V. V.'s Eyes Part 46

All at once it seemed almost as if there were some one in the room with her. She looked around hastily: but of course there was no one. She became very much frightened....

There came a knock on the door, and a voice:

"Genaman in the parlor to see you, Miss Cyahlile. Mist' Avery."

"I can't come down."

"Ma'am?"

"Say I'm not well and am lying down."

In the hall below, the parlormaid Annie encountered Mrs. Heth, waked from her nap by the two rings at the bell. Mrs. Heth ascended to Carlisle's room and rattled the k.n.o.b.

"Cally?... Why, your door's locked!"

The door opened, and Carlisle confronted her mother with a white tremulous face.

"What's the matter?" said Mrs. Heth, gliding in with an expression of maternal solicitude. "Annie said you weren't well and were lying down."

"I'm not well ... Mamma, let's go to New York to-morrow."

"Go _to-morrow!_... Why, _what's_ the matter?"

"Nothing. Only I--I'm so tired of being at home."

Then her strained stiffness broke abruptly, and she flung her arms around her mother's neck with an hysterical abandon by no means characteristic.

"Oh, I can't stand it here another day. _I_ can't! Please, please, mamma! It must be not having Hugo. I can't explain--it's just the way I feel. I'm so miserable here, I could die. _Please_, mamma!..."

Mrs. Heth, detecting with alarm the incipiences of a dangerous flare-up, said with startling gentleness:

"There, there, dear! Mamma will arrange it as you wish."

XIX

How it is One Thing to run away from yourself, and another to escape; how Cally orders the Best c.o.c.ktails, and gazes at her Mother asleep; also of Jefferson 4127, and why Mamma left the Table in a hurry at the Cafe des Amba.s.sadeurs.

Mamma arranged it, by Amazonian effort. New York, the colossal, received the runaway with an anonymous roar, asking no questions. Here, in the late afternoon of the first day, safe forever in a well-furnished room on a seventeenth floor, Cally Heth made her answer to Dalhousie's letter. She formally cremated the scrawl in a pink saucer which had previously been doing nothing more useful in the world than holding up a toothbrush mug.

The cremation was a rite in its way, yet required only the saucer and two matches. The letter, when well torn, flamed nicely, only a few sc.r.a.ps holding out against immediate combustion. There was one little fragment on top, observable from the beginning; it read:

or night fferson 4127

These topmost bits refused to respond to poking with the burnt match, and finally demanded a new match all to themselves. Within two minutes all were reduced to fine ashes, which the priestess of the rite duly took to the window, and scattered down into the "court." Then she washed her hands, put the saucer back under the mug, and raised another window to let out the smell.

This business completed, Carlisle glanced at her watch. It was ten minutes past six, or nearly time to begin to dress. The moment was an interlude in a day which had been full of exciting activity, keyed with the joy of journey's end and lovers' meeting. An evening in similar t.i.tillating vein waited just ahead. At this moment, Canning, bidden _an revoir_ some ten minutes ago, was doubtless dressing at his club, seven blocks away. Mrs. Heth, left to her own resources all afternoon, had fallen asleep in her chair, and still slept. Even the maid Flora was absent, having been given the afternoon off, after unpacking two trunks, to "git to see" her uncle, a personage of authority who served his country well by sorting letters in the New York Post-Office.

Alone in the hotel bedroom, Carlisle looked in the mirror of the mahoganized "dresser," occupied in taking off her veil and hat, and thought that Flora ought to be coming back now. Then she sniffed a little and was aware of a memorial smell from the rite. After that her mind appeared to float away for a time, and when she caught up with it again, it was thinking:

Nothing so much could really have happened, if I _had_ told.

It was an academic thought for a mind which must have known very well that everything was settled now. Carlisle, a.s.suming charge herself, promptly turned it out. Having put her hat on the bed, she began to busy herself with preparations for the evening. Flora lingering at her avuncular pleasures, she herself went to the closet and took down a dress. A capable girl she was, who could easily get out her own clothes when absolutely necessary.

Canning was dining the two ladies at the resplendent establishment of his choice, at seven-thirty o'clock; he was due to return in an hour now. All day he had been in attendance, and all day he had been the very prince of lovers. Having lunched with Mrs. Heth and Carlisle at their hotel, he and his betrothed had spent the whole afternoon together jogging about the May-time park in a hansom-cab,--such was her whim,--with late tea at the Inn of renown upon the Drive: and through all, such talk as sped the hours on wings. How fascinating he was, she seemed to have forgotten, in these days of absence and worry. And how strong and all-conquering!--a man of such natural lordliness of mien that cabmen and policemen, proud men and strangers as they were, spoke to him with something akin to respect.

Yes, Hugo was, indeed, a rock and tower of strength. With him behind her, she had the world at her feet.... Heavens! What could gossip possibly do to Mrs. Hugo Canning?

Outside was the roar of conglomerate humanity. Up here in this strange bedroom, indifferent host to a thousand transient souls, it was quiet and even a little lonely. Once more Carlisle caught her mind at its retrospective misbehavior, and once more turned the key on it. Having laid out her dress on the bed, she stood and looked down into the cheerless light-well a minute, and then decided to wake up her mother.

