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[Illustration: Paul stood by her, looking down into her eyes, bending
over her, smiling, pressing, confident, masterful. (Page 96)]
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THE SQUIRREL-CAGE
By
DOROTHY CANFIELD
With Illustrations By
JOHN ALONZO WILLIAMS
New York
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
1912
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright, 1911, 1912,
By
THE RIDGWAY COMPANY
Copyright, 1912,
By
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
Published March, 1912
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CONTENTS
BOOK I
THE FAIRY PRINCESS
CHAPTER PAGE
I An American Family 3
II American Beauties 12
III Picking up the Threads 22
IV The Dawn 32
V The Day Begins 42
VI Lydia's Godfather 55
VII Outside the Labyrinth 61
VIII The Shadow of the Coming Event 78
IX Father and Daughter 88
X Casus Belli 99
BOOK II
IN THE LOCOMOTIVE CAB
XI What is Best for Lydia 115
XII A Sop to the Wolves 122
XIII Lydia Decides in Perfect Freedom 131
XIV Mid-Season Nerves 139
XV A Half-Hour's Liberty 154
XVI Engaged to be Married 165
XVII Card-Dealing and Patent Candles 177
BOOK III
A SUITABLE MARRIAGE
XVIII Two Sides to the Question 193
XIX Lydia's New Motto 207
XX An Evening's Entertainment 215
XXI An Element of Solidity 226
XXII The Voices in the Wood 233
XXIII For Ariadne's Sake 244
XXIV "Through Pity and Terror Effecting a
Purification of the Heart" 261
XXV A Black Mile-stone 270
XXVI A Hint from Childhood 277
XXVII Lydia Reaches Her Goal and has Her Talk with Her Husband 289
XXVIII "The American Man" 307
XXIX ".........In Tragic Life, God Wot, No Villain Need be.
Passions Spin the Plot" 318
XXX Tribute to the Minotaur 328
BOOK IV
BUT IT IS NOT TOO LATE FOR ARIADNE
XXXI Protection from the Minotaur 337
XXXII As Ariadne Saw It 342
XXXIII What is Best for the Children? 351
XXXIV Through the Long Night 359
XXXV The Swaying Balance 365
XXXVI Another Day Begins 369
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ILLUSTRATIONS
Paul stood by her, looking down into her eyes,
bending over her, smiling, pressing, confident,
masterful (Page 96) Frontispiece
PAGE
"You say beautiful things!" he replied quietly. "My
rough quarters are glorified for me" 69
"No, no; I can't--see him--I can't stand any more--" 137
"I see everything now," she went on. "He could not stop." 272
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THE SQUIRREL-CAGE
BOOK I
THE FAIRY PRINCESS
CHAPTER I
AN AMERICAN FAMILY
The house of the Emery family was a singularly good example of the
capacity of wood and plaster and brick to acquire personality. It was
the physical symbol of its owners' position in life; it was the history
of their career, written down for all to see, and as such they felt in
it the most justifiable pride. When Mr. and Mrs. Emery, directly after
their wedding in a small Central New York village, had gone West to Ohio
they had spent their tiny capital in building a small story-and-a-half
cottage, ornamented with the jig-saw work and fancy turning popular in
1872, and this had been the nucleus of their present rambling,
picturesque, many-roomed home. Every step in the long series of changes
which had led from its first state to its last had a profound and
gratifying significance for the Emerys, and its final condition,
prosperous, modern, sophisticated, with the right kind of woodwork in
every room that showed, with the latest, most unobtrusively artistic
effects in decoration, represented their culminating well-earned
position in the inner circle of the best society of Endbury.
Moreover, they felt that just as the house had been attained with
effort, self-denial and careful calculations, yet still without
incurring debt, so their social position had been secured by unremitting
diligence and care, but with no loss of self-respect or even of dignity.
They were honestly proud both of their house and of their list of
acquaintances and saw no reason to regard them as less worthy
achievements of an industrious life than their four creditable grown-up
children or Judge Emery's honorable reputation at the bar. In their
youth they had conceived of certain things as worth attaining. They had
worked hard for these things and their unabashed pleasure in possessing
them had the vivid and substantial quality which comes from a keen
memory of battles with a world none too ready to grant human desires.
The two older children, George and Marietta, could remember those early
struggling days with almost as fresh an emotion as that of their
parents. Indeed, Marietta, now a competent, sharp-eyed matron of
thirty-two, could not see the most innocuous colored lithograph without
an uncontrollable wave of bitterness, so present to her mind was the
period when they painfully groped their way out of chromos.
The date of that epoch coincided with the date of their first
acquaintance with the Hollisters. The Hollisters were Endbury's First
Family; literally so, for they had come up from their farm in Kentucky
to settle in Endbury when it was but a frontier post. It was a part of
their superiority over other families that their traditions took
cognizance of the time when great stumps from the primeval forest stood
in what was now Endbury's public square, the hub of interurban trolley
traffic, whence the big, noisy cars started for their infinitely
radiating journeys over the flat, fertile country about the little city.
The particular Mrs. Hollister who, at the time the Emerys began to
pierce the upper crust, was the leader of Endbury society, had discarded
chromos as much as five years before. Mrs. Emery and Marietta, newly
admitted to the honor of her acquaintance, wondered to themselves at the
cold monotony of her black and white engravings. The artlessness of this
wonder struck shame to their hearts when they chanced to learn that the
lady had repaid it with a worldly-wise amusement at their own
highly-colored waterfalls and snow-capped mountain-peaks. Marietta
could recall as piercingly as if it were yesterday, in how crestfallen a
chagrin she and her mother had gazed at their parlor after this
incident, their disillusioned eyes open for the first time to the
futility of its claim to sophistication. As for the incident that had
led to the permanent retiring from their table of the monumental
salt-and-pepper "caster" which had been one of their most prized wedding
presents, the Emerys refused to allow themselves to remember it, so
intolerably did it spell humiliation.
Even the oldest son, prosperous, well-established manufacturer that he
was, could not recall without a shudder his first dinner-party. A branch
of the Hollisters had moved next door to the Emerys and, to Mrs. Emery's
great satisfaction, an easy neighborly acquaintance had sprung up
between the two families. Secure in this familiarity, and not
distinguishing the immense difference between a chance invitation to
drop in to dinner and a formal invitation to dine, the young
business-man had almost forgotten the date for which he had been bidden.
Remembering it with a start, he had gone straight from his office to the
house of his hosts, supposing that he would be able, as he had done many
times before, to wash his face and hands in the bath-room and brush his
hair in the room of the son of the house.
The sight of a black man in evening dress, who opened the door to him
instead of the usual maid, sent a vague apprehension through his
preoccupied mind, but it was not until he found himself in the room set
apart for the masculine guests and saw everyone arrayed in
"swallow-tails," as he thought of them, that he realized what he had
done. The emotion of the moment was one that made a mark on his life.
He had an instant's wild notion of making some excuse to go home and
dress, for his plight was by no means due to necessity. He had a correct
outfit of evening clothes, bought at the urgent command of his mother,
which he had worn several times at public dinners given by the city
Board of Trade and once at a dancing party at the home of the head of
his firm. However, the hard sense which made him successful in his
business kept him from a final absurdity now. He had been seen, and he
decided grimly that he would be, on the whole, a shade more laughable if
he appeared later in a changed costume.
He was twenty-one years old at that time; he considered himself a man
grown. He had been in business for five years and his foot was already
set firmly on the ladder of commercial success on which he was to mount
high, but not for nothing had he felt about him all his life the
inextinguishable desire of his family to outgrow rusticity. He chided
himself for unmanly pettiness, but the fact remained that throughout the
interminable evening the sight of his gray striped trousers or colored
cuffs affected him to a chagrin that was like a wave of physical nausea.
Four years later he had married a handsome young lady from among the
Hollister connections, and, moving away to Cleveland, where no memory of
his antecedents could handicap him, had begun a new social career as
eminently successful as his rapid commercial expansion. He forced
himself sometimes to think of that long-past evening as one presses on a
scar to learn how much soreness is left in an old wound, and he smiled
at the little tragedy of egotism it had been to him. But it was a wry
smile.
A brighter recollection to all the Emerys was the justly complacent and
satisfied remembrance of the house grounds during the first really
successful social event they had achieved. It was a lawn-fete, given for
the benefit of St. Luke's church, which Mrs. Emery and Marietta had
recently joined. Socially, it was the first fruits of their conversion
from Congregationalism. The weather was fine, the roses were out, the
very best people were there, the bazaar was profitable, and the dowager
of the Hollister matrons had spoken warm words of admiration of the
competent way in which the occasion had been managed to Mrs. Emery,
smiling and flushed in an indomitably self-respecting pleasure. The
older Emerys still sometimes spoke of that afternoon and evening as
parents remember the hour when their baby first walked alone, with
something of the same mixture of pride in the later achievements of the
child and of tenderness for its early weakness.
The youngest of the Emerys, many years the junior of her brothers and
sister, knew nothing at all of the anxious bitter-sweet of these early
endeavors for sophistication. By the time she came to conscious,
individual life the summit had been virtually reached. It is not to be
denied that Lydia had witnessed several abrupt changes in the family
ideal of household decoration or of entertaining, but since they were
exactly contemporaneous with similar changes on the part of the
Hollisters and other people in their circle, these revolutions of taste
brought with them no sense of humiliation. Such, for instance, was the
substitution for carpets of hardwood floors and rugs as oriental as the
purse would allow. Lydia could remember gorgeously flowered carpets on
every Emery floor, but since they also covered all the prosperous floors
in town at the same time, it was not more painful to have found them
attractive than to have worn immensely large sleeves or preposterously
blousing shirt waists, to have ridden bicycles, or read E. P. Roe, or
anything else that everybody used to do and did no more. She could
remember, also, when charades and book-parties were considered amusing
pastimes for grown-ups, but in passing beyond these primitive tastes the
Emerys had been well abreast of their contemporaries. The last charade
party had not been held in _their_ parlors, they congratulated
themselves.
A philosophic observer who had known the history of Mrs. Emery's life
might have found something pathetic in her pleasure at Lydia's
light-hearted jesting at the funny old things people used to think
pretty and the absurd pursuits they used to think entertaining. It was
to her a symbol that her daughter had escaped what had caused her so
much suffering, the uneasy, self-distrusting dread lest she might still
be finding pretty things that up-to-date people thought grotesque; lest
suddenly what she had toiled so painfully to obtain should somehow turn
out to be not the "right thing" after all. Marietta did not recall more
vividly than did her mother the trying period that had elapsed between
their new enlightenment on the subject of chromos and the day when an
unexpected large fee from a client of Mr. Emery (not yet Judge) enabled
them to hang their Protestant walls with engravings of pagan gods and
Roman Catholic saints. For their problem had never been the simple one
of merely discovering the right thing. There had always been added to it
the complication of securing the right thing out of an income by no
means limitless. The head of the household had enjoyed the success that
might have been predicted from his whole-souled absorption in his
profession, but Judge Emery came of old-fashioned rural stock with
inelastic ideas of honesty, and though he was more than willing to toil
early and late to supply funds for his family and satisfy whatever form
of ambition his women-folk might decree to be the best one, he was not
willing to take advantage of the perquisites of his position, and never,
as the phrase in the town ran, "made on the side." Of his temptations
and of his stout resistance to them, his wife and children knew no more,
naturally, than of any of the other details of his professional life,
which, according to the custom of their circle, were as remote and
hidden from them as if he had departed each morning after his hearty
early breakfast into another planet; but his wife was proud of the
integrity which she divined in her husband and, as she often declared
roundly to Marietta, would not have exchanged his good name for a much
larger income.
Indeed, the acridity which for Marietta lingered about the recollection
of their efforts to make themselves over did not exist in the more amply
satisfied mind of her mother. The difference showed itself visibly in
the contrast between the daughter's face, stamped with a certain tired,
unflagging intensity of endeavor, and the freshness of the older woman.
At thirty-two, Marietta looked, perhaps, no older than her age, but
obviously more worn by the strain of life than her mother at fifty-six.
