How it sounded like an Epitaph, but still she would not cry;
how she thinks of the Beach again, and hugs a Hateful Word to
her Bosom; and Hugo starts suddenly on a sort of
Wedding-Trip.
In her own room Carlisle was seized with a wild desire to cry. Her
spirit, shocked past bearing, demanded this instant relief. But she
fought down the loosening impulses within her, knowing their worse than
uselessness; she had shed her heart's tears for this before now. And her
need now was for strength; strength to meet her mother when need be,
against whom key nor bolt brought privacy: strength, above all, to wipe
out this mark set upon her forehead....
She resisted the impulse to fling herself face downward upon the bed,
which would have been fatal; kept stoutly upon her feet. And presently,
summoning all her courage, she stood at the window and peeped,
pale-faced, between the curtains. All was well down there now. The old
avenger was gone. There were only people passing serenely over the
familiar sidewalk, and the sunlight dying where she had stood and
learned just now that a lie has a long life.
Yes, the Colonel was gone: and with him, so it seemed, all veils and
draperies, all misty sublimations. One doesn't idealize one's self too
much, with curses ringing in one's ears.
Cally leaned weakly against the wall, both gloved palms pressed into the
cold smoothness of her cheeks. Somewhere in the still house a door
suddenly banged shut, and she just repressed a scream....
Old Colonel Dalhousie did not deal in moral subtleties, that was clear.
Regret, penitence, sufferings, tears, or dreamy aspiration: he did not
stay to split such hairs as these. His eye was for the large, the stark
effect. And by the intense singleness of his vision, he had freighted
his opinions with an extraordinary conviction. He had shouted down, as
from a high bench, the world's judgment on the life of Cally Heth.
Twenty-four years and over she had lived in this town; and at the end to
be called a she-devil and a hell-cat.
The girl's bosom heaved. She became intensely busy in the bedroom, by
dint of some determination; taking off her street things and putting
them painstakingly away, straightening objects here or there which did
very well as they were. Flora knocked, and was sent away. On the mantel
was discovered a square lavender box, bearing a blazoned name well known
in another city. Fresh flowers from Canning, these were; and Carlisle,
removing the purple tinsel from the bound stems, carefully disposed the
blossoms in a bowl of water. Once in her goings and comings, she
encountered her reflection in the mirror, and then she quickly averted
her eyes. One glance of recognition between herself and that poor
frightened little thing, and down would come the flood-gates, with
profitless explanations to follow in a certain quarter. She avoided that
catastrophe; but not so easily did she elude the echoing words of her
neighbor the Colonel, which were like to take on the inflection of an
epitaph....
After a time, when the dread of weeping had waned, Cally threw herself
down in her chaise-longue near the window, and covered her eyes with her
hand. And now with all her will--and she had never lacked for will--she
strove to take her mind from what no piety or wit could now amend:
struggling to think and remember how she had tried once, at a price, to
set right that wrong she had done. For other comfort there was none:
what she had written, she had written. She might give her life to the
ways of Dorcas; she might beat her breast and fill her hands with
pluckings of her gay hair. But she could not bring Dalhousie back to
life now, or face his poor father as a girl who had done no wrong....
* * * * *
Life in the House moved on. There was a caller or two, who found the
ladies excused; there was a telephone summons from Miss Evelyn McVey,
whose desire it was to entertain Mr. Canning at dinner, but who now met
only with a maid's message; and then, toward seven, there came mamma
herself, who was, of course, not so lightly to be disposed of.
But Cally had fortified herself for the little visit, and passed the
inspection without mishap. Mrs. Heth was acquiescent enough in her
daughter's desire to dine upstairs, which saved the bother of hunting up
another man in Hugo's stead, though involving regrettable waste of two
covers already prepared. Mamma lingered for fifteen minutes making arch,
tactful inquiries about the afternoon; but she noticed nothing more than
was accountable for by the slight headache to which Carlisle frankly
admitted. The little general's side remarks conceded no doubt whatever
that Hugo would present himself very shortly indeed after dinner, for
resumption of the agreeable matter in hand. They should have the library
to themselves, she promised, company or no company....