But she stopped on the way and turned back. Why wake up mamma half an hour too soon, just to hear the sound of one's own voice?

She took off her watch, and raised her hands to begin unfastening her waist. But she became engrossed in staring back at her reflection in the mirror, and presently her hands dropped.

Face and form, background and destiny, she was possessed of blessings many and obvious: all crowned now, sealed and stamped, with the love of Hugo Canning, which, he had pledged himself, was a love which should not die. What girl so entirely successful as she? Convincingly the excellent gla.s.s gave back the presentment of loveliness endowed with all the gifts of Fortune.

And yet she had run away: there was no evading that. An insignificant boy thousands of miles away had sent out a cry for help, and she, the proud and blessed, who had always considered herself quite as s.p.u.n.ky as another person, had bolted in a panic. And she had bolted too fast, it seemed, to consider even that, with that cry, there had come a new element into the situation, disturbing to the old argument. The full reach and meaning of Jack Dalhousie's letter seemed to be coming upon her now for the first time, just when she had ritually cremated it. Out of the pink saucer had mysteriously blown the knowledge that the author of that poor composition could no more be pictured as doing splendidly down in Texas....

For a third time her over-mind spied upon and detected the nether's treason; and this time Cally, turning abruptly from the mirror, was troubled. Having run away, could she not at least enjoy a runaway's peace? Why backward glances now? She had escaped Dalhousie. She had escaped Dalhousie's friend. She stood in this room the safest person in the world. No one on earth could betray her except herself.

The watch ticked loud, steadily drawing Hugo, and mamma and Flora. Up through the windows came the twilight and the rumble of the vast heedless city. Carlisle snapped on the lights. And then all at once, without warning, there closed down upon her an enormous depression, a sense as of standing on the brink of irretrievable disaster. Or it was as if she had run away, indeed, but had not escaped. Or as if, in cutting herself off from the past, she had cut away something important, which something here gave notice that it would not be peacefully abandoned. And mixed with this there was again that sense of large pressure upon her, so tangible that it was almost like a person in the room with her, sharing, dominating her councils....

She was far from understanding these feelings, but she did understand that she felt suddenly sickish and quite faint; and she thought practically of mamma's little flask of brandy in her bag somewhere, if only she could find it. Then speculations on this point vanished with the recollection that she stood in the modern Arabian Nights, all the resources of the world at her beck.

Cally stepped to the telephone and called down in a small but authoritative voice:

"Send me up a c.o.c.ktail at once, please. Room 1704."

"Yes, mum," replied the experienced voice far below. "What kind would you wish?"

"Oh ... the best," said she, less authoritatively; and then, rang off hurriedly, thinking how funny it was that she couldn't produce the name of a c.o.c.ktail when needed, since papa shook one up for himself nearly every evening, and Hugo always ordered them when they dined together, and laughed at the little faces she made....

The c.o.c.ktail came, on rubber heels, and she sipped it, walking about the room and not thinking at all about dressing. A spoonful or so of the yellow concoction, and the sickish feeling vanished, and she felt instead rather devilish and fast, like the blondined villainess in a play. She was a daring woman of the new school, a Woman with a Past, who rang up hotel bars and ordered the best c.o.c.ktails sent up at once....

Possibly the c.o.c.ktail had this moral reaction, that she no longer sought to discipline her mind. She sipped the drink gingerly, and her thought fluttered backward and forward, full of contradictions and repet.i.tions, as thought is in life, but now free.... Suppose, after all, that her past was not escaped? It wasn't such an easy thing to do, it seemed. Dalhousie thought he had escaped his, but it had run him down at last, way off in Texas. Suppose Dr. Vivian now decided (in view of her being a fugitive) that it was his duty to lay the matter before Colonel Dalhousie, and the tempestuous Colonel took the next train....

There was a knock at the door, causing her to start violently, and spill some of the c.o.c.ktail. However, it was not Colonel Dalhousie, but only the maid Flora, who entered with that air of eager hurry so characteristic of an habitually tardy race. It appeared that the infernal powers had conspired against her prompt.i.tude in the shape of a blockade, not to mention losting her way through the malicious misdirection of a white man selling little men that danced on a string....

Having learned further that the postal uncle was poly las' month but tollable now, Flora's young mistress said:

"We must dress in a hurry now, Flora. It's quarter to seven."

And then she went on through to the sitting-room of the suite, to wake her mother, thinking: "I can't go on this way the rest of my life, jumping out of my skin every time there's a knock.... What on earth have I been so afraid of?..."

Mrs. Heth slept on in her deep-bosomed chair, undisturbed by the click of switch or burst of light into her enveloping dusk. She had a magazine, face downward, in her lap; also a one-pound box of mixed chocolates, open. Her head had fallen upon her chair-back; a position which brought the strange dark little mustache into prominence, and also threw into relief the unexpected heaviness of the jaw and neck. The face of an indomitable creature, certainly, of one of those fittest to survive; but not exactly a spiritual face, perhaps, hardly a face finely sensitive to immaterial values....