The Open Question Part 25

"I'll take care of the marbles and the knife for cousin Ethan," said Val, "but you can have the other things," and she flung the treasured box to the opposite side of the room. The vandalism widened Emmie's trouble-clouded eyes. "Now my clothes are going in the bureau."

Val was sorting and folding away her own belongings with a deftness characteristic of her thin little hands. Emmie watched the process tearfully.

"And _my_ books and things like that go on this side," she went on, busily bringing order out of chaos. "Now, do you understand?" she said, sternly. "This half o' the room is mine. You can't _ever_ come here."

The little girl at the door nodded, speechless.

"Perhaps I'll help you afterwards to put your things away in the cupboard. First go down into the hall and bring me a piece of chalk out of the lift-up chair where they keep the brushes."

"Chalk!" What _was_ she going to do?

"Yes, chalk, goosie gander! Chalk! chalk!"

Emmie fled. She had serious thoughts of never returning, but curiosity and the memory of her best hat sitting on the floor got the better of her fears.

"That's right," said Val, on Emmie's reappearance. "Don't come over here!" she shouted. "_Stop_, I tell you!" She stamped violently as the child advanced, bewildered, holding out a piece of yellow crayon.

"Didn't I just say this part of the room is mine?"

"Y-yes."

"Well, it _is_, just as much as if it had doors, which it ought to have, and locks and bolts. Don't ever come here till you get my permission.

Understand?"

"I--I--" Emmie dropped the crayon, and retreated slowly. "I was only going to say we oughtn't to use that chalk. It belongs to Aunt Valeria's painting things."

"Look here!" Val waived such puny scruples aside. "See this seam in the carpet?"

"Yes," answered a small, scared voice.

"Well, I'll make it plainer, so's there's no mistake." She stooped and drew a yellow line down the seam from wall to wall. "Now," she said, getting up and striking a threatening att.i.tude, "you're younger than me, but I give you all that side for your room. This side is mine. If you ever cross that line without my leave, I'll kill you--yes, I'll kill you dead with cousin Ethan's knife!"

She turned her head and beheld her grandmother standing in the doorway.

CHAPTER IX

This was the beginning of the Four Years' War.

But although Val was worsted in this encounter, the race _was_ sometimes to the swift and the battle to the ingenious. For instance, that very night in bed she discovered a way of reducing Emmie to submission without resorting to physical violence. Val began to tell out loud a terrible and harrowing tale, which nearly threw the younger child into fits. Emmie would do anything for her dear, dear sister if only darling Val would say the black figure wasn't a ghost. Darling Val complied, after a thorough understanding that whenever Emmie was too unbearable that black figure, which was a ghost only on certain nights--that black figure should be introduced into their nocturnal amenities. Val was not always as good as her word. She did once or twice in the comfortable daytime make the sinister threat, "If you do that again I'll tell you a scary story when we're in bed to-night"; but in the morning the night is almost as far away as being grown up or dying--at all events too far off to seem very real or important. Experience proved that Val would forget the menace by the time it was dark, or else would be too sleepy to live up to it--so sleepy, in fact, that she could do nothing but kick Emmie in a desultory way, or lie like a log in the middle of the bed, leaving the younger child to find her half on the outer edge of both sides; whereupon Emmie's long-suffering patience would suddenly break down, and she would go crying to her grandmother's door, and stand there wailing till she was taken in. After some weeks' trial the plan of making the two sisters share the same room was abandoned, and Emmie had a cot at the foot of her grandmother's four-poster.

Val was made to realize that now she had crossed the Rubicon. Up to that hour she had been on probation, but this change once effected, she was "beyond the pale." Not that she was hara.s.sed, nagged, scolded; that she would have understood and known how to meet; she was ignored, not spoken to, not even seen. For days she might have been thin air, so little did her grandmother seem able to realize her corporal presence. There had been no doubt in Val's mind from the first but what Emmie was the favourite here. The very servants, she saw, were under the spell of Emmie's pretty ways, and in any time of trouble took it for granted that the imperious Val had been the aggressor. Natural and inevitable as was this att.i.tude of the entire household (for Mr. Gano was spared all details, and did not count), it was not calculated to make the sisters better friends, or win Val to a more amenable mind.

n.o.body, from Val's point of view, could care much about what Jerusha and Venie thought, but her grandmother's good opinion was somehow, even at this stage, a secretly coveted honor. Yet there was no blinking the fact Emmie was her pet. This form of putting the hard underlying fact was the more satisfactory in that one could as soon imagine Mrs. Gano dancing the Highland fling as having a pet. Gran'ma! who wouldn't let a dog or even a bird into the house, and whom no one could fancy nursing or caressing anything on earth! There was a suggestion of the ludicrous, a faint ironic aroma, in the phrase, which aroused angry pa.s.sions. It fitted in, too, with all manner of exigencies. In any event it was apposite to remark, "Of course Emmie's the pet." This could be said with such effect of scorn that Emmie found no refuge save in tears.

"What's the matter?" inquired Mrs. Gano.

She had happened on the twain as they were loitering in the hall before going off to church.

Emmie wept on. Val set her little red mouth doggedly. Her grandmother glared.

"Now what have you been doing to this poor child?" she demanded.

Gran'ma's eyes were very strange when she was angry, as Val had frequently confided to the cobwebs in the wood-shed--unlike anybody's on earth--piercing, glittery; made you cold down your back. Servants shook and scuttled when she looked at them like that. Val herself was always reminded of

"Tiger, tiger, burning bright In the forests of the night,"

and braced herself by saying, internally: "I ain't 'fraid o' tigers and I ain't 'fraid o' gran'ma"--this, too, with a fine sense of climax.

"What is it, Emmie? Stop crying. I can't have this noise."

"V--Val says I'm your p--pet."

"Nonsense! I have no pets. You are not to worry Emmeline. Never say that again. Understand?"

Val was silent.

Gran'ma's eyes were awful.

"Are you going to promise, or do you prefer to spend the day alone?"

That had been tried, and proved a great waste of time and opportunity.

"Yes, I promise."

"Very well; now go to church; Venie is waiting."

"Aha!" said the victorious Emmie when they were out of earshot. "Now you see what you get for teasing me."

And she crowed over her comrade with restored vivacity, till Val said, with suspicious geniality:

"Oh, well, I s'pose I was mistaken. I knew you were either her pet or else--"

"What?"

Emmie fixed her beautiful soft eyes expectantly on her sister.

Val turned on her with suppressed fury:

"Or else a creepin', crawlin' little woo--er--er--m."

Floods of tears, and Venus to the rescue.

The Four Years' War did not always rage round Emmie, although it was the innocent little sister who was the means of forcing upon Val the conviction that her grandmother was not, and never could be, her friend.