V. V.'s Eyes Part 37

"And if my mother confidently expects me for breakfast to-morrow?"

"I will write the telegram to her myself." He added: "Ah, you can't refuse me!"

Cally said: "I'm afraid you are one of the terrible masterful men that we read about, Mr. Canning. But--perhaps that's why I shall be glad to stay."

He thanked her with some unsteadiness, and said: "Where shall we dine?... And we could be excused from dressing, couldn't we? I can't bear to lose sight of you, even for an hour."

Of course he had his way there, too. In adjoining booths they did their telephoning, he to somebody or other about the reservations, she to leave a message for Florrie Willing. Later they dined in a glittering refectory, just opened, but already of great renown....

It was an unforgettable meal. So long as she lived, this evening remained one of the clearest pictures in Carlisle's gallery of memorabilia. Before the dinner was half over, Canning's immediate intentions became apparent to her. Doubts and hesitancies, if he had had any, appeared to recede abruptly from his horizon. With the serving of dessert, the words were spoken. Canning asked Carlisle to be his wife.

He did it after an endearingly confused preamble, which involved his family and his natural pride in upholding and continuing the traditions of his house. Critically speaking, his remarks might have been considered too long and too much concerned with the Cannings; but of the genuineness of his love, Carlisle could not entertain a doubt. As she and mamma had planned it, so it had fallen out. She accepted Hugo with her eyes while an affectionate servitor offered her some toasted biscuit. She accepted the biscuit, too.

It was later agreed that the betrothal should not be announced for the present, except to the parents of the contracting parties. Canning had argued strongly for a day in June, but Carlisle at length carried her point that the interval was quite too short. It was now the 20th of March, The final decision, reached on the train next day, was that Canning should join Mrs. and Miss Heth abroad, in June or July, and the formal announcement of the coming alliance should be made then, from London or Paris. The wedding itself would take place early in October.

XVI

Of Happiness continuing, and what all the World loves; revealing, however, that not Every Girl can do what the French People once did.

The row of maiden's testimonials had received their crowning complement.

The beginning at the Beach had touched its shining end. As she and mamma had planned it, so it had magically fallen out.

When Mrs. Heth heard the tidings (which she did within three minutes of Carlisle's arrival at home) the good lady hardly restrained the tears of jubilee. Having all but abandoned hope, she was swept off her feet by the overwhelming revulsion of feeling, and her att.i.tude--for of course mamma always produced an att.i.tude about everything upon the spot--was not merely ecstatic, but tender and magnanimously humble. For it was clear now that the daughter had outpointed the mother at the Great Game; Cally had justified her flare-up; and Mrs. Heth, with eyes n.o.bly moist, begged forgiveness for all the hibernal harshnesses.

"You must make allowances for the natural anxieties of a loving mother's heart," said she, in the first transports.... "You've done me so proud, dear little daughter. _Proud_!... How Society will open its eyes!..."

"So he is coming to dinner with us!" she added a moment later, exulting with her eyes. "He will speak to your father then.... It's not too late to add a course or two. And we must have out the gold coffee-set...."

Canning dined in state at the House that night, with coffee from the gold set. Next evening, there were similar ceremonies. Accompanying Carlisle homeward on the day following their re-meeting, Canning had meant to return at once to New York; for his long furlough had now run out, and he had felt a man's call of duty upon him. Moreover, it was already arranged that he should come again for a real betrothal visit, sometime before the first of May. Yet he lingered on for four days now, a man magnetized beyond his own control. Radiant days were these.

In view of Carlisle's desire that her news should not tamely leak out, depriving the Announcement of its due _eclat_, some little discretion was of course necessary at this period: else people would talk and say afterwards that they knew it all along. She saw that she must still make engagements which did not include her betrothed; she must meet the archnesses of her little world with blank looks above the music in her heart, with many evasions, and even, perhaps, a harmless fib or two.

Nevertheless, the lovers secured many hours all to themselves. Shut from public view in Mr. Heth's study, and more especially in long motor rides down unfrequented by-lanes they were deep in the absorptions of exploring each other, of revealing themselves each to each. And to Carlisle these hours, marked upon their faces with the first fresh wonder of her conquest, were dazzling beyond description.

Spring was coming early this year, slipping in on light bright feet. And in the House of Heth there was felt a vernal exuberance, indeed: permeating papa even, extending to the very servants. Mr. Heth had received the news of the great event with profound satisfaction, a.s.serting unequivocally that Canning was the finest young man he had ever seen. And yet, unlike mamma, his joy was tempered with a certain genuine emotion at the prospect of so soon losing the apple of his eye.

"You know the old rhyme, Cally," said he, pinching her little ear--"'Your son's your son all his life, but your daughter's your daughter _till_ she becomes a wife.'... Don't let it be that way, my dear. You're all the son your old father's got...."

As to mamma, her feet remained in the clouds, but her head grew increasingly practical. She had been rather opposed to postponing the announcement, being ever one for the bird in the hand; but she had yielded with good grace, and within the hour was efficiently planning the "biggest" wedding, and the costliest wedding-reception, ever given in that town. By the second day she was giving intelligent thought to the trousseau--every st.i.tch should be bought in Paris, except a few of the plainer things, in New York--and had finally decided that the refreshments at the reception should be "by Sherry." People should remember that reception so long as they all did live.

"All the Canning connection shall come," she cried,--"rely on me to get them here,--and all the most fashionable and exclusive people in the State. Every last one of them," said she, "except Mary Page."

