The Open Question Part 108

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 gra.s.s 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 rea.s.sure 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 a.s.sembled 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?"