The Open Question Part 83

"When--while you were ill I had a letter from him."

"Oh, indeed!" She turned with an indescribable look and settled down among the pillows.

"Shall I get the letter and read it to you?" said Val, to her own surprise and most unwillingly, but acting under a sense of strong coercion.

"As you please," said the wily old woman. "Have a look for Bunsen, too."

Val absented herself long enough, looking for Bunsen, to adapt Ethan's letter for a grandmother's ears. It had been no love-letter even in its original form, but it unconsciously paved the way for one and more to follow. Val wrote to her cousin that night:

"I have usually read your letters to the family, and think it would be better to go on doing so. It's not that my grandmother tries to make me. When I offer to, she says, 'As you please, my dear,' but I have a horrid, uncomfortable feeling if I don't. She seems to be looking through me into the back of my spine, to see why I want to keep the letter to myself. It's funny, but when I don't show it to her she makes me think she has divined not only all there was in it that I didn't want to show her, but a _great deal more_. It's that I resent most. So, if you want to say something you don't want her to see (about the money, you know, and things like that), just put a tiny check opposite the stamp-corner, and I'll know there's an enclosure meant only for me."

It was these "enclosures" that worked the mischief. They were a standing invitation to say things too intimate for other eyes. Brief and discreet at first, and dealing with figures, they expanded as time went on, till they had to be written finely on foreign note, that the discrepancy between the letter's bulk when brought to the front door, and the letter as it appeared in the family circle up-stairs, should not challenge attention. Mrs. Gano's confinement to her room made the matter easy.

Only the blind and un.o.bservant Emmie ever saw the letter when it came.

If it bore the significant check, it was opened alone; if not, the seal was ostentatiously broken under the vigilant eye. It was sure to be an exciting hour. Great preparations preceded: a propping up of pillows, and mending of the fire, if it were winter, that the reading and inevitable discussion might be uninterrupted; a proper arrangement of light and general careful "setting of the scene." Emmie, with soft eyes s.h.i.+ning, sitting demurely by in the little green chair that had been hers--her father's, too, when a child--and Val close to the bedside, reading with beating heart and a careful emphasis (for she was scolded else) the accounts of Ethan's varied life--accounts punctuated by comment, laughter, and sometimes by scathing disapproval.

"I'd tell him, if I were you," Mrs. Gano would say, sitting up with sudden vigor; and the opinion she would express seemed frequently too provocative and "pat" to be dispensed with. Val would unblus.h.i.+ngly annex it, and reap her reward in Ethan's spirited rejoinder, which in turn never failed to "draw" Mrs. Gano. That lady was, perhaps, not a little diverted at playing a part in the game; conscious, too, beyond a doubt, that with a girl like Val to deal with it was probably a question of accepting the correspondence and sharing in its entertainment, or knowing that it went on without her having power to direct or color it.

It was so the correspondence (all save the "enclosures") came to be family property, for Val would bring in her reply, that she might be approved for her line of argument, and that she might hear the keen enjoyment of that laugh which, unconsciously, she "played for" as much as any comedian ever did.

"I corresponded with several gentlemen when I was young," Mrs. Gano once said. "I hear the fas.h.i.+on is going out. It is a pity. A good letter is too good a thing for the world to lose."

Val burned with a wild desire to show the "enclosures," for they were the best of all. Her grandmother would rage, but she couldn't help appreciating them, the girl said to herself, with a mixture of terror at the thought, and of longing to make the confidence. It had come to be such a habit to share things, to "try" them against the steel of that wit and judgment, that she was conscious of an incompleteness of enjoyment in keeping any specially good thing to herself. If it were a book--"No," she would say, "I'll save this for our evenings"; and even if in a dull or mediocre page some one phrase or happy word shone out, she would fly up-stairs, and at the foot of that four-posted throne lay down the treasure-trove, getting in return a finer zest and a truer value.

If, as the time went on, Ethan had hours of feeling that his continued absence from the Fort was a piece of fantastic self-sacrifice which he would end by boarding the next train, Mrs. Gano no less was minded, more than once, to yield to her hunger for a sight of him. The thought of the little boy Ethan who had begged that the Fort might be his home, even more than the thought of the man, tugged at her heart-strings. Would she die before seeing her only grandson again? If in one of these moments Ethan had himself suggested coming, she would have welcomed him with open arms. Meanwhile she waited for the news that must be on the way--the news of his marriage.

Even in "enclosures" to her cousin, Val's only reference to that "barrier," which she would not admit, was characteristically by way of a gibe.

"We were talking the other day at the Otways'" [she wrote] "about its being rather funny to think my grandmother was my great-aunt and my father was my cousin--my mother, too, and my sister as well, all cousins. Emmie and I gathered that, according to the popular superst.i.tion, we ought by rights to have very few wits, or only one arm or a piece of a leg. Emmie and I a.s.sured each other on the way home that no reflection can be cast upon our arms and legs, but we agreed that we must take _great_ care that we are not idiots; so you may, after all, send me a few improving books."

