The Open Question Part 63

"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 ma.n.u.script.

"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 splas.h.i.+ng red comet with a fiery tail. Mrs. Gano blazed back at it through her gla.s.ses as she threw down the fragments of "The Brown House."

"Whose is this?" she said, opening the st.i.tched 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 fas.h.i.+on 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 pa.s.sion.

"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 hards.h.i.+ps of--"

"As if we didn't face hards.h.i.+ps 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 pa.s.sage.

"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 amus.e.m.e.nt 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!"