V. V.'s Eyes Part 54

She sat motionless, with averted face, and felt that she was slipping from her last mooring. Was it conceivable that Hugo was persuading her to hush it all up again--just because it was _easier?_... She and mamma had done that and thought nothing of it. But, for this moment, at least, it seemed horribly different to have such a thought about Hugo....

She said in a little voice: "But if it's right, I oughtn't to think about consequences, ought I?"

Canning groaned.

"How many times must I tell you that it's not right, that it's preposterous, that you yourself will say so to-morrow!..."

She made no reply, and then Canning, goaded on by his sense of strange impotence, spoke the depths of his secret resentment:

"Really, I should have thought that the views of your future husband would have more weight with you than those of a casual medical missionary, known to be irresponsible and untrustworthy."

Cally gave him a look full of young reproach, rose with nervous purposelessness, and went over to the empty hearthside. Much nearer now peeped that startling shape. She leaned upon the mantel and tried to think: of her duty to Hugo, of how natural it was that he shouldn't understand, of how all this had begun. But unhappily the tone of his last remark seemed to have set other chords quivering within her, and all that she seemed able to think of was that it was cruelly unjust for him to misjudge her so. He had promised to stand by her no matter what happened, and besides Dr. Vivian wasn't irresponsible and untrustworthy.

The wild thought knocked that Hugo, now that he knew the truth about her, had ceased to love her....

"Carlisle," said Canning, with more restraint, "isn't it reasonable for me to think that?"

Her reply showed some signs of agitation: "Why, Hugo--of course ... You must know your views have all the weight in the world with me. His have none ..."

He came up to her on the hearthstone, raised her hand, and kissed the little pink palm.

"Never mind--I'm sure that's true.... Now, my dear, we seem unable to understand each other to-day, and trying to do so only throws us farther and farther apart. We both need rest, and time for quiet thought. You must let me decide this point for you. I am going to send word to Dr.

Vivian now that you will let him hear from you to-morrow morning."

He released her hand, and turned decisively away. At that moment, the dim hall chimes began to strike six.

"Oh, no, Hugo! Please don't," she broke out, taking a little step after him.... "_Please!_ I don't think I could bear it...."

Canning wheeled instantly, his virile face darkening and flushing.

"You don't?... My views don't seem to matter so tremendously, after all!"

"Ah, Hugo dear! That hurts. How--"

"Tell me, Carlisle, did the idea of telling Colonel Dalhousie, for your happiness, originate with you or with this man?"

Touched once more in her spirit by his singular obsession, she replied, with constraint: "I don't remember, Hugo. Perhaps with him. But it wasn't his saying so that made it true. It is the way I feel ..."

"That brings us back to the beginning again. I have done my best to persuade you that this feeling is an hallucination."

Over and over this ground they went with quickening exchanges, Canning's patience wearing sharper at each circuit, Carlisle growing steadily whiter, but unluckily not more yielding. At last Canning said:

"You are going to trust your whole future life to me, Carlisle. It is hard for me to grasp that you refuse to trust me in this, the first thing I have ever asked of you. Tell me plainly that you mean to have no regard for my wishes."

Carlisle felt ready to scream. How had this miserable misunderstanding arisen? What was it all about? Her mind glanced back, but she could not remember, could not begin to retrace the bewildering steps. Worse yet, she hardly seemed to want to now, for Hugo could not possibly speak to her in this way if he loved her as he had said.

She said in a small, chilled voice: "That's unjust, Hugo. I have every regard--"

"So you say, Carlisle. But nothing else that you say supports it in the slightest."

The girl made no reply. And then Canning struck out:

"My entreaties carry no weight with you, it seems. Well, then I forbid you."

For the first time a tinge of color touched Carlisle's cheek.

"You forbid me?"

He had no sooner said the words than he regretted them. In the beginning nothing of this sort had been within his dreams; had he foreseen the possibility, it is probable that he would have given Carlisle her head at the start without argument. But, once the position taken, he could not bend back his pride to recede. And to him, too, came prodding thoughts, of a bride who was revealing strange sides of her nature, strange unlovelinesses....

"Good G.o.d!" broke from him. "With such excessive consideration for _two_ other men, haven't you an atom for the man you are to marry? Hasn't it occurred to you that in a matter seriously involving my life as well as yours, I have a claim, a joint authority with yourself?"

"Occurred to me? It has never been out of my mind."

"Yet you resent it, it seems. I say that I forbid your doing something so full of painful consequences to us both, and you show that you resent it ... Don't you?"

"It's a surprise to me that you would want to use your authority in such a way. But--"

"Then you must have failed to grasp that this act of folly you contemplate, over my entreaty and command, would bring an entirely new element into the situation ..."

Carlisle looked at him without shrinking now. "A new element into the situation? I don't understand. How do you mean?"

"Carlisle! Be frank! You know the effects of all this. Have you the right, when I have sought one girl for my wife, to offer me quite another?"

Pink deepened on the girl's cheek.

"I don't think I have.... Well, Hugo, you are free...."

"_Don't say that!"_ cried Canning, in a voice thick with a chaos of feeling. "It's unendurable ..."

He turned abruptly away.

Of the two, in that disruptive moment, Canning was far the more visibly perturbed. If women think with their emotions, Carlisle's emotions, rebelling at long overstrain, had now run away with her. She was never a docile girl, as her mother well knew. To Canning she had dealt the ultimate unbelievable buffet. Through all her incredible obstinacy, through all his knowledge of the capabilities of her spirit, he had hardly doubted that one hint of betrothal restiveness would be sufficient to bring her to her knees. Now he seemed to wear her words like a frontlet, branded in the mantling scarlet of his brow. The young man felt himself falling through s.p.a.ce....

The same familiar little room, but now with a new face. Twilight began to steal into it. On the cheerless hearthside, the lovers stood, and each knew that words once spoken live forever. And looking at each other's faces each knew, and could not change it, that the lover was not uppermost in them now. They were two human beings spent with long arguing, two wills hopelessly at the clash.

In the sudden break-up of the trusted and reliable, Canning's polished style had been torn from him. He owned, laboriously and at some length, that this serious disagreement between them was terribly disturbing to him. How would it be later, if she refused now to show any regard for his urgent requests? Was it unreasonable for him to expect his chosen wife to consider the responsibilities entailed by his name and position, to share his ambition to hold both above the stings of malice and unmerited scandal?

At another moment, both the manner and matter of Hugo's remarks would have touched Carlisle profoundly. But she was beyond thinking of Hugo now. All that her fluttering heart could feel was that when he had promised to stand by her through all time, he had meant only to stand by her as long as she did everything as he told her....

"No, Hugo, it is reasonable. That is what I say. I am unreasonable. I don't seem able to help it to-day."

And Hugo, with the last remnant of his unconquerable incredulities, for the twentieth time mentioned another day. A post-mortem flicker of reargument started: started, but went out, quickly extinguished by the perilous fascination of the personal. Unspoken thoughts pressed in upon them as they circled, lifelessly reiterating. These thoughts grew rapidly louder; and Canning, striving to keep his bitter hostility from his tone, gave voice:

"Of course the truth is--though I am sure you don't realize it yourself--this man has somehow got you under his influence ... A sort of moral hypnosis ... to compel you to do what is against your nature ...

and will bring you great harm."

At what conceivable point had the grounds of discussion become so completely metamorphosed?

"No, that isn't true. I'm not doing--"