Sometimes, as she noted in her mirror the sharp lines of a fatigue that
was almost bitterness, she experienced a certain unnerving uncertainty,
a total lack of zest for what she so eagerly struggled to attain, and
she envied her mother's single-minded satisfaction in getting what she
wanted.
Mrs. Emery had enjoyed the warfare of her life heartily; the victories
for their own sake, the defeats because they had spurred her on to fresh
and finally successful efforts, and the remembrance of both was sweet to
her. She loved her husband for himself and for what he had been able to
give her, and she loved her children ardently, although she had been
sorely vexed by her second son's unfortunate marriage. He had always
been a discordant note in the family concert, the veiled, unconscious,
uneasy skepticism of Marietta bursting out openly in Henry as a
careless, laughing cynicism, excessively disconcerting to his mother.
She sometimes thought he had married the grocer's daughter out of
"contrariness." The irritation which surrounded that event, and the play
of cross-purposes and discord which had filled the period until the
misguided young people had voluntarily exiled themselves to the Far
West, remained more of a sore spot in Mrs. Emery's mind than any blow
given or taken in her lifelong campaign for distinction. She admitted
frankly to herself that it was a relief that Harry was no longer near
her, although her mother's heart ached for the Harry he had seemed to
her before his rebellion. She fancied that she would enjoy him as of old
if the litter of inconvenient persons and facts lying between them could
but be cleared away; with a voluntary blindness not uncommon in parents,
refusing to recognize that these superficial differences were only the
outward expression of a fundamental alienation within. At all events, it
was futile to speculate about the matter, since the width of the
continent and her son's intense distaste for letter-writing separated
them. She had come, therefore, to turn all her attention and proud
affection on her youngest child.
It seemed to her sometimes that Lydia had been granted her by a
merciful Providence in order that she might make that "fresh start all
over again" which is the never-realized ideal of erring humanity.
Marietta had been a young lady fourteen years before, and fourteen years
meant much--meant everything to people who progressed as fast as the
Emerys. Uncertain of themselves, they had not ventured to launch
Marietta boldly upon the waves of a society the chart of which was so
new to them. She had no coming-out party. She simply put on long skirts,
coiled her black hair on top of her head, and began going to evening
parties with a few young men who were amused by the tart briskness of
her tongue and attracted by the comeliness of her healthful youth. She
had married the first man who proposed to her--a young insurance agent.
Since then they had lived in a very comfortable, middling state of
harmony, apparently on about the same social scale as Marietta's
parents. That this feat was accomplished on a much smaller income was
due to Marietta's unrivaled instinct and trained capacity for keeping up
appearances.
All this history had been creditable, but nothing more; and Mrs. Emery
often looked at her elder daughter with compunction for her own earlier
ignorance and helplessness. She could have done so much more for
Marietta if she had only known how. Mrs. Mortimer was, however, a rather
prickly personality with whom to attempt to sympathize, and in general
her mother felt the usual -in-law conclusion about her daughter's life:
that Marietta could undoubtedly have done better than to marry her
industrious, negligible husband, but that, on the whole, she might have
done worse; and it was much to be hoped that her little boy would
resemble the Emerys and not the Mortimers.
No such philosophical calm restrained her emotions about Lydia. She was
in positive beauty and charm all that poor Marietta had not been, and
she was to have in the way of backing and management all that poor
Marietta had lacked. It seemed to Mrs. Emery that her whole life had
been devoted to learning what to do and what not to do for Lydia. As the
time of action drew nearer she nerved herself for the campaign with a
finely confident feeling that she knew every inch of the ground. Her
expectancy grew more and more tense as her eagerness rose. During the
long year that Lydia was in Europe, receiving a final gloss, even higher
than that imparted by the expensive and exclusive girls' school where
she had spent the years between fourteen and eighteen, Mrs. Emery laid
her plans and arranged her life with a fervent devotion to one end--the
success of Lydia's first season in society. Every room in the house
seemed to her vision to stand in a bright vacancy awaiting the arrival
of the debutante.
CHAPTER II
AMERICAN BEAUTIES
On the morning of Lydia's long-expected return, as Mrs. Emery moved
restlessly about the large double parlors opening out on a veranda where
the vines were already golden in the September sunlight, it seemed to
her that the very walls were blank in hushed eagerness and that the
chairs and tables turned faces like hers, tired with patience, toward
the open door. She had not realized until the long separation was almost
over how unendurably she had missed her baby girl, as she still thought
of the tall girl of nineteen. She could not wait the few hours that were
left. Her fortitude had given way just too soon. She must have the dear
child now, now, in her arms.
She moved absently a spray of goldenrod which hid a Fra Angelico angel
over the mantel and noted with dramatic self-pity that her hand was
trembling. She sat down suddenly, and lost herself in a vain attempt to
recall the well-beloved sound of Lydia's fresh young voice. A knot came
in her throat, and she covered her face with her large, white,
carefully-manicured hands.
Marietta came in briskly a few moments later, bringing a bouquet of
asters from her own garden. She was dressed, as always, with a severe
reticence in color and line which, though due to her extreme need for
economy, nevertheless gave to the rather spare outlines of her tall
figure a distinction, admired by Endbury under the name of stylishness.
Her rapid step had carried her half-way across the wide room before she
saw to her surprise that her mother, usually so self-contained, was
giving way to an inexplicable emotion.
"Good gracious, Mother!" she began in the energetic fashion which was
apt to make her most neutral remarks sound combative.
Mrs. Emery dried her eyes with a gesture of protest, adjusted her gray
pompadour deftly, and cut off her daughter's remonstrance, "Oh, you
needn't tell me I'm foolish, Marietta. I know it. I just suddenly got so
impatient it didn't seem as though I could wait another minute!"
The younger woman accepted this explanation of the tears with a murmured
sound of somewhat enigmatic intonation. Her thin dark face settled into
a repose that had a little grimness in it. She began putting the flowers
into a vase that stood between the reproduction of a Giotto Madonna and
a Japanese devil-hunt, both results of the study of art taken up during
the past winter by her mother's favorite woman's club. Mrs. Emery
watched the process in the contemplative relief which follows an
emotional outbreak, and her eyes wandered to the objects on either side
the vase. The sight stirred her to speech. "Oh, Marietta, how _do_ you
suppose the house will seem to Lydia after she has seen so much? I hope
she won't be disappointed. I've done so much to it this last year,
perhaps she won't like it. And Oh, I _was_ so tried because we weren't
able to get the new sideboard put up in the dining-room yesterday!"
Mrs. Mortimer glanced without smiling at a miniature of her sister,
blooming in a shrine-like arrangement on her mother's writing-desk. She
shook her dark head with a gesture like her father's, and said with his
blunt decisiveness, "Really, Mother, you must draw the line about Lydia.
She's only human. I guess if the house is good enough for you and father
it is good enough for her."
She crossed the room toward the door with a brisk rattle of starched
skirts, but as she passed her mother her hand was caught and held.
"That's just it, Marietta--that's just what came over me! _Is_ what's
good enough for us good enough for Lydia? Won't anything, even the best,
in Endbury be a come-down for her?"
The slightly irritated impatience with which Mrs. Mortimer had listened
to the first words of this speech gave way to a shrewd amusement. "You
mean that you've put Lydia up on such a high plane to begin with that
whichever way she goes will be a step down," she asked.
"Yes, yes; that's just it," breathed her mother, unconscious of any
irony in her daughter's accent. She fixed her eyes, which, in spite of
her having long since passed the half-century mark, were still very
clear and blue, anxiously upon Marietta's opaque dark ones. She felt not
only a need to be reassured in general by anyone, but a reluctant faith
in the younger woman's judgment.
Marietta released herself with a laugh that was like a light, mocking
tap on her mother's shoulder. "Well, folks that haven't got real worries
will certainly manufacture them! To worry about Lydia's future in
Endbury! Aren't you afraid the sun won't rise some day? If ever there
was any girl that had a smooth road in front of her--"
The door-bell rang. "They've come! They've come!" cried Mrs. Emery
wildly.
"Lydia wouldn't ring the bell, and her train isn't due till ten," Mrs.
Mortimer reminded her.
"Oh, yes. Well, then, it's the new sideboard. I am so--"
"It's a boy with a big pasteboard box," contradicted Mrs. Mortimer,
looking down the hall to the open front door.
Seeing someone there to receive it, the boy set the box inside the
screen door and started down the steps.
"Bring it here! Bring it here!" called Mrs. Mortimer, commandingly.
"It's for Lydia," said Mrs. Emery, looking at the address. She spoke
with an accent of dramatic intensity, and a flush rose to her fair
cheeks.
Her olive-skinned daughter looked at her and laughed. "What did you
expect?"
"But he didn't care enough about her coming home to be in town to-day!"
Mrs. Emery's maternal vanity flared up hotly.
Mrs. Mortimer laughed again and began taking the layers of crumpled
wax-paper out of the box. "Oh, that was the trouble with you, was it?
That's nothing. He had to be away to see about a new electrical plant in
Dayton. Did you ever know Paul Hollister to let anything interfere with
business?" This characterization was delivered with an intonation that
made it the most manifest praise.
Her mother seconded it with unquestioning acquiescence. "No, that's a
fact; I never did."
Mrs. Mortimer in her turn had an accent of dramatic intensity as she
cried out, "Oh! they are American Beauties! The biggest I ever saw!"
The two women looked at the flowers, almost awestruck at their size.
"Have you a vase?" Mrs. Mortimer asked dubiously.
Mrs. Emery rose to the occasion. "The Japanese umbrella stand."
There was a pause as they reverently arranged the great sheaf of
enormous flowers. Then Mrs. Emery began, "Marietta--" She hesitated.
"Well," Mrs. Mortimer prompted her, a little impatiently.
"Do you really think that he--that Lydia--?"
Marietta accepted with a somewhat pinched smile her mother's boundary
lines of reticence. "Of course. Did you ever know Paul Hollister to give
up anything he wanted?"
Her mother shook her head.
Mrs. Mortimer rose with a "Well, then!" and the air of one who has said
all there is to be said on a subject, and again crossed the room toward
the door. Her mother drifted aimlessly in that direction also, as though
swept along by the other's energy.
"Well, it's a pity he is not here now, anyhow," she said, adding in a
spirited answer to her daughter's expression, "Now, you needn't look
that way, Marietta. You know yourself that Lydia is very romantic and
fanciful. It would be a very different matter if she were like Madeleine
Hollister. She wouldn't need any managing."
Mrs. Mortimer smiled at the idea. "Yes, I'd like to see somebody try to
manage Paul's sister," she commented.
"They wouldn't _have_ to," her mother pointed out, "she's so
levelheaded and sane. But Lydia's different. It's part of her
loveliness, of course, only you do have to manage her. And she'll be in
a very unsettled state for the first week or two after she gets home
after such a long absence. The impressions she gets then--well, I wish
he were here!"
Mrs. Mortimer waved her hand toward the roses.
"Of course, of course," assented her mother, subsiding peaceably down
the scale from anxiety to confidence with the phrase. She looked at the
monstrous flowers with the gaze of acquired admiration so usual in her
eyes. "They don't look much like roses, do they?" she remarked
irrelevantly.
Mrs. Mortimer turned in the doorway, her face expressing an extreme
surprise. "Good gracious, no," she cried. "Why, of course not. They cost
a dollar and a half apiece."
She did not stop to hear her mother's vaguely assenting reply. Mrs.
Emery heard her firm, rapid tread go down the hall to the front door and
then suddenly stop. Something indefinable about the pause that followed
made the mother's heart beat thickly. "What is it, Marietta?" she
called, but her voice was lost in Mrs. Mortimer's exclamation of
surprise, "Why it can't be--why, _Lydia_!"
