The Open Question Part 33

"Why, then, our great-grandmother had a daughter when she was fifteen!"

"No, no; she was very nearly sixteen--one may say she _was_ sixteen."

But Val and Emmie preferred the other form. A baby of your own to play with when you are only fifteen! Ha, _that_ was the way to begin life!

People in these times s.h.i.+lly-shallied so wastefully. This great-grandmother hadn't missed anything by her prompt.i.tude in marrying.

After she was a wife and a mother, she used to call her girl friends into the high-walled garden, and stationing a slave on the gate-post, to keep watch and give warning when the husband could be seen coming home from his counting-house, this real, proper kind of a great-grandmother would tuck up her long skirts and have a rousing game of hide-and-seek, stopping breathless in the middle when Sambo cried from his watch-tower, "Ma.s.sa comin'!" She would let down her gown and pin up her curls and go demurely to the gate to meet her lord, and tell him the baby and she had had a good day. Ah, it was plain they had been a frivolous pair! Theirs were the mahogany tables with slender, twisted legs and baize-lined folding tops, that in these serious days never caught sight of a card. Instead of reading Blair's "Sermons" and Baxter's "Rest," this agreeable ancestor had acc.u.mulated all those French romances down-stairs, and even when he left gay youth behind, he had sat in his counting-house, not like the King of Hearts, counting out his money, but revelling in the novels of the Wizard of the North. And when it was noised about at home among his growing daughters that he had nearly finished the latest one, and would bring it back that evening, the three girls would start fair and even from the bottom step, at his coming-home hour, and race to meet him. The lucky one who reached him first got the new _Waverley_.

To the adaptable eye of youth "all things are possible," with parents as with G.o.d. It never occurred to Val and Emmie as a subject for surprise or inquiry how such a person as their grandmother had come to find herself _dans cette galere_. Mrs. Gano would usually wind up her Calvert stories with a half-humorous, half-reverent smile.

"Your great-grandmother"--she never said "my father" or "mother," but with a detached, impartial air--"your great-grandmother was the best woman I ever knew; and your great-grandfather lived a useful life, and died, after receiving extreme unction, in all the odor of sanct.i.ty."

"He wasn't a p.i.s.spocalian, like us?" Emmie asked.

"No; Roman Catholic. We had all gone different ways by that time, but he would say, 'Ah! wait till you're as old as I: you'll all come back into the bosom of Mother Church.'" She would smile at this. "He was not a thinker--he had lived all his best years in the active world of work and pleasure, and when he saw his end in sight, he looked about him for a priest." She would smile again--less tenderly, more ironically. "This was priests' business; best leave it in their hands."

It was interesting to the children to observe that not even for the benefit of the young was family history falsified.

"Oh, he was consistent enough. Even before he embraced Roman Catholicism, he never spoke of religion except with the greatest reverence." She would glance sharply at the children's father, if he were present when she reached this point in that or any similar narrative, seeming for the moment to lose sight of the younger generation in her desire to point the moral for the benefit of her son.

"I never heard of a Calvert who questioned revealed religion; and as for the Ganos, any one who has a mind to look, may read in the family record that they were all eminent for piety in their day and generation."

"Does that little record go further back than 1760?" her son once asked, meditatively.

"No: but that's quite far enough to show what's expected."

During this illness in particular, there were times when Val was drawn unaccountably to the strange old woman. If the child had had more encouragement, she could have loved her well and openly, renouncing for her sake domestic heresy and schism. The secret pa.s.sion for loving and being loved had grown in the girl with every year. It was not only the strongest current that swept through her being--that is true of many--but even in this young and sheltered life it rose betimes to freshet and to flood, hungry, devouring, unappeased. The girl led three lives--the gay, triumphant surface one at school, the checkered existence at home, and that deep heart life apart in the sunlit valley of imagination, whither, when the wind of destiny blew bleak on the uplands of domestic life, she would retreat with all the honors of war--rally and "captain her army of s.h.i.+ning and generous dreams."

