The Open Question Part 73

"Exactly--exactly. It's the very cry of the unfit."

"I deny it. It's the cry of the man willing to work without ign.o.ble spurring, who doesn't want his comrades' disaster to sweeten victory, who wants to be fortunate, as you say, without blood-guiltiness."

"When that sentiment comes of strength, my friend, it means one thing; when it comes of weakness, it means another. There's hard fighting ahead, and Hercules will be to the fore. He'll be needed. The Ganos will be occupied in hating compet.i.tion."

Ethan gave vent to a sound of stifled indignation. Val watched him with suspended breath. His uncle watched him calmly, and then he said:

"A Gano can inherit money. I doubt if he can make it. I doubt if he can even keep it. I doubt if he can lose it like a man."

Ethan winced, recalling the days of the lost allowance, and his impotent railing at destiny while he starved in the streets of Paris.

"There isn't the shadow of a doubt what the end of our family history will be," the hoa.r.s.e voice ended. "Those of us who aren't ground under the heel of poverty will be snuffed out by disease."

"My G.o.d!" Ethan broke out; "and to think I called you an optimist! Why, you're just such another as Job, crying out: 'Let the day perish wherein I was born.' 'Oh, that I had given up the ghost, and no eye seen me'; or the Genevan confessing: 'Ma naissance fut le premier de mes malheurs.'"

He would have been ready to swear that he was writhing, not under the sense of an impa.s.sible barrier raised between him and some concrete coveted good, but at being confronted, where he least expected it, with a new aspect of the ugliness and pain and helplessness of the human lot.

"It doesn't seem to matter which way one turns," he burst out; "the sound loudest in one's ears is the lament of all the generations that have gone up and down hunting happiness, till, as you say, they fell on sleep. Whether I go to the cla.s.sics or read the new philosophies, whether it's Socrates or Seneca preaching the dignity of death, or the volcanic Nietzsche trying gloomily to exalt self, and losing himself in madness--whether I wander the Old World, or fly for better things to the New, it's the same thing. You began by telling me life was beautiful and good; you have ended by showing me afresh that it simply doesn't bear being thought about. Why, _Val_!"

He had risen and caught sight of the white, tear-drowned face looking out behind the chair.

"Val!" echoed her father; "I thought you were in bed!"

"Oh, I wish I had been!" She came out of the corner with her plumage of brave looks crushed and broken, all her young brightness tarnished.

"Father," she said, while the tears rained down, "I'm sorry you're so sad about the world, and about all us Ganos, but you needn't try to make cousin Ethan sad too, and me--and me--"

Ethan made a gesture forward, as if to take the girl in his protecting arms. John Gano's angry eyes flashed warning. He tried to hush his daughter's sobbing in his breast.

"You are my wise little girl, and you--"

"Wise! Yes; a great deal too wise to believe all this. I don't know _why_ I'm crying so." She looked up, smiling miserably through her tears. "Why, it's just nothing but arguing. When cousin Ethan's with me he never has such awful, awful notions. He's a little sad sometimes, and has to be cheered up, and you oughtn't to argue with him like this--"

The heaving sobs clutched her voice, stifling the last words.

"Come, come, child; you're over-excited. There--there!"

"When _I'm_ old"--she flung back her head with a poor little travesty of her common gesture--"I'll tell my children--_all_ of them--that it's been a good world to be in, and that they're not to be afraid, and--and not to be any sadder than they can help."

"Come, come; dry your eyes and go to bed."

She turned away with her handkerchief over her face.

"Good-night, little cousin," said Ethan, steadying his voice and taking her hand.

"Oh, good-night," she faltered, and with a movement full of exquisite young tenderness she lifted her little handkerchief and brushed it lightly across his misty eyes. "Father was only arguing," she said.

But the tears flowed down her cheeks afresh as she opened the door and went out.

CHAPTER XXIII

Two days later Ethan was on his way South with John Gano.

He stayed with his uncle for a month, and then sent for the despised Drouet, who was an excellent nurse. As he grew weaker, John Gano developed not only a tolerance, but a liking, for the alert, amusing Frenchman, and stayed contentedly in the quarters Ethan had found, until the spring, making a herbarium of the flora of that region. At the beginning of May he was to return home. Early in April, Drouet wired to his master in Boston to say that the doctor was alarmed at the patient's condition. Ethan went South at once, and three days after his arrival his uncle died in his arms.

"Don't drag me back to the North," he had said; "bury me where I fall."

And it was done.

Mrs. Gano was too ill to travel, and telegraphed that Ethan was to come back afterwards to the Fort.

It was a very different arrival from the last. The little cousins, dressed in black, looked more than ever like snow flowers on the fringe of winter.

Mrs. Gano was profoundly moved on seeing Ethan entering alone. She motioned the children out of the room, and had one long talk with her grandson about the end. Afterwards, in her fas.h.i.+on when she was suffering most, she shut herself up, and no one except the servants saw her until the following Sunday, which was Easter.

It struck Ethan as curious, and unexpected, that even the girls should put such restraint upon their grief. Emmie, it was true, was often seen in tears, but the most she ever said of her father was, "He knows there's a heaven now." Val conducted the household in default of her grandmother, and Ethan caught himself smiling surrept.i.tiously at the old-fas.h.i.+oned decorum she imposed upon herself in playing the unaccustomed role.

Emmie was to be confirmed this Easter. She was going through a very devout phase, and, when Val was not there, she talked to Ethan about the coming consecration with a curious religious fervor. There was a strain of unconscious mysticism in the girl that struck Ethan oddly, against the bare American background. It was to him more of an anachronism than any manifestation he had yet encountered, even at the Fort, that stronghold of the past.

"I love to talk about these things to you, cousin Ethan," she said; "Val doesn't understand."

Learning something of these confidences, Mrs. Gano took the first opportunity of saying, privately:

"I do not know quite where you stand, my dear Ethan, in matters of religious faith--" and she waited.

"I don't know quite where I stand myself," he had answered.

"You used to have a fine perception for things spiritual."

He smiled.

"I _once_ thought I might find Rome at the end of my wandering."

"Ah!" she said, quite calmly, "my father used to say, 'You will all have to come back to Mother Church.'"

"I do not mean that I felt like that long," Ethan said, hurriedly, realizing that he was sailing under false colors, "or that I think now as I suppose you do. It's probably little more with me than that 'I was born in the wilds of Christianity, and the briers and thorns still hang about me.'"

"You got that from your Uncle John," she said, coldly.

"No; it was said the century before he was born."

"To me, G.o.d is the great fact of life. To be without G.o.d is to be without hope in the world."

Ethan shaded his lowered eyes with one hand as he answered:

"Yes, I've thought that, too."

She looked at him rea.s.sured.