As from a great distance, the mother heard a confused rush in the hall,
and then, piercing through the dreamlike unreality of the moment, came
the sweet, high note of a girl's voice, laughing, but with the liquid
uncertainty of tears quivering through the mirth. "Oh, Marietta! Where's
Mother? Aren't you all slow-pokes--not a soul to meet us at the
train--where's Mother? Where's Mother? Where's--" The room swam around
Mrs. Emery as she stood up looking toward the door, and the girl who
came running in, her dark eyes shining with happy tears, was not more
real than the many visions of her that had haunted her mother's
imagination during the lonely year of separation. At the clasp of the
young arms about her face took light as from an inner source, and
breath came back to her in a sudden gasp. She tried to speak, but the
only word that came was "Lydia! Lydia! Lydia!"
The girl laughed, a half-sob breaking her voice as she answered
whimsically, "Well, who did you expect to see?"
Mrs. Mortimer performed her usual function of relieving emotional
tension by putting a strong hand on Lydia's shoulder and spinning her
about. "Come! I want to see if it _is_ you--and how you look."
For a moment the ardent young creature stood still in a glowing quiet.
She drank in the dazzled gaze of admiration of the two women with an
innocent delight. The tears were still in Mrs. Emery's eyes, but she did
not raise a hand to dry them, smitten motionless by the extremity of her
proud satisfaction. Never again did Lydia look to her as she did at that
moment, like something from another sphere, like some bright,
unimaginably happy being, freed from the bonds that had always weighed
so heavily on all the world about her mother.
Before she could draw breath, Lydia moved and was changed. Her mother
saw suddenly, with that emotion which only mothers know, reminiscences
of little-girlhood, of babyhood, even of long-dead cousins and aunts, in
the lovely face blooming under the wide hat. She felt the sweet
momentary confusion of individuality, the satisfied sense of complete
ownership which accompanies a strong belief in family ties. Lydia was
not only altogether entrancing, but she was of the same stuff with those
who loved her so dearly. It gave a deeper note to her mother's passion
of affectionate pride.
The girl turned with a pretty, defiant tilt of her head. "Well, and how
_do_ I look?" she asked; and before she could be answered she flew at
Mrs. Mortimer with a gentle roughness, clasping her arms around her
waist until the matron gasped. "_You_ look too good to be true--both of
you--if you are such lazybones that you wouldn't go to the station to
meet the prodigal daughter!"
"Well, if you will come on an earlier train than you telegraphed--"
began Mrs. Mortimer, "Everybody's getting ready to meet you with a brass
band. What did you do with Father?"
The girl moved away, putting her hands up to her hat uncertainly as
though about to take out the hat-pins. There was between the three a
moment of that constraint which accompanies the transition from
emotional intensity down to an everyday level. In Lydia's voice there
was even a little flatness as she answered, "Oh, he put me in the hack
and went off to see about business. I heard him 'phoning something to
somebody about a suit. We got through the customs sooner than we thought
we could, you see, and caught an earlier train."
Mrs. Emery turned her adoring gaze from Lydia's slim beauty and looked
inquiringly at her elder daughter. Mrs. Mortimer understood, and nodded.
"What are you two making faces about?" Lydia turned in time to catch the
interchange of glances.
Mrs. Emery hesitated. Marietta spoke with a crisp straightforwardness
which served as well in this case as nonchalance for keeping her remark
without undue significance. "We were just wondering if now wasn't a good
time to show you what Paul Hollister did for your welcome home. He
couldn't be here himself, so he sent those." She nodded toward the
bouquet.
As Lydia turned toward the flowers her two elders fixed her with the
unscrupulously scrutinizing gaze of blood-relations; but their
microscopic survey showed them nothing in the girl's face, already
flushed and excited by her home-coming, beyond a sudden amused surprise
at the grotesque size of the tribute.
"Why, for mercy's sake! Did you ever see such monsters! They are as big
as my head! Look!" She whirled her hat from the pretty disorder of her
brown hair and poised it on the topmost of the great flowers, stepping
back to see the effect and laughing, "They don't look any more like
roses, do they?" she added, turning to her mother. Mrs. Emery's answer
rose so spontaneously to her lips that she was not aware that she was
echoing Marietta. "Good gracious, no; of course not. They cost a dollar
and a half apiece."
Lydia neither assented to nor dissented from this apothegm. It started
another train of thought in her mind. "As much as all that! Why, Paul
oughtn't to be so extravagant! He can't afford it, and I should have
liked something else just as--"
Her sister broke in with an ample gesture of negation. "You don't know
Paul. If he goes on the way he's started--he's district sales manager
for southern Ohio already."
Lydia paid to this information the passing tribute of a moment's
uncomprehending surprise. "Think of that! The last time Paul told me
about himself he was working day and night in Schenectady, learning the
business, and getting--oh, I don't know--fifty cents an hour, or some
such starvation wages."
Mrs. Mortimer's bitterly acquired sense of values revolted at this.
"What are you talking about, Lydia? Fifty cents an hour starvation
wages!"
"Well, perhaps it was five cents an hour. I don't remember. And he
worked with his hands and was always in danger of getting shot through
with a million volts of electricity or mashed with a breaking fly-wheel
or something. He said electricians were the soldiers of modern
civilization. I told that to a German woman we met on the boat when she
said Americans have no courage because they don't fight duels. The
idea!"
She began pulling off her gloves, with a quick energetic gesture. Mrs.
Mortimer went on, "Well, he certainly has a brilliant future before
him. Everybody says that--" She stopped, struck by her rather heavy
emphasis on the theme and by a curious look from Lydia. The girl did not
blush, she did not seem embarrassed, but for a moment the childlike
clarity of her look was clouded by an expression of consciousness.
Mrs. Emery made a rush upon her, drawing her away toward the door with a
displeased look at Marietta. "Never mind about Paul's prospects," she
said. "With Lydia just this minute home, to begin gossiping about the
neighbors! Come up to your room, darling, and see the little outdoor
sitting-room we've had fixed over the porch."
Mrs. Mortimer was not given to bearing chagrin, even a passing one, with
undue self-restraint. She threw into the intonation of her next sentence
her resentment at the rebuke from her mother. "I still live, you know,
even if Lydia has come home!" As Mrs. Emery turned with a look of
apology, she added, "Oh, I only wanted to make you turn around so that I
could tell you that I am going to bring my two men-folks over here
to-night, to the gathering of the clans, and that I must go home until
then. Dr. Melton and Aunt Julia are coming, aren't they?"
"Oh, yes!" cried Lydia. "It doesn't seem to me I can wait to see
Godfather. I sort of half hoped he might be here now."
"Well, _Lydia_!" her mother reproached her jealously.
"Oh, you might as well give in, Mother, Lydia likes the little old
doctor better than any of the rest of us."
"He talks to me," said Lydia defensively.
"_We_ never say a word," commented Mrs. Mortimer.
Lydia broke away from her mother's close clasp and ran back to her
sister. She was always running, as though to keep up with the rapidity
of her swift impulses. She held her subtly-curved cheek up to the
other's strongly-marked face. "You just kiss me, Etta dear," she pleaded
softly, "and stop teasing."
Mrs. Mortimer looked long into the clear dark eyes with an unmoved
countenance. Then her face melted suddenly till she looked like her
mother. She put her arms about the girl with a fervent gesture of
tenderness. "Dear little Lydia," she murmured, with a quaver in her
voice.
CHAPTER III
PICKING UP THE THREADS
After she was alone she looked again at the miniature of Lydia. The
youthful radiance of the face had singularly the effect of a perfect
flower. Mrs. Mortimer glanced at the hat still drooping its wide brim
over the rose where Lydia had forgotten it, and stood still in a reverie
that had, from her aspect, something of sadness in it. After a moment
she sighed out, "Poor little Lydia!"
"What's the matter with Lydia?" asked someone behind her.
She turned and faced a dark, elderly personage, the robust dignity of
whose bearing was now tempered with shamefacedness. Mrs. Mortimer's face
sharpened in affectionate malice. "What are you doing here at this hour
of the morning?" she asked with a humorously exaggerated air of
amazement. "No self-respecting man is ever seen in his house during
business hours!" She went on, "Oh, I know well enough. You let Mother
have her first to make up for her being sick and not able to go to meet
her ship; but you can't stay away."
The Judge waved her raillery away with a smile. The physical resemblance
between father and daughter was remarkable. "I asked you what was the
matter with Lydia," he repeated.
Mrs. Mortimer's face clouded. "Oh, it's a hateful, horrid sort of world
we're all so eager to push her into. It's like a can full of angleworms,
everlastingly squirming and wriggling to get to the top. I was just
thinking that it would be better for her, maybe, if she could always
stay a little girl and travel 'round to see things."
"Why, Etta! I tell you _I'm_ glad to have Lydia get through with her
traveling 'round. Maybe I can see something of her if I hurry up and do
it now before your mother gets things going. I won't after that, of
course. I never have."
To this his daughter had one of her abrupt, disconcerting responses.
"You'd better hurry and do it before you get so deep in some important
trial that you wouldn't know Lydia from a plaster image. There are more
reasons than just Mother and card parties why you don't see much of her,
I guess."
Judge Emery forbore to argue the point. "Where are they now?" he asked.
"Oh, upstairs, out of my way. Mother's usual state of mind about Lydia
is more so than ever, I warn you. She thought I wasn't refined enough
company."
"Now, Etta, you know your mother never thought any such thing."
"Well, I know she was inconsistent, whatever she thought. While we were
here alone she was speculating about Paul Hollister like anything. And
yet, because I just happened to mention to Lydia that he is getting on
in the world, I got put down as if I'd tried to make her marry him for
his prospects."
There was an edge in her voice which her father deprecated, rubbing his
shaven chin mildly. He deplored the appearance of a flaw in the smooth
surface of harmony he loved to see in his family.
"Well, you know, Marietta, we aim to have everything about right for
Lydia. She's all we've got left now the rest of you are settled."
The deepening of the careworn lines in the woman's face seemed a
justification for the undisguised bitterness of her answer. "I don't see
why nobody must breathe a word to her about what everybody knows is so.
What's the use of pretending that we'd be satisfied or she'd be
comfortable a minute if Paul didn't promise to be a money-maker--or at
least to have a good income?"
She turned away and walked rapidly down the hall, followed by her
father, half apologetic, half reproachful. "Why, Daughter, you don't
grudge your sister! We couldn't do so much for you; but we're better off
since you were a young lady and we want Lydia to have the benefit."
Mrs. Mortimer paused on the veranda and stood looking in a troubled
silence at the broad, well-kept lawn, stretching down to the asphalt
street, shaded by vigorous young maples. Her father waited for her to
speak, too good a lawyer to spoil by superfluous words the effect of a
well-calculated appeal.
Finally she turned to him contritely. "I'm hateful, Dad, and I'm sorry.
Of course I don't grudge dear little Lydia anything. Only I have a
pretty hard time of it scratching along, and when I'm awfully tired of
contriving and calculating how to manage somehow and anyhow, it's hard
to come up to the standard of saying everything's lovely that you and
Mother want for Lydia."
"Anything the trouble specially?" asked her father guardedly.
"Oh, no; same old thing. Keeping up a two-maid and a man establishment
on a one-maid income, and mostly not being able to hire the one maid.
There aren't _any_ girls to be had lately. It means I have to be the
other maid and the man all of the time, and all three, part of the
time." She was starting down the step, but paused as though she could
not resist the relief that came from expression. "And the cost of
living--the necessities are bad enough, but the other things--the things
you have to have not to be out of everything! I lie awake nights. I
think of it in church. I can't think of anything else but the way the
expenses mount up. Everybody's getting so reckless and extravagant and I
_won't_ go into debt! I'll come to it, though. Everybody else does!
We're the only people that haven't oriental rugs now. Why, the
Gilberts--and everybody knows how much they still owe Dr. Melton for
Ellen's appendicitis, and their grocer told Ralph they owe him several
hundred dollars--well, they have just got an oriental rug that they paid
a hundred and sixty dollars for. Mrs. Gilbert said they 'just _had_ to
have it, and you can always have what you have to have.' It makes me
sick! Our parlor looks so common! And the last dinner party we gave
cost--" She detected a wavering in her father's attention, as though he
were listening for sounds inside the house, and broke off abruptly with
a hurt and impatient "Oh, well, no matter!" and ran down the steps.
