The Open Question Part 103

They had come back from the burial, and for the first time in their lives Val and Emmie were in the old house without that constant presence that had come to seem as much a part of the Fort as its very walls.

Ethan was still there. Mrs. Otway had come to be with them through those first days; but since the dead body had been carried out of the house loneliness was lodged there like a bailiff, violating the sanct.i.ty and blessedness of home.

Ethan found Val in the long room the next evening, sitting on the floor crying, with head against the big empty chair.

"Even you can't make the awful loneliness go away," she said. "I must wait awhile before I can think about taking up life."

The next day she said to him: "You must go away now, and you must come back for me."

"You still think it possible?"

"For you to go away?"

"For me to come back."

"Possible? Inevitable!" She smiled up at him with an air of tender mockery. "No escape from _me_. But never forget"--she was grave enough now--"we may escape paying the penalty--people do."

He studied her a moment. No; she was thinking only of the natural "chance." No idea of trying to control it had come her way. "Nor could she comprehend," he thought, "how, even if I am wrong in my inveterate mistrust, or if science should to-morrow carry us so far that we should be demonstrably beyond the reach of danger--she could not realize that no power on earth or in the heavens could make us fully credit our security, could carry us beyond the reach of _fear_. Imagination is, by so much, mightier than reason. Trust imagination to keep the fear alive, to work without ceasing, by day and by night, subtly to destroy the fabric of our lives."

But even when the strong contagion of his fear had reached and mastered her a moment, it was fear with another face.

"I see plainly"--she laid her hands on his shoulders--"you think that it will mend matters if you have the treachery to go the long journey by yourself, and leave me alone in the world. But it would only mean that we should die apart, and now, when we might have died later and together, and--and"--she laid her face against him--"after great joy."

He stroked her hair with an unsteady hand. "Look at me!" she cried on a sudden, lifting up her face. "You aren't afraid? Don't you see that I'd keep my word?"

"Yes, you'd keep your word."

In his inmost heart it would have helped him at that moment to have found any softness of shrinking there.

"Then you'll come when I send--you'll come and take me away?"

Was it fancy, or had she lightly stressed the "me"? He thought of how he had come first of all and taken John Gano to the South to die; how he had returned to follow his grandmother to her long home. He had a sudden vision of himself in the guise of Death. "Each time I come," he thought, "I see some one of this house off on his last journey. Soon little Emmie will be left alone."

But Emmie was not left to the last, and Ethan, though he never knew it, was responsible for her, too, turning her back upon the Fort--upon the world.

The effect of Mrs. Gano's death on a clinging and dependent nature like Emmie's was painfully apparent. Val's new-born sense of tender guardianship over her younger sister was certainly not weakened by the younger girl's confession, after he went away, of her pa.s.sion for Ethan.

"I always thought it might come right for me," she said, "till--till I saw the look on his face when he bade you good-bye. When will you be married, Val?"

"I don't know, dear."

"Some time during this year?"

"I should think so."

The younger girl bowed a meek head, and turned to her faith as a refuge, or, as Ethan would have said, an opiate. But the old helps seemed to have lost somewhat of their efficacy. She began to go to ma.s.s, and one day sought an interview with the Roman Catholic priest. A few months afterwards she was received into the Roman Church.

Val would not leave her sister while she was going through these phases, and forbade Ethan to come till she should send for him.

But Mrs. Gano had not been in her grave a year when Emmie herself made the final move that broke up the old home. How much religious fervor had to do with it, how much a sense of unfitness for the battle of life, how much a feeling in the gentle heart that she was delaying Val's happiness, no one ever knew. She bade her sister good-bye with many tears, turned her back upon the Fort, and entered the first year of her novitiate at the Convent of the Sacred Heart.

A week later, in early August, Val was married very quietly to her cousin, in the Church of St. Thomas. "But the real marriage was that evening on the river when we propitiated the Fates," she whispered, as they came down the church steps.

CHAPTER x.x.xII

They went abroad at once. At first, in a rhythm of rapture and of terror, the time went by, now with flying, now with faltering feet. But albeit living on the volcano's brink is possible to men--living there with fear is not. The fire still rages under foot, but the terror must burn out, or else the life.

It had been to Ethan a standing marvel that happiness--forgetfulness--had visited them so persistently even in these first months. In vain he said to himself, "Fool! be sure Nemesis keeps the score!" Of what avail that a man should tell himself Nemesis would exact the uttermost farthing for every care-free hour, when life, in the guise of the woman he loved, was luring him on from one day to the next, and the next, and the next?

April found them at Nice. They had come back to their hotel one night after the play, and Val had gone out on the balcony that opened off their sitting-room, declaring the night too glorious to waste indoors.

Ethan followed her, and while the town went to sleep, they sat there in the moonlight, and talked of many things. In a moment of protest against the anodyne of gladness that he felt stealing into his blood, he burst out with something of his wonder at their frequent and utter forgetting of the shadow.

"It's not wonderful at all--it's what all the world does without our good reason." She pressed closer to his side; then, as if feeling the sudden frost that had fallen on his spirit, she drew away, but smiling and unchilled. "Dear lord and master, I give you warning, I've done with fearing. I see that Life means well by us; I sha'n't doubt her any more."

"Unberufen"; and he smote the wooden bal.u.s.trade with his hand.

"I tell you plainly"--she flashed a tender defiance in his face--"the Fates gave me a very small stock of fear to begin with, and I've used it up. It's"--she held up her little hands and flung them out to the right and left--"_all gone_!"

"Hush; don't jest about it, dear."

"Never was more serious. I'm warning you. Not all the king's horses nor all the king's men--"

"Hush, hush!"

"Not even"--with a disdainful toe she touched the yellow-covered book that lay on the balcony floor--"not even your old Dumas fils can frighten me."

"I never heard him accused of trying."

"Oh yes, and most insidiously, in those lines he wrote to go before _Diane de Lys_."

"The lines to Rose Cheri?"

"Yes. If I were going to be frightened-- Ugh! I did have a black moment."

He drew her into his arms with a sheltering impulse.

"I had forgotten the verses were--"

"Oh, it wasn't the verses, it was the situation. He had loved her--"

"Yes, I remember; and she died."

"Isn't it queer that it should be left to poor Rose Cheri's lover to convince an American, with a very pessimistic lover of her own--left to Dumas to _convince_ me of death? You know when Henri de Poincy came for you this afternoon?"

"I left you to rest and read up _La Dame aux Camelias_; not meditate on mortality."