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V. V.'s Eyes

by Henry Sydnor Harrison · English · Gutenberg #13985 · 1,026,203 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: V. V.'s Eyes

Author: Henry Sydnor Harrison

Illustrator: Raymond Moreau Crosby


        
Release date: November 8, 2004 [eBook #13985]
                Most recently updated: October 28, 2024

Language: English

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V.V.'S EYES

by

HENRY SYDNOR HARRISON

Author of _Queed_

With Illustrations

1913







To my first, second, and third reader

NORVELL

Who raises books by hand




CONTENTS

I

Two Houses, with a great Gulf between; of V. Vivian, M.D., and
what he thought of John the Baptist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   1

II

Two Persons of More Importance, and why they went to the Beach in
October; Miss Carlisle Heth, and how she met an Unwelcome
Swain at Sea; how this Swain could swim enough for one. . . . . .  12

III

How Carlisle screamed when the Boat upset, or else didn't, as the
Case might be; also of Mrs. Heth, who went down Six Floors to
nail Falsehoods, etc. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  26

IV

Mr. Hugo Canning, of the well-known Pursuing-Sex; how the Great
Young Man pursued Miss Heth to a Summer-House, and what
stopped his Thundering Feet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  36

V

Dialogue between V. Vivian, of the Slums, and Mr. Heth's Daughter
(or his Niece); and what the lovely Hun saw in the Mr. Vivian's
eyes, just before he asked God to pity her. . . . . . . . . . . .  48

VI

Of Carlisle's Bewilderment over all the Horrid Talk; of how it wasn't
her Fault that Gossip was so Unreliable; of the Greatest Game in
the World; also, of Mr. Heth, who didn't look like a Shameless
Homicide. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  61

VII

How the Great Parti, pursued or pursuing to Cousin Willie Kerr's
Apartment, begins thundering again. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  73

VIII

Supper with the Cooneys: Poor Relations, but you must be Nice to
them; of Hen Cooney's friend V.V., as she irritatingly calls him;
also relating how Cally is asked for her Forgiveness, and can't
seem to think what to say . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  87

IX

Concerning an Abandoned Hotel, and who lived there; also of an
Abandoned Youth, who lived somewhere else, Far Away; how a
Slum Doctor dressed for a Function, such as involved Studs; and
how Kern Garland wishted she was a Lady . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105

X

A Beautiful New Year's Party, and who spoiled it, and how; how
Something is done, after all, for she tells the Man plainly that he
mustn't speak to her any more . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120

XI

In which Mr. Canning must go South for his Health, and Cally lies
awake to think. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134

XII

How V. Vivian still felt the Same about the Huns, No Matter what
Sam Thought; also how Kern Garland lost Something at the
Works, and what made Mr. V.V. look at her That Way. . . . . . . . 146

XIII

How Life was Gray and Everything was Horrid; how Carlisle went
to Little Africa with Hen; how the Man spoke to her again, just
the same, and what happened then; further, reporting a Confidential
Talk with a Best Girl-Friend. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159

XIV

In which Cally tells a Certain Person that she isn't Happy--Very 180

XV

In which she goes to New York and is very Happy indeed . . . . . 190

XVI

Of Happiness continuing, and what all the World loves; revealing,
however, that not Every Girl can do what the French People once did 201

XVII

Cally crosses the Great Gulf; and it isn't quite Clear how she will ever
cross back again. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 216

XVIII

Night-Thoughts on the Hardness of Religious Fellows, compelling
you to be Hard, too; Happier Things again, such as Hugo,
Europe, Trousseaux, etc.; concluding with a Letter from Texas
and a Little Vulgarian in a Red Hat . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235

XIX

How it is One Thing to run away from yourself, and another to
escape; how Cally orders the Best Cocktails, and gazes at her
Mother asleep; also of Jefferson 4127, and why Mamma left the
Table in a hurry at the Café des Ambassadeurs . . . . . . . . . . 249

XX

In which Jack Dalhousie wears a New Dignity, and the Lame
Stranger comes to the House of Heth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 266

XXI

That Day at the Beach, as we sit and look back at it; how Hugo
journeys to shield his Love from Harm, and Small Beginnings
can end with Uproars and a Proverb. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 278

XXII

One Summer in the Old Hotel; of the World's wagging on, Kern
Garland, and Prince Serge Suits; of how Kern leaves the Works
for Good and has a Dream about Mr. V.V.'s Beautiful Lady; of
how Mr. V.V. came to sit in the Still Watches and think again of
John the Baptist. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 296

XXIII

One Summer in Europe, which she never speaks of now; Home again,
with what a Difference; Novel Questionings, as to what is a Friend,
etc . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 320

XXIV

How the Best People came to the Old Hotel again; how Cally is
Ornamental, maybe, but hardly a Useful Person; how she encounters
Three Surprises from Three Various Men, all disagreeable
but the Last. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 334

XXV

In which the Name of Heth is lifted beyond the Reach of Hateful
Malice, and Mamma wishes that she had the Ten Thousand back
again . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 351

XXVI

Concerning Women who won't remember their Place, and a Speech to
Two Hundred of them, by Mr. V.V., no less; also revealing why
Hen Cooney never found V.V. in the Crowd around the Platform  . . 363

XXVII

Of one of the Triumphs of Cally's Life, and the Tête-à-tête following,
which vaguely depresses her; of the Little Work-Girl who brought
the Note that Sunday, oddly remet at Gentlemen's Furnishings  . . 378

XXVIII

A Little Visit to the Birthplace of the Family; how Cally thinks
Socialism and almost faints, and Hugo's Afternoon of Romance
ends Short in the Middle. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 394

XXIX

One Hour, in which she apologizes twice for her Self, her Life and
Works; and once she is beautifully forgiven, and once she never
will be, this Side of the Last Trump. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 410

XXX

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; how Hugo starts suddenly on a sort of Wedding-Trip . . . . 427

XXXI

Second Cataclysm in the House; of the Dark Cloud obscuring the New
Day, and the Violets that had faded behind a Curtain, etc.; but
chiefly of a Little Talk with Mamma, which produced Moral
Results, after all. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 443

XXXII

Time's Jests, and now the Perfect Apology, to stand a Lifetime in
Brick and Stone; concluding with a Little Scene, which she will
remember while she lives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  459

XXXIII

Her Last Day, in this History; how she wakes with a Wonder in her
Heart, has her Banquet laid at the Board of the Cooneys, 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 476

XXXIV

In which to love much is to be much loved, and Kern's Dearest Dream
(but one) comes True. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 495




ILLUSTRATIONS


"_IS_ THIS MISS HETH?" (Frontispiece)

"THERE'S _SOMETHING_ WRONG, SIR, MR. V.V." . . . . . . . . . . . . 118

"_PLEASE_ DON'T TROUBLE, HUGO" . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 260

"PAPA--I WANT TO INTRODUCE A GOOD FRIEND OF MINE--DR. VIVIAN". . . 474

From drawings by Raymond M. Crosby




     V.V.'s Eyes

     I

     Two Houses, with a great Gulf between; of V. Vivian, M.D.,
     and what he thought of John the Baptist.


V. Vivian, M.D. by the paint upon his window, dwelt in the Dabney House;
Mr. Heth--pronounced _Heath_ if you value his wife's good opinion--dwelt
in the House of his cognomen. Between the two lay a scant mile of city
streets. But then this happened to be the particular mile which
traversed, while of course it could not span, the Great Gulf fixed.

In one sense (though the wrong one) the Dabney House was the more
impressive of the pair of domiciles: for it was seven stories tall and
had two hundred rooms; while the House of Heth was only four stories and
basement, and had but fourteen rooms, counting in the trunk-room. But
physical size is size only: whereby hang few tales. Over and in the Heth
House there prevailed the most charming air of ease with dignity, of
taste plus means, that you could well imagine: while the circumambient
atmosphere of the Dabney House, not to put too fine a point on it, was
the abomination of desolation, or that abomination's little brother.
Before the one stretched a brilliant street where imposing residences
crowded each other just as close as they could crowd, and still be
imposing, and residences. Behind the other stretched the likeliest the
city could show in the way of slums, and, farther back, just over the
brow of the sinister Hill, something less cheering than honest slums.
One glittered upon the future; the other decayed into the past. And it
would cost you--to clinch the comparison with the true and only--two
thousand dollars a year, say, to secure Mr. Heth's house, negotiating
with his executor at that; while in the great pile of the eponymous
Dabney, you could have all of three rooms and (portable) bath for twelve
dollars a month, though strictly cash in advance....

Cartographers, with their miserable mathematics, called this a statute
mile, which, as we say, a brisk man can walk in the smoking of a
cigarette. But the authors of the Blue Book, grave fellows who have
better struck the scales from their eyes, would have computed you this
distance at _N_, which is infinity: and so closed up the book. For what
bridge shall cross the uncrossable, what ferryman ply for silver pounds
on the Great Gulf? An image-breaking age; no doubt; but there are
limits, in decency. No thread of destiny or clue of circumstance shall
connect two Houses set upon the poles of the world....

So spoke the Blue Book: judging somewhat by the look of it, after all,
pronouncing not without a touch of the weary wisdom which comes of
knowing too much. But is it not written how the hussy Appearance wears a
painted face, justly open to interrogation?--how there stands a summit
from which a man shall see yet more sharply than his most admired
authors, above referred to? Hence, look down. And behold, against the
sunny day two clues now visible upon the bosom of the Gulf, to wit: the
dark-eyed lad so oddly taking hired-carriage exercise up and down
Washington Street, between eight-thirty and ten-thirty A.M.; and yon
half-column of winged words in "The People's Forum" column of this
morning's "Post," under the caption (supplied by the editor): "Severe
Arraignment of Local Factory Conditions."

The Dabney House felt the pluckings first. They were Nobodies there; and
by that token they were early risers.

       *       *       *       *       *

She was fluttered to-day, was Mrs. Garland, by the nocturnal
reappearance of her errant husband, Mister, as simply called: but she
did not forget the iron rule. The "Post" was under the door by seven
o'clock. Dr. Vivian perused by seven-fifteen. He perused with a peculiar
and paternal gusto: for doctoring was not his meat and drink, and he had
written these winged words himself. But of the vehicular lad he heard
nothing till some hours later, when Labor Commissioner O'Neill,
skirting the old park from Centre Street, where he had been for cigars,
dropped in on the way back to his office.

Even here, the words came first. O'Neill had a "Post" in his hand.

It was then nearing eleven o'clock. The doctor sat at a tall old
"secretary" between his windows, swinging round with expectancy as his
friend entered. There were still people of a sort, human beings in a
manner of speaking, in the waiting-room; but he let them wait now, that
being what the room was for.

"Well?... How'd it strike you?"

The Labor Commissioner mopped his brow with a snowy handkerchief, which
released into the office the scent of cologne. He was a stoutish man,
and the morning, for autumn, was astonishingly warm.

"Well, it's ill-timed, V.V.," said he, without ill-humor. "And--kind of
extreme. I told you the other day how I felt about it."

The face of the medico fell.

"I thought you said you approved of a good, pertinent letter, to show
that the laity were backing you up!"

"I said a mild, easy-tempered letter might be all right. But--"

"Why, Sam, don't you think that's an awfully mild letter? You ought to
see what I edited out of it."

"Well, you left in enough to let the 'Post' in for a damage suit, all
right. You, too.... Only you won't have much to lodge a judgment
against, long's you haven't got a billhead printed and charge regular
fees like I told you."

"I'm perfectly responsible--far as that goes. Don't you worry."

The doctor's look showed that he considered O'Neill's pleasantry in bad
taste, to say the least of it. He had told Sam often enough, one would
think, that he meant before long to put in a good businesslike system of
fees, small fees....

The Commissioner was continuing: "Point is, V.V., there's nothing gained
getting these people's backs way up. They 're sore now. A little tact, a
little bit of--"

"Tact!"

"Sure thing. Look here, old boy, remember it's only a week since my
report was in the papers, practically blacklisting those four plants,
and I've already called personally on every one of 'em, putting it right
up to 'em. You heard me at Heth's and the Pickle people's, yourself. I
guess I put it up about as strong as could be done, hey? And that's all
can be done till I get me some more law. Put it right square...."

But V. Vivian, gazing steadily over the chair-back, had obviously been
stoking his inner fuel.

"Ah! Rousing public opinion's no use at all?... Why, don't you _know_
that public opinion is the grandfather of your little statute-book laws?
Don't you--"

"Yair. Know. See you say that in your letter."

"Well, it's a _great truth_!... How tactful will you feel some day, when
one of those floors at the Heth Works collapses and kills a
hundred people?"

Labor Commissioner O'Neill seemed unterrified by the grisly picture. He
was strolling about the very large, bare, and strange-looking medical
office, flicking cigar-ash where he would: a good-natured-looking
Commissioner of thirty, wearing a glossy brown suit and strong yellow
gloves. And his present pacific air was undoubtedly to his credit;
certainly he had been annoyed when his eye first fell on the "Severe
Arraignment," over his morning rasher....

"And that isn't the worst of it," shot the doctor again, flinging out an
arm. "It's only a detail, I say, this factory end of it; only a symptom,
don't you see? What we're dealing with is the most dangerous element in
the life of this city! Tact!... When fire couldn't sweep through that
new house of yours faster than the corrupting ideals of these people'll
lick through this community!"

"Whe-ew!" said Sam O'Neill, this ground being not unfamiliar.... "Got to
take 'em along slowly, Doctor, all the same. Rome wasn't built in
a day."

"But mark my words, the vandals kicked it down in about fifteen
minutes."

O'Neill felt vaguely worsted by this riposte. He was the older man, the
practical man, with a proven ability to make money out of real estate;
but old V.V., though talking like an anarchist of late, was admitted to
have a verbal dexterity at debate. Argument was forced upon Sam, as it
were. He demanded authority for calling these people corrupting; desired
to know if V.V. knew any of 'em personally. And presently he was reading
aloud from the letter in the "Post," reading retributively; one
swingeing phrase after another.

"And here--here! Listen to this, will you?--'Why should we stand by and
permit these shameless egoists of industry to bleed the strength from
the community's sinew and grow rich by homicide at the cost of the
race?'..."

Severe, indeed, the Arraignment seemed when read aloud to you in that
tone. Gusto ebbed a little, mayhap. But it was clear that the medical
author did not propose to retract; quite the contrary, in short.

"Permit! Ought to have asked why we applaud them, court them, _envy_
them--"

"'Shameless homicides'!--and he calls it mild! Now, here, honor
bright--"

"It's what they are--and more! You ask me if I know these people
personally? I reply that in the truest sense I do know 'em, very well,
for I've made a study of the type, d'you see?..."

Then the office door from the hall opened about a foot, a fat head in a
gaunt bonnet protruded through the crevice, having rather a decapitated
look, and a deep inflectionless voice said:

"Excuse me introodin', Doctor, I'm sure, but your sick here raskin' me
kin they see you soon."

"In five minutes precisely ..."

Morning sunshine streamed through the unwashen windows. V. Vivian had
risen in the ardor of his argument. Quite a different-looking man from
the Commissioner he was observed to be, tall where the Commissioner was
thick, eager where the Commissioner was easy-going. Rather a long face
he had, sensitive about the mouth, lucid about the gaze, and hair of a
tan shade which waved a little, no matter how crisply cut. The faded
gray suit he wore contrasted unfavorably with his friend's new brown;
on the other hand, his movements were not devoid of a certain lank
grace such as the gods have denied to rotundity.

Yet when he stepped out from his quaint desk, it was suddenly to be seen
that the young man limped, on his left foot: that this limp was not
accidental or temporary.... A lame doctor: so it was with him. And yet
the fire with which he spoke was surely not born of the
pharmacopoeia....

"Take it in the large--that's all I ask! Look at your job from a social
standpoint. I tell you, it's just these Huns, these yellow-rich Heths
and Magees and Old Dominion Pickle people who're rotting the heart out
of this fine old town. And the root of the whole trouble's in their
debased personal ideals, don't you see? 'Get on' at all costs, that's
the motto: slapping their money in their neighbors' faces and shouting,
'Here's what counts!'--spreading their degraded standards by example
through the community--yellow materialism gone mad.... Oh, I know!--I
know it isn't your slave-driving captains only. It's mainly the women
pushing from behind--fat horse-leeches' daughters always screaming
'more, more'--when there's--"

"Leeches! Peaches, you mean! You ought to see--"

"When there's no way to get any more but to bleed it out of--Corinne
Garland here!--which is duly done. Brutal egoism, that's the
philosophy--"

"Police!" cried O'Neill, puffing good-humoredly. "Why, V.V.!--They're
personally some of the best people in town! If you knew 'em you'd be the
first to say so. Take the Heths now, just to show you--"

"Huns all! I do know them, I say, through to their little prehensile
souls! You don't seem to get me.... Why, I feel _sorry_ for them, Sam! I
wouldn't mind much what they did if they were only _happy with it_! But,
good heavens!... D'you know what this age needs, my boy? _A voice crying
in the wilderness_...."

"H'm! Don't know about that. You'll find, where it's a matter touching
their pockets, people don't listen to voices much, either in--"

"They listened to John the Baptist!"

"What?" said Sam, rather disliking these constant references to the
ancient days.

"I say they listened to John the Baptist!" cried tall Dr. Vivian,
slapping one impetuous hand into the other. "Yes, and came running and
sweating to the desert, just to get a tongue-lashing from him--the very
same old scribes and Pharisees that drive motor-cars down Washington
Street to-day! And they'd run to him to-day, never fear! I tell you,
there's a voice the heart is never deaf to! And that's what this age
needs, Sam,--since you ask _me_,--a big, fierce prophet on the outskirts
of the city; a great, grim, uncompromising _hater_, with a tongue that
bites like a blacksnake whip. By George, they'd listen to him! He
couldn't hide where your yellow Huns wouldn't come to him on
their knees!"

"Let him do it, then,--go's far as he likes. Only don't ask _me_ ..."

O'Neill had not failed to perceive how the talk wandered from the Labor
Commission. Now, drawing on his gloves, he was struck by a
humorous thought.

"You're looking for work, for trouble, you say. Why don't you sign on
this John the Baptist job yourself?"

Oddly, the small gibe seemed to disconcert the orator. His cheek
acquired a pinkness; unexpectedly, too, he seemed to lose the thread of
his headlong thesis. However, he brandished his arms, gazing hard.

"That's as it may be! As it may be, my dear fellow! All I ... Ah," he
said hurriedly, turning. "One minute.... There's some one knocking...."

And he went striding off with his unequal step toward his visitors'
door--not his sick's--though it did seem that "Come in" would really
have answered just as well as usual....

The stoutish Commissioner glanced after him, dimly surprised.

Boyhood friends these two, their ways had long parted while the younger
followed away the descending fortunes of his father, the inventor of a
double-turbine which would never quite work. Their reëstablished
intimacy now was of the thorough-going sort: witness Sam's letting him
trot along on factory inspection the other day, something he'd have done
for no other amateur, not on your life. Yet old V.V. was kind of
puzzling at times, as now; wild-talking, then kind of reserved all of a
sudden, like pulling down a shade on you. Talked different at
different times....

Business awaited the Commissioner at his office in the Capitol, as he
now recalled. However, V.V. was opening his dingy old door.

Without, in the corridor, there was seen standing a scraggly-bearded
individual in a ragged shirt, which offered glimpses of a hairy chest in
need of soap. A stranger this chanced to be, but the genus was by no
means unfamiliar in the environs of the Dabney House. The young doctor's
speaking countenance, confronting him, appeared to fall a little.
Doubtless he had learned by now the usual business of such as these.

"Good morning," he said, in rather a firm way. "What can I do for you?"

The caller, having turned a china-blue gaze upon his host, wore a
confused air. He spoke in a furry, plaintive voice, professional in
its way.

"Jes lookin' fer the Doc a minute, sir, that's all. You ain't him, are
yer?"

"Why not?..."

And then it came over Vivian who this man must be: surely no other than
the Dabney House prodigal, spouse of his own fellow-lodger, landlady,
and _blanchisseuse_. Upon that thought he stepped out into the hall,
closing the office door behind him upon Sam O'Neill.

"Yes, I'm the doctor--and you're Mr. Garland, aren't you? Your wife and
daughter are friends of mine...."

Mr. Garland accepted the introduction with signs of abashment, but
stated his business simply.

"Doc, could you he'p me out with a coat like?"

"Oh ... A coat, you say?"

"Rags to my skin, sir. I 'clare you can see my meat...."

The bearded one inspected himself downward with feeble cackles, hollow
parodies of gay derision. And he added, with the same mock dash, that
he didn't mind his situation for himself, being used to taking them as
they come; 'twas his missus seemed sort of shamed _fer_ him ...

The pleasant-faced young man stood stroking his chin.

"Yes--yes--I can fit you out, I dare say," said he. "I--ah--have a coat
in here that I think'll do you. Very nicely.... S'pose you wait here a
moment, and we'll see--what we shall see ..."

He disappeared through a door down the hall, and returned presently,
carrying a black coat of the sort commonly known as a cutaway.

"There's the vest that goes with it, too," said he. "You might as well
have that--though of course Mrs. Garland may have to let it out a
little ..."

The man received the gifts in a somewhat awkward silence. Having eyed
the proffered coat,--which in this dim light appeared to be quite a good
one, newer-looking, indeed, than the one worn at present by the
doctor,--his gaze wandered up and then stealthily away. His air of
hesitancy was a little surprising.

"In the seams, you know," said V.V. "Make it bigger. She'll
understand ..."

Then thanks came from the furry voice, effusive yet somehow rather
sheepish: perhaps the man wasn't as experienced at this sort of thing as
he looked. However, he shambled away with speed, appearing at least to
know that when you had got what you wanted, that, and no other, was the
moment to go.

