I'd have answered your letter earlier only I haven't had any
heart for writing letters. Fate has knocked me out again. God
knows I've tried, and cut out the drink, and worked hard, and
suffered agonies of the damned, but it doesn't do any good.
The world isn't big enough for people like me to hide in, and
the only thing I can't understand is why people like me are
ever born. What's the use of it all, V.V., I can't see to
save my life. The trouble all came from a fellow named
Bellows, from home, a machinery salesman with T.B. Wicke
Sons, you may know him, who dropped off the train here a week
ago Saturday.
He saw me on the street one day, and then he went and told
everybody that I was in Texas because I'd been drummed from
home. Said I went out rowing with a girl and upset her and
then swam off for my skin and she was nearly drowned. I've
made some good friends here--or had made them, I'd better
say--and one of them rode out to our place and said I ought
to know what Bellows was saying, so I could thrash him before
he skipped town. Oh, what could I say.
Then I saw Miss Taylor just now, she's the girl from the East
I mentioned in the winter, and she asked me had I heard what
they were saying. I wanted to lie to her, and she'd have
believed me if I had, but you couldn't lie to her, and so I
said straight out I was crazy drunk at the time and didn't
know what I was doing, but I guessed most of it was true. She
cares a lot about those things, and I think she'd been
crying. God help me. So now everything's changed here; it
reminds me of home the way people look at me. Miss Taylor was
the worst, she's been so fine to me. She said come to see her
in two or three days, when she'd had time to think, and if
she casts me off, I can't stand it here any longer, and I
don't see how I can begin all over again, just when life was
seeming as if it might be worth while again.
So now, you see, V.V., why I wasn't prompter answering your
letter. I've tried to keep my courage up like you advised,
but it's too much for one man to carry. May you never know
the awful feeling that you're an outcast, not wanted
anywhere, is the wish of
Your unhappy friend, DAL.
P.S. How's father, do you ever see him these days? Don't let
him know any of this.
The girl looked through the rose-flowered curtains down into the sunny
street....
Dalhousie had long since become but a shadow and a name to Cally; she
had willed it so, and so it had been. Now, in his own poor scrawl, the
ghost of a lover too roughly discarded rose and walked again. And
beneath the cheap writing and the unrestrained self-pity, she seemed to
plumb for the first time the depths of the boy's present misery. The old
story, having struck him down once, had hunted him out and struck him
down again. Where now would he hide?...
The too reminiscent letter had come with the inopportunity of destiny. A
little more pressure and she was done for.
But this was mere mad folly. To shake it off at once, Cally began to
walk about her bedchamber. Nothing had really happened that had not been
true all along. She wished more than ever that it had all been started
differently, but it was too late to consider that now. She must think of
herself, and of Hugo and mamma. Dalhousie's friend had done his worst,
and she could still withstand it. Once in New York, once in Europe, and
all would be as it had been before....
Nevertheless, she was presently weak enough to open the letter again.
Now her eye fell upon two lines written in the margin at the top of the
first page, which she had missed before. They were in the writing of the
envelope, and read:
You can reach me at any time, day or night, through Meeghan's
Grocery--Jefferson 4127.
The words sprang up at her, and she stared back at them fascinated. The
man at the Dabney House was certain that she would tell now. He thought
the resolution might come on her suddenly, as in the night. Nominally,
he left it to her; yet at the same time he contrived to make her feel
caught in a trap, with no alternative, with this sense of enormous
pressure upon her. She remembered the man's strange, stern words to
her: "You can't be happy now, till you let the truth be known."
All at once it seemed almost as if there were some one in the room with
her. She looked around hastily: but of course there was no one. She
became very much frightened....
There came a knock on the door, and a voice:
"Genaman in the parlor to see you, Miss Cyahlile. Mist' Avery."
"I can't come down."
"Ma'am?"
"Say I'm not well and am lying down."
In the hall below, the parlormaid Annie encountered Mrs. Heth, waked
from her nap by the two rings at the bell. Mrs. Heth ascended to
Carlisle's room and rattled the knob.
"Cally?... Why, your door's locked!"
The door opened, and Carlisle confronted her mother with a white
tremulous face.
"What's the matter?" said Mrs. Heth, gliding in with an expression of
maternal solicitude. "Annie said you weren't well and were lying down."
"I'm not well ... Mamma, let's go to New York to-morrow."
"Go _to-morrow!_... Why, _what's_ the matter?"
"Nothing. Only I--I'm so tired of being at home."
Then her strained stiffness broke abruptly, and she flung her arms
around her mother's neck with an hysterical abandon by no means
characteristic.
"Oh, I can't stand it here another day. _I_ can't! Please, please,
mamma! It must be not having Hugo. I can't explain--it's just the way I
feel. I'm so miserable here, I could die. _Please_, mamma!..."
Mrs. Heth, detecting with alarm the incipiences of a dangerous flare-up,
said with startling gentleness:
"There, there, dear! Mamma will arrange it as you wish."