"But they haven"t raised all the money already!"
At this Mrs. Heth looked still more knowing. "Confess, Cally--didn"t Hugo do it? Didn"t he make another big subscription after his thousand?"
Cally, arrested at the foot of the steps, stared at her mother.
"Why--not that I know of. What do you mean?"
Now her mother looked somewhat disappointed, but said, snapping a glove b.u.t.ton: "It would be like him to do it, and say not a word to anybody.
Why, there"s a foolish story Mrs. Wayne told me this morning that the whole thing had fallen through, when Mrs. Berkeley Page came forward anonymously with a gift of twenty-five thousand--simply buying the building outright, in fact. I don"t, of course, believe a word of it.
She"s exactly the kind to let her right hand know what her left was doing. Still, I did think perhaps Hugo might possibly have done something of the sort. He was so interested--he spoke of the Settlement to me only yesterday...."
The girl gazed at her mother, and a sudden light broke into her eyes.
Across her memory there flashed Canning"s cryptic remark, only the other night: "We"ll show him something about giving away money some day."...
This, then, was what he had meant: perhaps he had already done it that night. She knew that Hugo had curiously disliked Dr. Vivian at sight, and that, by the bond between her and him, he had somehow entered into her own feminine feeling that to give handsomely to the fellow"s own charity (to which he himself gave nothing at all) was to show him up completely in the interest of public morals. The gift of such a sum as twenty-five thousand dollars simply exploded him off the horizon....
Her heart glowing toward her understanding lover, she clapped her small hands and cried: "He did!--I remember something he said about it now.
Oh, I _know_ he did!"
"I felt morally certain of it," said mamma, calmly, peering through the plate gla.s.s of the door. "Don"t tell me Mary Page would do a thing like that. Ah, here is the car at last...."
Carlisle said with sudden eagerness: "Do wait a minute for me, mamma! I believe I"ll go to the meeting, too."
Naturally some discussion followed this whimsical request. The upshot was that Mrs. Heth, being late already, promised to send the car back.
Cally, gloom banished, ran up the stairs, her mother"s voice following behind like a trade-wind.
"It"s to be in the office of that Dr. Vivian--you know?... one flight up. No difficulty in finding ... Sure to put on rubbers...."
The last words to be distinctly heard were: "Look for me right up at the front."
In her own room Carlisle flew about quite blithely, making ready for the unexpected excursion with odd antic.i.p.ations beyond mamma"s guessing. She felt grateful to Hugo, attached to him by a new tie; for he, however clearly he had understood it himself, had beautifully put her in just that position toward the religious fellow which she had so long desired to occupy: the position, in short, of overwhelming moral superiority.
How easy now, choosing her own moment, to say what would dispel forever the man"s odd little power of causing her to worry....
The streets were slippery, the journey was from pole to pole of the town and yet five minutes sufficed for it, bringing Settlementers to their destination. So easily does forty horse-power traverse the mile between Houses of Heth and Houses of Dabney. Cally Heth rolled up to the door of the abandoned hotel. Large and dismal it looked in the slanting rain.
Archaic, too, so the modern of the moderns thought, glancing upward over the face of the shabby pile as the car halted, and William, who was ever attentive to his young mistress, sprang out with the umbrellas. It was an odd place for anybody to live, certainly; an even odder place to draw in storm the world of fashion foregathering to its bosom. Yet this indubitably was the spot. There was the little procession of motor-cars, lined against the broken sidewalk in the wet, to prove it. The girl"s upward eye fell, too, upon a name, inscribed in white paint upon a window directly above the decayed grand entrance:
DR. VIVIAN
Carlisle became conscious of a certain excitement. She hoped very much that they hadn"t read out the names of subscribers yet.
She was late, so there was n.o.body to show her in. From the sidewalk she stepped under a queer little portico, which seemed to waft one back to a previous century. Here, at the vestibule step, she was obliged to move carefully to avoid treading on two dirty little denizens of the neighborhood, who knew no better than to block the way of the quality.
They were little Jew girls,--little Goldnagels, in short,--and while one of them sat and played at jackstones with a flat-looking rubber ball, the other and smaller lay p.r.o.ne upon her stomach, weeping with pa.s.sionate abandon.
Her agonized wails indicated the end of the world, and worse. Carlisle said kindly:
"What"s the matter, little girl?"