Far down the corridor of the old hotel, he turned once, looking back
furtively over his shoulder....

Vivian reappeared in his office, to be greeted with a grin by Sam
O'Neill, who, having just thrown his cigar-end into the ruined
fireplace, was ready to go.

"'Nother beggar, hey?"

"No--no ... Oh, no!" said the doctor, hastily. "Just a--ah--sort of a
fellow wanted to see me ..."

He halted in the middle of the room; stood absently pushing back his
hair; and his gaze, turned toward the window, became introspective, a
little dreamy....

"What we were speaking of, Sam.... Just to show you I'm not so
opinionated--so eccentric--as you seem to think. I read a great little
thing the other day.... In a magazine article, it was, describing one of
those so-called public balls--in Chicago, this one was. You know the
sort of thing--an orgy: rounders and roués, young cheap sports, old
rakes, all the demi-monde, rivers of alcohol.... Drunken women kicking
men's hats off and lying where they fell.... Regular bacchanalia. Well,
about one o'clock two men in evening clothes came into the gallery and
stood looking down into that--maelstrom of infamous faces.... Then one
of them said: '_John the Baptist would have 'em all grovelling in three
minutes_' ..."

He had told his story with a certain youthful expectancy, the air of one
who confides, counting upon a delicate understanding. But Sam O'Neill,
though perfectly willing to be delicate, could only say, after an
anti-climacteric pause: "Is that right? Well, that bunch needed to
grovel all right"--which was a little vague, say what you would of it,
chilling somewhat....

"Well, what's your coryphées' ball but life?" muttered Vivian, knocking
the ashes from the dead pipe he had been holding....

And then, turning away with the fire gone out of him, he added:

"All I say about these people is they'd be so much happier with their
shells hammered off. What's getting rich but building a wall between
yourself and the great common?... Seems to me God meant us all to be
citizens of the world ..."

"That's right," said Sam, reassuringly. And then, as the two men walked
toward the door: "Oh, I don't say that letter there'll do any _harm_,
V.V. Maybe a little stirring 'em up's just as well ..."

At the door, O'Neill recollected, and spoke again: "Oh, say, V.V.! Saw
your gay young friend Dalhousie just now. Had a pretty nice little load
of bananas too ..."

V.V. halted dead, his look changing abruptly. Trouble gathered on his
brow.

"Where?"

"Driving down Centre Street in a hack, looking sober as a judge, but--"

"What sort of hack?" demanded Vivian, as if a good deal might depend on
that.

"Reg'lar sea-going," answered the Commissioner, confirming the worst.
"Kind with the fold-back top, like you see principally at nigger
funerals and aldermen's parades...."

But it was evidently no merry matter to V.V.

"Then he's off," said he, slowly, and glanced at his watch.... "He
seemed all right when I saw him last night. Only you never can tell,
with him.... I wonder if I could catch him...."

The Commissioner thought not. "He was headed straight for Centre Street
Station, and that was a half-hour ago. Had a bag out front in the
sea-going, too. Oh, thunder, he's all right. Little trip'll do
him good...."

Left alone in his office, V. Vivian stood still, staring intently into
space.

New-returned to his old home town, this young man was deep in love with
twenty gallant schemes, from the general reform of the world, by his own
system, to the repairment of the stomachic equipment of Tubby Miggs,
aged six. But O'Neill's tidings of the vehicular lad knocked them all
from his mind. He forgot the Huns; forgot John the Baptist; forgot even
his sick, till one of the weller of them (as we may assume) knocked
memorially upon his door....

What trouble was brewing for his frail friend Dal?

       *       *       *       *       *

Upon this matter, now and henceforward, the other House was to have
information first. Dusk of that day had fallen before the word came to
the deserted hotel. But when it did come, the lame doctor broke his
evening office-hour without notice, and caught a train by
thirty seconds.




     II

     Two Persons of More Importance, and why they went to the
     Beach in October; Miss Carlisle Heth, and how she met an
     unwelcome swain at Sea; how this Swain could swim enough
     for one.


Mr. Heth perused the Severe Arraignment of himself about nine o'clock,
over his second cup of coffee. He perused with indignation; but, being
long since trained to keep a neat partition between downtown and uptown,
he did not divulge his sentiments to the breakfast-table, and even
carried the paper off with him to the office. By such demeanor, he
abdicates our present notice. Mrs. Heth, hours later, bought a copy of
the "Post" from a uniformed newsboy, to see what they had to say of the
Associated Charities meeting on the evening preceding, and of her
remarks in accepting the office of First Vice-President. Absorbed by
this particular piece-in-the-paper,--for so the good lady named all
journalistic efforts, from dry-goods advertisements to leading
editorials on Trouble in the Balkans,--it was past three-thirty o'clock,
post-meridian, or well after luncheon, before her eye chanced to alight
on the Dabney House's winged words.

At this hour the ladies sat at ease in their private sitting-room on the
seventh floor of the great handsome caravansary by the sea. For to-day,
as it falls out, the House of Heth, just as we have it so firmly fixed
on Washington Street, had split and transplanted itself; all that
mattered of it, the soul and genius of the House, having flitted off
seventy miles to the Beach for an over-Sunday rest.

It was the 29th of October, which should have meant grate-fires. On the
contrary, two windows in the rented sitting-room were open, and Miss
Carlisle Heth, laying down "Pickwick Papers," by Dickens, the
well-known writer, now rose and flung wide the third.

"Whew!" said she, just as an ordinary person might have done. "It's
stifling!"

Her mother, a lifelong conservative, presently replied:

"It isn't the heat, it's the humidity."

Carlisle looked out over the sunny sea, and wondered if her mother were
never going to take her nap. She was twenty-three years old, and, Hun or
no Hun, was certainly not displeasing to the fleshly eye. Also, she much
desired to pass the time with a little sail, having already privately
engaged a catboat for that express purpose. There was no reason whatever
why she shouldn't have the sail, except that her mother was opposed on
principle to anything that looked the least bit adventurous.

"There are cinders on me yet, in spite of my bath," added Mrs. Heth,
whisking through the less interesting pieces in the "Post."... "Willie's
train arrives at four-thirty, I believe?"

Miss Heth confirmed the belief.

"I wonder, really," mused the dowager, not for the first time, "what
attraction the place can offer Mr. Canning. Men are strange in their
choice of amusement, to say the least."

"He's tired of the hermit life, and wants to let down his bars and have
a little fun."

"He could have all the fun he wants in town, Cally. He has only to make
a sign--"

"Of course!--and be snowed under with invitations which would be odious
to him, and probably roped in for something by Helen and Sue Louise
Cheriton, say. He can have fun here, without its leading to anything."

She added, with perverse merriment: "At least he thinks he can, not
knowing that two enterprising strangers are camping right across his
little trail."

Mrs. Heth frowned slightly. She was a slim, rather small lady, and her
fair face, at first sight, suggested an agreeable delicacy. To herself
she acknowledged with pleasure that she was "spirituelle." To the
observer, after a glance at her attractive upper face, the thick jaw and
neck came as a surprise: so did the hands and feet. The feet, seen
casually in a company, were apt to be taken for the belongings of some
far stouter woman, sitting near. They were Mrs. Heth's, however; and she
had also a small round birthmark on her left temple, which a deft
arrangement of the hair almost concealed, and a small dark mustache,
which was not so fortunately placed. She was sane and sound as to
judgment, and her will had raised the House of Heth as by a
steam derrick.

Miss Heth, gazing down at three or four hardy bathers, who splashed and
shouted at the hotel float, said, laughing:

"Truly, mamma, what do you suppose the Cheritons would have given Willie
for the splendid tip?"

Mrs. Heth's frown at her newspaper deepened; otherwise she made no
response. She learned with difficulty, like a Bourbon; but many years'
experience had at last convinced her that her daughter's occasional
mocking mannerism had to be put up with. Conceivably there were people
in the world who might have liked this mild cynical way of Carlisle's,
seeing in it, not indeed a good quality, but, so to say, the seamy side
of a good quality; the lingering outpost of a good quality that had been
routed; at least the headstone over the grave of a good quality that
maybe was only buried alive. But of these people, if such there were,
Mrs. Heth was positively not one....

And Carlisle's next remark was: "What would you wear to-night, for the
occasion?... Oh, there's a big motor-boat going by like the wind."

For though she might sometimes jeer aloud over processes, the daughter
was known to be quite as serious at heart as her mother, over the great
matters of life. Otherwise, look you, she might not have been at the
Beach at all to-day. The fact was that she and mamma had not
_positively_ decided on this recuperative excursion (though they had
_practically_ decided) until after the arrival of Cousin Willie Kerr's
notelet at breakfast: in which notelet Willie mentioned laconically that
he and Mr. Canning were themselves going Beachward by the three o'clock
train, and concluded his few lines with _verbum sap_, which is a Latin
quotation.

Standing idly at the window, the girl had indeed been thinking of Mr.
Canning before her mother spoke; and thinking with most pleasurable
speculations. Truly he was worth a thought, was Mr. Canning, proud
stranger within the gates--"house-guest," as the society column prefers
it--for whom, if reports were true, many ladies fair had sighed,
sickened, and died. And she, alone in her maidenly coterie, had already
met the too exclusive metropolitan--four days ago, by the lucky fluke of
turning in at the Country Club at an out-of-the-way morning moment, when
she might have motored straight on home, and had been within an ace of
doing so. An omen, wasn't it? Five minutes she and Mr. Canning had
talked, over so-called horses' necks provided by his sedate host, and
before the end of that time she had perceived an interest dawning in the
young man's somewhat ironic eyes. With the usual of his sex one could
have counted pretty definitely on the thing's being followed up.
However, Mr. Canning, the difficult, had merely saluted her
fascinatingly, and retired to re-maroon himself in the rural villa of
his kinsmen, the Allison Paynes, where he halted for a week or two on
his health-seeking progress southward.

It looked like a parting forever, but wasn't, owing to that help which
comes ever to those who help themselves....

To the sensible query, Mrs. Heth, lightening, replied: "Of course, the
gray crêpe-de-chine."

"I think so, too. Only there's a rip at the bottom. I'm sure Flora
hasn't touched it since Mr. Avery put his large foot straight
through it."

Having turned from the window, Carlisle yawned and glanced at the clock.
The two ladies conversed desultorily of draped effects, charmeuse, and
why Mattie Allen imagined that she could wear pink. Mrs. Heth ran on
through the "Post." Carlisle put up "Pickwick," by Dickens, sticking in
a box of safety matches to keep the place. Then she examined herself in
the mirror over the mantel, and became intensely interested in a tiny
redness over her left eyebrow. She thought that rubbing in a little
powder, and then rubbing it right off, would help the redness, and
it did.

"I asked Mattie why she said such long prayers in the mornings. That was
what made me late for breakfast. Her feelings were quite hurt. Isn't her
devoutness quaint, though?"

"She uses my house," murmured Mrs. Heth, "like a hotel. One would think
it might occur to her that if she _must_ mummer like a deacon she ought
to get up--"

She broke off, her wandering eye having just then fallen upon the
Arraignment.

"She didn't like our packing her off right after breakfast a bit
either.... I'm devoted to her," said Carlisle, gently rubbing off the
powder, "but there's no denying there's a great deal of the cat
in Mats."

"Hmph!... Why, this is outrageous! I never read such a thing!"

"What is it?" said the daughter, not turning, clearly not interested.

"Here's a man saying he visited the Works with the Labor Commissioner,
and that conditions there are _homicidal!_ I never! Mmm-m-m. Here! 'I
speak particularly of the Heth Cheroot Works, but all four stand almost
equally as burning blots upon the conscience of this community'--"

Carlisle's attention was not diverted from her eyebrow. "The Works! He's
crazy.... Who is the man?"

"A piece in the paper here--let me see. Yes, here's his name. Vivian.
_V. Vivian_! There's no such man!..."

"Oh," said the girl, absently, "it's only some notoriety-seeking
nobody.... Like the man who threw the brick at papa that
election night."

"But nobodies haven't any right to publish such untruths!" said Mrs.
Heth, more grammatical than she sounded. "They ought to be punished,
imprisoned for it. 'Public opinion is the grandfather of statute-book
law.' Where's the sense in that?..."

"It's probably one of those Socialistic things.... They said the man who
threw the brick at papa was a Socialist."

"'Shameless egoists of industry--grow rich by homicide!' I'm greatly
surprised at Mr. West for printing such fanatical stuff. I trust your
father did not see this. He gave forty dollars to the tuberculosis fund,
and this is his reward."

She fumed and interjected awhile further, but her daughter's thought
had dreamed far away. From her childhood days she had carried a
mind's-eye picture of the dominant fourth member of the family, the
great Works, lord and giver of her higher life, which completely refuted
these occasional assaults from socialists and failures. Their malicious
bricks flew high over her girlish head. Presently Mrs. Heth rose,
looking about for her novel, which was a glittering new one, frankly for
entertainment only, and not half-cultural like "Pickwick." The two
ladies moved together for the bedrooms.

"You had better get a little nap, too," said Mrs. Heth, "to be fresh for
the evening."

"It's so early now. Perhaps I may stroll down for a few minutes first."

"Well--it's so quiet I feel as if we had the place to ourselves. But
come up in plenty of time for a nap before dinner.... You're here to get
two days of good rest."

"I'll shut the door between," said Carlisle.

Before long, from the mother's side of the door so shut, certain sounds
arose indicating that after the morning's fitful fever she slept well.
Carlisle, on her own side, quickly donned a white boating-dress, a blue
fillet for her hair, and white doeskin shoes with rubber soles. That
done, she went out through the sitting-room, shot down in the lift,
traversed the forsaken lobby, and emerged upon the long empty boating
pavilion which ran from the hotel's side-entrance well out over
the water.

"The bell-boy gave you my message, Mr. Wedge?" said she, to the
weather-tanned renter of boats. "How do you do? I'm late. How's the
little Lady Jane?"

"How you, Miss Heth? Glad to see you back again, Miss. Lady Jane's trim
as ever. Yes'm. And there's a little sou' breeze coming up--puffy, but
just suit her."

"Bring her up a little more."

"Yes'm--there now! Feels most like summer, don't it?"

"But it doesn't _look_ like it!" smiled Miss Heth, and glanced about at
the emptiness of things.

"You'd ought to of seen her afore the hot spell," replied Mr. Wedge,
with artificial hilarity....

Then the light air took the little sail and Carlisle slid away with the
sunshine on her hair.

For half a week the breath of summer had confounded October, mid-autumn
plucking a leaf from July's best book. Now, with the half-holiday at
hand and a Sabbath to follow, a few others beside the Heths and the
Willie Kerr select party had deemed it worth while to go down to the sea
where the breezes blow. Only a few, though: the desolate quiet of a
summer place out of season yet clung and hung over all. In a solitary
corner of the vast piazza four coatless men sat idly drinking the
rickeys of summer. These, indeed, watched the embarkation of the girl
with interest, and when she stood a moment to get a knot out of the
sheet, revealing the figure of the Huntswoman (though she was by no
means one of your great Amazons), one of them might have been heard
to say:

"Well, she can have _me_ any time.... And, by crackey, she can _sail_!"

The remark betrayed the hypnotic influence: for she really could not
sail very well. No athlete this lady; she had even let her saddle-horse
go after the purchase of the second car; the sail now stood as her sole
sporting activity, and that but lately taken up. However, she handled
her bark with a tolerable efficiency. Keeping prudently inshore, yet
feeling delightfully venturesome, she skimmed along by the row of
shut-up cottages, and was soon lost to the stare of the rickey-drinkers,
of whose interest she had been quite unaware, or, let us say,
practically unaware....

Not for the eyes of anonymous transients or liberal-minded drummers had
Carlisle Heth donned this charming boat-dress and put out upon the
bounding blue. Not just to break the tedium of the afternoon, either;
not even exclusively for the vast exhilaration of sailing, though
undoubtedly she thrilled to that. But the interesting coincidence,
giving a peculiar point to it all, was that the three o'clock train from
town was due within the half-hour, and her present course lay dead
across the line of the street from the station.

Travel-worn young men; desolate Beach; chagrin at coming; and then,
presto, upon the jaded vision:--blue, sunny water, white-sailed boat,
beautiful nymph. Great heavens, what a tableau!...

We well know how resistlessly the male of humankind is drawn to the
female, at the mere glimpse of her flinging aside the tools of his
trade, whatever it may be, and furiously pursuing to the ends of the
earth. And we know, too (for the true poets of all ages have told us),
how the female of our species goes her innocent ways full of artless
fancies and sweet girlish imaginings, all unaware that an opposite and
uproarious sex is in headlong pursuit. And how she springs up startled
from her other-worldly dreams, to hear the thundering feet behind....

Yet we do know also of cases everywhere which make familiar principles
not merely out of place, but fairly grotesque. You are hardly to
conceive Miss Heth's pretty tableau as staged for, her prospecting
journey to the Beach as concerned with, some ordinary male, of whom one
could expect that he would pursue even extraordinary maids in an
ordinary way....

The nymph sailed gayly, stimulated by agreeable anticipations. The
minutes danced by with the skipping waves. A gust of wind slapped the
solitary little canvas, and Carlisle's small but not incapable hand
tightened upon the sheet. Her eye went dreamily over water and strand.
Far down the shore, boys were swimming with faint yells, but the hotel
bathers had tired and gone in. She seemed to have the great Atlantic to
herself, and the fact seemed nice to her, and refined....

The years had passed since Carlisle Heth had formulated the careering
importance, even the nobility, of marrying high above her. Aspiration,
not your ditchwater cynicism, was the mainspring of her real being, as
her mother well knew; and this supreme fulfilment had long glittered
ahead as the ultimate crown, not of triumph only, but of happiness
consummate. A little too long, perhaps: waiting princesses grow
discontented. Vague dissatisfactions possessed the girl at times, for
all her large blessings; mild symptoms stewed and simmered from her
which surprised her in reflective moments, and her mother at all
moments. These things, she knew well, came all from a single want. Her
reach far exceeded her grasp. Her sighs were Alexander's.

Now, in the smiling and anticipatory afternoon, a limpid brook of
girlish imaginings beguiled her with enchanting music, while realer
water lapped her shallop, and the substantial breeze whipped her
glorious hair about her yet more glorious face. This face, it is time to
say plainly, attracted more than rickey-drinkers. Good men might here
read their dearest dreams come true; had so read them. The fact deserves
capitals, being enormously important. With one half the world only, as
all know, is character destiny: the rest is bent and twisted, glorified
or smashed, by Physiognomy, the great potter.

And this girl's destiny was obviously magnificent. Experience had long
since convinced her, personally, of that. Hoarse testimonials from the
pursuing sex she had had in superabundance from her fifteenth year. Yet,
while these were duly valued as indicating the strong demand, she had
waited, stanch to her destiny. Were not Alexandrine sighs her right? One
so endowed could hardly be asked to rest content with the youth of the
vicinage....

The cottage row was now well astern; the long string of empty bathhouses
slid by, water foamed under the swelling sail. Gliding with the bark,
dreamy retrospect met and joined hands with solider prospect. Carlisle
threw round a measuring eye, and perceived that she had covered more
distance than she had thought; had passed the limits of the board-walk
and the beach, which was quite far enough, considering. She luffed
cleverly, having a splendid blowy time of it, and put about. This done,
she permitted herself to glance for the second time over the purview.

No cloud of smoke stood upon the horizon stationward, no human being
appeared within such view of the strand as the cottages and bath-houses
left to her. The train, evidently, was late. Well, as far as that went,
there was no special hurry about getting back to the hotel. Mamma could
only scold a little, as usual.

Carlisle smiled to herself, rather tickled by the thought of the
brilliant march she and mamma had stolen upon the world. In five
minutes, under stiff Mr. Payne's eye at that, she had indubitably
interested Mr. Canning. And now, thanks chiefly to Willie Kerr's loyal
enterprise, ...

Her returning eye fell upon a bobbing object in the water, very near
her, and her heart missed a beat. Her lips moved soundlessly. _Jack
Dalhousie!_...

The bobbing object, in fact, was the head of a man of the sea; a
youthful swimmer who had come up on her unseen--behind her till she had
put about. The lad was swimming rapidly, though with a curious waste of
motive power, and was so close that Miss Heth seemed to herself to be
staring full into his face. His course was laid dead across her bows;
for other reasons, too, his piratical intentions were instantly obvious
to the girl in the boat.

How did he dare!--after all these months ...

For an exciting second she plotted escape by flight, but the impulse was
all but still-born. He would be on her before she could put about. The
girl sat entirely still, regarding the swimmer in a kind of fascinated
silence. The irony of fate, indeed, that, at a moment when her whole
mind and heart were toward the rose-pink future, this scapegrace ghost
from her only "past" should have risen out of the sea upon her. To dream
of a Canning, and be entrapped by a Dalhousie!...

The youth sloshed alongside, laid hold of the boat's nose, and
methodically and with some difficulty pulled himself in. The weight of
his ingress tipped the gunwale to the water's edge, but Carlisle made no
outcry. She was clear of head; and the heart of her desire was to be
free of this misadventure without attracting attention from the shore.

She said in a sharp, clear voice: "Mr. Dalhousie, are you perfectly
crazy?"

Dalhousie, in his swimmer's suit, sat stiffly forward, sluicing water
into the bottom. He was a big and well-built boy, with a face that had
no viciousness; but his dark eyes, with their heavy silken lashes, were
hardly meant for a man. Neither was his mouth, for all that he sought to
set it so firmly now.

"Mr. Dalhousie," he repeated with elaborate distinctness. "When d'
I--draw that--title?"

