One peculiarity of life at the Fort was that although visitors in
general were in high disfavor, everybody, from Mrs. Gano down to
Jerusha--especially Jerusha--was always hoping for a visit from cousin
Ethan. And he never came. The last vacation before Val's arrival Emmie
said he had had to go with the Tallmadges to Bar Harbor. This June he
couldn't come, because his aunt Hannah had died, and his grandfather was
alone; but he thought he might come "later on." Now that the maples were
scarlet and gold, he wrote regretfully, saying that, after all, he had
to go back to Harvard without any holiday. He sent his love to his
cousins, and the annual photograph--which she had commanded to be taken
each year--to his grandmother. She had a row of them on the mantel-piece
in her room. When the new one came like a falling leaf each autumn, she
spent anxious days deciding which of the old ones should go in a drawer
to make room for the latest. There were three that never yielded to any
new-comer, however beguiling. Ethan's cousins, it must be admitted, who
were ardent admirers of the more recent pictures, thought little enough
of Mrs. Gano's favorite three.
The first was of a child about three years old in his night-gown--a
dreamy little face framed in a halo of curling hair. Yes; it was more
like an angel than a flesh-and-blood boy, but it was yellowed and faded,
and not taken at an interesting age, so his two cousins thought.
The next was a very solemn little chap with a tiny pail in his hand,
dressed in a kilt, and wearing a wide white collar, seeming to labor
hopelessly with a wooden spade in a world of unmitigated woe.
The third had been taken in Paris with his school friend Henri de
Poincy, and he had on "funny French clothes," but he held his slender
figure very easily erect, and without seeming to remember he was having
his photograph taken. He had written from Neuilly to his grandmother:
"I always think of my summer at the Fort when I go to have your picture
done."
If that were the case, this time the remembrance must have been a
gracious one, for his dark little face was lit, expectant, beautiful.
"Why did he go to France?" Val had asked.
"Oh, some nonsense about accent, as if the only accent to be considered
was the French." Mrs. Gano threw back her head. "And then a cousin of
the Tallmadges married a Frenchman, a man called De Poincy. The mother
died, and left a boy--"
"That awful little ape in the pho-- I mean Henri?"
"Yes; Henri, a _very_ nice boy."
Mrs. Gano would not have prolonged the conversation, but Emmie said:
"I'm sure he's nice. Cousin Ethan's letters always say beautiful things
about Henri. _Do_ go on."
"I've told you scores of times."
As if that were not the flimsiest reason for not repeating a stock tale,
half of whose charm is its familiarity.
"Didn't cousin Ethan find Henri at the Tallmadges' when he got back?"
"Yes, after that summer he spent here." The old eyes were mild. "And
although Henri was a couple of years older, the two boys set up a sort
of David and Jonathan league. And when Henri's father sent for him to
come back to France--they said--humph!"
The mildness vanished in a sudden blaze.
"What did they say?"
Again Mrs. Gano threw back her head.
"Ethan _had_ been coming here. We had his room all ready for him, and
Valeria had bought pink wax-candles for his dressing-table--a most
unnecessary extravagance for a boy, as I told her. And as for Jerusha,
she wasted half her mornings brightening up Ethan's knocker on the front
door, and the rest of the time she was making cinnamon rolls. And, after
all--humph!" she said, with something rather near to a snort.
"Then those Tallmadges wrote, didn't they?" said Emmie, gently applying
the spur.
"Ho, yes, the Tallmadges wrote. The children were heart-broken at the
idea of separating, and so they had to let Ethan go to Neuilly with the
De Poincy boy."
"To improve his accent!" added Emmie, with borrowed scorn.
"Oh yes; I admitted in my reply that Ethan's accent was no doubt again
in need of improvement, but it had not been necessary to send him so far
afield as France."
"How long did he stay?" asked Val.
"Three years. He came back the summer you were born. He was nearly ten."
"Well, it's a good thing he came back. He does look a gump in those
French clo's--I mean"--Val caught herself up hurriedly, seeing how
unpopular the observation was--"I mean, I like him best in proper
American things. This last picture's scrumptious!"
After this, it was not only gran'ma and An' Jerusha who held the Fort in
readiness for Ethan's coming, eager to capitulate at the first blow on
the door; but two little girls as well, in their different ways, set
their faces towards the day when E. Gano's big brass knocker should be
lifted by E. Gano's own hand.
