The Open Question Part 119

And I know what to expect. I was ill once before. Grandma gave me a delicious gla.s.s of sangaree."

"You shall have sangaree." He made it himself. "Now, what else did she do for you?" he demanded, like one put upon his mettle.

Val glanced up at him slyly.

"_Grandma_ used to read suitable selections from the Bible."

He leaned against her chair, looking down into her face, smiling as she hadn't seen him smile for many a day.

"_I_ can give you suitable selections," he said, with shining eyes.

"'Behold, thou art fair, my love; behold, thou art fair; thou hast doves' eyes within thy locks: thy hair is as a flock of goats that appear from Mount Gilead.' 'Thy lips are like a thread of scarlet--'"

The voice that to her was different from all the voices of earth went thrilling along her nerves as it had done the first night she heard it at the gate, when in ignorant girl-fashion she had known no more than, "I must follow, follow, follow, wherever it may lead."

That night she whispered pa.s.sionately, "You are loving me more than ever you did."

"Yes," he said, holding her close; "the old Val has come back to me."

"There's another reason," she said in her heart.

Val had at last agreed to go to California.

"Are we sure to be ready to leave the Fort on Thursday?" she asked.

"Why Thursday?"

"Because of the ball."

"I should think we would be quite ready; but does it matter?"

"Very much."

"Why?"

"Oh--a--there'll be a kind of lull after the ball, and I'd rather--a--"

"Go out with flags flying? I understand."

She had laid even New York under tribute for her _fete_. With the help of a _chef_, a florist, and a decorator, a good deal of money had been spent to astonishingly effective ends, considering the smallness of the s.p.a.ce at command. It was hard, even with tons of flowers, to make the old Fort anything but simple and grim; but the more gracious garden, and above all the terraces, lent themselves kindly to flower aisles and arches, and a fairyland scheme of lighting.

The maid was putting the last touch to her mistress's ball-dress.

"That's enough. Now go and ask Mr. Gano to come here a moment."

Val turned a moment later and saw him at the door. The dead black and white of his evening dress gave the fine ivory of his face an added pallor. She looked at him with quickening pulse. No wonder women had found the haunting beauty of that face a troubling memory. As he leaned against the door, fastening a flower in his coat, smiling in at her in the old enigmatic way, she felt suddenly what it would be to her to lose her empire over that restless, homeless spirit. If they were meaning to go on and on, as other people did, how could they hope to escape other people's ending? And she smiled back at him suddenly in a fierce, triumphant fashion. He came forward into the room.

"What is it? Why do you look like that?"

"How do I look?"

"As if--as if--well, I should keep out of your way if I'd done you any wrong."

She laughed as she pulled on her long white glove.

"Am I such a gorgon in my new gown?"

His eyes went slowly over her with a kind of worship in them. She trembled slightly. "Not one pretty word for all my pains?"

He knelt down before her, bent the dark head, and kissed her little white shoes.

As they met a moment in the lancers, Val said: "I wish _she_ could have seen the old Fort to-night. _She_ loved splendor, too." She laughed up at him like a delighted child.

"I've been amused," he whispered back, "to hear people saying it's the most beautiful ball that's ever been given in the State."

"Well, of course, I meant it to be"; and she was whirled away.

It was about two o'clock in the morning that Ethan made his way out of the pavilion, with a feeling of unsupportable weariness. He must get away from all those noisy, irrelevant people; above all, he must get away from the sight of Val's unthinking joy. He walked on to the far corner of the osage-orange thicket, and stood there in the deepest part of the shadow. Down below the terraces the music clanged and jarred. The round j.a.panese lanterns, festooned from tree to tree, were like strings of giant gems, yellow topaz, rose and scarlet coral, lapis lazuli, turquoise, and opal. The late Indian summer night was not cold; every one had been saying, "What wonderful weather!" but to Ethan there was more than a hint of winter in the pungent air. There was that obscure menace, that sense of melancholy lying behind all, and round all, like the sea. Autumn had brought this message to him since his childhood. It was the time when Nature seemed to pause a while in her ceaseless masque of the seasons to whisper her one honest word into the ear of man. "Be warned!" she seemed to say; "be warned!"

Then he remembered--without rea.s.surement, rather with displeasure--that Val's pulses beat time to a brisker measure. To her the mysterious message had translated itself into a breathless sense of something new and strange on its way to her, "something wonderful going to happen, that never happened in the world before." Fresh realization of this "difference" that spread through all their life made to his hara.s.sed sense a clear line of cleavage down between their souls; and he felt himself alone. He remembered her merry look as he pa.s.sed her and Wilbur on the way up the terrace, her mocking whisper, "Not one of the 'Saviours' can dance. Oh, _poor_ America!" Even while he smiled at the remembrance, he was saying in his heart, "At this moment she can laugh and jest, and give a ball!" Then he reproached himself. Bah! woman is a grown-up child. How should she _realize_ existence! She has no system of faith or of philosophy. Her life is a string of moods--white pearls and black upon a thread of hazard.

CHAPTER x.x.xVI

It had pleased Val's love of travel by water, and helped her to endure the thought of her long overland journey to the Pacific, that they should go down by river to the great railway centre and junction for the West. Just before noon, on the day after the ball, all was in readiness for the last leave-taking. The heavier trunks had gone down early to the landing below the Fort. Ethan was leaving his agent and several servants to wind up affairs, and the house was still in gala-dress, and overrun with people. Many of the guests from a distance were not leaving till later, and they all went down to the river "to see the Ganos off." More than half the population of the town seemed to Ethan to be bent on the same errand. He got out of the crowd at the landing, looked at his watch, said he had forgotten something, and hurried back, shaking off Scherer and others, by the way, with scant ceremony. When he reached Mioto Avenue, instead of crossing it and continuing on up to the front entrance of the Fort, he walked hurriedly along the avenue skirting the bottom of the old wilderness, now the garden. When he came to the barberry-bush, he stopped, casting a quick look to right and left. With some pains and no little violence to his hands, he wrenched one of the new palings off the fence, and let himself in. Past the garish pavilion, up the first flight of steps, with a glance towards the thicket of the hundred-leaved rose, where An' Jerusha had stood so long ago with ap.r.o.n to her eyes--on, round the deserted house to the front porch. He stared at his name on the door with a sense of its being strange to find it there still. He lifted the knocker and let it fall; no one came. He rang the bell.

"The people who used to live here must all be gone away," he said to himself, playing with the idea that it was "many years after."

He went round to the back veranda. The door stood ajar. He looked in, wondering to find the place open, and yet fearing to see a face. All the world was down at the landing. He ran up-stairs three steps at a time.

Out of the writing-table drawer in his room he took an old note-book. It had come to light the day before, but there had been no fire in his room, and there was no means now of burning it. But he was glad he had remembered it in time. Down-stairs, as swiftly as of old when Yaffti followed hard; a moment's pause before the long-room door. He opened it, stood looking in a moment at the high red chair, and before pa.s.sing on, bent his head like one who acknowledges a greeting.

As he hurried down the terrace he started, catching sight of some one crouching down by the rose-bushes. He called out sharply:

"Who is that?"

"Me, sir," said the shamefaced Venus, getting up from her kneeling posture.

"What are you doing there?"

Up and down her gingham ap.r.o.n she was furtively rubbing her knees. Think of Venus losing her youth and acquiring "rheumatics!" How exactly like An' Jerusha she was growing!