The girl sat eyeing him with frosty calm: a look which covered rage
within, not unmingled with perturbation....

He was a neighbor of hers, this audacious youth, though not of
Washington Street; impecunious, and hence negligible; moreover somewhat
notorious of late for a too vivid behavior: the distant bowing
acquaintance of many years. This till the moment of indiscretion last
May; when, encountering his dashing attractions in the boredom of a dull
resort, far from her mother's restrictive eye, she had for an idle
fortnight allowed the relation between them to become undeniably
changed. Foolish indeed; but really she had thought--or now really
thought she had thought--that the impossible youth took it all no more
seriously than she. Not till her return home last month had he revealed
his complete untrustworthiness: presuming, as she termed it, making
claims and advances, putting her to trouble to keep her vernal unwisdom
from her mother. Still, she _had_ thought she had disposed of him
at last....

Now there sat the unwelcome swain, her boarder, so close that she could
have touched him. And her gaze upon him was like arctic snowblink: an
odd look in pretty young eyes.

"You've no right to force yourself upon me in this way," said she. "You
must get out of my boat at once."

"Oh, no, I mustn't, Carlisle. That's where you make--mistake. You've put
me off--too often. Now--the time's come."

"You must be out of your senses. This is outrageous. I insist--I demand
that you get out of my boat _immediately_."

"When d' ju--listen when I--demanded?"

His heavy resoluteness reduced her suddenly to the weakness of saying:
"A gentleman wouldn't do such a thing.... You will regret this."

"Man," said Dalhousie, with the same labored slowness, "comes before
gen'leman. An' the regrets--will be yours. I've come--to have a talk."

In the momentary silence, the drip, drip from his bathing-suit became
very audible. The lad leaked like a sieve, all over her boat. Miss Heth
glanced swiftly and vexedly from him, over the unchanged panorama. Empty
water lapping empty beach; no one watching. Only now, in the sky over
the station, there hung a haze of train-smoke....

Her eyes came back: and now she observed with some girlish anxiety the
young man's unwonted solemnity, the strange brilliance of his eyes. A
certain nervousness began to show through her cold calm: her unconscious
hand wound the taut sheet round and round the tiller, an injudicious
business in view of the gusty breeze. How to be rid most quickly of the
interloper?... She might, of course, put ashore with him: but she
particularly did not care to do that, and have all the piazza loungers
and gossips see her in his somewhat too gay company. Most particularly
she did not care to have her mother glance out of her upstairs window
and be stunned by the same sight, with apoplectic cross-examination to
follow ...

"Jack," said Carlisle Heth, hurriedly, in rather a coaxing sort of
voice, "if you will leave me now, I will--I promise to see you in town
next week."

A flicker touched Dalhousie's eyelid; but he said huskily, after a
pause: "Promise? What's your promise worth? You've promised me before.
You said--you loved--"

"I can't talk now. But on Monday afternoon--in the park--or at my
house--whichever you prefer ... I--I'll explain. I give you my word
of honor--"

"No! You've done that before--too. Explain! Howc'n you explain? Go on.
Try now. Why've you--refused to see me? Why--"

Red stained the girl's cheeks.

"Then you'll force me to put in immediately," she said, with an angry
reversal of tactics,--"and subject me to the humiliation of being seen
with you. What a coward!"

"Humiliation!" Dalhousie repeated, flushing vividly. "You say that?"

"Can't you understand that it would be? Are you really so stupid?
Haven't you learned yet that I don't ever want anything more to do
with you?..."

Such remarks brought action and reaction. The lad's look must have
warned Miss Heth that all this went rather far. In fact, she began a
sort of retraction, a hurried little soothing away of her impolitic and
fairly conclusive remarks. But Dalhousie interrupted her, rising
unsteadily in the boat, his young face quite strange and wild.

Who would scrutinize the dying flickers of last summer's flirtation? All
that mattered was only too well seen from the shore.

It was the smallest of the rickey-drinkers who bruited the mishap
abroad, his eye having happened to stray through a slit between a
cottage-side and a boat-house. At this time, with the approach of
evening coolness, the hotel piazza was filling up a little; and at the
man's word, the place was instantly in a turmoil.

There started, in fact, all the horrid rigors of amateur rescue work: of
which the least said the soonest mended. It was presently noted by some
coolhead that the renter of boats, having seen the disaster first, had
already put out for the scene of trouble, rowing lustily. Nobody could
beat him to his garlands now; that was clear; clear, too, that there
really wasn't much peril, after all. So the motley gathering of idlers
became content to stand upon the edge of the boat pavilion, gazing most
eagerly, gossiping not a little....

The bystander, like the Athenian, ever desires to see or to hear some
new thing. And really this spectacle was new enough to satisfy the
most exacting.

Perhaps a mile over the water, a hundred yards or so from shore, the
little boat Lady Jane lay side up on the sea. To it clung a young girl,
well above water; near her appeared the head of a young man, a swimmer.
So far, so good. But there was something wrong about this swimmer,
something grossly discordant in his position in the picture. It
developed upon close examination that the interval between him and the
overturned boat was not decreasing. It was widening indeed; widening
quite steadily.... Yes, there it was; unfortunately no longer open to
doubt. The man was pulling for the shore and safety, leaving the girl to
sink or swim as she preferred.

The sight was a strange one, resembling a defiance of established law.
It staggered the eye, like the sight of water running uphill. People had
seen the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and kissed the Pope's toe; but they
had never seen anything like this.

A nasal, hawk-nosed individual in eye-glasses voiced the sentiments of
all: "If that's your Southern chivalry, Warlow, the less I see of it
the better."

Another spoke more sympathetically, yet with unchanged point: "Poor
Dalhousie--born to trouble! Rye whiskey an' marryin' cousins--that's
what's killed him."

A third, an elderly woman, with a rich voice, said: "I wonder what there
was between those two...."

The actual rescue proved a tame affair. Suddenly attention was diverted
from it by the cry of a certain winsome young thing, who, when the alarm
was raised, had been among the first to scream.

"Oh, _look_ at that little man. He _hit_ him!"

"Where?--Who?--Oh!"

"Serves him ri--Ah-h!"

It proved as the screamer said. The smallest rickey-drinker, not content
with sounding the alarm, had gone brilliantly bolting down the beach.
Taking his stand there at a given point, he had flung himself upon the
youth who had so ably saved his own skin, as the latter waded ashore,
and struck him savagely in the face. It was observed that the man from
the sea seemed surprised by this attack. He stared at his small
assailant in a confused sort of way; and then with passionate swiftness
plucked hold of him by two favorite points of vantage, and threw him
bodily into the water. This movement, as it chanced, turned his gaze
seaward. The youth was seen to stand an instant, rigid as a bather in
marble, staring out over the water he had traversed ...

Then he turned, heedless of the brandishings of the little man behind
him, and went away toward his bath-house in the manner that is best
described as a slink.




     III

     How Carlisle screamed, when the Boat upset, or else didn't,
     as the Case might be; also of Mrs. Heth, who went down Six
     Floors to nail Falsehoods, etc.


Miss Carlisle Heth sat cold and proud in the approaching lifeboat,
picking at her sopping skirts. She ignored, hardly hearing, the
conversation of her rescuer, hinting broadly that she should reveal
these mysteries to him. Revelation, as she understood herself, was the
contrary of her desire. The occurrences of the last quarter of an hour
had actually dazed her; but the net result of them was sufficiently
manifest. Her purpose had been to detach herself unnoticed from
Dalhousie's gay fame. And now:--_Look at the boat pavilion_....

It was the bitterest moment of Miss Heth's well-sheltered young life. Of
notoriety, of a vulgar sensation such as this, of malicious gossip, of
all that was cheap and familiarizing, she had a deep-seated horror. Of
the moment of reckoning with her mother, whose objections to noisy rumor
rather surpassed her own, she felt a wholesome dread. There was also the
matter of her personal appearance, which she conceived to be repulsive:
she was confident that she looked a hideosity and a sight. Her eyes
fastened from afar upon the staring faces on the pavilion. She saw
hungry curiosity stalking there, naked and unashamed, and the sight
sickened her.

For these faces, as individual faces, she felt indifference and
contempt. But in the mass they seemed to assume the enormous importance
of good or ill repute. What these people were saying of her and
Dalhousie to-day, the world would say to-morrow.

To know what this was, she would have given on the spot all the money
she possessed (eight thousand dollars, birthday and Christmas presents,
in United States bonds). But to run the gauntlet of those questioning
faces was just a little more than she could endure. She was quick in
action. She said:

"Land me here, Mr. Wedge. And you must walk with me to the hotel."

As she directed, so it was done. They landed there, and Carlisle and Mr.
Wedge struck out hurriedly up the strand for the main entrance of the
hostelry. When the cunning ruse became plain to the staring gallery, it
was practically too late to do anything about it. You could not have
caught the escaping pair without a sprint. However, each man promised
himself to be the first to interview the boatman ...

After the humiliating cut-and-run, which stretched out interminably,
Carlisle found herself, at length, in the haven of the brilliantly
lighted elevator. Water dribbled from her skirt's edge; she was aware of
the elevator boy's African side-glances. If she had been a different
sort of girl, she could no longer have refrained from bursting into
tears. Fine ending to her rosy journey this!--a sensational "scene"
played out before a house of loafers, and now the babel of
thousand-tongued gossip, linking her name amorously (so she suspected)
with the red-painted ne'er-do-well. Charming background, indeed, for a
remeeting with the heir of the Cannings.

Her plight was crushing to the distracted girl; but her anger, the wild
resentment of a high spirit feeling itself abominably mistreated, made
it impossible for her to be crushed. She would not lie down tamely and
be trampled upon by malicious mischance. She would _not_ ...

Mrs. Heth, just risen from her refreshing nap, heard the sounds of
arrival in the adjoining room and opened the door between. Then she
leaned back against the door-frame, her ladylike eyes starting from
her head.

"_Carlisle!_... Oh, merciful heavens! What?--_What on earth's
happened?_"

Miss Heth, already beginning to free herself of her soaking clothes,
braced for the explanatory ordeal. Having no plan of procedure except to
put herself in as praiseworthy a light as possible (thus avoiding a
useless scene), she began in a hard, dry voice:

"I went out for a little sail. I thought it would be a nice thing to
do, the sea was so smooth and calm. A--a man was out swimming near me,
and he climbed into my boat. I ordered him out, and--and he jumped out,
and--I upset. He swam off--leaving me in the water--and the boatman had
to come out and bring me in. Oh, mamma!--_I'm the talk of the place!_"

Mrs. Heth took two swift strides into the room. She came like a cat,
claws out, ready to pounce. Her splendid hair hung loose about her head,
revealing the birthmark upon the temple, a round spot the size of a
silver half-dollar. Ordinarily dull pink, this spot was slowly mottling
in blues and purples: though evidently not with reference to the perils
of the deep, so narrowly escaped by her only child.

"The talk of the place!--what do you mean?" she asked in a voice that
sounded dangerous. "A man!--what man? Speak? What right did he have to
get into your boat?"

"Of course he had _no_ right to get into my boat, mamma," said Carlisle,
dribbling water. "None whatever. That is what I told him, from the
beginning. His name is Dalhousie. I--that part makes no dif--"

"Dalhousie! Colonel Dalhousie's son!--that young sot! Why, you don't
know him, do you?--you never met him in your life--"

"Please don't storm and rant, mamma. It only makes things worse. As I
was saying, when you interrupted, I--I met this man once--a long time
ago. Some one introduced him, I suppose. That must have been it. I--I've
never seen him from that time. He hadn't the faintest right to get into
my boat--not the faintest. He--"

"But what did he do it _for_? What did he want? What was his purpose, I
say?"

Carlisle turned away with a wet skirt to hang. It was certainly very
difficult to explain things to mamma.

"Oh, mamma!--How can I tell you why he wanted to get into my boat? All
this just wastes time. Perhaps he thought he would have a little
flirtation. Perhaps he wanted to rest from his--"

"What did he _say_ when he got in? He didn't just step on like you were
a street car, did he? Speak up! What ex--"

"That's just it! That's just what he did. He climbed in, and didn't say
a word. I at once told him to get out. That is what we talked about
_entirely_. Then at last he got out, in--in an angry way--shaking the
boat, and then I--I went over--"

"It passes belief! The young ruffian, after upsetting you, simply
deserted--Were you in the water long? Are you cold? Do you feel like you
were going to have chills?"

"No--I feel well enough, physically.... But--mamma--"

"You're going to have chills--that's it. No wonder! Wait! I never in my
life!..."

She whisked into her bedroom, and, returning with the travelling-bag,
produced a bijou flask with a silver top that turned into a little
drinking-cup. Into the top she swiftly poured a thimbleful of excellent
French brandy.

"Drink this. It will keep them off." And she added: "It passes
belief...."

And then she walked the floor, her unexpected hands, so oddly stubbed
and thick, clasped before her.

"You called out to him, of course? You screamed for his assistance?"

Carlisle, choking over the inflammatory draught, set the silver top down
on the bureau. There was a gratifying absence of cynicism in her manner.
She was always, as her mother knew, a serious girl at heart. She had to
drink nearly half a glass of water before she could dislodge all the
brandy from her larynx.

"Oh, mamma--how can I remember just exactly what I did? Please be
reasonable. I was too excited and frightened, suddenly plunged into the
water, to think what I was doing. The point--"

"You must have cried out. Of course you screamed for his assistance. And
the young blaggard ... What time is it? Five o'clock? Then Willie's
train is already in ..."

The spoken thought brought a full stop to the good lady's ejaculations,
shot her mind in dead silence round a corner. She stopped walking, stood
intently still. After all, what so serious had happened? Her daughter
was, indeed, the talk of the place, which was an exceedingly undesirable
thing; especially since an "exclusive" girl's name is so tender a bloom,
and Mr. Canning was very probably downstairs listening to it now--the
talk, that is. But, after all, young Dalhousie's dissolute misbehaviors
were so well known, nobody could possibly ...

"They can hardly say anything to reflect upon _you_," the mother summed
up aloud, frowning intently. "You have been foolish, most indiscreet.
How you ever permitted anybody to introduce such a character to you
passes my understanding. However--any attractive girl is likely to draw
the attacks of ruffianly men. His conduct surpass--"

"Yes--but do you think everybody'll understand that?" said Carlisle,
hurriedly, and rather felt that the worst was over. "That's just it,
mamma,--don't you see? How do we know what sort of gossip is being
bandied about downstairs now? You know people _always_ put the worst
possible construction they can on a--an episode like this!..."

Her mother wheeled on her, struck afresh in her dearest possession,
namely: her pride in the prestige of the name of Heth in an envious and
backbiting world.

"How do you mean, construction? What construction could they possibly--"

"Why, anything, mamma!--anything their horrid minds can think of. That
I'm a great friend of this charming man's, for instance,--engaged to
him, perhaps! That this exhibition in the boat was only a refined little
lovers' quarrel--"

"How under heaven could any fool say--"

"Well, you _know_ they'll wonder why he got into the boat in the first
place, and say the hatefullest thing they can think of ... There are
plenty of people who would like to see us h-humiliated."

Mrs. Heth, staring at her with an intake of the breath, then said
slowly: "_Ah--h_!" And she took in a whole range of new possibilities
with one leap of her immensely constructive mind.

"It isn't fair," said Carlisle, nervously, slipping into a pretty pink
negligee. "And you know how a gossipy story flies, growing all
the time--"

"I know," murmured her mother, intensely, as one who has suffered much
from just that demeanor of stories....

The falling sun shot a ray into the white-and-cherry bedroom; peeped at
the lovely girl sitting stiffly on the bed's edge, turned thick
mote-beams upon the lady of deceptive delicacy who stood, with flowing
brown hair and still more flowing robe de chambre, silent upon her peak
in Darien. The leather-shod clocklet, which always accompanied these two
upon their travels could now be heard ticking. Carlisle looked at her
mother, and there were both apprehensiveness and dependence in her look.
She herself was the cleverer of the two women, but very comforting it
was to her to feel this rock-like support behind her now.

Into Mrs. Heth's gray eyes had sprung a kind of glitter, the look of a
commanding general about to make an exterminative rush upon the enemy.
Hugo Canning to be maliciously informed that _her_ daughter was, had
been, or ever should be engaged to Jack Dalhousie! Not while she
retained her love of justice, and the power of locomotion in her limbs.

"Oho!" said she. "Well, I'll fix _that_ ... I'll stamp upon their
miserable lies ..."

The room telephone rang loudly, hastening decisions. Carlisle winced
visibly. In her mood of acute sensitiveness, she was for not answering
at all. But Mrs. Heth, the fighting man now in full possession of her,
tossed off the receiver with a brigadier air.

"Well?" demanded she sharply; and then, continuing: "Yes. Oh, yes!
Howdedo, Willie ... You've arrived, have you? (It's Willie Kerr, Cally.)
What? Oh, yes. She's quite well, though naturally somewhat upset by the
shock. It is a most unpleasant occurrence, and I feel deeply for the
young man's father, and his friends if he has any. Certainly, Willie. We
want the whole affair perfectly understood. Our position demands it.
Yes. I want to talk with you about it, at once. Will you meet me in the
Blue Parlor in ten minutes? Very well. Mr. Canning came with you, I
suppose?... Ah, yes ... What? _No_, Willie! Not a _line_! You must put
your foot down on that! This is entirely a personal matter and I will
not allow a piece in the paper about it. I won't have it.... Ah. All
right, then. I'll trust that to you. In ten minutes, Willie...."

The capable little general turned from the telephone to find the eyes of
the lieutenant or private fixed fearfully upon her.

"Willie," she explained, hurriedly, "says there's a newspaper reporter
hanging about--think of it!--trying to pick up something scandalous for
his wretched sheet. Willie has promised to attend to _him_. He says he
knows the editor or correspondent or whoever it is, and there won't be
the slightest trouble in shutting him up. There shan't be either. Now to
business."

At her best in action, mamma glided through the door into her own room,
slipping off her robe as she glided. In an amazingly short time she was
back again, breathing hard, and dressed for no-quarter affray.

"You didn't talk downstairs, Cally? No one pumped you as to what had
happened?"

"No, I spoke to no one."

Mrs. Heth wielded hatpins before the mirror, the glitter surviving in
her eyes.

"I am putting on a hat," she threw out, "to give matters a casual air. A
public hotel's a hotbed of gossip. Everything depends on the story's
being started right--on just the right note.... Thank God, I'm here!"

"Lie down," added Mrs. Heth, and Carlisle lay down.

The most exhaustive details of the affair had not, perhaps, been
laboriously collected as yet, but luckily Mrs. Heth was not the sort
that requires a mass of verbose testimony and dull statistics. The right
note awaited her touch six floors below, and time was pressing. Already
her mind had flown well ahead, perceived with precision just what was
required. Willie must be seen, and at least two ladies, of different
sets, great gossips, for preference; and to these she would confide,
with some little just indignation but without excitement, the astounding
truth about the young blackleg who, having boarded and upset her
daughter's boat, turned coward and scuttled off, ignoring her frightened
cries. Nor would she fail to express her sincere sympathy for Colonel
Dalhousie, whose heart (she understood) the behavior of his degenerate
son had broken before now....

"Do you want Flora with you?"

"No--I'd rather be alone."

"Remain quietly here till I return."

Briefly framed in the doorway, Mrs. Heth added: "You must get some
sleep to be fresh for the evening ... _I'll_ nail their slanderous
falsehoods."

Her daughter's glance upon her was touched with a flash of admiration,
the more striking in that she herself was quite unconscious of it.

Exact definition of desire and a simple strength of purpose from which
all aims of others bound back stone-dead: what brilliance of genius or
quintessence of mother-wit can hope to outdo this immortal combination?

Echo, solitary, answers ...

Mrs. Heth's return to the upper regions, an hour later, trumpeted
complete victory. The right note was struck; all was settled. Carlisle,
it appeared, had trusted insufficiently to the virtue of the Heth name.
Of horrid gossip there had been, at the worst, no more than a bare hint
or two, an attenuated suggestion. Malicious as the world was, few,
indeed, had dreamed any justification of Dalhousie's blackguardism.
Already, it appeared, the hotel rang with objurgations of it, and him.
Still, Mrs. Heth had struck the note, and struck hard.

Carlisle was bidden to sleep, after her trying experiences, to regain
her poise and color for the evening....

Alone again in the twilight bedroom, the girl snuggled beneath a pretty
pale-blue quilt, and absently scrutinized her pink and very shiny little
finger nails. After the excitement and strain of the last hour and a
half, she felt that she was now at peace. Nothing at all was going to
happen. Nobody could say anything the least bit horrid about her, the
least bit injurious to her position. She stood exactly where she had
stood when she went out for the sail. She was not even going to have
chills ...

She decided to dismiss it all from her mind and go to sleep, but her
mind for a time refused to come into this agreement. Though that was
exactly what she had meant not to do, the girl presently found herself
thinking back over the whole occurrence, from the moment when she first
saw Dalhousie in the water. In time vague doubts gathered and clouded
her perfect brow. She became a little oppressed by the recollection of
certain variations between what she had said and really intended to say
to her mother upstairs, and what her mother appeared to have said to
Rumor downstairs. For instance, she had never said that Dalhousie
_literally_ upset her boat, or even that he was exactly _in_ the boat
when it upset; and _never_ said that she had screamed again and again
for his help when she found herself in the water. No, she had
particularly avoided saying those things, for justly angry and excited
though she was, she hadn't considered it right to say anything that
wasn't strictly true. Mamma just jumped right on ahead, though, paying
no attention to what you said.

