The Open Question Part 82

She grasped his hand as she averted her white face, whispering:

"I will kiss you when you come again."

CHAPTER XXV

After Ethan had gone, life seemed to stand still for a long, long time.

The only real events were his letters, not to Val, although she had written him the very night after he went away. His letters were all addressed to her grandmother, and yet every syllable seemed to the girl's mind to be meant for herself--to be charged with subtle meaning, intelligible to no one else.

At Christmas he wrote the two girls a single perfunctory page of cousinly greeting that arrived with his presents, a couple of Russian silver belts. But this letter was addressed to Val, and she would not open it till she was alone. Inside was an enclosure in a separate envelope:

"DEAR COUSIN VAL,--Forgive me for not answering your letter. It would be nice of you to send me a line, now and then, to tell me how things go on at the Fort, and whether I can do anything for anybody there. I enclose cheque.

"Your affectionate cousin, ETHAN GANO."

"'Cousin!' 'cousin!' forever 'cousin!'" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed the girl; and she answered him the same day:

"DEAR ETHAN,--Thank you for the beautiful belt, but I do not forgive you for not answering my letter. Still, I will do anything in reason that you ask me if you don't ever call me cousin again."

And then followed an account of her surrept.i.tious household expenditures. He answered early in the New Year:

"DEAR VAL,--I obey your mandate, and will not hereafter own you for a cousin. I believe that by strenuous wis.h.i.+ng you could almost think yourself out of the relations.h.i.+p."

"I am very sure I could" [she wrote back] "if you would let me."

That letter, and several to follow, elicited nothing. She ate her heart out with humiliation and with longing, and then salved the hurt with dreams. Her best times were when she was quite alone, in the dark of the night or early in the morning. Regularly as she rose up, or lay down to sleep, she kissed the face of the little watch he had given her.

Sometimes, under the spell of an old and long-abandoned habit, she would slip to her knees by the bedside. But instead of any prayer, old or new, she would fling wide her arms, crying under her breath: "How long, O Lord--how long?" Never in her blackest hour did she believe there was worse in store for her than waiting.

In a quiet way people came and went at the Fort more than ever before.

Julia and Jerry, when he was home for the vacations, Ernest Halliwell, and Harry Wilbur in particular, after he had thrown up the fine position in Boston that Ethan had put in his way--they, and others, trooped in and out, carrying Val off riding, sleighing, dancing, boating. Harry Wilbur proposed to her on an average of six times a year, and took her smiling and affectionate refusal for mere postponement. It was to Val a life of waiting, but not of inaction.

Mrs. Gano, growing feebler and feebler, had allowed her eldest grand-daughter (as a special mark of favor, be it understood, and merely to "teach her how") to take the reins of household management. Yet from the royal elevation of the great four-poster, where she now spent most of her time, did Mrs. Gano rule the house as absolutely as before. Val, however, was not content to do merely the necessary, the expected. To Mrs. Gano's quiet satisfaction, the girl developed a pa.s.sion for careful household government. Not only were none of Mrs. Gano's directions slighted with Val at the helm, but she bettered her instructions, discreetly not taking credit. Privately she kept expense books, learned cooking--yes, and laughed to think of her old detestation of it. With Venie's help she made cretonne covers for the furniture, and seemed to renew all things by the magic of her industrious hands, for most of Ethan's money had to lie at the bank out of very fear. She brought down old lamps and ancient household G.o.ds from the attic and made "effects"

with them. She did not care about gardening, any more than she cared about cooking, but she hated the neglected, weed-grown borders under the windows. So she cleared and made them blossom again, filled the house with flowers, and thought a thousand times: "If he comes to-day he will find it beautiful."

It would not be true to suppose that this quest for beauty in such a barren field was satisfying. It filled in the time. It was part of the endless satisfaction of life that the world was full of so many things to do "by the way." She had her days of fierce anger at the delays, the vagueness of the future, the fear of the new interests that must be filling Ethan's life.