Cally dined at a reading-table, set by the fire. Later, when the tray
was gone and she was alone again, she relapsed into thoughts which had
gained unwonted lucidity and vigor.
She had been thinking of the night, a year ago this month, to which
everything in her life since seemed to run straight back. She had not
certainly calculated the ruin of Dalhousie that night: rather her lack
was that she had hardly cared what she did to him. In that narrow circle
of engrossments where she had moved, mistaking it for the living
universe, the great want, so it seemed now, was that she had never been
asked to measure herself by moral standards at all. What she got: this
was all that people looked at here, and according to this she had well
managed her affairs, snug in the snugness of the horse-leech's
daughters. She had been all for the walled little island,--as she had
heard it called,--the island of the upward bound, where self-propelment
was the test of right or wrong, and a marriage well above her the
touchstone of a girl's sound morality. On this island such as Jack
Dalhousie had no merit. What simpler than to kick him off, and turn away
with your fingers in your ears?...
Improbable people these, no doubt, if you were of those who judged
people by what they did, and never by what they had; hell-cats,
perhaps, if you happened to be a father thus made sonless....
Her abasement now fairly met the portrait of her sketched by a stranger
two hours since; outran what another stranger had said to her, one night
in a summer-house. She looked back over a year, and seemed to see
herself as truly one empty within, a poor little thing; common in her
whole outlook, vulgar in her soul.... Yes, _vulgar_. Let her hug the
hateful word to her bosom. How else could she have been made to feel so
again and again, by an obscure youth who had no power over anybody but
that he had kept his own face turned toward the stars?...
And when Cally's thoughts turned toward this present, struggling to show
beyond doubt that that girl and this were not one, they ran perpetually
into that new cloud of her own weakness which had unrolled above her
to-day, and now spread and blackened over the skies.
And yet she felt that it was not cowardice that tied her hands against
the fainting girls in the bunching-room. Her strung nerves had carried
it all deeper than that. She had spied on her father, found him out in
guilt; he, it seemed, must for years have been leading a double life
that would not bear looking at. How bring herself to confront papa, who
had always been so affectionate and generous to her, with his discovered
secret?...
If she but had some right, even, some standing from which to speak....
And here her new resolve was that when she saw Dr. Vivian at the
Settlement next week, she would consult him directly: now asking him to
say, not that she had no responsibilities about her father's business,
but that she had them in abundance.
But deeper than this, beneath all the flutterings of her mind, there ran
the increasing sense that, whatever the logic of it might be,
responsibility was on her nevertheless: the supreme responsibility put
upon free beings by the trust of a friend....
* * * * *
Hugo, it was presumable, would be detained with his Mr. Deming until the
latter's departure, or near it. He could hardly appear before nine
o'clock, or even nine-thirty; and perhaps he might not come at all.
Cally had felt unable to agree with her mother's theory that she was
required to sit awaiting Hugo's convenience there. At all events, she
had early resolved to settle the point by definitely "retiring" before
his possible arrival; relying upon a worse aching head to justify her
with mamma, who was not of the few to be favored with fuller
confidences.
But a little after eight, when this resolve was almost ready to shape
into the deed, the sensible reasoning on which it was based was suddenly
upset. The maid Flora came, bringing a new message from the preoccupied
lover, brief but decisive.
The business entanglements, it appeared, had only got worse with
talking. Hugo, beyond all expectation, found himself compelled to go
back to Washington with his law-partner to-night; possibly to go on to
New York to-morrow. Would Carlisle accordingly arrange to see him now,
for a few moments?
"_Now?_"
"Yas'm, he say as soon as you c'd make it convenient."
The girl had risen sharply in the first complete surprise of Flora's
message; she walked hastily across her floor. But having done these
things, she did not at once give the obviously due reply. She stood by
her dressing-table, staring fixedly at the colored woman, the aimless
fingers of her left hand continually pulling out and putting back the
silver top of a squat cut-glass bottle. She appeared to be thinking,
weighing pros and cons: processes surely unnecessary to a pasteboard
actor, sliding smoothly toward a manifest destiny.