It was at the end of a brief visit to Cincinnati that Ethan's strongest temptation a.s.sailed him. It came in the commonplace form of a photograph in a forwarded letter from Val. Partly the picture, but, even more, something of the girl's eager spirit that had got between the lines of the letter, something unsaid, yet eloquent, of her unexpected power of holding out, took sudden hold on him, made his nerves tingle as if by a bodily contact. There she was, vivid as she had been for so many yesterdays, to-day triumphant, irresistible. He must go--he must go to her! He had been attempting more than he had strength to carry through.

He flung some things into a valise and went down to the station. Train just gone--another in an hour and ten minutes. He got his ticket and bought papers and magazines. In the _Enquirer_ the report of an address before the Medical Congress caught his eye. The famous Dr. Gage had been haranguing his colleagues upon the supposed deterioration of the American race, because the birth-rate among the well-to-do cla.s.ses was lamentably low, the reason being that more and more the women of these cla.s.ses shrank from motherhood. In the course of his address Dr. Gage made a pa.s.sing reference to his forthcoming work on _Consanguineous Marriage_.

In the next column, among the hotel arrivals, it appeared that the great doctor was registered at the Burnet House. Ethan took out his watch.

"Why not? There's time." He jumped into the nearest carriage and drove to the hotel.

In something over an hour he returned, gave up his New Plymouth ticket, and got one for the afternoon express to New York. n.o.body at the Fort ever knew how near Ethan had been to taking them by surprise.

The Otways always went away in the hot weather. The summer that Val was twenty-two, Julia and her family went to the Jersey coast for their holiday. There, at Long Branch, they found Ethan. Both he and Julia mentioned the fact in their letters, and Val tried to think the meetings as casual and unimportant as they looked on paper; but it was the hardest summer she had known.

Besides the fact that Julia was enjoying opportunities of seeing Ethan denied to Val, there was matter in her letters even more disturbing--references to Mr. Gano's constant appearance in the train of a young and wealthy widow who had a house at Long Branch. This lady, Julia wrote, was known to have been one of a party Mr. Gano had taken yachting before coming to Long Branch. Val had heard about that party from her cousin, but no mention of Mrs. Suydam. The lady was much in Val's thoughts. At last, upon an exasperated reference in one of Julia's letters to Mr. Gano's "Circe," Val wrote to him: "Tell me something about this Mrs. Suydam, whom you have never once mentioned, although you see so much of her."

Ethan answered with a brief biographical sketch of the lady, carefully edited; for, in truth, Adelaide Suydam had led an eventful existence, albeit keeping her hold on society by virtue of her money and her good old Knickerbocker origin. Of other virtue she was held to have no embarra.s.sing amount. But she was a highly accomplished person, handsome, daring, and obviously determined to make life interesting to Ethan Gano.

Her added and special attraction for him lay in his discovery that she had no design to marry him; but he was presently made aware that she meant none the less to absorb him. A little puzzled, and a good deal intrigued by her, he returned from the yachting trip very much under her spell. She had skilfully arranged the Long Branch episode for the crowning victory.

It may have been the mere act of writing about her, however discreetly--seeing her perforce through Val's eyes for a moment--that brought about the recoil. The very discretion he found himself obliged to employ convicted him, and opened wide a window on the future. A glimpse of Val through it--however distant, unattainable--brought the prospect into truer perspective for him. He saw less of the Suydam, and went to the Otways to hear about Val.

"Circe" herself, not understanding the situation, and being far too adroit to underline her temporary defeat by putting questions, believed the handsome Julia Otway was the distracting influence. She arranged an exodus to Mount Desert. A friend had lent her a house there. "Long Branch was getting stupider and vulgarer every year--it was intolerable!" She found to her dismay that Mr. Gano was not inclined to take this view. It was then she realized that she was tired, run down, even a little ill. "Would Mr. Gano take her in his yacht to Bar Harbor?

He needn't stay if he really preferred Long Branch, but it would be a charity," etc. Well she knew he was the kind of man to find just the appeal she made a hard one to withstand. Before he quite realized the full significance of the scheme, he had promised she should go round by sea. By the time he "understood," she had practised her arts with such success that he no longer wanted to alter the course she set. "Circe"

saw herself on the point of being the captain's captain.

They were to start the next day, accompanied by Mrs. Suydam's very amenable half-sister. Ethan was going over the yacht to see that all was in readiness. Rummaging through one of the inconveniently full drawers in his cabin, he threw out on the floor a number of superfluous things to be carried away. In impatient haste he tossed out some old novels, caps, a blazer, a roll of moth-eaten bunting. "Wait a minute--isn't that--" He stooped and picked the bunting up. It unrolled--a blue flag, bearing the name "Valeria" in white letters. He stood with the end in his hand, staring at it. It had been in the bottom drawer since the day, four years before, when he had thrust it out of sight after getting that letter from Mrs. Gano: "I do not wish you to call your yacht 'Valeria.'

There are plenty of other names without using that of an unmarried girl."