After nearly a year had gone by, he answered one of her letters. She acknowledged the civility in such caustic fas.h.i.+on that he was piqued to reply by return of post. And so started on its uneven course that interchange of letters that was soon the greatest joy of her existence and the permanent stuff of her dreams. It gave her a feeling of having a fresh hold on him. She knew where he was now, and something of what he thought and did. Her own days were lived twice over, that he might share them, only the time she re-lived on paper was more vivid, more significant than the actual hours as they sped. Life took on such an edge in the process of being presented to Ethan that the girl wondered sometimes to find she enjoyed telling about the dance or picnic a thousand-fold more keenly than she had cared about the thing itself. At first she wrote flippantly, touching chiefly on the humors of the New Plymouth life; and when he took to sending her books, she bade him keep all the improving ones to himself. A certain English novel very much in vogue she promptly returned.

"If I want to read political economy, I've got my father's books. I like a story to be about love, and to end happily. If you think of sending me another novel, remember _I like plenty of orange-blossoms, not little bits of brain_." But oddly enough, she had no rooted objection to reading aloud to her grandmother any non-religious book, however serious. Val found that many of these dignified tomes were not as dull as you might think; but for long she laid the credit to Mrs. Gano's door. It was an old story that that lady had a way of making things seem interesting. Val was always privately grateful, even touched, at being let off from the religious readings. Once when Mrs. Gano was recovering from an illness, Val, sitting at the bedside, was visited by a fresh sense of her growing comrades.h.i.+p, even her growing dependence upon that alert and sympathetic mind. In a softened mood she fell to thinking how ready her grandmother had always been to put the worked book-marks in her Church histories and doctrinal treatises, and listen to Val read biography and travel aloud, all the while letting the girl feel that she was not only adding to the "common stock of harmless pleasure," but was sparing the older eyes.

"You are very good to me," Val said, leaning her head against the "painted calico" coverlid. It made her happy to feel the long, thin hand upon her hair. She had never got over the old childish sense of its being a proud thing to receive a mark of favor at those hands.

"Shall we read?" said the girl, presently.

"If you like."

In a flush of generous feeling, she reached out and took up _Literature and Dogma_ from the table at the bedside.

"What's that?" asked Mrs. Gano, narrowing her eyes.

Val told her.

"Oh no"--she sat up and looked round--"I sent to the library after Chevalier Bunsen for you and me."

"Let me read you this. You mustn't always think about what I like."

"Nonsense, child; Arnold's book would bore you, and you'd read it so it would bore me. Find Bunsen."

"You let Emmie read you this."

"Emmeline's different. Find Bunsen. You'll like Bunsen."

"Why do you suppose I have such a rage for biographies?" Val demanded, a shade anxiously.

"Partly because you're young."

"Emmie's younger still."

Mrs. Gano smiled and shook her head enigmatically.

"Young, and more interested in people, as yet, than in ideas."

"That has a very poor sound--like the personal column of a newspaper."

"Oh, it's natural enough. The walls of your own room tell the same story--all faces."

"Yes, but to hang up in your bedroom, what else is there?"

Mrs. Gano smiled, and then half whimsically:

"I don't say there's any special advantage in it, but I've always had a liking for the 'flower pieces' we painted in our youth, and for landscapes and marine views."

"Oh, _those_--"

"Exactly!" and the older woman laughed outright.

"Well, I'm sure," said Val, eager to defend herself, "cousin Ethan says that to the American, to the unjaded mind the wide world over, it is the 'life' in any picture or description that interests and fixes itself in the memory. A vast amount is said and written about St. Mark's in Venice. But in how many minds does it stand a beautiful and stately background for flights of pigeons to wheel and circle against, or to settle down before, on friendly terms with the populace? Not the glories of architecture, but the brief and gentle life of doves, makes the picture _vital_ in the mind."

"Ah, and when did Ethan say all that?"