V. V.'s Eyes Part 55

"I suggest that in your interest ... Otherwise I should be unable to account for the predominant part you have allowed him to play in this."

"And yet, Hugo, he was right in saying that I couldn't be happy if I didn't tell the truth. And you don't understand that even now."

"I fear I've always been dull at these camp-meeting metaphors."

Now they had struck the greased road, and easy was the descent to Avernus. Carlisle said, all weakness gone from her:

"Well, I don't ask you to understand any more. You feel that I'm not the same girl--"

"I didn't say that! I asked ... if you had the right--now--to make yourself a--different girl. By that--"

"I'm afraid I've already made myself a different girl from what you thought. You knew that when mamma told you what I had done...."

Why couldn't he say that he wanted her twenty times over, no matter what she had done? It would have been easy to say that half an hour ago.

Canning's reply was: "I've said again and again that you've done nothing. All this malicious scandal cannot touch you unless you yourself wilfully start it."

"You seem to care less about what I am, than about what people might think I am. And yet," she added, her hand upon her heart and her breath coming quicker and quicker, "you wonder that I let somebody else tell me what I am."

The deliberate reference to the revivalist fellow stung Canning like the flick of a glove in his face.

"Dr. Vivian? He has not my disadvantage of laboring to save his affianced's name from everlasting disgrace."

"Perhaps he doesn't find disgrace where you seem to look for it."

"It is cheap to be prodigal with other men's belongings. What is this man to you?"

"Hugo!--Hugo!" broke from her. "I can't bear this!... You must leave me."

"If I go," said Canning, trembling, "I do not return."

"It is what I wish," said Carlisle.

And her other hand came to her heart, to his glittering pledge upon her finger....

Canning stood watching her, paling and purpling. How they had come to this he knew no more than Carlisle; and no more than she could he force his steps backward. In truth, the deeps of him had never so pa.s.sionately desired her as now, yearning beyond reason or understanding to the untamed spirit. And yet ... What did he know of her, whom he thought he knew so well? She had flirted with a young drunkard, fraternized with a low crank, inextricably involved herself in the scandals of a suicide.

Taxed with these things, she was wantonly rebellious, contemptuously indifferent to his wishes. Lovely and wild she stood there. And yet ...

He heard his hoa.r.s.e voice saying: "Think, Carlisle. You are sure that this is what you wish ..."

"You leave me no alternative."

"Oh, but I have ... I do."

"Not one that I can accept."

"Then you force me to say good-bye."

"Good-bye."

His legs could not have heard the marching-order; he remained rooted where he stood. Ebbings and flowings of color mottled his handsome face.

"One last word ... Is it to come to this? We stand ... at the final parting of the ways. Think ... This is what you wish?"

If he still hoped for impossible reconciliation, or if merely some instinct moved him to put the burden for the breaking upon her, Carlisle did not know. She was past arguing now.

"This is yours."

On the pink palm he had kissed such a little while ago she held out the glorious diamond he had given her in the first radiance of the engagement. Canning saw no way of escaping the offering; he accepted it with a stiff bow, dropped it in the pocket of his coat. But it was a business to which even he quite failed to impart any dignity.

He looked blindly about for his hat and stick, remembered that he had left them outside, turned and faced his love again. Between them pa.s.sed a long look.

"Then ... this is good-bye."

"Good-bye," said Cally again.

And then Hugo opened the door of papa's study and went away. And in a moment there was the sound of the front door shutting.

Was it over, then? Was the parting of lovers so brief, so final?...

Cally started, as from a trance. She ran out of the study and through the dark library to the drawing-room and the front windows. Just in time, she stood behind the curtains, and caught a last glimpse of Canning's receding back. Brave and dear it looked, departing.

Over and over she said to herself: "He's gone ... Hugo's gone ... He has thrown me over ..."

Gone was the prince of lovers. Calamity fell upon calamity. It would be better to be dead. And suddenly all that was hard and resisting in the girl broke with the taut strain, broke with a poignant bodily throe, and she fell face downward into a great chair, weeping with wild abandon.

Here, within two minutes from the shutting of the door, her mother found her.

So the beginning at the Beach touched its farther end. It touched with the shocks of cataclysm, whose echoes did not soon cease to reverberate.

The word of the Lord came to Jack Dalhousie's father, and he would not suffer in silence. Mr. Heth arrived at the House at ten o'clock that night; it was the best he had been able to do, but it was too late for a family reunion by an hour. The two women had fled away to New York, probably on the very same train that bore back Hugo Canning. And behind them Rumor of the triple head had already risen, roaring an astonishment and a proverb.

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.

And still the world wagged on.

Calamity befell one House out of many, and the natural cycles did not stir a hair's breadth. The evening and the morning were another day, and another and another. May ran indifferent out, with blue skies and a maddening sequence of "Continued Heat." Then presently the long days had reached their length, loitered awhile, turned slowly backward. And June had become July, and midsummer lay fast over the half-empty town.

It was a summer that broke records for heat, and those fled from it who could. But in the industrious backwaters of towns, where steady work means steady bread, it is the custom of men to take the climate as it comes to them, freezing or sweating at the weather-man's desire.

Mountain and ocean, awninged gardens and breeze-swept deck: those solaces are not for these. Ninety Fahrenheit it ran and over, day after day, half of June, half of July. But in the old Dabney House Mrs.

Garland stood on by the steaming wash-tubs, and Kern fared daily to the bunching-room at Heth's and its air like the breath of a new bake-oven, and Vivian, the doctor, was never "on his vacation" when his sick called, and stout Mr. Goldnagel, week on week, mopped his bald Hebraic head and repaired while you waited, with all work strictly guaranteed.

Of these four it was the young physician who kept the busiest, for his work never ended. Falling back from his brief appearance in the upper world, he had been speedily swallowed again by his own environment.

Routine flattened him out as never before; the problem of life was to find time to sleep.