She stood this way so long and so silent that Flora prompted with a
giggle and further information.
"Miss Cyahlile, he say if you was to answer no, to say could he please
speak to you a minute on the 'phone."
Upon that Miss Carlisle was seen to replace the bottle stopper with
consciousness of movement, and to turn her slate-blue eyes briefly
toward the ceiling, with no movement of her head at all.
"Very well ... Say that I'll see him at half-past eight, for a few
minutes."
Flora, naturally, was not a woman without understanding the sign
language of her sex. It might be that she had learned the color of the
Canning money--and she had--but her dusky heart, like yours or mine, was
not for sale.
"Yas'm--certny ... Yas'm. Or, Miss Cyahlile--I _mout_ just say we 're
mighty sorry--but not knowin' he was expected, and you feelin' po'ly an'
all--you just this minute went to baid--an'--"
"No!--do as I say," said the young mistress, quite sharply. But, as her
faithful friend turned away, she added in another voice: "You're a good
girl, Flora.... Be sure to say just for a few minutes."
After the solitude and meditation came action at speed.
The maid vanished, the mistress slipped off her flowered negligee and
drew hot water in the bathroom. She proceeded, with no want of
experience or skill, to make herself beautiful for her lover: the lover
who had seemed over a gulf from her this afternoon, and now what worlds
away.... And if the rites were done somewhat hurriedly perforce, there
was no lack of conscientiousness here. She, who had said that she had
never paid her way through life, could only pay in what coin she had....
Events moved quickly. Flora, who was "on the doorbell" to-night because
of the dinner-party, was soon back to say that Mr. Canning was in the
library. She was sent ahead to make sure that the coast was clear.
Cally, in a soft black house-dress with an apricot waist-ribbon, went
down the back-stairs. She passed through the busy pantry, where Moses
and Annie were just ready for an expert entrance with the fish; went
through the back hall, where Flora stood flashing her teeth beside the
closed door of the dining-room; came to the side door of the library.
This door Cally opened, and shut it again behind her....
It was a massive and dark-beamed room, softened now with the light of
lamps and fire. Hugo stood in the middle of it, turning quickly at the
sound of the door. He, whose afternoon had taken a course so different
from his planning, still wore the clothes he had had on then, a dark
gray walking-suit which well became his fine-figured masculinity. Over
his brow there hovered a vexed business frown, nor did this altogether
vanish as he advanced upon Carlisle, a lover's welcome springing
imperiously into his eyes.
"Isn't this the devil's own luck?... Deming insists it all depends on
me."
"You go at nine-thirty?"
"He says he'll manacle me if necessary. It's confoundedly important, you
see--there are large interests involved. You know I wouldn't go
otherwise. Don't you?"
"And to-morrow you go on to New York?"
"No!--There's only the remotest chance. I'll go bail to be back here
to-morrow at five o'clock."
"Oh!... I--the message I got--"
"I put that in only to make absolutely sure of getting you.... Growing
cunning, you see."
"Oh--I didn't understand," said Cally, colorlessly, continuing to look
down at her pink fingernails.
She seemed to think of nothing further to say, but that appeared to make
no great difference. Hugo moved nearer. If he had remembered his thought
about her being too sure of him, it may be that the sight of her had
rushed his senses, as it had often done before.
"You were so unlike your natural dear self this afternoon," he said, on
the wooing note; and suddenly he had possessed himself of both her
hands. "To-night--and we've only such a little time--you are going to
make it all up to me ... Aren't you?"
Finding herself captured, the girl hastily raised eyes dark with
trouble, looking at her lover for the first time. And so looking, she
took her hands from his grasp with a hastiness which might have been a
little rasping to a morbidly sensitive man.
"Don't!--please don't! I--don't like to be touched.... I--I can only act
as I feel, Hugo."
