V. V.'s Eyes Part 31

She felt herself, as it were, turning pale inside, but into her cheeks there sprang a cold color.

"You wished to see me?"

"Well, do put on your hat, V.V.," interjected Hen, matter of fact, but glancing round at Cally's voice. "You'll catch pneumonia...."

"Yes--thank you.... I'd like to enlist your help, if I could, Miss Heth.

I've just come from the Works, you see," he hurried on with curious intensity--"where I went to try to right what seems to be a clear injustice. I wonder--do you remember the girl I happened to mention to you at my uncle's that night,--a buncher here at the Works?..."

His expression said that he was counting on her remembering. The girl in the car was looking him through and through. Hen c.o.o.ney disappeared from between them; the roar of traffic faded away.

"No, I don't remember," said Miss Heth, biting her lip a little.

"Oh!--the girl I wanted the _matrons_ for? Well, it's no matter," the tall young man said, with a belying look of youthful disappointment. But he went on with undiminished eagerness: "She's one of the best operatives in the Works, I a.s.sure you--a really valuable employee because she can get more work out of a machine than any two inexperienced girls. She's had over two years' practice, you see. This morning she reported again for work after nearly a month's illness in bed: she's had pleurisy. Well, MacQueen--the superintendent--declines to give her her place back."

"Why, what a shabby trick!" cried Hen....

She looked as if she desired to say much more, but she saw that V.V.'s eyes were fixed on Cally, whose father owned MacQueen, and forbore.

Cally's breast rose and fell. She saw what was coming now.... How did he dare--he who had so maligned her personally, who had so maliciously thrown bricks at papa and the Works--how did he dare to turn and beg favors from the objects of his slanders? This was the supreme impertinence. Now she would say to him what would destroy him from her ways forever....

V. Vivian was hurrying on, as if perceiving that he hadn't made the matter fully plain as yet: "It is quite a serious thing for her, because she can make more at the Works than anywhere else--she's a born buncher.

And she and her mother are dependent on her earnings. It seems a--a great hardship that she should be thrown out this way, without any fault of her own...."

"Put-on-your-hat!" ordered Hen, _sotto voce_; and again repressed further remarks seething within her.

The slum doctor, having neglected Hen's injunction hitherto, now obeyed it, though with inattention to the processes. He continued speaking, blind to all discouragements.... Would no one stop the G.o.d's fool, rushing with eager eyes to his doom?...

"I don't, of course, like to trouble you. But don't you think you could stop a moment, and say just a word to MacQueen--or to your father if he is in?..."

Now was the moment to demolish the irrepressible fanatic, who seemed incapable of understanding that his betters wanted none of him. And strange, oh, strange!--Cally Heth sat silent.... As the man reached the climax of his madness, the girl's hard challenging gaze, as if by some miracle of his ministering angels, had suddenly wavered and broken. Her eyes flitted from his face, rested fixedly on a hideous sprawling pile on the corner ahead, an abode of trade exceptionally repellent to all the senses. However, she was unaware of the detestable object, so confused was she by the odd frustrating weakness that suddenly possessed her, staying her hand in the act of delivering the mace-blow. It might be the very superlativeness of the man's temerity that disarmed her, paralyzing the hot will. It might be merely that ludicrous trusting look in his eyes, which somehow seemed to put him in the non-combatant cla.s.s, like some confiding child....

"I know, of course," he was concluding with unfaltering expectancy, "a word from you will make everything right at once."

And Carlisle, her glance returning toward him, but not to him, heard with disquiet and mortification her own voice saying, not indignantly at all:

"You will have to speak to my father about it if--if injustice has been done. I--I haven't time to go to the Works now--"

"Time!" cried Hen c.o.o.ney, at last a.s.suming control of things. "Why, good heavens, Cally! It wouldn't take us any _time_! We're right there now!--and don't you think Uncle Thornton _ought_ to be told how that brute's behaved ..."

Hen intended only an argument; but it happened that her explosive statement sprang out like a switchman, finally shifting the train of the talk.

"Oh!" said Cally, staring bewildered at her cousin. "Why--where are the Works--from here, I mean ...?"

Hen's strange look, confirmed her own confused conviction that she was appearing at an annoying disadvantage all at once. And forebodings possessed her, as of one walking wide-eyed into unsuspected perils.

"You _are_ lost, Cally, indeed. Why, my dear, we're right on the corner of Seventeenth and Ca.n.a.l now--they're leaning right up against your nose. There!"

