V. V.'s Eyes Part 17

Carlisle was hardly to be overwhelmed by the c.o.o.neys' teasing, nor perhaps was she seriously displeased by it. Even less did the detail of her eccentric cousins' knowledge surprise her. If there was a fight or a fire, a _bon mot_ launched or a heart broken, money made or a death died, it invariably happened that one of the c.o.o.neys was "just pa.s.sing."...

In the middle of the table stood an object of shiny green crockery, which seemed to be a cross between a fruit-dish and a vase. Most of the table service was quite familiar to Carlisle, not a little of it having started life as Christmas presents from the Heths. But this crockery piece was new, and, upon Chas's admonition, its shiny hideousness caught and riveted her attention.

"Aunt Rose Hopwood's parting gift," said Tee Wee, softly, following her fascinated gaze. "Oh, Cally, ain't it boo'ful!"

"Theodore," said his mother, quite sharply, "I don't think your stay at the University has improved your manners."

Theodore colored abruptly and deeply. "Why, I--I was only funning, mother."

"I think that's a very poor sort of funning. And this applies to you, too, Charles."

"Yes'm," said Charles, starting.

The eldest-born made no other reply to his mother, nor did Theodore: meekness under parental reproof being another of the odd c.o.o.ney characteristics. Conversation seemed about to languish; but Mrs. c.o.o.ney, as if to show that the episode was closed, said equably:

"By the way, Cally, Cousin Martha Heth is coming next week to make us quite a visit. If you are not too busy, do try to come in some time, and cheer her up. She is going to take treatment for her nose and also for flatfoot, and I fear is very miserable."

After supper Carlisle sat on the sofa, feeling rather sardiney, and had an irritating talk with Aunt Molly, the subject being Chas's affair with his Leither, for the furtherance of which he was reported to be even now arraying himself upstairs. The complacence with which Aunt Molly regarded the threatened alliance--all possible objections being answered in her mind by a helpless, "If she is the girl he loves?"--was most provokingly characteristic of the c.o.o.neys' fatal shiftlessness. And they were popular, too, in their way, and Chas might easily have married some socially prominent girl with money, instead of bringing a nameless saleslady into the family. It was impossible for Carlisle not to contrast her aunt's flabby sentimentalism with her own and her mother's sane, brilliant ambitiousness. If nothing succeeds like success, how doubly true it was that nothing fails like failure.

Carlisle had reached a point where she longed to shake her aunt, when Hen, who had been "sc.r.a.pping up" with Looloo, came in, putting an end to the futile talk.

To her mother's demand if they had stayed to wash the dishes, Hen replied that they thought they might just as well: there weren't many, and the water was nice and hot. And Chas, hearing the clatter from aloft, had slipped down the backstairs in his suspenders, and lent a hand with the wiping. Mrs. c.o.o.ney chided, saying the dishes should have been left for Hortense, to-morrow morning before breakfast. She asked Hen whether Chas knew that his white vest had come in with the wash, and though Hen was pretty sure he did, Aunt Molly presently made an excuse and slipped away upstairs. She was a great hand for being by when the children were dressing to go out, and no one in the family, not even Chas, could tie a white lawn bow half so well as mother....

Looloo lingered in the dining-room, the family sitting-room of evenings, where Theodore had engaged his father at checkers. Hen, dropping into a chair by the sofa as if she were rather tired, asked Cally for gossip of the gay world, but Cally answered briefly out of regard for the chasm between: how contract the name and fame of Mr. Canning to fit this shabby little "parlor"? Hen was thin, colorless, and sweet-faced, and was known in the family (for the c.o.o.neys, strange to say, knew of enormous individual differences among themselves) as the most thoughtful and considerate of the children, and as alone possessing the real Ambler nose. She rather suggested some slender pale flower, made to look at its slenderest and palest beside her cousin's rich blossom. Still, Hen was accounted a fine stenographer: they paid her sixty dollars a month at the bookstore, where she earned double at least.

For five minutes the talk between these two girls, of about the same age and blood but, it seemed, almost without a point of contact, was considerably perfunctory. Then, by an odd chance and in the wink of an eye, it took on a very distinct interest. Carlisle inquired if Hen had ever heard of a man named V. Vivian, said to be a nephew of Mr. Beirne; and Hen, with a little exclamation, and a certain quickening of countenance, replied that she had been raised with him. Moreover, she referred to him as V.V....

Though the c.o.o.neys knew everybody, as well as everything, and though Carlisle had thought before now of putting an inquiry to Hen or Chas in this particular direction, the manner of her cousin's reply was a decided surprise to her, and somehow a disagreeable surprise.

"Oh! Really?" said she, rather coldly. "I understood--some one told me--that the man had just come here to live."

"He's just come _back_," explained Hen, with interest. "Why, he was born here, Cally, three doors from where we used to live down on Third Street--remember? Well, Dr. Vivian lived right there till he was sixteen or seventeen--"

"Why do you call him Dr. Vivian?"

"Well, that's what he is, you see. He's a doctor--medical man."

