The Open Question Part 86

Val stared at her speechless, and then:

"I think if you were a man I could kill you. Why do you stay here?" she said, coming a step nearer with ill-controlled fury. "We aren't expecting Ethan to-day. Why do you stay?"

Julia squared her Junoesque shoulders against the crooked tree and stood her ground.

"You can, of course, behave like a wild savage if it suits you, but I'd like to know what you mean to do."

"Do!" Val dropped her arms listless to her sides. "What is there to do?"

"Shall you tell your cousin you stole his letters?"

"No. I shall tell my cousin exactly what happened." She turned to go up to the house.

"I wouldn't, if I were you. Look here, there's no reason, because our friends.h.i.+p's broken, that we should do more things we shall regret.

You've no right because you've got hold of my secret--you've no right to pa.s.s it on to Ethan." It was an agony to hear her call him Ethan. "You mustn't tell him that I--that I carry his letters about. And I won't tell him that you--"

"Tell him what you like!"

Val went angrily up the terrace-steps; but all the same, Julia knew perfectly that she had secured herself now against Ethan's hearing what had happened. Val could, most indefensibly, tear her secret out of her keeping in the pa.s.sion of the moment. But Julia had little fear that in cold blood her old friend would "give her away" to the man they both loved.

CHAPTER XXVII

That night Mrs. Gano was prostrated by a feverish cold. The doctor was sent for, and Val carried out his instructions so faithfully that in twenty-four hours the patient was comfortably mending.

In the intervals of nursing Val had written to Ethan in pencil:

"I've got to see you. It doesn't matter that I can't ask you to the Fort, or that grandma is not to know. You must come and stay a day or two at some small town quite near here. I'll get a day off for a picnic or something, and meet you either in Blake's Woods, or at one of the steamboat landings up the river. Don't hesitate about this. I'm not a child, and I've a right to see you about a matter so important to me."

She closed without a hint as to what the matter was.

He answered by return of post, pointing out that he couldn't possibly come to see her clandestinely, for her own sake.

"For my sake! Not a bit of it. For grandma's sake. He's afraid."

The conclusion was the easier in that she was herself afraid. It was then Val remembered that Mrs. Ball, the former Jessie Hornsey, who now lived in the capital of the State, had several times asked Val to visit her. The girl went out and sent the lady a telegram. "I'm going to stay a few days with Mrs. Austin Ball," she announced with outward calm and much inward trepidation when she came home.

"_You are going_--" Mrs. Gano sat up in bed and stared.

"Oh, Val," remonstrated Emmie, "and grandma ill in bed!"

"That has nothing to do with it," said the invalid, shortly. "But my house is not a Family Hotel for people to come and go as they--" A sneeze spoiled the effect she was making.

"There, you've caught more cold!"

Emmie rushed across the room and brought a shawl. Val wanted to help put it round her. Mrs. Gano waved her off, took the shawl herself, and with some premonition, perhaps, of a coming crisis, said:

"What does this mean?"

"It means that at last I want to accept one of Mrs. Ball's dozen invitations. The doctor says you're better. You could telegraph me if--"

"That's all very well, but in this house it is customary--"

"Yes, yes, dearest; I know it's customary to ask leave, and I do ask it.

But you must let me go. I--I never go anywhere, I never do anything; all my life is slipping away, just as Aunt Valeria's did."

The old woman looked into the young face and read the signs there misguidedly enough to say:

"Well, well, we can't very well afford it, but perhaps a little change--"

"I'll make it up, you'll see."

No later than that same afternoon the girl was on her way. She had given Ethan no warning--did not even know if she would find him still at the hotel from which he had written to Julia; but she drove straight to the Wharton House, learned that he was in, and sent up word that a lady wanted to see him.

While she sat there, oblivious of the expensive ugliness of the empty hotel parlor, the thought of seeing Ethan after all these years did not shut out the haunting remembrance of her grandmother. If that scorner of deceptions could see her now! If she ever came to know that Val, whom she trusted, had acted this complicated lie in order, most unmaiden-like, to beg a stolen interview with a man! She cringed at the thought of the old woman's high unsparing scorn. "Why do I always think of her! Other girls don't take even their fathers and mothers so seriously. They aren't _haunted_ by them." She hunched her shoulders with discomfiture. Why didn't Ethan come? What would her grandmother say? It would be distinctly awful to be despised by her. Should she save her reputation by running away without seeing Ethan? It seemed a sudden blessed way of escape from domestic degradation. She half rose, staring absently at the sofa pattern. Suddenly the perplexed eyes widened; the vague design of the satin damask had wrought itself into her brain. Out of the scrolls and arabesques a face seemed staring at her. With a twist of pain she recognized it--that sorrowfullest of all faces--that face of some one who never had a chance. The poor dim ghost that had been shut up so long in Aunt Valeria's dusty heap of clay, that had appeared to Val like a shadowy face at a prison grating--it had escaped at last: it was here!

As she sank back in the corner, the old tide of revolt rose high within her; but the flood to-day was chill with fear of failure, and bitter with the memory of those others who had been overwhelmed. Val had herself given up all "chances" for this one that she was reaching out for to-day. She was here to put that one to proof, and-- Ethan was at the door! In that first instant of his non-recognition her heart turned sick, so cold he looked, and so remote, forbidding even. She got up and came forward.

Ethan cried out in astonishment, throwing down his hat:

"_You!_ No, not really!"

"Yes."

He took both her hands, and looked into her face. Had she really thought him cold? Turning, he glanced about the room, as if to a.s.sure himself they were alone. She disengaged her hands.

"Come out and walk; I don't like it here," she said.

He looked at her reflectively, and yet with a kind of smouldering excitement.

"We'll get a victoria, and drive out to the country." He led the way down-stairs. "But how on earth have you managed it?" he said.

"I didn't manage, I just came."

"Grandmamma is with you?"

"Oh no."

"Who, then?"

"n.o.body."

"She hasn't let you come alone?"