V. V.'s Eyes Part 34

"Oh!..." said she. "So you think my father would be much happier if he stripped himself and his family to provide Turkish baths and--and Turkish _rooms_ for his work-girls? I must say I don't understand that kind of happiness. But then I'm not a _Socialist_!"

She said Socialist as she might have said imp of darkness. However, the young man seemed unaware of her bitter taunt. He leaned the hand which did not hold the cards against a pilaster in the vestibule-side, and spoke with hurried eagerness:

"I don't mean that exactly, and I--I _really_ don't mean to apply anything to your father, of course. I only mean--to--to speak quite impersonally--that it seems to me the reason we all follow money so hard, and hold to it so when we have it, is that we believe all along it's going to bring us happiness, and that ... After all--isn't it rather hard ever to get happiness that way? Perhaps we might find that the real way to be happy was just in the other direction. That was all I meant.... Don't you think, really," the queer man hurried on, as if fearing an interruption, "it stands to reason it's not possible to be happy through money? It's so _segregating_, it seems to me--it _must_ be that way. And isn't that really just what we all want it for?--to make a--a sort of little cla.s.s to ourselves, to wall ourselves off from the rest--from what seems to be--life. It elevates in a sense, of course--but don't you think it often elevates to a--a sort of rocky little island?"

They seemed to be personal words, in despite of his exordium, and V.

Vivian boggled a little over the last of them, doubtless perceiving that he was yielding fast to his old enemy (as indicated to O'Neill) and once more being too severe with these people, who after all had never had a chance....

Cally looked briefly away, up the sunny street. She raised a white-gloved hand and touched her gay hair, which showed that, though she hesitated, she was perfectly at ease. She had just been struck with that look suggestive of something like sadness upon the man's face, which she had noticed that night in the summer-house. She herself was inclined to connect this look with his religiosity, a.s.sociating religion, as she did, exclusively with the sad things of life. Or did it come somehow from the contrast between his shabby exterior and that rather s.h.i.+ning look of his, his hopefulness incurable?...

She replied, in her modulated and fas.h.i.+onable voice: "I don't agree with you at all. I'm afraid your ideas are too extraordinary"--she p.r.o.nounced it extrord'n'ry, after Mr. Canning--"for me to follow. But before I go--"

"They do seem extraordinary, I know," broke from him, as if he could not bear to leave the subject--"but at least they're not original, you know.... I think that must be just the meaning of the parable of the rich young man.--Don't you, yourself?"

"The parable of the rich young man?"

She looked at him with dead blankness. Pa.s.sers-by hopped over the coal-hole and glanced up at the pair standing engrossed upon the doorstep. Such as knew either of them concluded from their air that Mr.

Beirne was worse again this morning.

V. Vivian's gaze faltered and fell.

"Just a--a little sort of story," he said, nervously--"you might call it a little sort of--allegory, ill.u.s.trating--in a way--how money tends to--to cut a man off from his fellows.... This man, in the sort of--of story, was told to give away all he had, not so much to help the poor, so it seems to me, as to--"

"I see. And of course," she said, vexed anew--how did she seem _always_ to be put at a disadvantage by this man, she, who could put down a Canning, alas, only too easily and well?--"of course that's just what _you_ would do?"

"What I should do?"

"If _you_ had a lot of money, of course you would give it all away at once, for fear you might be cut off--segregated--rocky island--and so forth?"

To her surprise, he laughed in quite a natural way. "Uncle Armistead, who's usually right, says I'd hang on to every cent I could get, and turn away sorrowful.... Probably the only reason I talk this way is I haven't got any.... That is--except just a--a little income I have, to live on...."

No doubt he said this hypocritically, self-righteous beneath his meekness, but Cally was prompt to pounce on it as a d.a.m.ning confession.

She flashed a brilliant smile upon him, saying, "Ah, yes!--it's so much easier to preach than to practice, isn't it?"

And quite pleased with that, she proceeded to that despoiling of him she had had in mind from the beginning:

"Before I go, I started to tell you just now, when you interrupted me, that I was in rather a hurry yesterday, and didn't have time to--to say to you what I meant to say, to answer your request--"

"Oh!" said he, rather long drawn-out; and she saw his smile fade. "Yes?"