School had been postponed, partly because Mrs. Gano was too anxious
about her son's health, and too absorbed in the task of convincing him
indirectly that life was worth living, to take the necessary steps for
entering her granddaughter in the Primary Department of the Plymouth
Seminary for Young Ladies. But, besides this preoccupation, it was
recognized that the fall term was already far advanced, and it might be
as well--it was certainly more economical--to wait till after Christmas.
However, the growing discomfort and complication of having so
objectionable a child about hastened the beginning of Val's school days.
With great misgiving, and full of suspicion, Val took her place at a
little hacked and initialed desk in the down-stairs school one fine day
towards the middle of November.
But we are forever being disappointed of our direst fears, as well as of
our dearest hopes. She found that she soon got the "hang" of the
lessons; that her next-door neighbor, Julia Otway, was the nicest girl
in school, and very soon her "best friend"; that Val herself could run
faster than anybody in the games at recess; and that she had fallen
blissfully under the spell of pretty Miss Matson, the primary teacher,
who, strange to say, seemed to like Val.
The bustling life at the Plymouth Seminary for Young Ladies, full,
varied, delightful, would perhaps be considered by the professional
biographer of vital importance in moulding a young person's character;
for was this not the time and the place of her education? One is
inclined, in Val's case, at any rate, to say no. She learned by rote, at
that excellent institution, certain more or less useful things, and,
more important still, she made two or three dear friends, who taught her
much of value about the human heart; but for the most part she was
_educated_ at home. There, and not at school, she, in common with many
young people, found the influences that made her what she ultimately
became.
Her father, if he understood the matter so, naturally did not so express
himself. Perhaps he thought this child of his had too little of the Gano
love of books, and was over-fond of running breathless races, and
playing ball with the neighbor's boy.
"You came here to go to school, you know. You've played all your life up
to this. Now you must begin to work. This is a very important time in
your life."
"Is it?"
Val sat up very straight, with shining eyes and an air of pleased
responsibility.
"Oh, very important, indeed. For now you have still time to decide what
kind of a woman you're going to make of Val Gano."
"Oh, have I?"
He nodded.
"You can make up your mind you won't be a dull, ignorant person, all
your life bound in shallows and in miseries."
"No, indeed," she said, with vigor.
"It's in your power now to take the necessary steps towards some better
fate. By-and-by it will be too late: you'll be like the crooked catalpa
in the terrace, grown awry and too old to straighten out."
"No, I shall be like the tulipifera rhododendron."
He laughed.
"You are ambitious, my dear"; and then he sighed. "Few come up to
tulipifera. Now, I am far enough from being a rich man, and I can't give
my daughters a fortune; but I can give them something far more
valuable."
"Now?"
"Yes, I've begun giving it. I mean an education."
"Oh!"
This was a blow.
"See that you make the most of it. It will put a key in your hands that
can unlock a hundred doors to happiness. I am doing with you--only a
little more helpfully perhaps--what the Swedish peasant did with his
eldest son."
"What did he do?"
"He took the boy up to the top of the highest hill in the country, and
said, 'You are young, my son, but I am about to give you your
inheritance. Look abroad'--and he stretched out his arms--'behold, I
give you the world! Go forth and take what portion you will.'"
Val drew a quick breath.
"Ha! I know what _I_ want."
"What do you think you want, little girl?"
"I want to be loved--oh, but tremendously! And I want to do some one
thing awfully, awfully well."
It was the most old-fashioned, unchildlike speech of which Val had ever
delivered herself.
"Well, my dear," her father spoke, dreamily, "to be greatly loved, and
to do well some one piece of work, isn't a bad destiny. Older heads than
yours would be at a loss to better it."
Even to her father, even in that moment of great outgoing, she had not
liked to particularize what it was she wanted to do so "awfully, awfully
well." But there was no doubt in her own mind that she was going to be a
dancer. She practised every rainy day, and sometimes when it didn't
rain, down in the dark parlor, where it smelt so solemn and musty. There
was a huge oil-painting on the north wall, of Daniel Boone and his dogs
and other friends "Discovering Kentucky." Although their eyes were
turned ever towards "the dark and bloody ground," they were Val's
audience. To the burly hunter and his raccoon-capped and shaggy
companions she bowed and pirouetted, waved her arms and tossed her
heels. She did not dare touch the old rosewood piano after one or two
rapturous attacks upon the yellow keys had brought swift retribution out
of her grandmother's chamber; but dancing was not only a glorious and
heady excitement, but, unlike most of this young person's pastimes, it
was noiseless; it could be carried on by the hour without rousing any
one's suspicions, unless perchance a vague uneasiness as to "what keeps
that child so quiet." When discovered, she was usually found to be
breathlessly examining the gilt-edged annuals and gift-books on the
centre table, or else staring into the "stereopticon," though what view
was visible in that dim light remained a marvel.
