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 shoulder.
Footsteps above suggested that Chas and Aunt Molly were making a careful
toilet indeed for his call upon the obscure inamorata.
In the Cooney parlor, the two girls looked at each other. Carlisle tried
hard to stare Hen down, and failed. In this moment she felt that she
positively disliked her commonly negligible cousin. She had proved and
re-proved to her own almost complete satisfaction that the man who had
spoken the affronting words to her in the summer-house was a virulent
religious fanatic, or (since she had read the piece) a crazy Socialist,
like the man who had thrown the brick at papa, or both; almost certainly
both. She was, it might be said, deeply and irrevocably committed to
these beliefs: they settled and explained everything, and no more need
to think or worry. It was simply not to be endured that Henrietta Cooney
should cheekily sit there and try to unsettle everything, pretending....
"But understand me, Cally," Henrietta was saying, with provoking calm.
"Of course I didn't like that letter a bit. You see--Heth wasn't any
more than a name to V.V., a sort of symbol, when he wrote it. But I
think it was a mistake all through, and I scolded him well at
the time--"
"Oh, did you?" said Cally, her cheeks very pink. "I imagined you thought
it perfectly precious of him to call papa a shameless homicide."
"Why, you know I never thought anything of the sort, Cally dear,"
answered Hen....
She seemed surprised by the signs of her cousin's displeasure (which
really did seem excessive for a business controversy nearly two months
old) and went on in what was evidently intended to be quite a
soothing manner:
"You know, men are always hammering each other over things like
this--it's really not nearly so awful as it sounds!... And honestly,
Cally, that letter wasn't at all representative of V.V.--even though he
probably thought it was! I mean ... he may talk in that fierce way about
whole classes, but when it comes down to people--individuals--he's about
the kindest person. What he really thinks is--well, that _everybody's
good_.... Here's what I mean, Cally," said Hen, laughing a little, but
with a certain eagerness too, as if it were of some importance for Cally
to see what she meant.... "You know him, you say--slightly, of course.
Well, instead of writing any more letters about the Works, do you know
what it would be exactly like him to do now?"
"Throw a bomb in at papa's office-window?"
"No, speak to _you_ about it!" laughed Henrietta, unabashed--"some time
when he sees you at Mr. Beirne's or somewhere--ask you in the nicest,
most natural way to ask Uncle Thornton if he won't build a new Works!
And you'd see from the way he looked at you that he was perfectly _sure_
you were going to do it, too!"
Cally gazed at Hen silently for at least ten seconds.
"I'd enjoy immensely having him try it," said she slowly. "_Immensely!_
I--I've wanted for some time to say a few words to him...."
At that moment the broken Cooney doorbell rang feebly, and within one
minute V. Vivian came walking into the little parlor.
Supping at the Cooneys was not usually so interesting as this.
When the bell rang, Looloo, springing up from the Major's side in the
dining-room, hurriedly pulled shut the folding-doors between. She
apologized to her cousin through the diminishing crack, saying that it
was probably awful Bob Dunn, and Cally could come hide in there with
them if she'd rather. But Cally said briefly that she was not afraid,
and had to go home in a little while anyway.
In the same moment Carlisle heard the voice of the caller in the hall,
for whom Hen had just opened the door. She recognized this voice at the
first word. And she involuntarily rose in the Cooney parlor, feeling the
oddest, suddenest, most unreasoning impulse to go at once into the
dining-room, after all, and be with Looloo, and watch them play checkers
for a little while....
It was the surprise of it; nothing more. And Carlisle overcame that
impulse. She remained standing motionless, reconsidering as by lightning
flashes the quite complicated point of etiquette that so suddenly
confronted her. What was a lady's proper attitude toward a nobody who
has called her father a shameless homicide and herself a God-pitiful
poor little thing? There was no experience to guide here. But clearer
and clearer it seemed to become to Cally that to hold any converse with
such an one could only be, after all, essentially debasing. Icy
indifference was the stingingest rebuke....
Henrietta came through the door, with the lame medical man behind her.
Without looking at him, Cally gathered that the man found the sight of
her properly disquieting.
"You know my cousin, Miss Heth, I believe--_Doctor_ Vivian, Cally."
"Oh!... How do you do!" said the doctor.
Carlisle, not advancing from the sofa-side, said:
"I remember Dr. Vivian."
"Well, sit down, both of you," said Hen.
And then Henrietta, with that audacious forwardness which the Cooneys
mistook for humor, smiled treacherously at her cousin over the caller's
shoulder, and said:
"And entertain each other a moment, won't you? I have _got_ to speak to
mother...."
