's any special advantage in it, but I've always had a
liking for the 'flower pieces' we painted in our youth, and for
landscapes and marine views."

"Oh, _those_--"

"Exactly!" and the older woman laughed outright.

"Well, I'm sure," said Val, eager to defend herself, "cousin Ethan says
that to the American, to the unjaded mind the wide world over, it is the
'life' in any picture or description that interests and fixes itself in
the memory. A vast amount is said and written about St. Mark's in
Venice. But in how many minds does it stand a beautiful and stately
background for flights of pigeons to wheel and circle against, or to
settle down before, on friendly terms with the populace? Not the glories
of architecture, but the brief and gentle life of doves, makes the
picture _vital_ in the mind."

"Ah, and when did Ethan say all that?"

"When--while you were ill I had a letter from him."

"Oh, indeed!" She turned with an indescribable look and settled down
among the pillows.

"Shall I get the letter and read it to you?" said Val, to her own
surprise and most unwillingly, but acting under a sense of strong
coercion.

"As you please," said the wily old woman. "Have a look for Bunsen,
too."

Val absented herself long enough, looking for Bunsen, to adapt Ethan's
letter for a grandmother's ears. It had been no love-letter even in its
original form, but it unconsciously paved the way for one and more to
follow. Val wrote to her cousin that night:


     "I have usually read your letters to the family, and think it would
     be better to go on doing so. It's not that my grandmother tries to
     make me. When I offer to, she says, 'As you please, my dear,' but I
     have a horrid, uncomfortable feeling if I don't. She seems to be
     looking through me into the back of my spine, to see why I want to
     keep the letter to myself. It's funny, but when I don't show it to
     her she makes me think she has divined not only all there was in it
     that I didn't want to show her, but a _great deal more_. It's that
     I resent most. So, if you want to say something you don't want her
     to see (about the money, you know, and things like that), just put
     a tiny check opposite the stamp-corner, and I'll know there's an
     enclosure meant only for me."


It was these "enclosures" that worked the mischief. They were a standing
invitation to say things too intimate for other eyes. Brief and discreet
at first, and dealing with figures, they expanded as time went on, till
they had to be written finely on foreign note, that the discrepancy
between the letter's bulk when brought to the front door, and the letter
as it appeared in the family circle up-stairs, should not challenge
attention. Mrs. Gano's confinement to her room made the matter easy.
Only the blind and unobservant Emmie ever saw the letter when it came.
If it bore the significant check, it was opened alone; if not, the seal
was ostentatiously broken under the vigilant eye. It was sure to be an
exciting hour. Great preparations preceded: a propping up of pillows,
and mending of the fire, if it were winter, that the reading and
inevitable discussion might be uninterrupted; a proper arrangement of
light and general careful "setting of the scene." Emmie, with soft eyes
shining, sitting demurely by in the little green chair that had been
hers--her father's, too, when a child--and Val close to the bedside,
reading with beating heart and a careful emphasis (for she was scolded
else) the accounts of Ethan's varied life--accounts punctuated by
comment, laughter, and sometimes by scathing disapproval.

"I'd tell him, if I were you," Mrs. Gano would say, sitting up with
sudden vigor; and the opinion she would express seemed frequently too
provocative and "pat" to be dispensed with. Val would unblushingly annex
it, and reap her reward in Ethan's spirited rejoinder, which in turn
never failed to "draw" Mrs. Gano. That lady was, perhaps, not a little
diverted at playing a part in the game; conscious, too, beyond a doubt,
that with a girl like Val to deal with it was probably a question of
accepting the correspondence and sharing in its entertainment, or
knowing that it went on without her having power to direct or color it.
It was so the correspondence (all save the "enclosures") came to be
family property, for Val would bring in her reply, that she might be
approved for her line of argument, and that she might hear the keen
enjoyment of that laugh which, unconsciously, she "played for" as much
as any comedian ever did.

"I corresponded with several gentlemen when I was young," Mrs. Gano once
said. "I hear the fashion is going out. It is a pity. A good letter is
too good a thing for the world to lose."

Val burned with a wild desire to show the "enclosures," for they were
the best of all. Her grandmother would rage, but she couldn't help
appreciating them, the girl said to herself, with a mixture of terror at
the thought, and of longing to make the confidence. It had come to be
such a habit to share things, to "try" them against the steel of that
wit and judgment, that she was conscious of an incompleteness of
enjoyment in keeping any specially good thing to herself. If it were a
book--"No," she would say, "I'll save this for our evenings"; and even
if in a dull or mediocre page some one phrase or happy word shone out,
she would fly up-stairs, and at the foot of that four-posted throne lay
down the treasure-trove, getting in return a finer zest and a truer
value.

If, as the time went on, Ethan had hours of feeling that his continued
absence from the Fort was a piece of fantastic self-sacrifice which he
would end by boarding the next train, Mrs. Gano no less was minded, more
than once, to yield to her hunger for a sight of him. The thought of the
little boy Ethan who had begged that the Fort might be his home, even
more than the thought of the man, tugged at her heart-strings. Would she
die before seeing her only grandson again? If in one of these moments
Ethan had himself suggested coming, she would have welcomed him with
open arms. Meanwhile she waited for the news that must be on the
way--the news of his marriage.

Even in "enclosures" to her cousin, Val's only reference to that
"barrier," which she would not admit, was characteristically by way of a
gibe.


     "We were talking the other day at the Otways'" [she wrote] "about
     its being rather funny to think my grandmother was my great-aunt
     and my father was my cousin--my mother, too, and my sister as well,
     all cousins. Emmie and I gathered that, according to the popular
     superstition, we ought by rights to have very few wits, or only one
     arm or a piece of a leg. Emmie and I assured each other on the way
     home that no reflection can be cast upon our arms and legs, but we
     agreed that we must take _great_ care that we are not idiots; so
     you may, after all, send me a few improving books."


It was at the end of a brief visit to Cincinnati that Ethan's strongest
temptation assailed him. It came in the commonplace form of a photograph
in a forwarded letter from Val. Partly the picture, but, even more,
something of the girl's eager spirit that had got between the lines of
the letter, something unsaid, yet eloquent, of her unexpected power of
holding out, took sudden hold on him, made his nerves tingle as if by a
bodily contact. There she was, vivid as she had been for so many
yesterdays, to-day triumphant, irresistible. He must go--he must go to
her! He had been attempting more than he had strength to carry through.
He flung some things into a valise and went down to the station. Train
just gone--another in an hour and ten minutes. He got his ticket and
bought papers and magazines. In the _Enquirer_ the report of an address
before the Medical Congress caught his eye. The famous Dr. Gage had been
haranguing his colleagues upon the supposed deterioration of the
American race, because the birth-rate among the well-to-do classes was
lamentably low, the reason being that more and more the women of these
classes shrank from motherhood. In the course of his address Dr. Gage
made a passing reference to his forthcoming work on _Consanguineous
Marriage_.

In the next column, among the hotel arrivals, it appeared that the great
doctor was registered at the Burnet House. Ethan took out his watch.
"Why not? There's time." He jumped into the nearest carriage and drove
to the hotel.

In something over an hour he returned, gave up his New Plymouth ticket,
and got one for the afternoon express to New York. Nobody at the Fort
ever knew how near Ethan had been to taking them by surprise.


The Otways always went away in the hot weather. The summer that Val was
twenty-two, Julia and her family went to the Jersey coast for their
holiday. There, at Long Branch, they found Ethan. Both he and Julia
mentioned the fact in their letters, and Val tried to think the meetings
as casual and unimportant as they looked on paper; but it was the
hardest summer she had known.

Besides the fact that Julia was enjoying opportunities of seeing Ethan
denied to Val, there was matter in her letters even more
disturbing--references to Mr. Gano's constant appearance in the train of
a young and wealthy widow who had a house at Long Branch. This lady,
Julia wrote, was known to have been one of a party Mr. Gano had taken
yachting before coming to Long Branch. Val had heard about that party
from her cousin, but no mention of Mrs. Suydam. The lady was much in
Val's thoughts. At last, upon an exasperated reference in one of Julia's
letters to Mr. Gano's "Circe," Val wrote to him: "Tell me something
about this Mrs. Suydam, whom you have never once mentioned, although you
see so much of her."

Ethan answered with a brief biographical sketch of the lady, carefully
edited; for, in truth, Adelaide Suydam had led an eventful existence,
albeit keeping her hold on society by virtue of her money and her good
old Knickerbocker origin. Of other virtue she was held to have no
embarrassing amount. But she was a highly accomplished person, handsome,
daring, and obviously determined to make life interesting to Ethan Gano.

Her added and special attraction for him lay in his discovery that she
had no design to marry him; but he was presently made aware that she
meant none the less to absorb him. A little puzzled, and a good deal
intrigued by her, he returned from the yachting trip very much under her
spell. She had skilfully arranged the Long Branch episode for the
crowning victory.

It may have been the mere act of writing about her, however
discreetly--seeing her perforce through Val's eyes for a moment--that
brought about the recoil. The very discretion he found himself obliged
to employ convicted him, and opened wide a window on the future. A
glimpse of Val through it--however distant, unattainable--brought the
prospect into truer perspective for him. He saw less of the Suydam, and
went to the Otways to hear about Val.

"Circe" herself, not understanding the situation, and being far too
adroit to underline her temporary defeat by putting questions, believed
the handsome Julia Otway was the distracting influence. She arranged an
exodus to Mount Desert. A friend had lent her a house there. "Long
Branch was getting stupider and vulgarer every year--it was
intolerable!" She found to her dismay that Mr. Gano was not inclined to
take this view. It was then she realized that she was tired, run down,
even a little ill. "Would Mr. Gano take her in his yacht to Bar Harbor?
He needn't stay if he really preferred Long Branch, but it would be a
charity," etc. Well she knew he was the kind of man to find just the
appeal she made a hard one to withstand. Before he quite realized the
full significance of the scheme, he had promised she should go round by
sea. By the time he "understood," she had practised her arts with such
success that he no longer wanted to alter the course she set. "Circe"
saw herself on the point of being the captain's captain.

They were to start the next day, accompanied by Mrs. Suydam's very
amenable half-sister. Ethan was going over the yacht to see that all was
in readiness. Rummaging through one of the inconveniently full drawers
in his cabin, he threw out on the floor a number of superfluous things
to be carried away. In impatient haste he tossed out some old novels,
caps, a blazer, a roll of moth-eaten bunting. "Wait a minute--isn't
that--" He stooped and picked the bunting up. It unrolled--a blue flag,
bearing the name "Valeria" in white letters. He stood with the end in
his hand, staring at it. It had been in the bottom drawer since the day,
four years before, when he had thrust it out of sight after getting that
letter from Mrs. Gano: "I do not wish you to call your yacht 'Valeria.'
There are plenty of other names without using that of an unmarried
girl."

He remembered his old satisfaction in thinking how, under the new paint
as well as in the cabin drawer, the boat still bore the forbidden name,
faithful to the first allegiance. He had encouraged Val to call the
yacht hers in her letters, and the habit had clung to them both. And now
to-day, of all days, this blue flag comes out of hiding and goes
flaunting along the floor! It was as if Val herself had walked into his
cabin, to reassert her right, to keep "her" ship--that she never yet had
sailed in, and most likely never would--to keep it, notwithstanding,
free from profanation.

He went direct to Mrs. Suydam's. She had gone for a drive. Mrs. Ford,
her sister, was also out. Only Mr. Ford was at home. Ethan found that
gentleman in the billiard-room, and explained that he had a sudden need
to go to California--was, in point of fact, taking the night train. Mr.
Ford was an experienced yachtsman; would he look after the ladies, ask
whom he liked? etc. It was all arranged in ten minutes, and Ethan was on
his way to the Pacific Coast before Mrs. Suydam had heard of the failure
of her plan. Had it been the sudden effect of looking at the little
drama through Val's eyes that had made him sicken and shrink from the
dénouement? Or was he simply once again (as had happened before in that
first year after parting from Val) taking flight from a temptation that
would have interposed an evil memory between him and--the marriage that
he had determined should never be?


For the first time in her life the New Plymouth gayeties seemed to Val
insignificant, even irritating. She rejoiced that Mrs. Gano was so much
better that she let Val drive her out almost daily. They were more than
ever together, Emmie being absorbed by her church and charity work. One
day, driving back into the town, Val was laughing delightfully at her
grandmother's caustic remarks upon the "flabby philanthropy" of a
certain local society. They passed some soldiers on parade, and a
military band playing "Marching Through Georgia." Mrs. Gano's face
changed, and, to Val's amazement, she began to weep. Her grandmother!
who, since Val was a child, had said at times when other people cried
and marvelled that Mrs. Gano sat dry-eyed, "My tears lie very deep, and
most of them I shed before you were born!" This sudden gust of sore
weeping that shook her to-day stirred the young girl's pulses with a
shamed excitement, an obscure gladness. _She_ could feel, too, then,
even yet, with passion and unrestraint. But the girl looked away, and
presently the shaken voice said:

"The poor old South! Did you see the ragged flag, my dear?"

"Yes, I saw. We must have made a good fight that day."

The "we" on the lips of one born after the war, who never had had her
foot in the South, forged a new link. Mrs. Gano had put her hand through
the girl's arm and leaned lightly against the strong young shoulder.

"One may be proof against a good many things and not be proof against a
tattered flag," she said, half apologetically, and she pulled the
flapping veil across her face.

The old woman and the young one had drawn together in friendship
absolute. Not that Mrs. Gano developed an angelic complaisance, or Val a
superstitious reverence for the head of the house. They were not merely
the elder and the younger of the same race, but two human beings who,
side by side for many years, had struggled with themselves and with each
other, striking on the flint of character, each knowing at last exactly
when the sparks would fly, and each content to feel that the fire and
the flint were there.

But if Val Gano were not the most irrational of her sex, how was it she
could live year in, year out, this narrow life, refusing without
misgiving the only apparent ways of escape, waiting for an event that
even the eye of faith might well have wearied looking for, while summer
passed to autumn and winter waned to spring?

The girl believed, or made herself pretend she believed, that the
longest conceivable term of her waiting was the term of Mrs. Gano's
life. But the truth was even simpler. Val, unfortunately, was one of
those persons who do not easily accept whatever Fate chooses to lay at
their door. She was rather of those who stand ready to turn away the
blind bringer of gifts with the rebuff: "I will have nothing at your
hands but the thing I asked."

Vain, apparently, for Harry Wilbur, vain for the dashing new-comer, Mr.
Lawrence O'Neil, to think time was working the will of each. Time was
doing nothing so sensible.




CHAPTER XXVI


One of the things nobody had been able to get Val to do any more was to
sing. This had been at first set down to the death of her father, and a
special association of him with music. Even Julia shared that view.

The next spring after the summer the Otways had spent at Long Branch,
the three girls--Julia, Emmie, and Val--sat one chill afternoon on the
hearth-rug before the fire in the blue room. With very buttery fingers
they were eating the last of a great bowl of popcorn. Val, who had
presided over the popping, was losing the becoming flush that occupation
lent her. The years had taken from the face something of its old look of
frankness and love of fun, that had been almost boyish in its
simplicity. The subtler woman-look, the faint suggestion of brooding in
the eyes, had matured the face and lent it meaning. Emmie was the same
pretty creature, a little more fragile than before, whereas Julia was
blooming and bourgeoning into a very handsome woman of somewhat majestic
proportions. Instead of two, she looked five or six years older than
Val's twenty-three years. The brown and choral chiné silk Julia wore
this afternoon was turned away at the neck, and a lace fichu carefully
drawn down over the fine bust left visible the prettiest throat in the
world, as well as a little V-shaped space of fair white neck.

Emmie was tired of the talk of a party to which she was not going. It
was on the night of the choir practice, and, besides, she didn't approve
of dancing. She wiped her buttery fingers on her handkerchief.

"Let's go down-stairs and try our new hymn," she said, getting up.

"All right," agreed Julia.

"You two can, if you like," said Val.

"You must sing us 'Den lieben langen Tag;' I haven't heard it for
years."

"Don't care about it any more." Val gathered up and crunched the hard
scorched grains that had remained in the bottom of the bowl.

"Why not?"

"It's absurd to try to sing just after eating pop-corn."

"Nonsense!" said Emmie. "Grandma's reading old letters in the pack-room,
so she won't hear. If you'll put away the corn popper, I'll get the key
of the piano."

"It's a great pity not to keep up your music," said Julia, as Emmie went
off with the empty bowl. "You'll get hopelessly rusty."

"I shall never sing a note as long as I live," said Val, "and I wish you
wouldn't bother me about it before people."

Julia stared at her.

"You ought to understand without my telling you. It kills me to do it
half and half. I'll forget I ever wanted to have music in my life."

"You mean, I must never ask you to sing again?"

"It's the one thing about the whole matter that hurts most. You see,"
Val said, with an effort to speak in a commonplace tone, "I'm not
sulking about it, I'm not angry; I've simply wiped off the score."

"Dear Val, I'm so sorry!" Julia got up and put her arms about her
friend. "I didn't realize-- Oh, dearie, how hard it's been for you all
this time, when you take it like that!"

"Like what?"

"So--so quietly, so splendidly," said Julia, vaguely.

