She glanced at him with a touch of bewilderment, and glanced away again,
turning toward the door. Surely he had not always been like this....
"Mr. Avery will think I'm lost," said Cally.
However, Mr. V.V. successfully checked her departure, saying:
"I'm sure you can be of the realest help to the Settlement, Miss Heth,
if you care to be." And, then, veering abruptly, he said with his air of
making a plunge: "But I must take this opportunity to speak to you of
another matter. A matter which, I fear, will be disagreeable to you."
That sufficiently arrested her; she stood looking at him, with a
conflict of sensations within. Faces of Settlementers appeared in the
door, looked in at the bare room, passed from view again. The tall young
man in the new suit pushed back his hair, with the quaint gesture
he had.
"You once said," he continued, in a voice of light hardness, "that I
brought you nothing but trouble. That seems to continue true, though
perhaps you won't regard this as so--so serious...."
Trouble? More trouble for Cally Heth?
"Why--what do you mean?"
"The question of the Heth Works--has come up again. That, at least, is
the particular application. Of course many other factories are
involved."
The girl was completely taken aback. "Why, I don't understand. What has
come up?"
He then explained himself, in well-ordered sentences:
"The State Labor Commission feels strongly that the public good demands
a new factory law at this time, requiring all owners to conform to a
certain higher standard of comfort and safety for their employees. I
must add that I fully share the Commission's feeling. It is considered
that some publicity in the press is needed, preparing the public mind
for a progressive law by showing what present conditions are. A series
of articles has been decided upon, to begin about the first of November
and continue daily till the legislature meets in January. I have agreed
to write these articles. I thought it only fair," he ended short, "to
tell you this."
The girl heard him with startled astonishment. She had never, of course,
been interested in her father's factory other than as a family symbol;
and that factitious interest which she had felt at times last year, born
of this man's hostility, was gone long since, effaced by a tide of
stronger feelings. So his sudden exhumation of the topic as a cause of
war now came upon her with the harshest discordance. It seemed almost
like a wanton wounding of her, somehow like sheer disloyalty in him.
Surely if there were need of articles, this man might leave them to
somebody else to write....
Her young gaze was full of an unconscious reproachfulness.
"All that means that you are going to put some more letters in the paper
attacking my father?"
"I'm afraid it's inevitable it will seem so to you."
"Oh,"' said she, it seemed involuntarily, "I don't see how you _can_!"
The young man Mr. V.V. made no reply. It may be that he didn't see how
he could either....
He looked away from the reproachful eyes, slate-blue to match the plumes
in the hat: and there were phrases from his articles singing and kicking
in his head, phrases which would cry in the penny newspaper as no voice
could cry from the wilderness. Ten thousand words he had ready now, in
the old secretary upstairs; hard words all, that broke heads or hearts,
faiths implied too, it might be, and did not care; or didn't mean to
show it if they did. And he thought, too, of a little friend he had,
just pulled back from death's door, and hardly ready for her Trip now,
after ten weeks. So of course there could be no flinching now....
Through the door there came the continuous sounds of the nearness of the
multitude, but these two seemed almost as alone in his old hotel as they
had been on another afternoon long ago.
"Don't you think," said the pretty voice, still not angry--and surely
anger would have been easier to meet than this--"that before doing
anything so--so radical as that, you might wait a little while,
believing that my father would--do what is right?"
The lame doctor brought his eyes back to her and said, slowly: "You see,
I've been worried by the feeling--that I've waited too long already."
"Too long for what? That's just what I mean. What do you think could
possibly happen?"
"For one thing, Miss Heth," he said, with a faint dry smile, "the
building might fall down some day."
Color came into Cally's cheek. Her feeling now was that she had made
advances, spontaneous and friendly, and been smartly rebuffed. What
cared he for the troubles of the Heths?...
"You really think my father would risk the lives of his employees, just
to make a little more money for himself?"
He answered, almost brusquely: "I don't mean to judge your father.
People take their views of life from the atmosphere in which they live.
You appreciate that. I, of course, concede your father's point of view.
I fully understand it. I--wish it were possible for you to do as much
for mine."
She looked at him fixedly a moment, said, "I'm sorry you think this
necessary," and turned away to the door. But once again his voice
arrested her.
"Miss Heth!... You feel an interest in the Settlement. You've felt a
wish to help in the work--to lend a hand in some way to those less
fortunate than yourself. You--you haven't as yet decided just what you
want to do...."
She had paused at the door, half-turning; their eyes met once more. And
now the whole look of the strange young man seemed to change, and he
said with sudden gentleness:
"Why don't you go to the Works some day?"
But it was late in the day to seek to improve matters with looks and
tones, with efforts to put responsibilities upon her. Cally answered as
she had answered him once before: only it was a mark of some change in
her--toward him, perhaps toward life itself--that she spoke with a
dignity which had never been hers last year.
"I don't think I need do that to learn that my father isn't a homicide."