Perhaps the most memorable crisis of her childhood had found her in the
twilight of that musty parlor. It was a pale-gray, teeming spring
morning, after a night of rain--Saturday, and yet she had been forbidden
to go and see her friends next door.
"When _I_ was a little girl I didn't live at the neighbors'."
Val had been learning lessons, perched in the high window-seat of her
own room, looking out now and then with a glad sense of coming summer to
the early red of maple blossoms, and off to the blue Mioto Hills, that
rose on the other side the river, shutting in her world. Presently, down
below the rain-soaked terraces, in Mioto Avenue, a street-organ began to
play.
She dropped her book and leaned farther out. A watery gleam of sunshine
fell on the warm, dripping world. The smell of earth came up fresh, and
full of a mysterious promise. The "grind-organ," as the children called
it, sang and clanged. Val beat the swift time with her fist on the stone
sill, and her dangling feet moved staccato to the tune. She half closed
her eyes. Ah! now she could see better. She was gliding through a
brilliant scene at a ball. She was just sixteen, and dressed in blue and
silver, and there was a throng about her--all lovers! There were no
women, save those that looked enviously on from a far background of
flower-festooned wall. The faces near the blue-and-silver maiden were
chiefly strange, but all noble and beautiful. All these the generous
future would provide, but one or two she recognized as having followed
her out of the present. There was cousin Ethan as he looked in the last
picture, Jerry--and, well in the foreground, Jerry's handsome elder
brother, and certain other less-known young townsmen not to be spared
from the gay group of gallants; but they were destined, every man Jack
of them, to break their faithful hearts. She smiled and waved her
geography--her fan, of course--and each young gentleman took courage.
But wait! In a minute she would be carried off by the tall, dark,
fierce-eyed hero, who lived somewhere--somewhere--not in ballrooms,
except as the eagle may swoop into the valley--not in cities, but in
some mountain fastness in the kingdom at the end of the world.
Many a time she had wondered how they were to meet, how he was ever to
know that she lived with a cruel grandmother in New Plymouth. Ha! now it
was plain. The organ had ground out the truth. She would run away
by-and-by. He would see her somewhere dancing, and he would say
"Eureka!" "Ah!" she would say, "but I'm half engaged to my next-door
neighbor, or to the Duke of Daffy-down-dilly." "What does that matter to
me?" Whiff! he would carry her off, and say she should love him, whether
she liked it or not. Oh, it was wonderful!--it was palpitating to lie in
the dark, or in the pale spring sunshine, with shut eyes, and think
about this king of men, who would not be denied. Val couldn't remember a
time when she had not told herself stories with this fruitful theme for
inspiration. The proud, dark figure had come dimly out of the fairy
world, and had grown more human and distinct day by day. He began by
being a prince, and for some years he wore a gold-embroidered velvet
robe. By degrees he adopted a less and less striking attire, which,
however, had never yet degenerated into mere modern evening dress. The
noble gentleman could not be expected to put off his romantic melancholy
along with his royal robes, for a large part of the excitement of this
game of the imagination lay in the lady's proud rejection of his suit,
and flight from the fortress where he thought to hide her--his hot
pursuit--his being baffled, disappointed, and reduced to wild despair
before his ultimate victory. And this final triumph (oh, strong survival
of the savage in the female breast!) was invariably a triumph of arms.
Not even to a hero who was handsome, and tall, and strong as a giant;
not even to a hero half bandit, half blameless knight, that every other
girl in the world pined for, that every man envied and must needs
honor--not even to such a one will the untutored dreamer yield herself a
willing bride. A willing bride! The very phrase offends some ancient
canon fixed against self-abandonment in the very blood and bone of
womankind.