"Oh, you needn't think I'm trying to be a heroine," said Val, a little
defiantly; "it's just that I prefer not being a bungler when I know that
if I'd had half a chance--" She choked suddenly, and flung herself down
before the fire with her face hidden. Julia kneeled beside her,
murmuring sympathy.

"I think such a lot about my aunt Valeria these days," said Val,
sitting up presently and wiping her eyes. "This was her room, you know."

Julia nodded, looking round upon the walls.

"She painted these things, didn't she?"

"Yes," said Val. "Ain't they awful? It would half kill my grandmother to
hear anybody say that, and yet it's her fault that they're awful. You
know she wouldn't let Aunt Valeria go away and study when she was young.
Sh!"

Mrs. Gano's voice was heard outside the door calling Emmie to hunt for a
certain portfolio. She came in, looking through her spectacles at some
papers in her hand. She was heavily shawled and wore gloves (as she did
constantly now), and she had an old white Indian scarf over her head.
The broché ends hung down to her knees. She looked up sharply from the
yellowed papers as she came in. The two girls jumped to their feet. Mrs.
Gano greeted Julia cordially.

"Do you want us to go?" asked Val. "I brought Julia in here because
there was a fire."

"Certainly don't go," said Mrs. Gano. "I only came in for Valeria's
little desk."

Val helped to take off the carefully made cover that fitted over it.
Between the cover and the desk was something lying flat, carefully done
up in tissue-paper. Mrs. Gano opened it and smiled, recognizing the
scrawl on the square of card-board.

"Ah! Valeria's first attempt at a portrait of her father! She was a mere
baby." The old eyes beamed through the gold-bound spectacles, tender
with memory. "Her brother Ethan laughed at her, and said it was more
like the pear-tree than like their father--you see what he meant." She
laughed gently. "But Mr. Gano comforted Valeria, and said, 'It's quite
like enough, my dear. I've no desire to have my daughter a limner.'"

"Do you know, I can never get over the idea that 'limner' is something
immoral--indecent," said Val.

Mrs. Gano smiled reflectively. "Neither could your grandfather. That
was the dash of Puritan in him."

"Oh, but I mean the mere word. You told us that story when we were
children, and I didn't dare to ask; but I was sure it meant something
horrid, like some of the words in the Bible that look quite innocent and
yet mustn't be used in general conversation."

"Not at all," said Mrs. Gano, with a dignified air. "Your grandfather
was merely agreeing with Dr. Johnson that portrait-painting was an
improper employment for a woman. 'Public practice of any art and staring
in men's faces is very indelicate in a female,'" she quoted, but she
smiled again. "If your grandfather had lived, none of you would ever
have had a drawing lesson. I am more liberal about these things."

Val flashed a covert look at Julia. John Gano and others had filled in
the dim outlines of Valeria's life, and the things she had left behind
were eloquent in a way their creator never dreamed, and would bitterly
have resented. Mrs. Gano was lifting up the desk.

"Let me carry it in for you," said Val, preceding her grandmother with
the little rosewood box.

As she came back Julia heard Val in the hall dismissing poor Emmie and
her piano key with short shrift. She closed the door sharply, and
confronted her friend with ominous eyes.

"How my grandmother can bear to be so much in that room!"

"Without a fire on a day like this?"

"Yes; but anyhow, it's horrible in there."

"I thought you used to love it when she let you in."

"Yes, when I was little, and didn't understand. It's full of dilapidated
things that belonged to dead people. Ethan's father's fiddle--smashed.
My father's patent lamps--none of 'em work. Our grandfather's
walking-sticks, very tired-looking, leaning dejected against the wall
under a faded dirty picture of the Baptist college he built--it's a
Roman Catholic hospital now. And then that thing of Aunt
Valeria's--that's the worst of all!" She came nearer, and crouched down
on the rug beside her friend.

"What do you mean?"

"A pile of what used to be modelling clay. It's quite black now, but if
you see it in one particular way a face seems to look dimly at you out
of the dust, and, oh! it's the sorrowfullest face I ever saw. It's the
face of somebody who hadn't a chance."

"What is it like?"

"My opinion is it's Aunt Valeria's face, but sometimes--sometimes it
looks like me."

Neither spoke for awhile. Val sat huddled together staring into the
blaze.

"_She_ used to lie on the rug here before the fire, too."

The girl threw back her head like one shaking off an evil dream, but her
eye was suddenly arrested.

"I wonder what she thought of Mazeppa."

"Mazeppa?" echoed Julia.

"Yes." The other nodded to the iron bas-relief above the grate. "The
first time I heard father talk about natural law, about lines of least
resistance and all kinds of horrors (ante-natal tendencies and the
rest), I used to think of Mazeppa, and feel I was being bound on the
wild horse of the Past and left to the wolves. But I always knew I
should escape. It troubles me when I remember that Aunt Valeria didn't.
And perhaps she sat here with the same faith I have." She gave a little
shiver and stood up. "No, no; of course we've been utterly different
from the beginning."

"You've changed in the last two years more than anybody I ever knew."

Val turned quickly upon her friend.

"You mean, I'm getting to be like Aunt Valeria?"

"I don't know; I never saw her. But you--you are getting awfully
civilized."

She laughed. Val was very grave.

"Do you remember," Julia went on, "your plan of running away to be a
chorus-girl?"

"Yes"--the answer rang sharply--"and I would have done it too but that
grandma needed me--" She stopped, with a face suddenly fear-stricken.
"It looks as if I _was_ growing like Aunt Valeria"--she walked up and
down the room with her head caught between her two hands--"but I'm
not--I'm not."

She stopped before Julia, a prey to the feeling that if she allowed
Julia to think so she _would_ be like Aunt Valeria. She had the sense of
one lying in a trance: that if he does not make a superhuman effort now
and protest effectively he will be buried alive. The girl glanced
excitedly round the room, and felt the old presence egging her on. It
was here that other Valeria had dreamed and tried to work; it was here
she faced defeat--here she died, looking out at dawn to the rampart
hills that had hemmed them both in beyond escape.

"Don't think I'm the very least like her. I don't want to be a sculptor
or a poet, and that's not like Aunt Valeria. I'm not staying here out of
respect for any silly old family traditions, nor even because my
grandmother needs me. I've been pretending. I'm really staying for
Ethan's sake"--her face grew crimson--"_that's_ not like Aunt Valeria."

"For Ethan's sake!" echoed her friend.

"Yes. He made me promise. It's only for a little while I am giving up my
music not because I'm growing civilized, as you imagine, but because I
shall get something I want more, and that's not like Aunt Valeria. And
it doesn't matter who says 'No' to what I want: _I'll have it_--yes,
I'll have it in spite of all the angels in heaven and all the demons in
hell, and _that's_ not like Aunt Valeria!"

Julia, still sitting on the hearth-rug, had leaned forward, and was
staring at Val with a curious expression. The crouched-together attitude
had caused an envelope the girl had hidden in her bodice to work up to
the bit of bare neck revealed by the low-folded fichu. Val fastened
sharp eyes upon that part of the familiar gray-blue paper where in
Ethan's unmistakable hand she read as much of Julia's last name as
"tway." Val's fixed stare made the other look down. Two guilty hands
flew to her breast.

"Will you let me see that letter?" said Val.

"No."

"You must. I've told you my secret."

"I didn't ask you to."

Julia got up.

"There's something in it you're ashamed to show," said Val.

"Not at all."

"How long have you been corresponding with Ethan?"

"You've no right to cross-question me. I'm going home."

She moved to the door, and turned as she put her hand on the knob to say
good-bye. The word died on her lips as she saw Val's face. Before Julia
quite realized what was happening, the other had leaped upon her like a
young panther, and was tearing away the fichu at her neck. A short
struggle, and the letter was dragged out of its hiding-place. Val tore
open the door and fled down-stairs, out across the back and round the
wooden L, in at the side-porch, through the kitchen, crying to Jerusha,
"Don't tell Julia where I am!" up the back-stairs, and into an unused
room opening onto the long hall. She locked herself in, and sat down in
the dim light. Every pulse in her body was thumping like a stamp-mill.
She slipped onto her knees before the shrouded window, and with
quivering hands took out of the crumpled envelope several sheets of thin
blue Irish linen-paper closely written.

"Oh, longer than any of mine!" she wailed, in her sore heart.

But, stop! it wasn't all one letter. A little note was to apologize to
"Dear Miss Julia" for not answering her two former "charming letters,"
and to decline with many thanks the Otways' kind invitation to come and
visit them.

"The audacity! To visit _them_ indeed!"

His excuse was the pressure of political engagements.

"She had to write _two_ charming letters to get this."

But the postmark was the capital of the State. He was less than two
hours away! The other--the long communication--lacked the first page,
according to the numbering. She turned to the broken sentence at the
beginning:


     "... realized I was rather too notoriously a 'rich man' to stand
     much chance of election, but I was at least a man who could
     _afford_ to be defeated, and yet go on doing his level best to
     serve his country. I started in, believing that the way to serve
     her best was by being a Republican and a Sound Money man. It was
     all very well to say my own private interests lay along that line;
     I believed the public interest did as well. But I was not satisfied
     to be 'run' in blinders by an agent or a committee, pledged to see
     nothing but party advantages, pledged to controvert opposing
     opinions, however sound or unforeseen. I couldn't help seeing the
     other side. That's my special curse, by the way, and will stand
     forever between me and effective action. I have been about among
     the working-classes and the idle poor. I took nobody's word. I
     investigated for myself the trades-unions, the various political
     and industrial organizations. I looked into Pullman patriarchal
     tyranny and into Carnegie despotism, and recalled the more humane,
     more _democratic_, attitude of masters to men in the effete
     monarchies abroad. Here, in free America, tyranny stalks naked and
     unashamed. The employment of politics for mere private gain, the
     abuse of patronage, and in business the war of extermination waged
     by trusts and combines--everywhere the right of moneyed might, the
     rich playing into the hands of the rich while pretending to serve
     the people--all this opened my eyes. I have just come from
     Ironville. The strike is not going to be settled so easily,
     although the suffering is appalling. The masters mean to starve the
     men to death; the men mean to blow the masters to atoms. This is
     the _union_ I find in my native land--this the new free brotherhood
     of men. Sharks devouring little fishes!

     "What with lawless greed on one side and lawless need on the other,
     the outlook frowns. The question of the future isn't silver versus
     gold, it isn't Republican against Democrat, nor North against
     South, nor East against West, but human dignity and decency against
     capitalist slave-drivers and despoilers of the poor. _You_ know the
     spirit of fervor and of patriotism that carried me into the
     campaign. I tell you I'm sick with disillusionment.

     "I am far more afraid of being elected than of facing defeat. I
     have learned that these measures I proposed in such good faith are
     half-measures foredoomed to failure. Give me, if you can, some good
     reason to believe that this great and prosperous America is not
     like to become the devil's drill-ground. Yours very sincerely,

     "ETHAN GANO."


"Well, of all the funny letters for a man to write a girl!"

_Julia_ give him a reason! Julia setting herself up as understanding
politics! To be sure, she was two years older than Val, and was always
seeing her father's political friends; but that didn't account for....
It came over her how little one woman knows the side another woman turns
to men. It must be immensely flattering to have a "politician" writing
to her on terms of equality. Oh yes, Julia must be enormously uplifted.
Val was sure of it by the heaviness that weighed _her_ down. Julia, no
doubt, had "studied up" in order to share Ethan's interests on a side
that Val and other girls couldn't reach.

As she came out of her hiding-place she was concocting in her mind a
letter which the servant should carry over to Julia with the confiscated
correspondence.

Her excitement had died down, leaving for the moment a dead weight of
wretchedness. Ethan's letters to her had seemed before so full and
satisfactory, even her hungry curiosity had felt no want in them that a
letter could supply. For even the love he did not put into words seemed
not only implicit in every line of each "enclosure," but more subtly
delicious being veiled. His letters had filled up the empty spaces in
her life, seeming to carry her along step by step through his. But if
there was all this besides which he cared to write to Julia, what more
might there not be in a life so full and varied as his? How had she been
so blind, so easily content? It was years since they had said good-bye.
Wasn't nearly every novel in the world a warning against believing that
men remembered long the girl who was out of sight? No doubt, what she
had dimly feared had happened at Long Branch last summer--Julia had
improved the shining hour.

Val went wearily down the long hall, feeling that all the zest had gone
out of existence forever. She stopped to lean against the last window at
the head of the back-stairs. Looking out, she saw to her surprise that
Julia was sitting on the terrace under the crooked catalpa-tree. Ah,
she couldn't go and leave that precious letter behind! Val went down to
her with angry-beating heart. The other girl, leaning back against the
tree, watched with sullen eyes the slow approach. She had wrapped the
torn fichu up close about her throat. Something in Julia's handsome
impassivity stirred the other to a rage, more becoming had she not been
the arch offender. She dropped the crumpled envelope into Julia's lap.

"I congratulate you on being able to hold up your end of such a weighty
correspondence."

"Is that all you have to say after leaping at me like a wild-cat and
taking what didn't belong to you?"

"Oh, you're waiting here for me to apologize?"

Julia got up slowly.

"I never thought _you_ would do such a dishonorable thing!"

"It wasn't dishonorable. You and I were '_best_ friends.' I had just
given you my whole confidence. You owed it to me to be as frank with me.
I took what belonged to me."

"And I say that if you broke into our house and stole the silver, you
couldn't be more of a thief than you are this moment."

Val stared at her speechless, and then:

"I think if you were a man I could kill you. Why do you stay here?" she
said, coming a step nearer with ill-controlled fury. "We aren't
expecting Ethan to-day. Why do you stay?"

Julia squared her Junoesque shoulders against the crooked tree and stood
her ground.

"You can, of course, behave like a wild savage if it suits you, but I'd
like to know what you mean to do."

"Do!" Val dropped her arms listless to her sides. "What is there to do?"

"Shall you tell your cousin you stole his letters?"

"No. I shall tell my cousin exactly what happened." She turned to go up
to the house.

"I wouldn't, if I were you. Look here, there's no reason, because our
friendship's broken, that we should do more things we shall regret.
You've no right because you've got hold of my secret--you've no right to
pass it on to Ethan." It was an agony to hear her call him Ethan. "You
mustn't tell him that I--that I carry his letters about. And I won't
tell him that you--"

"Tell him what you like!"

Val went angrily up the terrace-steps; but all the same, Julia knew
perfectly that she had secured herself now against Ethan's hearing what
had happened. Val could, most indefensibly, tear her secret out of her
keeping in the passion of the moment. But Julia had little fear that in
cold blood her old friend would "give her away" to the man they both
loved.




CHAPTER XXVII


That night Mrs. Gano was prostrated by a feverish cold. The doctor was
sent for, and Val carried out his instructions so faithfully that in
twenty-four hours the patient was comfortably mending.

In the intervals of nursing Val had written to Ethan in pencil:


     "I've got to see you. It doesn't matter that I can't ask you to the
     Fort, or that grandma is not to know. You must come and stay a day
     or two at some small town quite near here. I'll get a day off for a
     picnic or something, and meet you either in Blake's Woods, or at
     one of the steamboat landings up the river. Don't hesitate about
     this. I'm not a child, and I've a right to see you about a matter
     so important to me."


She closed without a hint as to what the matter was.

He answered by return of post, pointing out that he couldn't possibly
come to see her clandestinely, for her own sake.

"For my sake! Not a bit of it. For grandma's sake. He's afraid."

The conclusion was the easier in that she was herself afraid. It was
then Val remembered that Mrs. Ball, the former Jessie Hornsey, who now
lived in the capital of the State, had several times asked Val to visit
her. The girl went out and sent the lady a telegram. "I'm going to stay
a few days with Mrs. Austin Ball," she announced with outward calm and
much inward trepidation when she came home.

"_You are going_--" Mrs. Gano sat up in bed and stared.

"Oh, Val," remonstrated Emmie, "and grandma ill in bed!"

"That has nothing to do with it," said the invalid, shortly. "But my
house is not a Family Hotel for people to come and go as they--" A
sneeze spoiled the effect she was making.

"There, you've caught more cold!"

Emmie rushed across the room and brought a shawl. Val wanted to help put
it round her. Mrs. Gano waved her off, took the shawl herself, and with
some premonition, perhaps, of a coming crisis, said:

"What does this mean?"

"It means that at last I want to accept one of Mrs. Ball's dozen
invitations. The doctor says you're better. You could telegraph me if--"

"That's all very well, but in this house it is customary--"

"Yes, yes, dearest; I know it's customary to ask leave, and I do ask it.
But you must let me go. I--I never go anywhere, I never do anything; all
my life is slipping away, just as Aunt Valeria's did."

The old woman looked into the young face and read the signs there
misguidedly enough to say:

"Well, well, we can't very well afford it, but perhaps a little
change--"

"I'll make it up, you'll see."

No later than that same afternoon the girl was on her way. She had given
Ethan no warning--did not even know if she would find him still at the
hotel from which he had written to Julia; but she drove straight to the
Wharton House, learned that he was in, and sent up word that a lady
wanted to see him.

