V. V.'s Eyes Part 53

Carlisle thought, with a little hopeful leap, that Hugo _must_ know. It was all irrevocably settled; and yet at the same time it may have been that, woman-wise, she had left ajar a little door somewhere, through which his man's wisdom might yet storm, and possess all....

"But--but doesn't it seem that if I--did him a wrong, I ought to be willing to set it straight?"

"Well, naturally!" said Canning, and smiled a little, sadly, to see how white and sorrowful-eyed she looked. "If you did him a wrong. But that's just the point. I'm afraid I can't agree with the somewhat extreme view this friend of the poor fellow's seems to have put forward.... By the way," he added, finding the natural question popping in so suitably here, "who is this man that has talked with you about it, Carlisle? Your mother didn't go into particulars."

Carlisle felt some surprise. "Oh--I supposed she told you. Dr.

Vivian--you remember--who ..."

The name took Canning completely aback.

"Vivian?--no!... _That_ chap!..."

Both remembered in the same moment his quizzical complaint that this man was his hoodoo. Both felt that the pleasantry had a somewhat gritty flavor just now.

"I hadn't thought of him," said Canning, at once putting down his surprise and explaining it, "because I didn't think you knew him at all.

In fact, I didn't know you'd ever seen him but once, or perhaps twice...."

Carlisle regretted that mamma had not explained all this. "I haven't more than three or four times.... Twice when I was with you, you remember, and then I met him again at Mr. Beirne's and the c.o.o.neys'--some cousins of mine. You see--he was a great friend of--his...."

"And I suppose he has worried you about this every time he got anywhere near you?"

"No," Carlisle answered, laboriously, "I don't think he has ever mentioned it--since the first. Of course I've had hardly any conversation with him--and it's always been about the Works. You know, I told you he usually talked to me about that--"

He said that he remembered; and each was then aware that the harmony of a moment ago had somehow slipped away from them. Canning, indeed, instead of being enlightened by the explanation, was more bewildered than ever. How could it be that this man, her father's a.s.sailant in the newspapers, the religious fellow whom Carlisle had never mentioned but to belittle, should have been the recipient of intimate confidences which she had withheld from him, her future husband? Naturally he could not understand in the least. However, glancing at her still face, he forbore to put another question.

"Well, that's got nothing to do with it anyway," he said, lightly, dismissing the side-issue. "Now, let's see.... Sit back comfortably, my dear, and we'll take it all quietly from the beginning...."

Hugo had got his facts from Mrs. Heth, and nothing had happened yet to suggest that they were in any way inaccurate. On the contrary, they seemed to have received subtle moral corroboration, so instinctive was it for the lover to lean backward from the views foisted upon Carlisle by her singular and religious confidant. That he himself was capable of coloring the case, attorney-wise, to suit the common interest did not really cross his mind.

The whole issue in the singular muddle, he pointed out, seemed to be whether or not the poor fellow had known that the boat was upset. Well, who could say what he knew, an intoxicated man in a blind pa.s.sion? Not Carlisle, certainly, plunged suddenly into the sea and intensely occupied with saving her life. How, for instance, could she know it if, in the instant when she was under water, the man had glanced back and--deadened by his drunken anger, admit that for him--had not returned for her? Of the dozens of people who had witnessed the disaster, not one had doubted that the unfortunate chap's desertion of her had been deliberate.... However, imagine that it hadn't been, exactly, imagine that the women in their excitement and resentment, and through misunderstanding of each other's statements, had failed to give him the full benefit of the doubt. It was still a great mistake to a.s.sume that what they had said or left unsaid had been decisive. Public opinion, knowing the unstable character of the man, had already judged him. Did his later life and behavior indicate, really, that that judgment was far wrong? And as to that night of excitement long ago, the world's rough-and-ready justice would hardly have taken much account of Carlisle's generous theory that perhaps the man didn't know what he was doing. By the same token, it would scarcely reopen the case now to admit that kind conjecture....

"I honor from the bottom of my heart, Carlisle," said Canning, "your wish to do the strictest justice. Need I say that I'm with you there, against the world? But what is the strictest justice? Perhaps you might bring a ray of relief to the poor man's father, and that's all. Is that really so great an object to move heaven and earth for, at the cost of much pain and distress to all who love you?..."

Having spoken at some length, Canning paused for a reply. The pause ran longer than he found encouraging. However, he was no more sensitive to it, to Carlisle's strange unresponsiveness as he talked, than was the girl herself. Indeed, it tore Cally's heart to seem to oppose her lover, pleading so strongly and sweetly for her against herself. Yet she had several times been tempted to interrupt him, so clear did it seem to her that he did not understand even now all that she had supposed was fully plain to him last night.

She said with marked nervousness, and a kind of eagerness, too: "You're so good and dear in the way you look at it, Hugo. You don't know--how sweet.... But it all comes down to whether he knew--doesn't it--just as you said. Well, you see I really _know_ he didn't--"

"You're mistaken there, my dear! Only G.o.d Almighty knows that. Don't you think we had better leave the judgment to him?"

That Canning spoke quite patiently was a great credit to his self-control. His failure to move her had filled him with a depressing and mortifying surprise. To say nothing of the regard she might be supposed to have for his wishes, he knew that he had spoken unanswerably.

"But you see--I really do know he wasn't such a coward, Hugo," said Carlisle, with the same nervous eagerness to accuse herself. "I--I knew him quite well--at one time. He was a wonderful swimmer, never afraid.... Perhaps it's only a feeling--but, indeed, I _know_ he wouldn't have swum off and left me--if--"

"My dear girl, if you were really so certain of that, why didn't you say so at the time?"

Carlisle, looking at the floor, said wistfully: "If I only had...."

