The Open Question Part 110

"Val! Val! I can't bear it!"

"I'll help you, dear."

"I can't let you die."

"Isn't it strange?--everybody's said that who has loved some one. And where are they all?"

"But you are so young." They had reached the sofa in the dark, and sat there locked together.

"Yes, thank Heaven, we're young." She pressed her face against his wet cheek. "Ah! don't be so terribly unhappy, dear. To die!--why, that's the most wonderful of all."

FOOTNOTE:

[A] By permission, from _A Shropshire Lad_, by A. E. Housman.

CHAPTER x.x.xIV

In her own room--Valeria's old blue room--she stood late the next evening, in her night-gown, before the fireplace.

"Well, Mazeppa, we've had a good run for it; but it's ill-going when one's bound--and when death follows." Only her lips stirred at the opening of the door. "That you, Ethan?"

He came in and shut the door behind him.

"These things I ordered for you in Paris came this morning," he said, speaking very low.

"What are they?" she asked, still staring at the bas-relief.

"A turquoise girdle for your beautiful white body, and a turquoise comb for your hair."

"Oh, beautiful! beautiful!" she said, as he, standing behind her, held the things across her shoulder before her eyes; "but beautiful beyond _anything_!" She took them in her hands. "It was dear of you--" She stopped as she glanced over her shoulder and saw the look in his eyes.

Her own went down before them, and slowly filled, but no tear fell. With an effort she seemed to force the salt-water drops back to their deep well. When she spoke, it was in a tone deliberately quiet, even every-day: "You say I've always counted so serenely on being happy; you don't know how I've dreaded getting to be too old to wear pale blue."

She fondled the stones of the girdle and laid the heart-shaped clasp against her cheek.

He watched her woman-joy in jewels with a look of hardness.

"It would take more than mere years to cure you of your pa.s.sion for turquoise."

"That was what I've been afraid of." She was smiling. "I should never have been able to resist pretty blue things."

How young she looked in her straight white gown and loosened hair!

"What a baby you are, after all," he said, thinking that those eyes of hers seemed to have caught, or kept, no reflection of the glare of life.

His own were hot and bloodshot, hers seemed always to have looked down on the pale cool blue of turquoises, or up to the blue of heaven.

She had nodded when he accused her of being a baby.

"And it's all very well to be a baby with brown hair and smooth forehead; but a gray-haired, wrinkled baby, dressed in baby-blue! It's just as well to be delivered from that."

"Upon my soul!" He stared at her with his strained, sleepless eyes.

"You've no sooner wrenched your mind away from this joy in life, than you fall to setting up a new shrine where you may worship Death, and give him thanks and praise."

"You think _I_ make a G.o.d of Death?" she said, very low. "If I do, it's only a new form of 'Thy G.o.ds shall be my G.o.ds.' If I've thrown away the old idols, it's not because they failed me, but because they failed you.

I have more need of you than I have of them; I cannot leave you to go and kneel apart."

"Shall it be here?" she asked.

"Here? No."

"I think I'd rather it were here--where for me it all began."

"No, no; not where _she_ lived."

"You think she'd come back and interfere?"

He studied her face, wondering a little. "She might interfere without coming back, if we stayed here."

"Besides, to stay here would be to waste time. We must go and see countries we have never seen before."

"Yes, and the journey's end must be far away from any place where we are known."

"Why?"

"Why should we shock people?"

"But it's bound to shock people."

"No, that's a popular fallacy. If I hear a stranger in the street saying that some one, a stranger to us both, took his life a little while ago in the opposite house, I am slightly disturbed, perhaps, at having the mask men wear pushed away for a moment; but I continue my walk, I eat my dinner as usual."

"How shall it be, then, so that our friends shall continue their walks and eat their dinners?"

"Somewhere a long way from here--"

"Yes, yes; we'll go to the Far East--we'll go to the end of the world."

"Yes, to the end of the world."

"And then it will be quite easy, when we've come to the end, just to step off."

"Quite easy."

Val busied herself unceasingly in the preparations for going the long journey. Ethan looked on at her calmness and activity with growing wonder. His first sense of revolt and horror was little by little merged in mere incredulity, then rank suspicion.

"Is her acquiescence genuine, complete?" he tormented himself with thinking, and then scourged his doubting spirit for foul unfaith.