While she sat there, oblivious of the expensive ugliness of the empty
hotel parlor, the thought of seeing Ethan after all these years did not
shut out the haunting remembrance of her grandmother. If that scorner of
deceptions could see her now! If she ever came to know that Val, whom
she trusted, had acted this complicated lie in order, most
unmaiden-like, to beg a stolen interview with a man! She cringed at the
thought of the old woman's high unsparing scorn. "Why do I always think
of her! Other girls don't take even their fathers and mothers so
seriously. They aren't _haunted_ by them." She hunched her shoulders
with discomfiture. Why didn't Ethan come? What would her grandmother
say? It would be distinctly awful to be despised by her. Should she save
her reputation by running away without seeing Ethan? It seemed a sudden
blessed way of escape from domestic degradation. She half rose, staring
absently at the sofa pattern. Suddenly the perplexed eyes widened; the
vague design of the satin damask had wrought itself into her brain. Out
of the scrolls and arabesques a face seemed staring at her. With a twist
of pain she recognized it--that sorrowfullest of all faces--that face of
some one who never had a chance. The poor dim ghost that had been shut
up so long in Aunt Valeria's dusty heap of clay, that had appeared to
Val like a shadowy face at a prison grating--it had escaped at last: it
was here!

As she sank back in the corner, the old tide of revolt rose high within
her; but the flood to-day was chill with fear of failure, and bitter
with the memory of those others who had been overwhelmed. Val had
herself given up all "chances" for this one that she was reaching out
for to-day. She was here to put that one to proof, and-- Ethan was at
the door! In that first instant of his non-recognition her heart turned
sick, so cold he looked, and so remote, forbidding even. She got up and
came forward.

Ethan cried out in astonishment, throwing down his hat:

"_You!_ No, not really!"

"Yes."

He took both her hands, and looked into her face. Had she really thought
him cold? Turning, he glanced about the room, as if to assure himself
they were alone. She disengaged her hands.

"Come out and walk; I don't like it here," she said.

He looked at her reflectively, and yet with a kind of smouldering
excitement.

"We'll get a victoria, and drive out to the country." He led the way
down-stairs. "But how on earth have you managed it?" he said.

"I didn't manage, I just came."

"Grandmamma is with you?"

"Oh no."

"Who, then?"

"Nobody."

"She hasn't let you come alone?"

He stopped.

"Oh, it's all right," she said, a little impatiently. "I've come to
visit an old school-friend."

They chose one of the carriages in front of the hotel, and drove rapidly
out of town.

She shrank back into her corner, feeling his eyes too keen upon her; but
when by chance she encountered them, she would have been less than woman
if she had not been reassured by the admiration in their kindling
depths.

"I suppose I'm changed too," he said, smiling.

"Y-yes; you're a little more alarming than you used to be."

"Oh, really!" he laughed.

"I suppose the change in me is a different one?"

He nodded.

"You've kept your word."

"My word?"

"Don't you remember telling me that I was rather good-looking at that
time, but the difference between us was that you'd improve and that I'd
grow repellent and plain if I wasn't very careful?"

"I _never_ said such a--"

"Oh yes. You used to be a wise child. Are you a wise woman?"

"Not enough to hurt," she said, with a little grimace.

He asked about Mrs. Gano and Emmie, and the bedridden An' Jerusha. The
year before, Venus had married the mulatto postman, and Val, at Ethan's
suggestion, had bought them a cottage, where they all lived very
happily. Val told him of the advent of the twins.

"What are you doing here?" she inquired, presently.

"Political business."

"I suppose you think I wouldn't understand that."

"I think it would probably bore you."

"Why bore me more than any other girls?"

"I didn't say so. But most young ladies of your age--"

"I'll soon be twenty-three; Julia is only twenty-four."

She could have bit her tongue out for her maladroitness.

"Julia? Ah, how is Julia?"

"This is pretty; let us stop here."

"All right. Driver, just pull up in that shade and wait for us."

They walked across the field, to a clump of trees by the Virginia
rail-fence that separated them from the large market-garden on the other
side.

"Now that I've come all this way," Val said, leaning against one of the
elms, with her hands loosely clasped in front of her, "I want to run
home and leave things to chance."

He made no answer. She glanced up to find him looking at her with an
intentness that confused her. She turned away, sat down, and took off
her hat. Her hair was loose; she pinned it up as well as she could, but
her hands felt unskilful, helpless. She could not free herself from the
sense of those deep eyes arraigning, caressing, compelling her. She
looked up with a fluttering smile.

"Sit down, and don't stare."

He only leaned back against the opposite elm.

"Yes, there's some other change in you besides the growing prettier.
What's happened?"

In the hypersensitized state of her nerves the question hurt keenly.
That they should not have met for all this time, and he ask that! It was
all she could do to keep the tears out of her lowered eyes.

"Come," he urged, "is some of the gilt worn off your particular piece of
gingerbread?"

"No," she said, with recovered firmness; "I've not come to complain.
I've only come to be helped to understand."

"Ah, life has pricked you, I see that--and"--he smiled faintly--"you
don't understand."

"Yes," she said--the voice was not quite so steady--"I've got hurt. If
I'd sat quiet, I wouldn't have bumped myself against sharp corners. But
I shall not sit quiet."

"Oh no, you may be depended on for that."

"But I _have_ sat quiet, you know, for years. That's done with, now."

He shifted his position uneasily.

"I don't want any longer to be always fortunate, always happy. I want to
know about life. I want to understand."

Still he said nothing.

"It's a kind of death not to understand," she said.

"And has some of Death's peace to recommend it. But let's come to
Hecuba. What do you want to understand?"

"It--is so--hard for me to say."

"Harder than not understanding?"

"No. I--want to know--if you have any objection to releasing me from my
promise?"

"What promise?"

She put her hands up, quickly, to hide her convulsed face. He had
forgotten!

"If you don't remember, that's release enough," she said, getting up.

He came forward and put his hand on her arm.

"You don't mean that about your going away from home?"

She nodded her averted head.

"Certainly I won't release you from that promise."

"Why not?" She turned swiftly on him. "What is it to you?"

"It's a great deal to me."

"Well, it's more to me. I've come to say I take my promise back."

He bent down to her.

"You _didn't_ come to say that, Val."

Her wet eyes fell before his softened looks.

"I--I can't say just what I came to say."

"Why not?"

"You're gone so far from me."

"No, I haven't, dear." The dark face was close to hers. "I've tried,
perhaps, but I haven't succeeded. Val--"

He drew her suddenly into his arms. She resisted a moment, and then,
with a little cry of self-abandonment, she hid her face on his breast.
They stood so till, with an infinitely tender movement, he turned the
lithe body over into the hollow of his arm, and kissed the upturned
face. She broke away trembling.

"Now I can ask you what I came to ask. Have you been caring about some
one else more than you've been caring about me?"

"What in the world put that into your head?"

"You have--you have!" she said, getting white.

"But I have not."

"You like writing to others more than you do to me."

"I don't, indeed. It bores me horribly to write to other people."

"Why do you do it, then?"

"Oh, you're thinking of the letters I write Otway."

"Who?"

"Hezekiah Otway. You see, he's chairman of our--"

She darted forward and seized his hands, laughing and holding them to
her breast as she looked up, radiant, into his face.

"Now we'll drive into town, if you please."

They went back to the carriage, and Val talked gayly about the Fort and
the people Ethan had known when he was in New Plymouth.

"Where shall we meet to-morrow?" she said, when they were again in the
town.

"Where does your Mrs. Ball live?"

"In the Chestnutville suburb. But that's no good."

"No good?"

"No; I've told you she's Miss Jessie Hornsey."

"Is that fatal?"

"Well, she'll want to do all the talking. You can come there of course,
but it won't be seeing you."

He considered.

"How long shall you stay?"

"Mustn't be more than three or four days."

He crossed swords with his conscience and still considered.

"You must come in the morning and take me boating," she said.

He laughed.

"Oh, adorable directness! How it simplifies all things! Boating be it."

"We must go quickly to the station for my things; the train I'm due by
is just in."

After getting her trunks and travelling-bag, they said good-bye, and Val
drove alone to West Walnut Street.

Mrs. Ball received the girl warmly, and with apologies at having only
just come in and found her message.

"I'm simply delighted to have got you at last. I only hope you won't
find it dull. If you'd given me a little longer notice, I would have had
some parties planned, and got Harry Wilbur to come. How is my handsome
cousin?"

"Oh, he's all right; and dear Mrs. Ball"--the girl sat down on a stool
and crossed her arms on her hostess's knee--"the fact is, I've come on
some private business. I haven't time for parties. If you want to be an
angel to me, just let me go and come as I please, for the two or three
days I'm here."

"Days? Make it two or three weeks, my dear. You know you've always been
an immense favorite of mine; my husband likes you, too. He said when we
visited my mother's last year that you were the most charming girl in
New Plymouth. Now it's settled, and I think I heard Austin come in." She
kissed Val on both cheeks, and went down-stairs to confide to Mr. Ball
that "the most charming girl" was not in New Plymouth, but under his
roof, and was evidently up to some mischief, and what ought they to do?

"Play dominos!" Mr. Ball's childish old father suggested vacantly.

That favorite pastime meant to him shuffling the dominos aimlessly about
the table, and in his more lucid intervals rising to the height of
matching them.

"Yes, paw." The good Mrs. Ball emptied the dominos out of the box and
set the old man to turning them face downwards. He went to sleep before
the task was done.

"_Oh!_" ejaculated Mrs. Ball, suddenly catching sight of something in
the evening paper her husband was unfolding.

"What?" She pointed to a paragraph announcing the meeting of the Sound
Money men at the Central Hall. Chairman, Mr. Hezekiah Otway. Debate to
be opened by Mr. Ethan Gano, etc.

"That's why she's come."

"Oh, think so?"

"Sure of it." The round good-natured face grew grave. "Husband, I think
I ought to put Harry Wilbur on his guard."

"Don't you meddle with outsiders' affairs," said husband.

"My dear, Val Gano's as good as engaged to my cousin. Harry was very
confidential with me the last time he was here. This Ethan Gano was at
one time the barrier. Such a fascinating creature," she sighed. "Not a
marrying man, and _most_ dangerous. He sha'n't come between them again."

"You can't interfere if--"

"I can wire my cousin to come and make us a visit, and I will." She
bustled out.

While Val was in her first beauty sleep, Harry Wilbur arrived.




CHAPTER XXVIII


The morning was warm and balmy. Val put on her blue muslin gown,
thinking rebelliously how Ethan had once said that a serge coat, and
skirt, and sailor hat were the proper "togs" for the river.

"Togs" was a proper ugly word for such garments. No stiff tailor-made
things for Val! "He said I'd grown prettier," she thought, gayly, as she
took a last look in the glass. But it was the thousandth time she had
quoted the comfortable assurance to her happy heart.

She met the unexpected Harry at breakfast with such apparent cordiality
that Mrs. Ball was slightly perplexed, even slightly disappointed.

"Now, what are we going to do to-day?" asked the hostess, in the middle
of the meal. "It's such a comfort, Harry, that you happen along at just
this moment. A man is so useful in helping to arrange things; and
Austin, of course, is too busy." Austin was already at the office.

"I've just had a note from my cousin, Ethan Gano." Val put her hand on
an envelope that lay, address downward, on the cloth. "He's at the
Wharton House. He'll be here at ten to take me for a row." It had given
her acute discomfort to make the announcement, and the look on the two
faces opposite did not restore her equanimity.

After an expressive little silence, Mrs. Ball said:

"Yes, it'll be nice on the river to-day. We can all go. I'll see about a
luncheon-basket;" and she rang the bell.

Thereafter the conversation flagged. At ten o'clock Ethan duly appeared,
spotless in boating flannels and white shoes. There is no more becoming
garb for the modern man. Val forgot her discomfiture a moment, looking
at him. Mrs. Ball compared her cousin's "business suit" unfavorably
with the new-comer's elegance, and promptly set down Gano's grace to his
clothes.

Val had been afraid her cousin would be uncomfortably restive under the
infliction of the extra couple. Before long she was resenting his too
amiable acceptance of the addition to the party. They drove down to the
river in the Balls' carryall, Harry and Val in front with the basket,
Mrs. Ball and Ethan behind. Gano was laughing and talking with an
unusually gracious air. Was Val to believe that under that charming
exterior he was burning with the dull rage that kept her silent and
_distraite_? His unwonted gayety looked suspiciously like relief.

When they got down to the landing it was found that Ethan had already
provided the boat and the hamper. But Val told herself that was not the
reason that he, as it were, took command of the little expedition. He
would always do that. Other people found it as natural as he did
himself. Mrs. Ball was to sit in the stern, "and, Val, you take the
tiller." When they had pulled a few yards up-stream Ethan shipped his
oars, stood up, and slipped off his white flannel coat and waistcoat.

"Will you keep my watch?"

Val nodded. How warm it felt! She put it in her bosom. No movement of
her cousin's was lost upon the girl, though her eyes never rested on
him. There had sprung up between them again that old, alert physical
consciousness that is like a sixth sense.

That the genial, broad-chested Wilbur should appear to advantage
out-of-doors was a matter of course. Val had told him once that he was
like a great Newfoundland dog--"too big for the house." But the
impression made by Gano's skill in open-air pursuits was partly due to a
sense of surprise on the part of the on-lookers that this fine-limbed,
small-handed, slender-footed creature should be as strong, apparently,
as the obvious athlete.

Mrs. Ball talked incessantly about people in society--about her plan for
"going to Europe" when Austin should have a holiday; about any and
every thing she poured out an unfaltering stream.

During luncheon Val, in sheer desperation, began to show some
consciousness of Harry Wilbur's existence. Finding that Ethan seemed not
to notice, she redoubled her friendliness and gayety. At last, "Let's go
for a walk--you and me," she said, jumping up and going towards the
dogwood thicket.

Harry, nothing loath, strode after her. Mrs. Ball felt herself a
diplomatist, and began to relax under Mr. Gano's unruffled courtesy. The
little match-maker did not know that Val's high spirits went down like
foam in a champagne-glass as soon as she was beyond the reach of her
cousin's eyes. But she came back smiling and trailing great branches of
white dogwood over her shoulder and down her sky-blue gown. She felt it
must be pretty, but she got no assurance that Ethan caught the effect.
Harry's ingenuous compliments only heightened her hidden wretchedness.
The day was a dreary disappointment to the girl. Ethan's apparent
satisfaction in it was the most disturbing element of all. Only once did
she have a word with him alone, and then not by his arrangement. She
left Mrs. Ball and Harry repacking their basket, of which almost nothing
had been used, and ran down the bank to help Ethan to put the cushions
back in the boat.

"I suppose Julia told you her father was coming up to-morrow night?"

"No. What for?"

"He's chairman of our committee."

"Don't say anything about my being here."

"Really?"

"Really."

"All right. I wish he weren't coming, though."

"Why?" said the girl, preparing to hear her own views set forth.

"Well, you see, the trouble is, old Otway is getting very deaf; he's not
really fit for public business any more, and nobody has the courage to
tell him. Isn't it appalling the way people cling to things--to the
things, too, that we're all forewarned will be taken from us if we stay
here long enough?"

She looked at him with a fresh sense of curiosity and wonderment. What a
strange new note he put into life! Yet those others laughed and jested
with him, and thought him one of themselves.

He took off his jacket again.

"I'll take care of that." She began to fold it. "What's in the pocket?"
She put her hand in with a thrill of joy at her audacity, and brought
out an old duodecimo of battered calf-skin. "Why, I remember this: it's
one of those little volumes that you brought from Paris."

"Did I have it with me--"

"Yes. Have you gone on carrying it about ever since you first came to
the Fort?"

"I hadn't seen it for years till the other day. I can't think how it got
among my things."

"You've marked it up frightfully. Grandma would scold you if she saw
that."

"The book marked me, why shouldn't I mark the book?"

"What does it say here?"

He shook his head.

"Please tell me."

"I thought you had studied Latin."

"Y--yes; I know what the words mean, but I don't know what the sentences
mean. Do translate this little bit."

"Nonsense! I might as well have it in English at once."

"You don't like people to know what you read?"

"I don't like people to read what I mark."

"Why not?"

"It's like leaving your diary open. Why should people--"

"I'm not 'people.' Mayn't I know this tiny bit?--'Meditare utrum
commodius sit, vel mortem transire ad nos vel nos ad eam.' What's that?"

Ethan only smiled.

"You never gave me back my watch."

"I forgot. No; I can't think why I tell such lies. I didn't forget at
all. Oh, here comes Mrs. Ball," she said, with an accent of despair,
"and we've not said a word about--"

"Bother Mrs. Ball!" Ethan ejaculated under his breath; and his cousin
blessed him.

Val's hostess hurried down the bank, and Ethan handed her into the boat.
Harry was left to cope with the basket.

"Now, what are you two arranging for to-morrow?" said the lady, settling
herself in the boat.

"We weren't arranging," replied Val; "we were speaking about a book."

She had put the volume back in the pocket of Ethan's jacket.

"There's a dance at the O'Connors' to-morrow night," said Mrs. Ball;
"perhaps you'd like to come with us."

She saw herself entering on Mr. Gano's arm.

"Ah, thanks; you're very kind, but I don't go to dances these days."

Mrs. Ball tried to think she was relieved on Val's account, but she
couldn't help saying, with an air:

"The O'Connors are among the first people here; they entertain in the
most princely way."

"_I_ was suggesting a day's fishing down by the Gray Pool," said Harry,
appearing with the basket; "it's that place on the Little Choctaw
River."