Judge Emery called after with a relieved belittling of her complaints,
"Oh, if that's all you mean. Why, that's half the fun. I remember when
you were a baby your mother did the washings so that we could have a
nurse to take you out with the other children and their nurses."
Mrs. Mortimer was palpably out of earshot before he finished his
exhortation, so he wasted no more breath but turned back eagerly in
response to a call from Lydia, who came skimming down the hall. "Oh,
Daddy dearest, it's a jewel of a little sitting-room, the one you fixed
up for me--and Mother says we can serve punch there the night of my
coming-out party."
Mrs. Emery was at her heels. Her husband laughed at his wife's
expression, and drew her toward him. "Here, Mother, stop staring at
Lydia long enough to welcome me home, too." He bent over her and rubbed
his cheek against hers. "Come, tell me the news. Are you feeling
better?" He gave her a little playful push toward the door of the
parlor. "Here, let's go in and visit for a while. I'm an old fool! I
can't do any work this morning. I kept Lydia from telling me a thing all
the way from New York, so that we could hear it together."
Lydia protested. "Tell you! After those monstrous great letters I've
written! There's nothing you don't know. There's nothing much to tell,
anyhow. I've been museumed and picture-galleried, and churched, and
cultured generally, till I'm full--up to there!" She drew her hand
across her slim white throat and added cheerfully, "But I forgot the
most of that the last three months in Paris. Nearly every girl in the
party was going home to come out in society, and of course we just
concentrated on clothes. You don't mind, do you?"
As she hesitated, with raised eyebrows of doubt, her mother, heedless of
what she was saying, was suddenly overcome by her appealing look and
drew her close with a rush of little incoherent tender cries choked with
tears. It was as though she were seeing her for the first time. Judge
Emery twice tried to speak before his husky voice was under control. He
patted his wife on the shoulder. "There, there, Mother," he said
vaguely. To Lydia he went on, "You've been gone quite a while, you know,
and--well, till you have a baby-girl of your own I guess you won't have
much notion of how we feel."
Lydia's dark eyes filled, responsive to the emotion about her. "I'm just
about distracted," she cried. "I love everybody and everything so, I
can't stand it! I want to kiss you both and I can't make up my mind
which to kiss first--and it's that way about everything! It's all so
good I don't know what to begin on." She brought their faces together
and achieved a simultaneous kiss with a shaky laugh. "Now, look here! If
we stand here another minute we'll all cry. Come and show me the house.
I want to see every single thing. All the old things, and all the new
ones Mother's been writing about." She seized their hands and pulled
them into the parlor. "I've been in this room already, but I didn't see
it. I don't believe I even touched the floor when I walked, I was so
excited. Oh, it's lovely--it's lovely!"
She darted about the room like a humming-bird, recognizing what was
familiar with fond little exclamations. "Oh, that darling little wicker
chair!--the picture of the dog!--oh! oh! here's my china lamb!" and
crying out in admiration over new acquisitions.
"Oh, Mother, what a perfectly lovely couch--sofa--what do you call it?
Why, it is so beautifully _different_! Wherever did you get that?"
Mrs. Emery turned to her husband. "There, Nathaniel, what did I tell
you?" she triumphed.
"That's one of your mother's latest extravagances," explained Judge
Emery. "There's a crazy fad in Endbury for special handmade furniture.
Maybe it's all right, but I can't see it's so much better than what you
buy in the department stores. Grand Rapids is good enough for me."
"He doesn't like the man who made it," said Mrs. Emery accusingly.
"What's the matter with him?" asked Lydia, rubbing her hand luxuriously
over the satin-smooth, lusterless wood of the sofa's high back.
Judge Emery replied, with his laugh of easy, indifferent tolerance for
everything outside the profession of the law, "Oh, I never said I didn't
like him; I only said he struck me as a crack-brained, self-willed,
conceited--"
Lydia laughed. She thought her father's dry, ironic turns very witty.
"I never saw anything conceited about him," protested Mrs. Emery,
admitting the rest of the indictment.
Judge Emery sat down on the sofa in question and pulled his tie into
shape. "Well, folks are always conceited who find the ordinary ways of
doing things not good enough for them. Lydia, what do you think of this
tie? Nobody pays a proper attention to my ties but you."
"I've brought you some beauties from London," said Lydia. Then reverting
with a momentary curiosity to the subject they had left, "Whatever does
this man do that's so queer?"
"Oh, he's just one of the back-to-all-fours faddists," said her father.
"Back-to-all-fours?" Lydia was dim as to his meaning, but willing to be
amused.
"That's just your father's way," exclaimed Mrs. Emery, who had not her
daughter's fondness for the Judge's tricks of speech.
"He lives as no Dago ditch-digger with a particle of get-up-and-get in
him would be willing to," said Judge Emery finally.
Lydia turned to her mother.
"Why, it's nothing that would interest you in the least, dear," said the
matron, taking in admiringly Lydia's French dress. "Only for a little
while everybody was talking about how strangely he acted. He was an
insurance man, like Marietta's husband, and getting on finely, when all
of a sudden, for no reason on earth, he threw it all up and went to live
in the woods. Do you mean to say you only paid twenty dollars for that
dress?"
"In the woods!" repeated Lydia.
"Yes; the real woods. His father was a farmer, and left him--why you
know, you've been there ever so many times--the Black Rock woods, the
picnic woods. He has built him a little hut there and makes his
furniture out of the trees."
Lydia's passing curiosity had faded. "Not quite twenty, even--only
ninety-two francs," she at last answered her mother's question. "You
never saw anything like the bargains there in summertime. Well, I should
think your carpenter man _was_ crazy." She glanced down with
satisfaction at the hang of her skirt.
"Oh, not dangerous," her mother reassured her; "just socialistic, I
suppose, and all that sort of thing."
"Well, who's crazier than a socialist?" cried her father genially. He
added, "Where are you going, Daughter?"
Lydia stopped in the doorway, with a look of apology for her lack of
interest in their talk. "I thought I'd just slip into the hall and see
if there's anything new there. There's so much I want to see--all at
once."
Her fond impatience brought her parents forward with a start of
pleasure, and the tour of inspection began. She led them from one room
to another, swooping with swallow-like motions upon them for sudden
caresses, dazzling them with her changing grace. She liked it
all--all--she told them, a thousand times better than she remembered.
She liked the new arrangement of the butler's pantry; she loved the
library for being all done over new; she adored the hall for being left
exactly the way it was. The dining-room was the best of all, she
declared, with so much that was familiar and so much that was new. "Only
no sideboard," she commented. "Have they gone out of fashion while I was
away?"
Mrs. Emery, whose delight at Lydia's approval had been mounting with
every breath, looked vexed. "I knew you'd notice that!" she said. "We
tried so hard to get the new one put in before you got back, but Mr.
Rankin won't deliver a thing till it's just so!"
"Rankin!" cried Lydia, stopping so short in one of her headlong rushes
across the room that she gave the impression of having encountered an
invisible obstacle, "Who's that?"
"Oh, that's the crazy cabinet-maker we were talking about. The one
who--"
"Why, I've met a Mr. Rankin," said Lydia, with more emphasis than the
statement seemed to warrant.
"It's a common enough name," said her mother, struck oddly by her
accent.
"But here, in Endbury. Only it can't be the same person. He wasn't
queer; he was awfully nice. I met him once when a crowd of us were out
skating that last Christmas I was home from school; the time when you
and Father were in Washington and left me at Dr. Melton's with Aunt
Julia. I used to see him there a lot. He used to talk to the doctor by
the hour, and Aunt Julia and I were doing that set of doilies in
Hardanger work and we used to sit and sew and count threads and listen."
"That's the one," said her father. "Melton has one of his flighty
notions that the man is something wonderful."
"But he wasn't queer or anything then!" protested Lydia. "He never
talked to me any, of course, I was such a kid, but it was awfully
interesting to hear him and Godfather go on about morals, and the
universe, and the future of man, and such--I never heard such talk
before or after--but it can't be that one!" Lydia broke off to marvel
incredulously at the possibility. "He was--why, he was awfully nice!"
she fell back on reiteration to help out her affirmation.
"They say there's queer blood in the family, and I guess he's got his
share," Judge Emery summed up and dismissed the case with a gesture of
finality. He glanced up at a tall clock standing in the corner, compared
its time with his watch, exclaimed impatiently, "Slow again!" and
addressed himself with a householder's seriousness to setting it right.
A new aspect of the matter they had been discussing struck Lydia. "But
what does he--what do people do about him?" she asked.
This misty inquiry was as intelligible to her mother as a cipher to the
holders of a key. "Oh, he's very nice about that. He has dropped out of
society completely and keeps out of everybody's way. Of course you see
him when he comes to set up a piece of his furniture or to take an
order, but that's all. And he used to be so popular!" The regret in the
last clause was that of a thrifty person before waste of any kind. "I
understand he still goes to Dr. Melton's a good deal, but that just
counts him in as one of the doctor's collection of freaks; it doesn't
mean anything. You know how your godfather goes on about--" She broke
off to look out the window. "Oh, Lydia! your trunks are here. Quick!
where are your keys? It seems as though I couldn't wait to see your
dresses!" She hurried to the door and vanished.
Lydia did not stir for a moment. She was looking down at the table,
absorbed in watching the dim reflections of her pink finger-tips as she
pressed them one after another upon the dark polished wood. Her father
opened the door of the clock with a little click, but she did not heed
it. She drew her hand away from the table and inspected her finger-tips
intently, as though to detect some change in them. When her father
closed the clock-door and turned away she started, as though she had
forgotten his presence. Her gaze upon him gave him an odd feeling of
wonder, which he took to be apologetic realization that he had spent a
longer time oblivious of her than he had meant. His explanation had a
little compunction in it. "I have a time with that pendulum always. I
can't seem to get it the right length!"
Lydia continued to look at him blankly for a moment. Then she drew a
long breath and took an aimless step away from the table. "Well, if that
isn't too queer for anything!" she exclaimed.
Judge Emery stared. "Why, no; it's quite common in pendulum clocks," he
told her.
CHAPTER IV
THE DAWN
The morning after her return from Europe, Lydia awoke with a start, as
though in answer to a call. The confusion of the last days had been such
that she had for a moment the not uncommon experience of an entire
blankness as to her whereabouts and identity. Realization of where and
who she was came back to her with much more than the usual neutral
relief at slipping into one's own personality as into the first
protection available against the vague horror of nihility. After an
instant's uncomfortable wandering in chaos, Lydia found herself with a
thrill of exultation. She was not negatively relieved that she was
somebody; she rejoiced to find herself Lydia Emery. She pounced on her
own personality with a positive joy which for a moment moved her to a
devout thanksgiving.
It all seemed, as she said to herself, too good to be true--certainly
more than she deserved. Among her unmerited blessings she quaintly
placed being herself, but this was the less naive in that she placed
among her blessings nearly everything of which she was conscious in her
world. Her world at this time was not a large one, and every element in
it seemed to her ideal. Her loving, indulgent father, who always had a
smile for her as he looked up over his newspaper at the table, and who,
though she knew he was too good to be wealthy, always managed somehow to
pay for dresses just a little prettier than other girls' clothes; her
devoted, idolizing mother, whose one thought was for her daughter's
pleasure; her rich big Brother George in Cleveland, whom she saw so
seldom, but whose handsome presents testified to an affection that was
to be numbered among the objects of her gratitude; good, sharp-tongued
Sister Etta, who said such quick, bright things and ran her house so
wonderfully; Aunt Julia, dear, dear Aunt Julia, whose warm heart was one
of Lydia's happiest homes, and Aunt Julia's brother, Dr. Melton--ah, how
could anyone be grateful enough for such an all-comprehending,
quick-helping, ever-ready ally, teacher, mentor, playmate, friend and
comrade as her godfather!
