V. V.'s Eyes Part 89

Cally, handing the salt to Hen, said: "I am, indeed,--with Looloo. Don't you notice that she's getting prettier every day?"

Looloo, fair as a lily, proved that blushes made her prettier still; the Major said finely, "Praise from Sir Hubert"; and Aunt Molly, giving the same truth a sound wholesome turn, observed that Loo needn't get set up, for she'd never be as pretty as Cally, no matter how she improved.

Cousin Martha's remark was: "But to go back to what I was saying, Cally.

That Wednesday night was the worst I ever spent...."

And Cally felt apologetic to her poor relative to-day, a good deal ashamed before her. Her sudden impulse had been to ask papa's old cousin to come and stay in one of the four spare rooms at home (thus permitting Chas to come down from the c.o.o.ney attic); but she had had to put that impulse down. The Heths had not built walls around their little island for nothing....

They were in the limousine, she and Hen, driving down to Saltman's. Hen said she would be delighted to come in that evening, and play bridge with Uncle Thornton. She was a player of known merits, rather famous for successes with hare-brained no-trumpers. And Cally, thinking what man she should ask for Hen, discovered suddenly that her thought was going much beyond a table of bridge to-night; that what she was really planning was to marry her cousin off this year. And she found herself searching about for somebody very nice for Hen, very desirable.

"Oh, by the bye," she said, presently--"I was just thinking--do you remember that corduroy suit I had last year--striped gray, with a Russian blouse?"

Hen, it seemed, remembered this suit perfectly. And Cally said no wonder, since she had worn it till she would be ashamed to be caught in it again.

"I was wondering," said she, "if you could make it do for anything, Hen.

It would honestly be a favor if you'd take it off my hands."

Henrietta swept on her a look of incredulous delight.

"Cally!... Why, you good old bluffer! You know perfectly well that suit's a beauty, as good as new--"

"No, oh, no! Indeed, it isn't," said Cally, quite eagerly. "You've forgotten--it's worn, oh, quite badly worn. I'll show you to-night when you come. And then you'd have to cut it down, too.... Only you mustn't ever wear it around me, Hen, I'm really so sick of the sight of it...."

So Hen presently said: "There's no use my pretending or being coy, Cally. Oh, I'd dearly love to have it. I've been wondering what on earth I'd do for a nice suit this year.... Why, it's like an answer to prayer...."

And what had she ever done in a human world to ent.i.tle her to be bestowing last-year's suits upon Henrietta c.o.o.ney, the busy and useful?

"She's worth three of me," thought Cally, "and I've been looking down on her all this time just because they're poor. I seem to be little and mean clear through...."

And suddenly she saw that memories had been gathering here; that Saltman's hard-worked stenographer had grown intimate and dear....

Her hand closed over Hen's, and she was speaking hurriedly:

"Hen, do you know you're a great old dear? Don't look.... I've never told you how good you were to me this summer, when I was so unhappy, and n.o.body else seemed to care.... And since I've been back, too, helping me more than you know, perhaps. I didn't appreciate it all at the time, quite, but I do now. And I won't forget what a good friend you've been to me, what an old trump...."

Hen, taken quite by surprise, turned on her a somewhat misty gaze. She answered that Cally was a darling goose; with other things solacing and sweet. And then the two cousins were parting, the one to her typewriter, the other to her ease: but both feeling that a new tie bound them which would not loosen soon.

The car started from Saltman's door, and Cally glanced at her watch: it was just three o'clock. Probably at this moment Dr. Vivian and papa were shaking hands in the office at the Works. Why, oh, why, hadn't she said that she would go, too, as she had so much wanted to do? Surely she could not have harmed that meeting; she might even have helped a little.

About her were the bustle and clangor of busy Centre Street. People hurrying upon a thousand errands, each intent upon his own business, under the last wrapping each soul alone in the crowded world. And no one knew of his brother's high adventures. Men walked brus.h.i.+ng elbows with angels, and unaware....