* * * * *
For the second time also, Cally went away from the Dabney House without
the company of her staunch little mother: who would remain in this place
till among the last, contending among the best people for the thing she
held dearest in the world.
Cally, however, was well looked after by Mr. Avery, who welcomed her
upon the threshold of the sewing-class room (if that is what it was),
removing himself firmly from the Kemper. His proposal was to continue
the tour of the premises, but she replied that she found Settlementing
dreadfully boring, and was of a mind to steal away for home. The
disappointed pink one then proposed to accompany her, and pay a little
call, as he put it. However, she professed an incurable dulness after
her slumming, and countered with an offer to set him down at his club,
if he liked.
It was so arranged, with the gallant, and also with mamma. William
Banks, detached by a nod from the procession of waiting vehicles over
the dingy street, wheeled up to the entrance; halted with a whir;
electrically self-started himself once more. Carlisle bowled off with J.
Forsythe Avery, who was well pleased with this token of her regard, and
resolved to make the most of it. But soon the time came when he was
debarked from her conveyance; she was rid of his ponderous ardors; and
Cally rolled through the twilight streets alone....
There had settled down upon her a deep and singular depression. Her
spirit ached, as if from a whipping. She thought a little of the Works;
she had remembered that moment of somewhat painful revelation last year;
but no reflection brought any doubt of her father. Long since she had
reached the sound conclusion that that was the way business was; and if
this fixed belief had been shaken a little now, she was hardly conscious
of it. Papa, of course, did all that was reasonable and right for his
work-people; it was perfectly outrageous that he should be subjected to
abuse in the newspapers. Dr. Vivian, for his part, was conceded a
religious fellow's strange sense of duty, though it required an effort
to concede him that. Still Cally was not thinking of it from these
points of view exactly. It all seemed to be quite personal, somehow....
She gazed through the car-window at the familiar panorama, streets,
houses, and people which she now did not see. It had been, indeed, an
afternoon of snubs, such as she was hardly accustomed to receiving; and
she seemed to have lost something of that wholesome defensive power she
had possessed last year, the power of being righteously indignant.
Time's whirligig had brought her to this,--that she had all but offered
her friendship to Jack Dalhousie's friend, and he had more than repulsed
her. She did feel indignant, a little; but, deeper than that, she felt
wounded, she hardly knew why. After that moment of barrier-less intimacy
in the drawing-room, how could he bear to be so hard?
Her vesper thoughts veered a little, moved from Vivian to Director Pond,
who had also brusquely rebuffed her. It was Mrs. Page's experience that
Cally had had this afternoon, and she too found it humiliating. She had
lately caught a distant glimpse of "work" in terms different from those
which the dull word had worn heretofore: vaguely discerned activities in
which the best women were coöperating usefully with men--coöperating
equally as human beings, and no nonsense; not as women at all. There was
something mysteriously inviting in this. She had felt a bracing absence
of sex in Pond's hectoring catechism and blunt rejection of her. Yes,
and in the cool declaration of war from Dr. Vivian, who had grown so
hard since May. Busy and serious beings these, who would not be deterred
by the flutterings of the doubtless ornamental but completely
useless....
"You're to go back for Mrs. Heth, William."
"Yas'm," said William, and clicked the little door behind her.
Yes, and where there was no sex, there she, Cally Heth, wasn't wanted.
Hard words these, but they seemed to have the ring of truth. She was
wanted as a woman, she was wanted as an ornament, but she appeared to
have no particular purpose as a human being. And the best prospect that
life held out to her to-night was to settle down in a weary world as
Mrs. J. Forsythe Avery.
Cally opened the front door, which was hospitably kept on the latch
during the daytime, and stepped into the dim hall of home. Rarely in her
life had she felt more dispirited. Nevertheless, when she heard a
footfall from the direction of the drawing-room, and was reminded that
papa had already come in, her combative blood plucked up at once. She
wanted to tell her father immediately that he was going to be attacked
in the papers; never fear but he would know what to do about it.
"Papa!" she called. "Where are you? I ..."
Speaking, she had put her head through the drawing-room portières,
rehung that very day: and so it was that her sentence was never ended in
this world. For it was not papa who turned so quickly at the sound of
her voice, and came walking so straight and sure towards her. Not papa,
this splendid and once well-admired figure, now confronting her with
such unmistakable feeling. No, the wonder of all wonders had happened;
and the universe seemed to hang in momentary suspense as Cally Heth
looked again into the eyes of her prince of lovers.
"Carlisle," said Hugo's remembered voice, "I've come back."
She stood unmoving in the doorway, her fingers tightening on the silken
hanging. Her breast was in a tumult of emotions, in which a leaping
exultation was not wanting. But stronger than anything else in this
moment was the uprushing feeling that here was one whom she had well
trusted once, and who had failed her in her direst need.
"So I see," said she.
And continuing to look fixedly at him as he advanced upon her, beginning
to speak, she was shot through with a bitter thought:
"He's found I'm not so badly damaged after all."