The intensity of the craving for approbation, the love-hunger in the child's heart, would be called morbid by those who find that epithet a ready one to apply to heights and depths from which they themselves are debarred by a n.i.g.g.ard nature. It was true (even if, like many another fact about this young creature, it is not to be approved) that she had had an affair of the heart in New York--princes apart--when she had attained the ripe age of seven. It had been a kind of infidelity to the dark-browed hero of dream, for the gentleman in question was not a n.o.bleman, not even a Nimrod, and he had red hair. But, nevertheless, he was a peril to the peace of mind of a diminutive maid, and all unconsciously to himself "brought her acquainted with" a more thrilling joy and a more poignant pain than some women can look back upon from the height of fifty years. Oh, these strange stirrings of the too eager heart!--the sharp rapture and the sharper pain, the whimsical, bitter pathos of them read by the light of later "exultations, agonies!" Who that has had this window opened for him into the virginal chamber of awakening woman-life can look through it without tears? But this particular window is not for our eyes. After that premature romance had come to an untimely end, or, rather, when its hopelessness was comforted and covered by the quick-growing ivy of new affections, there was peace for a time in the camp of love, or only border skirmis.h.i.+ng. Not, of course, for any lack of enterprise, or any dearth of heroes, for almost any pa.s.ser in the street will serve for a peg to drape the gossamer of a dream upon. He is perhaps the unrequited lover--he is some one in disguise; not Mr. Ernest Halliwell, the son of the local doctor, but heir to an earldom over the sea. You are sorry you can never love him; he must break his heart in vain. It is almost _too_ sad, for his hair curls prettily over his ears, and his smile is gentle and haunting. But high above all these little "foot-notes," as it were, to the great main text of the romance, ran the radiant "continued story" of that one who cometh--he with swift, unfaltering feet, he with the sheltering arms--bearing the great gift in his bosom, and his face, still for a little s.p.a.ce--still hidden.

Meanwhile, eager friends.h.i.+ps at school, and devotion to her father at home, and to Jerry's handsome brother in the promised land beyond the osage hedge--not all these and hope besides could fill the foolish, hungry heart. n.o.body else in the world but a few novel-writers and herself seemed in the least concerned about the chief business of life, which was plainly loving and being loved. It did not appear to be a subject of conversation with grown persons. Not only at the Fort, with a grandmother who plainly could know nothing of such matters, and a father who, besides his children, loved only rocks and trees, but in the homes of the other girls as well, the supreme topic was neglected, ignored, except when considered covertly among the young, as conspirators whisper treason. It was very queer. Evidently her absorption in the subject was part and parcel of her perverted nature, her "low curiosity." It was, at all events, a weakness to be hid except from that very best of all her "best friends," Julia Otway. Not that Julia even was told of the Great Romance, but the two girls wondered and surmised together, bringing day by day to their common store every new sc.r.a.p of knowledge or conjecture that came their way. Val was the more adventurous, the less fastidious.

She it was who would speculate most boldly, sketching out certain chapters, certain scenes even, in that great coming drama, that are currently supposed not to enter the imagining of maidens. Yes, yes; it was all wrong perhaps to think about these things; but why, then, were they so interesting? It wasn't her fault. But at last one day, when the more modest-minded Julia said, "I want awfully to hear, but I don't think we'll tell these stories any more. I don't feel somehow as if it was quite right," then Val knew that indeed she was "low-minded," and was as humiliated as the sternest moralist could desire.

She admired Julia more than ever for her rigid asceticism. Ah yes! there was no blinking the fact. _That_ was the kind of strength of mind it was fine to have, but the richly merited rebuke of herself made her wince with shame. The very memory of the moment was like a dagger-thrust for years.

And still there was a buoyancy in her that was always lifting her mountains high after these deep descents into the pit. One potent device for the recovery of self-respect was to name a day from the dawn of which she should start a new life, absolutely different from the past, which was by this act cut off and dropped into oblivion. Monday mornings began not alone a new week, but a new era. Her great fresh start of the year was taken annually at Christmas, or if one made a slip--one always did--the New Year was the time, or else Easter, or, after all, one's birthday was a fitting moment for such regeneration. The girl who had been only eleven was inevitably a poor creature, but the person of twelve! Ah, when the clock struck that complete and significant number a new and quite perfect existence was inaugurated! The next year, to be about to enter one's teens, was discovered to be, after all, the psychological moment for starting a new life. Then fourteen! Ah, _that_ was the true age of understanding, besides being twice the sacred number seven! If she was much happier than other people for the most part--as she knew she was--she had also moments of being much nearer despair.

There were all the times when people hurt her feelings, and when her only consolation was the old one of pretending she hadn't any feelings to hurt. If life ministered to her more than it did to most, it bruised her too from crown to sole.

There were those hours of reaction, after long expectation of some birthday-party, or the Fourth of July fireworks, or the school Commencement, when a blank wretchedness fell upon her. It hadn't been what she had hoped. How or where it had failed was partly a mystery, but there was a strange bitterness left behind. She refused vehemently in her own mind to accept for truth the rumor abroad in the world, "Nothing ever comes up to expectation." Oh yes, things would by-and-by come up to and exceed antic.i.p.ation. It was only now, and through some fault in her, that they fell short of perfection. As she grew older she developed a pitiless self-criticism--of her speech, her manners, her looks, her attainments. This creature, among certain girls that were awkward, and certain others that put on airs and graces, this profoundly egotistical little person, was actually commended for being "perfectly un-selfconscious"; the fact being that she was far _too_ "aware" of herself, saw herself far too vividly in her mind's eye, to go on making the current mistakes of affectation or of clumsiness. She knew unerringly when she giggled with embarra.s.sment, when she had been "making eyes," when she was in danger of seeming superior, or what her grandmother called "toploftical." She was keenly, quiveringly self-conscious, and conscious too of other people; feeling their moods as an aeolian harp feels the light wind, brightening under their unspoken, their merely looked approval, and shrinking beneath her careless exterior at their unuttered blame, wearing her reputation for hardness like an inversion of the magic suit of mail, seeming stout armor, and yet letting every arrow through. Still, it served its purpose, since no one dared say, "See! that struck home!"