The whole thing had happened very unfortunately, she saw that clearly
now. Of course, she couldn't tell mamma that she and Jack Dalhousie had
quarrelled terribly in the boat and he had looked as if he meant to
strike her, for then mamma would have asked, How could you have had such
a terrible quarrel with a man that somebody barely introduced to you
once, a long time ago? And if she had said pointblank, No, I don't think
I screamed, mamma would have asked, Why under heaven didn't you
scream?--and all this would have meant stopping for a long explanation
right there, just when there was so much else to think about, and mamma
almost bursting a blood-vessel as it was.

Still, she wished now that it had all been started differently. In the
excitement, of course, she had not had time to think out every single
thing carefully and definitely. It occurred to her now, after some
meditation, that she might simply have said to mamma: "He had frightened
me so by getting into my boat, that when I upset and I knew I wasn't
going to drown, I didn't want to call him back"....

Darkness crept into the white-and-cherry bedroom. Till now, what with
nearly drowning and mamma and everything, she had really thought very
little about it from Dalhousie's point of view. Now it came over her,
rather dubiously, that what everybody seemed to be saying of him
downstairs did put him in quite a disagreeable position. But then, of
course, everybody was a little worked up and excited just now. In a day
or two they would forget about it, and the whole thing would blow over.
Besides, he deserved the severest punishment for the way he had treated
her; and as for anything he might say now (though as a gentleman he
would hardly say anything and try to blacken a lady's character), of
course nobody would listen to him for a minute.

And as far as that went, nobody would listen to her either. People never
did. She regretted the whole occurrence as much as any one, but you
could _never_ correct flying gossip; everybody knows that. People always
arrange the little details as they want them arranged, according to what
makes the most exciting story, and they never pay the smallest attention
when you come in with a just, mathematical face and say: "You haven't
got it quite right _there_. There's a little mistake _here_...."

Worry, clearly, was out of place. It never does any good, as all
philosophers agree; and besides, it brings wrinkles in or near the
forehead. Carlisle turned on her other side and snuggled with more
relaxation beneath the pale-blue quilt. Drowsiness stole over her,
seducing thought. Presently she slept, and dreamed of Mr. Canning.




     IV

     Mr. Hugo Canning, of the well-known Pursuing-Sex; how the
     Great Young Man pursued Miss Heth to a Summer-house, and what
     stopped his Thundering Feet.


Nor were the figments of sweet sleep too fanciful or far-flown. About
eight-thirty o'clock, when Mrs. and Miss Heth stepped from a descending
lift into the glaring publicity of the main floor, the first object that
their eyes fell upon was Mr. Hugo Canning in the flesh. The second was
Cousin Willie Kerr, even more in the flesh, trotting loyally at his
side. At this precise instant, in short, the celebrated transient
quitted the dining-room for the relaxations of his evening.

The coincidence of the moment was pure: one hundred per cent, as they
say commercially. One takes it to mean that Destiny, having handled a
favorite child somewhat roughly for a time, now turned back its smiling
mother-face. The ladies Heth, having dined refinedly in their
sitting-room, descended in search of cooling breezes, or for any other
reason why. Over the spaces of the great court, half lobby, half parlor,
Miss Heth had seen the masculine apparitions an instant before they saw
her: or just in time, that is to say, to be showing them now her
flawless profile....

It is easily surmised that Miss Heth's manner in action was contained,
her habit the very reverse of forward. One seeing her now would be
cheaply cynical, indeed, to say or dream that, with reference to some
such conjuncture as the present, this girl had left a happy home many
hours before. Her presence shamed every unworthy surmise. With a lovely
unconsciousness she was spied walking her innocent ways toward the
piazza with mamma, even now girlishly unaware that an opposite and
uproarious sex was in headlong pursuit....

If this pursuit--to be doggedly literal--appeared to lag for a moment,
if it did not seem to start with that instant _élan_ which one had a
right to expect, be sure that there was a complication of sound reasons
for that. Kerr, in the circumstances, was the appointed leader of the
chase; and Kerr hesitated. Canning's desire to avoid the local society
and be left free to outdoor exercise and sleep was, in truth, only too
well known to him. And to-night, worse luck, the distinguished visitor
appeared even less socially inclined than usual: annoyed when the select
little party he had expected from northerly haunts had been found
represented at the Beach by a telegram instead; increasingly bored by
the desolate air of the all but empty hostelry. "When's the next train
out of this hell-hole?"--such was Mr. Canning's last recorded remark up
to this not uninteresting moment.

Kerr, when he saw Mrs. and Miss Heth over the distance, merely made a
genial exclamation, and then gazed. He was nearing forty, was Willie,
short and slightly bald, with an increasing appreciation of the world's
good things and as much good nature as his round figure called for.
Canning's acquaintance he had by the chance of a lifelong friendship
with Mrs. Allison Payne. By reason of a native clannishness and certain
small obligations of a more material nature, he was more than ready to
share his privileges with his brilliant cousins. But....

"So that's the drowned lady," said Canning's voice, rather moodily, at
his elbow.... "Well, then, I know her."

"Dandy girl, Carlisle," exclaimed Willie, instantly. "Great little piece
of work...."

One hundred feet away, opportunity unconsciously receded toward the
piazza. Willie, having hesitated through no unfaithfulness, plunged with
no want of tact.

"Got to speak to 'em a minute--make inquiries--cousins, y' know. D' ye
mind?"

"My dear chap, why should I?"

"Awright--just stop and say howdedo," said the plump diplomatist. "Won't
take a minute...."

And Canning, perceiving then that Kerr expected to make this stop in his
company, said with an assurance not unbecoming to his lordly bearing:
"If you please. And don't start anything, for pity's sake. I'm for bed
in fifteen minutes."

So it all fell out, according to the book. So it was that the pursuing
feet were free to thunder. So Mrs. Heth heard the voice of the leal one,
subdued from a distance: "_Howdedo, Cousin Isabel! How're you an'
Carlisle this evening_?..."

And so the maid turned, startled from her other-worldly dreams....

He was the greatest parti that had ever crossed her path, that was ever
likely to cross her path. But Miss Heth faced him with no want of
confidence; received his greeting with a charming bright negligence. One
saw readily that such a matter as "making an impression" was far indeed
from this maid's mind. If doubts, a vague uneasiness relative to the
afternoon, still fretted the hinterlands of her mind (and they did), she
was much too well trained, too resolute withal, to let them appear
troublously upon the surface. Moreover, the nap of forty minutes, not
winks, had been like the turning of a new leaf; and she was fortified,
woman-wise, with the knowledge that she looked her best. Over her
shoulders there clung a shimmering scarf, a pretty trifle all made of
the scales of a silver mermaid. It was observed, however, that the gray
crêpe-de-chine quite justified its choice....

The meeting of four had been effected in one end of the wide garish
space: among the loungers of the lobby, all eyes were turned in that
direction. There were salutations; the introduction of Mr. Canning to
Mrs. Heth; inquiries after Miss Heth's health. Quite easily the square
party resolved itself into two conversational halves. Mrs. Heth, it was
clear from the outset, preferred Willie Kerr's talk above any other
obtainable at that time and place. She was, and remained, absolutely
fascinated by it....

"It seems quite unnecessary," Mr. Canning was saying--but he pronounced
it "unne's'ry"--"to ask if you are any the worse for the ducking...."

"Oh, no--I'm quite well, thank you. We've suffered nothing worse than
the spoiling of all our plans in coming here!"

The man's look politely interrogated her. "Oh, really? I'm sorry."

"We came, you see, to be very quiet. And we were never so frightfully
noisy in our lives."

He smiled; made his small distinguished bow.

"You've reason to feel annoyed on all scores then. At any rate, it's
charming to find you as our fellow guest."

And his eyes flitted from her toward Kerr, and then turned briefly upon
mamma, and her strange little downy mustache.

Carlisle now perceived the disinterestedness, if not the faint
weariness, in Mr. Canning's manner; she saw that he had forgotten the
five minutes at the Country Club. The strong probability was, moreover,
that he thought the worse of her for allowing herself to be nearly
drowned in so vulgarly public a way. However, she was untroubled; she
thought him, for her part, adorable to look at and of a splendid manner
and conceit; and aloud she inquired, with her air of shining
indifference, if Mr. Canning was not delighted with the Beach
in October.

"Well, you know, I think I've been here before"--he said _bean_, most
deliciously--"only I can't be quite sure. It seems to me a most
agreeable place. Only, if it isn't indiscreet to inquire, what does one
do in the evening?"

"Usually, I believe, one goes to bed directly after dinner. If one does
this, and dines extremely late, the evening slips by quite nicely,
we find."

"But the afternoons? Wouldn't they perhaps loom a thought long at times,
waiting on for dinner?"

"There's napping provided for the afternoon, you see. And many other
diversions, such as reading, walking, and thinking."

"Perhaps one should arrange to spend only afternoons at the Beach. You
make them sound simply uproarious."

"We're a simple people here, Mr. Canning, with simple joys and sorrows,
easily amused."

Mr. Canning looked down at her. However, Carlisle did not meet his gaze.
Having already, in a quiet way, given him two looks where they would do
the most good, she was now glancing maidenly at mamma, who conversed
vice-presidentially of her Associated Charities policies.

"They must be brought to help themselves!" Mrs. Heth was saying.
"Wholesale, thoughtless generosity is demoralizing to poverty. It is
sheer ruination to their moral fibre."

"Promiscuous charity!--ruination! Just what I always say," chirped
Willie. "Look at ancient Rome, ma'am. Began giving away corn to the
poor, and, by gad!--she fell!"...

"Delightful! I see I shall like it here," Mr. Canning was observing--and
was there perceptible the slightest thawing in his somewhat formidable
manner?... "I too," said he, "have dwelt in Arcady."

The girl looked over the spaces, a little smile in her eyes.

"Ah, then you didn't need to be told that the sandman comes early
there."

"But not, I think, when the moon shines bright--and the simple
amusements you speak of seem to be waiting? Surely games in the evening
are not altogether forbidden, or does my memory of the place
deceive me?"

"You seem to remember it perfectly. But I thought your complaint was
that there was nothing at all amusing to do in Arcady."

"Ah," said Mr. Canning, "but I'm having my second thoughts now."

She had given him a third, uptilting look with her speech; and now it
was as if the great eligible had seen her for the first time. If the
gaze of his handsome eyes became somewhat frank, this girl had been
fashioned to stand all scrutiny victoriously. A mode which defined the
figure with some truthfulness held no terrors for her; rather the
contrary. Her skin was fine and fair as a lily, with an undertone of
warmth, dawn pink on the cheek; the whiteness of her neck showed an
engaging tracery of blue. Her mass of hair, of an ashy dull gold, would
have been too showy above a plain face; but the case was otherwise with
her. Her mouth, which was not quite flawless but something better, in
especial allured the gaze; so did her eyes, of a dusky blue, oddly
shaped, and fringed with the gayest lashes ...

"Besides," added the man, looking down at her with a certain lightening
in his gaze, "as I remember, I did not say that there was nothing
amusing to do. I merely, as a stranger, came to you begging some
guidance on the point."

"I see. But I very much doubt my ability to guide you in that way, Mr.
Canning--"

"I can only observe that you've thrown out a number of perfectly ripping
suggestions already--walking on the piazza, for example. Mightn't we
steal that diversion from afternoon temporarily, don't you think?
Perhaps Mrs. Heth would agree to pursue the missing breeze so far?"

"That would be nice," said Carlisle.

You could distinctly hear his thundering feet now....

Strolling for four was agreed upon, and that simple afternoon amusement
started. But, arriving at the piazza, the dowager discovered that, after
all, the night air was just a little cool for her, and turned back, not
without some beaming. She mentioned the Blue Parlor as her port of call,
where smoking was forbidden. Willie, doing his duty as he saw it,
dropped his cigar into a brass repository. He had faults like the rest
of us, had Willie, but his deathless loyalty deserved a monument in
a park.

Carlisle and Mr. Canning strolled on alone. She walked outwardly serene
as the high-riding moon, but inwardly with a quickening sense of
triumph, hardly clouded at all now. As she and mamma had planned it, so
it had fallen out....

Many eyes had followed this shining pair as they quitted the common
gathering-place. She, as we have seen, was inviting as a spectacle. He,
to the nobodies, was simply one of the sights of the place, like the
Fort. And his distinguished House was still a small one, at that, not
yet arrived where another generation would unfailingly put it. If the
grandfather of Hugo Canning had founded the family, financially
speaking, it was his renowned father who had raised it so fast and far,
doubling and redoubling the Canning fortune with a velocity by no means
unprecedented in the eighties and nineties. To-day there were not many
names better known in the world of affairs, in the rarer social
altitudes, even in the shore-hotels of the provinces....

And the son and heir of the name and fortune, who now trod the Beach
piazza with Miss Carlisle Heth, was obviously more than many sons of
wealth, much more than a mere trousered incident to millions. This one
saw in the first glance at his Olympian bearing; but Carlisle Heth knew
more than that. Upon this young man the enterprising vehicles of modern
history had, long since, conferred an individual celebrity. Often had
the Sunday editors told their "public" of his exploits in the sporting
and social realms, as they called them; not rarely had journals of a
more gossipy character paragraphed him smartly, using their asterisks to
remove all doubt as to who was meant. Before such an evening as this had
ever crossed her maiden's dreams, Carlisle Heth had read of Hugo
Canning....

It was a bad throat, a God-given touch of bronchitis or whatnot, that
had sent the great young man south. This was known through Willie Kerr,
and other private sources. Also, that he would remain with his Payne
cousins through the following week; and in December might possibly
return from the Carolinas or Florida for a few days' riding with the
Hunt Club. Meantime he was here: and it was but Saturday, mid-evening,
and a whole beautiful Sunday lay ahead....

From the piazza, after a turn or two, Miss Heth and Mr. Canning
sauntered on to a little summer-house, which stood on the hotel
front-lawn, not far from the piazza end. She had hesitated when he
commended the pretty bower; but it was really the discreetest spot
imaginable, under the public eye in all directions, and undoubtedly
commanding a perfect view of the moonlight on the water, precisely as he
pointed out.

In this retreat, "What a heavenly night!" exclaimed Miss Heth.

Canning, still standing, looked abroad upon a scene of dim beauty,
gentle airs, and faint bright light. "Now that you say it," he replied,
"it is. But depend on it, I should never have admitted it quarter of an
hour ago."

"Oh! But isn't it rather tedious to deny what's so beautifully plain?"

"Should you say that tedious is the word? A better man than I denied his
Lord."

"Yes," said Carlisle, not absolutely dead-sure of the allusion, "but he
was frightened, wasn't he, or something?"

"And I was lonely. Loneliness beats fear hollow for making the world
look out of whack."

"Doesn't it? And is there a lonesomer place on the globe than a summer
resort out of season?"

"But we were speaking of fifteen minutes ago, were we not?" said
Canning, and sat down beside her on the rustic bench.

The walls of this little summer-house were largely myth, and lattice for
the rest. Through the interstices the dim brightness of the moon misted
in, and the multitudinous rays from the hotel. There reached them the
murmur of voices, the languorous lap of water. A serene and reassuring
scene it surely was; there was no menace in the night's silvern
calmness, no shadow of stalking trouble....

Carlisle imagined Mr. Canning to be capable of a rapid advance at his
desire, and was opposed on principle to such a course of events. Still,
she was saying, a moment or two later:

"And in the Payne fort on the Three Winds Road--I suppose you never feel
lonely there?"

"Why fort, if one might know?"

"I've been told that you were awfully well barricaded there, prepared to
stand any sort of siege."

Canning seemed quite amused. He declared, on the contrary, that neglect
and unpopularity were his portion in a strange land.

"I'm an invalid on sick-leave," said he, "and my orders are to go to
bed. Please don't smile, for it's all quite true ..."

He appeared to develop a certain interest in the moonlit talk. He
proceeded in a voice and manner no longer purely civil:

"And, to bare my soul to you, I'm no fonder of being lonely than another
man.... Do you know that, but for Kerr, you're my one acquaintance in
all this part of the world? What shall we say of that? I sit at dinner,
consumed by blue devils. I emerge, and behold, you walk across the
lobby. Haven't I some right to feel that the gods are with me even at
the Beach?"

Perchance she might have given him some information there, but instead
she laughed musically.

"The god of the pretty speeches, at any rate! Must I tell you that you
didn't look quite overjoyed when dear Willie came dragging you up?"

"I've no doubt I looked all sorts of ways, for I'd never felt more unfit
for any society, including my own. The more is my debt to you for
chasing my devils away.... But perhaps I owe you no thanks after all, as
one guesses that you do these little services for others without any
particular effort."

Carlisle glanced at him, smiling a little from her dusky eyes.

"Your experience is that most people find it a great effort to speak
pleasantly to you, I suppose?"

"Again I point out to you that our talk is not of most people, but of
you."

"Oh! And is there something particularly original about me? This grows
exciting."

"I, for one, think that beauty is always original," said Canning, with
sufficient impersonality, but no more.... "Still, we know, of course,
that unaided it cannot drive the blues of others very far."

"After the sugar-coating comes the pill. Tell me in what way I have been
deficient."

"Ah, that's yet to learn. To be charming by habit is an agreeable thing;
but you haven't convinced me yet, you know, that you know how to
be kind."

Her lashes fell before his masculine gaze; she did not answer. About
them was the sweet hush of the night. She was aware that he had moved
nearer upon their bench; aware, too, of a faster beating of her heart.
And then, quite suddenly, a new voice spoke, so close that both started
sharply; a rather shy voice, yet one possessed of a certain vivid
quality of life.

"I beg your pardon--but _is_ this Miss Heth?"

They turned as upon one string. At the door of the summer-house stood
the blurred figure of a man, bareheaded and tall. The light being
chiefly behind him, he showed only in thin silhouette, undistinguishable
as to age, character, and personal pulchritude. Stares passed between
the dim trio.

"I am Miss Heth."

"Could you possibly let me speak to you--for a moment, Miss Heth? I
realize, of course, that it's a great intrusion but--"

Canning started up, annoyed. Carlisle, without knowing why, was
instantly conscious of a subtle sinking of the heart: some deep instinct
rang a warning in the recesses of her being, as if crying out: "This man
means trouble." She glanced at Mr. Canning with a kind of little shrug,
suggesting doubt, and some helplessness; and he, taking this for
sufficient authority, assumed forthwith the male's protectorship.

"Yes? What is it that you wish?"

The tall stranger was observed to bow slightly.

"As I say, I beg the favor of speaking to Miss Heth a few
moments--privately. Of course I shouldn't venture to trespass so, if the
matter weren't vitally important--"

"Who are you?" demanded the great young man with rather more impatience
than seemed necessary. "And what do you wish to speak to her about?
Speak plainly, I beg, and be brief!"

The two men stood facing each other in the faint light. Ten feet of
summer-house floor was between them, yet something in their position was
indefinably suggestive of a conflict.

"I should explain," said the intruder, dim in the doorway, "that
I come as a friend of poor Dalhousie--the boy who got into all
the trouble ... Ah...."

The involuntary ejaculation, briefly arresting his speech, was his
perfect tribute to the girl's beauty now suddenly revealed to him. For
Carlisle had unconsciously leaned forward out of the shadows of the
bench just then, a cold hand laid along her heart.

"This afternoon," the man recovered, with a somewhat embarrassed rush.
"I--I appreciate, I needn't say, that it seems a great liberty, to--"

"Liberty is scarcely the word," said Hugo Canning, fighting the lady's
battle with lordly assurance. "Miss Heth declines to hear...."

But the stranger's vivid voice bore him down: "_Do you, Miss Heth?_...
The situation is terribly serious, you see. I don't want to alarm you
unnecessarily, but--I--I'm afraid he may take matters into his
own hands--"

Canning took an impatient step forward.

"Nevertheless, it's pure impudence for him to send to this lady,
sneaking for favors now. Let's--"

"Mr. Canning, I--I'm afraid I _ought_ to speak to him!"

"_What?_" said Mr. Canning, wheeling at the voice, as if stung.

"_Oh!... That's kind of you!_"

Carlisle felt, under Mr. Canning's incredulous gaze, that this sudden
upwhirl of misfortune was the further refinement of cruelty. She hardly
knew what to do. Scarcely thinkable as it was to dismiss Hugo Canning
from her presence, it seemed even more impossible to pack off this
nameless intruder. Inconceivable malignity of chance, indeed! Only one
doubt of its all being settled and blown over had lingered on to trouble
her; and now without warning this doubt rose and rushed upon her in the
person of the sudden stranger--and before Mr. Canning, too. It occurred
to her, with ominous sinkings of the heart, that she had relied
mistakenly upon Dalhousie's gentlemanliness. What horrid intention was
concealed behind these strange words about his taking matters into his
own hands? And suppose she refused to see the emissary alone, and he
then said: "Well, then, I'll just have to speak before your friend."...
What would Mr. Canning think of her then? What was he going to think of
her anyway?

Carlisle, having risen, answered her protector's gaze with a look of
appealing sweetness, and said in a low, perturbed voice:

"I'm so dreadfully sorry. But I don't quite see how I could refuse just
to--to hear what he has to say. Under the circumstances, would
it--wouldn't it be simply unkind?"

Canning said, with small lightening of his restrained displeasure: "Ah!
I'm to understand, then, that you wish to give this--gentleman an
audience alone?"

It was, of course, the last thing on earth she desired, but God clearly
was out of his heaven to-day, and Mr. Canning would like her better in
the long run if he stepped aside for a space now. She said, with a
restraint which did her credit:

"_Could_ you forgive me--for five minutes? You must know how I--dislike
this. But _oughtn't_ I--"

The great parti gave an ironic little laugh.

"As you please, of course. I shall await your pleasure on the piazza."