"Nothing could be better," Ethan agreed.

And then he stopped, having caught Val's unenthusiastic glance. Another
day to be lived through, cooped up in a boat, she was thinking; or
pursued, at all events, by two superfluous people.

"Yes," said Mrs. Ball, "the scenery on the Little Choctaw is very wild
and splendid. A cousin of mine--you know, Harry, cousin Bettie
MacFadden--she says it's just like some place abroad--in Scotland, I
think."

"Oh, really," said Ethan, in his charming way, "I must see that, but we
might go fishing on a dull day. If it's as fine as this to-morrow, why
not-- Don't I remember"--he turned to Mrs. Ball--"that you're a very
good horsewoman?"

"Oh--er--well--"

"They were telling me at the hotel you have a ride hereabouts out to
some wild park."

"Yes; he means Forest Park Lodge," said Wilbur.

"Let us go there," said Ethan, "and I'll wire them to have luncheon
ready."

It was all arranged before they parted, Mrs. Ball salving any prick of
conscience by assuring herself it was far better not to seem afraid of
this masterful Mr. Gano, with his reputation for being dangerous. It was
right, and even politic, not to "leave him out." All that was necessary
was that she, Mrs. Ball, should "be there."

"I don't ask you to come back with us to-night," she said, on their
return to town. "We have time only to snatch a mouthful before going to
a concert."

Mrs. Ball had a sense of playing up with grace and distinction to some
imaginary standard of life abroad. "He will find me much more like the
ladies he knows in London and Paris than most people about here."


Val had told herself that Ethan had invented the ride so that they
should be freer; they would get ahead of the others, or fall behind, and
have some time to themselves. But Mrs. Ball started off next morning
with Mr. Gano, and ruthlessly rode beside him all the way. Val
alternately raged in her heart, and forgot how sore it was, watching one
of those two on in front. How well he sat his horse! But so did Harry.
What was it in Ethan that distinguished him so from other men, and set
him for ever apart? She tried to give it a name while Harry's small-talk
trickled vaguely through her brain.

They stopped to lunch, and put up the horses at the Forest Park Lodge.

While they were dismounting, a buggy dashed up with a man and a girl in
it. The miserable old mare had been driven to death, and was covered
with sweat and foam.

"Brute!" said Ethan under his breath, glowering at the man, who threw
the reins round the whip, and helped his companion out.

"Pretty sort of girl to let him drive like that," was Val's comment, as
the couple went towards the hotel.

"Never saw so much of a beast's ribs before without the trouble of
taking off his skin," said Wilbur.

"My goodness!" added Mrs. Ball, "that's not a horse; it's a plate-rack."

"Look here," said Ethan to the man who was leading their horses to the
stables, "you're going to rub this other beast down, I suppose, and--"

"Never have no sich orders from Mr. Joicey," said the man. "That's
Joicey." He jerked his thumb after the two figures. "Comes here a lot.
Mare looks wuss'n she is. D'ye know that there nag is Blue Grass?"

"Not the filly that won--"

"Yes, siree bob; won a pile fur Joicey's father. Goes like hell even
yet."

"Give her a rub down and a feed, and say nothing about it," said Gano,
transferring something from his pocket to the man's hand. "For the sake
of battles long ago," he added to his companions, seeming to apologize.

As they walked up to the hotel Mrs. Ball ran on volubly about the
ill-treatment of animals.

"I like to remember some magnificent thoroughbreds I saw the last time I
was in Holland," Ethan said in the first pause. "I fell in with their
owner afterwards, a certain Monsieur Oscar."

"That the fellow that trains horses?" asked Wilbur.

"Yes, founder of the Continental Cirque. He'd been all over the world,
and was giving his last performance while I was at Scheveningen. When I
came across him afterwards, he had sold all the animals and properties
of his great show. 'All,' he said, 'except my eight favorite horses.' I
asked if he was going to keep them. 'No,' he said; 'I shot them after my
last performance. I might have sold them well, but I thought perhaps
they might come down in the world, and end by going between shafts. No,
I cared about 'em, so I shot 'em.'"

"Oh, how could he have the heart!" Mrs. Ball was shocked.

"You should have seen the fellow's face! He had cared. I couldn't help
thinking what a lot of room there was in the world for that kind of
caring."

"Gracious no, it's too brutal! He should have given them to people who
would appreciate them."

"As Mr. Joicey does Blue Grass? You've heard of General Boulanger's
celebrated black charger--he's a cabhorse now in Paris. Marshal
Canrobert's splendid animal is in the Pasteur Institute at Garches,
where it is used for the production of serum. Saint-Claude, too, the
winner of the Grand Steeplechase at Auteuil in '90, he's there being
experimented upon. No, dear Mrs. Ball, there seems to be just one safe
asylum for horses as for men. Hello, there! did you get my telegram?" he
called out briskly to the hotel-keeper. "Gano--luncheon for four."

In a moment he seemed to have the entire staff of the place bustling
about him, waiters throwing open the windows at his complaint of
closeness, putting fresh flowers on the table laid for the _partie
carrée_, deaf to the appeals of the few other people in the big
dining-room, the landlord praying Mr. Gano to remember that he was
nearly half an hour before the time.

"Do they know him?" Mrs. Ball whispered to Wilbur.

"Must; or why should they take all this trouble?"

Val smiled to herself, believing it superfluous to dive into her
cousin's pocket for the reason; it was there in his face, in his air. It
was so, she told herself, that princes walked the world, barriers going
down before them, and people vying to do them unasked service. Yes, it
was not for nothing she had dreamed about the prince.

The luncheon was a distinct success. It soon became evident that Ethan
was making great headway with Mrs. Ball. Her vivacity, and his unwonted
responsiveness, had kept the ball rolling merrily. Was he making himself
so agreeable, Val began to wonder, that he might be surer of a welcome
in West Walnut Street? "Jessie Ball is bent on impressing Ethan,"
thought the pitiless young observer. "She's growing quite affected"; and
she watched her hostess coldly. It seemed to Val a part of Mrs. Ball's
desire to play up to some imagined standard of extra punctilio that led
her, towards the end of the meal, to pass her purse to Harry under the
table, while Ethan wasn't looking, forming with her lips the words "I'm
hostess." Val's sense of embarrassment was acute. Ethan wouldn't like
it, after ordering things himself. Val knew, too, that if her cousin had
not been a rich man, Mrs. Ball's breeding would have appeared better.
She would not have troubled about the bill.

Ethan's later amazement when he called for the account, that there
should be a discussion as to who should pay for the repast he had
ordered, made Val want to get under the table. By so much was she
relieved at his giving way before Mrs. Ball's shrill insistence.

"Oh, very well, if it pleases you better so." He jumped up to cut the
discussion short. "Send it out after us. And when will you have the
horses--in half an hour?"

Mrs. Ball was uncomfortably conscious that her fine straw-colored hair
had come out of curl in the wind, there, under the trees. With the
indomitable spirit of woman in pursuit of beauty, she was determined to
borrow the chambermaid's tongs, and restore the fuzziness with which she
had started forth. It was essential, therefore, that she should take
time as well as herself by the forelock. She hurried Val up-stairs.

"What a fascinating man!" she said, with a sigh, as she stood before the
glass. "Val, dear, I hope you won't lose your heart to Mr. Gano."

"Oh, I've got past that," said the girl, with a misleading air of
frankness.

"Well, I'm relieved to hear you say so. There's something about him very
magnetic to my way of thinking--positively irresistible." She sighed
again. "But he'd make a shocking bad husband, that's one comfort."

"_Comfort!_" Val laughed a little hysterically.

"Well, now, what _have_ I said?"

But Val was hatted and gloved, and ran down-stairs. Ethan was smoking in
the porch.

"Where are those funny friends of yours?" he said.

She was up in arms at once.

"You always say my friends are funny."

"And so they are, dear child."

"They're not a bit funnier than my relations."

"Oh, they don't compare."

"How long before the horses will be ready?" said Val, loftily, as one
who chafes at a delay, making meanwhile a rapid calculation as to how
long Mrs. Ball's work of restoration might be counted on to keep her
up-stairs.

"They'll be here presently," said Ethan, throwing away his cigarette.

"Let's go and see." Val led the way round to the back of the hotel. "My
friends are perfectly delightful, but I don't mean to let them
monopolize every minute of our time."

He looked at her with an odd expression, and then turned away his face.
Her heart gave a great leap. They went on to the stable. Wilbur was
there. The buckle on Gano's saddle-girth, he said, had got bent. While
it was being taken off Ethan moved about, looking in sheds and open
doors.

"What are you hunting for?" Val called after him.

"A place for you to sit down. They'll be some minutes repairing that
thing."

"You'd better go back to the house," said Wilbur, who was showing the
man how to get the metal straight without breaking the tongue of the
buckle.

"No," said Val; "I shall go in there, and up those cobwebby stairs, and
sit on the hay by the door that opens into mid-air."

As she walked towards the barn-door it seemed to her that her whole
existence depended upon whether Ethan followed her.

At the door she turned, and saw him looking after her. Then she went
in. Was he coming? oh, was he, _was_ he? She began to mount the stair,
but her heart seemed to stay down there on the bottom step. She wouldn't
look back again, but there was no sound, no sign. It was not
overwhelmingly important to _him_ to see her alone. She felt the hot
tears stinging her eyes. Then the sunshine that streamed into the musty
place through the open half of the double door--suddenly it was
darkened. She knew it was Ethan on the threshold. He came after her up
the narrow seed-strewn stair, that had no banister.

"Don't walk so near the edge," he said, and he came on the outside,
pushing her a little towards the inner wall.

They went up side by side, the girl quite silenced by the sense of his
nearness. She half held her breath, expecting every second he would say
something--something that for her would be momentous. When they had
reached the loft, and he had not opened his lips, a disappointment swept
over her so acute it was almost humiliation. She waded heavily through
the hay to the open door, that looked out on the horses and the group
below.

"I can't think what I am to say about this visit, when I get home," she
said. "It seems as impossible to tell them I've been seeing you as it
does not to say so."

"When must you go?"

He accepted it, then. No crying out against her going, but merely
"when." She turned away from the open door, where she could see Mrs.
Ball just arrived on the scene making her a sign, and she steadied
herself an instant with her hand against the wall in the shadow. The
close smell of the hay choked her. Was it like this people felt before
fainting? "Oh, why did I come?" she heard herself saying. And then,
instead of losing consciousness, an electric sense of life and joy
spread through all her body. Ethan's fingers had closed about her hand
that had hung so limp at her side. There must have been some virtue in
him, for at the touch she was whole again.

"Don't be sorry you came," he said.

"Mustn't I?"

She tried to subdue her gladness.

"No; even though parting is more than I have courage to face."

She waited an instant for what was to follow, and then, "What? I--I
didn't hear what you said."

"But there are some things," he went on, "that we must do without
courage."

"Ethan"--she turned and faced him with a kind of fierceness like a
creature at bay--"if you find you can do that, it will be because you
don't care much."

"Don't care!"--his face came closer, his voice was so shaken out of its
even cadences it sounded like a stranger's--"don't _care_! Do you know
that I never in all my life knew what caring meant till I knew you? Do
you know that I'd give everything I have on earth, and every other hope
of happiness, just to be able to believe there is no barrier between you
and me?"

He stopped. Val's heart was too full to speak on the instant. In the
silence Wilbur's voice rang out clear at the bottom of the stairs:

"I say, Val, aren't you ever coming?"


Mrs. Ball asked Ethan to come in after their ride and have a cup of tea.
He thanked her, and seemed to accept. They all went into the dim parlor,
and when Mrs. Ball had drawn up the blinds old Mr. Ball was discovered
asleep in the arm-chair. He woke at the noise, and blinked feebly.

"Why, paw," said Mrs. Ball, "how did you get in here?"

The old man grunted.

"You've dropped your knitting," said Val, stooping and picking up a
strip of gray wool-work with needles sticking in it.

He took it, and began feebly moving his rheumatic hands, while Mrs. Ball
bustled about making the tea and sending the maid-servant in and out.
Ethan turned his back, and looked out of the window. Val suddenly felt
the repulsiveness of the old man as she had never felt it before. She
saw that Ethan had taken out his watch.

"It isn't possible it's nearly five o'clock!" he said, as though that
were an unheard-of hour for tea. "I'm sorry, but I must get back to my
hotel," and almost before Mrs. Ball knew where she was, he had shaken
hands and was gone.




CHAPTER XXIX


"Grandma is not so well to-day," said Emmie's letter the next morning.
"I think you oughtn't to be away long. She is surprised to have only a
'safe arrival' telegram from you and no letter. She says she doesn't
count the post-card. But she does, and I think you'd better not send her
another."

Val read it out at breakfast.

"Well, you just write and tell them I'm giving a Pink Luncheon for you
to-morrow, and that there are two more dances next week. You can't
possibly go till a week from Saturday."

"But perhaps, if grandma really isn't so well, I oughtn't to stay quite
so long."

"My dear girl, she's been 'not so well' since before I was born."


The Pink Luncheon was a huge success. The fame of its pinkness--of Mrs.
Ball's "perfectly fascinating" visitor, and that visitor's perfectly
adorable cousin, Mr. Gano--were long discussed among Mrs. Ball's "first
people." The ungrateful guest alone was not content.

"Miss White has just asked Will Austin," Harry whispered to her as they
were leaving the table, "if I'm the man you're going to marry."

His laughing eyes left her in no doubt as to the audacious answer he had
given. She glanced across at Ethan. He was lingering a moment with his
neighbor, Baby Whittaker, while they ate a philopena, smiling and
talking for all the world as if-- But, after all, what did it matter?
Since the moment when Ethan had said that about his "caring," she had
lived in a cloudy rapture. Nothing but a blessed happiness was clearly
defined, not even the wish to define. For a time Ethan's confession was
all-sufficient. She had borne with his absence and his engagements with
Mr. Otway, as she bore now with his polite pretence that Miss Whittaker
really existed. Val endured the inconclusive hours with a patience that
would have been more surprising had it been patience at all, and not
sheer absorption in the unreasoning joy of living over that moment,
which she felt had justified her coming, even if it presaged no easy
issue. She had determined to stay at least a week longer. A week was a
lifetime; a thousand things could happen in a week.

Dimly in the background of her mind she was feeling her way to a
conclusion that, if all else failed, should beyond peradventure break
down this nightmare barrier. But she did not even subconsciously face
the extremity.

They had all been going to ride out to Miss Baby Whittaker's in the
afternoon.

Val was no friend to the plan, but too much had been said of Baby
Whittaker's conquest of Ethan the day before at the Pink Luncheon for
her to venture an objection. When the discreet Saturday brought with it
floods of rain, Val's heart went out in gratitude.

During the little lull in the downpour, about two o'clock, Ethan had
ridden over, whereupon the Ball household smiled covertly at his
eagerness to go to Baby Whittaker's. But it was no use, the roads were
already very bad, and down came the torrent again. It was just as well,
perhaps, as Mrs. Ball wouldn't, in any case, be able to go. Old father
Ball had had a seizure of some sort in the morning, and Mrs. Ball hung
over him solicitously, fearing another.

Val's chief concern was lest, when Ethan saw the dropped jaw and leaden
eyes, he should turn and flee. "Why _did_ they keep their old and sick
in the parlor?" thought the girl, angrily.

Suddenly Mrs. Ball gave a scream. "Harry, help me to take him into his
room!"

He was struggling. Ethan went forward, and he and Harry carried the old
man out.

"Is he dead?" asked the girl, when Ethan came back.

"No, he's not in luck this time, I'm afraid. I've lent Harry my horse to
go for the doctor. The _doctor_!" He gave a little dry laugh.

They stood at the window, looking out.

Surreptitiously she glanced at him.

"Oh, you wouldn't look so grave if you knew what I know," she thought to
herself. "I _feel_ it's coming all right for us. It must, it _must_! But
I dare not say so yet;" and with her sense of superior knowledge, of
being in the councils of the gods, her spirits rose.

"How can you bear to be in the house with that awful old man?" Ethan was
saying.

"Oh, he's not often like this. Isn't it wonderful," she remarked, with
recovered cheerfulness, "to think he's nearly ninety?"

"Repulsive. He gave me the horrors the first time I saw him."

"I can't help staring at him. He seems hardly human."

"He's not human. Only the animal survives. To think that we can go on
eating and sleeping so long after the heart and the brain have burned
themselves out!" He moved away impatiently, saying, half to himself:
"How perishable the best things are! How long the lower nature lasts!"

"Twenty-three--ninety"; she did the sum. "Sixty-seven years more,
perhaps."

"For you!" He wheeled round and looked at her. "Heaven forbid! Upon my
soul, if I thought that _you_, with all you stand there for--of beauty
and gladness--if I thought you'd go on living till you were the feminine
counterpart of that old horror, I"--he choked with a half-whimsical
fury--"I believe I could kill you with my own hands."

She came closer, smiling.

"It would be just like me to go on till I'm a hundred, if I'm not
stopped."

"What prompts you to say such things to me?" he said, sharply, and
turned again to the window.

"But all the old don't end like Mr. Ball. _I_ shall be a lively old
lady, if I'm not stopped."

"Oh, nothing could stop you."

She laughed.

