The Open Question Part 32

As if gently to divert her attention, the son would perhaps face about, and, walking slowly back with her to the house, would do a little quoting on his own account:

"'Many a night from yonder ivied cas.e.m.e.nt, ere I went to rest, Did I look on great Orion sloping slowly to the West.'

Ah! the music--the sheer music in that man!"

"There was music before _his_ day. And Tennyson is one of them that hath ears to hear, as well as tongue to speak. Small doubt but from his ivied cas.e.m.e.nt in the West he heard the voice of the Lord from out the chambers of the South. 'Canst thou bind the secret influences of Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion? Canst thou bring forth Mazzaroth in his season? Or canst thou guide Arcturus with his suns?'"

"I can see Ca.s.siopeia," Val would observe, just to show that she was not quite out of it.

And she would grasp her father's hand tighter, to remind him of their agreement that the straggling W stood for "We"--Val and her father. Then he would find Lyra and the Little Bear, and tell how the Milky Way, instead of being, as Hiawatha and Val had thought, "pathway of the ghosts and shadows," was really star-dust, the scattered nebulae of other suns and systems.

Mrs. Gano would look back before going in-doors, and say, with solemn upward gaze:

"Yes, yes! 'An undevout astronomer is mad.'"

Then they would go in silently to bed.

CHAPTER XII

A letter by the late post from cousin Ethan! It would be the last before he himself would appear. Emmie watched, with luminous eyes, her grandmother's opening of the envelope. Val, in banishment, waited impatiently outside in the dusk on the stairs to hear the news; but the face of the reader in the long room darkened as she read. She dropped the letter in her lap at the close, speechless.

"Oh! what is it, gran'ma?" quivered the sympathetic Emmie.

The old lady merely turned away her head.

"Gran'ma, he isn't _dead_?"

"No, not exactly dead," she said, very low.

"He is very ill?"

"No. He is gone again to France."

"But I thought he was coming here for _sure_ this time?"

"So did I; not so Aaron Tallmadge!"

The name swept out like a sudden gust, scattering to the winds her unnatural calm.

"But you said he was nearly of age, when he would be his own master."

"Aaron Tallmadge remembered that." Her lips trembled with anger, and the big chair seemed to share her agitation. She held on to the red padded arms, as though she rocked on the high seas in a gale. "When Ethan comes of age he'll be five thousand miles away."

"But can't you stop him? Let Venie take a telegwaf."

"No, no!" The high wind, in which the great chair rocked, died down, the angry animation faded out of the old face, leaving it older still and very weary. "No, no; these things are not to be forced. It's natural. He has been with Aaron Tallmadge all his days; he is his heir. He lives in a world where men think much of the bond of money, and little of the bond of blood. I shall not write again."

She folded up the letter and put it in its envelope. Her head drooped over the task.

"I thought cousin Ethan loved being here?"

"A long time ago. He was very little."

"But he never forgot?"

"It used to seem so."

Lower the old head sank, till the folds of white veil, falling on either side, met like two drawn curtains across her face.

"But you could see in his letters he was terribly sad and sorry to have put off coming--just to please his grandfather."

"Ah, well! it was a long time ago, and he was very little."

Mrs. Gano lifted her head--and, behold, her face was wet with tears. She found her pocket-handkerchief, and wiped them away angrily, as if she resented the salt-water drops more than her grandson's defection.

"Natural enough, I suppose," she said, with an a.s.sumption of half-scornful indifference. "Ethan's a man now, with wide means and the world before him. Why should he come to this dull, smoky town, when he can 'improve his accent' under brighter skies? There's no fortune here for him to inherit, and nothing new for him to see."

"He hasn't ever seen _me_," said Emmie, "nor Val."

Her grandmother drew her close and held the beautiful little face in her hands, looking down with unaccustomed tenderness, while again the tears gathered. A sudden movement of "This will never do." She cleared her voice and rose hurriedly.

"Good-night, child; go to bed. I must tell your father we needn't look for Ethan after this."

Emmie kept on going to bed at half-past eight, even when she was old enough to have struck for another hour's freedom. But Emmie had not so much to get into her day; in fact, she was constantly going about saying she had nothing to do, and begging her grandmother to find her some way of getting through the hours. This frame of mind was, like G.o.dliness, one of the mysteries to Val. How anybody found the day long enough, and what being "bored" meant, were matters equally impenetrable. Her father was right. The world was a beautiful and absorbing place to one whose pleasure in it was unjaundiced. Val reflected with pride that _her_ capacity for enjoyment was not blighted by too great early piety. It was no doubt because she was so singularly enlightened and advanced that, to her, just being alive, was so rapturous a joy. There was Emmie, now.