"I meant to say to you," she went on, with the same "great lady"

graciousness, "that I shall of course speak to my father about the girl you say was unjustly dismissed. It's a matter, naturally, with which you have nothing to do. But if an injustice has been done by one of his subordinates, my father would naturally wish to know of it, so that he may set it right."

The little speech came off smoothly enough, having been prepared (on the chance) last night. For the moment its effect seemed most gratifying.

The young man turned away from her, plainly discomfited. There was a small callosity on the pilaster adjacent to his hand, and he scratched at it intently with a long forefinger. Standing so, he murmured, in the way he had of seeming to be talking to himself:

"I knew you would ... I _knew_!"

She disliked the reply, which seemed cowardly somehow, and said with dignity: "It's purely a business matter, and of course I make no promises about it at all. If there _has_ been any injustice, it was of course done without my father's knowledge. I have no _idea_ what he will do about it, but whatever he decides will of course be right."

The man turned back to her, hardly as if he had heard.

"The trouble is," he said, in an odd voice, harder than she had supposed him to possess, "I didn't trust you. I--"

"Really that's of no consequence. I'm not concerned in it at--"

"I was sure all the time you would--be willing to do it," he went on, in the same troubled way. "I was _sure_. And yet last night I went off and spoke to somebody else about it--a man who has influence with MacQueen--John Farley--a--a sort of saloonkeeper. Corinne is back at work this morning."

The girl struggled against an absurd sense of defeat. She wished now--oh, _how_ she wished!--that she had gone away immediately after giving him mamma's and papa's cards....

"Oh!" she said, quite flatly.... "Well--in that case--there is no more to be said."

But there he seemed to differ with her. "I'd give a good deal," he said slowly, "if I'd only waited.... Could you let me say how sorry I am--"

"Please don't apologize to me! I've told you before that I--I _detest_ apologies...."

"I was not apologizing to you exactly," said V. Vivian, with a kind of little falter.

"I--haven't anything to do with it, I've said! It's all purely a business matter--purely!" And because, being a woman, she had been interested in the personal side of all this from the beginning, she could not forbear adding, with indignation: "I can't _imagine_ why you ever thought of coming to me, in the first place."

"Why I ever thought of it?" he repeated, looking down at her as much as to ask whom on earth should he come to then.

"If you had a complaint to make, why didn't you go direct to my father?"

"Ah, but I don't know your father, you see."

"Oh!... And you consider that you do know me?"

The man's right hand, which rested upon the pilaster, seemed to shake a little.

"Well," he said, hesitatingly, "we've been through some trouble together...."

Then was heard the loud sc.r.a.ping of shovels, and the merry cackle of the old negro, happy because others toiled in the glad morning, while he did not. Cally Heth's white glove rested on Mr. Beirne's polished bal.u.s.trade, and her piquant lashes fell.

She desired to go away now, but she could not go, on any such remark as that. Staying, she desired to contradict what the alien had said, but she could not do that either. The complete truth of his remark had come upon her, indeed, with a sudden shock. This man _did_ know her. They _had_ been through trouble together. Only, it seemed, you never really got through trouble in this world: it always bobbed up again, waiting for you, whichever way you turned....

And what did this lame stranger have to do with her, that, of all people on earth, his eyes alone had twice seen into her heart?...

She looked suddenly up at him from under the engaging little hat, and said with a smile that was meant to be quite easy and derisive, but hardly managed to be that:

"Supposing that you do know me, as you say, and that I came to you to prescribe for me--as a sort of happiness doctor.... Would you say that to give away everything I had--or papa had--would be the one way for me to be--happy?"

"Happy?..."

He curled and recurled the corners of the Heth cards, which did not improve their appearance. He gazed down at the work of his hands, and there seemed to be no color in his face.

"To be happy.... Oh, no, I shouldn't think that you--that any one--could be happy just through an act, like that."

"I could hardly give away more than everything all of us had, could I?"