"Don't be so hopeless. You see, I've studied the subject of old age. The
reason it isn't more valued is because it's taken too modestly. I
suppose it's difficult not to be modest if you're ninety. But no old
person should be unselfish or patient. That's fatal. You see the success
our own grandmother has made."

Without turning round, Ethan began to laugh, too.

"A woman must be gentle and amiable (if she can manage it) while she's
young. It's becoming in the young," she said, piously; then, with a
cheerful gleam, "but all old women should be defiant--yes, they should
study a dictatorial style, and make the young ones toe the mark. It's
the only way. Oh, I'll be an aged Tartar, and, you'll see, they'll all
say, 'A person of remarkable character is old Mrs.--' H'm!"

She stopped short, and he turned round smiling and glowering at her, and
then back again to the window.

"Oh!" she exclaimed, looking over his shoulder.

"What? That poor devil over there? Yes, I've been watching him."

"I don't see-- Oh, yes, the cripple. Ethan, Ethan, what _is_ one to do
with you!"

She dropped on the sofa with a face of comic despair.

"Do with me?"

"Yes--if every time you look out of the window you see a 'devil' of some
sort."

He laughed, and then:

"But you said 'Oh!' and I thought--"

"I said 'Oh!' because the rain's stopped and the sun's trying to shine.
And all you can see is a cripple dragging his leg through the mud! Come
along"--she jumped up--"the rain's ruined the roads, but it hasn't hurt
the river, and we'll go for a row. It's going to be beautiful."

She dragged him off without ceremony.

As they passed by the Wharton House, "There's Otway," said Ethan,
looking up at a group of men at the entrance.

Mr. Otway came down the steps and shook hands.

"This is a surprise!" he said to Val. "Come in and see Julia. She has no
idea you're here."

"Oh, thank you, not this evening. We're going on the river, and it gets
dark so soon. I didn't know Julia was coming."

"Neither did I," laughed the indulgent father, "until this morning.
Well, come in to-morrow. Good-bye!"

They got a boat, and by half-past four were speeding up-stream to
Ethan's steady stroke.

"It'll be a simply glorious evening. We shall have a flaming sunset,
you'll see!"

"Yes. The rain has washed the world till it shines."

They talked very little at first.

"I don't think we ought to go beyond the Gray Pool," said Val,
regretfully.

"Where's that?"

"About a mile on."

"Oh, we can get farther than that."

"Well, they don't know where I am, you see, after all, and it's nice by
the Gray Pool, where the trees bend down. You could rest there."

"Do I look as if I wanted to rest?"

"Can't say you do."

"You've never told me what brought you here all of a sudden."

"I wanted to find out something."

"Well, have you succeeded?"

He smiled at her in that sudden way of his that made her heart contract.
She couldn't speak directly, but her silence seemed to her to say too
much. She rushed nervously for the light veil of words.

"I was afraid my life was growing poorer than I had imagined. If you
were going out of it, I knew I must go and find something to fill up the
empty place."

"Going out of it?" He scrutinized her keenly. "Where should I go?"

"Oh, there are so many people and things beckoning to you. How could I
tell? I was afraid you'd gone into some world where I couldn't follow--"

"So you came after me?" he smiled tenderly.

"Some world," she said, getting a little red, "where you didn't want
me."

"I _always_ want you--" he stopped short, drew his forward-bending
figure up, and pulled hard at the oars. "But as to my world, you'd hate
it if you found yourself at close quarters with it. I give you the best
side of it in my letters."

"I've told you I don't want only the best."

"What do you want?"

"All."

The brave, yet shamefaced look left nothing doubtful; but he affected to
think she spoke only of letters.

"If I wrote you 'all,' I'd make a pessimist of you in no time."

"Would it be things about--about other women that would make me--"

"Chiefly about men; most of all, about the things that are stronger than
men."

They were silent a moment.

"I don't know how it is," she drew her hand across her eyes; "but you
give me again the old feeling that you're somehow a prisoner--"

"A prisoner--yes."

"And that I must set you free."

His dark eyes were misty for a moment. "You couldn't do that without--"

"Without?"

He shook his head, turned, and glanced behind him. "Oh, look at the
sun!"

It was going down in a crimson flood that dyed the whole country-side a
red that was like new-spilt blood. It was one of those atmospheric
effects under which the most contradictory colors in nature are subdued
to a common hue. One has at such times a sense of looking at the
landscape through colored glass. The white and yellow farm-houses flamed
a dull orange. Their windows glowed like brass reflecting fire. The very
trees and grass were soaked in the strong dye of the sun. Ethan's steady
pull took them swiftly on, out of sight of farms, into the wilder
country. Still the girl sat with uplifted face. Her love of autumn and
of sunsetting had been no sad reflective sentiment, but something more
than common--eager, subtly exhilarated, joyous. To-day, stimulated and
at the same time balked, she found in the splendor of the hour a sharper
sense than ever of the drama in life, the essential poetry in human
experience.

"I think I must be growing old," she said, with a happy sigh.

"What are the signs?"

"I'm beginning to notice the scenery. I'm grateful to the sun."

Her eyes fell suddenly on the clean-carved features opposite; the dark
head and the pale ivory of the face seemed alone of all things in the
responsive world to refuse to wear the livery of light.

"Oh, I forgot," she said, "you don't like sunsets any more than you like
autumn. Here's the mooring-place."

He stopped his long, steady stroke, and paddled the boat under the
overhanging trees.

"On the contrary," he said, making fast, and looking the while through
the branches to the conflagration in the west--"on the contrary, I've
changed, too--'growing old,' perhaps, like you." He smiled and sat down,
his eyes on the slow-sinking sun. "These, and scenes like them, are the
conditions that reconcile me."

"Reconcile! They lift me up so high that I am dizzy."

She closed her eyes an instant, and then opened them with a fluttering
smile. They seemed to have forgotten there had been any thought of going
ashore.

"It is so splendid and yet so calm," he said, in a low voice. "It sets
me free from the burden and heat of the day."

"It doesn't set _me_ free--not that I want to be set free. I love the
burden and heat of the day. But this--_this_ sets me thrilling. It
clutches me at the heart, and makes my breath taste sharp, like steel,
against my tongue. This is the wonder-time of day."

"Yes," he said, dreamily--"yes, in a sense, it is the wonder-time. No
morning or high noon, anywhere up and down the world, can match this
hour."

"But it makes you sad," she said, resentfully, as though he had spoken
an ill thing of some one dear.

"No, I'm not sad any more; I'm reconciled. It is the moment when I can
most easily forget my own existence, and feel melted into the general
life."

She turned away with flashing eyes.

"Why are you so angry?" he said, softly, "or is it the sunset dyes you
redder than it did?"

"That you can say such things so calmly, and at such a moment--with all
this" (she opened her arms as if passionately to embrace the beauty of
the world)--"all this spread out before us, with only you and me to see
it, the unconscious world not caring _that_"--she snapped her quick
white fingers in the lazy air. "You sit there saying the eyes that glory
in it, the hearts that ache at the wonder of it, _they_ are nothing;
they are here to look on a moment, suffer, and die, while the great
spectacle goes on and on and on. Why did we come here, then? What's the
good of it?"

"_I'll_ never tell you."

"I'd begin to believe some of your libels on life if I thought there
wasn't more in it than just--"

"Just?"

"That we are brought here with all _this_ inside us"--she drew her
doubled hand across her breast like one in pain--"all this, and with the
destiny of brutes--cheated a little while with gladness while we're
children--"

"_That's_ a superstition, too. The happiness of children is more than
half an illusion of the old. _I_ remember. Others have forgotten; that's
the difference."

"No, no; I remember, too!" The raised voice was half challenge, half
appeal. "_I_ was happy, and I'm happy still, except when you--" She
broke off near the brink of tears. "And I mean to be happy. Oh, it's a
good, _good_ world, and I'm glad I'm here."

"_I'm_ glad you're here."

"But if you were right"--she looked out with a vague fear to the fading
west--"if all this keen consciousness existed just to be tortured a
little while, and then flung down in the dark--if that is all"--the
eager face grew white--"then human life's an outrage."

Silence for a moment, and then in a low voice came the words:

"It _is_ an outrage."

"Don't say so, Ethan; I can't bear it."

"Oh yes, we can all bear it; and by so much we ephemera get back our
lost significance, our sovereignty."

She looked up.

"Through this strange fate of ours," he said, "we fulfil the end of the
world."

Old doctrinal associations flitted before the phrase, blurring for her
his pagan use of it.

"The end, the aim of the universe, seems to be beauty--beauty so varied
in spirit and in form that it often gets strange names from men."

"Yes, it is _all_ beautiful, isn't it, Ethan?"

"That you can always see it so, and that even I can see it sometimes,
proves we are not the lowest in the scale of life. That power of finding
Beauty through her disguises is the best seal civilization sets on men."

"And so even you believe we fulfil the end of the world?"

He nodded.

"It's as magnificent, in its way, as a mountain peak, or the going down
of the sun, that puny men should accept the outrage of life and the
insult of death so nobly, with so little crying out. When one thinks of
it"--he laughed harshly--"the old gods and heroes were pygmies compared
with modern men. What were their doings and their destinies to the
hopeless, silent battle men are waging, without God and without hope in
the world? The men of to-day don't go reeling into battle, drunken with
the wine of hope, or dazed with the fairy tales of faith. But they fight
none the less well, knowing they go out to die, and not even sure for
what cause. It is so they fulfil the end of the world. Nothing in it is
mightier than the spirit of man calmly confronting his fate."

She drew a quick breath.

"You've put it into words," she said, "but I've _felt_ it."

He looked at her with dull foreboding. He had expected contradiction,
not acquiescence.

"Come," he said, rising and catching up the boat-cushion. "It's chilly
here in the boat. Why did we come under these wet trees? Let's land, and
go and sit in what's left of the sunset there."

"You're not calmly confronting your fate," she said, smiling dimly.

"Come." He held out his hand.

She took it and laid her cheek against it.

"I'll come with you," she said, "into the light or into the dark."

"Child, child, what have I done to you?"

He dropped the cushion in the bottom of the boat. She clung to him. He
wavered, the boat rocked violently.

"Be careful, it's deep here," she said, and drew him down on the cushion
at her feet.

"Val"--he averted his face--"you must try to understand. The barrier
between you and me is a real one. It's not a question of whether your
father's views were right or wrong, but that our imaginations have been
infected by them. I, at least, would always be fearing, expecting
disaster, and the fear would bring the evil to pass. Or even if it
didn't, the fear would--would destroy us."

"No, no!"

"It's true. I have no courage equal to facing either my family
inheritance, or my own dread of life--in a little child." He threw off
her clinging hand. "_Think_ of any one feeling as I do about life,
thrusting it on another--on some one I would love as I would love
your--" He dropped his head and covered his eyes with his hand.

"Why do you think always of some possible other person? Why do you never
think of _me_?" she cried.

He made a sudden movement, dropping his hand on the gunwale of the boat,
and looking straight into her eyes, with something new in the mobile
face, something that inundated, drowned her in one hot flush of passion.

"Oh!" she cried, half closing her eyes, "do you care like that?" and she
drooped forward into his open arms.

"Like this and like this," he said, kissing her fiercely. "Oh, my love!
my love! why have you infected me? Why have you poured yourself into my
very blood?" He had taken her by the shoulders almost roughly,
arraigning her with sombre-burning eyes. "You put that face of yours in
all my dreams. I go to sleep with it on my pillow; I wake up, it still
is there. In the blackest night I see you as I saw you first, standing
above the darkness, holding a great light in your hand. But the light is
not to light my way. Get you back into your fortress as quickly as you
can." He pushed her from him. "I am the enemy."

"'Enemy,' 'coward'--I've another name for you," she said, trembling;
"and if I have any light, it surely is for you. Dear Ethan, don't you
see? Don't you see?"

"See?" The moody eyes were heavy with passion.

"It's all quite clear." She sat before him in the bottom of the boat,
with hands clasped, and a veiled exaltation in her eyes. "We must make a
compact. We Ganos are honest people; we'll play fair."

"A compact?"

"Yes. It will seem to other people like the common one. They'll call it
marriage. It may be, we'll live a lifetime together without doing the
ill you most dread doing. But if--if the worst comes to the worst, we
will have had one perfect year."

"What do you mean, Val?" He seized her wrists.

"It's more than every man and woman gets," she cried.

"And then?"

"Then, according to the compact, we will go out together before--before
we've opened the door--to another." With a broken cry she flung herself
on his breast.

"Hush, hush, child! this is all--" His eyes were full of tears.

"You'll see it is the only way. No one but ourselves will pay for our
being glad a little while."

"Glad! Do you think you could be glad, poor child, with such an end
forever before your eyes?"

"Hasn't all the world that end in view? Aren't many of us glad in spite
of all?" She smiled up into his face. "But can't you see that I'd rather
be sad with you, than be glad with any other?"

He kissed her, and then: "This is nothing but madness--and my work,
too," he added, bitterly--"_my_ work."

She put her fingers on his lips.

"You take too much credit. It wasn't you who said, 'All mankind is under
a sentence of capital punishment.' It isn't as if we could escape, you
know."

The old sense of all the ways being barred, of being a creature trapped,
lay heavy on him.

"Oh, my dear, my dear!" he said, with a weary laugh, "we ought to be
less rational, or more so. You think you love me, little girl?"

He laid his hands about her throat, and as he looked into the face his
senses swam again. She neither spoke nor moved, but the quick, bright
scarlet was in her cheek, and all her womanhood was in her eyes.

"This leaping of the importunate blood," he thought, "all this
heartache, because of the will to live of that creature who is never to
be born; the spirit of the race, heedless of 'compacts,' clamoring for
reincarnation."

"If life's as terrible and strange as you say," Val whispered, drawing a
little away, "and if this life's _all_, why, it's as clear as daylight,
we'd be less than rational, we'd be stark mad, to let our little day of
happiness go by. You see"--she crept closer to him again in the failing
light, half crying--"it concerns only us. We'll live our perfect day,
and when the evening comes we'll lie down--"

"In each other's arms," he said, hiding his face in her loosened hair,
his tortured mind turning with passion to the image of ultimate peace.

"Yes." Sobbing faintly, she drew away that she might see his face. His
voice had sounded strangely. "This is our compact," she said, and she
kissed him on the lips.

"Our betrothal," he answered, dreamily, as one who has set his lips to a
philter.

"Betrothal? Yes. I didn't know what a strange sound the word had. We
must exchange rings. Oh, Fate, be kind to us!" She lifted up her face as
she drew off the ring she wore. "You needn't be afraid to be kind. We
are honest people. We'll keep faith. Ethan," she whispered, "they
_can't_ grudge us so little as we ask."

"The powers that be?"

She nodded.

"You said yourself that what we ask is more than many men and women
find. A year with you"--he gathered her up to his breast--"a whole year
of beautiful life and beautiful love without fear of the long decline!
It's a dream to draw the very gods out of their heaven. Oh, be sure
they'll be jealous of you and me."

He kissed her again and again.

"We mustn't let them be jealous. Where's your ring?"

He drew off his signet, and took from her the little old band set with
pearls and two small rubies.

"Too little for me," he said, "and too--"

He smiled at the obvious femininity of the old trinket.

"It's not for you to keep. We must make a sacrifice. I'll give yours to
the Spirit of the Air." She threw the signet as far up into the twilight
as she could, and they both listened. "Yours is accepted," she said,
triumphantly. "You must give mine to the Water."

"Aren't you afraid the Earth will be jealous?"

He held the ring over the side of the boat.

"Oh, no; the Earth is patient; she knows we'll give her more than a
ring. Why do you wait? The Water-spirit will be angry."

"You never told me who gave you this."

"It was my grandmother's engagement ring."

"No; was it? If this ring hadn't been given, neither you nor I would be
in the world."

He dropped it into the river. They sat quite still, each knowing
perfectly what new train had been started in the other's mind, and
neither wanting to unpack the heart with words. A couple of boats came
up the river, full of boys and girls, laughing and singing. When they
got nearly opposite the pool their voices rang out plainly, complaining
of the current, and suggesting turning back.

"What a pity you asked me that about the ring!" Val whispered.

"I'm not sure it was a pity, dear."

The passion had gone out of his voice.

"You _like_ her standing here between us?"

"I don't like to forget what must be remembered."

If Ethan were conscious that the mental apparition of the old woman with
her silent, but effectual, "I forbid the banns"--if he were quite
conscious that her coming brought behind the dash of disillusionment a
sense, too, of reprieve, he forbore to say as much. It was enough that
the first wearer of the sunken ring had made not only the difference to
those two of being summoned out of the infinite, but the difference of
holding them back from the infinite as well. The compact they had made
was null and void as long as their common ancestress lived. Her
character and influence built high an impregnable barrier between her
descendants and this thing she would despise, and which they knew would
give her her first taste of the cup of humiliation.

"It cannot be while she is in the world," said Ethan.

With unconscious cruelty the other answered:

"But she is very, very old, and we are young."

A sudden stifled cry rose apparently out of the bushes and tall
water-weeds just to their left. Ethan sprang up.

"It's only those boys," said Val, as a chorus of confused exclamations
came from beyond the Gray Pool.

"No, it was nearer. Didn't you hear a splash?"

The screams grew more distinct.

"One of 'em's in the water," he said. "Hallo, there!"

He paddled out from the overshadowing tree.

