The Open Question Part 30

After the first fifteen minutes' application in the evening at home, Val would place her grammar and her little square red-edged Caesar 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 Caesar," 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. .h.i.therto 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 Princ.i.p.al 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 Princ.i.p.al, 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 s.h.i.+eld, 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, "d.a.m.nation!"

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 s.h.i.+ps. 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 accomplis.h.i.+ng 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 h.o.a.rd 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, capsic.u.m and paregoric, and compelled him, between his paroxysms of amus.e.m.e.nt 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 h.o.a.rd" was composed of worthless Confederate notes, and it was just because they had that trunk full of money that they were poor.