The Open Question Part 81

"Oh yes--he's done with all that now."

"Then why on earth should _we_ go on--"

"We're not dead, my dear."

"You don't mean--"

She looked at him with horror-filled eyes.

"What's the matter?"

"You--" But she couldn't bring the awful doubt to birth. That any one in her own range of experience should be heard to hint that the dead were done with thinking! Not that a mythical person in a book, but some one she knew, should be found saying calmly that he had abandoned hope of the life to come! "My father," she whispered, coming a trace nearer, "did he ever say he didn't believe in immortality? No! no! he couldn't.

But did he ever tell you he wasn't _sure_?"

"How can any one be sure?"

"How can you bear to live if you're not sure?" she cried.

He stared at her in astonishment, forgetting Mrs. Gano's saying, "The one Christian tenet I am satisfied Val holds is the doctrine of the Resurrection."

"I thought you said your father talked quite freely to you."

The girl grasped the slender branches of the elder-bush.

"Then there _are_ people, and I know them, who don't believe in immortality."

The world seemed to swim. As she lifted up her dazed eyes, she saw a green-clad figure lingering disconsolately along the brow of the hill.

Another instant Julia and she had recognized each other.

"Not to believe in immortality!" she repeated, as though she had never heard of the idea before. "Then, for such people it's all this life--_this_ life. They can't afford to miss anything here; it's their only chance. Do you hear, cousin Ethan? This life--this life may be all."

On an uncontrollable impulse he seized her hand to draw her down beside him.

"Julia's coming," said Val, hurriedly, and advanced to meet her friend.

"Oh, here you are!" called out the new-comer. "I didn't get to church, after all. And I've a message from my father," she said to Ethan, as he came forward. "He wants you to come to supper to-night to meet Senator Green."

When Val and Ethan got home late for dinner, they were met in the hall by Mrs. Gano.

"Lo! she comes, 'with high looks like the King of a.s.syria,'" Ethan quoted.

Mrs. Gano levelled an unmistakably cold stare at the culprits.

"Emmeline tells me you were not in church."

"No; we were late," said Ethan. When Val had run up-stairs to take off her things: "You must forgive me this once," he added, speaking low, "for I'm going away to-morrow."

He had no word alone with his cousin till the next morning. Nothing further had been said about his going, but his trunk was packed and the carriage ordered. He found Val sitting alone in the parlor, in a corner of the sofa by the window.

"What are you doing here?" he said, shutting the door.

"Just thinking."

"Don't do that, such a bad habit."

"Oh, I'm just trying to get accustomed to realizing there are people who believe"--she spread out her hands and let them fall--"this is all."

"Don't bother about such people," he said, sitting down.

Val, usually so ready of tongue, was seized upon by silence. Ethan, too, sat speechless, struggling with the sense of keen-edged wretchedness that pressed knife-like on his heart. How was he to say good-bye?

and--with a long look down the road--how was he to live afterwards?

She--oh, she would console herself; she was very young. But for him ...

the immense dead weight of life pressed intolerably hard. The futility of it extinguished the very sun. Presently, as they sat there so silent, Val bowed her head, hiding her face in her hands. It shot through him that some realization had come to her of the unseen forces that make of us their sport--some vision of the bitter absurdity of the pigmy human lot we make such a pother about.

The sense of a vision shared, of a common pain, merged swiftly into physical yearning. The physical yearning cried aloud for a.s.surance that it, too, was "common." He looked down upon the bowed head and the little white nape of her neck. He noticed how out of the upturned swaths of firm-bound hair the wild love-locks were falling--locks so fine that they looked like faint wavy shadows falling over the ears.

Had she any faintest notion of the hunger in him that would not let him sleep? As he bent over her the white neck was suffused with rose. Ah, she knew! The traitor blood had signalled him behind her back.

"Kiss me, dear," he whispered. Had she heard? The little ears glowed scarlet. "Dear--" He slipped his hand under her chin, and turned her face to him. The curtaining lids still hid her eyes, but the lashes quivered, and that odd little pulse in her upper lip, that was beating, too, "piteously," he said to himself. "Look at me, dear. Val, open your eyes, I say."

She did.

It was like a shaft of suns.h.i.+ne; the rapture of the look startled him.

He would have been prepared for tears, but this cloudless joy--

Ah, she was very young!

"Kiss me, child."

He did not bend towards her. She should come to him for this last greeting that was the first as well.

The radiant face, flus.h.i.+ng, paling, came closer. He felt the breath from out her parted lips.

But the sweetness of her nearness could not for him wipe out the fact that before them lay parting and long heartache.

"Good-bye," he said, brokenly.

She drew back before the kiss was more than inhaled.

"Good-bye!" she echoed. "No; I will never kiss you 'good-bye'" She freed herself from his prisoning arms. "Never, never, never!" She sprang up.

"To get that kiss from me you must be lying dead."

And she fled out of the room.

A little later he made his farewells to the a.s.sembled household in the hall. Having kissed Emmie, he turned to Val.