"Ethan!" Val held out her hands in a sudden agony of fear. "It's
horribly deep here, and there's a current! It's the most dangerous place
on the river!"

"Yes. Bad place for a little chap. Where did he go down?" he shouted.

"It was a lady. Her boat's just behind you."

Ethan turned, and saw dimly, a few yards off, Mr. Otway grasping the
side of a row-boat, and looking over into the water in a pitiable
paralysis of horror.

"Where? where?" Ethan called, scanning the river on all sides.

Something vague rose up a few yards below the boats, and moved quickly
down the current. Ethan was overboard in an instant, striking out in the
direction of the dark object.

Val caught up the oars and followed in the boat. It was all over in a
few minutes. Ethan had laid hold on the unconscious girl, and swam with
her to the bank. Val rowed across, and Ethan and she, between them,
dragged Julia into the boat. The boys, who had followed, called back to
Mr. Otway that the lady was saved.

When the father got up with them, Julia was reviving.

"You'd better get into their boat," said Ethan to Val; "the old man's
not fit to go alone down-stream, you know. You won't mind?"

"No," said Val; "but let us keep close together."

"Of course."

"She _would_ come," Mr. Otway kept saying, helplessly. "I _told_ her my
river days were over. She _would_ come."

"How did the accident happen?" said Val, keeping eyes and ears intent
upon the boat just in front.

Ethan bent to the oar, looking back now and then to see that Val was
close. Julia lay motionless, with Ethan's coat over her.

"We must go as fast as we can," he called out. "We'll be able to get
some brandy at Leigh's Landing, and a trap."

"How did it happen?" Val repeated.

"Oh, we started only five minutes after you did, and Julia rows so well
we could have caught up with you. But she changed her mind or else got
tired, and when you got out of sight"--he put on his _pince-nez_ and
looked anxiously after the boat in front--"when you got out of sight,
she wanted to rest."

"Where was that?"

"Near the Gray Pool. She pulled the boat in among the rushes. I was
tired, too. I think I fell asleep. First thing I knew we were out of the
rushes, and Julia was leaning out of the far end of the boat."--("I
wonder how much she heard?" was the thought that haunted Val.)--"Whether
it was my speaking suddenly startled her, or whether she lost her
balance, I don't know--I don't know at all." And he droned on about,
"She _would_ come. I _said_ my river days were over."

They found, as Ethan prophesied, dry clothes and warming potions at
Leigh's Landing, and a farm wagon to take them back to town.

The two men sat talking volubly in front, Ethan driving. The two girls
occupied the back seat, in a silence never once broken till they said
"Good-night" at the Wharton House.




CHAPTER XXX


"Well, Val, where have you been?"

"I've been boating, and--"

"Boating, after all! And poor Harry so anxious, riding along those awful
roads to the Forest Park Lodge."

"Why should he do that? He might have known--"

"He knew there was a very urgent telegram for you here." Mrs. Ball was
deeply reproachful. "We thought it best to open it."

Val snatched it up and read:


     "_Come home at once_.--SARAH C. GANO."


"Oh, she's ill; dying, perhaps! Oh, God! not dying!" She leaned against
the wall; her face frightened her hostess.

"My dear, it doesn't say a word about being ill."

"It's what it means; she knew I'd understand."

"Don't take it like that, Val." She put her arm round the girl.

Val threw her off, exclaiming: "Oh, I must go this moment. Can we send
Ethan word? Quick, quick!"

"I'll let him know soon enough," returned the other, fastening
suspicious eyes on the girl's pitiful face. "I expect Harry back every
moment. I'll help you with your packing."

In a dim way Val was relieved on second thoughts that Ethan should not
be summoned. He and she had been plotting treason. The poignant fear and
grief that swayed her would wear an artificial air in his presence after
what had passed.

The packing, Harry's return, the hurried supper, all went as in a
nightmare. Now she was driving to the station, now she was saying
good-bye to Mr. and Mrs. Ball, and to Harry. No, he was coming with her
apparently. Now they were in the train. Now they were rattling and
clattering through a tunnel. She sat in a corner with closed eyes, while
tears trickled incessantly from under the lids.

"Dear, dear, I love you," she said to herself, and her lover was far
away from her thoughts. On the throne of life a bowed old woman seemed
to sit alone. "Oh, I'll be better to you after this, only live and give
me a chance." She drew her limp figure up suddenly and turned her back
on Harry's whispered solicitude. A lightning-like realization came, as
she sat there, of what the life of this woman had meant to her. And it
was going--going--would be gone, perhaps, before Val got home. She
covered up her face. She told herself it was no common relation that she
bore to the ancient _châtelaine_ of the Fort. Something deeper than the
blood tie, a thing wrought out of sheer personal force, hammered out of
antagonisms, welded with fear and with love, and binding, abiding
gratitude for a glimpse of the unconquerable mind.

She saw now that if life from the beginning had never worn that cheap
and shabby air that it did to many girls without wealth or family
distinction; if, from the beginning, and day by day to the end, life had
carried itself bravely in the tumble-down old home; if in the leanest
years it had never lacked dignity, nor ever lost its faint old-world
fragrance; Val knew who it was who had wrought the spell, and who had
maintained it against all comers.

And this magical power was threatened; this costly life in danger. It
suddenly seemed the one thing in the world best worth preserving. A few
hours before she had faced the idea of its loss so willingly--her tears
gushed afresh at the memory--even with an obscure, impatient longing she
had thought of this thing, that she saw now in its true aspect, as
unspeakably terrible and tragic. For it was something irreparable. There
was nothing like _her_ in the world; the things that went to her making
had passed away. To think that all that was represented by such a
spirit--that a force like this, after enduring and dominating life so
long, should go out into Nothingness--why, it was merely incredible. But
the presentment of the possibility had shaken the foundations of the
world.

It was close on midnight when Val and Wilbur drove up to the gate.

"Harry," said the girl, "you've been so kind, be kinder still: let me go
in alone."

"Very well. I'll come back in a quarter of an hour to see if I can do
anything."

There was a light in the long room. Val lifted the knocker, and as it
fell Emmie opened the door. It seemed to Val that her sister's face said
"Death." She pushed past her without greeting, and into the long room.
Mrs. Gano was sitting in the great chair. She leaned forward, holding
fast by the arms. The veil falling on either side her face did not hide,
or even soften, the expression of concentrated contempt with which she
said, very low:

"So you've come back."

"Y--yes. I thought--"

"You thought you'd come before it was too late."

"Yes; I was afraid--"

"I'm glad there's _something_ you're afraid of doing, though I can
scarce imagine what."

Val put her hand up, bewildered, to her eyes.

"The last thing I would have believed of Valeria Gano was that she would
do something underhand."

"Oh, but I didn't--"

"You didn't pretend to me that you were going to visit Mrs. Austin Ball
when you were really running after Ethan?"

"I haven't been running after any one."

"Did he write you to come?"

"No."

"Did he expect you?"

"No."

"Some one who went up in the same train with you has had the audacity
to bring back the report that you went to the hotel to see Ethan before
you went to Mrs. Ball's at all."

Val did not make the expected denial.

"I'm ashamed of you"--the old face worked--"I've never been ashamed
before of a woman of this house."

"I am not ashamed," said Val.

"Then all I can say is"--Mrs. Gano extended her shawled arm--"you are
without the feelings of a decent woman."

Val had sat down like one dazed.

"Ask Emmeline," said the old voice, shaking as it rose; "the whole town
is ringing with the story, how you left your home under false pretences,
and pursued this man, who cares nothing for you--"

"He does care for me." Val's nerves quivered under her grandmother's
derisive laugh, but it did not escape her that Emmie had caught
convulsively at the corner of the great buffet, and was leaning against
the pillared cupboard.

"I dare say," observed Mrs. Gano, "that Ethan cares for a good many
ladies, if the truth's told, but he doesn't get most of them to run
about the country after him; that honor is reserved for you."

"Wait!" Val struggled to her feet with a sense that she was choking.
"I'll tell you the honor that's reserved for me: Ethan cares more for me
than for any one in the world."

Emmie leaned forward with white face and glittering eyes.

"Indeed," said Mrs. Gano, "and when is the wedding, if one may know?"

Val sank slowly back in the chair, dropping her hands at her sides and
her gloves on the floor.

Emmie drew herself up, and the color came back into her face.

"It's only an indefinite engagement as yet, perhaps," said the younger
girl. Her dark eyes flew to Val's hands. "Did he give you a ring?"

"Yes," said Val, mechanically.

"Why don't you wear it?"

"What is that to you--to any one but Ethan and me?"

"It _is_ something to your family," said Mrs. Gano. "I, too, should like
to see the engagement ring."

Val thought of the gossip-loving town, the endless questions, "When is
the wedding?" "Why the delay?"

"There is no engagement."

"You said he gave you a ring." Emmie's words were quick and glad under
their suspicion.

"I can't show you Ethan's ring."

"Why, where's your own?" Emmie came nearer.

Val got up and faced her sister with angry eyes.

"How dare _you_ cross-question me? Don't you suppose I know it's _you_
that have brought in the town's chatter, and magnified it, and--"

"Your sister has done no more than her duty. She at least cares
something for the family dignity. She has felt all this gossip to the
quick."

"I've no doubt of it," said Val.

"Where is _my_ ring?"

"Y--your ring?"

"Yes, _my_ engagement ring. There has never been any need to hide that."

"I--"

"Ah, I see! there, too, you took the initiative. You don't bring back a
ring, but you left one behind. _He_ has a pledge to show, if you
haven't. But my ring was never meant for that; send and get it back.
Give me your arm, Emmeline." They passed Val by. At the threshold the
old woman turned. "Send and get it back, I say!"

A soft knock at the front door arrested her.

"Go and see, Emmeline." Mrs. Gano sat down on the chair just inside the
door, averting her face from Val. At the sound of Wilbur's voice she
half rose. "At _this_ hour!"

"Oh, he just wants to see me a moment." Val moved forward.

Mrs. Gano stood up, blazing through her spectacles, and cut off the
retreat.

"Emmeline will remind him that you are not now away from your own home.
As long as I'm here, life under this roof must be conducted with some
decorum."

"Oh, grandmamma, grandmamma!" said Val, hysterically, beginning to laugh
and to cry all at once, "don't you see? We thought you were dying, and
he's come to see if he can do anything."

"_Dying_, indeed!" Her tone was that of one resenting some far-fetched
impertinence. "Go and tell him that I never felt better in my life, and
that he'd better go home."


Mrs. Gano did not appear the next day, nor the next. Val watched her
opportunity that second evening, when Emmie was out of the way, to go
into her grandmother's room and see for herself how she was.

Mrs. Gano certainly appeared in excellent health. She was up, and she
was dressed with all her customary care. Standing by the window in the
waning light, she bent her veiled head over a book.

"Good-evening, grandmamma; how are you?"

Mrs. Gano turned and looked over her spectacles.

"Good-evening."

"I was afraid you were ill."

"You are very determined I shall be ill, it seems to me."

"No, no, but I naturally wanted to come and--" She stopped, feeling too
chilled and rebuffed to say more.

"To come and bring me back my ring?"

Val, without answering, walked to the door.

"You _did_ give it to Ethan? Answer me."

"Yes, grandmamma."

"Have you got it back?"

"No, grandmamma."

"But you've heard from him?"

"Yes--Emmie must have told you--letters and telegrams."

"Had you written him to send back my ring?"

"No, grandmamma."

"Why not?"

It crossed the girl's mind, "Suppose I tell her, 'Because I saw him
throw it away.'" She smiled faintly.

"You will write for it to-night. Go and do so at once."

"No, I'm sorry; I can't do that--I'm sorry;" and she went out.

Val had a glimpse of her the next morning, when Mrs. Gano made her final
cold-weather "flitting" from the blue room up-stairs to the long room
down-stairs. But it was Emmie and the servants who assisted. The removal
was in the act of being finished when Val appeared on the scene. No
notice was taken of her. She went out and walked about the garden.
Returning to the house a little later, she met Emmie coming down the
steps of the porch with a letter.

"Where are you going?"

"To the post-office, and grandma doesn't want to be disturbed."

"Then you'd better go stand guard at the door."

"Oh, she can lock the door."

"I'm going to the post-office; I can take the letter."

"No."

"Give it to me, I say."

"I won't!"

"I saw the address; it shall never go."

"Grandma!" Emmie called, with all her might, holding the letter to her
breast and backing up the steps. "Grandma!"

"How the old scenes of childhood repeat themselves," thought Val. "I've
been 'going for her,' and she's been shouting 'Grandma!' ever since we
came here as little girls."

"_Grandma!_" Emmie was still calling, and the long room door opened.

"I want to speak to you," said Val to her grandmother.

"Val won't let me take your letter--"

"Go this instant and do as I told you," said Mrs. Gano to Emmie.

Val barred the front door.

"I must speak to you, grandmamma, before that letter goes out of the
house."

"Let me go, I say." Emmie struggled to get by. Val stood firm.

"How dare you--" Mrs. Gano began.

"I dare for a very good reason, and I'll tell you what it is if you'll
take the letter and let me speak to you alone."

They stood looking at each other for a moment over Emmie's shoulder.
Then Mrs. Gano caught the letter out of Emmie's hand and went back into
her room. Val noticed how feebly she walked, followed, and quickly shut
and locked the door.

"Open that door," said her grandmother.

"I want to speak to you alone."

"Open my door."

Val did so.

"Open it wide."

She obeyed.

"Emmeline, go away, and don't come back till I call you. Now," she
resumed, as Emmie's footsteps died away, "let us understand--Who is
mistress in this house?"

"You are."

"Very well, then."

"But you are not _my_ mistress."

"What do you mean by that?"

"I mean there are some things I must decide for myself."

"I've ceased to trouble myself for the moment about _your_ decisions."

"That letter of yours to Ethan is to take something that concerns me
more than anybody here--to take it out of my hands."

"If you can't manage your own concerns with propriety, your family must
help you."

"No, I won't be helped." They looked at each other. "I must make my own
mistakes. It's I who have to live with them; I've a right to choose
which they shall be."

"As your natural guardian, it is well within my province to write to my
grandson about your unheard-of conduct."

"No."

"Oh," she laughed derisively, "then, maybe, you will at least permit me
to write and ask that my property be returned to me."

"Your ring?"

"My ring."

"No--please--"

But the "please" was drowned in a tide of indignation.

"I've had enough of your preposterous assurance. I'll write what and to
whom I choose."

"Ethan won't read your letter. I'll wire that he is not to."

"It's likely he'll obey you!"

"Oh, be very sure he will."

The angry old eyes were wide with wonder. What was the relation between
these two?

"Has he asked you to marry him?"

"No;" and she smiled.

"You think he will?"

"Yes, I think he will."

She opened her lips to say "When?" but some astute sense had come to her
of how far she could go. She contented herself with a haughty lifting of
the head.

"In my young days--"

"Yes, yes, but things aren't always so simple now. Oh, haven't you any
faith in me, or in Ethan either?"

"My faith has had a rude shock."

"That was only because I didn't take you into my confidence. But don't
you know there are some things it's hard to tell to older people? Oh,
_don't you remember_, grandmamma!" the girl cried.

"H'm!" but the face gradually softened.

"Give us a little time, and it'll all come right. You don't want to get
rid of me instantly, do you?"

"You know quite well--"

"Yes, yes, you'd like us to be old maids, but I--" she shook her head in
the manner of one regretfully declining an impossible request. "May I
shut the door?"

"Yes."

She came back, sat down on the crimson footstool at the side of the
chair, and laid her head on the arm.

"Please be kind to me," she said; "it's very lonely here at the Fort
when you aren't kind." Neither moved for several moments, and then Val
felt the touch on her hair. The tears rushed suddenly into her eyes. She
took the hand and kissed it. "How beautiful your hands are!" she said,
laying her cheek in the palm, and then raising her head to look again.
"The inside is the color and the texture of a rose-leaf."

"Is that the kind of thing Ethan has been saying to you?" The inquiry
rang a little grimly.

"Oh no," Val laughed. "He couldn't. _My_ hands aren't beautiful." They
were quiet awhile. "I haven't much that I can tell you, dear," the girl
went on, "but that I'm very happy--oh, the happiest person in the
world!" She smiled up into the vigilant old face. "And that in the end I
shall have what--what I've wanted since I was sixteen--oh, ever since I
was born, I think." She lowered her eyes, and the red came into her
cheeks.

"And Ethan?"

"Oh, he's happy, too. But that's not the part _I_ can tell you."

"Where is he? What is he going to do?"

"He's got a great burden of responsibility on him just now, with the
elections coming on. He's going to the Chicago Convention, you know."

"H'm! Well, I don't pretend to fathom those newfangled arrangements--but
understand one thing--"

"Yes?"

"I won't have him here till there's a formal announcement."

"Very well, dear." But the bright face fell.




CHAPTER XXXI


It was a little over a year after this that Mrs. Gano's life was
despaired of.

"A complication of troubles, no one of them very serious, but all
together, and at her age--"

The doctor completed the sentence with a gesture.

The next day Ethan stood with his cousins at the bedside.

"I did not send for you," was Mrs. Gano's greeting.

"No; Val did," volunteered Emmie, who had not been told the result of
the doctor's consultation.

"_Val_"--the sick woman raised her head--"you take a great deal upon
yourself."

