"Consumption."
Ethan sat looking at him in silence. Val half rose. She must let them know she was there. But--consumption! She sank down. Was it true _that_ was the ghost that haunted the Fort? Certainly it was true that she had never heard the word on the lips of her elders.
"My father and my wife died of it," John Gano was saying. "My mother has the old lingering form of it. It was "galloping consumption" that carried my sister Valeria out of the world at thirty. I am dying of it.
My children--"
A curious hoa.r.s.e sound tore its way out of his throat, and he buried his head in his hands. When he looked up his eyes were wild and bright. Val held her breath, and the nails of her clinched hands dug into her palms.
"I have just one hope," her father said, "that my innocent children will go out as painlessly as may be, before the great battle begins."
Val drew back, crouching behind the chair-back with blanched face.
"It is too late to hope that," said Ethan.
"No, it"s not too late; the enemy is still in ambush."
"The enemy?"
"Yes. The battle won"t begin till s.e.x finds them out."
"What then?"
"Then they will have to be told what I was not told in time."
"What would you say?"
"I"--the hoa.r.s.e voice shook--"I"d tell them how full of holes their armor is."
"Uncle John, you"ll never be so cruel."
Val, behind the big chair, lifted her scared face in the shadow, looking on as a woman might at a duel fought for her.
"It is the only kindness. When I thought I shouldn"t live to see them old enough to know, I wrote the matter down. Ha!"--he laughed wearily--"in the form of a last will and testament; a legacy from a father who will leave them nothing else except--" He got up and turned away, coughing. He walked up and down the room again, with dragging step and bent head. He stopped suddenly and laid his hand on the young man"s shoulder. "I see too plainly the lesson of the past not to hand my knowledge on. It"s all I"m good for now. This fair future for the race that I"ve believed in, that I"ve foreseen so long--" He was interrupted by the painful cough, but conquered it an instant. "Not only have I always known I could have no personal share in it, not even through my children--"
The cough gripped him again, and he turned away with handkerchief to his lips.
Ethan watched him, unmoved, with a kind of unsympathetic fascination.
"I think," said the young man, before his uncle found his voice again, "you are going on to say something I had to try to disabuse my mind of, years ago, when my own health smashed up before I went to France."
John Gano dropped into the rocking-chair by the fire, and lay back a moment with closed eyes and laboring breath.
"I didn"t know," he said, faintly, "that you"d had your warning, but I see"--he opened his eyes suddenly--"I see that your New England blood is too thin, too office-stricken, to save you. You"ve nothing--absolutely nothing to hope for from the Gano side." His voice was strong. It rang like a challenge. "My mother is wrong! Our fathers _have_ eaten sour grapes."
Ethan leaned forward about to speak, but his uncle broke in harshly:
"I tell you you belong to a worn-out race. _We_ are among those who are too remote from the soil--"there is no health in us.""
"Oh come, Uncle John, don"t talk as if we were Aztecs, or an effete monarchy."
"We _are_ effete, and we deserve to die out root and branch."
The little movement over in the dark corner pa.s.sed unnoticed in Ethan"s attempt at protest.
"Or perhaps you think," said John Gano, "because we are not of n.o.ble descent, that being an old or rather a long dominant and idle race, doesn"t count."
He smiled with a tinge of superior pity.
"How do you know we"re so old a family?" demanded his nephew.
"I feel it in my bones; they ache--_they ache_." He had begun the sentence with a hoa.r.s.e laugh, and at the end his haggard face settled into lines of pain. "But whether we"re an old family in the paltry social sense is beside the mark. Nature doesn"t care a continental copper," he went on fiercely, "whether you"re a king or a bankrupt cotton-planter, or any other c.u.mberer of the earth. What people don"t realize is that a peasant or a rag-picker may come of an idle, worn-out stock, and if so, be sure Nature has marked him down. If purple and fine linen don"t deceive her, neither do rags. No sickly sentimentality about _her_. She"ll find her enemy, the unfit, through any and all disguise.
As for your aristocrat, she won"t distinguish him even by her revenge.
She has nothing to do with that figment of the pompous mind, "belonging to an old family." Families are _all_ old. The question is: How closely are you related to--well, to use the ready-made phrase: How near are you to the soil?--to the fountain-head of blood made sweet by denial and swift by strenuous living? Ah, my boy, our fathers sat too long at their ease in houses that the building and the tending of made muscle and brawn for others. We lounged in arm-chairs by our fires of fat Southern pine, but the men who got the vital warmth were the men who hewed the tall trees down. We"ve blinded our eyes over books, and blunted our humanity in a petty concern about our souls, while our bodies were going to destruction."
There was dead silence for a few minutes.
"And those more fortunate ones," his nephew said, in a dull, resentful voice, "who are they? How is it possible to be _sure_? How shall your elect be known?"
"As of old, by their fruits. They and their children have broad shoulders; they haven"t chests like ours--they haven"t hands like mine."
He held his up, and both men (the girl, too, in the far corner) saw the fire glow red behind the thin, transparent fingers. He dropped them with an air of one who throws up a desperate game. Val pushed aside the rug that still partly covered her, and slid to the ground, arrested on the sofa"s edge by Ethan"s saying more angrily than she had thought that voice could sound:
"I tell you straight, Uncle John, I don"t accept this paralyzing doctrine of yours, still less do I think your children will. I tell you frankly I rebel against--"
John Gano"s wax-white hand caught him by the shoulder in a grip that made the young man wince.
"So did _I_ rebel, and I"ve been paying for it these sixteen years. Oh yes, I knew very little, but I rebelled against the little I knew. I did worse--I married. I did worse even than that--_I married my first cousin_."
He drew off, as if the better to watch the effect of his words. Ethan, looking at him darkly, felt there was a devilish ingenuity in his uncle"s ignoring the possibility of any further mixing of Gano blood, and yet holding up his own misdeed as a hideous warning to the world in general, a thing of unmitigated evil.
"These matters were not understood in my day," he went on, "but happily the men and women of these times are not left in darkness."
"Oh yes, they are," said Ethan. "The men and the women are new, but the darkness is the old darkness."
"No; science has put it to rout. I had no one when I was young to tell me the things I"m telling you."
Ethan"s face was undisguisedly satirical, but his uncle was oblivious.
"The Ganos have all been well-intentioned people, and yet they went on down there in Virginia and Maryland, generation after generation, marrying their own cousins, breeding in and in, till--well, you, for instance, and my children are more like brother and sister than cousins.
You are even nearer than some brothers and sisters are. You each have in you the concentrated essence of a single family"s strain. As I"ve told you, when I look at my innocent children, I could curse the eternal law that will not let me pay my debt alone. If we rebel"--he fastened his lean fingers on Ethan"s shoulder again, and spoke with growing excitement--"if we rebel against _that_ commandment, we and our wretched children are punished." He released his grip, but with eyes bloodshot, menacing, he stood over the young man still: "If we rebel, instead of dying out calmly and gently, we"ll have to be stamped out."
"What do you mean?"
No lounging now; the young man sat arrow-straight and eagle-eyed.
"I mean that certainly in _this_ race the weakest go to the wall. We Ganos can"t compete."
"I wouldn"t if I were Hercules. I loathe compet.i.tion."