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.
It was life's waggish way that the project conceived in the obscure
dreams of an out-at-elbows young man, and born a foundling upon his
money, should have been adopted at sight as the spoiled darling of
fashion's ultra-fashionable. Undoubtedly, astute Mr. Dayne had had
somewhat to do with this, he who so well understood the connection
between social prestige and the obtainment of endowment funds. But
whatever the underlying causes and processes, it was plain that the
Dabney House Settlement rode the crest of the "exclusive" wave this
autumn. And the fact was grasped by Mrs. B. Thornton Heth within
twenty-four hours of her home-coming, so admirably was it fitted to
her need.
Mrs. Heth had had time enough through the summer, heaven knew, to study
out the problem of restoring the family name to its former effulgence,
to decide upon the family attitude, or note, for the season ensuing. The
note, already firmly struck in her summer's letters to friends,--with
which she had taken immense pains, knowing from herself how closely they
would be scanned,--was that poor Carlisle, shocked into hysteria by the
tragedy, had magnanimously blamed herself where she had no blame beyond,
perhaps, youthful thoughtlessness. Thus they were people, and in
particular she was a person, severely persecuted for righteousness'
sake, but resolved to bear it nobly.
So much for the note, but a passive thing at best. None saw more clearly
than Mrs. Heth that a quietly resolute campaign of vindication was
necessary, none more clearly that a campaign meant money in considerable
sums. If you desired to prove anything, you must have money; stated in
another way, you could prove anything provided you spent money enough.
How best to spend large sums in this case?
Musing long upon the family attitude in dull European days and nights,
the good lady had gradually developed a complete code of etiquette, as
of funerals. Thus she had concluded that to give an elaborate and
superbly costly entertainment--ordinarily an unanswerable act of
vindication--would under the circumstances be "in bad taste." A series
of small but exclusive dinners would better strike the note on the
entertaining side; while, as for more public proof of martyrhood finely
borne, she at length decided that frank deeds of selfless charity would
be about the proper thing. She had no sooner come in touch again with
the home atmosphere than she determined to give ten thousand dollars,
perfectly anonymously, to Mr. Dayne's Settlement House Foundation.
Carlisle thought these developments odd enough, and indifferently
pictured her mother's dismay, if suddenly informed whose cause it was
she was so enthusiastically pitching in to help. For it seemed that she
alone knew that the Settlement everybody was talking about was not Mr.
Dayne's at all, but Dr. Vivian's, who wished his gift to be kept a
secret. Carlisle said nothing to unsettle her mother, who possibly still
thought that Hugo Canning, the gone but not forgotten, was the royal
contributor. The girl, indeed, observed with relief that mamma's
militant energies were once more in full swing. She had spent six weeks
with the little lady when every particle of fight had been flattened out
of her, and that was an experience she was not anxious to repeat.
Cally herself was glad to be at home again, though this was a
home-coming like none other she had ever known. Four months' use had not
robbed memory of its poignancy, and the moment of arrival at the House
she found unexpectedly painful. However, there came at once the
remeeting with papa, and the first and worst hour of reconnection with
the old life again was lubricated with reunion and much talk.
Mr. Heth had been lonely and somewhat depressed during the summer, as
his letters had revealed. But he was unaffectedly happy at having his
wife and daughter back, and lingered over the breakfast-table till
nearly ten o'clock, so much did he have to ask, and to tell, about
the summer.
Of that summer Carlisle never afterwards liked to talk. The first weeks
of it always stood out in her mind as the most wretched period of her
life. All spirit, all pluck, all dignity and self-respect appeared to
have been crushed out by the disasters which had befallen her. There was
absolutely nothing left on earth to be thankful for, except that the
engagement had never been announced.
Through these days Cally hadn't seemed to care that Jack Dalhousie had
killed himself, hadn't cared if the constrained tone of Mattie Allen's
"steamer-letter"--which said that Mattie was terribly sorry, dear, but
was vague as to what--indicated that the Heth glories had undergone a
great and permanent eclipse. All her consciousness seemed sucked into
the great ragged hole in her life left by Canning's going. Not till now,
it seemed, had she realized to what measure her prince of lovers had
twined himself into the reaches of her being. To pluck him, at a word,
from her heart would have been a difficult task at best, and it was made
the more difficult for her in that she did not, at first, put her will
into it. For there had lingered in her a sort of stunned incredulity:
she could not quite believe that their quarrel had been irretrievable,
that Hugo was gone forever. In the four days' waiting and hiding in New
York, even after she had put the ocean definitely between them, she
multiplied her woes by keeping the small door of hope constantly open
against her lover's possible return. And oh, how wretched she was
through these days, how sorry, sorry for herself!
And mamma was enormously sorry for herself; and there they were, the
worst companions for each other that could possibly have been found in
the world. So they had sat down in London, in a modest family-hotel well
off the track of tourists and of fashion; for none knew better than
mamma when to draw the purse-strings tight, and the European tour,
planned as a triumphal progress, had been abased to a refuge and
rustication.
The average women in such a situation would, of course, quickly have
pooled their sorrows for mutual comfort; but these two were fixedly
held apart by their fundamental lack of sympathy with each other, and
further by the disciplinary character of mamma's attitude. Whatever she
wrote in her letters, Mrs. Heth's personal note was that Carlisle had
wilfully brought shame and disgrace upon her ever indulgent parents, and
she did not desire that the girl should be diverted for a moment from
the contemplation of her errors. In their quiet quarters, they saw
practically no one, did nothing but make themselves and each other as
miserable as they could. They fairly wallowed in their respective seas
of self-pity. And days passed when they hardly exchanged a word.