As she lay in her soft white bed and looked about her pretty room with
an ineffable sense of well-being, it seemed to her that everything that
had happened to her was lovely and that the prospect of her future could
contain only a crescendo of good-fortune. It was not that she imagined
for herself a future remarkably different in detail from what was the
past of the people about her. Even now at what she felt was the
beginning of the first chapter, she knew the general events of the story
before her; but this morning she was penetrated with the keenest sense
of the unfathomable difference it made in those events in that they were
about to happen to her. She had been passively watching the excited
faces of people hurling themselves down-hill on toboggans, but now she
was herself poised on the crest of the slope, tense with an excitement
not only more real, but somehow more vital to the scheme of things, than
that felt by other people who had made the thrilling trip before her.
She lay still for a few moments, luxuriating in the innocent egotism of
this view of her future, which was none the less absorbing for being so
entirely unterrifying, and then sprang up, impatient to begin it. No one
else in the house was awake. She saw with surprise that it was barely
five o'clock. She wondered that she felt so little sleepy, since she had
been up late the night before. All the family and connections had
gathered, and she had talked with an eager breathlessness and had
listened as eagerly to pick up all those details of home news which do
not go into letters; those insignificant changes and events that make up
the physiognomy of an existence, without which one cannot again become
an integral part of a life once familiar. It had been a fatiguing,
illuminating evening.
A change of mood had come in the night. As she dressed she felt that, in
some way, neither the fatigue nor the illumination had lasted on through
the blankness of her sound young sleep. She felt restlessly fresh and
vigorous, like a creature born anew with the morning light, and she did
not feel herself as yet an integral part of the busy, absorbing life to
which she had returned. The countless tendrils of Endbury feelings,
standards, activities, brushed against her, but had not as yet laid hold
on her. Europe had never been more real to her young-lady eyes than an
immense World's Exposition, rather overwhelmingly full of objects to be
inspected, and now, here in Ohio, even that impression was dim and
remote. But so, also, was Endbury; she had left the one, she had not yet
arrived at the other. She felt herself for the moment in a neutral
territory that was scarcely terrestrial.
The silent house was a kingdom of delight to be rediscovered. She
wandered about it, enchanted with the impressions which her solitude
gave her leisure to savor and digest. She threw open a window, and was
struck with the sweet freshness of the morning air, as though it were a
joy new in the history of the world. She looked out on the lawn, with
its dew-studded cobwebs, and felt her heart contract with pleasure. When
she stepped out on the veranda, the look of the trees, the breath of the
light wind across her cheek, the odor of dawn, all the indefinable
personality of that early hour was like an enchantment about her.
She ran out to her favorite arbor and plucked one of the heavy clusters
of purple grapes, finding their cool acidity an exquisite surprise. She
raised her face to the sky with wonder. She had never, it seemed to her,
seen so pure yet colorful a sky. The horizon was still faintly flushed
with the promise of a dawn already fulfilled in the fresh splendor of
the sunbeams slanting across the fresh splendor of her own youth.
Never again did Lydia see the things she saw that morning. Never again
did she have so unquestioningly the happy child's conception of the
whole world as magically centered in indulgent kindness about herself.
As she looked up the clean, empty street stretching away under the shade
of its thrifty young trees, it seemed made only to lead her forward into
the life for which she had been so long preparing herself. Endbury, with
its shops, its bustle of factories so unmeaning to her, the great bulk
of its inexplicable "business," existed only as the theater upon the
stage of which she was to play the leading role in the drama of
life--she almost consciously thought of it in those terms--which, after
some exciting and pleasurable incidents and a few thrilling situations,
was to have a happy ending, none the less actual to her mind because
lost in so vague a golden shimmer. Her father's house, as familiar to
her as her hand, took on a new and rich dignity as the background for
the unfolding of that wonderful creature, herself; that unknown, future,
grown-up self, which was to be all that everyone who loved her expected,
and more than she in her inexperience knew how to expect.
She was in a little heaven, made up of the most ingenuous aspirations,
the innocence of which seemed to her a guarantee of their certain
fulfillment. Her fervent desire to be good was equal to and of the same
quality as her desire to be a successful debutante. It would make her
family so happy to have her both. These somewhat widely diverging aims
were all a part of the current of her life, the impulse to be what those
she loved would like to have her. It was not that she was willing to
give up her own individuality to gratify the impulse, but rather that
she did not for an instant conceive of the necessity for such a
sacrifice. It was part of her immense happiness that she had always
loved to be what it pleased everyone to have her, and that, apparently,
people wished to have her only what she wished to be. She was like a
child guarded by her elders from any knowledge of forbidden food. All
the goodies of which she had ever heard were hers for the asking. In
such a carefully arranged nursery it would be perversity to doubt the
everlasting quality of the coincidence between one's desires and one's
obedience. It was no more remarkable a coincidence than that both dew
and sunshine were good for the grass over which she now ran lightly to
another corner of the grounds about her parents' house. Here, just
outside the circle of deep shade cast by an exuberantly leaved maple,
she stood for a moment, her hands full of grapes, her eyes wandering
about the green, well-kept double acres called diversely in the family
"the grounds" (Mrs. Emery's name) and "the yard." Lydia always clung to
her father's name; she had very little inborn feeling for the finer
shades of her mother's vocabulary. Mrs. Emery rejoiced in the careless
unconsciousness of the importance of such details, but she felt that
Lydia should be cautioned against going too far. It was one of the
girl's odd ways to be fond of the few phrases left over in the Emery
dictionary from their simpler earlier days. She always called the two
servants "the girls" or "the help" instead of "the maids," spoke of the
"washwoman" instead of the "laundress," and, as did her father, called
the man who took care of the grounds, ran the furnace, and drove the
Emery's comfortable surrey, the "hired man" instead of the "gardener" or
the "coachman," or, in Mrs. Emery's elegantly indefinite phrase, "our
man."
Lydia explained this whimsical reaction rather incoherently by saying
that those nice old words were so much more fun than the others, and in
spite of remonstrance she clung to her fancy with so lightly laughing an
obstinacy that neither she nor anyone suspected it of being a surface
indication of a significant tendency.
She had occasionally other droll little ways of differing from the
family, which were called indulgently "Lydia's notions." Her mother
would certainly have thus named this flight out into the early morning.
She would have found extravagant, and a little disconcerting, the
completeness of Lydia's content in so simple a thing as standing in the
first sunshine of an early morning in September, and she would have
been unquestionably disturbed, perhaps even a little alarmed, by the
beatific expression of Lydia's face as she gazed fixedly up into the
sky, the tempered radiance of which was as yet not too bright for her
clear gaze.
All the restless joy of a few minutes before, which had driven her about
from one delight to another, fused under the sun's first warmth into a
trance-like quiet. She stood still in the sunshine, a slow flush, like a
reflection of dawn, rising to her cheeks, her lips parted, her eyes
bright and vacant. An old person coming upon her at this moment would
have been painfully moved by that tragic pity which age feels for the
unreasoning joy of youth. She looked a child, open-eyed and breathless
before the fleeting beauties of a bubble, most iridescent when about to
disappear.
It was a man by no means old who swung suddenly into sight around the
corner, walking swiftly and noiselessly upon the close-cut grass, and
the startled expression with which he found himself close to Lydia was
by no means one of pity. He fell back a step, and in the instant before
the girl was aware of his presence his gaze upon her was that of a man
dazzled by an incredible vision.
She brought her eyes down to him, and for the space of a breath the
expression was hers as well. The sunlight glowing about them seemed the
reflection of their faces. Then, for a moment longer, though mutual
recognition flashed into their eyes, they did not speak, looking at each
other long and seriously.
Finally, with a nymph-like stir of all her slender body, Lydia roused
herself. "Well, I can speak--can you?" she asked whimsically. "Don't you
remember me?"
The man drew a long breath and took off his cap, showing close-cropped
auburn hair gleaming, like his beard, red in the sun. "You took my
breath away!" he exclaimed.
"What was the matter with me?" asked Lydia, prettily confident of a
compliment to follow.
It came in so much less direct a form than she had expected that before
she recognized it she had returned it with naive impulsiveness.
"I didn't think you could be real," said the man, "you looked so exactly
the way this glorious morning made me feel."
"Why, that's just how you looked to me!" she cried, and flushed at the
significance of her words.
Before her confusion the other turned away his quiet gray eyes, and said
lightly, "Well, that's because we are the only people in all the world
with sense enough to get up so early on a morning like this. I've been
out tramping since dawn."
Lydia explained herself also. "I just couldn't sleep, it seemed so
lovely. It's my first morning home, you know."
"Is it?" responded the man, with a vagueness he made no effort to
conceal.
It came over Lydia with a shock that he did not know she had been away.
She felt hurt. It seemed ungracious for anyone in Endbury not to have
missed her, not to share in the joyful excitement of her final return.
"I've been in Europe for a year," she told him, with a dignity that was
a reproach.
"Oh, yes, yes; I remember now hearing Dr. Melton speak of it," he
answered, with no shade of apology for his forgetfulness. He looked at
her speculatively, as if wondering what note to strike for the
continuation of their talk. Apparently he decided on the note of
lightness. "Well, you're the most important person there is for me
to-day," he told her unexpectedly.
Lydia arched her dark eyebrows inquiringly. She was always sensitively
responsive, and now had forgotten, like a sweet-tempered child, her
momentary pique.
He smiled suddenly, moved, as people often were, to an apparently
irrelevant tenderness for her. His voice softened into a playfulness
like that of a person speaking to an imaginative little girl. "Why,
didn't you learn in school that all wise old nations have the belief
that the first person you meet after you go out in the morning decides
the fortune of the day for you? Now, what kind of a day are you going
to give me?"
Lydia laughed. "Oh, you must tell first! You forget you're the first
person I've seen this morning. I'll see what I can do for you after I've
seen what you are going to do for me." She added, with a solemnity only
half jocular, "But it's ever so much more important in my case, for
you're the first person I meet as I begin my life in Endbury. Think what
a responsibility for you! You ought to give me something extra nice
beside, for not remembering me any better and never noticing that I had
been away." She broke into a sunny mitigation of her own severity, "But
you can have some grapes, even if you are not very flattering."
The man took the cluster she held out to him, but only eyed them as he
answered, "Oh, I remember you very well. You're a niece of Mrs.
Sandworth's, or of her husband's, and Mrs. Sandworth is Dr. Melton's
sister. You're the big-eyed little girl who used to sit in a corner and
sew while the doctor and I talked, and now," he brought it out rotundly,
"you've been to Europe for a year, and you're grown-up."
Lydia hung her head laughingly at his good-natured caricature. "Well,
but I _have_, really and truly," she protested, "all of that. And I just
guess you haven't had two such interesting things happen to you in such
a short time as--" She stopped short, struck dumb by a sudden
recollection. "Oh, I beg your pardon," she murmured; "I forgot about
what they said you had--"
Her expression was so altered, she looked at him with so curious a
change from familiarity to strangeness, that his steady eyes wavered a
moment in startled surprise. "What's that?" he asked sharply; "I didn't
catch what you said."
"Why, nothing--nothing--only they were telling me yesterday about how
you--why, it just came over me that you _had_ had a great deal happen to
you this last year, as well as I."
He looked a relieved and slightly annoyed comprehension of the case.
"Oh, that!" he summed it up for her with a grave brevity. "I have lost
my father, and I have started life on a new footing during the past
year."
Lydia fumbled for words that would be applicable and not wounding. "I
was so sorry to hear that--about your father, I mean. And about the
other--it must be very--_interesting_, I'm sure."
His silence and enigmatic gaze upon her moved her to a fluttered fear
lest she seem ungracious. She added, with a droll little air of letting
him see that she was not of the enemy, "I do hope some day you'll tell
me all about it; it sounds so romantic."
The young man gave an inarticulate sound, and stroked his ruddy beard to
conceal a smile. "It's not," he said briefly. He put his cap back on his
head and looked down the street as though his thoughts were already
away.
