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 passion 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 god of Death?" she said, very low. "If I do, it's
only a new form of 'Thy gods shall be my gods.' 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.
Still, no self-reproach could rid him quite of his mental attitude of
jailer watching, argus-eyed, over a prisoner whose resourcefulness might
any day or night find suddenly a way to freedom.
Life during these days of setting her house in order went on with a
regularity, an outward tranquillity, that would have made a less
sceptical soul than Ethan's pause and wonder. It was not Val who refused
to see their few friends.
"Ethan is very busy." "Ethan is writing." "He's so sorry he can't join
us to-day; but I'll go with you," etc. These were the fragments that
floated up-stairs from the hall, or through his curtained windows from
the gate. So little did Val seem unnerved or pain absorbed, he was sure
that she was more friendly to her friends than ever, more mindful of
them. He watched with wonder her childish pleasure in making little
farewell presents.
"Nobody is forgotten, I think," she said, looking with outward content
at a table piled with labelled packages.
Ethan in his heart was saying: "All this looks like a genuine
leave-taking, all but her own face, her even, unjarred voice, her
unfrightened eyes."
"This is what I'm best pleased about." She took up the long envelope
with the papers referring to Venus's cottage, which had been settled on
that faithful servant for life, and was afterwards to go to the twins.
"Grandma would have been glad about this."
"What are you doing with all _her_ things?" Ethan asked, with restless
dark eyes searching her face for weakness or for subterfuge. "Those
things you are giving away seem all to be yours."
"Yes, all yours and mine."
"And what of hers?"
She shook her head vaguely.
"You'll have to sell them."
"Never! never!"
His eyes gleamed. Was he on the track?
"Other people will sell them if you don't."
Her face clouded.
"I've already given away a great many household things, to Emmie's poor
people, and others Venus has told me about."
"And the rest?"
"I hear Julia."
"She won't come up here."
"She may."
He hastened to secure the door. Val ran out and met Julia at the top of
the stair. Ethan listened to the greeting, and heard Julia say:
"Why, _Val_!"
"What is it?"
"It's true, then?"
"What?"
Val's voice rang quick and anxious.
"You are nicer to me these last few days."
"Oh, do you think so?"
Relief breathed through every syllable.
"Don't you realize that, until just now, you haven't kissed me since--"
"Sh! Let's go down; we mustn't disturb Ethan."
That evening, while Ethan sat smoking and writing letters in his room,
Val got up from the sofa where she was lying.
"Where are you going?" he said, without turning round.
"Down-stairs. I'll be back by-and-by."
"Come here."
She stood beside him. He leaned back in his chair looking at her till
she put her hand over his eyes.
"Don't! don't!" she whispered, leaning her cheek on his hair.
He put his two hands round the little waist, touching the turquoises in
her belt.
"Who is to have this--afterwards?" he said.
She stood up straight.
"You didn't think I would give that away?"
"Well--" His air puzzled her.
"Would you be content," she said, "to think of any one else wearing it?"
"Content! But sometimes it's hard to believe you are facing the thought
of laying it aside."
She flushed under his look.
"I don't know that I _shall_ lay it aside."
While he stared she went out of the room, shutting the door.
He sat for a moment, following up first one train and then the other
suggested by her speech, till he had convinced himself finally that the
explanation of these last days lay in the fact that she was _not_ facing
the compact. She would elude it. He started to his feet. It was as if he
had been brought face to face with proof of wifely infidelity.
He found her in the long room kneeling before the open escritoire.
"What are you doing?"
"Getting ready," she said.
He sat down in the great chair and watched her. She carried handfuls of
yellowed papers and bundles of letters, and heaped them on the bed of
red coal in the grate. She tore the morocco binding off old diaries and
burned the manuscript leaves.
"What are you doing?" he reiterated, starting up like one shaking off a
dream.
"She always said she'd rather things were burned than pulled about by
careless hands, by strangers."
"I remember." He sat down. This did not look like evasion, for Val
shared his own strong sentiment for family things. "I remember, too," he
said, with dull regret, "she used to tell me 'the whole history of a
family is locked up in that escritoire.'"
"It takes a long time to burn."
She stirred the slow-smouldering papers to a blaze.
"It took a hundred years to make," he said; "and many hundred
agonies--and joys," he added, watching her dim smile--"yes, and joys."
He helped her with the next load, looking at the writing on the outside
of the letter-bundles as he undid them.
"Grandfather Gano," he said, throwing a handful on the fire. "Your
father"--another handful. "Aunt Valeria"--another. "Grandm--"
"Don't," cried Val, with quivering face; "you mustn't call their names!"
