The Open Question Part 41

"I think it very beautiful of her," said Ethan, softly.

"And not alarming?"

"Alarming?" He knitted puzzled brows. "I begged her to think of me as--like this."

There was a pause.

"It's not _her_ doing," he resumed, hastily, striking out at some indistinct enemy lurking behind the old man's looks. "No ceremony could make us surer of each other. That's why we're not unhappy. It's exactly the same as if we were married."

"_Exactly?_" He eyed the young face shrewdly, and then, a little baffled by its mixture of sensitive shrinking and frank defiance: "You will oblige me by not keeping this appointment"--he motioned to the letter.

"I'm sorry I can't oblige you, sir."

"Reflect a moment."

"I can't even reflect about it. She's going away to-morrow to spend several months with her sister. After that she goes back to Va.s.sar. I may not see her again till next summer."

"You don't mean she's going back to school this fall?"

"Yes. She lost a year. They couldn't afford-- But now she's going to finish her course."

"Good Lord!"

"I beg your pardon."

"There's no reason why she shouldn't go back to school?"

"Reason why--? No."

A light broke, or rather a darkness spread, over the young man's face, wiping out the grace, stamping it fiercely with detestation of him who had dared think insulting thoughts of Almira. But the old man was smiling and rubbing his parchment hands.

"Tempest in a teacup! Come and have breakfast," he said, walking to the table; "everything's getting cold."

But Ethan put the letter of the clerkly hand into his breast-pocket, and went towering out of the room.

Aaron Tallmadge chuckled genially as he rang for hot buckwheat cakes.

"Romantic! absurd! Great baby!" he muttered, and opened the morning paper--his paper--Ethan's by-and-by.

Ethan had not needed his grandfather's recommendation to abstain from mentioning in any letter to Mrs. Gano that her more and more irregular correspondent had been ill that last severe winter before he came of age, or that he considered himself engaged to be married to a girl older than himself and penniless. Mr. Tallmadge persistently affected to put this last achievement aside as sheer youthful nonsense. But those letters in the misleading hand came to Ashburton Place with irritating regularity. He began secretly to await with no small anxiety Ethan's view of the moral as well as legal liberty conferred by the distinction of being twenty-one. Before that moment arrived, the doctors were agreeing that the young man must not, till his health should be established, spend another Christmas in New England.

"At the end of the Indian summer away with him."

"By all means," said Mr. Tallmadge. "Why wait even for the summer? All he needs is a thorough change."

The old man was thinking--thinking not alone of the health, but ambitiously of the future, of his grandson.

"Where shall I send him?" asked Mr. Tallmadge.

"It doesn't much matter where he is in the summer," the doctors agreed; "but get him south of Mason and Dixon's line next winter."

These insensate _medicos_ had no bowels of political compa.s.sion. They must have known well enough that the region indicated was not a part of the world lightly to be recommended to Aaron Tallmadge.

"I'll go and visit my Gano relations," Ethan had said, promptly.

"You'll do nothing of the kind," returned his grandfather. "It's no reason, because you feel the cold here, that I should send you where you'd catch yellow fever and malaria."

From the Tallmadge point of view, Mason and Dixon's line did no less than divide habitable from uninhabitable America. Voluntarily to cross the kindly boundary was contrary to reason. There was no difficulty in deciding that Italy or the South of France would be more advantageous for the young man's conversance with modern languages, as well as farther away from Almira Marlowe, and more tolerable to his grandfather and guardian than Virginia or Florida.

Mr. Tallmadge's capable junior partner was able to relieve his chief of all active concern in the conduct of business till Ethan should be ready to a.s.sume command. To this latter end, a few years' foreign travel, and a thorough re-establishment of the young man's health, were next in order. The plan worked well on the health score. A summer in England and a winter on the Riviera seemed to have set Ethan free from the family infirmity, but also to have whetted his appet.i.te for foreign life, and increased his indifference to the proud post of chief proprietor of the greatest Republican organ in New England. But this might be merely the first effects of Miss Almira's having thrown over her first love and married a lawyer in Poughkeepsie, New York.

After all, Mr. Tallmadge reflected, his grandson was still very young, and intimate knowledge of life in other lands might not come amiss. So the energetic old man went to and fro, joining Ethan, now in Paris, now in London, travelling about with him during the summer, and returning alone to "the great Republican organ" in the autumn, leaving his grandson to new friends, new pursuits, and warmer winter haunts.

The young man was not all this time merely seeing life, he was recording it in desultory fas.h.i.+on. Some of his verses appearing in English periodicals raised a little dust of praise among a set in London calling itself critical. But it was the French point of view that most appealed to him.

He was under that spell which France knows so well how to cast round the young man of artistic instinct. Her tongue was the peerless language of letters. Through no medium less supple, less subtle, could the complexities of modern life and thought hope for adequate literary expression.