"He doesn't look in the least like a medical man to me," said Carlisle, as if that ought to settle something.

"Oh! You know him, then?"

"I have spoken to him," replied Carlisle, her gaze full on Hen's face.

"You see a great deal of him, I suppose?"

"No, we don't," said Hen, with an odd air, suggestive of regret. "He keeps so terribly busy. Besides being sort of a missionary doctor, he's always working on dozens of grand schemes of one sort or another. His latest is to raise about a million dollars and buy the Dabney House for a Settlement! How's that for a tall one? He just mentioned it to me this morning, _en pa.s.sant_, and says I must help him raise the million--"

"I suppose you didn't know that one of his grand schemes was to write a terrible article in the paper attacking papa and the Works?"

"Oh!" said Hen, plucking a thread from her old black skirt. "Oh, that letter in the 'Post,' long ago, you mean? Yes, I--knew about that; I wanted to speak to you about it at the time. Did you read it, Cally?"

"I glanced at it," said Cally, shortly.

Full of the interest of thundering feet as the week had been since Willie and mamma had given her the connecting link, Carlisle had in fact made a point of getting hold of a copy of the old paper containing that particular piece. Not being at all familiar with Works and newspapers, she had found the process involved with considerable perplexity and trouble, but she had felt amply rewarded in the end. The piece came to her hand like a weapon, against any possible remeeting with its remembered author.

Now she regarded Hen with steadily rising annoyance.

"What was your friend's idea in writing such outrageous stuff, do you know? Is he really crazy, as they say, or is he just an ordinary notoriety seeker?"

Colorless Hen looked rather hard at her pretty cousin. She allowed a perceptible pause to fall before she said:

"I thought you said you knew him."

"No; I said that I barely spoke to him once."

"If you only said good-morning to him--if you only _looked_ at him once, on the street--I don't see how you could possibly imagine.... Why, Cally, he's about the least self-seeking human being that ever lived.

He's so absolutely un-self-seeking that he gives away every single thing he's got, to anybody that comes along and wants it. In the first place, he's giving away his life.... Some of his ideas may be visionary or mistaken, but--"

"I should think so, after glancing at his article. What _was_ his object, then, my dear?"

"Well, that's simple, I should think. He went to the Works, and thought that conditions there were bad, and being what would be called the reformer type, I suppose he thought it his duty to tell people so, so that the conditions would be corrected--"

"Well, really, Hen! Don't you know, if conditions _were_ bad at the Works,--whatever that may mean, and I for one have never felt that working-girls were ent.i.tled to Turkish baths and manicures,--don't you _know_ papa would correct what was wrong without being called a homicide by--by eccentric medical men?"

Hen hesitated, and then began: "Well, business is hard, Cally, and men in business--"

"Why doesn't your friend try attending to his own, then, the medical business, instead of interfering all the time with other people's?"

The c.o.o.ney answered quite easily: "You see, he'd say this _was_ his business." Then she smiled a little, thoughtfully, and said: "He'd say, Cally, that the world's all one family, and everybody's responsible for everybody else. The cute part about it is that he absolutely believes it.... And it worries him that people aren't as happy as they ought to be, the poor because they haven't anything to be happy with, the rich because they have too much. He and Mr. Beirne argue about that for hours. He's absolutely the only person I ever saw who really doesn't care for--"

"Why, my _dear_!" interrupted Carlisle, smiling rather dangerously.

"You'll make me believe that you _admire_ the man immensely."

Hen laughed, and replied enigmatically: "Well, it's nice to feel free to admire what's admirable, don't you think so?"

"You do admire him very much?"

"I think he's perfectly precious," said Henrietta c.o.o.ney.

A peal of triumph from the rear room indicated that Major c.o.o.ney had reached the king-row in the teeth of bitter opposition. The peal came from Looloo, who should have been reading "Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme"

with a big dictionary instead of hanging over her father's shoulder.

Footsteps above suggested that Chas and Aunt Molly were making a careful toilet indeed for his call upon the obscure inamorata.

In the c.o.o.ney parlor, the two girls looked at each other. Carlisle tried hard to stare Hen down, and failed. In this moment she felt that she positively disliked her commonly negligible cousin. She had proved and re-proved to her own almost complete satisfaction that the man who had spoken the affronting words to her in the summer-house was a virulent religious fanatic, or (since she had read the piece) a crazy Socialist, like the man who had thrown the brick at papa, or both; almost certainly both. She was, it might be said, deeply and irrevocably committed to these beliefs: they settled and explained everything, and no more need to think or worry. It was simply not to be endured that Henrietta c.o.o.ney should cheekily sit there and try to unsettle everything, pretending....

"But understand me, Cally," Henrietta was saying, with provoking calm.

"Of course I didn't like that letter a bit. You see--Heth wasn't any more than a name to V.V., a sort of symbol, when he wrote it. But I think it was a mistake all through, and I scolded him well at the time--"

"Oh, did you?" said Cally, her cheeks very pink. "I imagined you thought it perfectly precious of him to call papa a shameless homicide."