He looked back at her. "It's like calling them to look at the way we
treat the things they left us."
He went on silently with his task. There was no doubt she felt it
keenly; why do it, then? Only out of shrinking from those "stranger"
hands. Then she was facing the compact, after all.
"Ethan?"
"Yes."
"Why do you stay here?"
"Because the time's so short."
"Dear one"--she came and leaned against him--"go and finish your
writing; I'll come back in an hour."
"No, I'll stay here till you've done."
"Oh, I sha'n't have done all for several days," she said, pleading.
But she knew that look in his face. No use to urge. She turned away, and
scattered the charred paper down on to the hearth among the journal
bindings. He made the fire up again for her. Then, one by one, she took
from the mantelpiece all the old photographs of her husband, and laid
them on the flame--all but the one of the baby Ethan, which she thrust
in her dress, keeping her face hidden from her husband. Then she went
over to a pile of pictures he had not noticed before, lying by the
buffet.
She took a little hammer with a claw handle out of the drawer, and bent
over the frames, loosening the nails, taking out the pictures and
tearing them up.
"What are those?"
"Aunt Valeria's--"
"Why do you bother with them?"
"I don't want people to be smiling at them. Oh, Ethan," she cried out
with the sharpness of intolerable pain, "I--I can't bear it, if you sit
there watching me! I can do it alone almost callously, thinking very
little of _them_, thinking about you and me, till all these poor
reminders are just old paper; but you--" She hid her face.
"They _are_ just old paper, dear."
He went over to her, and she turned from him, trembling.
"No, no; when you are here, they all come alive in my hands. Oh-h-h!"
She lifted her tear-wet face, and held up clasped hands like one praying
pardon. "You were right; they are a hundred agonies, they cry out while
I tear and burn them."
"No, dear, no; the dead are done with crying."
"But these people--" She looked up and down the long room with misty
eyes, like one dimly descrying a throng. "_They_ aren't dead, Ethan."
A sharp fear seized him that the strain had been too much.
"Come--come away," he said.
But she clung to the great brass ring in the lion's mouth on the buffet
drawer. "They won't _really_ die till we have destroyed all their
work--and destroyed ourselves."
"That's true in a sense," he murmured.
"Of course it's true. Does anybody think my grandmother died when the
breath went out of her body? She won't really die till the last person
dies who remembers her. And the others; here they've been all these
years, kept tenderly alive, in letters, in wills and certificates,
diaries, poor little pictures!" Her voice wavered and recovered itself
fiercely. "Shall I tell you what it's like, destroying these things?"
She broke into wild weeping. "All these are like hands clinging on to
life. I wrench their fingers away; I force them down. The glimpses I
have of them--it's like the last look on drowning faces."
"Val," he said, hoarsely, "there's time yet. Suppose we don't shirk our
trust. Suppose we hold the Fort for the Ganos as long as ever we can."
She took his handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped away her tears,
but they flowed and flowed afresh.
"An understanding like ours," he said, hurriedly, "may be
superseded--wiped out by a better understanding." With an eagerness that
seemed strange to himself, he tried to soothe and reassure her.
His heart shrank at her unlighted look.
"Do you hear, Val? We are not so primitive that we must make a fetich of
our compact."
"I'm very primitive, dear; you told me so yourself."
He loosed his hold upon her with a sinking sense of having done
something he could never quite undo. Feeling his arms no longer about
her, she looked up.
"Poor darling!" she said, framing the dark face in her two hands; "I
didn't mean to cry and unnerve you. But it wasn't for me I cried--not
even for you. You ought to forgive me that a few tears fell, just this
once, over those other graves that nobody will ever remember any more."
He stared down at her, seeing how unmoved his words had left her.
"Haven't you heard what I've been saying to you, dear?"
"What was it?" she said, wearily, putting out her hand to take up
another of the faded water-colors. He caught the hand, lifted her in his
arms, and carried her to the big chair. He sat, holding her against him,
thinking how he should put it to her--this new, this growing sense of
his, that the family will to live was stronger than his individual will
to die, and that there was justification in this realization for a
different compact. He sat weighing the chances of the new life, trying
for Val's sake to find loop-holes of escape from the prison he himself
had builded, for Val's sake coercing himself to face payment of the long
penalty of life and guilty fatherhood; in Val's name even trying to
think all might still be well.
He looked down at the face on his breast, and saw that for the moment
all was well without his troubling. Val had cried herself to sleep.
