V. V.'s Eyes Part 30

Henrietta c.o.o.ney's voice spoke, singularly apropos:

"You don't seem to be the only one who's been bored lately, Cally--that ought to comfort you! Chas and I saw Mr. Canning yesterday, and he looked bluer than indigo. Mad, too!"

Surprise betrayed Carlisle into a naked display of interest. Turning with a little jump, she stared at Hen with a kind of breathless rigidity.

"You saw _Mr. Canning yesterday!_... Where?"

"Why, out on the old Plattsburg Turnpike," said Hen, certain now that the affair was not on again--"near the Three Winds Road. We happened to be taking a walk out there, and he dashed by on that beautiful big bay mare of Mr. Payne's, going like a runaway. He didn't look happy a bit ... You knew he was here, I suppose?"

By a very special effort, Carlisle had recaptured her poise: it was not her habit to confide her troubles to anybody, least of all to a c.o.o.ney.

"Oh, no!" she answered in a voice of careless frankness. "I don't know the first thing about his movements any more."

"Well, it seems he only came for over Sunday. A friend of Mr. Payne's told Chas he was here, on Sat.u.r.day. He went off again on the noon train to-day."

"Oh!... Did he?"

"Looloo saw him at the station. She happened to be there, meeting a friend of hers."

Gone!--He had come, not seen her, and gone!... A wave of bitterness swept through Cally, impelling her to hit out at somebody.

"Of course. Isn't it _funny_ how your family always sees and hears everything?"

But Hen answered, entirely unmoved, in fact with an air of modesty: "Any family can do it who keep their eyes and ears open. For instance, good old Looloo heard where he checked his baggage to: Palm Beach, if it's of any interest to you."

"I don't believe it is, my dear. He'll be checking it back this way again very soon, I've no doubt. Are we going the right way for Dunbar Street?"

Hen shot at her a look of unconscious admiration. Her pretty cousin's indifferent air seemed to support the theory that she had actually rejected the prince of partis, which, in fact, was exactly what it was meant to do. Hen had never really thought that Cally had it in her. She threw her alert eye around to see where they were. The car had turned south at Twelfth Street, had crossed Centre, and was now rolling into a quarter of the town very different-looking, indeed, from Washington Street. Hen said they were all right for Dunbar Street and told Cally to cheer up. Much worse was coming, Hen said.

There was nothing personal in Hen's admonition, but the truth was that Cally, gazing fixedly at the pa.s.sing sights, felt anything but cheerful at this moment. The c.o.o.neys' tidings were staggering in their way.

What was the meaning of Mr. Canning's mysterious flying visit? That it had to do with her she did not question; and, tensely meditating, she presently found a hypothesis not unsatisfying after its kind. He had come with the hope that she would at last make some generous overture toward a reconciliation. More direct advances, after her three galling rebuffs of him, he naturally could not bring himself to make. Yet he had taken a long journey merely to put himself in her way--perhaps counting on a chance meeting, more probably expecting that she, hearing of his presence, would this time extend the sweet olive. The wormwood in it was that she would have been perfectly willing to extend the olive if she had only known....

The car, pushing through a mean and shabby neighborhood, offensive to refined eyes, ears, and nostrils, now turned into a narrow street brisk with the din of business, but by no means lovely to look upon. Recalling the c.o.o.ney presence, Cally suddenly stirred with the deadly self-protective instinct of her s.e.x, and directed Hen to cease instantly all thinking about her and Mr. Canning. She did it, needless to say, scientifically, by saying with just the plausible degree of interest:

"I meant to ask you--what on _earth_ was the trouble with Hortense, Hen?

I supposed she was a perfect _fixture_ with you, an inst.i.tution!"

"What's the trouble with all the servants in this town?" cried Hen. "I tell you, Cally, I don't know what's going to become of us. Why ..."

She launched with zest upon the somewhat unoriginal thesis, and Cally relapsed into her own thoughts, which were full of rebellion at the bitter untowardness of her fate....

Much water had flowed under the bridge of sighs since the parting in the library. Pa.s.sed long since, it seemed, was that uprush of burning humiliation; subdued was the betraying flare-up (mamma's favorite word nowadays)--vanished to thin air like a midsummer madness, delirium's delusion, hardly possible to understand, much less recapture, now. A day had hardly pa.s.sed, after the second rejection of Mr. Canning at her door, before the thought of whistling him back again flashed luringly across Carlisle's mind. She repelled the thought, but it recurred, and she came to dally with it, ably a.s.sisted in that direction by mamma.

What had he done to warrant such absurd melodramatics?... More and more her mind had fastened upon the genuine tenderness, the emotion, the man had shown in his last moment with her. In love with her without quite realizing it himself, he had in the moment of parting been swept away by his feelings, and had taken a not strictly authorized kiss or two. What Sir Galahad among men was proof against such a tripping in the presence of lovely and irresistible temptation?...