She sank back exhausted. Val could not read in Ethan's eyes that he had
abandoned hope. But the girl's heart was full of dread. She went softly
out of the room.

"Oh, grandma, you've hurt her feelings," said Emmie, gently.

"Nonsense!"

"I saw tears in her eyes. Think of Val crying!"

"It's no great affair that one should cry now and then. Perhaps it's
just as well that you've come, after all." She fixed a far from
hospitable look upon her grandson. "I was about to write you. Leave us
awhile, Emmeline." She closed her eyes as the girl went out, as if to
summon strength. "I don't approve of the tone of your last letter to
Val."

Ethan stared.

"Oh, she reads me parts still. She reads me a great deal. The tone of
the later ones, especially the last--"

She shook her head with a weak, slow movement.

"I am sorry you think--"

"We haven't time to waste being sorry; let us be different." With sudden
energy she pulled out one page of a letter from under her pillow. "I
haven't eyesight to read your shocking writing, my dear--"

"No, no; don't try. I remember what you mean. I won't make fun of the
Churchman in politics any more--not in my letters. I apologize to the
bishop."

"Oh, _that_"--she smiled--"that was rather amusing, though not in the
best taste. No; what I mean was on the last page. Read from 'whom the
gods love.'"

"Do you mean this quotation?"

"Yes."

"'Life, though a good to men on the whole, is a doubtful good to many,
and to some not a good at all.' Is that it?"

"Yes. What's the rest?"

"'To my thought it is a source of constant mental distortion to make the
denial of this a part of religion--to go on pretending things are better
than they are. To me early death takes the aspect of salvation.'"

"Now I ask you, Can you find nothing better than that to say to a girl?"

"It was not I who found it."

"You say it's George Eliot. Well, she had too much sense to present that
view to a young girl. She put it in a diary. If you've nothing better to
put into yours, so much the worse for you. Don't you know there are two
ways of interpreting 'whom the gods love die young'?"

"Yes"--he smiled--"'young' when they die at eighty." And he looked at
the living commentary.

"Very well; it's a view to keep in mind. But it's not only occasional
things like that that I deprecate in your letters; the letters
themselves should cease."

"Really." He drew himself up and returned her direct look, but the
wasted face and sunken eyes struck compunction to his heart. "Very
well," he said, soothingly.

"It's not very well at all, but very ill, that you should try to waive
the subject."

"Waive it?"

"Yes. You think I'm dying, and you won't oppose me. I'm not dying, and I
mean to see Val through this before I _do_ die."

"Through what?"

"Through her foolish befogment about you. I had a long talk with Harry
Wilbur last week. He has behaved well. _You_--" She paused, as if trying
to pluck out the heart of his mystery; then, abandoning the attempt: "I
want you to promise me before you leave this room that you'll go away by
the next train, and that you won't see Val, or write to her, till one or
other of you is safely and suitably married."

He had a moment's temptation to pacify her at all costs, but as he
looked into the old face he felt that a degradation would cling to him
if he played falsely with a spirit as honest and courageous as this. She
wasn't a woman one could lie to comfortably.

"I can't promise you that," he said, after a struggle.

"Why not?"

"Oh, the old reason," he answered, with a look of weary pain.

"What is that?"

She craned her head forward.

"You have to ask?"

"I have to ask."

"I love her."

"And don't you know--" Her loyalty to Val stopped her. "Why don't you
tell her?"

"I have."

"Then, why aren't you-- What's the trouble?"

"What's the trouble?" he echoed.

"Yes. You surely aren't waiting for me to go?"

"No, no," he said, hastily, feeling his fears for the moment dislodged
and feebly flying like a flock of bats and owls before the daylight in
the brave old eyes. "No, no; you are not the barrier."

"What then?"

"I suppose, primarily, it's Uncle John. He left us a legacy."

"John!"

A sudden mist of weakness rose before her like a veil.

"Yes."

Ethan turned away, and paced the dim room from the bedside to the
fireplace, back and forth. It came over the sick woman that it was just
so John had walked and talked about this life he lacked the energy to
live. How like him Ethan was growing in air and manner! It was as if
John had got up out of his grave to walk the old track in the old
restless fashion. What was it he was saying about "the wreck of creeds"?

"--the mere expediency of the conventions right and wrong, and yet man's
hopeless struggle to be rid of the phantom Duty. If you pass the
churches by, she confronts you in the schools, in the laboratory,
follows you in the streets, dogs you day and night, the 'implacable
huntress.' We may free ourselves from all superstitions but Duty. She,
in one guise or another, is ever at the heels of men."

"You wouldn't be a Gano if you didn't feel so," she said, wondering
vaguely if she had dreamed Ethan's coming and John's going.

Which was it, walking the worn and faded track on Valeria's old blue
Brussels?

"Exactly. So Uncle John said."

Ah, then it was Ethan!

"What was it John said?"

She drew herself up, and shook off the veil of faintness.

"Several unforgettable things about man's first duty to the race--about
not inflicting upon others the burdens Val and I must bear."

"Burdens!" (Ah, she remembered now what they had been talking about.)
"What burden, I'd like to know, does Val bear that you can't lift?"

"Her father's."

"Humph! And you?"

"She and I are of one blood. We carry a double share."

"And let me tell you"--she sat up straight in the great bed--"a double
share of Gano is no bad addition to the world's brew."

"Did you ever say that to Uncle John?"

"Good Heaven! To hear you talk, a body'd think you had invented the law
of heredity--you and your uncle John."

"God forbid!"

"Well, God _has_ forbid, and let that content you. He is quite capable
of looking after His own world."

Ethan's faint head-shake and his smile seemed to infuriate her.

"My good soul, you take too much responsibility. It doesn't lie with you
to refashion the world. God's universe has been good enough for a great
many good people."

"That it has been good enough for you doesn't cover the question," he
said, brutally, adding in haste, "even if you didn't deceive yourself.
It is not, as things are, good enough for all. But Uncle John was right:
it would be a better place to live in if people hesitated to perpetuate
disease."

"Perpetuate disease! What folly you talk! Don't you see that your
improved new modes of living breed new diseases? If you have not the
cholera of my youth, you have the Bright's disease and the influenza
that we knew nothing of. Disease is part of the plan."

"What an awful doctrine!"

"Not at all. _I_ can't be sure that it wouldn't leave the world poorer
if disease were got rid of. I'm not, like you, ready to arraign the
Everlasting." (Val opened the door softly, came in, and stood at the
foot of the bed.) "To my finite mind, unsearchable are His judgments,
and His ways past finding out. I only know that they are just, and that
I am the work of His hand."

"I envy you your faith."

"No, you don't. You think yourself superior to it, and what's the
result? You walk in darkness."

"Not altogether in darkness." He looked across at the girl.

"Yes, in darkness and in fear. Not the fear of God--that's tonic--but in
the fear of pain. Oh, I've watched this phase of modern life. It's been
coming, coming for years. The world to-day is crushed and whining under
a load of sentimentality. People presently will be afraid to move, lest
they do or receive some hurt."

"All people don't wear your armor."

"There is no armor but God," she said, in a clear voice. "'We are
troubled on every side, yet not distressed; we are perplexed, but not in
despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; cast down, but not destroyed.'"

He bent and kissed her hand. She withdrew it and laid it on his head,
smoothing the thick, dark hair.

"You carry one Gano burden that I pity you for: you think too much about
life."

"Ah, and it doesn't bear being thought about?"

"But Val will help you there," she went on, ignoring the question. "All
she asks is the wages of going on." She reached out a hand to the girl,
who came and stood by her cousin. "Val hasn't the letter, but she has
the spirit. Remember, you two, when you come in the modern way to pick
flaws in the Faith, that if I wore stout armor, as you say, it was not
of this world's forging. Remember, that I told you I could not have
lived the half--no, nor the quarter part of my long life, if I had not
been 'persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor
principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor
height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us
from the love of God.'" She closed her eyes. "Now go and leave me, you
two. I am tired."

Treading softly, Ethan went out of the room. Val watched beside her till
the night-nurse came.

The next morning Mrs. Gano sent for the clergyman (through Emmie, saying
nothing to the others), and took the Communion.

"It's a habit of mine," she told Ethan afterwards. "I always commune
several times a year."

"Only at Easter and Christmas," Val told him privately, afterwards.
"But she is angry if we seem to notice anything unusual."

About four o'clock Emmie, who did not appreciate the gravity of the
situation, came in from visiting a young girl who was very ill--not
expected to live.

"Oh, grandma, you should have seen her! so gentle and so resigned;
saying good-bye to all her friends." Emmie broke down.

"H'm! I consider that an unnecessary strain on the feelings."

"Oh no," remonstrated Emmie; "it was beautiful! She prayed for us all."

"She might do that without making a scene."

"Oh, grandma, you don't realize what it was like. I never saw any one so
ready for the other life as Ada Brown."

"Oh yes, you have. The best 'getting ready' isn't done on death-beds."

"You're so unsympathetic," murmured the girl.

"Yes, I've hated scenes all my life; but death-bed scenes I consider
indecent."

"_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 you _have_ done your best, there's no more to be
said."

And no more _was_ said 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 a superhuman 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 the faith 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 she had 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 from _me_. 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 of _fear_. Imagination is, by
so much, mightier than reason. Trust imagination to keep the 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.




CHAPTER XXXII


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 before
_Diane 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 to _convince_ me of death? You know when Henri de Poincy came for
you this afternoon?"

"I left you to rest and read up _La 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 of
_Diane_. 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, I had considered it too
much to realize it. But there was that dainty Rose Chéri before me.
_She_ had 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 that _feeling_,
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, really
_saw_, 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 they _could_ not 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 this
_being 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 for _me_ to 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. _You_ don'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 our frequent 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 as _she_ left 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's new law partner. The late-comer was
reputed to be tremendously clever, and to have written a very "modern"
and highly successful novel.

"Scherer's _great_," 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 and sodded croquet-ground was looking,
Julia said, with a slight embarrassment:

"Your husband just _made_ us 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."

"_Much_ ground 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 her
_fiancé_ sang 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 ways
of 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."

"Blaming _me_? 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."

"_You_ need 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."

"For _me_?" 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 I _used_ to 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.




CHAPTER XXXIII


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."

"_Your_ digestion 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. "There _are_
ways 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 a
_little_." 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. She _must_ have 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 frankly to 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
you _make_ yourself. What--are--you--thinking--about?" she demanded.

But she waited in vain. He seemed to forget her question--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 kind _she_ would 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 and awakening. 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, and was 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 on her 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'--to _sleep_!"

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. And _she_ went 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 realized what
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, when _they're_ dust," 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 she loved. 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?


     "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 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.

     "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, from _A Shropshire Lad_, by A. E. Housman.




CHAPTER XXXIV


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 beyond
_anything_!" 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 think _I_ make 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 where _she_ lived."

"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 all _her_ things?" 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 I _shall_ lay it aside."

While he stared she went out of the room, shutting the door.

He sat for a moment, following up first one train and then 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 was _not_ facing
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 of _them_, thinking about you and me, till all these poor
reminders are just old paper; but you--" She hid her face.

"They _are_ just 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 my hands. 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. "_They_ aren'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't _really_ die 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't _want_ to keep to the first compact?"

"Of course I do; I _shall_ keep 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 is _my_ fault 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's _she_ most 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.




CHAPTER XXXV


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 that _I'm_ trying 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 over his 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'd_ like 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--in _any_ way 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. _Certain_
to, 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 the _sake_ of 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--_anything_ rather
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 he _must_
starve, 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 who _want_ to 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 a _horrible_ racket
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 be _me_," 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, "_I_ want 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."

"But _you_ haven'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 was pruned 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 to
_them_."

"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'll _ever_ go at all if I don't go now?"

"Ha!" he said, with a flash, "now we have the _real_ reason."

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 wish _we_ could 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.
_You_ can 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 women _can_ know, 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 as _we_ welcomed
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 were _dreadfully_
hard 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, _I_ don't mean to forget."

"Yes, yes," he said, soothingly.

"But I don't _want_ to."

He looked down at her perplexed.

"I don't mean to forget anything, not even the sad things. I don't want
to let _anything_ go."

"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," she said, 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 she _was_ well 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.

"_Grandma_ used 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.

"_I_ can 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 her _fête_. With the help
of a _chef_, 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 wish _she_ could have
seen the old Fort to-night. _She_ loved 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, _poor_ America!" 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 she _realize_ existence! 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.




CHAPTER XXXVI


It had pleased Val's love of travel by water, and helped her to endure
the thought of her long overland journey to the Pacific, that they
should go down by river to the great railway centre and junction for the
West. Just before noon, on the day after the ball, all was in readiness
for the last leave-taking. The heavier trunks had gone down early to the
landing below the Fort. Ethan was leaving his agent and several servants
to wind up affairs, and the house was still in gala-dress, and overrun
with people. Many of the guests from a distance were not leaving till
later, and they all went down to the river "to see the Ganos off." More
than half the population of the town seemed to Ethan to be bent on the
same errand. He got out of the crowd at the landing, looked at his
watch, said he had forgotten something, and hurried back, shaking off
Scherer and others, by the way, with scant ceremony. When he reached
Mioto Avenue, instead of crossing it and continuing on up to the front
entrance of the Fort, he walked hurriedly along the avenue skirting the
bottom of the old wilderness, now the garden. When he came to the
barberry-bush, he stopped, casting a quick look to right and left. With
some pains and no little violence to his hands, he wrenched one of the
new palings off the fence, and let himself in. Past the garish pavilion,
up the first flight of steps, with a glance towards the thicket of the
hundred-leaved rose, where An' Jerusha had stood so long ago with apron
to her eyes--on, round the deserted house to the front porch. He stared
at his name on the door with a sense of its being strange to find it
there still. He lifted the knocker and let it fall; no one came. He rang
the bell.

"The people who used to live here must all be gone away," he said to
himself, playing with the idea that it was "many years after."

He went round to the back veranda. The door stood ajar. He looked in,
wondering to find the place open, and yet fearing to see a face. All the
world was down at the landing. He ran up-stairs three steps at a time.
Out of the writing-table drawer in his room he took an old note-book. It
had come to light the day before, but there had been no fire in his
room, and there was no means now of burning it. But he was glad he had
remembered it in time. Down-stairs, as swiftly as of old when Yaffti
followed hard; a moment's pause before the long-room door. He opened it,
stood looking in a moment at the high red chair, and before passing on,
bent his head like one who acknowledges a greeting.

As he hurried down the terrace he started, catching sight of some one
crouching down by the rose-bushes. He called out sharply:

"Who is that?"

"Me, sir," said the shamefaced Venus, getting up from her kneeling
posture.

"What are you doing there?"

Up and down her gingham apron she was furtively rubbing her knees. Think
of Venus losing her youth and acquiring "rheumatics!" How exactly like
An' Jerusha she was growing!

"I wus lef' in chawge, sah."

"Well, you've left the veranda door open!"

She stopped rubbing her knees and wiped her eyes.

"Dat do' sutny am open, sah. I wanted--t' see de las' ob yer. Dis w'ere
me an' maw done spy out fo' yo' dat firs' time. Ole Mis' G'no--_she_
didn' min' me an' maw bein' yere."

"You saw me come back?"

"Yass, sah." Then, as if to palliate the crime of the open door: "Mebbe
a long time fo' I see yo' comin' in agin."

"Yes," he said, "it's likely to be a long time," and his slow look went
round the place, shying at the pavilion.

Venus seemed to think it incumbent upon her to hold up her end of the
conversation.

"Huh! Can't say fo' sho' why I'm carryin' on like dis yere." She mopped
her eyes. "Miss Val gone away laffin' fit to kill."

"Yes, she takes it better than we do. Good-bye, Venus."

"Goo'-bye, sah. Trufe is, sah, Miss Val mighty sot on seein' de worl'.
Goo'-bye, goo'-bye!"

She waved her apron till he was out of sight.

"They've rung the 'all aboard' bell twice!" Val called excitedly from
the deck of the steamer as Ethan appeared at the landing.

He gladly cut his good-byes short, with an eye on the figure up there
against the sky, in dull blue tweed, belted in with white wash-leather.
She had shown him one morning, nearly a year ago, how neatly that same
white leather strip fitted over the old Russian belt that she had clung
to until he got her the one of turquoises.

"Of course," she had said that day in Paris, laughing and showing her
white teeth, "if I were a clumpy lady now--if I hadn't such a nice
little waist, I couldn't wear two belts, and I could never wear white at
all! So mind you appreciate me."

It was that day he had gone and ordered the turquoise girdle. Was she
wearing it now? Of course. Absurd child! she never dressed without it.
He glanced up at her in the midst of the handshaking, seeing neither
Wilbur nor Scherer nor Julia, but a wind-blown figure above him on the
brow of Plymouth Hill, looking out to the future. And to-day? The same
questioning eyes, shoulders well set back, the little head held
high--she was still looking the world in the face; it would be defiance
but for the smile.

As the paddle churned the water there was a chorus of good-bying and
hurrahing. The whistle shrieked--the steamer lumbered fussily
down-stream.

"Why don't you wave, too?" said Val, excitedly. "Is that old book under
your arm what you went back for? Why is your other hand full of leaves?"

"I can't imagine why." He opened his fingers and let the scarlet
barberries and the small crisp leaves fall into the river.

