The Open Question Part 29

But wait! In a minute she would be carried off by the tall, dark, fierce-eyed hero, who lived somewhere--somewhere--not in ballrooms, except as the eagle may swoop into the valley--not in cities, but in some mountain fastness in the kingdom at the end of the world.

Many a time she had wondered how they were to meet, how he was ever to know that she lived with a cruel grandmother in New Plymouth. Ha! now it was plain. The organ had ground out the truth. She would run away by-and-by. He would see her somewhere dancing, and he would say "Eureka!" "Ah!" she would say, "but I'm half engaged to my next-door neighbor, or to the Duke of Daffy-down-dilly." "What does that matter to me?" Whiff! he would carry her off, and say she should love him, whether she liked it or not. Oh, it was wonderful!--it was palpitating to lie in the dark, or in the pale spring suns.h.i.+ne, with shut eyes, and think about this king of men, who would not be denied. Val couldn't remember a time when she had not told herself stories with this fruitful theme for inspiration. The proud, dark figure had come dimly out of the fairy world, and had grown more human and distinct day by day. He began by being a prince, and for some years he wore a gold-embroidered velvet robe. By degrees he adopted a less and less striking attire, which, however, had never yet degenerated into mere modern evening dress. The n.o.ble gentleman could not be expected to put off his romantic melancholy along with his royal robes, for a large part of the excitement of this game of the imagination lay in the lady's proud rejection of his suit, and flight from the fortress where he thought to hide her--his hot pursuit--his being baffled, disappointed, and reduced to wild despair before his ultimate victory. And this final triumph (oh, strong survival of the savage in the female breast!) was invariably a triumph of arms.

Not even to a hero who was handsome, and tall, and strong as a giant; not even to a hero half bandit, half blameless knight, that every other girl in the world pined for, that every man envied and must needs honor--not even to such a one will the untutored dreamer yield herself a willing bride. A willing bride! The very phrase offends some ancient canon fixed against self-abandonment in the very blood and bone of womankind.

Can it be that in the ages unrecorded, before men going hence left behind them laws on stone, or testament on papyrus, the women of that far-off time had inscribed a legend on the hearts of all their s.e.x, graved it so deep and plain that a little girl of the nineteenth century (casting about for stories to send herself to sleep) may read it in the dark after all those aeons have gone by? Can it be that, reading and understanding this language, which being dead yet speaketh, knowing the ancient mother-tongue better even than her father's own, she takes the legend for a text, obeys it as a natural law, and thrills to it as did her old ancestress of the cave and tent, smiling covertly, and deliciously afraid?

The fresh wind blew the child's wild hair across her face; the sun shone down more golden; the organ jangled through its tunes. Now, with a jerk of restlessness, it abandoned "Il Trovatore" and struck into a waltz.

Ha! the window-seat was too cramped. She slid down and began to dance.

Gran'ma's voice. The little girl stopped suddenly, opened the door, and went sedately down-stairs, with her lesson books conspicuously in evidence. At the bottom she stopped and listened. Cautiously she opened the parlor door and closed it behind her. She flung her books down and coursed wildly round the centre table, as one sees a dog just let out of the kennel celebrate his liberty. Suddenly she stopped and bowed solemnly to Daniel Boone, saying under her breath:

"Now I'm the greatest dancer on the earth. Now they're all applauding.

Now I make three courtesies. They clap and clap till I begin again. This is the most wonderful dance of all."

She started afresh, curving her arms above her head, fantasticating steps, some graceful, some grotesque, whirling faster and faster to the rhythm that was beating in her brain. Suddenly a dark face looked out of the throng in that theatre of her imagination, and she knew it was the face of her fate. There was the Duke of Daffy-down-dilly, too, leaning out of a box and applauding as hard as he could. The dark man sat quite still, but his eyes gleamed.

After the last great dance, which was called "The Filigree Finale" (all the dances had beautiful names), the Duke threw her a bouquet of roses, and held out his arms.

"I spurn the flowers." She kicked out a scornful foot. "I turn my back.

Oh, it's _deafening_ the way they're applauding!"

Suddenly, in the heartless process of dancing away from plaudits and a duke, she stopped short as if she had been shot. The color fled out of her face, and her thin hands dropped limp at her side. There was a kind of terror in her eyes as presently she moved forward, dragging her wings, so to speak, to the opposite end of the room, where, over a marble-top table, an old-fas.h.i.+oned mirror reflected Daniel Boone. The child peered into the gla.s.s, but it was dark, and the marble-top table held her at arm's-length. She could only see dimly the top of her head.