She had had a little sister named Rosemary, two years older than she, and very lovely in the little picture of her that papa always carried in the locket on his watch-chain. Often Cally had wished for her sister; never so much as through this day. There was one, she liked to think, whom she could have talked her heart out to, sure that she would understand all, share all. But Rosemary had been dead these twenty years....

"Drive me a little, William, please.... For half an hour, and then home...."

The car went far over familiar streets that she had first seen from a perambulator. She sat almost motionless, the tangible world faded out.

It was good to be alone; this was a solitude peopled with fancies. Her mind dreamed back over the long strange year, while her steadfast face was s.h.i.+ning toward the Future.

Strange enough it seemed now; but till the other day Hugo and Dr. Vivian had hardly once met in the thoughts of Cally Heth. They had hardly met in life, never exchanged a word since the night in the summer-house: so she, untrained to discernment, had supposed that they had nothing to do with each other. Now, in the last few days, it had come to seem that these two had, in her, been pitted against each other from the beginning.

Forces not of her making had cut and patterned her life; and she, driven on by feelings which she herself had hardly understood, had crumpled up that pattern and seized the shears of destiny in her own hand. The groove she had been set and clamped so fast into ran straight as a string into Hugo Canning's arms; but she had broken out of her groove, and Hugo was gone, to cross her path no more. And her mother thought, and Hugo had said almost with his parting breath, that she had been driven to these madnesses by mere foolish femininisms, new little ideas picked up from c.o.o.neys or elsewhere.

It was true that she had these ideas; true, too, that she was not alone with them. She had been drilled from birth to the ranks of the beguilers of men, their sirens but their inferiors; and something in her, even before this year, had rebelled at that rating of herself, dimly perceiving--as she had heard a man say once--that marriage was better regarded as a career than as a means of livelihood. She had been drilled again to believe that her happiness depended on money in quant.i.ties, things had; but then, at the first pinch of real trouble, these things had seemed to sag beneath her, and she perceived dimly, once more, that she had built her house upon something like sand. And if her particular experiences here had been unique, she had seen that her experience was, after all, a common one. As if with eyes half-opened, she had divined all about her other people making the discoveries she had made; or, better yet, knowing these truths without having to discover them. She was but one of a gathering company, men as well as women, old with young....

Hugo had stood rock-like across the way she was moving. And so Hugo had lost her.

But these things seemed hardly to matter now; it all went down so much deeper. Surely it was over something bigger than her "little views" that her story-book prince had locked arms with the lame slum doctor, curiously recognized by him as an adversary at sight.

They had entered her life in almost the same hour, two men so different that she had come at last to see them as full opposites. So entering together, they had both become involved with her in the first moral problem of her life, which also began in that hour. And upon that problem each had been called, in turn, to ring his mettle. One, the fine flower of her own world, with a high respect for that world's opinions and on the whole a low esteem of the worth of a woman, had found her completely satisfying as she was. The other, a wanderer from some other planet, with his strange indifference to the world's values and his extraordinary hope of everything human, had been so pa.s.sionately dissatisfied with her that he, a kind man surely, had broken out in speech that had left a scar upon her memory. And upon the stranger's shocking apprais.e.m.e.nt of her, there had, indeed, hung a tale.

There were times when it had seemed that everything she had done afterwards had been but stages of an effort, months prolonged, to shake herself free from that compa.s.sionate _G.o.d pity you_....

But no; she knew it was not that way exactly. Before that night she had felt vague reachings and had put them down; and similarly afterwards.

b.u.t.tressed about with her island's social security, strong in her woman's faculty for believing what she needed to believe, she could easily persuade herself, or almost, that there had been only an unfortunate misunderstanding about Jack Dalhousie, that she personally hadn't done anything at all. She remembered that she had all but put the matter where it would trouble her no more. And then there had come a night when she saw that the stranger, by a certain gentleness and trust there were in him, had not been able to believe his own hard words of her. This man believed that she was good; believed it because he himself was good. And the moment of that revelation had been terrible to her.

She had felt in Hen's parlor the smart of coals of fire, the strange, new shame of being trusted, but untrustworthy. So there had entered her a guilty disquiet: and afterwards, however she had struggled, however Hugo's protecting strength had compa.s.sed her about, that novel sense had kept growing through the months, steadily gathering momentum....