Can it be that in the ages unrecorded, before men going hence left
behind them laws on stone, or testament on papyrus, the women of that
far-off time had inscribed a legend on the hearts of all their sex,
graved it so deep and plain that a little girl of the nineteenth
century (casting about for stories to send herself to sleep) may read it
in the dark after all those æons have gone by? Can it be that, reading
and understanding this language, which being dead yet speaketh, knowing
the ancient mother-tongue better even than her father's own, she takes
the legend for a text, obeys it as a natural law, and thrills to it as
did her old ancestress of the cave and tent, smiling covertly, and
deliciously afraid?
The fresh wind blew the child's wild hair across her face; the sun shone
down more golden; the organ jangled through its tunes. Now, with a jerk
of restlessness, it abandoned "Il Trovatore" and struck into a waltz.
Ha! the window-seat was too cramped. She slid down and began to dance.
Gran'ma's voice. The little girl stopped suddenly, opened the door, and
went sedately down-stairs, with her lesson books conspicuously in
evidence. At the bottom she stopped and listened. Cautiously she opened
the parlor door and closed it behind her. She flung her books down and
coursed wildly round the centre table, as one sees a dog just let out of
the kennel celebrate his liberty. Suddenly she stopped and bowed
solemnly to Daniel Boone, saying under her breath:
"Now I'm the greatest dancer on the earth. Now they're all applauding.
Now I make three courtesies. They clap and clap till I begin again. This
is the most wonderful dance of all."
She started afresh, curving her arms above her head, fantasticating
steps, some graceful, some grotesque, whirling faster and faster to the
rhythm that was beating in her brain. Suddenly a dark face looked out of
the throng in that theatre of her imagination, and she knew it was the
face of her fate. There was the Duke of Daffy-down-dilly, too, leaning
out of a box and applauding as hard as he could. The dark man sat quite
still, but his eyes gleamed.
After the last great dance, which was called "The Filigree Finale" (all
the dances had beautiful names), the Duke threw her a bouquet of roses,
and held out his arms.
"I spurn the flowers." She kicked out a scornful foot. "I turn my back.
Oh, it's _deafening_ the way they're applauding!"
Suddenly, in the heartless process of dancing away from plaudits and a
duke, she stopped short as if she had been shot. The color fled out of
her face, and her thin hands dropped limp at her side. There was a kind
of terror in her eyes as presently she moved forward, dragging her
wings, so to speak, to the opposite end of the room, where, over a
marble-top table, an old-fashioned mirror reflected Daniel Boone. The
child peered into the glass, but it was dark, and the marble-top table
held her at arm's-length. She could only see dimly the top of her head.
She dropped down in a miserable little heap between the claw feet of the
table. Perhaps she alone of all the heroines of earth was not, never
could be, beautiful! It had never occurred to her before. A thousand
recollections seemed to rush at her at once to fasten the fear in her
heart, to make it hideous certainty. If she had been going to be
beautiful, would not some one have mentioned it? Emmie had heard a
thousand times how pretty she was. Cousin Ethan was known to be the most
beautiful of boys. As to Val's looks, why, she was so little a credit to
a handsome race that nobody could be got to own her. Hadn't her mother
said, "Emmie is like me; but Val--I suppose she's more like you"? and
her father had hurriedly disclaimed the faintest resemblance between his
eldest daughter and himself. Her grandmother had said: "You are not like
my side of the house, and I don't see a trace of the Gano in you. I'm
sure I don't know where you came from." Ah, it was clear she had not
referred to mere wickedness. She was repudiating her descendant's
plainness. The child put her hands over her face. But it was incredible
that this blow at the root of joy was meant for her. She dropped her
hands, taking heart of grace. Katie O'Flynn, the cook in New York, had
said, in some interval of truce, that Val had "rale Oirish oyes," and
she had said it with no accent of condolence. If only she hadn't added,
"They're put in wid smutty fingers, me darlint!" Even at the time Val
had felt the last remark tactless, and had changed the subject, but
now--
"Oirish oyes!" It was meant well, but it had a horribly common sound. It
was another way of saying, "You look like the cook." And yet--and yet no
one had ever cared so much about being beautiful before. She would have
submitted gladly to letting those "rale Oirish oyes" be torn out and the
poor quivering little body be hacked in pieces if only it might be put
together in a truer harmony. But there _were_ ugly people in the world,
who began ugly, and went on being ugly to the bitter end. How had she
come to take it so for granted that beauty belonged to her as a right?