She dropped down in a miserable little heap between the claw feet of the table. Perhaps she alone of all the heroines of earth was not, never could be, beautiful! It had never occurred to her before. A thousand recollections seemed to rush at her at once to fasten the fear in her heart, to make it hideous certainty. If she had been going to be beautiful, would not some one have mentioned it? Emmie had heard a thousand times how pretty she was. Cousin Ethan was known to be the most beautiful of boys. As to Val's looks, why, she was so little a credit to a handsome race that n.o.body could be got to own her. Hadn't her mother said, "Emmie is like me; but Val--I suppose she's more like you"? and her father had hurriedly disclaimed the faintest resemblance between his eldest daughter and himself. Her grandmother had said: "You are not like my side of the house, and I don't see a trace of the Gano in you. I'm sure I don't know where you came from." Ah, it was clear she had not referred to mere wickedness. She was repudiating her descendant's plainness. The child put her hands over her face. But it was incredible that this blow at the root of joy was meant for her. She dropped her hands, taking heart of grace. Katie O'Flynn, the cook in New York, had said, in some interval of truce, that Val had "rale Oirish oyes," and she had said it with no accent of condolence. If only she hadn't added, "They're put in wid s.m.u.tty fingers, me darlint!" Even at the time Val had felt the last remark tactless, and had changed the subject, but now--

"Oirish oyes!" It was meant well, but it had a horribly common sound. It was another way of saying, "You look like the cook." And yet--and yet no one had ever cared so much about being beautiful before. She would have submitted gladly to letting those "rale Oirish oyes" be torn out and the poor quivering little body be hacked in pieces if only it might be put together in a truer harmony. But there _were_ ugly people in the world, who began ugly, and went on being ugly to the bitter end. How had she come to take it so for granted that beauty belonged to her as a right?

There was Miss Tibbs, who lived near by in Mioto Avenue. Think of being like that! with taily hair, and little, little eyes, and teeth that-- No! no! no! She struggled to her feet, storming up into the high window-seat, and straining till she opened the near window, and could force back the heavy shutter, letting in a flood of light. But it was not the sudden glory of the day that made the child blink and draw back so suddenly. Miss Tibbs was pa.s.sing the gate.

"Good-morning," said that lady, looking more appalling than ever.

"It's like that--like that I'll be," thought the child, tumbling to the ground.

Feverishly she swept the card-basket and the books off the table. Then, drawing up a chair, she climbed up on it, clinching her teeth and setting her jaws to bear the shock that perhaps awaited her. And still there was hope in her heart as she leaned forward on the marble top and looked into the mottled gla.s.s with imploring eyes. Slowly the tears gathered. In mute agony she turned away, climbed off the table, and hung limp over the back of the chair.

"Oh, G.o.d, I'm ugly!" she said, and clung there with shut, hot eyes. The moments pa.s.sed. "I can't bear it, G.o.d. Let me die!"

The strained voice was m.u.f.fled in her clinched little jaws, and with her fists she beat helplessly on the back of the old-fas.h.i.+oned chair.

Presently she slipped down to the floor, and wandered aimless about the room. When she came near the gla.s.s again she glanced with a sharp conviction of intolerable shame at the top of a s.h.a.ggy head, which was all that she could see. Even that was too much. She flew to the window and drew the shutters to, feeling she should never be able to bear the light again.

"What did You make me for?" she cried, arrested an angry instant, facing sharply about, as though confronting an enemy. "I didn't want to come if I had to be ugly!" She slid down off the window-seat, and walked quickly to and fro with rising anger. "It would have been so easy, too, for _You_. Just think what it means to me!" She stopped and looked heavenward. The "Oirish oyes" were blazing. "I should think You'd prefer things pretty for yourself. But if You don't, why do You go and spoil it all for me?" And so on, in frantic young fas.h.i.+on, she beat her wings against the old prison-house. For between the origin of evil and the origin of ugliness there is no great gulf fixed in the female mind.

Looking back long afterwards on this hour of anguish, she could not laugh, as philosophic grown-up folk are pleased to do, at the sorrows of childhood. She knew that that morning in the musty parlor was one of the bitterest experiences life had brought her, simply because it had come to her as a child, for whom beauty was as yet a conventional physical perfection, and not the high soul of things.

After the one-o'clock dinner, she had shaken Emmie off, and gone out to walk up and down in the warm wind behind the house. She had come out bareheaded, and her shock of wild hair was blown about almost as if some one were saying the "I b'lieve," and the Windgeist, or some other "der stets verneint," had borrowed Val's form of dissent.

She was a thin slip of a girl, and no one seeing her would have much wondered that this young wors.h.i.+pper of obvious red-cheeked, dimpled, yellow-haired, picture-book beauty, had been bitterly disappointed with the thin little face, its irregular lines and faint coloring, the good-sized mouth in lieu of the heroine's puckered rosebud, the tawny no color, all colors, hair, that merely waved distractingly instead of curling; the black eyebrows and lashes, too well defined--yes, "s.m.u.tty"; the long, deep-set gray eyes, that no wis.h.i.+ng could make blue before the gla.s.s, but that sometimes, out in the suns.h.i.+ne, changed to turquoise, and sometimes in the dusk or lamplight were limpid, gleaming black.

"h.e.l.lo!" said Jerry, through the osage-trees.

"h.e.l.lo!"

"What's the matter?"

"Nothing."

"Been getting it?"

"Don't be an idiot!"

"Come and fis.h.!.+"

"Can't."

"Does Mrs. Gano make you stay here?"

"She can't _make_ me do anything."