Following Hen's nod, Cally's gaze rested again on the somewhat displeasing pile on the corner, this time with a seeing eye. Her fascinated stare took in with one sweep a dirty ramshackle building of weather-worn gray brick, spilling over the sidewalk and staggering away (as it looked) down the littered side-street: rather a small building, obviously old, certainly not fragrant, quite sinister-looking somehow....

The girl felt as if the skies were falling. She perceived that there was some mistake. "Oh ... You mean that is part of them? But the--the main part, I suppose, is--"

"No, this is all there is of 'em, Cally!" said Hen, suddenly with a kind note in her voice. And she waved upward toward a wire screen atop the ancient building, where large black letters spelled out:

THE HETH CHEROOT WORKS

_"Is that the Works?"_ breathed the daughter of the Works, with a sort of stunned incredulity.

In her utter bewilderment, she was confused into glancing at Jack Dalhousie's friend, who stood silent upon the sidewalk, two yards away.

Thus she surprised his translucent eyes fixed upon her with a look which she had seen there on two other remembered occasions. The eager confidence had, indeed, faded from his face, but not as she had designed that it should fade. The man had the grace to look away at once, seeming embarra.s.sed: but in one glance she saw that he had read to the heart of what she felt, thus discovering the real birthplace of her Family. And his eyes had said to her, quite plainly, that of course he would not on any account ask her to stop now; and that, on the whole, G.o.d must pity her again for a poor little thing who did not even know where and how her own father made his money....

She could have cried for the angry mortification of this moment, but perhaps that confrontation steadied her as nothing else could have done.

She said hurriedly, but with some degree of naturalness:

"Well--it certainly isn't pretty--Hen! But I don't suppose factories usually are. You know, I--haven't happened to be down here for a good many years...."

And then, catching the driver's eye, she nodded sharply to him to go on.

In the cross-sweep of larger troubles, dismissed bunchers were naturally forgotten. The car started with a little jump.

"Why, aren't you going to _stop_?"

It was Hen c.o.o.ney who thus sounded the note of rather indignant surprise, not the man from the slums, who, understanding, stood tall and silent, lifting his old derby....

Cally, looking straight ahead, replied: "I can't stop now."

That left the whole matter indeterminate; n.o.body was committed to anything, one way or another. Hen c.o.o.ney earned Cally's undying resentment (at least for the remainder of the drive) by crying over her shoulder as the car rolled away:

"Of course Uncle Thornton'll give her her place back! Don't you worry, V.V.!..."

That night the subject of the Works was touched upon again, in the course of an extended talk between Carlisle and her friend Mattie Allen, a talk ranging intimately over various aspects of life and living. It took place in Carlisle's pretty bedroom, toward two o'clock A.M. In the earlier evening the girls had brilliantly attended the Thursday German (which was always held on Mondays), and now Mattie was spending the night: a ceremony which she dearly loved, especially the eleven o'clock breakfast in bed. They routed all hands out at eight at the Allens, regardless.

The two girls, Carlisle and Mattie, were the dearest friends in the world, being perfect natural foils, each made to appear at her best by the presence of the other. Many other bonds they had also, as the fact that, while each was charming and most attractive to men, they very rarely attracted the same men, thus obviating hostile jealousies.

Speaking roughly, tall, athletic, handsome, normal young men loved Carlisle; while Mattie, though rarely appealing to these demiG.o.ds, made instant killings with "clever" men, literary fellows, teachers of Greek, and promising young entomologists. Doubtless the comparatively favorable impression Mattie had made on Mr. Canning at the Beirne reception was due to the fact that he, though a demiG.o.d, had thought, at times, of writing a book....

"Mats," said Carlisle, apropos of nothing whatever, "have you ever heard people criticizing the Works--saying horrid things about conditions being unhealthy there, or anything of that sort?"

"Why, yes, dear, I have," said Mats at once, and sweetly. "Not very lately, though. I think there was an article in the paper about it, wasn't there, a month or two ago? Why?"

"What have you heard people say?" replied Carlisle.

"Well, I can't remember exactly, Cally, but it seems to me I heard them say the Government was going to have a new law about it, or something. Why?"

This last was a popular word with Mattie, whose mind in relation to her own s.e.x was distinctly interrogatory. All evening, mostly by indirect methods, she had been examining Carlisle in regard to Mr. Canning, and his strange visit....

"Oh, nothing," said Carlisle, gently patting her face with a steaming cloth.

Mattie selected a hairbrush from her little spend-the-night kit.