All this was quite clear to her now. Nothing had made her tell the truth about Jack Dalhousie except that one man had expected her to. Of all that had happened to her, here was the beating heart.

No one in her life had met her on this ground before. She had been expected to be a charming woman if she could, a woman as ornamental as possible. He only had expected her to be a good woman; and something in her had found the strange call irresistible. He, by the trusting eyes he had, had put her upon her honor; not her "woman's honor," but her honor; and she, who had never had an honor before, had grown one, all for him.

As long as she could remember, men had paid tribute to her in all the ways of men with maids. But he alone had put any trust in her as a free and moral being; and she had bent the high heavens and all but broken her mother's heart that he should not have trusted her in vain.

She was far, far from being a good woman. Hugo certainly was anything but a bad man. Yet, when all was said, it was her expanding desire to be good that Hugo had stood against. And the collision had destroyed him.

Was this the great mystery then, the world's secret? Was this the wish that each human being had, planted away in the deeps, overlaid and choked, forgotten, yet charged with omnipotence: _the wish to be good_?

Were they all waiting for somebody to pa.s.s by, sounding the secret call, to drop all and follow?...

Oh, wonder, wonder, that the simple faith of one good man should have power to overthrow princes and powers!...

The car rolled swiftly, its windows open to the sunny day. All about were the sights and noises of city streets. But the flying panorama brought no distraction: out there, men walked as trees. There blew a light autumn wind, gently kicking at Cally's veil, waving tendrils of fine hair about her face. Unaware, suffering had laid its touch upon her; this face was lovely with a deeper meaning: and yet the young girl's April-freshness clung to her still. She was in the first exquisite bloom of her womanhood. And she sat very still in the rolling car, full of a breathless wonder at the miracle of life.

It had been the year of her spirit's Odyssey. And now, when she came at last to fair haven, marvel fell upon marvel: and the quest of her heart stood saluting her from the sh.o.r.e. What need had she to ponder or to justify, she who, setting out to find happiness upon the s.h.i.+ning earth, had so strangely found it among the yet more s.h.i.+ning stars?

Very slowly, very delicately, had knowledge unfolded within her. On a day there had been pain, and nothing. On a day there had been thrilling peace, and luminous wings beating so strong, so sure....

To love; to love unasked....

She knew that women thought this a shame to them; she had thought it so herself. Yet could it be? Had he not taught her this, or nothing, that to give was ever a finer thing than to take? Was it a shame to love what was lovable, and fine and beautiful and sweet? Ah, no; surely the shame for her would be, knowing these things now at their value, not to love them, to hold back thriftily for the striking of a bargain. Was not here, and no otherwhere, the true badge of the inferior, to measure the dearest beats of one's heart as a prudent trader measures?

So Cally Heth, the often loved and lovely, was strong to feel on her wonderful day. Beneath the maiden's invincible reserve, under the mad sweetness of this unrest, clear upon that Future which was so enveloped in a golden haze, she felt a pride in her own human worthiness, as one who now does the best thing of her life. She had always wanted to love above her: how time and this man had invested her ideal with a richer meaning!... Was not this the touchstone of that change within herself she had sought, that day when Colonel Dalhousie's rod had chastened her?

Many symbols of happiness had shone and beckoned about her, and she had turned her back on all of them to follow a man in a patched coat whose power was only that he spoke simply of G.o.d, and believed in the goodness of his fellows. Over the gulf that lay between their worlds, this man had called to her: and now she had made him her last full response, which was herself. He was the saint in her life; and she had found him beneath all disguises, and laid her heart at his feet.

Home again; dreams laid by. There was action for a s.p.a.ce. Antic.i.p.ation painted the world in rose.

It was after four; by the clock on the mantel. Cally stood at the window, dressed, waiting. She was bound for a workers' meeting in a somewhat dilapidated Settlement House in the slums, which only the other day had been an abandoned hotel, for cause. And never in her vivid life had she dressed with greater care....