V. V.'s Eyes Part 83

"So you refuse pointblank," said Mrs. Heth, in a m.u.f.fled sort of voice, "to carry out your parents' wishes."

"About this--I _must_. I'll do anything else you want me to, anything.... And, mamma, this isn't papa's wish," said the girl, with some emotion. "He told me--the other night--that I mustn't think of marrying anybody I didn't care for. He said he had never thought the same of Hugo--"

Then mamma smote the flat arm of her morris-chair, and sprang up, exploding.

"_That's it_! Shove it off on your poor, generous father!... How characteristic of your whole behavior! Why, you ought to be _ashamed_ to mention your father's name!" cried mamma; and, indeed, Cally was, though for reasons not known to her mother....

Mrs. Heth walked the floor, in the grip of those agonies which the defeat of her will brought her in poignant measure. It may be that her faith in her diplomatic plan had never been triumphantly strong. Now, certainly, her purposes were punitive only, and her flowing sentences well turned to her desire....

"You suppose your father's overjoyed to have his delightfully _independent_ daughter thrown back on his hands--of course!" she was remarking. "True, you've heard him say a thousand times that he was going to sell his business as soon as you married and buy himself a place in the country and begin to have some pleasure of his own. But, of course, that was only his little joke! Yes, yes!" said mamma, brandis.h.i.+ng her arms. "What he really wants is to go on slaving and toiling and worrying his heart out to keep you in pampered idleness and luxury, indulging your lightest whim without regard--"

"Mamma, mamma!--do, please!" the girl broke in. "If papa has been working so hard on my account--and I didn't know that--then I don't want him to do it any more. I wish he would sell--"

"Oh, I've no patience with your deathbed repentances! Don't you know your father's involved in serious worries at this moment, entirely on your account? Do you think a few dramatic speeches from you can undo--"

"Worries on my account? No, I didn't know of any.... What worries?"

Cally had stood listening with a kind of numbed listlessness, ready to go at the first opportunity, now that the real purpose of the interview was discharged. But suddenly she perceived a new pointedness in her mother's biting summaries; and she turned, with a slightly startled look in her eyes.

Her mother returned the gaze with savage sarcasm.

"Oh! You never heard of the Labor Commissioner and his hired character-a.s.sa.s.sin, I suppose! Never--"

"Yes, but I didn't know any of that was on my account."

"No, no, indeed! You thought it was just a little whim of your father's to keep his factory in a condition that's been a scandal in the community. Fighting off legislation--bribing inspectors--just his little bits of eccentric self-indulgence. You thought that ten thousand dollars I gave to the Settlement grew on a tree, I suppose. You--"

"Mamma," said Cally, in a strained voice, "what on earth are you talking about? I want to understand. What did that money you gave to the Settlement have to do--"

"Don't you _know_ he needed it for his business?" cried mamma, advancing menacingly. "I tell you he'd put it by to spend it on the Works this fall, and stop these attacks on him. And why did I have to take it from him, but on _your_ account, miss?--to try to clear the family name from the scandal you brought upon us--"

"_What_?"

"A scandal," continued mamma, in a crescendo sweep, "that all but undid my lifework for the family's position, and that may yet cost your father his presidency at the bank."

The good lady easily saw that she had struck the right punitive note at last. Indeed, the question now, Cally's peculiarities being considered, was whether she had not struck it rather too hard. The girl's face had suddenly become the color of paper. The intense concentration of her gaze was painful in its way, slightly disconcerting to mamma.

"Do you mean," said Cally, in quite a shaky voice--"do you say that papa--meant to improve the Works _this fall_--and that you--that I--"

"I mean exactly what I say," said Mrs. Heth, resolutely. "And I say it's high time you were beginning to understand your position in this family, as a guide to your strange behavior. Do you suppose your father enjoys being under attack all the time? Haven't you heard him say a hundred times, that it was bad business to let things go at the Works? Where were you six years ago when he said we'd have to economize and put up a new building, and I prevented him for your sake, arguing that you were just coming out and were ent.i.tled to--"

"_Six years_!... Why ... why, then I'm responsible for it _all_!...

