If Cally felt that she had somehow confessed her weakness to Mr.
V.V.--about the Works, about life--and been forgiven by him, it seemed that even that did not quite settle it all. It must have been that one small corner of her mind refused to consider that all this was a closed episode.
She turned, with her hand on the k.n.o.b.
"Shall you go to that meeting of Mr. Pond"s next Wednesday--his meeting for workers? He has asked me to go."
The young man said that he would be at the meeting; that he hoped to see her there.
Cally hesitated again. Perhaps she thought of Hugo then; of perhaps the small unreconstructed corner of her mind grew more unrestful.
"I"m not sure that I"ll be able to go," she said, slowly.... "Dr.
Vivian--is your telephone number still the same--Meeghan"s Grocery? I--I may want to speak to you some time."
Yes, it was just the same. Meeghan"s Grocery.
V.V. stood looking at her from the middle of the floor, one hand raised to his hair in his characteristic gesture. His old-fashioned sort of face wore a faraway look, not so much hopeful now as wistful; a look which had been moving to Cally Heth, even in the days when she had tried to dislike him. But of this, the young man from the lonely outskirts was not aware; of the nature of his replies he had taken no note. In his ears whispered the subtlest of all his many voices: "She"ll never speak to you, once that"s printed. Tear it up. You"ve a right to your youth...."
"Good-bye," said Cally, "and thank you."
"Miss Heth," said Vivian, starting, hurriedly--"I--if I--if it should ever happen that I could _help_ you in any way--it"s not likely, of course, I understand that--but if it _should_ ever happen so--_promise_ me that you"ll send for me."
But the girl did not make that promise then, her reply being: "You _have_ helped me--you _must_ know that.... You"re the one person in the world who has."
Cally walked home alone, in the dying effects of a lovely afternoon.
She had left the c.o.o.ney parlor in the vein of one emerging from strange adventures in undiscovered countries. This queer feeling would hardly last over the solid threshold of Home, whose atmosphere was almost notoriously uncongenial to eccentricities of that sort. But it did linger now, as Cally trod somewhat dreamily over streets that she had long known by heart. Four blocks there were; and the half-lights flickering between sky and sidewalk were of the color of the girl"s own mood.
In this moment she was not troubled with thought, with the drawing of moral lessons concerning duty or otherwise. Now Mr. V.V."s unexpected last speeches to her seemed wholly to possess her mind. She was aware that they had left her curiously humbled.... Strange it seemed, that this man could be so unconscious of the influence he had upon her, had clearly had even last year. Stranger yet that he, whom only the other day she had thought of as so narrow, so religiously hard, should prove himself absurdly over-generous in his estimate of her.... Or no, not that exactly. But, at least, it would have been absurd, if it had not been so sweet....
The revolting corner of her mind seemed now to have laid down arms.
Perhaps the girl"s vague thought was that the feelings roused in her in the bunching-room had, after all, been unreasonable, even hysterical, as Hugo had plainly enough stated, as Hen herself had partly argued.
Perhaps it was merely that all that trouble would keep, to be quietly pondered over at a later time. But rather, it seemed as if a mist had settled down over the regions of practical thought, hiding problems from view. The Works had somehow been swallowed up in that apologia she had made, Cally Heth"s strange apology to Mr. V.V. for herself and her life.
Cally walked slowly along the familiar street, her thoughts a thousand miles in the blue. If the words of the good young man had humbled her, they had also mysteriously stirred and uplifted. She thought of his too trusting tribute, she thought of what they had said about women, their strength and their hope of freedom; and the misty pictures in her mind were not of herself--for well she had felt her weaknesses this day--but rather they were of a dim emerging ideal, of herself as she might some day hope to be. Vague aspirations were moving in her; new reachings of the spirit; dreams that spoke with strange voices....
And, companied by these ethereal fancies, she came, before she was aware of it, to the substantial steps of Home, where began the snuggest of all snug grooves....
She arrived with the intention, already well formed, of retiring forthwith to her room, and--probably--spending the whole evening there.
But here, as it chanced, interruption fell across her thought. Just at her own door, Cally almost ran into a man who was standing still upon the sidewalk, as if waiting for some one: a tall old gentleman standing and leaning upon his cane. Cally came out of her absorption just in time to escape collision.
"I beg your pardon!..." she began, with manner, stepping back.
But then her feet faltered, and her voice died suddenly away, as she saw that this silent old man was her neighbor, Colonel John B. Dalhousie, whom she had never spoken to in her life.
The Colonel was regarding her with frightening fixity. The girl"s descent from the empyrean to reality had the stunning suddenness of a fall: she showed it in her blanching face. Now, as the two thus stood, the old man raised a hand and swept off his military hat in a bow of elaborate courtesy.
"An apology from Miss Heth," said he, in a purring voice, "is the last thing on earth one of my name would have ventured to expect."
Doubtless the meeting had been obliged to come some day: Cally had often thought of it with dread, once escaped it by a narrow margin. That it should have come now, in the gentler afterglow of this curiously disturbing day, seemed like the grimness of destiny.... No fear of over-generosity here; no gleam in these eyes of brave and beautiful things....