His lack of responsiveness came, Lydia thought, from her having wounded
his feelings. "Oh, I'm sure you must have some good reason for doing
such a _queer_ thing," she said hurriedly. Then, appalled by the words
on which the haste of her good intentions had carried her, "Oh, I mean
that it's very brave, heroic, of you to have the courage--perhaps
something very sad happened to you, and to forget it you--"
The other broke into the laugh he had been trying to suppress. His gray
eyes lighted up brilliantly with his mirth. "You're very kind," he said,
"you're very kind, but rather imaginative. It doesn't take any courage;
quite the reverse. And it's not a picturesque way of doing a retreat
from active life. I hope and pray that it's to be a way of getting into
it."
The girl's face of bewilderment at his tone moved him to add, a ripple
of amusement still in his voice, "Ah, don't try to make me out. I don't
belong in your world, you know; I'm real."
Lydia continued to look at him blankly. The obscurity of his remarks was
in no way lessened by this last addition, but he vouchsafed no further
explanation. "You've given me my breakfast," he said, holding up the
grapes; "I mustn't keep you any longer from yours."
He waited for a moment for Lydia to respond to this speech, struck by a
sudden realization that it might sound like an unceremonious hint to her
to retire, rather than the dismissal of himself he intended. When she
made no answer, he turned away with a somewhat awkward gesture of
leave-taking. Lydia looked after him in silence.
CHAPTER V
THE DAY BEGINS
She watched him until he was out of sight, and although the vigorous,
rhythmic swing of his broad shoulders was like another manifestation of
the morning's joyous, buoyant spirit, it did not move her to a
responsive alertness. After he had turned a corner, she lowered her eyes
to the cluster of grapes she still held; a moment after, without any
change in expression, she relaxed her grasp on them and let them fall,
turning away and walking soberly back to the house. The dew had already
disappeared from the grass. There was now no hint of the dawn's
coolness; the day had begun.
Her father met her at the door with an exclamation about her early
hours. He would really see something of her, he said, if she kept up
this sort of thing. It would be too good to be true if he could
breakfast with her every morning. Whereupon he rang for the coffee and
unfolded his newspaper. Lydia did not notice his absorption in the news
of the day, partly because she was trained from childhood up to consider
reading the newspaper as the main occupation of a man at home, but more
because on this occasion she was herself preoccupied. When Mrs. Mortimer
came in on an errand and was prevailed upon to sit down for some
breakfast with her father and sister, there was a little more
conversation.
Mrs. Emery had not come down stairs. A slight indisposition which she
had felt for several days seemed to have been augmented by the
excitement of Lydia's return. She had slept badly, and was quite
uncomfortable, she told her husband, and thought she would stay in bed
and send for Dr. Melton. It seemed foolish, she apologized, but now
that Lydia was back, she wanted to be on the safe side and lose no time.
After these facts had been communicated to her older daughter, Mrs.
Mortimer asked, "How in the world does it happen that you're up at this
hour?"
Lydia answered that she had been inspecting the yard, which she had not
seen the day before. She described quite elaborately her tour of
investigation, without any mention of her encounter with her early
caller, and only after a pause added carelessly, "Who do you suppose
came along but that Mr. Rankin you were all talking about yesterday?"
Judge Emery laid down his paper. "What under the sun was he prowling
about for at that hour?"
"He wasn't prowling," said Lydia. "He was fairly tearing along past the
house so fast that he 'most ran over me before I saw him. I'd forgotten
he is so handsome."
"Handsome!" Mrs. Mortimer cried out at the idea. "With that beard!"
"I like beards, sometimes," said Lydia.
"It makes a man look like a barbarian. I'd as soon wear a nose-ring as
have Ralph wear a beard."
"Why, everybody who is anybody in Europe wears a beard, or a mustache,
anyhow," opposed Lydia. "I got to liking to see them."
"Oh, of course if they do it in Europe, we provincial stay-at-homes
haven't a word to say." Mrs. Mortimer had invented a peculiar tone which
she reserved for speeches like this, the neutrality of which gave a
sharper edge to the words.
"Now, Marietta, that's mean!" Lydia defended herself very energetically;
"you know I didn't say it for that." There was a moment's pause, of
which Marietta did not avail herself for a retraction, and then Lydia
went on pensively, "Well, he may be handsome or not, but he's certainly
not very polite."
"He didn't say anything to you, did he?" asked her father in surprise,
laying down the paper he had raised again during the passage between the
sisters.
Lydia hastily proffered an explanation. "He couldn't help speaking; he
almost ran into me, you know. I was standing under the maple tree in the
corner as he came around from Garfield Avenue. He just took off his cap
and said good morning, and what a fine day it was, and a few words like
that."
"I don't see anything so impolite in that. Perhaps he wasn't European in
his manners," suggested Mrs. Mortimer dryly. She had evidently arisen in
the grasp of a mood, not uncommon with her, when an apparently causeless
irritability drove her to say things for which she afterward suffered an
honest but fruitless remorse. Dr. Melton had recently evolved for this
characteristic of hers one of the explanations which the Emerys found so
enigmatic. "Marietta," he said critically, "is in a perpetual state of
nervous irritation from eye-strain. She has naturally excellent and
normal eyesight, but she has always been trained to wear other people's
spectacles. It puts her out of focus all the time, and that makes her
snappy."
She had answered explicitly to this vague diagnosis, "Nonsense! The
thing that makes me snappy is the lack of an oriental rug in our
parlor."
"You're looking at that through Mrs. Gilbert's magnifying glasses,"
suggested the doctor.
"I'm not looking at it at all, and that's the trouble," Marietta had
assured him.
"Absence makes the heart--" the doctor had the last word.
Lydia tried this morning at breakfast to obtain the same advantage over
her sister. She flushed with a mixture of emotions and tried in a
resentful silence to think of some definable cause for her accusation
against Rankin's manners. Finally, "Well, I gave him a bunch of grapes,
and he never so much as said thank you. He just took them and marched
off."
"Perhaps he doesn't like grapes," suggested Mrs. Mortimer, grim to the
last.
After breakfast, when Mrs. Mortimer and her father disappeared, Lydia
found herself with a long morning before her. The doctor telephoned that
he could not come before noon. Judge Emery, after his proprietary
good-by kiss, advised her to be quiet and rest. She looked a little
pale, he thought, and he was afraid that, after her cool ocean voyage,
she would find the heat of an Ohio September rather trying. Indeed, as
Lydia idled for a moment over the dismantled breakfast table she was by
no means moved to activity. Dark shades were everywhere drawn down and
the house was like a dimly-lighted cave, but through this attempt at
protection the sun was making itself felt in a slowly rising,
breathless, moist heat.
Lydia climbed the stairs to her mother's room. She was looking forward
to a long visit, but finding the invalid asleep she turned away from the
door rather blankly. She was as yet too much a stranger in her own home
to have at hand the universal trivial half-dozen unfinished tasks that
save idle women from the perils of uninterrupted thought. The ribbons
were all run in her pretty underwear; she owed no notes to anyone,
because she had been at home too short a time to have received any
letters; her hair had been washed the last day on the steamer, and her
new dresses needed no mending. Her trunks had been unpacked the day
before by her mother's competent hands, which had also arranged every
detail of her tasteful room until to touch it would disturb the effect.
Lydia began to experience that uneasy, unsettling discomfort that comes
to modern people in ordinary modern life if some unusual circumstance
throws them temporarily on their own resources. She lingered aimlessly
for some time at the head of the stairs, and then, leaning heavily
against the rail, began to descend slowly, one step at a time, to
prolong the transit. Where the stairs turned she noticed a stain on the
crisp sleeve of her white dress. It came, evidently, from one of the
grapes she had eaten that morning under the maple tree. A current of
cool air blew past her. It was the first relief from the stagnation of
the sultry day and, sitting down on the landing, she lost herself in
prolonged meditation.
In the obscurity of the darkened hall she was scarcely visible save as a
spot of light showing dimly through the balustrade, and she sat so still
that the maid, stepping about below, did not see her. On her part, Lydia
noticed but absently this slight stir of domestic activity, nor, after a
time, louder but muffled noises from the dining-room. Even when the door
to the dining-room opened and quick, light steps came to the foot of the
stairs, she did not heed them. A confused, hushed sound of someone busy
about various small operations did not rouse her, and it was not until
the fall of a large object, clattering noisily on the floor, that she
became conscious that someone beside the maid was in the hall. She
leaned forward, and saw that the object which had fallen was the
newel-post of the stairs. It had evidently been detached from its
fastenings by the workman who, with his back to her, now knelt over a
tool-box, fumbling among the tools with resultant little metallic clicks.
Lydia ran down the stairs, finger on lip. "Hush! Don't make any more
noise than you can help. Mother's still asleep." At his gaze of
stupefaction she broke into her charming light laugh, "Why, I always
seem to strike you speechless. What's the matter with me now?"
The other emerged from his surprise with a ready, smiling acceptance of
her tone, "I was wondering if I oughtn't to apologize to you--if I
should ever see you again--for being so curt this morning. And then you
spring up out of the ground before me. Well, so I will apologize. I do.
I'm very sorry."
They adopted, as in the first part of their earlier talk, the
half-humorous familiarity of people surprised in an unconventional
situation, but, in spite of this, the young man's apology was not
without the accent of serious sincerity.
Lydia responded heartily in kind. "Oh, it was I who was horrid.
And--wasn't it funny--I was just thinking--wondering if I should ever
have a chance to try to make you see that I didn't mean to be so--" she
hesitated, and fell back on iteration again--"so horrid."
The fashionable Endbury boarding-school had not provided its graduate
with any embarrassment of riches in the way of expression for various
shades of meaning. He answered, lowering his voice as she did, "Oh, you
were all right, but I was most objectionable with my impertinent laugh.
I'm sorry."
She challenged his sincerity, "Are you really, really?"
"Oh, really, really," he assured her.
"And you want to do something nice to make it up to me?"
"Anything," he promised, smiling at her as at a child.
"You've promised! You've promised!" She indulged herself in a noiseless
hand-clasp. "Well, then, the forfeit is to tell me all about it."
"All about what?"
"Goodness gracious! Don't you remember? That's what we were both horrid
about. I asked you to tell me about it, and you--"
He remembered, evidently with an amusement not entirely free from
annoyance. "Oh, I'm safe. I'll never see you to tell you."
She sat down on the bottom step and drew her white skirts about her.
"What's the matter with right now?" she asked, smiling.
"I've got to earn my living right now," he objected, beginning with a
swift deftness to bore a tiny hole.
She was diverted for an instant. "What are you doing to our nice old
newel-post?" she asked. "I thought they said you were going to set up
the new sideboard."
"Oh, that's no job at all; it's done. Didn't you hear me pushing and
banging things around? Now I've the job before me of fitting the very
latest thing in newel-posts in place of your old one."
The girl returned to her first attack. "Well, anyhow, if it's a long
job, it's all the better. Go ahead and talk at the same time. You won't
feel you're wasting time."
Their low-toned talk and the glimmering light of the hall made them seem
oddly intimate. Lydia expressed this feeling while Rankin stood looking
doubtfully at her, a little daunted by the pretty relentlessness of her
insistence. "You see, you're not nearly so much a stranger to me as I am
to you. Remember how I sewed and listened. I'm a grown-up little
pitcher, and my ears are still large. I was remembering just now, before
you came in, how strangely you used to talk to Dr. Melton, and I thought
it wasn't so surprising, after all, your doing 'most anything queer."
Rankin laughed as he bent over his tools. "Little pitchers have tongues,
too, I see."
Either Lydia felt herself more familiar with her interlocutor than
before, or one result of her meditation had been the loss of her
excessive fear of wounding his feelings. She spoke now quite
confidently, "But, honestly, what in the world did you do it for?"
"It?" He made her define herself.
"Oh, you know! Give up everything--lose your chance in society, and poke
off into the woods to be a common--" In spite of her new boldness she
faltered here.
He supplied the word, with a flash of mirth. "Don't be afraid to say it
right out--even such an awful term as workman, or carpenter. I can bear
it."
"I knew it!" Lydia exclaimed. "As I was thinking it over on the stairs
just now, I said to myself that probably you weren't a bit apologetic
about it; probably you had some queer reason for being proud of yourself
for doing it."