She turned away hurriedly, passed him and went over to the fireplace.
There she stood quite silent before the dull red glow, locking and
unlocking her slim fingers, and within her a spreading coldness.
Behind her she heard the thundering feet.
"I hoped, you see," said Hugo's voice, disappointed, but hardly
chagrined, "that you would be feeling a little more--well, like your own
natural self, after your rest ... Particularly as all our plans for
these two days have been so upset."
She replied, after a pause, in a noticeably constrained voice: "I
haven't said that I don't feel my natural self. That's only your--your
interpretation of what you don't like.... I--that seems to be just the
trouble between us."
"Now, now!--my _dear_ Cally!" said Hugo, soothing, if somewhat wearied
to see still another conversation drifting toward the argumentative.
"There's no trouble between us at all. I, for one, have put our little
disagreement to-day out of my head entirely. I do feel that there's not
much happiness in these so-called modernisms, but don't let's spoil our
few minutes.... Why, Carlisle!" said Hugo, in another voice. "Why,
what's the matter?"
She had astonished him by suddenly laying her arm upon the mantel, and
burying her face in the curve of it. So close Canning stood now that he
could have taken her in his arms without moving; but some quality in her
pose discouraged the idea that she might desire comfort that way.
Carlisle's difficulties, indeed, were by no means over for the day. The
conviction which had come upon her with the first full view of her
lover's face--where Colonel Dalhousie seemed also to have set his
afflicting mark--had suddenly grown overwhelming. She had made her draft
for payment against an account where there were no more funds.
"Are you ill?"
"No," she answered, straightening at once.... "I ... I'm afraid--this is
my natural self."
"Something troubles you?" said Hugo, with penetration.
She nodded, and turned away.
She had always been capable of independent action; it was her chief
strength, however mamma might speak of flare-ups. But never in her
womanhood had she felt less in tune for heroics and a scene. Life was
shaking to pieces all around her.
"Hugo," she began, with difficulty, playing at arranging a slide of
books on the table with hands like two blocks of ice ... "I--I
hesitated about coming down at all, but now--I think ... As you are
going away to-night, and would be coming back to-morrow entirely on my
account ... I think I ought--"
"Why, my dear! What's all this about?... Do you mean you've let your
feelings be hurt by my going off? Why, you--"
"It isn't that."
The nature of his understanding seemed to stir something in her, and she
went on in a rather steadier voice:
"I've been thinking of something you said to me once--that I wasn't the
girl you had asked to marry you ... It's taken me a long time, but I've
learned that that was the truth. I'm not--"
She was checked, to her surprise, by a soft laugh.
"So that's been it!... I never imagined--no wonder!... Why, Cally! How
could you suppose I meant it? Don't you know I was angry that day?--off
my head? Would I--"
"But it's true! I'm not that girl at all--I feel differently--I--"
"Well! Let's not waste good time in mare's nests of _that_ sort. Why,
dear little girl, would I be here now, if I wasn't satisfied as no other
man on earth--"
"But I'm not satisfied, Hugo."
Cally turned now, faced him fully, a faint color coming into her cheek.
In the man's handsome eyes she had surprised an unmistakable
complacence.
"I'm not satisfied," she said, hurriedly, "to know that we are miles
apart, and drifting further every minute. Don't you see there's no
sympathy--no understanding--between us? What interests me, appeals to
me, what is really my natural self--that only annoys you, makes
you think--"
"I've been at fault there, I own," he interrupted, soothingly, nodding
his head respectfully up and down. "To tell the truth, I've been so
immensely interested in _you_,--in Carlisle the woman,--that I haven't
seemed able to make proper allowance for your--your other interests. I
promise to turn over a new leaf there. And, on your side, I am sure, you
do realize, Carlisle--"
"Hugo," said the girl, desperately, "you don't understand me. I am
trying to say that I can't marry you. I cannot."