The faces in the crowd were growing dim, but still she waved her
handkerchief.

"You remember that man you once told me about?" she said.

"What man?" He looked dreamily back at the throng as though expecting to
find him there.

"Don't you remember he was at play when the Roman guard came to carry
him to his execution? I should like to call back to my friends as he
did: 'Bear witness when I am dead that I had the better of the game!'"


Ethan's prophecy proved true. Val loved the place at Oakland, and all
the walks and drives about. She delighted in San Francisco, and she
ransacked Chinatown with unabated curiosity.

"You've never told me what you think of _Yaffti_," Ethan said to her
some days after their arrival.

"_Yaffti?_"

"My sailboat."

"Oh, I haven't encountered _Yaffti_ as yet."

He presently realized that she had never been down to the beach since
she came. Instinctively he avoided suggesting it again. He would go off
for a sail sometimes himself with his man, Sam Cornish, an old sailor
who had been with him years before on his yacht. But Val was ingenious
in inventing inland outings. _Yaffti_ for the most part was tethered
fast in the little cove, and Sam smoked endless pipes on the pier.

But Val made the old sailor's acquaintance nevertheless, and delighted
in him. One day, in an encounter down at the stables, Sam made bold to
remonstrate with her upon her "fear o' the sea."

"'Tain't wot I expected by the look o' yer, mum."

She laughed a little nervously, and went up the drive to meet Ethan.

"What's Sam being saying?" he said, conscious of the faint trace of
agitation in her face.

"Sam? Oh, nothing! Sam and I are great friends." Restless under her
husband's continued scrutiny, she asked: "How long have you known Sam?"

"Oh, seven or eight years, I should think."

"Well, he likes me best, anyhow," she laughed.

"I dare say," said Ethan, adopting her note; "all ignorant persons do."

"Yes, it's true!" She stopped a moment. "Now, why is that, do you
suppose?" she said, with the candid air of a scientific investigator.

"Merely because you have the _beau rôle_ to play," he said, still
smiling. "You help them to believe in happiness. I'm apt to verify their
worst suspicions."

Ethan left his wife very little alone, and it was strange and pitiful to
him--a daily mockery of the human lot--that they should be so often
happy, and in spirit closer together in these hours, than they had ever
been in their lives. They clung to each other like two lost children,
and the days went by in a dream.


They had had three weeks of quite perfect weather. To-day, for the first
time since their coming, the sky lowered, the air was heavy. Still, the
sun showed his dazzling Californian face at intervals, and Ethan watched
the weather signs while he dressed, his heart secretly set upon going
off, by-and-by, with _Yaffti_ and Sam for a sail. He must find out
discreetly how Val was going to spend the morning.

"What's for to-day?" he said to her at breakfast.

"I've a beautiful plan if the weather behaves," she answered.

They stood at the door of the summer-house after breakfast. Val would
leave him every now and then, go to the lattice-window that looked out
to sea, and come back with the latest Signal Service report. Her version
was so uniformly favorable that Ethan laughed at last.

"You're like an old night-watchman!"

"I'm not a bit like an old night-watchman."

"Yes, yes," he insisted. "Weren't you told as a child how they used to
go crying the hour under the windows in Baltimore, 'Eleven o'clock, and
all's well!' 'Midnight, and all's well'?"

"Very nice of them, I'm sure; and if the family watchman says 'All's
well' after luncheon, you are to take me to China."

It was so she always spoke of Chinatown. He thought of the narrow,
malodorous alleys, the stifling shops, and regretted, with a double
pang, the breezy bay and _Yaffti_. However, he would have a couple of
hours' sail before luncheon to sustain him.

"All right," he said out loud, "we'll go to China this afternoon."

As she leaned against him he put his arm about her waist.

"Where's your turquoise gewgaw?" he said.

"Here"--she lifted a hand to her hair.

"No; I meant the other--the--" As he noticed the shade on her face:
"You've lost it! Aha! I knew you would if you wore it every day."

"I haven't lost it," she said.

"Tired of it already?"

"No; I didn't put it on this morning."

He looked at her with changed eyes. She dropped her own, went over to
the lattice, and stood there facing seaward. When he came in to get the
tobacco-pouch he had left on the rustic table, she went out. He thought
of that morning in Paris when he had designed the belt and chosen the
stones. How he had dwelt in imagination on the moment when he would
clasp it round her, see her joy, and be given his reward! Then came back
the actual moment of his giving her the gift--came back with an even
greater anguish than he had known in living through the moments by the
fire in his wife's room at the Fort. He tasted the intolerable bitter of
the contrast between what he had hoped that hour would bring, and what
it actually had brought, till he was ready to cry out: "What demon made
me mention it? She's right not to wear the accursed thing!"

As soon as Val went in-doors he would go for a sail. For nearly half an
hour she had been trailing about the garden in her soft white draperies,
now bending down to look at some growing thing, now looking up to the
wind-blown cloud masses, to where the strong sunlight poured down
between the rifts. He leaned against the door of the summer-house,
rolling cigarettes. He suspected rather than heard her talking her
foolish "little language" to the bird in the juniper-bush, the spoiled
bird that always got crumbs after breakfast. By-and-by she came towards
him across the lawn with a little green branch in her hand. He realized
that she must be weary, she was dragging her feet. Something curiously
unlike Val, something inelastic, shackled, struck him in her gait. His
face darkened suddenly; an involuntary shock of repulsion went through
him, a resentment keen, impersonal, unconscious of everything save his
own inward recoil, until he noticed Val had stopped short and the green
branch had fallen at her feet. He went forward to pick it up. As he
handed it to her he saw her eyes were full of tears.

"My dear one, what is it?" he said, with sharp remorse.

"Don't--don't look at me! Turn away your eyes."

"Why--why, dear?"

"Your eyes hurt--oh, they hurt me!"

"How _can_ you say such a thing!" he exclaimed, ready to perjure
himself. He would have laid his arm about her, but she shrank away.
"It's not like you, Val!" he began, almost indignantly.

"No, no," she said, on a wave of her old impetuosity, "it's not a bit
like me! I would have loved the great miracle. I would have waited upon
it reverently every step of the way, so proud, so happy--"

She broke off and went from him into the house.

His painful remorse was checkered by the reflection, "And I was going
for a sail! Impossible now."

He stayed all the morning in the house or garden, reading to Val when
she would let him, surrounding her with every offering of tenderness his
keen self-reproach could invent. But he was too close in spirit to the
woman at his side not to divine a little how she shrank from this new
considerateness that was own cousin to pity.

As he sat in the library reading aloud before luncheon, he became
acutely conscious of a change in her mood. At first he thought the story
was interesting her deeply, and began to pay more attention to it
himself, glancing up covertly now and then at the face opposite to him.
The languid eyes were full of light again, her apathy swallowed up in
some unexplained alertness. He was so struck with the change that he
bent forward and laid his hand over hers. It trembled sharply under his
touch. She rose and walked about the room. He read on till the
luncheon-bell rang. She sat at the table scarcely eating, answering his
remarks with gentle vagueness, and looking much out of the window.

"No hope of going to China to-day," he said, at last, following her
eyes.

"Not at two," she answered. "That was why I didn't dress."

After luncheon they went back to the library.

"What do they mean by shutting the windows?" she exclaimed, and flung
them wide.

The papers in the room flew about, and he closed the door. He took up
the book again, feeling that neither of them was much in the mood to
talk. But the day had grown so overcast that he went and sat in the
bay-window, so that he might read the small print more readily. Val
moved restlessly about. He refrained from looking at her again until he
became conscious that she had stopped suddenly. He glanced up, and saw
her standing rooted, with a look of tension on her face, her head
slightly tilted, lips parted, breath held.

"What is it?" he said, nervously.

"Don't you hear?"

"What?"

"Yaffti."

"What nonsense!" he laughed.

"Sh! Listen!"

In the silence he caught the faint far-off growl of thunder.

"You forget," he said, after a moment, speaking as one who tries to cast
off some evil spirit, "you forget I've made _Yaffti_ fast in the bay."

"He's coming inland to-day," she said; "he's tired of waiting for us."

Ethan had picked up the book, and read on with a curious under-current
of excitement. As he turned the leaves he would throw out a swift
glance, almost like one running for his life who keeps an eye on an
enemy.

The flying cloud squadrons had rallied. They were drawn up now in
serried masses, black and threatening. The sun had fallen back
overpowered, vanquished utterly. Such noonday darkness in the lands of
sunshine is a commonplace of sub-tropical climate, but to Ethan it came
to-day as a portent and a warning.

Val moved from window to window, watching the great red-wood trees
swaying and lashing, and taking the wind in her face.

Ethan closed his own window, and suggested that the others be put down.

"No, no," she opposed him, almost sharply.

"What's the matter with you to-day?" he said at last, unable to endure
her restlessness any longer. "Can't you follow the story--can't you
think when there's a thunderstorm?"

"Oh yes," she said; "I can think best of all then."

As she stood looking up in a kind of ecstasy, suddenly the lightning
played about her. Involuntarily Ethan shrank and shut his eyes in that
first instant. In the stupendous crash that followed he sprang up. Was
the house struck?

She stood quite still with exultant eyes, listening for the
thunderpeals as if they were answers to some question, waiting for the
lightning like one lost in the dark, who sees a torch borne nearer.

He put down the windows in spite of her "Ah no! ah no!" just as the
rain-cloud broke over the house.

"I keep thinking it's the big tulip-tree at home," she said, "making
that sound like surf on the shore."

The rain dashed in floods against the window-panes, and ran down in
sheets like sea-water off the port-holes of a ship.

"One good thing," said Ethan, "it's too violent to last long."

The house groaned and trembled under the bombardment of the storm.

"Listen!" she said again. "Oh, Yaffti is very angry this time. I told
you he was tired of waiting so long in the bay."

She opened the library door.

"Where are you going?" he demanded.

She went back and kissed him.

"Only up-stairs. I want to write to Emmie."

Ethan had been right: the storm was too violent to last. When it had
spent itself he went down to the pier. Sky still a little overcast, but
louder than ever the sea called to him.

He walked up and down, up and down. The salt blew keen in his face.
By-and-by he went to the boat-house to consult Sam.

"Well," in Sam's opinion, "they mout be a bigger gale on the way, and
then, again, they moutn't."

But after a while the warm wind seemed to blow the clouds low down on
the threshold of the ocean. The dome of heaven was swept bare and clean
except for a little corner of the west. And louder than ever the sea
kept calling. He would go up to the house, he told Sam, and see what
Mrs. Gano was doing--if she minded his going out for an hour.

She had written to Emmie a simple family letter, full of affection and
reminders of the old days. "I hope you've forgiven me for being so
horrid to you when we were children. You have the comfort of remembering
you were always very gentle and forbearing to everybody. I was a
monster. I'm still rather a monster, but I'd like you to go on thinking
kindly of me."

She found she had no stamps, and looked in Ethan's room. His travelling
letter-case--it was really a portable writing-stand--lay open on the
floor of his dressing-room, with his bunch of keys in the lock.

"Careless boy," she said to herself, and went over to close it.

Her eye fell on the old note-book that Ethan had gone back for that day
they left the Fort. She opened it idly. He had shown her the first pages
himself, with their odds and ends of verse, jottings and subjects, etc.
Absently she turned the leaves to the end. The last entry was the
longest, the date early in that year:


     "NICE.

     "Forgetfulness! That is all my prayer. Do I blame the men who
     drink? No. Opium-eaters? Not I. I wonder we do not all--all who
     have the taste of suffering on our lips, and the knowledge of the
     aimless grotesque end--I wonder we do not buy oblivion at any
     price. How is it we are cajoled to bear this aching at the heart?"


"What date is this?" said the woman aloud, and read again: "Nice--why,
he was with _me_, and we were happy! Nothing had happened then," she
said, forgetting all the pain of the old doubt in the greater pain of
the new certainty.

She read on:


     "Forgetfulness! Dear saints in heaven! it's not a crown, not the
     white robe and palm I crave--forgetfulness! A little sweet upon the
     threshold, and then the dark. By sweet I mean the present love of
     some one dear; or, more honestly set down, I mean the companionship
     of the one dear soul on that far quest. Story-makers write at the
     end, 'And they lived happy ever after.' Give me and my dear one the
     epitaph, 'And they were dead together forever after.' For those
     myriads who merely skimmed the surface of thought and feeling--for
     those who had few fears and fewer heartaches, there may come a
     Resurrection Morn. The loud trumpet, dear, shall pierce our sleep
     as well, perhaps, and we will rouse and stir a little in our folded
     shrouds. I will whisper in your drowsy ear, 'Dear heart, it is the
     morning. Shall we arise? Shall we take up the round again?' And you
     will lie closer, with your arms of dust about me, and the dear
     voice will say in my ear, 'No, no, beloved; it is well with us here
     in our narrow house.' And I will say, 'Bethink you, this is the day
     when all men rise and greet their friends.' 'Friend,' you will
     answer, 'I give you greeting here.' And I, 'The just who rise
     to-day are given great reward.' But my beloved says, 'You gave me
     my reward; I have it in my heart of dust.' 'But Life and Light are
     waiting for you there.' And you will say, 'I know them both; and
     Death and Darkness are the better part.' Then, as I feel the
     blessed numbness stealing over this quintessence of the dust, I
     will rouse me one last moment, remembering how fair and fit for
     living and for loving my beloved was, and I will say with all the
     old world-anguish aching anew in every atom of my body's dust,
     'Dear, there is much love awaiting you up there--that love you did
     so hunger for. Rise up. Love calls.' 'Hush, hush! I have found my
     love,' I seem to hear you saying, low and faint, like one who
     lingers but a moment on the hither shore of sleep. 'Oh, dear, dear
     heart, I'll say one word before we sleep. There is no other day of
     waking. If you stay here now, it is the end. There comes no more a
     Resurrection Morn.' 'There comes no more a battle or undoing,' I
     hear you say, so faint, so low, I scarce can part the sound from
     silence; 'no more retreat, no more defeat, no aching of the brave
     and hopeless heart.' Then, 'Good-night,' say I. And you,
     'Good-night.'"


"No, no!" cried the living woman. "I'm apter at 'good-morning.' _I'm_
not that woman down beside him in the dark."


"Val!" he was calling in the garden; "Val!" he was calling on the stair.

She had closed the book, and slipped it guiltily into her pocket.

She left her letter on the floor and ran out to meet him, catching up
hat and gloves as she hurried through her own room.

"I was just coming to ask you--" he began. "Oh, you've changed your
dress!"

"Yes," she said, not meeting his eyes.

"Well, what shall we do?" They went down together to the door. He
thought regretfully of _Yaffti_ and the shining bay. "What do you think
you'd like?"

"Let us go down--" She nodded towards the boathouses.

"You don't mean down to the beach?"

"Yes."

He studied her a moment.

"The wind off the bay is fresh after the storm," he hesitated. "You are
dressed very lightly."

"No, no--quite warm."

"In that blue cobweb, open at the throat?"

"It's the dress you like best," she said, in a low voice.

He saw now there was something more than common careful, something
selected, in the simple toilet--her creamy laces, her favorite jewels.

"Very charming; but you can't deny you're not dressed for rough
weather."

"Yes, I am; you'll see. But bring my reefer, too."

While he got the jacket she put on her hat and gloves.

Down on the pier she found the wind stronger than she had expected. She
shivered a little, although it was warm, and drew the rough reefer
together. She saw Ethan throw back his head, and his nostrils expand
slightly as he inhaled the strong sea smell.

"Will ye be goin' out?" Sam asked.

"No, not to-day."

"Why not?" asked Val, quickly.

Ethan turned with a sudden light in his face.

"Do you mean you really don't mind?"

"Not--not if you take me."

He looked into her eyes and then across the bay. It was some time before
he spoke:

"Sam to the contrary, I'm not sure but what the worst is to come."

She shook her head.

"'The worst' is over."

"Do you see that bank of cloud?"

"It will make a fine sunset," she answered. While Sam was getting the
boat ready: "He must stay behind," she said, very low.

Ethan seemed about to give the order, but it stuck in his throat.

"Shall I tell him?" she asked.

Still no answer.

"Sa--" she called.

"We can go alone another day," Ethan interrupted, hurriedly.

She shook her head.

"When that other day comes I may not be able."

"What should prevent you?"

"Something stronger than I--or you." As he looked at her: "I may come to
feel too much that sense you said I lacked. Quick, quick! Make him
hurry: it's late. It might come to seem too late."

"Late. Do you realize it's not four weeks since the ball? You who wanted
to go to China and Persia, and God knows where!"

"Well, I _am_ going--God knows where." She turned away her head.

Sam was waiting to hand her in.

"No, Ethan, _you_," she whispered. But she looked back when she was in
the boat, and smiled at the old sailor.

"You needn't come this time," she said, as he was preparing to follow
Ethan. "I can manage the tiller."

Sam's doubtful looks vanished as he observed the lady's air of custom.

"Where shall we go?" said Ethan.

"I think I'll steer for the sunset," she answered, in the same level
voice.

He paused with the sheet in his hand.

"That would bring us--" He looked out across the water, far across it,
beyond it, till his cloudy eyes found the cloud-hung entrance to the
open sea.

"It will bring us out at the Golden Gate," she said.