The Open Question Part 79

"At least, it's because of what my father said that you--that you--began about Harry Wilbur."

"Well, perhaps."

"I'm very much disappointed in you."

"I'm very sorry."

"I thought you were more--understanding. If you had known my father better," she continued, with all-unconscious irony, "you wouldn't have minded him a bit. It was just a theory."

"Ah, my child, it isn't a theory that we're first cousins."

The note of finality in the low voice pierced her through and through.

"But plenty of people--" she burst out; and then one by one her father's arguments and menaces, like curses, came back to roost. "If we rebel against that law, we and our innocent children are punished," she seemed to hear him say.

They walked on some time without speaking. Twice Ethan glanced down at the face beside him. For all its profound trouble, it was not the face of one defeated. He drew a perverse pleasure from the observation.

Curiosity had from the first played no small part in the charm his cousin cast about him. What would she do under such and such conditions?

And, meanwhile, what new longing, what new pain, that mutinous little face had planted in his heart! "I have never kissed her," he kept thinking as he looked at her mouth. "Has Wilbur ever kissed her?" The idea was revolting. He put it from him. He thought of the people that never have children. Suppose-- He looked down at her again. This time he caught her eye, and she flushed hotly. He had no need of speech to a.s.sure him they had been thinking along the same lines.

"Of course," said Val, with an obvious effort, "I ought to behave as if I didn't understand what's involved. Any _nice_ girl would pretend she--" Her voice got tangled and lost in a dry little sob; but she burst out again under her breath: "Oh, they aren't like _me_--the nice girls.

n.o.body ever cared so much as I do. Everything's different when you--when you care like this."

His heart contracted sharply. Had this come into his life only to go and leave him stricken in poverty? Under the girl's extravagance of speech was a richness of nature that gave her fierce young words authority.

This primitive, unfaltering pa.s.sion, naked and unashamed, was not only beautiful in his eyes with a kind of pagan splendor, but it soothed and satisfied his weary, doubting spirit. For the moment it carried his questioning down its swift current, making of his fears a mock, and whirling his heavy doubts like straws. And yet he kept a vigilant watch upon himself. With a man's abiding fear of being ridiculous, he was uncomfortably conscious of the little group of belated church-goers turning into St. Thomas's from Market Street, not so hurried but they might notice Val's excited face. To his companion, in her absorption, these acquaintances had been thin air.

"I dare say my father knew that, to many a girl, it wouldn't really matter much whether she married Harry Wilbur, or any other nice convenient person; but to _me_--"

"Come down this street," Ethan said. "You don't want to get into that mob."

He felt himself to be in one of those positions where to turn left or right, to go forward or go back, is equally to find offence and suffering. "It doesn't matter about me; I must think of her," he said to himself. At all hazards he must not forget that the girl at his side was little more than a child. He could neither explain to her why he was bound in honor to leave her, nor must he leave her with any haunting memory of the pain this going cost him. She had turned obediently when he suggested the side-street.

"Oh, I'm certain of it"--she brought one tight-clinched hand with a quick movement to her breast--"n.o.body ever cared like this before. Just look at their faces."

She stopped on the corner, eying, with a kind of impersonal disdain, the people that pa.s.sed up the church-steps.

"You can see from their faces they've never cared--like this."

"Come," said Ethan, nervously, "they'll wonder why we are hanging about."

"Most people are only half alive," she said, walking on; "they don't feel, they don't hear, they don't see, they don't even smell."

Ethan began to laugh almost hysterically.

"They can't turn such unexpected corners, anyhow," he said.

His laughter seemed a little to clear the atmosphere.

"You don't believe?" she inquired. "No, I suppose people _wouldn't_ believe. But I've felt quite dizzy with joy at smelling hay after a rain. Heliotrope makes me want to laugh and sing. Violets make me feel meek and wistful; but they all _do_ something to me. You, now, simply dislike the pungent smell of marigolds. I feel it stick into me like a kind of goad. But I oughtn't to tell anybody." She sighed.

"Why not?"

"Even you laughed."

"Forgive me, dear."

For the "dear" sake she smiled up at him, thrilling.

"Oh, I forgive you, though I don't much like the idea of having told you--even that much."

"What nonsense! You must tell me everything."

"Must I?" She moved closer to his side. "Only I should like you to have a good opinion of me--and--well, to care so much about smell, I'm afraid, is very vulgar."

"Oh, I don't think so."

"Novelists do. They are ready to tell you her hearing was 'most sensitive,' and all about his 'eagle eye,' that nothing escaped, but they are too refined to say nothing escaped the heroine's nose. Your friends the poets, too, have a very low opinion of smell. Of course, if I could always remember to call it 'fragrance,' it would be better, but I don't always mean fragrance."

"No, no," he laughed. "I admit that smell used to be the poor relation of the senses, and was kept decently in the background; but over in France _nous avons change tout cela_."

"Oh, well, that's all right, then."

"You aren't going to church?"

"Of course not."

"It's so ugly here. Shall we turn back and go up on the Hill?"

"No. Yes." (They could come down before the Presbyterian Church was out.) "Let's walk very fast."

They talked little on the way, but neither of them noticed the fact.

They were approaching that point where _nur das reine Zusammensein_ was interchange enough. From the Dug Road they turned into the ravine. Ethan caught her by the hand, and they scrambled breathless to the top.

"Let's rest here," he said.

Val sat down under the elder-bush that grew in the cleft of the Hill.

She looked up at him smiling, and then turned away her conscious eyes.

Instead of sitting down, he stood with his hands in his pockets, looking at her with a sense of vague uneasiness behind the tingling in his blood.

"I suppose you know that I ought to have taken you home after your flat refusal to go to church?"

"You aren't my master--yet."

"Yes, I am."

The blood flew to her face obedient to the call.

"Yes," she said, slowly, "you are."