And he stamped out and away into the moonlight, passing the silent
intruder with a look which said loudly that he would have kicked him if
it had promised to be worth the trouble.

The silver cord was loosed. The village-clock, quarter of a mile away,
struck nine, and all's well. Hugo Canning's stately back receded.
Coincidently the shabby-looking stranger who had displaced him stepped
forward into the summer-house. The first thing Carlisle noticed about
him was that he was lame.




     V

     Dialogue between V. Vivian, of the Slums, and Mr. Heth's
     Daughter (or his Niece); what the lovely Hun saw in the Mr.
     Vivian's eyes, just before he asked God to pity her.


Dalhousie's tall friend advanced with a limp, in silence. He halted at a
courteous distance; it was seen that one hand held a soft hat, crushed
against his side. A faint wave of the ethereal light immersed the man
now, and Carlisle dimly descried his face. She observed at once that it
did not seem to be a menacing face at all; no, rather was it kindly
disposed and even somewhat trustful in its look. It was the second thing
that she noticed about him.

Perhaps no girl in the world was less like the popular portrait of a fat
horse-leech's daughter than this girl, Carlisle Heth. Surely no advance
ever less resembled the charge of a hating prophet upon a Hun than this
man's advance. Carlisle, to be sure, was never one to think in
historical or Biblical terminology. But she did note the man's manner of
approach upon her, and his general appearance, with an instant lifting
of the heart. The whole matter seemed desperately serious to her, full
of alarming possibilities, a matter for a determined fight. And she felt
more confidence at once, the moment she had seen how the emissary
looked, how he looked at her.

Chiefly for strategic reasons, she had sat down on the bench again, well
back in the shadows. She did not speak; had no intention of speaking
till speech might gain something. And the stranger, silent also, wore an
air of hesitancy or confusion which was puzzling to her and yet quite
reassuring, too. If he had come to say that Dalhousie would talk unless
she did, would he be this sort of looking person at all?...

The man began abruptly; clearly nothing plotted out in advance.

"He's quite crushed.... I--I've just come from him...."

And then, hurriedly running his fingers through his hair, he retraced
his steps for a better start.

"I should first say how kind it is of you to receive a--a stranger, in
this way. I need hardly say that I appreciate it, greatly.... And I
bring his hope that you can be merciful, and forgive him for what he
did. He is badly broken, that I promise you.... It's all so curiously
confused. But it doesn't seem that he can be quite so bad as they're
saying here to-night...."

The stranger hesitated; he was gazing down with grave intentness.

"Miss Heth, Dal swears he can't remember the boat's upsetting at all."

His tone expressed, oddly, not so much a contradiction of anybody as a
somewhat ingenuous hope for corroboration: Carlisle's ear caught that
note at once. She was observing Jack Dalhousie's shabby friend as a
determined adversary observes. He had moved a little nearer, or else the
pale light better accustomed itself to him. And she saw that his face,
though manifestly young, had an old-fashioned sort of look which seemed
to go with his worn clothes; a quaint face, as she regarded it,
odd-looking in some elusive way about the eyes, but, she felt surer and
surer, not dangerous at all.

Now her gaze, shifting, had fastened upon his tie, which was undeniably
quaint; a very large four-in-hand showing pictorially, as it seemed, a
black sea holding for life a school of fat white fish. And then there
came a lovely voice from the shadows--lovely, but did it sound just a
little hard?...

"Perhaps you had better begin at the beginning, and tell me who you are,
and what it is you want."

"Yes, yes! Quite so!" agreed the author of the Severe Arraignment,
rather hastily....

A little easier said than done, no doubt. Yet it may be that one of the
young man's inner selves still hovered over the belief that this girl
must be Mr. Heth's (of the Works) niece, or haply a yet more distant
relative....

"I mentioned that," said he, "because it was naturally uppermost in my
mind. I--ah.... But to begin at the beginning, as you say.... I got a
telegram in town, telling me that Jack Dalhousie was in serious trouble.
It was from Hofheim, a fellow, a sort of druggist, who happened to know
that I was one of his best friends. So I caught the six-ten train and
Hofheim met me at the station. _My_ name's Vivian...."

He stopped short, with an odd air of not having intended to stop at this
point at all. So bystanders have watched the learning bicycle rider,
irresistibly drawn to his doom against the only fixed object in miles.
However, no association of ideas woke in the mind of the silent girl
upon the bench. Not easily at any time did brick-throwing Socialists
gain foothold there; and this day had been a disruptive one for her,
beyond any in her experience.

"The name," hastily continued the young man, with an intake of breath,
"probably conveys nothing to you. I--I merely mention it.... Well,
Hofheim, this sort of--fellow, wasn't in the hotel when the--the
occurrence took place, but he told me what everybody was saying, as we
came up in the 'bus together. I feel very sure you can have no idea....
Shall I repeat his story? I don't, of course, want to trouble you
needlessly."

"Do."

So bidden, he swiftly epitomized the narrative told him by the fellow
Hofheim, who had got it at fifth or sixth hand after Mrs. Heth's
striking of the right note. The Hofheim rendering seemed to include such
details as that Dalhousie (being an entire stranger to Miss Heth) had
overthrown her boat with homicidal hands, and that, as he swam away, he
had laughed repeatedly and maniacally over his shoulder at the girl's
agonized screams.

"They don't say that he struck you--with an oar," the man concluded, sad
and satirical. "I believe that's the only detail of the sort they
omit.... As a matter of fact, Miss Heth, Dal says he never heard you
scream at all."

Then he clearly paused for a reply, perhaps a reassuring burst; but
there was only silence. The harried girl on the bench was thinking,
intently but with some bewilderment. Somewhat aghast as she was (truth
to tell) at the way in which the minor variations had been maliciously
distorted, her attention had been closely engaged by the curious way in
which Mr. Dalhousie's friend was going at things. Why did he sound less
like a challenge and a threat than like somebody whistling hopefully to
keep up his courage?

The question irresistibly emerged. Carlisle's slim fingers furled and
unfurled the end of her mermaiden's scarf, and she looked up at the tall
stranger in the dusk and sweetly spoke for the third time.

"But I don't understand. If he has told you all about it, I--I don't see
why you have come to me at all."

Then the man appeared to recollect that he had omitted the most
important part of his narrative--of course she didn't understand, no
wonder!--and spoke with some eagerness.

"I should have explained that in the beginning!--only of course I don't
like to trespass too far on your time.... You see--unfortunately--Dal's
hardly in position to speak about the matter at all. I--"

He paused, as if seeking how to put it, and then spoke these
doubt-destroying words:

"It is very perplexing, but the truth is--he says so himself--he doesn't
know at all what took place."

"Oh!... _He doesn't know_!"

"I don't wonder you're astonished at his saying so," said the young man,
in quite a gentle way. "And yet I do believe him absolutely...."

He now explained, in well-selected phrases, that Jack Dalhousie had been
very drunk when he boarded the boat, having taken a running start on the
evening preceding. Though he might have seemed normal enough, through
long experience in control, he was actually quite irresponsible; and
drink had played strange tricks with his mind before now. The boy could
remember getting into the boat, it seemed; remember that--ah--that she
had objected (very properly) to his presence; remember standing up in
the boat, very angry, and the wind blowing in his face. The next thing
he remembered was being in the water, swimming away. And then, when he
landed, a man standing there on shore cursed him and struck him in the
face.... Then he had looked out over the water; he saw the upset
sailboat and the boatman rowing out, and the people, and it rushed over
him what he must have done. Till then, he said, he had never dreamed
that anything had happened. He could hardly believe it, even with the
evidence of his own eyes. Then later Hofheim, the sort of fellow, had
gone up to see him, and told him what people were saying, which so much
more than confirmed his worst suspicions. Hofheim was a stranger, but he
meant well....

Dalhousie, in short, was in the singular position of having to implore
others to assure him that he hadn't done all these terrible things. And
it appeared that Miss Carlisle Heth was the one person in the world who
could possibly give him that assurance.

So spoke the stranger. That he had scattered lifelines, that all his
oratory had come agrapple with nature's first law, evidently did not
cross his mind. He gazed down at the girl's dimly limned face, and his
gaze seemed full of an unconquerable hopefulness.

"The boy's behavior has been inexcusable in any case," he said. "And be
sure he's been punished, and will be punished severely. But ... it must
be that either the--the trouble didn't happen at all as this story says
it did, or if--at the worst--it did happen that way, Dalhousie was
simply out of his mind, quite insane, and didn't know what he was doing.
He isn't, of course, a ruffian or a coward. Won't you help to make them
understand that?"

The girl raised her eyes, which in the twilight were darker than the
'depth of water stilled at even.'

"I don't see the necessity for that," she said, in a firm voice. "I--I'm
afraid I can't consent to be involved in it any further."

Over the little summer-house hung the sweet beauties of the serene
night. About it stretched the calm lawn in chequers of large faint
brightness and gigantic shadows. Within it stood the tall stranger,
rooted in his tracks. Then it seemed to occur to him that there was some
misunderstanding; that at least, in his anxiety about his friend, he
hadn't allowed sufficiently for the properly outraged feelings of the
lady--this so unreasonable-looking daughter of Mr. Heth of the Works, or
his niece....

"It's all tremendously trying for you, I know," he said, with the same
sort of gentleness. "I assure you the situation has distressed me
greatly--from every aspect. And I think it's most kind and--and generous
of you to let me speak with you when you must feel that you've been so
badly treated.... But you see--as it stands, you are involved in it,
really, more than any one else. I'm sorry, but in fact the whole issue
is in your hands."

"I can't see that. He has given you his--his version of what took place.
No one will prevent him from saying the same thing to whomever
he wishes."

"But who will believe him?"

Carlisle perceived a rhetorical question, though she didn't know it
under that name; she made no reply. She would really have preferred no
more questions of any sort--what was the use of them? In her, as in all
the Maker's creatures, the instinct for self-preservation was planted to
work resistlessly. Small wonder, indeed, if, in the unexpected discovery
that dependence on Dalhousie's dubious gentlemanliness was unnecessary,
the uprush of relief should have swept away all lesser considerations,
flooded down all doubts. All was settled again in a trice, as by a
miracle: the miraculous agent here being, not the Deity (as she vaguely
suspected), but only the Demon Rum, he who had taught the frail lad
Dalhousie to be so mistrustful of himself ...

She had had a harassing day, including three momentous _tête-à-têtes_
with three different and widely variegated men, mostly comparative
strangers: Jack Dalhousie, Mr. Canning, and now this Mr. Vivian. She was
very tired of being dogged and nagged at and interfered with, and she
wanted very much to terminate this interview, which she saw now had been
extorted from her by a pretty sharp piece of deception. And through her
mind there skipped a beckoning thought of Mr. Canning, conceived as
feverishly pacing the piazza ...

"You see, his defence," Mr. Vivian was saying, with some signs of
nervousness, "is merely his own word that he had no idea you were upset.
I believe him absolutely, because I know he wouldn't lie, and he admits,
to his own disadvantage, that his memory isn't at all clear. But--it's
all so muddled and confused somehow--I'm afraid everybody else will
think that a rather silly fabrication, invented by a desperate man to
put himself in the best light possible. That is--unless his word is
corroborated."

His inflection invited remarks, nay, urged them, but there was only
silence.

And then within V. Vivian, M.D., there woke a cold doubt, and gnawed
him.

"Miss Heth--I must ask--for the whole moral question hangs on this ...
_Did he know that you were upset_?"

Miss Heth cleared her throat, preparatory to rising. She saw now that
she ought never to have consented to talk with this strange man at all.
Mamma would have known that in advance.

"It is--rather absurd--for me to be asked to decide what _he_ knew. He
has assured you that--"

"But--I don't make myself clear, I see--the fact is that yours is the
only assurance that will carry the smallest weight on that point.... He
wasn't--may I ask?--actually _in_ the boat when it went over, was he?"

"N-no. As to that--I believe he had just got out, but--"

"Did you think at the time that he knew you were upset?"

"Unfortunately, I am not a mind reader," she began with dignity,
objecting seriously to these obstacles in the way of ending the
interview. "Thrown without warning into the water, I could not look into
his thoughts and see--"

"Quite so. But did he show in any way that he knew you were upset?"

A kind of chill had crept into the stranger's voice. The two young
people gazed at each other. The man had strange eyes (they were the
third thing she had noticed about him), gray, she thought, and gifted
with an odd sort of translucence, singular and speaking.

"Let me see. No, he did not. That is what I said at the time--that he
didn't take the slightest notice of me--"

"He swears he never dreamed anything was wrong till he landed. Don't you
feel that that's quite possible, at least? Or.... did you scream out
for his help, so loudly that he _must_ have heard you, if he'd
been himself?"

"The--the first few minutes in the water were very confusing. I can't
pretend to say exactly what I did or didn't do. I had to think about
saving my life--"

"Of course. But if you'd screamed a number of times in saving your life,
you would be likely to remember it, wouldn't you?"

"Really I can't acknowledge your right to--"

"Miss Heth--_why didn't you scream_?"

His swift cross-examination touched the quick of her spirit; and she
came to her feet, trembling a little, and feeling rather white.

"I will not allow you to catechise me in this way. I will not...."

Dr. Vivian, from the Dabney House, over the Gulf, stood still, quite
silenced....

The thought had struck V. Vivian, and shot him down, that this girl was
lying, deliberately suppressing the truth that meant more than life to
Dal. She hadn't screamed. Dal hadn't known she was upset.... Yet was it
thinkable? In the fiercest denouncing of the yellowest Huns, who had
ever dreamed anything so base of them as this? _Lying?_ With that face
like all the angels, that voice like a heavenly choir?...

The tall doctor saw that his suspicion was unworthy and absurd. His was
no simple choice between his friend's shameful cowardice, and this
girl's criminal falsehood. No, Dal was crazy-drunk at the time, and
himself cried out in his misery that the worst that they said of him was
probably true. And even supposing that this girl was no more than a
fiend in seraphic shape, what conceivable reason could she have for such
infamous suppression? Motive was unimaginable.... No, the fault must be
his own. He had pressed too hard, pried too tactlessly and
inquisitively, not made her understand sufficiently the dire swiftness
of the poor boy's need....

These two stood face to face. Carlisle saw that Jack Dalhousie's friend
was becoming excited; but then, so was she. The man spoke first, in a
low, hurried voice:

"I don't mean to catechise--indeed, I don't. You must try to forgive me
for the liberties I seem to be taking.... The thing's so serious, so
pitiful. This story already flying around back in town--making him a
base coward--he'll never live it down. And it's to-night or never, a--a
misstatement travels so fast and far, and has so long a life--"

"You should have reminded him of all this," said Carlisle, her rounded
breast rising and falling, "before he got into my boat."

"Oh, you have a right to say that! He's been wrong, insanely wrong! But
does he deserve disgrace--ostracism--ruin? You alone stand between
him and--"

"I don't feel that it--it's right for me to be brought into it further.
I've explained that. And I must ask--"

"But you _are_ in it already, you see. Whatever anybody does or leaves
undone, now and for the future--_you are in it_...."

The enemy paused, gazing at her; and then suddenly, before she could
make just the right opening to go past him, he abandoned restraint, and
flung himself upon entreaties.

"Couldn't you make a statement--just a little statement--saying that you
feel certain he didn't know the boat was upset? that perhaps in the
excitement you forgot to scream?--that you know he wouldn't have left
you if he'd understood you were in trouble? Couldn't you at least give
him the benefit of the doubt?--say or do something to show you've no
bitter feeling toward him?--"

"Did he show any regard for my feelings? I must ins--"

"All the finer is your opportunity--_don't you see_?... Even strain the
truth a little for him, if that's necessary. God," said the shabby young
man, quite passionately, "would count it a virtue, I know, for it's now
or never to save a man.... Couldn't you do that? I promise you you won't
be bothered any more about it. I know how awfully hard it's all been for
you. Couldn't you say _something_ to help him a little?"

Miss Heth, facing him, imperceptibly hesitated.

For a second, offended though she was by his religious reference (she
never heard the name of God mentioned in polite society), this quaint
begging Mr. Vivian had her upon the balance. Her flying thoughts swept
down the parting of the ways. But they flew swiftly back, stabbing all
hesitancies....

She wished as much as any one that it had all been started differently,
as it might have been had she been perfectly certain in advance that no
one would dare say anything the least bit horrid about her. It was not
her fault that gossip was so notoriously unreliable. And now it was
simply impossible to rake up the whole subject again, just when it was
all settled, and go through another long explanation with mamma. Of
course she didn't believe all this about Dalhousie's being ruined and
disgraced forever: that was just the man's way of working on her
feelings and trying to frighten her. She knew very well that the whole
thing would blow over in a few days, if just quietly left to itself.

And what use, whispered the returning thoughts, would the unknown make
of the "little statement" he begged so for? What would mamma say, for
instance, to a black-typed piece-in-the-paper in the "Post" to-morrow?
And what of Mr. Canning--nudged the wise thoughts--the happiness symbol
on the piazza, whose princely feet were so plainly twitching to thunder
behind?...

No; clearly the only sensible thing to do was to end all the talk and
quibbling at once, definitely. Carlisle took a step forward over the dim
chequered floor, resolute as her mother.

"I can't add anything to what I've already said. I cannot let you detain
me any longer."

Her advance had brought her fully into what light there was, falling
mistily through lattice and door. And at the look in her eyes, young Dr.
Vivian's hands fell dead without a struggle at his sides. His tall
figure seemed mysteriously to shrink and collapse inside his clothes. He
said, oddly, nothing whatever. Yet an hour's oration could not have
conveyed more convincingly his sense of irreparable disaster.

The instantaneous cessation of his verbal flow curiously piqued the
girl's attention. Face to face as they stood, she was struck quite
sharply with an elusive something that seemed to cling to this man's
look, a subtle enveloping wistfulness which she had vaguely noticed
about him before, which somehow seemed, indeed, only the sum of all that
she had noticed about him before. It may have been this look that
briefly checked her withdrawal. An odd desire to justify herself
somewhat more clearly fluttered and stirred within her. Or--who can
say?--perhaps this was no more than the beautiful woman's undying desire
to appear at advantage before every man, however far beneath her.

"You--you must not think me unfeeling," she said in a sweet hurried
voice. "I want to be as considerate as possible. I am terribly sorry for
him--terribly--and you must tell him so, from me. But I--I am in a
peculiar position. I am not free to--"

"I see. I understand now."

His strange tone fell upon her ears as a challenge, quiet though it was;
and it was a challenge which Carlisle, though instantly regretting her
generosity (when she might just have walked away), saw no entirely
dignified way of avoiding.

"You see what?" she said, faltering a little. "I don't know what you
mean."

The man replied slowly, almost as if he were thinking of something else,
and the thought rather hurt him:

"I see your only thought is to gain some point for yourself--you alone
know what--no matter what pain your silence may give to others.... Ah,
that's sad...."

Angry and a little frightened, too, Carlisle Heth drew her gossamer
shawl more closely about her shoulders, with a movement that also wore
the air of plucking together her somewhat wavering hauteur.

"You are at liberty to think and say what you please," she said,
distantly, and with a slight inclination of her head started past him.

But he did not seem to hear the dismissal order; stood unmoving,
blocking her progress; and looking up with now tremulous indignation,
Carlisle ran once more full on the battery of his speaking eyes....

Perhaps it was not difficult to guess what John the Baptist would have
said, in such a case as this: but then the young man V.V. was not
thinking of John the Baptist now. He was not feeling grim at all at this
moment; not fierce at all. So in his look there was to be seen nothing
of the whiplash, not one thing reminiscent of the abhorring fanatic on
the outskirts of the city. His eyes were filled, indeed, with a sudden
compassion; a compassion overflowing, unmistakable, and poignant. And
from that look the richly dressed girl with the seraph's face instantly
averted her gaze.

She heard a voice: the lame stranger speaking as if to himself.

"All that beauty without, and nothing at all within.... So lovely to the
eye, and empty where the heart should be.... God pity you, poor little
thing...."

And then Carlisle passed him quickly and went out of the summer-house
upon the lawn. The escape, this time, presented no difficulties. For the
last syllable had hardly died on the young man's lip before
self-consciousness appeared to return upon him, staggering him, it may
be, at the words of his mouth. He turned, abruptly, and fled in the
other direction.

So the audience in the moonlit summer-house concluded precipitately,
with the simultaneous departure of both parties from opposite exits.
Carlisle Heth went hurrying across the lawn. Within her, there was a
tumult; but her will was not feeble, and her sense of decorum and the
eternally fitting hardly less tenacious. Strongly she ruled her spirit
for the revivifying remeeting that awaited her just ahead....

But it was not Mr. Canning's voice which greeted her as she stepped up
on the hotel piazza. It was the low, angry challenge of her
soldier-mother, nipped in the act of charging upon the summer-house.

"_Carlisle_!... In heaven's name, what have you been doing?"

Facing mamma on the deserted piazza-end, Carlisle explained in a hurried
sentence that Mr. Dalhousie had sent a pleading friend to her, whom she
had felt obliged to see....

"Are you _mad_ to say such a thing? Was it for wild antics of this sort
that I threw everything to the winds to bring you down here?"

"Oh, mamma--please!" said Carlisle, her breath coming fast. "I've had
about enough.... I--I couldn't run the risk of his starting heaven knows
what scandalous story. Where is Mr. Canning?"

Mamma looked as if she wanted to shake her.

"You may well ask," she said, savagely, and turned away.

"I do ask," said Carlisle, with returning spirit. "Where is he?"

Mrs. Heth wheeled on her.

"Did you suppose he would hang about kicking his heels for hours while
you hobnobbed with low men in dark summer-houses? He just excused
himself on the ground of a cold caught on the piazza, and has retired
for the night. You shall do the same. Come with me."