"Then come. I'm going to Bentley's Pond."

Val wavered. She might fish even if she was ugly. In fact, as she came to think of it, it was one of the few things left to do--that and disobeying gran'ma.

"All right; wait a minute."

She went in-doors for her hat. A sense of returning life came warmly over her. She could still fish. Fis.h.i.+ng alone was a career. She had a panoramic glimpse of herself through the future years--fis.h.i.+ng morning, noon, and night; in all weathers and in every clime; as a young lady, fis.h.i.+ng; fis.h.i.+ng as a woman; as an old bent crone, still fis.h.i.+ng--fis.h.i.+ng forever and forever, her head tied up in a veil. She planted a Tam o' Shanter on her wind-blown hair, thinking: "I won't begin with a veil to-day. I don't mind Jerry--he's ugly, too."

CHAPTER XI

Close as was her relations.h.i.+p with her father, there was more than one thing she never told him. She never spoke of her grandmother's brutality. She sympathized with him silently for having such a mother, and felt that they were fellow-sufferers under her iron rule. Did she not make him, too, do things he didn't want to do--make him go out and walk when he preferred to sit still, reprove him for trying his eyes by the waning light, and even at times pa.s.s severe strictures on his clothes and his opinions? He was much better and stronger after a couple of quiet years at the Fort; but it was cruel of her grandmother to speak in that way about his "yielding to la.s.situde and inertia," and hint that he was "quite as well now as many of the men who were carrying on the work of the world."

"Health," she would say, "is a comparative term. No one is perfectly healthy, any more than any one is perfectly good."

But this innocent-sounding plat.i.tude was evidently annoying to John Gano. It was after one of these painful talks about his rousing himself (of which Val heard only the concluding phrases) that he had tried to get back into the bank. It wasn't his fault that Mr. Otway couldn't make an opening for him. John Gano had even been urged into making visits to Cincinnati and New York to see if he could find something. He came back from these quests depressed and ill, not mentioning in Val's hearing having found anything but an unusually fine specimen of the _Ardea herodias_, or something of the sort, on the far Atlantic coast. But for long after these expeditions he would talk vehemently to his mother of the fierce compet.i.tion of the great cities, of the growing costliness and cruelty of civilization, and speak darkly of the coming social revolution, when the poor should learn their power. But Val realized, and felt miserably certain her father realized, that Mrs. Gano did not much concern herself with the large historic outlook, that she would have preferred knowing her son had secured a clerks.h.i.+p, even under some bloated bondholder, rather than hear that the doom of capital was nigh, and that Henry George was revolutionizing opinion about the land-tax.

But this particular difference of view was a delicate matter, not seemly for a daughter to mention. Her father, being a kind of hero, of course never complained; neither would Val. His sense of loyalty even led him to excuse his mother when only her own misdeeds arraigned her, as when, after Emmie began to go to school, she was allowed to stay at home whenever she cried, whenever it rained, whenever she liked--and Val never on any pretext whatsoever.

"She thinks Emmie has a delicate chest, you see," her father had explained. "You are such a hard little nut--no danger of your cracking."

However, her grandmother, who seemed, oddly enough, to have some faint glimmering of justice, appreciated Val's superiority in some things. If she lost her spectacles, she would say to Emmie, hunting about with big blind eyes:

"You are good only at losing things, my dear. Call Val."

Or if a parcel was to be tied up, or something carefully lifted down from a height, she would trust Val rather than anybody in the house.

This recognition of deft-handedness, small claim on consideration as it might seem, was still a balm to the child. She was wicked, she was hideous, she was unloved, but she never broke things as did the adored Emmie. No, Val was at least clever and quick in her movements; it might not be much out of the wreck of a heroine, but it was something. One other quality was admitted as time went on. If something questionable happened in the house, something that had to be inquired into, it came in time to be Val's privilege to be called in to give a faithful and veracious account of it. Emmie was no keen observer, and she was p.r.o.ne to spare other people's feelings if her own were not too much engaged.

Besides, Emmie had a high character to sustain; Val, having none, could brace herself and tell the horrid truth, even about herself. One proud day there was a great difference of opinion as to the exact circ.u.mstances attending the breaking of one of the coffee-mugs of great-grandfather Calvert's wonderful and priceless service of thin white china with the broad gold key. It lived in the mahogany buffet, and was washed once a year--_used_, never! Val was called in before the a.s.sembled household to give her version, the summons being solemnly prefaced by "I've never known you to tell me a lie." That was what made it so proud a moment, in spite of the uneasy sense that the tribute was not deserved. When Miss Brown had required the girls in her cla.s.s to go over the arithmetic lesson four times, no matter if they were sure they had got the sums right at first, Val had instructed the entire Preparatory Department to lay their books down on the ground and hop across them. This might next morning be reported as "going over" the sums as many times as Miss Brown liked.

"You are superficial," Professor Dawson said, detaining Val one day after the Latin lesson; "your oral translations are too often mere happy guesses instead of accurate knowledge. You must spend three-quarters of an hour at least on your Latin alone."