Vivian as a slave-driver, flinging orders this way and that:
"He"d of brung it himself, on"y I was going walkin" myself, ma"am, and asked him to leave me take it."
If the fall was from the height of the securest moment Carlisle had known since her self-betrayal, the more stunning was the impact. Her heart appeared to abdicate its duties, with one kick; all her being drew together in a knot within her. It had come, after all. To run away was well, but she had not run soon enough....
She received the note mechanically, saying: "Very well."
"Would you wish me to wait for a nanser, ma"am? Doctor he didn"t say ..."
In heaven or earth, what answer would she find to this?
"No, you needn"t wait."
"Do you feel faint, ma"am?"
"Faint?... No, why should I?"
The young person, convicted of impertinence and silliness besides, turned red, but would not remove her gaze from the lady"s face.
"The--the heat we been havin", ma"am. I don"t know--it"s so sickenin", kind of. I--I fainted last week, twice, ma"am."
Something nameless in the little creature"s wide-eyed gaze, timid and yet thrilled, arrested Carlisle in the act of shutting the door upon her. Was it possible that this singular messenger of Fate had knowledge of the message she brought?
"Why do you stare at me so?"
The girl replied with simplicity:
"I can"t help it, ma"am, you look so sweet."
Carlisle leaned against the polished edge of the gla.s.s and oak door. The same chill little hand clenched the unfinished pages to Hugo, and Vivian"s only too fatally finished note. She perceived who this girl must be, and even in this moment her thought was riveted by the wild suspicion that her secret had already been betrayed.
"You live at the Dabney House, I suppose?--you"re a buncher at the Works?... How did you know me--that this note was for me?"
Here was a puzzler, indeed. By what instinct had little Kern known, the instant the door began to open, that this, and no other, was Mr. V.V."s beautiful lady?...
"How could you be anybody else, ma"am?... You couldn"t."
"I believe I have heard Dr. Vivian speak of you. Possibly," she said, with stony bitterness, "you have heard of me in the same way?"
The girl seemed to shrink a little at her tone. "Oh, ma"am--no! To _me_! No, ma"am! He _wouldn"t_ ..."
"But he is a great friend of yours?"
Kern raised a hand to her heart, understanding only too much that was not so. It was a glorious moment for her, and a terrible one.
"No, ma"am," said she, shaking her head a number of times. "I"m only his charity sick."
She added, as if to make the repudiation complete: "Mr. V.V."s friends are ladies, ma"am."
"Mr. V.V.?"
Confronted by her d.a.m.ning slip, the young person turned scarlet, but she stood her ground with a little gasp.
"A nickname, ma"am, that _all_ his sick call him by...."
A fair enough rally, no doubt, but on the whole it accomplished nothing.
Just in the middle of it, the lady had shut the door in the small vulgarian"s face.
Carlisle clutched the two letters to her breast. The door having been shut, she was alone in the world. She went up two flights in the Sunday afternoon stillness, and locked herself in her room. Mamma should not enter here on her gliding heels.
So this, after all, was what he meant by "seeing." Having decoyed her with false hopes for five days, he struck from ambush, giving her no chance to speak for herself. Well, she would be hard, too. She would make no answer, and when he spoke, she would deny ...
That the worst had now come to the worst, she had not entertained a doubt. Accordingly the emotional revulsion was strong when, breaking open the envelope with cold fingers, Carlisle found that the letter within was in a different handwriting from the superscription. It was not from Dr. Vivian at all.
However, her instant uprush of relief was somewhat mitigated when she saw--as she did in the first glance, for this hand had been not unfamiliar to her once--that the letter Vivian enclosed to her was from Jack Dalhousie.
Standing rigid by the window, she read with parted lips:
WEYMOUTH, May 14th.
DEAR V.V.:
I"d have answered your letter earlier only I haven"t had any heart for writing letters. Fate has knocked me out again. G.o.d knows I"ve tried, and cut out the drink, and worked hard, and suffered agonies of the d.a.m.ned, but it doesn"t do any good.
The world isn"t big enough for people like me to hide in, and the only thing I can"t understand is why people like me are ever born. What"s the use of it all, V.V., I can"t see to save my life. The trouble all came from a fellow named Bellows, from home, a machinery salesman with T.B. Wicke Sons, you may know him, who dropped off the train here a week ago Sat.u.r.day.
He saw me on the street one day, and then he went and told everybody that I was in Texas because I"d been drummed from home. Said I went out rowing with a girl and upset her and then swam off for my skin and she was nearly drowned. I"ve made some good friends here--or had made them, I"d better say--and one of them rode out to our place and said I ought to know what Bellows was saying, so I could thrash him before he skipped town. Oh, what could I say.
Then I saw Miss Taylor just now, she"s the girl from the East I mentioned in the winter, and she asked me had I heard what they were saying. I wanted to lie to her, and she"d have believed me if I had, but you couldn"t lie to her, and so I said straight out I was crazy drunk at the time and didn"t know what I was doing, but I guessed most of it was true. She cares a lot about those things, and I think she"d been crying. G.o.d help me. So now everything"s changed here; it reminds me of home the way people look at me. Miss Taylor was the worst, she"s been so fine to me. She said come to see her in two or three days, when she"d had time to think, and if she casts me off, I can"t stand it here any longer, and I don"t see how I can begin all over again, just when life was seeming as if it might be worth while again.
So now, you see, V.V., why I wasn"t prompter answering your letter. I"ve tried to keep my courage up like you advised, but it"s too much for one man to carry. May you never know the awful feeling that you"re an outcast, not wanted anywhere, is the wish of
Your unhappy friend, DAL.
P.S. How"s father, do you ever see him these days? Don"t let him know any of this.
The girl looked through the rose-flowered curtains down into the sunny street....
Dalhousie had long since become but a shadow and a name to Cally; she had willed it so, and so it had been. Now, in his own poor scrawl, the ghost of a lover too roughly discarded rose and walked again. And beneath the cheap writing and the unrestrained self-pity, she seemed to plumb for the first time the depths of the boy"s present misery. The old story, having struck him down once, had hunted him out and struck him down again. Where now would he hide?...
The too reminiscent letter had come with the inopportunity of destiny. A little more pressure and she was done for.
But this was mere mad folly. To shake it off at once, Cally began to walk about her bedchamber. Nothing had really happened that had not been true all along. She wished more than ever that it had all been started differently, but it was too late to consider that now. She must think of herself, and of Hugo and mamma. Dalhousie"s friend had done his worst, and she could still withstand it. Once in New York, once in Europe, and all would be as it had been before....
Nevertheless, she was presently weak enough to open the letter again.
Now her eye fell upon two lines written in the margin at the top of the first page, which she had missed before. They were in the writing of the envelope, and read:
You can reach me at any time, day or night, through Meeghan"s Grocery--Jefferson 4127.
The words sprang up at her, and she stared back at them fascinated. The man at the Dabney House was certain that she would tell now. He thought the resolution might come on her suddenly, as in the night. Nominally, he left it to her; yet at the same time he contrived to make her feel caught in a trap, with no alternative, with this sense of enormous pressure upon her. She remembered the man"s strange, stern words to her: "You can"t be happy now, till you let the truth be known."