Carlisle went with her.

       *       *       *       *       *

And next morning, Sunday, the very first news that greeted the two
ladies, upon their appearance for a late breakfast, was that Mr. Canning
and Mr. Kerr had left the Beach for town by the nine-twenty-two train.




     VI

     Of Carlisle's Bewilderment over all the Horrid Talk; of how
     it wasn't her fault that Gossip was so Unreliable; of the
     Greatest Game in the World; also, of Mr. Heth, who didn't
     look like a Shameless Homicide.


The explosion that followed the boat occurrence at the Beach came as a
complete surprise to the heroine of the small affair. When she had
terminated the interview in the summer-house, she understood that she
was giving the signal for talk to cease and all trouble to proceed to
blow over. The want of cooöeration on the part of talk and trouble was
gross, to say the least of it. The tide of excited questions and comment
that poured in on and around Carlisle, upon her return to town on
Monday, resembled the breaking of flood-gates. Her small and entirely
private misadventure had become her world's sensation. And within a day
there came a climax which secretly astonished and frightened her not a
little. The primal blood-tie itself was severed for offended
righteousness' sake. The proud old widower, Colonel Dalhousie, already
sorely tried by his son's wildnesses, could not stomach his flagrant
cowardice. It was shouted about the town that he had cut Jack off with a
curse, and turned him finally out of his house.

Unplagued by the curses of imagination, Carlisle had, indeed,
anticipated nothing in the least like this. She was dazed by the
undreamed hubbub. For the first few days after her home-coming, she
remained very closely in the house, to avoid all the worrying and horrid
talk; and one day, the day Mattie Allen ran in with popping eyes to tell
her about Jack Dalhousie, she pretended to be sick and stayed in bed,
and really did feel extremely badly.

In these days of uneasiness, Carlisle wished far more than ever that
the whole thing had been started differently; and she wondered often,
and somewhat fearfully, if Dalhousie's friend, Mr. Vivian, would try to
force himself on her again. That did not happen; nothing happened; and
the more and more calmly she came to think about it all, the more
clearly the girl saw that she personally was not to blame for the
misunderstanding. It was plainly seen as one of those unfortunate
occurrences which, while regretted by all, herself as much as anybody,
you simply could not do a single thing about. And if it had seemed
impossible to rake it all up again even that night, how much more
unrakable was it now, when days had passed, and everybody had accepted
everything, for better or worse, as it was? Fate and gossip had proved
too strong. Deplorable, indeed; but it was to be, that was all.

It was very plain, of course, that all the initial excitement and pother
could not possibly last. Withhold food from gossip, and it starves and
dies. Carlisle simply stayed quiet and held her tongue; and as the days
passed without more developments of any sort, she found her
philosophical attitude thoroughly justified by events. Town-talk, that
bugbear of the delicate-minded, shot off first to the Hoover divorce,
and then to the somewhat public disagreement between the Governor of the
State and Congressman Hardwicke, at the Chamber of Commerce luncheon for
the visiting President; finally to a number of things. By the time six
weeks had passed, the Beach had dropped completely from the minds of a
fickle public. Dalhousie, it seemed, had considerately vanished. Talk
ceased. The boat trouble blew over, much as the boat had done....

About this time, namely, about the middle of the seventh week, one of
Willie Kerr's cryptic messages lay beside Mrs. Heth's breakfast plate on
a morning. It ran:

     I think he will come at 5.30 o'clock
     Wednesday. Better arrive first?

     W.K.

Willie's cipher (he liked to write as if he lived in Russia, with the
postal spies after him like hawks) was no mystery to Mrs. Heth, she
being, in a certain measure, its inventor. Having taken the telegraphic
brevity upstairs to show to Carlisle, she disappeared into the telephone
booth, to rearrange her afternoon. If all subscribers to the telephonic
system were as tireless users as she, probably fewer people would have
made large fortunes by the timely purchase of forty dollars worth
of stock.

This was a Wednesday morning in mid-December. Carlisle, recuperating
from a gay debutante rout on the evening preceding, remained in bed. By
this time the "season" was well under way: all signs promised an
exceptionally gay winter, and Carlisle was, as ever, in constant demand.
She had meant to spend the morning in bed anyway, and then besides her
mother had pointed out the necessity of being fresh for the
afternoon....

From the moment of their abrupt parting at the Beach, Carlisle had not
set eyes upon Mr. Canning, though he was known to have lingered as a
house-guest all through the following week. The circumstance had
surprised her considerably at the time, until she had thought out some
satisfactory explanations for it. To-day her maidenly thoughts assumed a
wholly prospective character, very agreeable and cheery. Mr. Canning,
having arrived yesterday from some southerly resort of his choice, was
again staying at the Payne fort on the Three Winds Road, his reported
design being to ride a few times with the Cold Run hounds, otherwise
barricading himself as unsocially as before. Still, he expected to
remain for a week at least, which was very nice; and under these
circumstances it was as natural as possible that his connoisseurship
should be asked to pass judgment on the new little bachelor apartment in
Bellingham Court, where his friend Kerr was just comfortably
installed.... Where, also, no impossible stranger could intrude himself
upon the company of his betters, with revivalist vocabulary and
killjoy face.

The clock stood at eleven. The drawn shades imparted a restful dimness
to the bedroom, but the reliable maid Flora had been in to shut the
windows and start a merry fire in the grate. This room had been done
over last year in gray and old rose, with the "suit" in Circassian
walnut, and wainscoted walls which harmonized admirably. It was a
charming cloister, all most captivating to the eye, with the possible
exception of the dressing-table, which rather bristled with implements
and looked just a thought too businesslike.

Carlisle loafed and invited her soul. Her glorious ash-gold hair, whose
habit of crinkling from the roots was so exasperating to contemporaries
of her own sex, swept loose over the pillows, charmingly framing
her face....

While the Beach episode itself was now long since closed and done with,
it was not unnatural that the memory of Dalhousie's friend, the Mr.
Vivian, should have remained in Carlisle's mind, for Mr. Vivian had
addressed such words to her as had never before sounded upon her ears.
These words had clung by their sheer astounding novelty. To have God
petitioned to pity you by a shabby nobody in a pictorial tie: here was
an experience that invited some elucidation. For a time the girl's
thoughts had attacked the nobody's sincerity: he was merely failure
pretending to despise success. But, not ungifted at self-suasion though
she was, she had not seemed to find solid footing here; and she had
early been driven irresistibly to quite a different conclusion.
Evidently this man Mr. Vivian was a queer kind of street-preacher type,
victim of a pious mania which rendered him dangerously unsound in the
head. This, obviously, was the truth of the matter. On no other theory
could his pitying her be satisfactorily explained.

It was true that, with the dying down of her own sense of vague ambient
perils, she herself had come once more to feel dreadfully sorry for Jack
Dalhousie, and even to admit in her meditations that she could have
afforded to be more magnanimous in defending him from gossip. But then
that did not at all change the fact that Dalhousie deserved the severest
punishment for all the trouble and worry he had brought her. It clearly
was not right, was not moral, to make things too easy for wrongdoers.
She had gradually come to see herself as a custodian of the moral law in
this quarter, a tribunal of justice which, while upholding the
salubriousness of punition, yet strives to keep as large and generous
as it can.

Therefore it followed as the night the day that Mr. Vivian, who could
work himself up to the condition of feeling sorry for her as she
discharged her painful duties (while admiring her loveliness), was a
sort of camp-meeting madman. He was an advanced kind of religious
fanatic, nearly in the foaming stages, something like a whirling
dervish. His emotional gibberings were beneath the notice of sane,
wholesome people.

Still, in lengthening retrospect, Carlisle had become quite dissatisfied
with the manner in which she had permitted the summer-house interview to
terminate. It was somewhat galling to recall the tameness with which she
had allowed a Shouting Methodist such a last word as that, entirely
unreproved. Because unreproved, the staggering word had stuck fast; in
spite of all efforts, it remained as a considerable irritation in the
background of her mind. Many times she had resolved that, if she ever
saw the man again (which seemed unlikely, as nobody appeared ever to
have heard of him), she would make a point of saying something pretty
sharp and definite to him, showing him how little she cared for the
opinions of such as he. And then, at other times, she decided that it
might be best simply to ignore the man altogether, turning her back with
dignity, after perhaps one look such as would completely show him up.
Let sleeping dogs lie, as they say....

She rose, in excellent spirits, shortly after noon, and began an
unhurried toilet. The toilet was so unhurried, indeed, that she had
hardly finished and descended to the family sitting-room on the second
floor when her father's latch-key was heard clicking in the front door.
This sound was the unofficial luncheon-gong. The House of Heth proceeded
to the dining-room, where Mr. Heth kissed his daughter's cheek in
jocund greeting.

"Good-_afternoon_, Cally! And you just up--well, well! Times have
changed--

     "'Early to bed, early to rise--
     That makes us all healthy,
     Wise and wealthy--'

"That was my father's rule, and Lord, he kept us to it...."

Mrs. Heth, already seated, bit her lip slightly, which seemed to confer
prominence upon her little mustache. Her consort's habit of quoting, and
especially of misquoting, was trying to her, but she now knew it to be
incurable, like her daughter's occasional mannerism. She sat as usual
rather silent, plotting out the next few hours of her busy time, her
remarks being chiefly of a superfluous managerial nature to that
thoroughly competent African, Moses Bruce.

Carlisle, having so lately risen, ate but a _déjeuner_. Mr. Heth, on the
contrary, attacked the viands with relish, restoring waste tissues from
two directors' meetings, a meeting of the Convention Committee of the
Chamber of Commerce, and an hour in his office at the bank. He was a
full-bodied, good-looking, amiable-mannered man, of sound stock and
excellent digestion, and wore white waistcoats the year round, and fine
blond mustaches, also the year round. He certainly did not look to the
casual eye like a shameless homicide, but rather like an English country
gentleman given to dogs. He was fifty-four years old, a hard worker for
all his indolent eye, and his favorite diversion was about twelve holes
of golf on Sunday morning, and his next favorite one table of bridge by
night in the library across the hall.

Greetings over, Mr. Heth said "Catch!" to his wife and daughter,
referring to the ten-dollar goldpieces from the directors, and remarked
that he hadn't been near the Works for two mornings, and that money made
the mare go. A sober look touched his fresh-colored face as he voiced
these observations, but then he was tired and hungry, and nobody noticed
the look anyway. This fashion of the 1.30 luncheon had been one of the
earliest of their Yankee innovations which had caused the rising Heths
to be viewed with alleged alarm by ante-bellum critics, dear old
poorhouse Tories who pretended that they wanted only to live as their
grandsires had lived. The Heths, unterrified, and secure from the
afternoon torpor inflicted on up-to-date in'ards by slave-time régime,
dispatched the exotic meal with the cheerfulness of Property.

"Effete, Cally,--that's what this age is," said Mr. Heth, pushing back
his chair, and producing his gold toothpick. "Everybody looking for
somebody else's neck to hang on to. And makin' a lot of grafters out of
our poor class. Look at this Labor Commissioner and his new-fangled
nonsense. Nagging me to spend Lord knows how many thousands, making the
plant pretty and attractive for the hands. Voted for the fellow, too."

"I never heard of such a thing. What sort of things does he want you to
do, papa?"

"Turkish baths and manicures and chicken sandwiches, I guess. I don't
listen to his rot. Law's good enough for me. Point I make is that's the
spirit of the poor nowadays. I pay 'em wages that would have been
thought enormous a hundred years ago, but are they satisfied? Not on
your life!..."

Winter sunshine, filtering in through cream-colored curtains, touched
upon those refinements with which the prosperous civilize and decorate
the brutal need: upon silver, growing flowers, glittering glass,
agreeable open spaces, and fine old mahogany. It was an exceptionally
pleasant room. The Heths might be "improbable people," as Mrs. Berkeley
Page was known to have said on a certain occasion and gone unrebuked,
but their material taste was clearly above reproach. And all this was to
their credit, proving efficiency in the supreme art, that of living. For
the Heths, of course, were not rich at all as the word means nowadays:
they were far indeed from being the richest people in that town. Their
merit it was that they spent all they had, and sometimes a little more;
and few persons lived who could surpass Mrs. Heth in getting a dollar's
worth of results for each dollar expended....

Carlisle and her father chatted pleasantly about the remarkable spirit
of the poor, and the world's maudlin sentiment towards it and them. The
lovely maid professed herself completely puzzled by these problems.

"We're always giving them money," she pointed out, spooning a light
dessert in a tall glass, "or getting up bazaars for them, or sending
them clothes that have lots more wear in them. And what do they do in
return, besides grumble and riot and strike and always ask for more? And
they stay poor just the same. What is going to happen, papa?"

Mr. Heth lit a cigar--not one of the famous Heth Plantation Cheroots.
He requested Cally not to ask _him_.

"Never be satisfied," said he, "till they strip us of everything we've
worked our lives away earning. They'll ride in our motor-cars and we'll
sit in their workhouse. That'll be nice, won't it? How'll plain little
girls like that, eh?"

She was the apple of papa's eye; and she rather enjoyed hearing him talk
of his manifold business activities, which was a thing he was not too
often encouraged to do. To-day the master of the Works was annoyed into
speech by recent nagging: not merely from the Commissioner of Labor, but
from the Building Inspector, who had informally stopped him on the
street that morning....

"Don't you think, papa," Carlisle said sweetly, "that it will all end in
something like the French Revolution?"

Mr. Heth thought it extremely likely.

"Well," said he, "I shan't be bothered by their college folderol.
O'Neill's easy enough managed. All I need to do is invite him and Missus
O. to dinner."

"Who's O'Neill?" demanded Mrs. Heth, gliding in.

For the second time during the meal, she had been absent from the table,
on a telephone call. She always answered these summonses personally,
regardless of when they came, appearing to fear that otherwise she might
miss something.

"And who," she added, "is going to invite him to dinner?"

Mr. Heth explained, and said that nobody was. He'd only mentioned the
possibility if the fellow ever got troublesome, which was most unlikely.
His wife was a climber--social bug, you know. "Pays to know your man,
eh, Cally?..."

"I should say! And O'Neill's wife manages him?"

"Don't they always?" said he, pinching her little pink ear. And
thereupon he bethought himself of a thoroughly characteristic quotation,
which he rendered right jovially:

     "'Pins and needles, pins and needles,
     When a man marries, his trouble begins,'

"As the fellow says," concluded Mr. Heth; and so departed for The
Fourth National Bank. Mrs. Heth, reminding her daughter about being
fresh for the afternoon, glided to her writing-desk in the library.
Carlisle confronted three hours of leisure before the prospective Great
Remeeting. She went to the telephone, and called up her second-best
girl-friend, Evelyn McVey. It developed that she had nothing special to
say to Evey, or Evey to her. However, they talked vivaciously for twenty
minutes, while operators reported both lines "busy" and distant people
were annoyed and skeptical.

That done, Carlisle went to the upstairs sitting-room, and sat by the
fire reading a Christmas magazine, which had come out on Guy Fawkes day,
the 5th of November. Presently she slipped off her pumps the better to
enjoy the heat: and assuredly there is nothing surprising in that. It is
moral certainty that Queens and Empresses (if we knew all) dearly love
to sit in their stocking-feet at times, and frequently do so when
certain that the princesses-in-waiting and lady companions of the bath
are not looking. The telephone interrupted Carlisle twice, but she
toasted her arched and silken little insteps well, read three stories,
and thought that one of them was quite sweet. Where she got her hands
and feet she often wondered. They were so clearly neither Heth nor
Thompson. By this time her unwearied mother had gone out to "get in"
three or four calls; also an important Charities engagement at Mrs.
Byrd's, where Carlisle was to call for her in the car at five o'clock
_sharp_, for their visit to the Bellingham. Carlisle now became
conscious of a void, and ate five chocolates from a large adjacent box
of them, the gift of J. Forsythe Avery. Then she yawned delicately, and
picked up "Sonnets from the Portuguese" (by Mrs. Browning); for she, it
must be remembered, had a well-rounded ideal, and believed that it was
your duty to cultivate your mind. Life isn't all parties and beaux, as
she sometimes remarked to Mattie Allen....

There came a knock upon the door, breaking the thread of culture. The
seneschal Moses entered, announcing callers, ladies, in the
drawing-room. Carlisle sighed; recalled herself to actuality. After
glancing at the cards, she conceded the injudiciousness of saying that
she was out, and told Moses to announce that she would be down in a
moment. She kept the callers waiting twenty moments, however, while, in
her own room, she made ready for the street. She was donning a hat which
in shape and size was not unlike a man's derby; it was of black velvet,
lined under the brim with old-blue, and edged with a piping of
dark-brown fur. At a certain point in or on it, there stuck up two stiff
straight blue plumes. The hat was simply absurd, wildly laughable and
ridiculous, up to the moment when she got it on; then it was seen that
it had a certain merit after all. It was a calling-costume (as one
believes) that Carlisle assumed for the Bellingham; a blue costume, of a
soft material which had been invented only about a month before, and
which was silk or satin, according as you looked at it, but certainly
did not shine much. The coat, or jacket or wrap, which completed the
suit was arresting in design, to say no more of it. Less original were
the muff and stole of darkest sable; but they were beautiful.

Carlisle, it need hardly be said, went downstairs in her hat. "Oh," the
visiting ladies would say, "but you are going out." "Oh, not for half an
hour yet," she would protest. "I'm _so_ glad you came."

About 4.30, J. Forsythe Avery, who had no office hours, was ushered into
the stately Heth drawing-room. The lady callers withdrew promptly, but
not so promptly as to make it too pointed. It was generally believed at
this time that Miss Heth "had an understanding" with Mr. Avery, though
it was quite well known that she, personally, much preferred young
Robert Tellford. The figure, however, at which a famous life insurance
company commanded Robert's undivided services made him a purely academic
interest. With J. Forsythe the case was totally different: from the
environs of his native Mauch Chunk the Avery forbears had dug principal
and interest in enormous quantities.

J. Forsythe remained for twenty minutes, the period named when he had
telephoned. Having failed to secure any extension of time, he went away,
and Carlisle skipped upstairs to look in the mirror, and put on the
concluding touches indicated above. Descending and emerging into the
winter sunset, she sent the waiting car on ahead to the Byrds', and set
out to do the five blocks afoot. Exercise makes pink cheeks.

It was a splendid afternoon, sharp and clear as a silver bell. Carlisle
walked well, especially when one considers the sort of shoes she wore:
she had the good free stride of one who walks for the joy of it and not
because that is the only conceivable way to get somewhere. Nevertheless,
just as she reached the Byrd doorstep, she was overhauled by the
Cooneys, her poor but long-stepping relatives. There were only two of
them this time, Henrietta and Charles, better known, from one end of the
town to the other, as Hen and Chas.

The Cooneys, who were young people of about her own age, greeted
Carlisle with their customary simple gaiety. Both exclaimed over her
striking attire, Charles adding to his sister:

"Let Uncle Dudley stand next to Cally there, Hen--I'm better-looking
than you, anyway."

"I'd like to see a vote on that first. Recognize _mine_, Cally?" cried
Hen--"the brown you gave me last fall? First appearance since I steamed
and turned it. It'll stand a dye next year, too. But we haven't seen you
for a long time, my dear. Did you know Aunt Rose Hopwood's staying
with us now?"

"Oh, is she? I hadn't heard, Hen. How is she?"

"She's bad off," said Chas, cheerfully. "Deaf, lame, and cruel poverty's
hit her right at her old home address. I guess she'll come live with us
later on. Come walk out to King's Bridge for an appetite."

Carlisle, with an impatient foot on the Byrds' bottom step, glanced from
Chas to Hen, smiling a little. Her cousins were well-meaning young
people, and she liked them in a way, but she often found their breezy
assurance somewhat amusing.

"Thank you, Chas," said she, "but I've an engagement with mamma. I'm to
pick her up here now. I hope Aunt Molly's well?"

"Fine," said Hen. "Come and see us, Cally. Why don't you come to supper
to-morrow night?"

The lovely cousin obviously hesitated.

"Aw, Cally doesn't want to come yell in Aunt Rose Hopwood's trumpet,
Hen--"

"Aunt Rose Hopwood's going home to-morrow."

"First I've heard of it. Frankly I doubt your word."

For that Hen idly smote Chas's shins with her silver-handled umbrella
(Carlisle's gift three Christmases before), at which Chas cried _ouch_
in such a manner as to attract the attention of bystanders. Henrietta
liked this umbrella very much and commonly carried it, like a cane,
through all droughts.

"But," said she, reconsidering, "I think Hortense'll be off to-morrow,
that's so. Well, come the first soon night you feel like it--"

Carlisle had been doing some considering also, her conscience pricking
her on account of the cousinly duty, long overdue.

"I've an engagement to-morrow--so sorry," she said, rather hastily. "But
how about one night early next week, say--Thursday, if that
would suit--?"

Chas and Hen agreed that it would do perfectly. Pot-luck at seven. Sorry
she wouldn't walk on with them. Bully day for Shanks's mares. And
so forth....

Carlisle, an eye-catching figure in her calling costume (assuming that
this is what it was) glanced after her poor relations from the Byrds'
vestibule, and was amused by her thought. How exactly like the Cooneys'
lively cheek (and nobody else's) to propose a country walk with them as
a perfectly satisfactory substitute for an hour's _tête-à-tête_ with
Hugo Canning!




     VII

     How the Great Parti, pursued or pursuing to Cousin Willie
     Kerr's apartment, begins thundering again.


Bellingham Court was the very newest of those metropolitan-looking
apartment hotels which the rapid growth and complicating "standards" of
the city was then calling into being. It was on the most fashionable
street, Washington, in one of the most fashionable parts of it. And it
had bell-boys, onyxine vestibules, and hot and cold water in nearly
every room.