After an interval, during which she sat with a glitter in her eye, she added explosively:

"_I'll_ show her whether I'm probable!"

The remark, it seemed, had rankled even in the moment of supreme victory....

Spring, too, it became, the quintessence of spring, in the young maiden's heart. Nature but symbolized the brilliant new life henceforward to be her own. And the more she came to discern her lover against his background of wealth, place, and power, the more she saw how brilliant that life was to be, the more she thrilled with the magnitude of her own accomplishment. Of himself in their new relation, Canning talked much in these days, and with an unaffected earnestness: of the high nature of the career they would make together; of his own honors and large responsibilities to come; in chief of his family, whose name it would be their pride to uphold through the years ahead. And the girl's heart warmed as she listened. What was all the storied dignity of the Cannings now but so much sweet myrrh and frankincense upon her own girlish altar?...

He was her maiden's ideal. He was her prince from a story-book, come true. If any flaw were conceivable in so complete a fulfilment, it might have been imagined only in this very fact of Hugo's all-perfectness.

Marrying upward, in the nature of the case, involved a large material one-sidedness: that was the object and the glory of it all. Yet now, in her romantic situation, there woke new emotions in Cally Heth, and she dimly perceived that her lifelong ambition carried, through its very advantages, a subtle disadvantage to the heart. Unsuspected tendernesses seemed to stir within her, and she was aware of the vague wish to bestow upon her lover, to make him a full gift for a gift. However, it was clear that Canning had everything. For the priceless boons he was to confer upon her, she saw that she had nothing to give him in return, except herself.

With this return, Canning, for his part, seemed amply content. When the hour came when, for his manhood, he must report himself again to that office in New York which had not known his face since October, he took the parting hard. He was to return again before April was out, for a fortnight's stay preceding his betrothed's departure for Europe; yet he seemed hardly able to tear himself away....

"I hope we shall have a long life together," said he, a bright gleam in his handsome eyes, "but it's certain, my own dear, that we'll never be engaged but once...."

Moved herself by the farewells, she teasingly reminded him of his one-time impatience to fly back to lights and home. But Canning, straining her to his heart, replied that home was where the heart is, and was admitted to have the best of the argument.

Carlisle's world had been knocked far out of its ordered orbit. Hugo Canning, possessed by her, was so towering a fact that it threw the whole horizon into a new perspective. Between this shining state and the winter of discontent, there was no imaginable connection. Cause and effect must turn a new page, life's continuity start afresh.

So it seemed, in love's first bloom. And yet, circ.u.mstances being as they were, it was hardly possible that Carlisle should at one stroke completely cut herself off from the past, as Florrie Willing constantly did, as the French people once did, by means of their well-known Revolution.

In Hugo's absence (full as the days were with questions of the trousseau, rendered doubly exciting by mamma's princely att.i.tude toward expense), Carlisle began to recognize once more the landmarks of her former environment. Doubtless a certain period of emotional reaction was inevitable, and with it the rea.s.sociation of ideas began. Canning was away a solid month. One day soon after his return,--it was on a lovely afternoon in early May, as they were motoring homeward after four hours'

delightful _tete-a-tete_ in Canning's own car,--Carlisle said to him:

"Oh, Hugo, what do you think I did while you were away? Subscribed a hundred dollars to a Settlement House! My own money, too,--not papa's at all!"

Hugo, whose intensity of interest in his betrothed seemed only to have increased during the days of absence, cried out at her munificence.

"So, you've money, in those terms--well!" said he. "Aren't you mortally afraid of being gobbled up by a fortune-hunter some fine day?"

"A _great_ many people have warned me about that--mentioning you specially, by the way. But I've always told them that you loved me for my fair face alone."

Canning made a lover's remark, a thoroughly satisfactory one.

"But don't you see," he added, "this business of your having money changes everything. I must double my working hours, I suppose! I'm too proud a man to be dependent on my wealthy wife for support."

"I'm glad to know you may be prosperous, too, some day, Hugo," said she; and, after a little more frivolous talk: "Did I mention that I'm soliciting subscriptions from visiting men for that Settlement I spoke of?"

"Great heavens!" cried Canning, amused. "Why, don't you think a Hundred Dollars is more than sufficient--for one little family?"

"They wouldn't say so," said Carlisle, laughing and coloring a little, "for they're asking for twenty-five thousand dollars and have raised about two so far. What could be more pitiful than that?"

Canning, who was driving his car to-day, as he occasionally liked to do, then asked, why was a Settlement? And as well as she could Carlisle retailed her rather sketchy information: how "they" planned to buy the deserted Dabney House, make it the headquarters for all the organized charities of the city, and use the rest of the great pile for working-men's clubs, night cla.s.ses, lodgings, gymnasiums and so forth.

Thanks to the influence of Rev. Mr. Dayne, Mrs. Heth had been induced to lend her name as a member of the Settlement a.s.sociation's organization committee. But it was from her cousin Henrietta c.o.o.ney that Carlisle had got most of her facts, at a recent coming-to-supper while Hugo was away.

Canning, listening, was glancing about him. Having made an adventurous run to-day by way of the old Spring Tavern,--he had plotted it out himself, with maps and blue-books,--they had reentered the city by the back door as it were, and now spun over unaccustomed streets.

"I didn't know you went in for charity, my dear."

"Oh, a cousin of mine is drumming up funds for this, you see...."