Then the faint hum of voices from the dining-room down the hall became
quite audible in the library. By the ebbing of color from Hugo's virile
face, Cally knew that she had penetrated his satisfaction at last; but
by the look in his eyes she learned that she had lodged no conviction
in him.
"I hesitated when you asked me in September," said she, slowly, and
trying her best to make her voice sound firm. "I should have made up my
mind sooner--I've been to blame. I'm sorry to--"
He said in a slightly hoarsened voice: "What has happened since I left
you this afternoon?"
What, indeed? Everything seemed to have happened.
"Something did happen ... But I--I don't think there's any use to talk
about it."
"Tell me what has happened. I have a right to know."
"I will, if you wish--but it won't do any good.... I went out, to my
cousins'. And at the door, as I came back, I--I met Colonel Dalhousie.
He stopped me ... expressed his opinion of me. He said things
that I--I--"
She stopped precipitately, with a break in her voice; turned from him.
"Oh!--I understand ... Poor little girl."
At the mention of the name of ill omen, Canning's strong heart had
missed a beat. He had thought the old corpse buried past exhumation; the
sudden rising of the ghost to walk had staggered for an instant even his
superb incredulities. But with that sudden tremulousness of hers, he was
himself again, or almost, with a new light upon her whole strange and
unreliable demeanor. Small wonder, after such an encounter, if she was
brought to the verge of hysteria, her feminine reason unseated, her mind
wandering mistily over the forgotten past....
He tried to take at least one hand in loving sympathy, but found that
the matter could not be arranged.
"The shock has upset you--poor darling! I understand. No wonder!..."
"No--I'm not upset ... I--Hugo, I can't marry you. I'm truly
sorry--I've tried--but now I'm quite sure--"
"But this is madness," said Hugo's queer voice. "Don't you see it is as
you say the words?... Not marry me--because an old ruffian waylaid you,
called you--hard names--"
"No, but because what he said was true. No--of course that's not the
reason ... I must tell you the truth ..."
Cally lifted misty eyes, beneath which faint circles were beginning to
appear, and said with sadness:
"Hugo, I don't love you."
Then she watched, painfully, the last remnants of his assurance drop
away from his face: and after that, she saw, with a certain fear, that
she had still to make herself believed.
Hugo, supported not merely by his own justifiable confidences but by her
mother's affirmations, could, indeed, put no credence in his ears. Many
explanations were possible for this extraordinary feminine perversity;
she had happened to mention the one explanation that was not possible.
"You don't know what you're saying," he began, huskily, out of the
silence. "You're not yourself at all nowadays ... Full of new little
ideas. You've taken a whim, because an old rascal ... whom I shall
punish as he deserves--"
"No ... That helped me to make up my mind, perhaps. But I've learned
I've never loved you--since you left me last year."
Cally moved away from Hugo, not caring to witness the breaking-up of his
self-control. She leaned against the heavy mahogany table, clenching a
tiny handkerchief between chill little hands. If the months had brought
her perfect vengeance on the man who had once failed her in her need,
she was finding it, indeed, a joyless victory.
"I'm to blame for not telling you before--when you were here last
month," she said, with some agitation ... "Only I really didn't know my
own mind ... All summer I seemed to ... just to take it for granted
that--everything was the same--that I still cared for you. But--Hugo, I
don't. I'm sorrier than I can say for what has been my fault...."
The young man had been standing like one in a trancelike illness, who
can hear, indeed, with horrible distinctness, but can neither move nor
speak. But now the increasing finality of her words seemed all at once
to galvanize him; he shook himself slightly and took one heavy
step forward.
"What you need is a protector, little girl--a man. I know about the
summer--I suffered, too.... Of course. And in the loneliness--you've let
yourself be affected.... The unrest of the day--"
"No, no! _Please_," said she, almost ready to scream--"don't think this
is one of my new little ideas you speak of. I--it's true that we don't
seem to think alike about things.... But I'd never have noticed that at
all if I loved you. I'd want to think and do only as you wished. But
I don't--"
"I've spoiled you ... letting you think you could have your way with
me," said Hugo, in his thick and gritty voice. "You're mad to-night,
little girl ... aren't responsible for what you say...."