Of course so abject a surrender to the slings and arrows of outrageous
Fortune could not last indefinitely. Human nature's safety-valve is its
extraordinary resilience. Hope springs eternal, etc. Nevertheless, it
took a small shock or so to arouse these two women at the mill from
their spiritless prostration. One night in early July, Carlisle came
suddenly upon the name of Hugo Canning in the foreign tattle column of a
London newspaper. She read, with intense fixity of gaze, that Hugo was
in Europe: in short, that Hugo was enjoying himself at Trouville, where
he was constantly seen in the company of the Honorable Kitty Belden,
second daughter of So-and-So, and so forth....
All this time, Carlisle had been taking upon herself most of the blame
for the quarrel and break. She had been distracted and unreasonable; she
had never explained to Hugo sensibly how it had all happened; it was
only natural that he should have misunderstood and misjudged, and in the
end lost his temper and said hard things which he did not mean. And he
was suffering by it no less than she: oh, be sure of that.... Now, as
she sat alone in her bedroom, the newspaper crumpled on the floor beside
her, there seemed to fall scales from her eyes, and she saw how bitterly
she had deceived herself. Where was now the love pledged to last
forever? Six weeks parted from her, and gaily gallivanting at the
slipper-toes of happier girls, whom the breath of trouble had
not touched.
Not even in this moment did Carlisle tax her once-betrothed with moral
wrong in the matter of the "telling," for that whole episode had
remained in her mind rather a flare-up of mysterious emotions than a
case of religious "conviction of sin" and atonement. Probably Hugo had
said and done what he thought was right then. But now it was clear to
her, as by a flash, that he had done wrong in quite a different way,
that he had committed the deadly sin of love. He had deserted her in the
moment of her greatest need of him. At the first pinch his boasted
mighty love had broken down; and, beneath all the disguises, it was such
a contemptible little pinch at that, only that he was afraid of what
people might say about her. Now he stepped the beaches of France, a
squire of dames unconcerned. Should she wear her heart in mourning for a
light-o'-love and a jilt? She would not. She would not....
Easier said than done, no doubt. Yet Cally's thoughts had at least
received a powerful new twist, which is the beginning of reconstruction.
And it was only a day or two later that mamma in her turn received an
arousing blow, in that debasing of her by the Associated Charities which
her niece-in-law, Henrietta Cooney, had mentioned to the Dabney House.
As it happened there came a letter from Hen Cooney by the same mail that
brought mamma's death-dealing one from Mrs. McVey. For Hen, who had
never dreamed of corresponding with Cally before, had started up this
summer with a long and quite affectionate steamer-letter, and had since
written regularly once a week, the newsiest and really the most
interesting letters that the Heths got at all. This letter had a private
postscript, written on a separate sheet, which said:
Cally, I don't know how you'll take it, but I think I ought
to tell you frankly how matters stand. Of course there was
plenty of talk, especially at first, and some of it was
pretty strong. But whether you like it or not, most of the
responsibility for what happened is being put on Aunt Isabel.
Do you remember Mrs. John S. Adkins who was at the Beach the
day it happened? She has told everybody it was Aunt Isabel
who came downstairs and told her and others the story that
they afterwards repeated. And then, besides, it seems to be
generally understood that you were the one who wanted to
straighten things out when you had no idea it was too late,
and everybody whose opinion is worth having knows it's easy
enough to slip into a mistake, but takes a lot of spunk to
stand up and say so long afterwards. Good-bye again.
Hen.
Carlisle removed this postscript, tore it into small pieces, and put the
pieces in the waste-basket under a newspaper. Later in the afternoon she
had to go into her mother's bedroom to recover a novel which the older
lady had abstracted for her own perusal. She found her mother lying on
the bed, an open letter in her hand and on her face the marks of
rare tears.
Carlisle, turning away with her book, hesitated. The two women had not
spoken a word all that day.
"What's the matter, mamma?" she said constrainedly.
Mrs. Heth, stirring a little on the bed, said, with difficulty: "The
Associated Charities met to elect new officers. I am--omitted from the
board." She added, in a voice from which she could not keep the
self-pity: "I should naturally--have been president this year."
Her crushed mildness touched Carlisle abruptly. For the first time in
all this trouble, perhaps for the first time in her life, she had a
considerate and sympathetic thought for her mother. It was mamma, it
seemed, upon whom the reprisals of society were to fall most heavily,
yet it was she, Cally, who had caused it all. Suppose she had been a
good daughter, to begin with; suppose she had even been an obedient
daughter, and had kept her own counsel, as mamma had commanded and
implored. Ah, how different would have been this ghastly summer!...
She walked over to the bed, quite pale, put her hand on her mother's
rumpled hair, and said with some agitation:
"I'm very sorry to have given you all this trouble, mamma."
Mrs. Heth looked up at her, her small eyes winking.
"Oh--I--I'm sure you meant to do what you thought was right. But--oh,
Cally!..."
And then she was weeping in her daughter's arms.
Perhaps the stout little lady was ready now for a reconciliation.
Perhaps the strain of silent censoriousness had worn out even her strong
will. Perhaps, in some far cranny of her practical heart, there was a
spark which secretly admired Cally for her suicidal madness. At any
rate, drying her eyes presently, she said:
"How Mary Page will gloat over this.... Well, we can't go on this way,
my child. We'll die if we don't have some diversion. Lord knows we'll
need all our strength for the fall."