On that Hen left them. Through some bias in its ancient hinges, the
parlor door swung to behind her. It shut with a loud click. From behind
the other closed doors, the merry voices of the checker-players and
rooter grew very audible.
Despite the hostess's cordial injunction, the two young people in the
shut Cooney parlor did not immediately sit down and begin to entertain
each other. Both remained standing exactly where Hen had left them, and
there ensued a hiatus of entertainment just long enough to be quite
distinctly appreciable.
Then the absurdity of her--Miss Heth's--feeling constraint before this
Mr.--no, Dr.--Vivian, this friend of the Cooneys and malicious attacker
of the Cooneys' relatives' characters, rushed over the girl
inspiritingly. Then it occurred to her simply to incline her head
coldly, and leave the man without a word: dignified that, yet possibly
open to misconstruction. So, taking one graceful step toward the door,
Carlisle said, with a sufficiency of distant hauteur:
"You can entertain yourself, I hope? I am going."
The tall young man removed his gaze from the blank space left by Hen's
exit, with a kind of start, and said hurriedly:
"I hope you aren't letting _me_ drive you away? I--I merely stopped a
moment in passing, on a--a professional matter...."
"Why should you imagine that I am anxious to avoid you?"
He said, with gratifying embarrassment: "I naturally couldn't hope
that--you would wish to see me--"
And then suddenly all her just and fortifying resentment seemed to
return to her, and she said with frosty calm:
"Yes, I've rather wanted to see you again. I didn't quite place you
when--I had this opportunity before...."
The man regarded the floor. He looked as if he knew what was coming.
"I've recently read your letter in the 'Post' about my father. Tell me,
what pleasure do you find in writing such wicked untruths about people
who've never harmed you?"
In her mind it had seemed exactly the thing to say, the rebuke which
would put him finally in his place on all scores, show him up completely
to himself. But the moment it was out, it acquired somehow the wrong
sound, jangling and a little shrewish and somewhat common, and she
rather wished she hadn't said it. She had never seen anybody turn pale
so suddenly....
The man wore the same clothes he had worn in the summer-house, she
thought; indubitably the same large four-in-hand, floating the fat white
painted shad, or perch. He was rather better-looking in the face than
she had supposed; and in this light she observed more clearly the rather
odd expression he wore about the eyes, a quality of youthful
hopefulness, a sort of confidingness: not the look of a brick-thrower,
unless you happened to know the facts in the case. All this, of course,
was his own lookout. If he wanted to say and do outrageous things, he
had no right to appear so pained when he got his merited punishment. He
had no right to put on that appealing look. He had no right to
be lame....
"It is perfectly natural for you to say and think that," he was saying
with an odd air of introspection, quite as if he were reassuring
somebody inside of him. "I don't think there was anything untrue in that
letter, but--no doubt it must have seemed so. And of course ... I
_don't_ suppose you can go to the Heth Works much, or be very
familiar--"
"It isn't necessary for me to go to the Works to learn that my father is
not a homicide."
Her voice had lost something of its first ringing assurance. It seemed
to shake a little, like an indignant child's.
The young man said hurriedly:
"No, no! Of course not! I--indeed, I think you misunderstood what I
meant to say in--in that letter. I must have expressed myself badly. I
did not intend so much a--a criticism of individuals, as of
society, for--"
"Oh, please don't apologize. That's always rather silly, I think. I like
to see people with the courage of their convictions, no matter how wrong
they are. Good-evening."
"Don't go," said the slum physician, instantly, much as Mr. Canning had
said at a similar yet totally different moment--"that is--_must_ you--go
at once? I--there is something I've wanted very much to tell you."
She stopped still; stood in silence gazing at Dalhousie's friend, the
shabby author of the two Severe Arraignments. Undoubtedly there was a
sinking feeling within her, unsteadying in its way. But she was
spirited, and into her eyes had come a hostile challenge. Passionately
she dared this man to ask God to pity her again....
Her eyes were oval and lifted the least bit at the outer corners. The
bow of her upper lip drew up a little most engagingly at the middle
(like Teresa Durbeyfield's), an irregularity more endearing to the eye
than any flawlessness. There was the possibility of tenderness in this
mouth; more than the promise of strength in the finely cut chin. Her
thick lashes began pure gold, but changed their minds abruptly in the
middle, and finished jet black....
She was the loveliest thing this man's eyes had ever rested upon. And as
at the Beach, he seemed to begin with a plunge:
"Jack Dalhousie's gone away, Miss Heth--gone to Weymouth, Texas, to
live. I had a letter from him, day before yesterday. He's got work
there, on a stock-farm--among strangers. He hasn't taken a drink
since--October. He's making a new start, with nothing to remind him of
what's past. I ... hope he will be happy yet."