Instead of being glad, he was conscious of an absurd irritation. She
could sleep, then!
Covertly he watched her the next morning, thinking with surprise:
"Yes, even in the broad daylight and away from the haunted long room,
I'm of last night's opinion still. It doesn't matter about me--for her
sake I must go on."
"Come and sit on the terrace," he said, when she was leaving the
breakfast-room.
"Oh, dearest, not now."
"Why not?"
"I--I'm a house-keeper, you know. I have many things to do in the
morning."
"I give you ten minutes by my watch to order dinner."
"Ethan, if you never leave me to myself, I--I can't get ready."
He put his arm through hers, and led her out by the veranda down to the
second terrace. The servant was spreading a Navajo blanket on the
ground, under the catalpa-tree. Val sat down on the barbaric colored
rug, and watched Ethan walking to and fro on the edge of the terrace.
When they were alone--
"Did you misunderstand me yesterday, that you talk again to-day of
getting ready?"
"No, I understood--I understood that because I cried you were ready to
let me break the compact if I wanted to."
He had never heard such contempt in her voice. He stopped and looked at
her. Her face was strangely hard.
"Not because you cried, but because I see the matter from another--I
think better--point of view."
She shook her head.
"You're deceiving yourself because of me."
Her words angered him unaccountably.
"I should have thought it natural that any woman, especially one of your
temperament, would have welcomed the suggestion."
"As if I didn't know it!"
"Know what?"
"That you've been looking out hour by hour, minute by minute, to see if
I wasn't showing the white flag."
In his sense of being convicted, he was ready to curse her keenness.
"Do you know, it strikes me you have no inkling of the mother-sense?"
"That's part of my luck," she said, doggedly.
"You don't _want_ to keep to the first compact?"
"Of course I do; I _shall_ keep to it."
"No," he said, quietly.
She started, clasped and unclasped her hands.
"You are only tempting us," she said. "It may look for a moment like a
possible thing--it isn't."
"It is perfectly possible if we are not superstitious. The new claim
brings a new insight, a new wisdom."
She shivered.
"Think of founding a new existence on broken faith, on cowardice."
"You know you are talking sheer superstition."
She seemed not to hear.
"Do you realize," he went on, "that many people, enlightened enough to
admit we have a right to do as we like with ourselves, would deny we had
a right to deprive another--"
"You talk as if you didn't know a girl 'deprives' a whole possible
family of life every time she says 'No' to a man who asks her to marry
him. No use to talk to me, I'm a hardened criminal."
She made a nervous, mocking motion to get up and cut the colloquy short.
Ethan stopped her with a gesture of grave rebuke.
"Do you know that, if you had committed all the crimes in the calendar,
a capital sentence could not be executed upon you now."
"Think of it!" she said, with indignant eyes. "They'd not only keep the
sword hanging over a poor wretch all that time--they'd let her horror
and shrinking stamp itself on an innocent creature. Oh, man's justice is
an odd jumble!"
"If public justice falls short, what of mine to you?" He walked a few
paces up and down. "I've never seen you like this before, Val."
"I've never before lived through such days," she said, very low.
"You deceived me with your calmness."
"You see how necessary it was--you wouldn't have understood that I
didn't want to break my oath."
"I understand now." He stopped before her with haggard face. "I come
here into a girl's happy life--I take away her content, I snuff out her
ambitions, I give her nothing in return. For years I bar the way to
marriage--for all time I've shut the door on music. It is _my_ fault you
were allowed no outlet for your energies. I force you back on a barren
love for a life-interest, and saying, 'There is only this,' I add,
'Accept it at your peril.' I am filled with horror at the thought of the
way I've marred and broken a beautiful life."
"Oh, dear one, don't, don't! It's not true, you know. It wasn't really
beautiful till you came."
He shook his head.
"Do you want to make it possible for me ever to think of myself without
intolerable loathing?"
"Dear, dear!" She held out her hands.
"Promise me to forget the old evil compact."
"Ethan, you'll regret this," she said, dropping her hands; "it's not you
who ask it of me--it's all those others." She nodded towards the dark
mass of shadow made by the Fort against the gay autumnal background of
scarlet maple and golden elm. "It's the Ganos--it's _she_ most of all. I
might have known. If you live under her roof, you come under her law."
She knew him too well to imagine she could stand out successfully
against his resolution that the compact should be abandoned. What little
by little helped to heal her spirit was presently her belief that he not
only willed the new course, but desired it. Of that he had fully
persuaded her--he had almost persuaded himself.