Why--_I've been on his back all the time_!"

"I'm glad you realize it at last.... Oh, well!" said her mother, throwing out both hands and speaking with a kind of gruff tolerance,--"there's no use to _cry_ about it."

"I'm not crying," said Cally.

She was, indeed, not crying as her mother had usually seen her cry; not with storm and racking. Nevertheless, two indubitable drops suddenly glittered upon the gay lashes, and now fell silently as Cally spoke.

"But I could cry," said she, "I'm so happy ... I'm so glad, to know it's all been my fault.... You don't know ... I went to the Works the other day--"

"Oh, you did!" said her mother, bitterly, but enlightened a little. "And have been criticizing your father, I suppose, the father who has sacrificed--"

"He'll forgive me.... He _must_. I'll find a way."

Mrs. Heth, flinging herself down in her chair again, said in a voice full of sudden depression: "I should say you owed him apologies, for that among other things.... Well, I give you up."

Cally stood unmoving, slim hands locked behind her head, staring toward the window. Gone was the albatross from her young neck, melted the cloud from the azure round. Wisdom had come with such startling unexpectedness that she could not take in all that had happened to her just now. But all that mattered was as plain and bright as the suns.h.i.+ne waiting for her out there. She, and not papa whom she had so wronged in her thoughts, had made the bunching-room what it was; she, and n.o.body else, should make it better after this. And through the splendid confusion of sensations that, mounting within, seemed to float her away from this solid floor, she heard one clear voice sounding ever louder and louder.

It was the voice of the prodigal, chastened and penitent: _"I will arise and go to my father."_

Cally turned toward the door.

Her mother, stirring from her heavy rebuking apathy, said: "Oh, there's no use bothering him now to say you're sorry. You've not thought of him all these years ..."

"That's why I can't wait--now," said Cally. "And besides, there's something else I want to speak to him about.... A--a business matter."

Mamma demanded an explanation. And Cally, pausing briefly at the door, turned upon that censorious gaze a face radiant as the morning.

"I'm going to give him my fifty thousand dollars to build a new Works with.... Won't you please help me make him take it?"

But what her mother may have replied to this request failed to overtake Cally, flying down the hall to the telephone....

The bedroom conference, it was seen, had not been wholly fruitless, after all. Mrs. Heth's last stand for Hugo--like Hugo's last afternoon--had taken a slant not antic.i.p.ated by her, but at least wholesome and moral in its effects. Cally's dreaded accusing interview in the study gave place, beyond all imagining, to an unpremeditated outpouring by telephone, in which her chief fear was only of making a perfect little silly of herself. And lastly, Mr. Heth, called summarily from a directors' meeting at the Fourth National Bank, was overflowed with such a wave of feminine incoherence and emotionalism as he found great difficulty in a.s.sociating with his usually self-contained little daughter....

Papa indeed, knowing nothing of any conference or of any dark cloud either, was treated to the astonishment of his life. When he finally understood that the house was not in flames, or his wife stricken with a deadly malady, when he began to get some notion of what all the strange pother was about, his replies, for the most part, took the following general directions: (1) that little Callipers was out of her mind with her sickness, didn't know what she was talking about, crazy, and the greatest little goose that ever was; (2) that she had no business ever going to the Works, but that was all right now, and he didn't want to hear another word about it; (3) that he couldn't stop to talk such foolishness in business hours, and she'd better go and lie down and rest and get her senses back; (4) that he gave her that money for herself, and when he got dependent on his little daughter, he'd let her know; (5) and that there, there, not to bother him now, we'd see, after lunch....

Sufficiently vague replies these; yet they seemed to leave the daughter in no doubt whatever that the matter which had all in a moment become dear to her heart was as good as settled. For when papa terminated the conversation by smartly ringing off, she immediately called another number: Jefferson 4127, this one was, which, as the book shows (only she did not look at the book) is the number a.s.signed to Meeghan's Grocery, down by the old Dabney House....

