The Open Question Part 92

She waited an instant for what was to follow, and then, "What? I--I didn't hear what you said."

"But there are some things," he went on, "that we must do without courage."

"Ethan"--she turned and faced him with a kind of fierceness like a creature at bay--"if you find you can do that, it will be because you don't care much."

"Don't care!"--his face came closer, his voice was so shaken out of its even cadences it sounded like a stranger's--"don't _care_! Do you know that I never in all my life knew what caring meant till I knew you? Do you know that I'd give everything I have on earth, and every other hope of happiness, just to be able to believe there is no barrier between you and me?"

He stopped. Val's heart was too full to speak on the instant. In the silence Wilbur's voice rang out clear at the bottom of the stairs:

"I say, Val, aren't you ever coming?"

Mrs. Ball asked Ethan to come in after their ride and have a cup of tea.

He thanked her, and seemed to accept. They all went into the dim parlor, and when Mrs. Ball had drawn up the blinds old Mr. Ball was discovered asleep in the arm-chair. He woke at the noise, and blinked feebly.

"Why, paw," said Mrs. Ball, "how did you get in here?"

The old man grunted.

"You've dropped your knitting," said Val, stooping and picking up a strip of gray wool-work with needles sticking in it.

He took it, and began feebly moving his rheumatic hands, while Mrs. Ball bustled about making the tea and sending the maid-servant in and out.

Ethan turned his back, and looked out of the window. Val suddenly felt the repulsiveness of the old man as she had never felt it before. She saw that Ethan had taken out his watch.

"It isn't possible it's nearly five o'clock!" he said, as though that were an unheard-of hour for tea. "I'm sorry, but I must get back to my hotel," and almost before Mrs. Ball knew where she was, he had shaken hands and was gone.

CHAPTER XXIX

"Grandma is not so well to-day," said Emmie's letter the next morning.

"I think you oughtn't to be away long. She is surprised to have only a 'safe arrival' telegram from you and no letter. She says she doesn't count the post-card. But she does, and I think you'd better not send her another."

Val read it out at breakfast.

"Well, you just write and tell them I'm giving a Pink Luncheon for you to-morrow, and that there are two more dances next week. You can't possibly go till a week from Sat.u.r.day."

"But perhaps, if grandma really isn't so well, I oughtn't to stay quite so long."

"My dear girl, she's been 'not so well' since before I was born."

The Pink Luncheon was a huge success. The fame of its pinkness--of Mrs.

Ball's "perfectly fascinating" visitor, and that visitor's perfectly adorable cousin, Mr. Gano--were long discussed among Mrs. Ball's "first people." The ungrateful guest alone was not content.

"Miss White has just asked Will Austin," Harry whispered to her as they were leaving the table, "if I'm the man you're going to marry."

His laughing eyes left her in no doubt as to the audacious answer he had given. She glanced across at Ethan. He was lingering a moment with his neighbor, Baby Whittaker, while they ate a philopena, smiling and talking for all the world as if-- But, after all, what did it matter?

Since the moment when Ethan had said that about his "caring," she had lived in a cloudy rapture. Nothing but a blessed happiness was clearly defined, not even the wish to define. For a time Ethan's confession was all-sufficient. She had borne with his absence and his engagements with Mr. Otway, as she bore now with his polite pretence that Miss Whittaker really existed. Val endured the inconclusive hours with a patience that would have been more surprising had it been patience at all, and not sheer absorption in the unreasoning joy of living over that moment, which she felt had justified her coming, even if it presaged no easy issue. She had determined to stay at least a week longer. A week was a lifetime; a thousand things could happen in a week.

Dimly in the background of her mind she was feeling her way to a conclusion that, if all else failed, should beyond peradventure break down this nightmare barrier. But she did not even subconsciously face the extremity.

They had all been going to ride out to Miss Baby Whittaker's in the afternoon.

Val was no friend to the plan, but too much had been said of Baby Whittaker's conquest of Ethan the day before at the Pink Luncheon for her to venture an objection. When the discreet Sat.u.r.day brought with it floods of rain, Val's heart went out in grat.i.tude.

During the little lull in the downpour, about two o'clock, Ethan had ridden over, whereupon the Ball household smiled covertly at his eagerness to go to Baby Whittaker's. But it was no use, the roads were already very bad, and down came the torrent again. It was just as well, perhaps, as Mrs. Ball wouldn't, in any case, be able to go. Old father Ball had had a seizure of some sort in the morning, and Mrs. Ball hung over him solicitously, fearing another.

Val's chief concern was lest, when Ethan saw the dropped jaw and leaden eyes, he should turn and flee. "Why _did_ they keep their old and sick in the parlor?" thought the girl, angrily.

Suddenly Mrs. Ball gave a scream. "Harry, help me to take him into his room!"

He was struggling. Ethan went forward, and he and Harry carried the old man out.

"Is he dead?" asked the girl, when Ethan came back.

"No, he's not in luck this time, I'm afraid. I've lent Harry my horse to go for the doctor. The _doctor_!" He gave a little dry laugh.

They stood at the window, looking out.

Surrept.i.tiously she glanced at him.

"Oh, you wouldn't look so grave if you knew what I know," she thought to herself. "I _feel_ it's coming all right for us. It must, it _must_! But I dare not say so yet;" and with her sense of superior knowledge, of being in the councils of the G.o.ds, her spirits rose.

"How can you bear to be in the house with that awful old man?" Ethan was saying.

"Oh, he's not often like this. Isn't it wonderful," she remarked, with recovered cheerfulness, "to think he's nearly ninety?"

"Repulsive. He gave me the horrors the first time I saw him."

"I can't help staring at him. He seems hardly human."

"He's not human. Only the animal survives. To think that we can go on eating and sleeping so long after the heart and the brain have burned themselves out!" He moved away impatiently, saying, half to himself: "How perishable the best things are! How long the lower nature lasts!"

"Twenty-three--ninety"; she did the sum. "Sixty-seven years more, perhaps."

"For you!" He wheeled round and looked at her. "Heaven forbid! Upon my soul, if I thought that _you_, with all you stand there for--of beauty and gladness--if I thought you'd go on living till you were the feminine counterpart of that old horror, I"--he choked with a half-whimsical fury--"I believe I could kill you with my own hands."

She came closer, smiling.

"It would be just like me to go on till I'm a hundred, if I'm not stopped."

"What prompts you to say such things to me?" he said, sharply, and turned again to the window.

"But all the old don't end like Mr. Ball. _I_ shall be a lively old lady, if I'm not stopped."