The Open Question Part 35

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 astonis.h.i.+ngly 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 gla.s.ses 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 princ.i.p.al 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 gla.s.ses. "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 friends.h.i.+p 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_."