And so the pleasant facile days went by in idly roving, idly writing, meeting interrogatively his predestinate experience and setting the more presentable answers down. Where answer there was none, he aped the older men, whom he called "Masters," and made s.h.i.+ft with more or less cynical guesses. It was these last that brought him his little meed of precocious success. He had not originality enough to see that the cynicism was not his own. He was not, and seemingly was not to be, of the stature that can wear simple sincerity in the grand manner. That writer, young or old, must have something of true greatness in him who can hold out long in these days against the flattering temptation of hinting that he is laughing in his sleeve at all solemn persons. And yet no doubt seriousness was the dominant note in the young American's character, a seriousness that still looked askance at itself, and smiled oftener at its own gravity than at any other wrinkle in the tragi-comic mask of humanity.

He had seen something of what people in London and Paris called "society," had been very well amused, but not enamoured of it. When men who made letters a profession--perhaps one should say trade--admonished him: "Never refuse a swagger invitation. Your opportunities, considering you're a foreigner, are simply unheard of. Go everywhere, see everything. You must know life before you can write about it," Ethan would say, half impatiently: "As if you could escape from life! As if art kept her treasures in the jewel-cases of the aristocracy, and never displayed them except at social functions!"

Even in indulgent Paris he was a good deal chaffed about his success with the fair. It is a thing other men reconcile themselves to with difficulty. Some one said once to Ethan's old school friend, De Poincy:

"No one but a woman has any business to be as good-looking as that fellow Gano. I couldn't trust a man with a face like that."

"Oh, you may trust him right enough," De Poincy answered. "And as to his face--look at that jaw of his."

"Anything the matter with his jaw?"

"There's 'man' enough in that to relieve your mind. Oh, he's a stubborn brute, Gano is; but you can trust him." And people did trust him.

But not only did he tire presently of the gay and flaunting aspect of social life, his fastidiousness by-and-by turned aside as well from those less presentable experiences that dog the rich and idle youth of capitals.

At first with a dull old tutor, and presently without him, he had for headquarters a tiny _appartement_ in Paris. It was there, or with the De Poincys in Nice, that he felt most at home. Something over two years had gone by in this agreeable fas.h.i.+on when his grandfather addressed to him a temperate but very serious letter inviting him to return, either to complete his interrupted studies "on American lines," or to enter at once on his initiation into the practical duties of editors.h.i.+p. Ethan at first temporized, and then, being pressed, declined to pursue either course. He "liked living abroad." This fact, thus stated, greatly irritated old Tallmadge. He ordered his grandson home. Ethan wrote, still very politely, but quite definitely, refusing to come just then.

Mr. Tallmadge, angrier than ever, cabled, "Is it on account of health?

Are you afraid of climate?" Ethan cabled back: "Perfectly well. Prefer Paris."

This lack of patriotism on the part of a grandson of his seemed to Aaron Tallmadge nothing short of revolutionary. It was no use Ethan's quoting to him, _Tout homme a deux pays, le sien et puis la France_. The more Mr. Tallmadge pondered the matter, the more he felt convinced that this incredible preference for Paris was the shameful mask of some other preference. "Some woman's got hold of him again," he decided. "I'll soon settle that." Whereupon he wired: "Come right home, or I stop allowance."

Then was his grandson most unreasonably angry. He sent back, in a blank sheet of writing-paper, the recently received check for the next quarter, which he had neglected to cash, and he looked about for employment. Henri de Poincy, who had recently pa.s.sed into the diplomatic service, was now in Russia; but young Gano started out on his quest of a living with no foreboding. He went to see various men of affairs, firm friends of his, he felt convinced, and stated the case; in fact, a cooler head than Ethan's might have suspected he overstated it. It was true he had received a "final" letter, which he thought most insulting, full of a crudely expressed conviction that Ethan was in the toils of some foreign woman, and saying that unless he returned instantly his grandfather would know this suspicion was well founded, in which case the young man had nothing to expect from him in the future.

Those persons of influence whom young Gano had consulted in his dilemma all promised to keep him in mind and see what they could do, and most of them thereafter forgot even to invite him to dinner. He began to realize that being a young American of leisure, with no axe to grind, with an absurdly large income for a man of his years, and known to be sole heir to one of the big fortunes "in the States," was an altogether different matter from being a person suddenly bereft of these advantages. He gave up his charming _appartement_ in the Champs-Elysees, and presently found that he couldn't keep even the single room he had taken in the Rue de Miromenil. He moved to the Rue de Provence.

He was in low water--very low water, indeed--before he got the post of Parisian correspondent on a London paper. With this diminutive buoy he managed to keep afloat; but his former position as an independent young gentleman with large expectations was blown upon, and no one more hypersensitive than he to the outward and visible signs of people's appreciation of his altered circ.u.mstances. He withdrew more and more from the swim. Smart Parisian society and the rich American colony knew him no more. After a while his English editor complained that his news was becoming too exclusively "literary and artistic; we expected something about the races last week. Give us more society."

To this the Parisian correspondent replied: "I never yet wrote about society unless indirectly, and I do not propose to begin."

"There was formerly," persisted the editor, who knew quite well what he wanted, "a flavor of the fas.h.i.+onable world about your Parisian notes, which our readers miss. French art and Bohemia are overdone."