"Hortense gave you no notice at all?" she demanded out of a dream.

"Did you ever? Why, honestly, Cally ..."

He was to pause once again, to bid the Paynes farewell, on his final progress back to what he had once called lights and home. That would be in April, said Cousin Willie Kerr, when his six months' sentence ran out. The distant promise brought the girl no comfort now. Why, really, should she not take this new opportunity he had given her, and dispatch him a little note, saying in a friendly way that she had wanted to see him again? By day after to-morrow, he could be at her side....

It was a little note that mamma, though ignorant of the circ.u.mstances, had so specially recommended in the desolate weeks; had commanded, offered bribes for, cried for with real tears, bl.u.s.tered and threatened for with a purpling birthmark. In her own mind the girl had already worded many which met the situation with merely a front of sweet generosity, carrying no forfeiture of dignity, no real acknowledgment of surrender. What was the fibre of foolish hardness in her that resisted all mamma's importunities, all her own urgent wisdom?

"Five years ago," said Hen, "we paid eight dollars a month, and got really good ones. Now the greenest of them holds you up for twelve and fourteen. Hortense was simply bribed off...."

Cally roused, glancing about. "Papa says," she observed, absently, "it will all end in something like the French Revolution. Heavens! What a perfectly sickening street!"

"Isn't it?" said Hen, cheerfully. "Yet it's interesting too, Cally, for this is where the city makes all its money."

Money-making, indeed, Ca.n.a.l Street looked. Long processions of trucks rolled up and down it, giving motorists more time than they desired to look about. All around them, as the car moved slowly on, were warehouses, new and old cheek by jowl together; commission merchants, their produce spilled over the sidewalk; noisy freight yards, with spur-tracks running off to shipping-rooms of all descriptions; occasional empty ground used as dumps, littered with ashes and old tin cans; over all a thousand smells, each more undelectable than the last.

But _April_! You might as well say in another life. How could she ever get through the days till then?...

"I'm glad you're interested," she said aloud, sharply, thinking that this was exactly what came of giving a lift to the c.o.o.neys. "I think it's simply disgusting.... Get us through this, William."

"It's familiar, at any rate. Let's see. Dunbar must be the next street over but one, isn't it?"

Cally, lifting a handkerchief to obliterate the adjacent odors of a gas-tank, said: "I haven't the smallest idea."

"Why, don't you like the rattle of business, Cally? Don't you like the bustle, the fine democratic air?--Why, _h.e.l.lo_! There's V.V.!"

Carlisle's head turned at once.

"He's signalling us," said Hen, waving back; and she nervily added: "Stop, William!"

Following Henrietta c.o.o.ney's look, Carlisle's eyes fell, sure enough, upon the tall figure of Dr. Vivian crossing the humming side-street straight toward them. Her glance caught him in the act of removing his derby, bowing in response to the cheeky salute of Hen....

"Ah, he's using a cane," added Hen, below her breath. "That means his foot is bad...."

"But he has no right to signal _me_," said Carlisle. "Drive on, William."

But she herself unconsciously spoke in an undertone, and the order appeared to be lost in the enveloping din. William, all but blockaded anyway, had come to a halt. Coincidentally sounded the voice of Hen, the pachyderm:

"h.e.l.lo, V.V.! What're you doing way down here in the wilds? Not visiting the sick, without your little black bag?"

V. Vivian stood bareheaded at the side of Mr. Heth's (of the Works) shining car.

"How'do, Henrietta?--Oh, good afternoon, Miss Heth. No, I--I'm down here on other business this time...."

Carlisle, her eyes about on a level with the young man's interesting piscatorial necktie, had acknowledged his greeting by the smallest and frigidest inclination of her head. That done, feeling outraged by this whole proceeding, she at once looked ostentatiously in another direction.

The lame doctor, for his part, appeared a little embarra.s.sed by the rencontre, or perhaps excited, one or both.

"I--it's a very fortunate coincidence, meeting you in this way," he began at once. "The fact was, I--ah--was just thinking of you at that moment, Miss Heth,--wishing very much to see you--"

Miss Heth turned her pretty head once more, this time with a sort of jerk. So the man pretended to have forgotten that she had ordered him not to address her again.

Now her eyes fully met those of Dalhousie's friend, and in that meeting she was conscious of an odd little shock, almost like a physical impact.... Why was it that this impossible man, with his ridiculous opinions, his wicked untruths, and his face so full of a misplaced hopefulness, kept coming like a destiny across and across her path? What was her silly weakness, that he never looked at her with those quite misrepresentative eyes without making her angry and unhappy?...