He cast a startled look at her. "You're the only person in Endbury with
imagination enough to guess that."
"But why? why? why?" she urged him, her flexible eyebrows raised in the
eagerness of her inquiry. "I feel just as though I were going to hear
the answer to a perfectly maddeningly unanswerable riddle."
He had another turn in his attempt at evasion. "It wouldn't be polite to
tell you the answer, for what I'm trying to do is to get out of being
what everybody you know thinks is the only way to be--except Dr. Melton,
of course."
"What's the matter with 'all the people I know,'" she challenged him
explicitly.
He laughed and shook his head. "Oh, I've nothing new to say about them.
Everybody has said it, from Ecclesiastes to Tolstoi."
"They never say anything about just ordinary folks in Endbury that I
know."
Rankin looked at her whimsically. "Oh, _don't_ they?"
"_Do_ they?" Lydia wondered at the possibility. Presently she brought
out, as a patently absurd supposition, "You don't mean to say that
Endbury people are wicked?"
"Do you think that none but wicked people are written about in serious
books? No; Lord, no! I don't think they are wicked--just mistaken."
"What about? Now we're getting warm. I'll guess in a minute."
He looked a little sadly down at her bright, eager face. "I'm afraid you
would never guess. It's all gone into your blood. You breathe it in and
out as you live, every minute."
"What? what? what? You can't say it, you see, when it comes right down
to the matter."
"Oh, yes, I can; I can ask you if it wouldn't be a tragedy if they
should all be killing themselves to get what they really don't want and
don't need, and starving for things they could easily have by just
putting out their hands."
Lydia's blankness was immense.
He said, with ironic triumph: "You see, when I do say it you can't make
anything out of it." After this he turned for a time all his attention
to his work.
He had evidently reached a critical point in his undertaking. Lydia
watched in silence the deft manipulations of his strong, brown fingers,
wondering at the eager, almost sparkling, alertness with which he went
from one step to another of the process that seemed unaccountably
complicated to her. After he had finally lifted the heavy piece of wood
into place, handling its great weight with assurance, and had submitted
the joint to the closest inspection, he gave a low whistle of
satisfaction with himself, and stepped back to get the general effect.
As he did so he happened to glance at the girl, drooping rather
listlessly on the stair. He paused instantly, with an exclamation of
dismay.
"No; I'm not going to cry," Lydia told him with a very small smile, "but
it would serve you right if I did."
The workman wiped his forehead and surveyed her in perplexity. "What,
can I do for you?" he asked.
"If you're really serious in asking that," said Lydia with dignity,
"I'll tell you. You can take for granted that I am not an idiot or a
child and talk to me sensibly. Dr. Melton does. And you can tell me what
you started out to--the real reason why you are a common carpenter
instead of in the insurance business. Of course if you think it is none
of my concern, that's another matter. But you said you would."
Rankin looked a little abashed by the grave seriousness of this appeal,
although he smiled at its form. "You speak as though I had my reason
tied up in a package about me, ready to hand, out."
Lydia said nothing, but did not drop her earnest eyes.
He thrust his hands into his pockets and returned this intent gaze, a
new expression on his face. Then picking up a tool, and drawing a long
breath, he said, with the accent of a man who takes an unexpected
resolution: "Well, I _will_ tell you."
He returned to his work, tightening various small screws under the
railing, speaking, as he did so, in a reasonable, quiet tone, with none
of the touch of badinage which had thus far underlain his manner to the
girl. "It's very simple--nothing romantic or sudden about it all. I did
not like the insurance business as I saw it from the inside, and the
more I saw of it, the less I liked it. I couldn't see how I could earn
my living at it and arrive at the age of forty with an honest scruple
left. Not that the insurance business is, probably, any worse than any
other--only I knew about it from the inside. So far as I could guess
the businesses my friends were in weren't very different. At least, I
didn't think I could improve things by changing to them. Also, it was
going to grow more and more absorbing--or, at least, that was the way it
affected the older men I knew--so that at forty I shouldn't have any
other interests than getting ahead of other people in the line of
insurance.
"Now, what was I to do about it? I can't make speeches, and nobody but
crack-brained soreheads like me would listen to them if I did. I'm not a
great philosopher, with a cure for things. But I didn't want to fight so
hard to get unnecessary things for myself that I kept other people from
having the necessaries, and didn't give myself time to enjoy things that
are best worth enjoying. What could I do? I bothered the life out of Dr.
Melton and myself for ages before it occurred to me that the thing to
do, if I didn't like the life I was in, was to get out of it and do
something harmless, at least, if I didn't have gumption enough to think
of something worth while, that might make things better.
"I like the cabinet-maker's trade, and I couldn't see that practicing it
would interfere with my growing all the honest scruples that were in me.
Oh, I know that it's the easiest thing in the world for a carpenter to
turn out bad work for the sake of making a little more money every day;
I haven't any illusions about the sanctity of the hand-crafts. But,
anyhow, I saw that as a maverick cabinet-maker I could be pretty much my
own master. If I had strength of mind enough I could be honest without
endless friction with partners, employers, banks, creditors, employes,
and all the rest of the spider web of business life. At any rate, it
looked as though there were a chance for me to lead the life I wanted,
and I had an idea that if I started myself in square and straight, maybe
after a little while I could see clearer about how to help other people
to occupations that would let them live a little as well as make money,
and let them grow a few scruples into the bargain.
"You see, there's nothing mysterious about it--nor interesting. Just
ordinary. I'm living the way I do because I'm not smart enough to think
of a better way. But one advantage of it is that I have a good deal of
time to think about things. Maybe I'll think of a way to help, later.
And, anyway, just to look at me is proof that you don't _have_ to get
ground up in the hopper like everybody else or shut the door of the
industrial squirrel-cage on yourself in order not to starve. Perhaps
that'll give some cleverer person the courage to start out on his own
tangent."
Lydia drew a long breath at the conclusion of this statement. "Well--"
she said, inconclusively; "_well!_" After a pause she advanced, "My
sister's husband is in the insurance business."
"You see," said the workman, drilling a hole with great rapidity, "you
see I ought not to talk to you. I can't without being impolite."
Lydia seemed in no haste to assure him that he had not been. She pulled
absently a loose lock of hair--a little-girl trick that came back to her
in moments of abstraction--and looked down at her feet. When she looked
up, it was to say with a bewildered air, "But a man has to earn his
living."
Rankin made a gesture of impatience, and stopped working to answer this
remark. "A living isn't hard to earn. Any healthy man can do that. It's
earning food for his vanity, or his wife's, that kills the average man.
It's coddling his moral cowardice that takes the heart out of him. Don't
you remember what Emerson says--Melton's always quoting it--'Most of our
expense is for conformity to other men's ideas? It's for cake that the
average man runs in debt.' He must have everything that anyone else has,
whether he wants it or not. A house ever so much bigger and finer than
he needs, with ever so many more things in it than belong there. He must
keep his wife idle and card-playing because other men's wives are. He
must have his children do what everyone else's children do, whether it's
bad for their characters or not. Ah! the children! That's the worst of
it all! To bring them up so that these futile complications will be
essentials of life to them! To teach them that health and peace of mind
are not too high a price for a woman to pay for what is called social
distinction, and that a man must--if he can get it in no other way--pay
his self-respect and the life of his individuality for what is called
success--"
Lydia broke in with a sophisticated amusement at his heat. "Why, you're
talking about Newport, or the Four Hundred of New York--if there is any
such thing! The rest of America--why, any European would say we're as
primitive as Aztecs! They do say so! Endbury's not complicated. Good
gracious! A little, plain, middle-western town, where everybody that is
anybody knows everybody else!"
"No; it's not complicated compared with European standards, but it's
more so than it was. Why, in Heaven's name, should it strain every nerve
to make itself as complicated as possible as fast as it can? We're free
yet--we're not Europeans so shaken down into a social rut that only a
red revolution can get us out of it. Why can't we decide on a
rational--" He broke off to say, gloomily: "The devil of it is that we
don't decide anything. We just slide along thinking of something else.
If people would only give, just once in their lives, the same amount of
serious reflection to what they want to get out of life that they give
to the question of what they want to get out of a two-weeks' vacation,
there aren't many folks--yes, even here in Endbury that seems so
harmless to you because it's so familiar--who wouldn't be horrified at
the aimless procession of their busy days and the trivial false
standards they subscribe to with their blood and sweat."
"My goodness!" broke in Lydia.
The exclamation came from her extreme surprise, not only at the
extraordinary doctrine enunciated, but at the experience, new to her, of
hearing convictions spoken of in ordinary conversation. The workman took
it, however, for a mocking comment on his sudden fluency. He gave a
whimsical grimace, and said, as he began picking up his tools, "Ah, I
shouldn't have given in to you. When I get started I never can stop."
His expression altered darkly. "But I hate all that sort of thing so! I
_hate_ it!"
Lydia shrank back from him, startled, but aroused. "Well, I hate hate!"
she cried with energy. "It's horrid to hate anything at all, but most of
all what's wrong and doesn't know it's wrong. That needs help, not
hate."
He had slung his tool-box on his shoulder before she began speaking, and
now stood, ready for departure, looking at her intently. Even in the dim
light of the hall she was aware of a wonderful change in his face. She
was startled and thrilled by the expression of his eyes in the moment of
silence that followed.
Finally, "You've given me something to remember," he said, his voice
vibrating, and turned away.
CHAPTER VI
LYDIA'S GODFATHER
Lydia stood where he left her, listening to the sound of his footsteps
die down the walk outside. She was still standing there when, some time
later, the door to the dining-room behind her opened and a tiny elderly
man trotted across the hall to the stairs. Lydia recognized him before
he saw that she was there, so that he exclaimed in surprise and pleasure
as she came running toward him, her face quivering like a child's about
to weep.
"Oh, dear Godfather!" she cried, as she flung herself on him; "I'm so
glad you've come! I never wanted so much to see you!"
He was startled to feel that she was trembling and that her cheek
against his forehead, for she was taller than he, was burning hot. "Good
gracious, my dear!" he said, in the shrill voice his size indicated,
"anybody'd think you were the patient I came to see."
His voice, though high, was very sweet--a quality that made it always
sound odd, almost foreign, in the midst of the neutral, colorless
middle-western tones about him. He spoke with a Southern accent,
dropping his _r's_, clipping some vowels and broadening others, but
there was no Southern drawl in the clicking, telegraphic speed of his
speech. He now looked up at his tall godchild and said without a smile:
"If you'll kindly come down here where I can get at you, I'll shake you
for being so foolish. You needn't be alarmed about your mother."
Lydia recoiled from the little man as impulsively as she had rushed upon
him. "Why, how _awful_!" she accused herself, horrified. "I'd
_forgotten_ Mother!"
Dr. Melton took off his hat and laid it on the hall shelf. "I will
climb up on a chair to shake you," he continued cheerfully, "if already,
in less than twenty-four hours, you're indulging in nerves, as these
broken and meaningless ejaculations seem to indicate."
He picked up a palm-leaf fan, lost himself in a big hall-chair, and
began to fan himself vigorously. He looked very hot and breathless, but
he flowed steadily on.
"I can't diagnose you yet, you know, without looking at you, the way I
do your mother, so you'll have to give me some notion of what's the
occasion of these alternate seizures and releases of a defenseless
Lilliputian godfather." He made a confident gesture toward the upper
part of the house with his fan. "About your mother--I know without going
upstairs that she is floored with one or another manifestation of the
great disease of social-ambitionitis. But calm yourself. It's not so bad
as it seems when you've got the right doctor. I've practiced for thirty
years among Endbury ladies. They can't spring anything new on me. I've
taken your mother through doily fever induced by the change from
table-cloths to bare tops, through portiere inflammation, through
afternoon tea distemper, through _art-nouveau_ prostration and mission
furniture palsy, not to speak of a horrible attack of acute insanity
over the necessity for having her maids wear caps. I think you can trust
me, whatever dodge the old malady is working on her."
