The Open Question Part 67

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. s.h.!.+ 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 embarra.s.sed, 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-wors.h.i.+p, 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 wors.h.i.+p 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 a.s.sured 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 pa.s.sing 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 amus.e.m.e.nt 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!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed 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 Sat.u.r.day. 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 cla.s.ses," 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 suns.h.i.+ne. 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 s.p.a.ce. 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 pa.s.sionate 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 compa.s.sing 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 plat.i.tude 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.