He remembered his old satisfaction in thinking how, under the new paint as well as in the cabin drawer, the boat still bore the forbidden name, faithful to the first allegiance. He had encouraged Val to call the yacht hers in her letters, and the habit had clung to them both. And now to-day, of all days, this blue flag comes out of hiding and goes flaunting along the floor! It was as if Val herself had walked into his cabin, to rea.s.sert her right, to keep "her" s.h.i.+p--that she never yet had sailed in, and most likely never would--to keep it, notwithstanding, free from profanation.

He went direct to Mrs. Suydam's. She had gone for a drive. Mrs. Ford, her sister, was also out. Only Mr. Ford was at home. Ethan found that gentleman in the billiard-room, and explained that he had a sudden need to go to California--was, in point of fact, taking the night train. Mr.

Ford was an experienced yachtsman; would he look after the ladies, ask whom he liked? etc. It was all arranged in ten minutes, and Ethan was on his way to the Pacific Coast before Mrs. Suydam had heard of the failure of her plan. Had it been the sudden effect of looking at the little drama through Val's eyes that had made him sicken and shrink from the denouement? Or was he simply once again (as had happened before in that first year after parting from Val) taking flight from a temptation that would have interposed an evil memory between him and--the marriage that he had determined should never be?

For the first time in her life the New Plymouth gayeties seemed to Val insignificant, even irritating. She rejoiced that Mrs. Gano was so much better that she let Val drive her out almost daily. They were more than ever together, Emmie being absorbed by her church and charity work. One day, driving back into the town, Val was laughing delightfully at her grandmother's caustic remarks upon the "flabby philanthropy" of a certain local society. They pa.s.sed some soldiers on parade, and a military band playing "Marching Through Georgia." Mrs. Gano's face changed, and, to Val's amazement, she began to weep. Her grandmother!

who, since Val was a child, had said at times when other people cried and marvelled that Mrs. Gano sat dry-eyed, "My tears lie very deep, and most of them I shed before you were born!" This sudden gust of sore weeping that shook her to-day stirred the young girl's pulses with a shamed excitement, an obscure gladness. _She_ could feel, too, then, even yet, with pa.s.sion and unrestraint. But the girl looked away, and presently the shaken voice said:

"The poor old South! Did you see the ragged flag, my dear?"

"Yes, I saw. We must have made a good fight that day."

The "we" on the lips of one born after the war, who never had had her foot in the South, forged a new link. Mrs. Gano had put her hand through the girl's arm and leaned lightly against the strong young shoulder.

"One may be proof against a good many things and not be proof against a tattered flag," she said, half apologetically, and she pulled the flapping veil across her face.

The old woman and the young one had drawn together in friends.h.i.+p absolute. Not that Mrs. Gano developed an angelic complaisance, or Val a superst.i.tious reverence for the head of the house. They were not merely the elder and the younger of the same race, but two human beings who, side by side for many years, had struggled with themselves and with each other, striking on the flint of character, each knowing at last exactly when the sparks would fly, and each content to feel that the fire and the flint were there.

But if Val Gano were not the most irrational of her s.e.x, how was it she could live year in, year out, this narrow life, refusing without misgiving the only apparent ways of escape, waiting for an event that even the eye of faith might well have wearied looking for, while summer pa.s.sed to autumn and winter waned to spring?

The girl believed, or made herself pretend she believed, that the longest conceivable term of her waiting was the term of Mrs. Gano's life. But the truth was even simpler. Val, unfortunately, was one of those persons who do not easily accept whatever Fate chooses to lay at their door. She was rather of those who stand ready to turn away the blind bringer of gifts with the rebuff: "I will have nothing at your hands but the thing I asked."

Vain, apparently, for Harry Wilbur, vain for the das.h.i.+ng new-comer, Mr.

Lawrence O'Neil, to think time was working the will of each. Time was doing nothing so sensible.

CHAPTER XXVI

One of the things n.o.body had been able to get Val to do any more was to sing. This had been at first set down to the death of her father, and a special a.s.sociation of him with music. Even Julia shared that view.

The next spring after the summer the Otways had spent at Long Branch, the three girls--Julia, Emmie, and Val--sat one chill afternoon on the hearth-rug before the fire in the blue room. With very b.u.t.tery fingers they were eating the last of a great bowl of popcorn. Val, who had presided over the popping, was losing the becoming flush that occupation lent her. The years had taken from the face something of its old look of frankness and love of fun, that had been almost boyish in its simplicity. The subtler woman-look, the faint suggestion of brooding in the eyes, had matured the face and lent it meaning. Emmie was the same pretty creature, a little more fragile than before, whereas Julia was blooming and bourgeoning into a very handsome woman of somewhat majestic proportions. Instead of two, she looked five or six years older than Val's twenty-three years. The brown and choral chine silk Julia wore this afternoon was turned away at the neck, and a lace fichu carefully drawn down over the fine bust left visible the prettiest throat in the world, as well as a little V-shaped s.p.a.ce of fair white neck.

Emmie was tired of the talk of a party to which she was not going. It was on the night of the choir practice, and, besides, she didn't approve of dancing. She wiped her b.u.t.tery fingers on her handkerchief.

"Let's go down-stairs and try our new hymn," she said, getting up.