The Open Question Part 106

"I don't see how that affects the situation," said Val, a little haughtily.

Julia was looking after the men.

"You've never forgiven me," she said, "and yet I should think you'd been happy enough to--"

"To what?"

"Not to harbor ill-will."

"I don't see what my being happy has to do with it."

"Why, everything. The one who has got what she wants hasn't much ground for complaint."

"_Much_ ground for complaint?" Val's eyes sparkled. "What do you mean?

What have I to complain of?"

"Nothing, of course, really. But I've thought the few times we've met that you--that you didn't particularly like--" She stopped.

"When I don't like things I change them," said Val, privately congratulating them both that Julia's sentence was left hanging in the air. Pride was working strongly upon her. "It's true enough that I've got what I want; but haven't you?" The two men came back round the L, crunching the new gravel under their feet. "The Halliwells said you are to be married next month."

"Other people always know what I'm going to do so much better than I do my myself."

"It's not true, then?"

"It's not settled."

The men were within ear-shot.

"You and Mr. Scherer must stay to supper," said Val, with a deliberate cordiality, as the men rejoined them, "mustn't they, Ethan?"

In the evening old Mr. Otway and Jerry came over. Julia played, and her _fiance_ sang student songs.

Julia noticed that Mr. Gano made no effort to get Val to sing, and she fell to imagining what his feelings had been when he found that he had silenced that wonderful voice. She went home full of secret pain and irritation--irritation at Tom Scherer because--well, because he was not Ethan Gano; pain at finding how the old feeling she had thought dead had sprung up quick, tormenting, under the careless glance of those sombre eyes.

Almost every morning she resolved to go no more to the Fort; almost every evening saw the resolution broken.

If, in the days that followed, Julia's odd footing in the house was not discouraged by Val's proud tolerance, it was maintained by an att.i.tude on Ethan's part, entirely friendly, sometimes even flattering. With Scherer, too, he was on the best of terms. Scherer, immensely pleased at Gano's liking for his society, was ready to smoke and talk politics or literature till two in the morning. He could sit in court all day, play tennis or sing songs in the evening, and again sit up half the night.

"Do men always need outsiders? Is a wife never enough? Still, it isn't Scherer I mind," Val said, honestly enough, to herself, "although he is beginning to echo and imitate Ethan absurdly."

The real trouble was that they went almost nowhere without Julia. It was Julia and Ethan who one day, when Val was confined to her room with a cold, arranged the steamboat excursions up and down the Mioto.

Val, lying in bed in the blue room, heard them laughing down on the back veranda.

Ethan came up-stairs an hour or so later.

"Oh, you're awake!"

"Well, yes; it isn't likely I'd sleep with all that noise."

"What noise?"

"Why, Julia and you laughing."

"Oh, I'm sorry. It was stupid of us to leave the door open."

The answer jarred.

"Does Julia know my cold's worse?"

"Yes, she wanted to come up and see you."

"She did!"

"I wouldn't let her disturb you. But she's got a plan--rather an amusing plan. Julia is full of ideas."

"What kind of ideas?"

"Oh, plans for pa.s.sing the time. This, for instance: going one of these fine days with hampers and some good fiddlers on an absurd flat-bottomed steamboat, that stops every time a pa.s.senger comes out of the virgin forest to the water's edge and waves an umbrella to the man at the wheel."

"Going an excursion on the steamboat is an idea that every man, woman, and child in New Plymouth has had for the last century."

Ethan smiled.

"Shall I read to you?"

"You don't want to talk?"

She had some ado not to cry, but she kept saying to herself: "Silly!

silly! silly!"

"I don't mind," he answered; but he walked about the room looking at Aunt Valeria's atrocities, and naturally, Val said to herself, growing grave. How he had laughed down on the veranda!

In a couple of days she had shaken off her cold sufficiently to go on the river with Julia's party. Although it was little pleasure to Val, she offered no slightest objection to this excursion or to the second "up river."

But although no one noticed anything amiss, the days were bringing her an acute disquiet. She saw clearly that Julia was not in love with Tom Scherer, and she saw further. A new sense came to her, not altogether depressing, of life's fecund possibility for unhappiness. So many ways of going wrong, only one of going right! Well, it was very exciting.

"Is this what the story-books mean? Am I what's called jealous?" she asked herself. "Am I secretly afraid of Julia? Was Ethan right? Does even joy like ours change and pa.s.s? No, no; it will be all right to-morrow."

Although she called herself a thousand fools, and guilty of vulgar suspicions into the bargain, she presently could not rid herself of the feeling that Ethan was a little cold to her; the mere fancy that this might be so made her shrink from him, lightly evade his caress, first frustrate and then deny his tenderness.

"You are tired of being kissed?" he said, one morning.

As she only smiled and made no answer, he did not for thirty-six hours offer to repeat the offence, and went with lowered looks, silent, impenetrable, when they were alone.

"Is it really so?" she burst out that second evening, after Julia and the rest went home. "Is it only when others are here that you are happy?"

"It's only when others are here that I can forget that there's a rhythm even in such love as ours."