"But you ask my pardon," the smooth-cutting voice went on. "It is granted, of course, my dear. You took my son"s heart, and broke it, but that"s a bauble. You took his honor, and I kicked him out, but honor"s a name in a printed book. You took his life, and I buried him, but sons, we know, cannot live forever. What is there here to make a father"s heart grow hard?"
Cally raised her hand to her throat. She felt suffocating, or else a little faint. From life she seemed to have stepped into the house of dead men"s bones; and here she could see at play old emotions not met before in her guarded life: shrivelling contempt, undying hatred, immortal unforgiveness. Nevertheless, the subtlest stroke in the naked confrontation was that something in the father"s expression, distorted though it was, reminded her of the son, whose face in this world she should see no more.
She tried to move past the face of her Nemesis, appeared physically incapable of motion; tried to speak, and had little more success.
"I--I"m--very sorry--for--" she said, indistinctly, and her ears were mocked with her ghastly inadequacy. "I--I"ve--"
"Sorry? Why, of course you are. Doubtless the little unpleasantness has marred your happiness at times. But I am gratified to know that you have other young men for your amus.e.m.e.nt, now that my son has withdrawn himself from your reach."
The old Colonel stooped further, brought his stabbing gaze nearer her.
There were heavy yellow pouches under his eyes; his lower lip, not hidden by the stained white mustaches, twitched spasmodically.
"G.o.d looked and repented him that he had made man. I might wish that he"d made you a man--for just five minutes. But what do you imagine he thinks when he contemplates you and your work, my dear? Eh?... little she-devil, pretty little h.e.l.l-cat!..."
Cally smothered a little noise between a cry and a sob. She started away, by sheer strength of horror; somehow got away from the terrible old face, ran up her own steps. Glancing whitely over her shoulder from this secure coign, she saw that Jack Dalhousie"s father still stood unmoving on her sidewalk, staring and leaning on his cane....
She closed the door quickly, shutting out the sight.
x.x.x
How it sounded like an Epitaph, but still she would not cry; how she thinks of the Beach again, and hugs a Hateful Word to her Bosom; and Hugo starts suddenly on a sort of Wedding-Trip.
In her own room Carlisle was seized with a wild desire to cry. Her spirit, shocked past bearing, demanded this instant relief. But she fought down the loosening impulses within her, knowing their worse than uselessness; she had shed her heart"s tears for this before now. And her need now was for strength; strength to meet her mother when need be, against whom key nor bolt brought privacy: strength, above all, to wipe out this mark set upon her forehead....
She resisted the impulse to fling herself face downward upon the bed, which would have been fatal; kept stoutly upon her feet. And presently, summoning all her courage, she stood at the window and peeped, pale-faced, between the curtains. All was well down there now. The old avenger was gone. There were only people pa.s.sing serenely over the familiar sidewalk, and the sunlight dying where she had stood and learned just now that a lie has a long life.
Yes, the Colonel was gone: and with him, so it seemed, all veils and draperies, all misty sublimations. One doesn"t idealize one"s self too much, with curses ringing in one"s ears.
Cally leaned weakly against the wall, both gloved palms pressed into the cold smoothness of her cheeks. Somewhere in the still house a door suddenly banged shut, and she just repressed a scream....
Old Colonel Dalhousie did not deal in moral subtleties, that was clear.
Regret, penitence, sufferings, tears, or dreamy aspiration: he did not stay to split such hairs as these. His eye was for the large, the stark effect. And by the intense singleness of his vision, he had freighted his opinions with an extraordinary conviction. He had shouted down, as from a high bench, the world"s judgment on the life of Cally Heth.
Twenty-four years and over she had lived in this town; and at the end to be called a she-devil and a h.e.l.l-cat.
The girl"s bosom heaved. She became intensely busy in the bedroom, by dint of some determination; taking off her street things and putting them painstakingly away, straightening objects here or there which did very well as they were. Flora knocked, and was sent away. On the mantel was discovered a square lavender box, bearing a blazoned name well known in another city. Fresh flowers from Canning, these were; and Carlisle, removing the purple tinsel from the bound stems, carefully disposed the blossoms in a bowl of water. Once in her goings and comings, she encountered her reflection in the mirror, and then she quickly averted her eyes. One glance of recognition between herself and that poor frightened little thing, and down would come the flood-gates, with profitless explanations to follow in a certain quarter. She avoided that catastrophe; but not so easily did she elude the echoing words of her neighbor the Colonel, which were like to take on the inflection of an epitaph....
After a time, when the dread of weeping had waned, Cally threw herself down in her chaise-longue near the window, and covered her eyes with her hand. And now with all her will--and she had never lacked for will--she strove to take her mind from what no piety or wit could now amend: struggling to think and remember how she had tried once, at a price, to set right that wrong she had done. For other comfort there was none: what she had written, she had written. She might give her life to the ways of Dorcas; she might beat her breast and fill her hands with pluckings of her gay hair. But she could not bring Dalhousie back to life now, or face his poor father as a girl who had done no wrong....