There was Miss Tibbs, who lived near by in Mioto Avenue. Think of being
like that! with taily hair, and little, little eyes, and teeth that--
No! no! no! She struggled to her feet, storming up into the high
window-seat, and straining till she opened the near window, and could
force back the heavy shutter, letting in a flood of light. But it was
not the sudden glory of the day that made the child blink and draw back
so suddenly. Miss Tibbs was passing the gate.
"Good-morning," said that lady, looking more appalling than ever.
"It's like that--like that I'll be," thought the child, tumbling to the
ground.
Feverishly she swept the card-basket and the books off the table. Then,
drawing up a chair, she climbed up on it, clinching her teeth and
setting her jaws to bear the shock that perhaps awaited her. And still
there was hope in her heart as she leaned forward on the marble top and
looked into the mottled glass with imploring eyes. Slowly the tears
gathered. In mute agony she turned away, climbed off the table, and hung
limp over the back of the chair.
"Oh, God, I'm ugly!" she said, and clung there with shut, hot eyes. The
moments passed. "I can't bear it, God. Let me die!"
The strained voice was muffled in her clinched little jaws, and with
her fists she beat helplessly on the back of the old-fashioned chair.
Presently she slipped down to the floor, and wandered aimless about the
room. When she came near the glass again she glanced with a sharp
conviction of intolerable shame at the top of a shaggy head, which was
all that she could see. Even that was too much. She flew to the window
and drew the shutters to, feeling she should never be able to bear the
light again.
"What did You make me for?" she cried, arrested an angry instant, facing
sharply about, as though confronting an enemy. "I didn't want to come if
I had to be ugly!" She slid down off the window-seat, and walked quickly
to and fro with rising anger. "It would have been so easy, too, for
_You_. Just think what it means to me!" She stopped and looked
heavenward. The "Oirish oyes" were blazing. "I should think You'd prefer
things pretty for yourself. But if You don't, why do You go and spoil it
all for me?" And so on, in frantic young fashion, she beat her wings
against the old prison-house. For between the origin of evil and the
origin of ugliness there is no great gulf fixed in the female mind.
Looking back long afterwards on this hour of anguish, she could not
laugh, as philosophic grown-up folk are pleased to do, at the sorrows of
childhood. She knew that that morning in the musty parlor was one of the
bitterest experiences life had brought her, simply because it had come
to her as a child, for whom beauty was as yet a conventional physical
perfection, and not the high soul of things.
After the one-o'clock dinner, she had shaken Emmie off, and gone out to
walk up and down in the warm wind behind the house. She had come out
bareheaded, and her shock of wild hair was blown about almost as if some
one were saying the "I b'lieve," and the Windgeist, or some other "der
stets verneint," had borrowed Val's form of dissent.
She was a thin slip of a girl, and no one seeing her would have much
wondered that this young worshipper of obvious red-cheeked, dimpled,
yellow-haired, picture-book beauty, had been bitterly disappointed with
the thin little face, its irregular lines and faint coloring, the
good-sized mouth in lieu of the heroine's puckered rosebud, the tawny no
color, all colors, hair, that merely waved distractingly instead of
curling; the black eyebrows and lashes, too well defined--yes, "smutty";
the long, deep-set gray eyes, that no wishing could make blue before the
glass, but that sometimes, out in the sunshine, changed to turquoise,
and sometimes in the dusk or lamplight were limpid, gleaming black.
"Hello!" said Jerry, through the osage-trees.
"Hello!"
"What's the matter?"
"Nothing."
"Been getting it?"
"Don't be an idiot!"
"Come and fish!"
"Can't."
"Does Mrs. Gano make you stay here?"
"She can't _make_ me do anything."
"Then come. I'm going to Bentley's Pond."
Val wavered. She might fish even if she was ugly. In fact, as she came
to think of it, it was one of the few things left to do--that and
disobeying gran'ma.
"All right; wait a minute."
She went in-doors for her hat. A sense of returning life came warmly
over her. She could still fish. Fishing alone was a career. She had a
panoramic glimpse of herself through the future years--fishing morning,
noon, and night; in all weathers and in every clime; as a young lady,
fishing; fishing as a woman; as an old bent crone, still
fishing--fishing forever and forever, her head tied up in a veil. She
planted a Tam o' Shanter on her wind-blown hair, thinking: "I won't
begin with a veil to-day. I don't mind Jerry--he's ugly, too."