The lamenting one, who was about four years old, rolled around and regarded the lady with a contorted face. Her wails died to a whimper: but then, curiosity satisfied and no solace offering, she burst forth as with an access of mysterious pain.
"Did she hurt herself?" said Carlisle, third-personally, to the elder girl, who had suspended her game to stare wide-eyed. "What on earth is the matter?"
The reply was tragically simple:
"_A Lady stepped on her Junebug_."
Sure enough, full on the vestibule floor lay the murdered slumbug, who had too hardily ventured to cross a wealthy benevolent"s path. The string was yet tied to the now futile hind-leg. Carlisle, lingering, repressed her desire to laugh.
"Oh!... Well, don"t you think you could catch her a new one, perhaps?"
"Bopper he mout ketch her a new one mebbe to-morrow, mom.... _Hiesh_, Rebecca!"
Moved by some impulse in her own buoyant mood, Carlisle touched the littlest girl on the shoulder with a well-gloved finger.
"Here--Rebecca, poor child!... You can buy yourself something better than Junebugs."
The proprietor of the deceased bug, having raised her damp dark face, ceased crying instantly. Over the astounding windfall the chubby fingers closed with a gesture suggesting generations of acquisitiveness.
"Is it hers to keep?" spoke her aged sister, in a scared voice. "That there"s a _dollar_, mom."
"Hers to keep ..." replied the G.o.ddess, smiling.
But her speech stopped there, shorn of a donator"s gracious frills, and the smile became somewhat fixed upon the lovely lip....
There had appeared a man"s face at the gla.s.s of the old doors, and the lady, straightening benignantly to sweep on to her triumph upstairs, had run suddenly upon his fixed gaze. Nothing, of course, could have been more natural than this man"s appearance there: who upon earth more suitable for door-keeper to the distinguished visitors than he, who had given his office to the Settlement to-day, in lieu of more expensive gifts? Yet by some flashing trick of Carlisle"s imagination, or of his air of immobility, seen darkly through the gla.s.s, it was almost as if he might have, been waiting there for her alone....
But the meeting of eyes was over as soon as it began. With so prompt a courtesy did the Dabney House physician swing open the door that it was as if he had been opening it all along, as if she hadn"t caught him looking at her....
"How do you do, Miss Heth?... Such a dreadful day!--you were brave to venture out."
"How d"you do?" said Carlisle, in the voice of "manner," a rising voice, modulated, distant and superior. And over her shoulder, she addressed the little Jew girls, with an air of more than perfect ease:
"Well, then, good-bye! Be sure to catch her the new one to-morrow...."
She had seen that the strange young man was smiling. And by that she knew that he remembered their last meeting, and wanted to trade upon her queer weakness at that time, pretending that he and she were pleasant acquaintances together. Presently she should inform him better as to that. But why, oh, why, that small flinching at the sight of him, the very man she had fared into the downpour to explode, not pausing even to mourn her lover"s going?...
"I"m a search-party of one," said Dr. Vivian, throwing wider the door, "for Mr. Pond. I wondered if he could have got lost, somewhere down here--he"s never turned up yet."
"Mr. Pond?"
"The director of the Settlement, you know, when it opens for business in the fall. He happened to be in Washington, and was good enough to run down to-day to make us a little address."
"Oh."
Carlisle found herself, beyond the door, in a quaint high-ceiled court, enfolded with peristyles in two long rows, and paved with discolored tiles loose under the foot. At the farther end of the court there ran away a broad corridor into the dusk, and here also, full fifty feet distant, rose the grand stairway with ornate sweeping bal.u.s.trade ending in a tall carved newel-post. Obsolete and ruined and queer the whole placed looked, indeed....
"Luckily," added Dr. Vivian, "I"m in good time to serve as a guide."
But Miss Heth was already walking past him with an expensive rustle, moving straight toward the stairway. For this, needless to say, was not the moment to speak that pointed word or two which should unmask the man; there would be an unavoidable vulgarity about it here, in this solitude. And even if she should get no further opportunity upstairs--well, after all, the situation spoke for itself; nay, thundered. Had not Hugo--come to think of it--struck the note of the subtler victory, he who had given magnificently and said nothing?
_n.o.blesse oblige_, as the Gauls say....