The Open Question Part 121

It was so she always spoke of Chinatown. He thought of the narrow, malodorous alleys, the stifling shops, and regretted, with a double pang, the breezy bay and _Yaffti_. However, he would have a couple of hours' sail before luncheon to sustain him.

"All right," he said out loud, "we'll go to China this afternoon."

As she leaned against him he put his arm about her waist.

"Where's your turquoise gewgaw?" he said.

"Here"--she lifted a hand to her hair.

"No; I meant the other--the--" As he noticed the shade on her face: "You've lost it! Aha! I knew you would if you wore it every day."

"I haven't lost it," she said.

"Tired of it already?"

"No; I didn't put it on this morning."

He looked at her with changed eyes. She dropped her own, went over to the lattice, and stood there facing seaward. When he came in to get the tobacco-pouch he had left on the rustic table, she went out. He thought of that morning in Paris when he had designed the belt and chosen the stones. How he had dwelt in imagination on the moment when he would clasp it round her, see her joy, and be given his reward! Then came back the actual moment of his giving her the gift--came back with an even greater anguish than he had known in living through the moments by the fire in his wife's room at the Fort. He tasted the intolerable bitter of the contrast between what he had hoped that hour would bring, and what it actually had brought, till he was ready to cry out: "What demon made me mention it? She's right not to wear the accursed thing!"

As soon as Val went in-doors he would go for a sail. For nearly half an hour she had been trailing about the garden in her soft white draperies, now bending down to look at some growing thing, now looking up to the wind-blown cloud ma.s.ses, to where the strong sunlight poured down between the rifts. He leaned against the door of the summer-house, rolling cigarettes. He suspected rather than heard her talking her foolish "little language" to the bird in the juniper-bush, the spoiled bird that always got crumbs after breakfast. By-and-by she came towards him across the lawn with a little green branch in her hand. He realized that she must be weary, she was dragging her feet. Something curiously unlike Val, something inelastic, shackled, struck him in her gait. His face darkened suddenly; an involuntary shock of repulsion went through him, a resentment keen, impersonal, unconscious of everything save his own inward recoil, until he noticed Val had stopped short and the green branch had fallen at her feet. He went forward to pick it up. As he handed it to her he saw her eyes were full of tears.

"My dear one, what is it?" he said, with sharp remorse.

"Don't--don't look at me! Turn away your eyes."

"Why--why, dear?"

"Your eyes hurt--oh, they hurt me!"

"How _can_ you say such a thing!" he exclaimed, ready to perjure himself. He would have laid his arm about her, but she shrank away.

"It's not like you, Val!" he began, almost indignantly.

"No, no," she said, on a wave of her old impetuosity, "it's not a bit like me! I would have loved the great miracle. I would have waited upon it reverently every step of the way, so proud, so happy--"

She broke off and went from him into the house.

His painful remorse was checkered by the reflection, "And I was going for a sail! Impossible now."

He stayed all the morning in the house or garden, reading to Val when she would let him, surrounding her with every offering of tenderness his keen self-reproach could invent. But he was too close in spirit to the woman at his side not to divine a little how she shrank from this new considerateness that was own cousin to pity.

As he sat in the library reading aloud before luncheon, he became acutely conscious of a change in her mood. At first he thought the story was interesting her deeply, and began to pay more attention to it himself, glancing up covertly now and then at the face opposite to him.

The languid eyes were full of light again, her apathy swallowed up in some unexplained alertness. He was so struck with the change that he bent forward and laid his hand over hers. It trembled sharply under his touch. She rose and walked about the room. He read on till the luncheon-bell rang. She sat at the table scarcely eating, answering his remarks with gentle vagueness, and looking much out of the window.

"No hope of going to China to-day," he said, at last, following her eyes.

"Not at two," she answered. "That was why I didn't dress."

After luncheon they went back to the library.

"What do they mean by shutting the windows?" she exclaimed, and flung them wide.

The papers in the room flew about, and he closed the door. He took up the book again, feeling that neither of them was much in the mood to talk. But the day had grown so overcast that he went and sat in the bay-window, so that he might read the small print more readily. Val moved restlessly about. He refrained from looking at her again until he became conscious that she had stopped suddenly. He glanced up, and saw her standing rooted, with a look of tension on her face, her head slightly tilted, lips parted, breath held.

"What is it?" he said, nervously.

"Don't you hear?"

"What?"

"Yaffti."

"What nonsense!" he laughed.

"s.h.!.+ Listen!"

In the silence he caught the faint far-off growl of thunder.

"You forget," he said, after a moment, speaking as one who tries to cast off some evil spirit, "you forget I've made _Yaffti_ fast in the bay."

"He's coming inland to-day," she said; "he's tired of waiting for us."

Ethan had picked up the book, and read on with a curious under-current of excitement. As he turned the leaves he would throw out a swift glance, almost like one running for his life who keeps an eye on an enemy.

The flying cloud squadrons had rallied. They were drawn up now in serried ma.s.ses, black and threatening. The sun had fallen back overpowered, vanquished utterly. Such noonday darkness in the lands of suns.h.i.+ne is a commonplace of sub-tropical climate, but to Ethan it came to-day as a portent and a warning.

Val moved from window to window, watching the great red-wood trees swaying and las.h.i.+ng, and taking the wind in her face.

Ethan closed his own window, and suggested that the others be put down.

"No, no," she opposed him, almost sharply.

"What's the matter with you to-day?" he said at last, unable to endure her restlessness any longer. "Can't you follow the story--can't you think when there's a thunderstorm?"

"Oh yes," she said; "I can think best of all then."

As she stood looking up in a kind of ecstasy, suddenly the lightning played about her. Involuntarily Ethan shrank and shut his eyes in that first instant. In the stupendous crash that followed he sprang up. Was the house struck?

She stood quite still with exultant eyes, listening for the thunderpeals as if they were answers to some question, waiting for the lightning like one lost in the dark, who sees a torch borne nearer.

He put down the windows in spite of her "Ah no! ah no!" just as the rain-cloud broke over the house.

"I keep thinking it's the big tulip-tree at home," she said, "making that sound like surf on the sh.o.r.e."

The rain dashed in floods against the window-panes, and ran down in sheets like sea-water off the port-holes of a s.h.i.+p.

"One good thing," said Ethan, "it's too violent to last long."

The house groaned and trembled under the bombardment of the storm.