CHAPTER XIII

After several years' supremacy as "the greatest dancer on the earth,"

that brilliant career was suddenly abandoned. It was evident that a mistake had been made. Val's true destiny was to be Queen of Song. It was difficult to ill.u.s.trate the fact in your unmusical grandmother's house, but you could do a good deal in that direction at the New Plymouth Seminary for Young Ladies. You could roar down several hundred girls in the morning hymn, and you could even have occasional surrept.i.tious performances in the gymnasium, or at home in the kitchen, where whole cycles of impromptu operas were given in a season. For the rest, you sang to yourself in lonely places and exulted. Sometimes you trembled, shaken to the verge of tears by the beauty and pathos of your own voice.

There had been a brief interval when the sum of achievements in the drawing-cla.s.s seemed, in Val's mind, to point to her becoming a second Rosa Bonheur. It was certain that her copy of Landseer's "Rabbits" was a work of extreme merit. Even her grandmother, who usually said "Hum!"

when she looked at Val's original designs for wall-paper or carpet, remarked on beholding the rabbits: "I'll have them framed."

If that were not distinction, where shall it be found?

But it was grasping to set more than one snare for greatness--let Emmie be Rosa Bonheur, Val would be the great singer of her time.

"Let me have music lessons," she prayed. "I'll practise at school and at Julia's."

"It is out of the question," said her grandmother.

Val knew "out of the question" meant it was a question of being out of pocket.

"I'll give up drawing."

"Drawing is much less expensive; and even so, you and Emmie must give it up after this term."

"Then, what on earth are we going to learn besides common lessons?"

"I'll teach you botany and gardening," said her father.

"I don't care about botany," said Val, hotly, "and"--unmasking the hypocrisy of years--"and as for gardening, there isn't _any_thing I hate so much."

"_What?_"

Her father couldn't believe his ears.

"Yes. I'm sorry. It's very kind of you to offer so often to teach me; but I really quite hate flowers."

Her father looked at her with a severity she had seldom seen in his face.

"Then, in that case"--he spoke as though originating a punishment fit for a new unnatural crime--"in that case you should learn cooking."

After such a blow, there was nothing for it but to remember that for weeks Jerusha had wanted her to take some household sewing to poor old Miss Kirby up on Plymouth Hill. Val would run all the way to the Dug Road and there, in the deep cut in the hill-side, or in the even more lonely ravine above, she would sit with the bundle of sewing on her knees, raging solemnly over it at fate, and devising spirited revenges.

In a wood on the farther side there was a place deep hidden in bush and brier, where a wild grape-vine made a swing between two old forest trees. It was a distinct source of comfort to Val that she didn't know the names of these trees. She would shut her eyes tight, and swing high out in the free air, with a sense that she was flying from two calling voices, afraid the accents should reach her clearly, afraid lest by an unwary peep something in bark or leaf should press back upon her impatient memory "their ugly names," cheered and strengthened after each escape by finding her ignorance intact.

Out, far out, on the wild grape-vine, swinging till she forgot the importunate trees, forgot all threatened ignominy, forgot everything but the ecstasy of living and swinging and singing, and looking forward--looking out past home perplexities and wild wood tangles, out, far out, towards the secure beauty and the certain wonder of the coming years.

Emmie came home from school earlier than usual one memorable day, and told Mrs. Gano with frightened eyes that Val had done something awful.

She couldn't make out what, for all the Academic and Collegiate girls whispered about it secretly at recess. But Val was locked up in the Princ.i.p.al's room, and it was considered doubtful if she'd _ever_ be let out, so angry was Miss Appleby. But even the Princ.i.p.al's wrath was less than the wrath of her niece, Miss Beach, the new teacher of the primary school and of gymnastics.

Emmie had naturally felt humiliated at her sister's disgrace. She thought she could never, never go back to school again. By the time the miscreant got home, Mrs. Gano was properly worked up to receive her.

Val saw at a glance from Emmie's cloudy eyes and her grandmother's, cold and gleaming, how her story had been forestalled. She held up her head, and said, carelessly:

"Well, I've got myself into a sc.r.a.pe."

Her grandmother fixed her silently for an instant, and then said:

"'Sc.r.a.pe' is not the word. You've heard that expression from Jerningham Otway. _We_ don't get into sc.r.a.pes."