V. V.'s Eyes Part 87

"No one ever did anything so sweet to me before."

But that only made things worse, turning a white light, as it were, on thoughts she had had before now of the loneliness of his life. So she, finding herself not strong enough to be a comforter after all, said in a resolute kind of way:

"I never like to hear my friends depreciated. So please don't do it any more.... What was the name of that book about factories--the one you said that Mr. Pond had?"

Silence behind her, and then: "'The New Factory Idea,' by T.B. Halton."

She noted this information carefully on one of her sheets of paper, thus proving that she was right to go and get them, all the time.

"I thought," said she, "I might see if Saltman had it. Then I could begin to cram to-night."

But no, he said that Saltman hadn't it, but would order it, of course.

And then the sc.r.a.ping of a chair-leg advised all listeners that Mr. V.V.

was violating that injunction laid upon him as to not getting up....

He advanced round the table-end, his hand raised in his nervous and characteristic gesture. So anyone who wished could see that deficiency at his elbow, about which he himself seemed so splendidly indifferent.

He was as tall as Hugo; but Hugo, with his lordly good looks and beautiful clothes, was certainly a much more eye-catching figure. And yet, as she straightened now and looked, the knowledge shot suddenly through Cally that this doctor in his patches somehow looked, that he had always looked, rather the finer gentleman of the two....

"Johnson's the publisher," said V.V., coming to a halt in front of her.

And then, taking the sheets of note-paper unconsciously from her unresisting hands, he added, looking down:

"But--how'd you mean just now ... that I--I've accomplished so--so much?"

By now Cally could smile, in quite a natural-seeming way; and this she did, full under the prophetic gaze, revealing shining white teeth and glimpses of a rose-lined mouth. And if "he was a Hun, she had always been the loveliest of them, G.o.d wot....

"I'm beginning to believe," said she, "that you're not such a very strange man, after...."

So she ended; her gaze shifting, the smile dying on her lip. For the door of the library had opened authoritatively, and that difficulty which had embarra.s.sed her all through the afternoon suddenly confronted her upon the threshold.

Mr. Heth, of the Works, en route to his study, was briefly surprised by the little tableau he had stumbled upon. But seeing young men about the house at all hours wan no nine days' wonder for him; and he came on in with quite his usual air.

"Ah, Cally! Didn't know anybody was in here," said papa; and he glanced from her, with amiable expectancy, toward the stranger. "What's this confabulation about?"

Cally felt herself turning white. She steadied herself with one hand on the writing-leaf of the desk.

"We were talking about the new Works," said she.... "Papa--I want to introduce a good friend of mine--Dr. Vivian."

"Oh, Mr. Heth!... I'm so glad to know you, sir."

Thus the fearless young voice at her side. But Cally was gazing, transfixed, at her father, on whose face the friendly greeting air was giving place to astonished displeasure, not untouched with indignation.

He had stopped short in the middle of the floor, and the hand he had been automatically putting out fell dead at his side.

"Oh!--Ah!--Dr. Vivian!" said Mr. Heth, with the stiffest inclination.

And then, his look going from one to the other of the two young people, he added, as if involuntarily: "_Vivian_?... Ah! I'd--have expected a different-looking man!"

The pause then, the suspense of all action from the world, was infinitesimal. But it seemed long to Cally. And she thought she could never forgive her father if he turned away, leaving this slight upon her friend.

"Papa," she began, unsteadily, "I don't think...."

But once again her sentence hung unended. V.V., advancing, came then into her line of vision; and Cally saw that he had no thought for the cover of her skirt. Her father's forbidding deportment had not escaped the young man; there were both a diffidence and a dignity in his bearing. And yet she saw that his face wore like a flower that guileless and confiding look he had, the look of a man who cannot doubt that, in their hearts, all mean as kindly as he himself. He moved upon her silent father as if singing aloud an immortal faith in the goodness of his fellows: _Though he slay me, yet will I trust him_....

But what his audible voice was saying was very simple, and a little embarra.s.sed:

"I've felt that I've just come to know you to-day, Mr. Heth ... to understand things better. I suppose it's too much to hope that you can forget what's past, all at once. But I'd be mortified to feel.... Ah, sir!--I've felt honored by your House to-day...."

That was all; the mists lifted. He saw no difficulties, and so there were none. Papa's face was thawing back, through several surprised looks, to its natural kindliness; he had taken the offered hand, in the middle of the little speech; and then, within a minute, he was saying, quite amiably, that well, well, we'd say no more about it ... s'posed the thing to do was to let bygones be bygones....