However the untutored voice at Meeghan's reported that Doctor was out on his rounds and not to be reached before one o'clock. So Cally had to defer for a little while the happiness she would have in telling the lame wanderer across her path that, after all, his eyes had not put their trust in her in vain.

Later she sat again on a revolving seat at Gentlemen's Furnis.h.i.+ngs, eagerly purchasing s.h.i.+rts, cost not exceeding one dollar each, for James Thompson, aged thirteen, of up-country. It happened to be her work to do in the world, and she was doing it.

She was waited upon at the popular counter by Miss Whirtle herself, whom Cally remembered by figure if not by name; and she was so extremely agreeable and mollifying in her manner that the Saleslady's arrogance thawed away, and they were soon discussing questions of neck-sizes and sleeve-lengths in the friendliest intimacy. There were collars and neckties purchased, too,--these items Cally added on her own account, being in the vein of making presents to people to-day,--and here Miss Whirtle's taste was invaluable in a.s.sisting one to decide which were the n.o.bby shapes and swell patterns and which the contrary. The robust one patted her transformation many times at Miss Heth, invited her at parting to call again; and later on--that night, it was--reported the whole conversation in detail in the Garland dining-room, imparting, we need not doubt, her own witty flavor to it all.

In Baird & Himmel's Cally met several other acquaintances, and finally Evey McVey, who was delighted to see her out again, but seemed to be examining her rather curiously, doubtless with reference to Hugo and what had happened in that quarter. Evey herself complained of being tired; so Cally drove her second-best friend to the McVey residence in the car, but pleaded duties at home against getting out for a little visit.

And then, bowling homeward in the brisk airs, she could return to her own thoughts again, which, as by the rubbing of an Aladdin's lamp, had suddenly become so happy and so absorbing. Later, she must think about mamma, and with what time and solaces she could close that breach. But in these hours her thought was all for her father, whom she seemed just to be beginning to understand for the first time in her life....

Now all the imaginative dreads and nightmare terrors were faded away, and she felt beneath her feet the solid sanity of Hugo's self. She had seen the Works on an exceptionally bad day; she had gone there, overdrawn and ignorant, looking for horrors; what she had actually seen and felt had been mysteriously intensified a hundredfold by her violent encounter with Colonel Dalhousie. For all that she knew, to this very moment, the Works might be, indeed (as the beautifully tactful girl Corinne had said), the best place to work in town.

But what Cally was thinking now was that, in sitting in judgment on her father, she had blindly judged him as if he were a free man--she, of all people, who had felt so poignantly the imprisoning powers of a groove.

Now it appeared, as by a sudden light upon him, that papa had always been clamped fast in a groove of his own, exactly as she had been; a groove fixed for him by his place in society, by the way other men ran their cheroot factories,--for, of course, papa must do as his compet.i.tors did, or be crowded out, and the hardest-driving, meanest man set the pace for the kind ones, like papa,--and last and chiefly by the extravagances of a wife and daughter who always cried "give, give," and didn't care at all where the gifts came from. How could papa possibly be free with two costly women on his back all the time?... Strange that she hadn't grasped all this clearly, the minute she had recognized herself as a horse-leech's daughter....

Now the first thing to do, obviously, was to get off papa's back at once. Her fifty thousand dollars would be a sound starter there; of course papa would take it, since she wanted him to so much. And her mind, as she drove, kept recurring to this symbol, kept bringing up pictures of the new Works that would be, built perfect with her money.

She saw it considerably like the beautiful marble palace of her childhood's thought, the pride of Ca.n.a.l Street without, and within wonderfully clean, s.p.a.cious and airy, and most marvellously fragrant. In this new palace of labor, faints and swoons were things undreamed of.

Trim, smiling, pretty girls, all looking rather like French maids in a play, happily plied their light agreeable tasks; and, in especial, the cheeks of poor Miller (who had stoutened gratifyingly) were observed to blossom like the rose.