"What are you doing?"
"Getting ready," she said.
He sat down in the great chair and watched her. She carried handfuls of yellowed papers and bundles of letters, and heaped them on the bed of red coal in the grate. She tore the morocco binding off old diaries and burned the ma.n.u.script leaves.
"What are you doing?" he reiterated, starting up like one shaking off a dream.
"She always said she"d rather things were burned than pulled about by careless hands, by strangers."
"I remember." He sat down. This did not look like evasion, for Val shared his own strong sentiment for family things. "I remember, too," he said, with dull regret, "she used to tell me "the whole history of a family is locked up in that escritoire.""
"It takes a long time to burn."
She stirred the slow-smouldering papers to a blaze.
"It took a hundred years to make," he said; "and many hundred agonies--and joys," he added, watching her dim smile--"yes, and joys."
He helped her with the next load, looking at the writing on the outside of the letter-bundles as he undid them.
"Grandfather Gano," he said, throwing a handful on the fire. "Your father"--another handful. "Aunt Valeria"--another. "Grandm--"
"Don"t," cried Val, with quivering face; "you mustn"t call their names!"
He looked back at her. "It"s like calling them to look at the way we treat the things they left us."
He went on silently with his task. There was no doubt she felt it keenly; why do it, then? Only out of shrinking from those "stranger"
hands. Then she was facing the compact, after all.
"Ethan?"
"Yes."
"Why do you stay here?"
"Because the time"s so short."
"Dear one"--she came and leaned against him--"go and finish your writing; I"ll come back in an hour."
"No, I"ll stay here till you"ve done."
"Oh, I sha"n"t have done all for several days," she said, pleading.
But she knew that look in his face. No use to urge. She turned away, and scattered the charred paper down on to the hearth among the journal bindings. He made the fire up again for her. Then, one by one, she took from the mantelpiece all the old photographs of her husband, and laid them on the flame--all but the one of the baby Ethan, which she thrust in her dress, keeping her face hidden from her husband. Then she went over to a pile of pictures he had not noticed before, lying by the buffet.
She took a little hammer with a claw handle out of the drawer, and bent over the frames, loosening the nails, taking out the pictures and tearing them up.
"What are those?"
"Aunt Valeria"s--"
"Why do you bother with them?"
"I don"t want people to be smiling at them. Oh, Ethan," she cried out with the sharpness of intolerable pain, "I--I can"t bear it, if you sit there watching me! I can do it alone almost callously, thinking very little of _them_, thinking about you and me, till all these poor reminders are just old paper; but you--" She hid her face.
"They _are_ just old paper, dear."
He went over to her, and she turned from him, trembling.
"No, no; when you are here, they all come alive in my hands. Oh-h-h!"
She lifted her tear-wet face, and held up clasped hands like one praying pardon. "You were right; they are a hundred agonies, they cry out while I tear and burn them."
"No, dear, no; the dead are done with crying."
"But these people--" She looked up and down the long room with misty eyes, like one dimly descrying a throng. "_They_ aren"t dead, Ethan."
A sharp fear seized him that the strain had been too much.
"Come--come away," he said.
But she clung to the great bra.s.s ring in the lion"s mouth on the buffet drawer. "They won"t _really_ die till we have destroyed all their work--and destroyed ourselves."
"That"s true in a sense," he murmured.
"Of course it"s true. Does anybody think my grandmother died when the breath went out of her body? She won"t really die till the last person dies who remembers her. And the others; here they"ve been all these years, kept tenderly alive, in letters, in wills and certificates, diaries, poor little pictures!" Her voice wavered and recovered itself fiercely. "Shall I tell you what it"s like, destroying these things?"
She broke into wild weeping. "All these are like hands clinging on to life. I wrench their fingers away; I force them down. The glimpses I have of them--it"s like the last look on drowning faces."
"Val," he said, hoa.r.s.ely, "there"s time yet. Suppose we don"t shirk our trust. Suppose we hold the Fort for the Ganos as long as ever we can."
She took his handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped away her tears, but they flowed and flowed afresh.
"An understanding like ours," he said, hurriedly, "may be superseded--wiped out by a better understanding." With an eagerness that seemed strange to himself, he tried to soothe and rea.s.sure her.
His heart shrank at her unlighted look.
"Do you hear, Val? We are not so primitive that we must make a fetich of our compact."
"I"m very primitive, dear; you told me so yourself."
He loosed his hold upon her with a sinking sense of having done something he could never quite undo. Feeling his arms no longer about her, she looked up.
"Poor darling!" she said, framing the dark face in her two hands; "I didn"t mean to cry and unnerve you. But it wasn"t for me I cried--not even for you. You ought to forgive me that a few tears fell, just this once, over those other graves that n.o.body will ever remember any more."
He stared down at her, seeing how unmoved his words had left her.
"Haven"t you heard what I"ve been saying to you, dear?"
"What was it?" she said, wearily, putting out her hand to take up another of the faded water-colors. He caught the hand, lifted her in his arms, and carried her to the big chair. He sat, holding her against him, thinking how he should put it to her--this new, this growing sense of his, that the family will to live was stronger than his individual will to die, and that there was justification in this realization for a different compact. He sat weighing the chances of the new life, trying for Val"s sake to find loop-holes of escape from the prison he himself had builded, for Val"s sake coercing himself to face payment of the long penalty of life and guilty fatherhood; in Val"s name even trying to think all might still be well.
He looked down at the face on his breast, and saw that for the moment all was well without his troubling. Val had cried herself to sleep.