Flicked in her spirit, she broke across his argument with a changed
voice and gaze.
"Why is it madness not to love you?"
"It's not a thing to argue about now, I say. You do love me ... I know
it. You'll marry me next month, that I swear. Why--"
"No!--when I love, I want to look up, and when I marry, I'll marry above
me...."
That checked his queer truculence; and Cally, desperate with the need to
drive home her meaning, swept on with no more nervousness.
"And--don't you see?--I've not been able to look up to you since that
day last year.... The day--I'm sorry to have to say it--when you came
all the way down from New York to show me that you didn't care for a
woman who was getting new little ideas about telling the truth...."
Canning's face was the color of chalk, his look increasingly stony; in
his eyes strange passions mounted. Now he seemed, to intend to say
something, but the girl's words flowed with gathering intensity.
"Why, think what you did that day, Hugo!--_think, think!_ If I needed a
protector and a man,--and I did,--that was the time for you to show me
how protectors and men can act and love. If I was wrong, it seems to me
that was the time of all times when you ought to have stood by me,
protected me. But I was _right_--don't you know I was?... I--it was the
first time I had ever thought about doing right--and _you threw me over
for it_.... Of course I know there was a quarrel, but--you know
perfectly well what you said. You said then, just as you say now, that I
was shocked out of my senses, didn't know what I was saying. And then
you said that people would point at me to the longest day I lived, so
the thing to do was to hush it all up, or else I wasn't the girl you had
asked to be your wife. Anything--anything--except that I should tell the
truth.... So you went off and left me to bear it all alone. And then,
when my heart had been broken into little pieces, when I'd cried my eyes
out a hundred times, then, when all the trouble was over, and people
weren't cutting me on the street,--then you came back. And even then you
never said once that you were ashamed, or sorry for the way you'd
treated me. You just came back, when I'd fought it all out without you,
and whistled, and thought that I'd tumble into your arms.... Oh, it's
natural, I suppose, for a woman to lie and be mean, and afraid of what
people will say--for that seems to be the--the way they're brought
up.... But--but--"
Her voice, which had begun to trail a little, dropped off into silence.
She turned away; made a visible effort to control herself. And then
there floated again into the still room the sounds of muffled revelry:
strong Mrs. Heth making merry with her friends, a few of the best
people....
"But I only hurt your feelings for nothing," said the girl, in quite a
gentle voice.... "Hugo, try to forgive me if I've done you any wrong.
But ... you--you have your train to make. Don't you think you'd
better go now?"
Hugo's extraordinary reply was to seize her in his arms.
"Go?... Yes, and take you with me ... you little witch. Why, you're
raving, little witch," said the hoarse, violent voice in her ear. "Gone
out of your head with notions.... D'you think I'll let your life and
mine be spoiled for a few minutes' crazy madness? You need to remember
you're a woman, that's all.... Don't struggle. It's no use."
Her wild efforts to release herself, indeed, only drew his embrace
tighter. His cheek rested upon her hair.
"Don't struggle, little witch. You've had your head too long. I'll make
up your mind for you. You're going to marry me now. To-night. Don't tire
yourself so. It's all settled. You belong to me--you see that now,
don't you?..."
Now his hand was beneath her chin; he raised the still face she had kept
so resolutely buried against his breast. And Cally felt his burning kiss
upon her forehead, her cheek, upon lips that would nevermore be his.
"Little temptress ... you were so anxious for me to love you last
year.... Doesn't this teach you that I'll never give you up? It's all
settled now. We'll be married at once. I'll hold you this way--kiss you
this way--till you learn to do what I say. Then you'll go up and put on
travelling-clothes. Never mind lug...."
His wedding-trip ended in the middle of a word. His clasp had been
weakened by that hand he had raised, and with the sudden strength of
desperation his bride had broken from him. In an instant she had put the
table between them.