With all her advantages, she wasn't happy; and she was as religious as her grandmother, if not more so. The inference was plain. People who were worried about their souls could not be expected to relish the selfish joy of being first in the games at recess. They probably didn't even eat their meals with the immense relish of the unregenerate. They didn't feel their hearts swell up with unaccountable gladness, at mere waking in the morning, to receive a broadside from the sun straight between the eyes. But it was just the same if the wind blew, or the rain fell. For no discoverable reason beyond lack of piety, Val would feel herself filled from crown to toe with tingling delight at this mere "being alive." There were, alas! other times when, for reasons partly patent, partly obscure, she was sore oppressed; but never did any hour find her so bowed down that the wild tumult of a storm would not stimulate her like strong wine. She would run about the house with flying hair and wide, excited eyes, when she couldn't manage to escape out-doors, and feel the rapturous buffet of the winds and dash of the rain in her face.

"She is like an electrical eel when there's a thunder-gust," she once overheard her grandmother say.

"Some affinity between the child and the elements," her father had replied, half seriously. "She came into the world during the wildest and most destructive storm that ever swept over the State."

After hearing that, Val felt no apology was needed for her desire to go out and romp with the winds. It was all very well for other people to shut doors and windows and sit in the middle of non-conducting feather-beds (as her mother had done), but how should Val be afraid of thunder and lightning? They had come forth in their splendor and their might to welcome her into the wonderful world. Dangerous to others? Oh, very likely. They were friends and allies of Val Gano.

But not only through these more or less usual avenues did gladness reach her, but through some of the th.o.r.n.y by-ways before which men had set up the warning signal, "Pain!"

There was that affair of the hornet's sting. How l.u.s.tily she had howled when, stepping into the ash-gray nest down by the choke-pear-tree, she found herself surrounded by an army of angry enemies, darting little poisoned knives! How frantically she had run back to the house, rending the air with shrieks, and yet queerly conscious, after the first shock of surprise, that this was a curious experience and a great discovery, not alone of the power of hornets, but a discovery, too, of the power of pain in herself! Before she reached the house, and leaving a l.u.s.ty yell only half finished in her throat, she had stopped to notice, with an excitement akin to pride, how the back of her hand and arm had puffed up to an enormous size, and was stinging still, as if a thousand knives were being turned about in the flesh. Here was something quite new.

While it agonized her, it kept her sense of curiosity in a tumult of painful pleasure. She stood still, watching the hand swell, while the tears poured down her flushed cheeks, absorbed in noting the action of the poison, wondering how much more the uncanny power of the sting could swell her poor little distorted hand. Was there any pain more horrible than this? Was it possible human beings could endure anything worse? And if so, what? She shut her wet eyes, dizzy with suffering, and yet in the dim background of her mind almost avid of that intenser pang, if any such there were in the a.r.s.enal of Nature's weapons against man.

Later came the memorable attack of diphtheritic sore throat, that made them all so kind. _That_ was one of the most diverting things that had ever happened to her, not merely because her father sat by her nearly all the time, when her grandmother was or wasn't there; not only because her unwary elders fell into discussions that, no matter where else they led, could not terminate in Val's being ejected from the room, just as they got to the interesting crisis; not because of the thrilling tales of her grandmother's old acquaintance, Betsy Patterson, of Baltima', her marriage with Jerome Bonaparte, and her journey, alone and friendless, half across the world, to meet her mortal enemy and brother-in-law, the great Napoleon. Not in these obvious delights alone lay the whole advantage of the diphtheria incident, but in the discovery that there was a sensation, in or under the actual pain itself, that was new, exciting, almost agreeable. It was touching experience at a fresh point, and was far from being altogether regrettable. This sharp pain when one tried to swallow was only a keener way of feeling alive, a new accomplishment of the alert, responsive body. As if with foreknowledge that her experience in this direction was going to be limited, or as though she had heard Sir Thomas Brown say, "There is some sapor in all ailments," Val showed every inclination to make the most of this one.

"Now, you've got to behave, Emmie," she would say, if her sister seemed likely to forget that here at last her customary privileges must for the nonce give way. "You've only got a weak chest, but _I've_ got a diphtheritic throat!"

It was during the agreeable time of convalescence that her grandmother showed her the faded samplers that she and her sisters and Aunt Valeria had worked as children. She got out the little boxes of old trinkets, too, and told the "story" of each and every one. There were volumes in these simple rings and mourning brooches, watch-chains of hair, badly-painted miniatures, enamelled hearts and charms. She seemed to have literally dozens of gold and silver pencils. One was to be Val's and one Emmie's, when they were "old enough to take great care of them."

But all the best ones seemed to belong to cousin Ethan. And there was that priceless and magnificent possession (that was also to be Ethan's), Grandfather Calvert's gold snuffbox, presented by the Burns Club, of "Baltima'," and inscribed with a verse of good-fellows.h.i.+p. This was the ancestor that Val took most interest in, even before the revelation of the snuffbox. He had been a merry gentleman, who amused himself so well in the "Baltima'" of his day, that he had to be sent when only nineteen as "supercargo," whatever that meant, to the West Indies. It was evident paternal punishments in those times were slight, for he had loved "supercargoing." He came home with a store of stories and a fortune, and--as it presently leaked out, to Val's and Emmie's delight--he ran away with his wife when he was only twenty-one and the little lady barely fifteen. Mrs. Gano had been betrayed into admitting that she was born before her mother had reached her sixteenth birthday.