V. V.'s Eyes

by Henry Sydnor Harrison

In these days the House of Heth was in a continual bustle. On Tuesday next--a week to a day from the Settlement meeting--the ladies were to depart for New York, Hugo, and Europe, the Trousseau and the Announcement, to return no more till mid-September. On the same day the titular master of the house was to go off for a five days' fishing junket, thence flying to New York for the "seeing off," and soon thereafter starting out for a three weeks' business trip to the Far West. Along with the various domestic problems raised by this programme, there were all the routine duties of the season to be attended to. Cold-weather things must still be salted down with camphor balls and packed away; costly pictures provided with muslin wrappers; drawing-room furniture with linen slip-covers; rooms cleaned and locked up, doors and windows screened and awninged. Mrs. Heth went dashing from one bit of generalship to another, and telephoned ten thousand times a day. Nevertheless she kept eyes in her head, and accordingly she observed to Mr. Heth one starlit night, as they sat a deux on the little front balcony where flowering window-boxes so refinedly concealed one from the public view:

"I never saw a girl so absolutely naive about showing her feelings. She began to droop the minute he left the house, and hasn't been her natural self since.... Irritable!--till you can't say good morning without her snapping your head off."

"Maybe, it's the weather," suggested Mr. Heth, who wore a white flannel suit and fanned himself with a dried palm-leaf. "And I reckon, too, she's feeling sorry to leave her old father for such a long time. Four months--hio!"

"Cally's not the girl to get black rings under her eyes for things like that."

She added presently: "It's a pure love-match, which is naturally a gratification to me, who brought the whole thing about. 'Thank God, Cally, you've got a mother,' I said to her only the other day. But I do say there's such a thing as carrying love just a little too far."

Cally, meantime, while affecting no interest in summer clothes for chairs, kept as closely occupied with her own affairs, social activities and preparations for the brilliant absence, as mamma did with hers. Much time went, too, to her correspondence with Canning, who wrote her daily fat delightful letters, all breathing ardent anticipation of her approaching visit in his own city. And back to Canning, she wrote even fatter letters every morning in mamma's sitting-room, dear letters (he thought them) in which she told him every single thing except what she was really thinking about....

And why shouldn't she tell Hugo that also? Once or twice she really came very near doing it. For as her mind had become released from her first acute apprehensions, it had seemed to insist on turning inward a little; and there grew within her a sense of unhappiness, of loneliness, a feeling of her poor little self against the world. She longed for some one to explain it all to, to justify herself before; and who more appropriate in this connection than her lover? That Hugo might have been shocked, and perhaps disgusted, to have the misunderstanding discovered to him by way of the Dalhousies' megaphone was, indeed, likely; but to have her quietly tell it to him, as it really happened, with the proper stress on circumstances and gossip, would be quite another matter. She felt almost certain that he would agree with her; it once that it would be a great mistake to rake up all this now, when it had all blown over and Dalhousie was doing so splendidly down in Texas....

However, Cally procrastinated. And then, Sunday morning in church, as she sat pensively wishing for a confidant, it came upon her somewhat startlingly that she already had one: Dr. Vivian was her confidant. Did he not know more about her than anybody else in the world?...

The simple thought seemed to cure her instantly of her wish. She had tried having a confidant and it had brought her to this; henceforward let her keep her own counsel. (So she mused, walking homeward in the brilliant sunshine and light airs with J. Forsythe Avery, who had just conquered his pique over his rejection last January.) That her one confidant's honorable silence expressed his trust that she herself would "tell" was possibly true; but that, in this no-quarter conflict between them, was merely so much the worse for him. She would not think of him at all. She had run away from him every time she had seen him; now she had but to do it once more, and all would be as if it had never been....

At the Sabbath dinner-table, which was to-day uninvaded by guests, the Heths' talk was animated. The imminent separation brought a certain softness into the family atmosphere; papa basked in it. He had spent his Sunday morning playing sixteen holes of golf at the Country Club, and would have easily made the full round but for slicing three new balls into the pond on the annoying seventeenth drive. This had provoked him into smashing his driver, as he had a score of only eighty-eight at that point, which was well below his personal bogey. Even mamma affected interest in her spouse's explanations of how it all happened.