It also had a fat black hall-porter in a conductor's uniform, and this
functionary informed Mrs. Heth that Mr. Kerr was momentarily detained at
the bank, but had telephoned orders that any callers he might have were
to be shown right up. The Heth ladies were shown right up.

Willie's new apartment consisted of a sitting-room, a fair-sized
bedroom, and a very small bath. About the sitting-room the ladies
wandered, glancing disinterestedly at the Kerr Penates. Presently Mrs.
Heth opened doors and peeped into what lay beyond.

"It's a good thing he's small," said she. "H'm, that thing looks like a
foot-tub."

Carlisle, looking over her mother's shoulder, laughed. "You couldn't
splash about much.... You shave at that, I suppose."

"I don't. One shaves. There's a better apartment he could have got for
the same price, but manlike he didn't find it out till too late. What's
this--bedroom?... Yes, there's the bed."

They stepped back into the sitting-room, and Carlisle, strolling
aimlessly about, became a little silent and distrait.

It is possibly true, as crusty single-men affirm, that a certain
solacing faculty inheres in beautiful ladies: the faculty, namely, of
explaining all apparently unwelcome situations upon theories quite
flattering to themselves. But Carlisle surely needed no such
make-believe in this moment of rather excited expectancy.

Of course she knew well enough what inferences Evey and Mattie, for
instance (in both of whom there was a certain amount of the cat), would
have drawn from the fact that Mr. Canning, last month, had not seemed to
follow up in anyway their very interesting meeting at the Beach. She
alone knew the real circumstances, however, and it had become quite
clear to her that Mr. Canning's demeanor was only what was to be
expected. He was the proudest of men, and (that awful night at the
Beach) she had expelled him from her presence like a schoolboy.
Naturally he had been annoyed and offended--stung even into the rudeness
of abandoning her in a summer-house to an entire stranger. How could you
possibly wonder (unless feline) that he, great unsocial at best, had
thereafter remained silent inside his fort?...

"How like a man," breathed Mrs. Heth, glancing at her watch, "to pick
out this day of all others to be detained at a bank."

She had sat down in one of the bachelor chairs, to take her weight from
her feet, which hurt her by reason of new shoes half a size too small.
The sitting-room was pleasant enough in a strictly orthodox fashion, and
was illuminated by an electric-lamp on the black centre-table. Mrs.
Heth, who had helped Willie with his furnishings, had considered it the
prettiest electrolier that fourteen dollars would buy in the town during
the week before last. Carlisle had come to a halt before the bookcase.
It was a mission-oak case, with leaded glass doors. For the moment it
might be said to represent rather the aspirations of a bibliophile than
their fulfilment, since it contained but seven books, huddled together
on the next-to-the-top shelf. Carlisle swung open the door, and examined
the Kerr library title by title: "Ben Hur," "The Little Minister,"
"Law's Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life" (from his loving
Grandma--Xmas 1904), "Droll Tales," "Religio Medici" (Grandma
again--Xmas 1907), "The Cynic's Book of Girls"--

Carlisle laughed merrily. "Willie has two copies of 'The Cynic's Book
of Girls.'... I'd never thought of him as a divil with the
women somehow."

"He could never get Helen Tellford to _look_ at him."

"'Religio Medici.' Is it religious or medical? It might be either, by my
Latin."

"One of those faith-healing things, I suppose. Emmanuel Movement. I'd
sit down if I were you.... Ah! There's Willie at last. Mind,
Carlisle,--don't you hear the steps?"

"Well, we're invited to look at his things--aren't--"

Her careless voice died, as both together became aware that these could
not possibly be the steps of a proprietor. The approaching feet halted
decorously without, and instead of the door's bursting open there came
only a manly knock upon it. Carlisle looked at her mother, and found
that her mother was looking at her with quite a tense expression. This
certainly was not the way they had wanted things to happen....

"Possibly it's only a tradesman," murmured Mrs. Heth, with hope; and she
added in a commanding voice: "Come in."

The door opened, with a certain stately dubiousness. Full on the
threshold stood Mr. Hugo Canning, no less: an impressive presence in
loose motor-coat of black fur. Mr. Canning stood agaze; it was to be
seen that he was taken considerably by surprise.

For the smallest known fraction of a second, the tableau held. Then
action began, dashingly.

"Why, Mr. Canning!" cried Mrs. Heth, heartily, rising. "What a very
pleasant surprise! So you're back with us again? Delightful!"

Mr. Canning came forward; he bowed with fine civility over the proffered
hand, voicing great pleasure in this remeeting. And then his eye went
flitting, with a certain interrogativeness, from mother to daughter.

"Such an agreeable coincidence," beamed the good little lady. "Or
perhaps this is not your first visit here, like ours? When did you
return? Carlisle...."

Carlisle, having forgotten more about the Great Game than her mother
would ever know, was far from effusive. Advancing half a step from the
bookcase, and offering the tips of white-gloved fingers, she said,
smiling perfunctorily:

"How nice to see you. And Willie Kerr, our very delinquent host,--do you
bring us news of him?"

"I'm told that he's unluckily detained downtown. But, indeed, it's
charming to find you awaiting him too, Miss Heth."

Mrs. Heth sparkled, and declaimed of Willie's remissness. Canning stood
in the middle of the floor, hat and stick under his arm, looking without
pretences at Carlisle. Under the agreeable indifference of his seemingly
amused eye, she felt her color mounting, which only brightened her
loveliness. Perhaps it was not quite so easy to maintain the reasoning
of beautiful ladies here on the firing-line, as in the maidenly
cloister at home.

"Why are men the unreliable sex, Mr. Canning?" said she, laughing. "Here
Willie begs us for days to visit him at his rooms--I believe he thinks
there's something rather gay and wicked about it, you know, though mamma
picked them out for him!--and assures us on his honor as a banker that
he is in every afternoon by five at the very latest. So we inconvenience
ourselves and come. And now--look!"

"At what, Miss Heth? I trust nothing serious has happened?"

"Ah, but our time is so valuable, you see. We must leave without even
saying how-do-you-do. Don't you think so, mamma?"

"So it seems," said Mrs. Heth, and sank into a chair.

Canning smiled.

"Very pleasant little diggings he has here," he observed casually--"my
first glimpse of them. I happened to be coming in town on business, and
Kerr invited me particularly to drop in to see them, at half after
five sharp."

"Really! How _very_ fortunate we are! But, oh, why didn't you come a
little earlier and charitably help us through the wait? We've had
nothing on earth to do but read and reread 'The Cynic's Book of Girls.'"

"Had I ventured to hope that you were to be here," said he, with a
little bow--and was there the slightest, most daring stress upon the
pronouns?--"you may be sure I should have arrived long ago."

Carlisle, dauntless, looked full at him and laughed audaciously.

"I recall you now as a maker of the very prettiest speeches. And the
worst of it is--_I_ like them!... Mamma," she added, with fine, gay
courage, "it is sad to go just as the guests arrive. Yet don't you
think, really--"

"I'm afraid we must, my dear. Willie's evidently--"

But the need for tactics was fortunately at an end. If Carlisle had
drawn it rather fine, it was yet not too fine. The door flew open, and
in bounded Willie. Destiny climbed to the wheel once more.

Willie, though heated with hurry and worry, handled the situation
loyally and well, expressing just the right amount of surprise at the
coincidental assemblage, in just the right places. Of his detention at
the bank (where, as we may infer from his long incumbency, he discharged
a tellership to the complete satisfaction of the depositing public), he
spoke in bitter detail.

"If you'll excuse the French, ma'am," he summed up, "a man might's well
be in hell as ten cents out."

"Why, I do think, Willie," said Mrs. Heth, "that rather than take all
that trouble, I should simply have paid the ten cents from my own pocket
and said no more about it."

But even Willie, perfect host though he was, did not see his way clear
at the moment to explaining the banking system to a lady.

"You might call it sporting pride, ma'am," he said, patiently, and
proposed a little tour of the rooms.

The tour, in the nature of the case, was a little one, almost a fireside
tour, and soon over. Willie simply did not have the material to spin it
out indefinitely. Then refreshments were hospitably insisted on:
tea--muffins--something of that sort, you know--and Willie cried down
his order through the telephone, which had already been duly
admired--one in every room, etc. Next from a hidden cubby he produced
siphon-water, glasses, and a black bottle of Scotch. Needed it, said
he--digging two hours for ten cents out.

"Like the quarters, hey, Canning? Gad, may move again. Man across the
hall--bigger rooms--wants to sublet. Like you to look at 'em sometime,
Cousin Isabel. Say, Cousin Isabel, by the bye," he added, expertly
putting ice into three glasses, "ran down that chap V. Vivian for you,
just now. Fact. Old Sleuth Kerr--catches 'em alive. He's Armistead
Beirne's nephew--just turned up here--what d'you think of that?"

"Mr. Beirne's _nephew_!" echoed Carlisle Heth, without the slightest
strategy.

"Vivian? Who on _earth_, Willie?" demanded Mrs. Heth, puzzled; and
looked, not at Willie, but at Carlisle.

"Don't you remember?--chap that wrote that fierce slush attackin' the
Works, month or so ago? That's the bird.--Got rye right here, if you
prefer it, Canning.--Walked a block with him and old Beirne just now.
Remember Amy Beirne--eloped with some inventor fellow--what's his
name--oh, sure, Vivian, haha! Lived in Alabama. Here's regards."

Mrs. Heth now recalled the name, and also having asked Willie, long
since, to identify it. However, she thought the topic just a little
inopportune at the moment.

"Ah, yes. Mr. Beirne's nephew--well! I hope you made this _very_ mild,
indeed, Willie? You know I rarely consent to.... He might be better
employed, one would think, than vilifying the Works, but there's no
accounting for tastes, as I always say."

"Just water with a dash, ma'am. Oh, he's one of these slumming chaps,
seems--kind of a Socialist, y' know--"

"The Works?" queried Mr. Canning. "Ah, yes! Mr. Heth's--of course! Is a
cigarette permitted?..."

Carlisle, who had been gazing into the fire and acquiring information,
roused. "Oh, here's your tea, Willie!" said she. "How very good
it looks!"

Unlike mamma, she did not in the least mind Mr. Canning's hearing
mention of the Works, even under attack. Shame at trade was not in her:
she was confidently proud of the great mute author of her brilliant
being. And it was by this pride, dating back many years and untouched by
any late personal impression, that no "attack" could gain standing in
her mind. At seven, she had one day asked her father, "Papa, what _are_
the Works?"--and papa had smiled and answered, "It's the place where all
our money comes from." To this day, her mind's eye called up a great
white marble palace, something like the New York Public Library, only
bigger, from the front of which, through an enormous cornucopia, poured
a ceaseless flood of golden dollars....

"I've no patience with Socialism," said Mrs. Heth, rising. "Where do you
want your things put, Willie? Divide all our property up equally with
the lazy and drunken classes, to-day, and by to-morrow the hard-working,
well-to-do people would have won every bit of it back again. I'm
surprised everybody can't see that, aren't you, Mr. Canning?"

"I'm astonished at their blindness," said Canning, gazing at the floor.
"Vivian is clearly off his chump at all points."

"That's right--screw loose," said Willie, genially. "Set 'em here, boy.
From the feller's literary style, I'd expected a regular riproarin'
fire-eater. Gad, no! Face like a child's, kinder cute-lookin'! Fact.
Polite as peaches. You pour, Carlisle, will you?"

The folding-table was set. The tea-things were tenderly arranged upon it
by the dusky waiter. The little company moved and shifted. Host Kerr
surveyed the pleasant scene with no little secret pride of
proprietorship. His room--his tea the ripping-looking girl was serving
on his patent table--his hireling just backing out of the door....
However, his also was the manifest duty in the premises; and, bestirring
himself, he fetched tea and cakes for Mrs. Heth and invited her to sit
with him beside the mission-oak bookcase.

Canning had dropped into a chair near the fireplace, one yard from the
tea-table. He wore without concealment the air of waiting to be
entertained. Carlisle poured, and thought that in ten minutes, or at
most fifteen, this would be all over: if the present _tête-à-tête_ was
to lead to another, and so on through a gorgeous climacteric sequence,
it was now, or it was never. Here was an exciting thought, with
stage-fright possibilities to some; but Carlisle, confident through her
many testimonials, merely smiled prettily and asked Mr. Canning if he
would not take one or more of the cunning little pink cakes. It
appeared that Mr. Canning would; pink, he said, was his color.

"I believe we parted rather suddenly," said Carlisle, continuing to
smile a little to herself, "the last time I had this pleasure. Do you
remember?"

He desired to know if she could possibly conceive his memory to be so
short.

"I was immensely mortified," said she, "to learn that I had given you a
cold--it was a cold, wasn't it?--or whooping-cough?--by keeping you so
long in the night air that evening. I've worried so about it all these
weeks. _Am_ I too late to inquire?"

"I kick myself to have gone away leaving you anxious," said Canning,
with entire gravity. "The attack, as it chanced, was transitory. There
was no coughing--whooping or otherwise. The trouble was purely
localized, in the head, and--"

"In the imagination, might one almost say?"

"In the head. You must have heard somewhere of cold in the head? A
well-known though unfashionable complaint, throughout the north. I, on
the other hand, was much troubled about you, whom I was compelled, by
your command, to leave to the mercies of the nocturnal caller. However,
Kerr assured me, before I was obliged to go away, that you had come
through alive and uninjured."

"Ah, but did I?"... She added, after a brief pause: "Should you call a
biting lecture on one's shortcomings from a strange man no injury?"

"But surely, speaking to that topic alone, my supplanter could not have
spun it out for two hours, while I, luckless one, tramped alone on
the piazza."

"Two hours?... As I say," Carlisle laughed at him, nibbling a little
pink cake, "I like your pretty speeches."

The fire crackled merrily. The masculine paraphernalia stood,
convenient. Canning stretched out an indolent but man's sized hand and
refilled his glass. From across the room Kerr's voice sounded, conveying
enthusiasm founded on the solid rock of patience:

"And this little poem about roses and how cold your nose is--I must
really show you that, ma'am. Spicy, you know! And the witty picture!"

"I'll compromise on an hour," said Canning. "And what hideous foibles
did the visitor charge you with to banish me that long?"

"With being quite heartless."

"Oh."

"With having nothing inside to be kind with. For these reasons he felt
quite sorry for me."

"Ah! Is it possible that you could remember _my_ suggesting, just a
thought before him--"

"I do remember. But, you see, this man is quite crazy. I suspected it
then, but I know it now, for you said so not five minutes ago."

Canning looked at her.

"Your words," said Carlisle, "were that he was off his chump at all
points. I hope mamma isn't listening, for she doesn't like me to use
slang, and will not believe me when I say the men teach it to me."

"Oh!... Was _that_ Vivian!"

Carlisle nodded. "It makes it all quite interesting, doesn't it? To be
felt sorry for by a man who writes really wicked attacks on one's
father's perfectly lovely business. Only I knew all along he wasn't
really quite right.... I hope you've had a very happy trip?"

"Thank you. I don't believe I have, particularly."

"Oh, I'm sorry!... Have you suffered at all from the blues, since you
got well of the cold and escaped at midnight from your little fort?"

Canning continued to look at her.

"I've felt lonely," said he, "when the moon shines bright."

"You?"

A knock fell upon the door, making all look up; and Kerr bustling
forward, first opened the door, and then stepped out into the hall. He
returned in a moment, his round face puckered dubiously.

"It's Johnson," he explained--"chap across the hall, with the better
apartment. Wanted to show it to me now. He's living down the river,
and's going off in half an hour. H'm. Well, guess I better let it go
till the next time he's in."

"Don't mind us, old chap," said Canning, without hesitation.

"If you wanted mamma to look at it with you, Willie? Perhaps--"

Mrs. Heth was already on her feet.

"Nonsense, Willie! Of course get the man while he's here--and _I'm_ here
too! Across the hall?--it won't take us five minutes--"

"All right'm--thank you," agreed Willie, with evident pleasure. He
added, smiling roguishly: "You two be trusted five minutes without a
chaperon?"

Carlisle laughed dazzlingly.

"Five years, Willie. Mr. Canning is absolutely safe."

Mrs. Heth, saying archly that they would not absent themselves quite so
long as that, glided out. Willie followed, engrossed in Johnson. The
door was left half open. Johnson was presented. Their voices died away
across and down the hall....

A momentary silence fell upon Mr. Canning and Carlisle, thus deserted in
the Kerr sitting-room. It appeared to embarrass neither. Having risen,
Canning stood at the mantel, sipping his Scotch and looking down at her.
Carlisle went on cutting bread and butter, or something of that sort.
She felt agreeably excited. In the manner of the shining passer-by she
had observed just that progressiveness noted on the occasion of their
two other meetings: faintly ironic boredom yielding slowly to passive
interest, passive interest warming steadily....

She had taken off her coat, at Kerr's solicitation; she sat with lowered
lashes, the glow of the fire upon her cheek. To what measure she engaged
and intrigued the eye, Mr. Canning had had seven weeks to forget. No
dull wit, we may suppose, in appreciation of feminine masterpieces, he
seemed to see it suddenly with some force now, standing and sipping the
pleasurable Scotch. And he began to speak in a voice not previously
heard in Kerr's apartment.

"Lonely, Miss Heth, when the moon shines bright--blue, too, now that I
think of it.--You are good enough to ask if I've had a happy trip.
Happy!... Weeks of moping from dull place to duller, months ditto
staring one in the face, and for this present--the rural villa of one's
estimable cousins, with the sun and the stars for company. Really does
it seem such a trifle to you to be plucked up by the ears from one's
environment, transplanted bodily league on league, and set down on an
empty road four miles from nowhere?"

"Nowhere? You are cruel, Mr. Canning. Four miles travelled in the right
direction might bring you to a good deal. Only mountains never really
come to Mahomets, not in life."

"Ah, but I'm no Mahomet in these months, alas! to scale mountains or not
as the whim strikes me. If I were!... But no, no!--my sentence, you see,
is expressly to avoid all mountain-climbing with whatever else is
pleasant--to play the invalid, to rest, breathe deep, sleep and coddle.
And for excitement--it is my revered mother's own suggestion--why, write
a book if I like--my impressions of the New South, or any other reason
why! Write a book! What have I to do with writing, think I, of a long
morning or a longer night! I'm no scrivening professor, but blood and
flesh.... You couldn't imagine the number of times I've been tempted to
chuck all the mild climate tomfoolery, and cut away for lights
and home!"

Carlisle gazed up at him, her chin upon her ungloved hand. Was there
pose in these depictions of Mr. Hugo Canning as a morose recluse? She
thought not: his light bitterness rang true enough, the note of a man
really half-desperate with ennui. And she read his remarks as a subtle
sign of his confidence, an acknowledgment of acquaintance between them,
a bond....

"But you can't do it, I suppose?--if your health demands that you put up
with us a little while longer?"

"I seem rude?--of course. But my meaning is quite the contrary.... May
you, Miss Heth, never know the sorrows of the transplanted and
the idle--"

He broke off, staring with apparent absentness.

Much interested, Carlisle said, toying with her teaspoon:

"I didn't think you rude at all. It seems to me perfectly natural that
you should be both bored and blue--especially if you don't feel quite
well.... But surely a little mild pleasuring during rest hours isn't
forbidden as injurious to throats?"

"A little?"

"Of course you think we haven't much to offer, but really there is
_some_ amusement to be had here. Really! Perhaps a little gambolling now
and then--"

"My curse," said Canning, turning his dark eyes down upon her, "is that
I can't learn when to stop. Once I begin, I am never satisfied till I've
gambolled all over the place."

Carlisle's eyes fell before his gaze. "This," said she, drawing on a
glove, "is a small place."

"You appear to invite me to gambol?"

"I? Oh, no! These are matters that men decide for themselves."

"Possibly the fact is that you invite without desiring to do so."

"Then what," said she, suddenly laughing up at him, "should I have to
think of your rudeness in declining my invitation all these days?"

She rose on that, looking about for coat and furs.

"But you must not think of going," said Canning, instantly.

The thundering of his feet grew very audible now.

"The instant mamma comes back. She is staying a long time, isn't she? Do
you realize that we've been here hours and hours, and that it looks like
midnight outdoors?"

"Still, it would be a satisfaction to finish one conversation with you.
We seem to remain all beginnings."

"What end is there to such conversations as this, Mr. Canning?"

"Conversations end in many ways, Miss Heth. I have known them to end
like journeys."

The man left the fire, advanced to her side, took the modish wrap from
her hands. But he did not at once offer to hold it for her. He stood two
feet away from her, and a gleam came into his eyes, faint and a
little cold.

"But I wonder," said he, musingly, "if what two men told you in a
summer-house one night isn't quite true, after all."

"That I have no heart, you mean?"

"And don't know the meaning of being kind. Easter lilies are pretty on a
tomb, but they were never my favorite flowers."

"No," she said, "it is not true. My heart is here"--she touched the
place--"it is large--and I am, oh, very, very kind."

"You are rather adorable, you know," said his abrupt voice. "Here is
your coat."

She was warm to the eye, animating, of an exquisite figure. Her nearness
released a faint fragrance. She slipped her left arm into the sleeve he
offered, and looking up at him, half over her shoulder, said with a
mocking little laugh:

"And _you_ know that kind-hearted girls are always awfully credulous....
I sweep you off your feet. My eyes _intoxicate_ you, drive you _mad!_ Go
on. I've told you that I like your pretty speeches."

"I do not always stop with speeches--you wild, sweet thing...."