And papa's daughter, Cally, turned away quickly from that spectacle, winking furiously, and wondering when she had got to be such a baby....

[Ill.u.s.tration: PAPA--I WANT TO INTRODUCE A GOOD FRIEND OF MINE--DR.

VIVIAN]

Strange things had been happening of late, it seemed; strange memories gathering for backward thought hereafter; novel pictures ranging in the immaterial storehouse that opens down the years. But in all Cally's invisible collection, then or thenceforward, there was never a scene that she saw so vividly as this: herself standing silent by the newel-post in the wide hall; her father, distinct and genial in the light through the open door, observing to Mr. V.V. that hard words b.u.t.tered no parsnips, as the fellow said; and V.V., half-smiling at her over papa's broad shoulder, and saying to her with his eyes that of course this was the way it was meant to be, all along.

x.x.xIII

Her Last Day, in this History; how she wakes with a Wonder in her Heart, has her Banquet laid at the Board of the c.o.o.neys, dreams back over the Long Strange Year; finally how she learns Something that not Everybody Knows: what it is like at the End of the World.

A morning in October, and she had waked to fare forth and capture, by hook or by crook, the most eligible parti who was ever likely to swim into her ken. Another morning in October, and all her waking horizon seemed filled by the knowledge that, at half-past four in the afternoon, she would meet and talk of cheroot factories with a man so little eligible that he trusted the crows to bring his raiment. In the wide world was there another person whose life's pendulum, in a twelvemonth, had swung so wildly far?

Eight o'clock now, by the little clock on the mantel: eight hours and a half to Mr. Pond's meeting for workers at the old Dabney House. One needn't be an astronomer to calculate that. And Cally Heth lay wide-eyed in her great bed, and thought how strange, how wonderful is life....

In the watches her mind had gone back and back over the long year; and she had marvelled at the tininess of turnings upon which, it was all clear now, great issues had hung. She could put her finger on time after time, last year and even this, when the smallest shifting in the course would have brought her, to-day, far otherwhere. 'Had she said that, had she done this'.... Was it all the wild caprice of Chance, then, that had no eyes? Were people so helpless, the slight sport of Luck, thistledown blowing in the winds of the G.o.ds? Ah, but she saw clearer than that. Had she not felt all along how powerfully this sequence of happening and encounter had pressed toward far other ends? And the divinity that had shaped them at last, acting and reacting and giving circ.u.mstance a soul, had been only that mysterious divinity that makes human beings what they are. There was truth in the saying that destiny is only character under its other name.

No chance here, surely, that had waked her so still and shining-eyed, such a wonder in her heart....

She had marked this day for diligent study. Last night an unknown hand had left at the door a hard-used copy of "The New Factory Idea," by T.B.

Halton. And Cally, at the end of a second long business conference with her father, had read three chapters of the absorbing work, and slept upon the resolve to devote this morning to it altogether. But she had seen at the first look of the flooding sunshine upon the shutters, that she did not feel studious at all. Let books look to themselves to-day.

Her desire was to be outdoors; to be alone, and to muse awhile. Surely n.o.body ever had so much, so much, to think about.

However, as a daughter one wasn't altogether free; nor yet again as a member of organized society. All day the claims of the familiar encroached upon the real world within, and thoughts, the radiant aliens, had to range themselves in as they could.

She was breakfasting with her father. They were to forage for luncheon to-day, these two, and spoke of it; he naming the club, she electing her cousins the c.o.o.neys. And here was the token of the more cheerful atmosphere prevailing this morning in the house. Mrs. Heth was entertaining a lunch-party of seven ladies, her contemporaries, at two o'clock this day. True, the invitations had been issued before the crash: but the hopeful point, as even the servants were aware, was that they had not been recalled.

They were glad that mamma felt like seeing people again; and said so.

And Cally then asked her father if he had any engagement for the evening.

Mr. Heth glanced at her over his "Post," and his glance feared that he saw yet another conference advancing upon him. Yet, it was fair to say, he had not been by any means inconvincible about the new Works. Real estate was real estate, say what you would; and it might be that the violent shake-up in the family plans had made the immediate future of the business a somewhat concrete issue.

He said, guardedly perhaps: "To-night?--let's see.... Well, not that I think of just now."