She was acutely aware that his question carried a new tone into the discussion, that Hugo had criticised her for the first time. The tiny crack in their perfect understanding yawned suddenly wider. And distressed, and pitifully conscious that it was all her fault, Cally flung herself instinctively across the breach. Her gaze still lowered, she took Hugo's hand and pressed it to her smooth cheek: an endearing thing, and done with a muteness more touching than any speech.

Canning was moved. She was not demonstrative by habit. He kissed the cheek, for once almost as if she were a child. And he said that of course she would have said so that night, except that she hadn't really been certain of anything of the sort then. That feeling came now, born of excessive sympathy and nervous shock. The mistake would be to accept these feelings for her final judgment on such a very complicated and serious matter.

So he was arguing the case for postponement of discussion once more, with excellent good sense and an even more moving insistence....

If he had now but ceased his argument, turned, gathered her to his arms, and adjured her by his overflowing love to entrust herself to him, it is possible that within two minutes he might have had her weeping on his breast, in complete surrender. Body and soul, she was sore with much pounding: more than an hour ago, she needed sympathy and comfort now, loverly occupation of the desolating lonely places within her. But Canning argued, seeing nothing else to do, argued with a deepening note of patience in his voice. And when he stopped at length, it was natural that she should argue back: though she really meant this for her last attempt to convey the dim light that was in her.

"I hate to seem so silly and obstinate, Hugo. I--I can't seem to explain it exactly. But I really don't think that waiting would make any difference--in my feeling. And don't you think, if I feel I ... couldn't be happy till I--got this off my mind...."

Again he explained that this feeling was but a pa.s.sing illusion, here to-day, gone to-morrow.

Carlisle hesitated. But Canning, seeing only silence for his pains, said with a little quickening of his tone:

"Tell me, my dear! Honestly, would such a thought as that--about your happiness--ever have occurred to you if it hadn't been suggested to you by Dr. Vivian?"

Natural as the inquiry was to Canning, it jangled oddly upon Carlisle.

She could not understand Hugo's recurrence to this man; it seemed curiously unreasonable, quite unlike him and somehow quite unjust....

"Why, I don't know, Hugo. I--I seem to have had it on my mind a good deal lately. Perhaps he first made me think of it that way--I don't know."

"Don't you think perhaps we might have understood each other a little better all along, if you had talked it over with me before you talked to him about it?"

"Yes, I do now. I didn't seem to think.... It all happened so unexpectedly--I never planned anything at all. And then I thought--I hoped--you would think I was doing right."

"My dear girl, n.o.body in his senses could possibly think you were doing right, and n.o.body who cared for you could want you to abandon yourself to the impulses of a moment of nervous hysteria."

He rose and paced the floor, four paces to the room. A handsome and impressive figure of a man he looked, his hands rammed into the pockets of his beautiful blue-flannel coat, his fine brow wrinkled with a responsible frown. He was seven years older than Carlisle, and, in the absence of Mr. Heth (whom neither telephone nor telegraph, prayer nor fasting, had yet been able to reach), he stood as her lawful protector and the man of her family. He must save her from the effects of her own hysterical moment, or n.o.body would. Clearer and clearer it had grown that he had to do with a distracted creature who, in a state of shock, had somehow pa.s.sed under the influence of a man of the unscrupulous revivalist type, and upon whom, in her present mood, all reasoning was thrown away. Gentleness and firmness were the notes for dealing with a flare-up. Well, gentleness had been tried in vain....

Carlisle looked at Canning as he paced, in the grip of a heart-sick fear. The same comfortable, homely little room, with tight-closed door; the same evening sunshine filtering in across the faded carpet; the same situation, the same man and woman. But what was this new shape that peeped at her from behind the familiar objects? A delusion and a snare had been her first feeling of perfect unity. But was it conceivable that she and Hugo might _quarrel?_...

That was the one thing that could not be borne; anything to avoid that.

She must give him his way, since he would not give her hers. She must agree to put it off till to-morrow, and then to-morrow he would still think she was unreasonable, and so they would put it off again, forever.

She thought of Jack Dalhousie, lying on his back, but with open eyes which did not cease to question her; of poor Dr. Vivian, even now awaiting her word with trusting eyes which did not question anything; and she saw that to turn back now would be like a physical fracture somehow, like breaking her leg, and that the moment she had said she would, she would have to cry again, and afterwards she would be quite sick. And then she looked at Hugo, who was so manly and sure, who _must_ be right, no matter how she felt now: and so began to nerve herself to speak....

But Canning had a new thought, a new argument, which now became definite. Coming to a halt in front of her, he said in a businesslike sort of way:

"Let's see now. You want to send word to Dr. Vivian this afternoon that he is to tell Colonel Dalhousie that you feel you did his son an injustice. Is that it?"

Checked in her drift toward yielding, Carlisle said that was what she had thought.

"Well, let's imagine what would happen then. I said just now that for you to do this would accomplish nothing, but it would of course raise a cloud of doubt, of which the Colonel would probably make the very most.

He would not be so scrupulous about giving you the benefit of the doubt as you feel, at the moment, about giving it to his son. He could make a most unpleasant story of it."

Carlisle sat with lowered eyes, listening to the firm just tones. Very lovely and desirable she looked in a "little" white dress which Hugo had praised once....

"And malice would seize on this story and make it worse and worse the further it travelled. If you stop to think a moment, you will easily see what a sensation the scandalmongers can make out of the materials you ingenuously wish to offer them."

He himself stopped to think; his keen mind flung out little exploring parties over the prospect he hinted at, and they raced back shrieking with vulgar horrors. Surely, surely his chosen bride could never have contemplated this.

"Carlisle, have you reflected that you would be pointed at, whispered about, till the longest day you live?"