So Mr. Canning; and with that speech he did in fact stop most abruptly,
and at once turned a step away. In the sharp brief silence, Carlisle put
on her other sleeve for herself.

From the hall, almost at the door, it seemed, had sounded the brisk
approaching voices of Mrs. Heth and Kerr; presumably also of Johnson.
Destiny, having had its way with their absence, was returning them upon
the dot. In the sitting-room, talk of such matters as Miss Heth's wild
sweetness necessarily came to a sudden conclusion.

The big man lounged with folded arms. His look was slightly annoyed.

"One more beginning, and you have your way again, after all! This
becomes a habit," said he, with his faint ironic note. "Miss Heth, I am
as you say quite dull and safe: the dullest of all creatures, a play
valetudinarian, bored to ill-manners at times, as you have observed, by
large overdoses of my own society. Could you take pity on me? Could you
and Mrs. Heth give me the pleasure of dining with me, and Kerr, at the
Arlington, perhaps,--or wherever else you may prefer,--on the first
evening you can spare for deeds of mercy?"

Carlisle looked at him, buttoning her glove. Her lips smiled; but in
truth she was a little unsteadied by the exciting moment just passed
through, by the buoyant sense of triumph welling up within her. Were not
all men, however exalted or difficult, alike her playthings at
her pleasure?

"Of course I shall first beg," added Mr. Canning, "to be permitted to
pay my respects to you and Mrs. Heth--might I say to-morrow afternoon
at five?"

"We shall be so glad to see you, if you care to come," said Carlisle,
looking away from him. "As to dining, that would be very nice, of
course,--but are you sure your health would--"

"Oh, confound my health!" cried the great hermit. "Promise me now that
you will never speak the word in my presence again."

"I promise.... Only really--if my invitation to gambol should lead you
to--"

"You are as God made you, Miss Heth. It's not your fault that you
invite."

He gave her a look, and, turning, swung wide the door for the chaperon.




     VIII

     Supper with the Cooneys: Poor Relations, but you must be
     Nice to them; of Hen Cooney's friend V.V., as she
     irritatingly calls him; also relating how Cally is asked for
     her Forgiveness, and can't seem to think what to say.


The Heths' poor relations, the Cooneys, lived in a two-story frame house
on Centre Street, four doors from a basement dry-cleaning establishment,
and staring full upon the show-window of an artificial-limb manufactory,
lately opened for the grisly trade.

The interval between the families of Heth and Cooney was as these facts
indicate. If Thornton Heth had married an ambitious woman, and he had,
his sister Molly had displayed less acumen. The Cooney stock, unlike the
Thompson as it was, deplorably resembled a thousand other stocks then
reproducing its kind in this particular city. The War had flattened it
out, cut it half through at the roots, and it had never recovered, as
economists count recovery, and wouldn't, for a generation or two at the
least. Accursed contentment flowed in the young Cooneys' blood. They had
abilities enough, but the sane acquisitive gift was not in them. They
were poor, but unashamed. They were breezy, keen, adventurous, without
fatigue. They claimed the gasoline-cleaning establishment as their
private garage, challenging any car under six thousand dollars to beat
the expensive smell. A large and very popular group of family jokes
centred about the plant of the legman.

Carlisle Heth "came to supper" with the Cooneys, as agreed, on the
Thursday following the magic afternoon at Willie's apartment. The week
intervening had been, as it chanced, one of the most interesting and
titillating periods of her life; by the same token, never had family
duty seemed more drearily superfluous. However, this periodic, say
quarterly, mark of kinsman's comity was required of her by her father,
a clannish man by inheritance, and one who, feeling unable to "do"
anything especial for his sister's children, yet shrank from the
knocking suspicion of snobbery. In the matter of intermealing,
reciprocity was formally observed between the two families. Four times
per annum the Cooneys were invited in a body to dine at the House of
Heth, Mrs. Heth on these occasions speaking caustically of her consort's
relatives, and on Christmas sending gifts of an almost offensively
utilitarian nature.

The noisy cousins filled the dingy little parlor to overflowing; this,
though Mrs. Cooney and Hen, having rushed out for the welcome, had at
once rushed back to the preparations for supper. For it appeared that
Hortense was absent once again, having asked to "git to git" a night
off, to see her step-daughter allianced to a substitute Pullman porter.
The two ladies, however, were only gone before, not lost, and through
the portières joined freely in the conversation, which rattled on
incessantly in the Cooney style.

Carlisle sat on the rusty sofa, listening absently to the chatter. Her
unaspiring uncle-in-law, the Major, who was vaguely understood to be "in
insurance" at present, parted his long coat-tails before the Baltimore
heater, and drifted readily to reminiscence. Louise and Theodore (as the
family Bible too stiffly knew Looloo and Tee Wee) sat together on a
divan, indulging in banter, with some giggling from Looloo--none from
grave Theodore. Chas informally skimmed an evening paper in a corner,
with comments: though the truth was that precious little ever appeared
in any newspaper which was news to the keen young Cooneys....

"And I said to Hen," observed Major Cooney to his fashionable niece,
having now got his short history of the world down as far as the
'80s--"now stop your whining around me, Miss. If you've got to whine, go
down to the cellar and stand in the corner. Well--"

"Why could she whine in the cellar, father? That point isn't clear,
sir," said Tee Wee's deep voice.

"Because it was a whine-cellar!" cried Hen, through the portières.

There was mild laughter at this, rather derisive on the part of all but
the Major; but when Chas, glancing up from his paper, remarked crisply:
"Aw, Miss Mamie! Like to speak to you a minute, please!"--the merriment
seemed mysteriously to acquire a more genuine ring. Carlisle politely
inquired who Miss Mamie was.

Looloo, who alone seemed the least bit awed by the presence of her
dazzling cousin, undertook to explain.

"She's Mamie Willis, Cally,--I don't believe you know her. Well, you see
she's always making the most atrocious puns, and is very proud of
them--thinks she's quite a wit. So, you see, when anybody makes an
awfully bad pun, like Hen's--"

"Brightest thing I've heard to-night," screamed Hen, defiantly, through
the curtains.

"Aw, Loo!" came her mother's soft voice from the unseen. "Run upstairs
and get half a dozen napkins, my child. The wash is in the basket on
my bed."

"We always pretend like we're repeating it to Miss Mamie, just for fun,"
concluded Looloo. "Yes'm, mother!"

"Oh! I see," said Carlisle.

She had donned for the coming to supper a plain house-dress of soft
dark-green silk, two summers old and practically discarded. ("This old
thing, my dear! Why, it positively belongs in the _rag-bag!_") She never
dressed much for the Cooneys. Also, by wholly mechanical processes of
adjustment to environment, her manner and air became simpler, somewhat
unkeyed: she unconsciously folded away her more shining wings.
Nevertheless, there was about her to-night a fleeting kind of radiance
which had caught the notice of more than one of her cavalier cousins,
notably of pretty little Looloo, who had kissed the visitor shyly (for a
Cooney) at greeting, and said, "Oh, Cally! You do look _so_ lovely!"
Cally herself was aware of an inner buoyance oddly at variance with the
drab Cooney _milieu_. Recent progress in the great game had more than
blotted out all memory of little mishaps at the Beach....

Starting aloft for the napkins, Looloo was adroitly tripped by Tee Wee,
and fell back upon him with a little shriek. Instead of checking the
tumult that followed, Major Cooney, including Carlisle in the
proceedings with a mischievous wink, called out: "Give it to him, Loo!
Give it to him!" Loo, having got her small hand in his hair, gave it to
him, good-fashion. Tee Wee moaned, and Chas made a fairly successful
effort to gag him with the newspaper. In the midst of the uproar, Mrs.
Cooney's gentle voice could be heard calling, "Supper, supper," and Hen,
entering with a large dinner-bell, conceived the whimsey of ringing it
loudly in everybody's ear.

Presently, after much noise and confusion, they were seated at the
antique mahogany, with the dent near one edge where a Yankee cavalryman
had rested his spurred foot too carelessly once upon a time. It was then
observed that Hen, having silenced her great clapper, was unobtrusively
gone from the midst. The circumstance proved of interest to the
younger Cooneys.

"She's nursing a little bunch of violets she got three days ago," Tee
Wee explained to Carlisle. "Says she's going to wear 'em to the Masons'
to-morrow, though anybody can see they can't possibly live through
the night."

"I thought I saw a purple box in the front window as I drove up," said
Carlisle. "Is it a secret who sent them?"

"'Bout forty," said Chas, making a fine one-hand catch of a napkin.
"You'd hardly call 'em a bunch, Tee Wee--more like a nosegay."

"Pass this coffee to Cally, son."

"Bob Dunn sent 'em, Cally, down at the bookstore," said Looloo, sweetly.
"And he wrote Hen a love-letter Thanksgiving beginning, 'Darling
Miss Cooney.'"

"That so?" said Tee Wee, who was just home from the University for
Christmas and not up on all the news yet. "How'd he sign it--'Your
loving Mr. Dunn'?"

"'Ave some werry nice 'am, Cally?"

"Yes--thank you. But do go on and tell me about Mr. Dunn. Does Hen like
him?"

"No, but she loves violets," said Tee Wee. "Made me sit up half of last
night, fanning 'em for her."

"Loo, pass Charles's plate, daughter."

Carlisle surveyed the noisy table as from some lofty peak. She knew
that the Cooney habit of monopolizing all conversation, and dashing
straight through every topic, was only their poor-but-proud way of
showing off: sometimes it was a little irritating, but to-night only
rather fatiguing to the ear-drums. The children came two years apart, as
regular as some kind of biannual publication; Looloo, seventeen, being
the youngest, and also the best-looking and the most popular in the
family. But then all the Cooneys were good-looking, including the Major,
and all were popular in the family. In fact, they were more like a
house-party than a family at all: and in some ways they rather resembled
a queer little secret fraternity, enjoying strange delights and
responding with shrieks to unintelligible catchwords.

To-night the talk was more than usually disjointed, owing to the
regrettable absence of Hortense. There was constant jumping up, infinite
"passing." Mr. Tee Wee, manipulating the water-pitcher from the
side-table, complained aside to his mother at the universal thirst.
Chas, it seemed, had charge of the heating-up of the later crops of
biscuits: he kept springing off to the kitchen, now and then returning
with a heaping platter of what he called his little brown beauties.

In the midst of the confusion, Hen strode in, looking somewhat defiant,
and instantly drew the fires of all.

"How're the little patients, Hen? Number 9 looked pretty sick to me
this--"

"Best thing I know is running 'em up and down the hall, and then brisk
massage--"

"Gargled 'em yet, Hen?"

Hen, laughing wildly, stood her ground.

"That's all right!" she retorted to the last sally, which happened to be
Chas's. "There are swains in this town who might boost their standing a
little if only _they'd_ patronize the florist once in a while!"

This drew loud approbation, and Chas (who was understood to be very
attentive to a Miss Leither--_Leither!_--of the Woman's Exchange),
laughing with the majority, threw up his hands, saying,
"Hellup! Hellup!"

He fled to the kitchen to look after his little brown beauties. The
noisy supper proceeded. Presently Major Cooney, the easy-going and
reminiscent, gave the conversation a new tack.

"And where are your violets, Cally, my dear?" he asked, directing one of
his mischievous winks at Looloo. "You must have a flower-shop full at
home, if what we hear is true."

Carlisle, on the point of saying something slightly caustic about Chas
as a swain, found the tables abruptly turned. All the Cooneys were
looking at her. She said with equanimity that, on the contrary, she got
so few flowers that when she did have any, she sat up at night with them
just like Hen.

"And I'll wear 'em to the Masons' to-morrow night, too!" said Hen,
throwing round a look which challenged contradiction.

"Now, cousin, what's the use?" said Chas, reëntering with his platter.
"The Visitor is giving you the rush of your young life, and we're all
on. Take a handful of my beauties."

"You mean Mr. Canning? My dear Chas, if he only were!"

There was no rebuffing the Cooneys. They began their little third-degree
system.

"He called on you last Thursday afternoon, didn't he, Cally?" said
Looloo, laughing, with a little face for her daring.

"One call, my dear child!"

"You went motoring with him on Friday," said Theodore, gravely, "and
stopped for tea at the Country Club at 6.20, you taking chocolate--"

"One motor-ride!"

"You dined with him at the Arlington on Monday night, table decorations
being small diamond necklaces--"

"Good heavens!" laughed Carlisle, coloring a little. "All this is
terribly circumstantial! I had no idea my movements were--"

"Movement is useless--don't move, lady! We have you covered--"

"There, there, children!--stop showing your jealousy," laughed Mrs.
Cooney; and her eyes rested with a brief wistfulness on the shining
niece who plumed eagle's feathers for flights where her daughters would
never follow. "You'd all give your eye-teeth to be half as pretty and
attractive as Cally ..."

"Yes'm," said Chas. "Well, then, Cally, have one more sardine, _please_.
Nothing on earth for the complexion like these fat saline fellows that
mother catches fresh every morning with her little hook and line.--Mind,
_Loo_! You're joggling The Bowl."

Carlisle was hardly to be overwhelmed by the Cooneys' teasing, nor
perhaps was she seriously displeased by it. Even less did the detail of
her eccentric cousins' knowledge surprise her. If there was a fight or a
fire, a _bon mot_ launched or a heart broken, money made or a death
died, it invariably happened that one of the Cooneys was "just
passing."...

In the middle of the table stood an object of shiny green crockery,
which seemed to be a cross between a fruit-dish and a vase. Most of the
table service was quite familiar to Carlisle, not a little of it having
started life as Christmas presents from the Heths. But this crockery
piece was new, and, upon Chas's admonition, its shiny hideousness caught
and riveted her attention.

"Aunt Rose Hopwood's parting gift," said Tee Wee, softly, following her
fascinated gaze. "Oh, Cally, ain't it boo'ful!"

"Theodore," said his mother, quite sharply, "I don't think your stay at
the University has improved your manners."

Theodore colored abruptly and deeply. "Why, I--I was only funning,
mother."

"I think that's a very poor sort of funning. And this applies to you,
too, Charles."

"Yes'm," said Charles, starting.

The eldest-born made no other reply to his mother, nor did Theodore:
meekness under parental reproof being another of the odd Cooney
characteristics. Conversation seemed about to languish; but Mrs. Cooney,
as if to show that the episode was closed, said equably:

"By the way, Cally, Cousin Martha Heth is coming next week to make us
quite a visit. If you are not too busy, do try to come in some time, and
cheer her up. She is going to take treatment for her nose and also for
flatfoot, and I fear is very miserable."

After supper Carlisle sat on the sofa, feeling rather sardiney, and had
an irritating talk with Aunt Molly, the subject being Chas's affair with
his Leither, for the furtherance of which he was reported to be even now
arraying himself upstairs. The complacence with which Aunt Molly
regarded the threatened alliance--all possible objections being answered
in her mind by a helpless, "If she is the girl he loves?"--was most
provokingly characteristic of the Cooneys' fatal shiftlessness. And they
were popular, too, in their way, and Chas might easily have married some
socially prominent girl with money, instead of bringing a nameless
saleslady into the family. It was impossible for Carlisle not to
contrast her aunt's flabby sentimentalism with her own and her mother's
sane, brilliant ambitiousness. If nothing succeeds like success, how
doubly true it was that nothing fails like failure.

Carlisle had reached a point where she longed to shake her aunt, when
Hen, who had been "scrapping up" with Looloo, came in, putting an end to
the futile talk.

To her mother's demand if they had stayed to wash the dishes, Hen
replied that they thought they might just as well: there weren't many,
and the water was nice and hot. And Chas, hearing the clatter from
aloft, had slipped down the backstairs in his suspenders, and lent a
hand with the wiping. Mrs. Cooney chided, saying the dishes should have
been left for Hortense, to-morrow morning before breakfast. She asked
Hen whether Chas knew that his white vest had come in with the wash, and
though Hen was pretty sure he did, Aunt Molly presently made an excuse
and slipped away upstairs. She was a great hand for being by when the
children were dressing to go out, and no one in the family, not even
Chas, could tie a white lawn bow half so well as mother....

Looloo lingered in the dining-room, the family sitting-room of evenings,
where Theodore had engaged his father at checkers. Hen, dropping into a
chair by the sofa as if she were rather tired, asked Cally for gossip of
the gay world, but Cally answered briefly out of regard for the chasm
between: how contract the name and fame of Mr. Canning to fit this
shabby little "parlor"? Hen was thin, colorless, and sweet-faced, and
was known in the family (for the Cooneys, strange to say, knew of
enormous individual differences among themselves) as the most thoughtful
and considerate of the children, and as alone possessing the real Ambler
nose. She rather suggested some slender pale flower, made to look at its
slenderest and palest beside her cousin's rich blossom. Still, Hen was
accounted a fine stenographer: they paid her sixty dollars a month at
the bookstore, where she earned double at least.

For five minutes the talk between these two girls, of about the same age
and blood but, it seemed, almost without a point of contact, was
considerably perfunctory. Then, by an odd chance and in the wink of an
eye, it took on a very distinct interest. Carlisle inquired if Hen had
ever heard of a man named V. Vivian, said to be a nephew of Mr. Beirne;
and Hen, with a little exclamation, and a certain quickening of
countenance, replied that she had been raised with him. Moreover, she
referred to him as V.V....

Though the Cooneys knew everybody, as well as everything, and though
Carlisle had thought before now of putting an inquiry to Hen or Chas in
this particular direction, the manner of her cousin's reply was a
decided surprise to her, and somehow a disagreeable surprise.

"Oh! Really?" said she, rather coldly. "I understood--some one told
me--that the man had just come here to live."

"He's just come _back_," explained Hen, with interest. "Why, he was born
here, Cally, three doors from where we used to live down on Third
Street--remember? Well, Dr. Vivian lived right there till he was sixteen
or seventeen--"

"Why do you call him Dr. Vivian?"

"Well, that's what he is, you see. He's a doctor--medical man."

"He doesn't look in the least like a medical man to me," said Carlisle,
as if that ought to settle something.

"Oh! You know him, then?"

"I have spoken to him," replied Carlisle, her gaze full on Hen's face.
"You see a great deal of him, I suppose?"

"No, we don't," said Hen, with an odd air, suggestive of regret. "He
keeps so terribly busy. Besides being sort of a missionary doctor, he's
always working on dozens of grand schemes of one sort or another. His
latest is to raise about a million dollars and buy the Dabney House for
a Settlement! How's that for a tall one? He just mentioned it to me this
morning, _en passant_, and says I must help him raise the million--"

"I suppose you didn't know that one of his grand schemes was to write a
terrible article in the paper attacking papa and the Works?"

"Oh!" said Hen, plucking a thread from her old black skirt. "Oh, that
letter in the 'Post,' long ago, you mean? Yes, I--knew about that; I
wanted to speak to you about it at the time. Did you read it, Cally?"

"I glanced at it," said Cally, shortly.

Full of the interest of thundering feet as the week had been since
Willie and mamma had given her the connecting link, Carlisle had in fact
made a point of getting hold of a copy of the old paper containing that
particular piece. Not being at all familiar with Works and newspapers,
she had found the process involved with considerable perplexity and
trouble, but she had felt amply rewarded in the end. The piece came to
her hand like a weapon, against any possible remeeting with its
remembered author.

Now she regarded Hen with steadily rising annoyance.

"What was your friend's idea in writing such outrageous stuff, do you
know? Is he really crazy, as they say, or is he just an ordinary
notoriety seeker?"

Colorless Hen looked rather hard at her pretty cousin. She allowed a
perceptible pause to fall before she said:

"I thought you said you knew him."

"No; I said that I barely spoke to him once."

"If you only said good-morning to him--if you only _looked_ at him once,
on the street--I don't see how you could possibly imagine.... Why,
Cally, he's about the least self-seeking human being that ever lived.
He's so absolutely un-self-seeking that he gives away every single thing
he's got, to anybody that comes along and wants it. In the first place,
he's giving away his life.... Some of his ideas may be visionary or
mistaken, but--"

"I should think so, after glancing at his article. What _was_ his
object, then, my dear?"

"Well, that's simple, I should think. He went to the Works, and thought
that conditions there were bad, and being what would be called the
reformer type, I suppose he thought it his duty to tell people so, so
that the conditions would be corrected--"

"Well, really, Hen! Don't you know, if conditions _were_ bad at the
Works,--whatever that may mean, and I for one have never felt that
working-girls were entitled to Turkish baths and manicures,--don't you
_know_ papa would correct what was wrong without being called a homicide
by--by eccentric medical men?"

Hen hesitated, and then began: "Well, business is hard, Cally, and men
in business--"

"Why doesn't your friend try attending to his own, then, the medical
business, instead of interfering all the time with other people's?"

The Cooney answered quite easily: "You see, he'd say this _was_ his
business." Then she smiled a little, thoughtfully, and said: "He'd say,
Cally, that the world's all one family, and everybody's responsible for
everybody else. The cute part about it is that he absolutely believes
it.... And it worries him that people aren't as happy as they ought to
be, the poor because they haven't anything to be happy with, the rich
because they have too much. He and Mr. Beirne argue about that for
hours. He's absolutely the only person I ever saw who really doesn't
care for--"

"Why, my _dear_!" interrupted Carlisle, smiling rather dangerously.
"You'll make me believe that you _admire_ the man immensely."

Hen laughed, and replied enigmatically: "Well, it's nice to feel free to
admire what's admirable, don't you think so?"

"You do admire him very much?"

"I think he's perfectly precious," said Henrietta Cooney.

A peal of triumph from the rear room indicated that Major Cooney had
reached the king-row in the teeth of bitter opposition. The peal came
from Looloo, who should have been reading "Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme"
with a big dictionary instead of hanging over her father's shoul

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