Over ten feet of lamplit space, the lovers of yesteryear regarded each
other. Both were white, both trembling. The girl now suffered a brief
collapse; her face dropped into her upraised hands, through which,
presently, her voice came brokenly:
"_Go!_... Go, I beg you...."
Canning stood panting, shaken and speechless. Upon him was the last
measure of defeat. He had staked his passion and his pride in the
supreme attack, and had been crushingly repulsed. Doubt not that he read
the incredible portents in the heavens now. His face went from chalk to
leaden gray.
He drew his tongue once across his lips, and said, just articulately:
"If I go--out of this room--alone ... as God lives, you'll never see me
again."
It must have been something in Hugo's difficult voice, surely nothing in
the words, that set a chord to stirring in Cally. She took her eyes from
her hands, glanced once at his subtly distorted face. And then she stood
silent by the barrier table, looking down, knotting and unknotting her
yellow sash-ends....
That other night of humiliation in the library, which she had never been
able to forget, had risen swiftly on the wings of memory. But,
curiously, she felt no such uprush of shame now; her fury mysteriously
ebbed from her. Even in this moment, still trembling from his familiar
handling, still with the frightening sense of her life going to ruin
about her, she felt a rising pity for her prince of lovers whom time and
circumstance had brought to this....
"Perhaps," said she, out of the silence, in almost a natural tone, "I
ought to feel very--angry and--and indignant.... But I don't. I only
feel sad.... Hugo, why need there be any bitterness between us? We've
both made a mistake, that's all, and I feel it's been my fault from the
beginning. If you seem to take me--rather--lightly.... I must have
taught you to think of me that way.... And you'll soon see how--how
superficial my attraction for you was, soon forget...."
Strangely, these mild words seemed to affect Hugo more than anything
done or said before. In fact, he appeared unable to bear them. He had
checked her speech suddenly by lifting his hand, in a vague way, to his
head; and now, without a word, he turned away, walking blindly
toward the door.
She, in silence, followed his going with dark eyes that looked half
ready to weep.
By the door into the hall, through which she had come a little while
before, the broken young man paused. His face was stony gray, touched
with livid streaks. Standing, he looked unseeingly about the room,
around and over her; then at last at her. It had seemed to be his
intention to say something, to claim the woman's privilege of the last
word. But now, when the moment arrived, there came no words.
For once Hugo must be indifferent to anti-climax, must fail to leave a
lady's presence with an air. Standing and looking, he suddenly flung out
one arm in a wild, curious gesture; and on that he opened the door,
very quickly.
The door shut again, quietly enough. And that was all. The beginning at
the Beach had touched an end indeed. Hugo was gone. His feet would
thunder this way no more.
* * * * *
But the latter end of these things was not yet. One doesn't, of course,
kick out of one's groove for nothing.
Cally, returning after a time to her own room, did not go at once to
bed, much as she would have liked to do that. She sat up, fully dressed,
by a dying fire, waiting for what must come. She waited till quarter to
eleven, so long did the dinner-guests linger downstairs. But it came at
last, just as she had known it would: on gliding heels, not knocking,
beaming just at first....
The interview lasted till hard upon midnight. When it ended, both women
were in tears. Cally retired to a fitful rest. At nine o'clock next
morning, papa telephoned for Dr. Halstead, who came and found
temperature, and prescribed a pale-green medicine, which was to be
shaken well before using. The positive command was that the patient
should not get out of bed that day.
And Cally did not get up that day, or the next, or the next. She lay
abed, pale and uncommunicative, denying herself even to Mattie Allen,
but less easily shutting herself from the operations of her mind.
And at night, when the troubled brain slips all control, she dreamed
continually of horrors. Horrors in which neither Hugo nor mamma had
part: of giant machines crashing through floors upon screaming girls, of
great crowded buildings falling down with frightful uproars and bedlam
shrieks. Through these phantasms the tall figure of Colonel Dalhousie
perpetually moved, smiling softly. But when Cally met the doctor of the
Dabney House in her dreams, the trust was gone from his eyes.