He had run on volubly, to give Lydia time to recover herself, his keen
blue eyes fixing her, and now, as she wavered into something like a
smile at his chatter, he shot a question at her with a complete change
of manner: "But what's the matter with _you_?"
Lydia started as though he had suddenly clapped her on the shoulder.
"I--why, I--just--" she hesitated, "why, I don't know what _is_ the
matter with me." She brought it out with the most honest surprise in the
world.
Dr. Melton's approval of this answer was immense. "Why, Lydia, I'm proud
of you! You're one in a thousand. You'll break the hearts of everyone
who knows you by turning out a sensible woman if you don't look out. I
don't believe there's another girl in Endbury who would have had the
nerve to tell the truth and not fake up a headache, or a broken heart,
or _Weltschmerz_, or some such trifle, for a reason." He pulled himself
up to his feet. "Of course, you don't know what's the matter with you,
my dear. _I_ do. _I_ know everything, and can't do a thing. That's me!
Physically, you're upset by Endbury heat after an ocean voyage, and
mentally it's the reaction caused by your subsidence into private life
after being the central figure of the returned traveler. Last evening,
now, with that mob of friends and the family pawing at you and trying to
cram-jam you back into the Endbury box and shut the lid down--_that_ was
enough to kill anybody with a nerve in her body. What's the history of
the morning? I hope you slept late."
Lydia shook her head. "No; I was up ever so early.--Marietta came over
to borrow the frames for drying curtains, and stayed to breakfast."
Something about her accent struck oddly on the trained sensitiveness of
the physician's ear. Her tone rang empty, as with something kept back.
"Marietta's been snapping at you," he diagnosed rapidly.
"Well, a little," Lydia admitted.
The doctor laid the palm-leaf fan aside and took Lydia's slim fingers in
both his firm, sinewy hands. "My dear, I'm going to do as I have always
done with you, and talk with you as though you were a grown-up person
and could take your share in understanding and bearing family problems.
Your sister Marietta is not a very happy woman. She has too many of your
father's brains for the life she's been shunted into. She might be
damming up a big river with a finely constructed concrete dam, and what
she is giving all her strength to is trying to hold back a muddy little
trickle with her bare hands. The achievement of her life is to give on a
two-thousand-a-year income the appearance of having five thousand like
your father. She does it; she's a remarkably forceful woman, but it
frets her. She ought to be in better business, and she knows it, though
she won't admit it. So, don't you mind if she's sharp-tongued once in a
while. It's when she feels the muddy water oozing through her fingers."
He fancied that Lydia's eyes on his were a little blank, perhaps absent,
and broke off with a short laugh. He was quite hardened to the fact that
people never understood his fanciful metaphors, but Lydia, as a child,
had used to have a curious intuitive divination of his meaning. After
his laugh he sighed and turned the talk.
"Well, and has Flora Burgess been after you to get your impression of
Endbury as compared with Europe? Your mother said she wanted an
interview with you for next Sunday's _Society Notes_."
Lydia smiled. The subject was an old joke with them. "No; she hasn't
appeared yet. I haven't seen her--not since my birthday a year ago, the
time she described the supper-table as a 'glittering, scintillating mass
of cut-glass and silver, and yet without what could really be called
ostentation.' Isn't she delicious! How is the little old thing, anyway?"
"Still trotting industriously about Endbury back yards sowing the
dragon's teeth of her idiotic ideas and standards."
"Oh, I remember, you don't like her," said Lydia. "She always seems just
funny to me--funny and pathetic. She's so dowdy, and reverential to
folks with money, and enjoys other people's good times so terrifically."
"She's like some political bosses--admirable in private life, but a
menace to the community just the same."
Lydia laughed involuntarily, in spite of her preoccupation. "Flora
Burgess a menace to the community!"
The doctor turned away and began to mount the stairs. "Me and
Cassandra!" he called over his shoulder in his high, sweet treble. "Just
you wait and see!"
He disappeared down the upper hall, finding his way about the darkened
house with a familiarity that betokened long practice.
Lydia sat down on the bottom step to wait for his return. The clock in
the dining-room struck twelve. It came over her with a clap that but
half a day had passed since she had run out into the dawn. For an
instant she had the naive, melodramatic instinct of youth to deck out
its little events in the guise of crises. She began to tell herself with
gusto that she had passed some important turning-point in her life;
when, as was not infrequent with her, she lost the thread of her thought
in a sudden mental confusion which, like a curtain of fog, shut her off
from definite reflection. Complicated things that moved rapidly always
tired Lydia. She had an enormous capacity for quiet and tranquillity.
To-day she felt that more complicated things were moving rapidly inside
her head than ever before--as though she had tried to keep track of the
revolutions of a wheel and had lost her count and could now only stare
stupidly at the spokes, whirling till they blended into one blur. What
was this Endbury life she had come back to? What in the world had that
man been talking about? What a strange person he was! How very bright
his eyes were when he looked at you--as though he were, somehow, seeing
you more than most people did. What did the doctor mean by all that
about Marietta? It had never occurred to her that the life of anyone
about her might have been different from what it was. What else was
there for people to do but what everybody else did? It was all very
unsettling and, in this heat and loneliness, daunting.
Through this vague discomfort there presently pierced a positive
apprehension of definite unpleasantness. She would have to tell her
mother that she had spent the whole morning talking to Mr. Rankin, and
her mother would be cross, and would say such--Lydia remembered as in a
distant dream her supreme content with life of only a few hours earlier.
It seemed a very bewildering matter to her now.
Ought she so certainly to tell her mother? She lingered for a moment
over this possibility. Then, "Oh, of course!" she said aloud, flushing
with an angry shame at her moment's parley with deceit.
She heard her mother's door open and turned to see the doctor running
down the stairs, his wrinkled little face very grave. "You were right,
Lydia, to be anxious about your mother, and I am an old fool! There is
no fool like a fluent fool! I'm afraid she's in for quite a siege.
There's no danger, thank Heaven! but I don't believe she can be about
for a month or more. I'm going to 'phone for a trained nurse. Just see
that nobody disturbs her, will you?"
He darted away, leaving Lydia leaning against the newel-post, gasping.
The clock in the dining-room chimed the quarter-hour. She cried out to
herself, as she climbed the stairs heavily, that she could not stand it
to have things happen to her so fast. If all Endbury days were going to
be like this one--
She was for a moment brought to a standstill by a realization of depths
within herself that she had not dreamed of. She realized, horrified,
that on hearing the doctor's verdict her first thought--gone before it
was formulated, but still her first thought--had been one of relief that
now she need not tell her mother.
It had not occurred to her at all, nor did it now, that she either
should or should not tell her father.
CHAPTER VII
OUTSIDE THE LABYRINTH
The Black Rock woods lay glowing under the cloudy autumn sky like a heap
of live coals, the maples still quivering in scarlet, the chestnuts sunk
into a clear yellow flame, the oaks, parched by the September heat,
burnt out into rusty browns. Above them, the opalescent haze of October
rose like a faint blue smoke, but within the woods the subdued light was
richly colored, like that which passes through the stained glass of a
great cathedral. The first of the fallen leaves lay in pools of gold in
the hollows of the brown earth, where the light breezes had drifted
them.
It was, for the moment, singularly quiet, so, that, as Lydia walked
quickly along the footpath, the pleasant rustle of her progress was the
only sound she heard. Under a large chestnut she paused, gathering her
amber-colored draperies about her and glancing uncertainly ahead to
where the path forked. She looked a yellow leaf blown by some current of
the air unfelt by the rest of the forest and caught against the rough
bark of the tree. After hesitating for a moment, she drifted slowly
along the right-hand path, looking about her with dreamy, dazzled eyes.
From time to time, she stopped and lifted her face to the light and
color above her, and once she stood a long time leaning against a tree,
stirring with the tip of her parasol a heap of burning maple leaves.
Under her drooping hat her face was almost vacant in a wide beatitude of
harmony with the spirit of day. When she walked on again it was with a
lighter and lighter step, as though the silence had come to have a
lovely meaning for her which she feared to disturb.
The path turned sharply after passing through a thicket of ruddy
brambles, and she found herself in a little clearing which the haze of
the upper air descended to fill. The yellow chestnuts stood in a ring
about the sunburnt grass. It was like a golden cup filled with some
magic, impalpable draught.
Through this she now saw a rough little house, brown as an oak leaf,
with a wide veranda, under which, before a work-bench, sat Daniel
Rankin. His tanned arms moved rhythmically backward and forward, but his
ruddy head was high, and his eyes, roving about the leafy walls of the
clearing, caught sight of Lydia as soon as she had turned the corner.
She stopped short, with a startled gesture, on the edge of the woods,
but remained standing quietly while Rankin sprang up from his seat and
walked toward her smiling.
"Oh, Miss Emery," he called welcomingly. "I didn't recognize you for a
minute. Every once in a while a young lady or a child loses her way from
a picnic in the woods and stumbles into my settlement. I always have to
hurry to show them there's no danger of the wild man who lives in that
house eating them up." He came up to her now, and put out his hand with
a frank pleasure.
"I wasn't afraid," said Lydia; "I was startled for a minute, but I knew
right away it must be your house. You described it to me, you know."
"It's very much flattered that you remember its portrait," said the
owner. "Won't you honor it some more by sitting down in its veranda for
a while? Or must I take you back to your picnic party at once?"
Lydia moved on, looking about her at the piles of boards, half hidden by
vines, at the pool of clear water welling up through white sand in front
of the house, and at the low rough building, partly covered with
woodbine ruby-red against the weather-beaten wood.
"My picnic party's gone home," she explained. "It was only Marietta and
her little boy, anyhow. My sister thought it was going to rain, and took
the quickest way home. I told Marietta I'd walk across and take the
Garfield Avenue trolley line. I must have taken a wrong turn in the
path."
They had reached the veranda now, and Lydia sank into the chair which
Rankin offered her. She smiled her thanks silently, her face still
steeped in quiet ecstasy, and for a long time she said nothing. The
quick responsiveness that was at all times her most marked
characteristic answered this rare mood of Nature with an intensity
almost frightening in its visible joy.
Rankin also said nothing, looking at her reflectively and stroking his
close-clipped red beard. Above the faded brown of his work-shirt, his
face glowed with color. In the silent interval of the girl's slow
emergence from her reverie, his gaze upon her was so steady that when
Lydia finally glanced up at him he could not for a moment look away. The
limpid unconsciousness of her eyes changed into a startled look of
inquiry, as though he had spoken and she had not understood. Then a
flush rose to her cheeks, she looked down and away in a momentary
confusion, moved in her chair, and began to talk at random.
"So this is where you live. It's lovely. It looks like a fairy
story--the little house in the wood, you know--nothing seems real
to-day--the woods--it makes me want to cry, they are so beautiful. I've
been wondering and wondering what outdoors was looking like. You know
poor Mother is sick, and though she's not so awfully sick, and of course
we've a trained nurse for her, still I've had to be housekeeper and I
haven't had time to breathe. The second girl left right off because of
the extra work she thought sickness would make, but it seems to me we've
had a million new second girls in the three weeks. It's been awful! I
haven't had time to get out at all or to see anybody."
She was quite herself now, and confided her troubles with a naive
astonishment, as though they were new to humanity.
"Yes; I've heard ladies say before that it's quite awful," agreed her
companion gravely. He swung himself up to sit on his work-bench, his
long legs stretched before him, just reaching the ground. "Envy me," he
went on, smiling; "I don't have to have a second girl, or a first one,
either."
"What _do_ you do?" asked Lydia, not waiting, however, for an answer,
but continuing her relieved outpouring of her own perplexities. "It's
perfectly desperate at home. I haven't had a minute's peace. This
afternoon I just got wild, and said I _would_ get away from it for a
minute, and just ran away. Father's nice about it, but he does look
something fierce when he comes home and finds another one left. He says
that Mother doesn't have to change more than two or three times a year!"
She presented this as the superlative of stability.
Rankin laughed again. Lydia felt more and more at her ease. He was
evidently thinking of her pretty looks and ways rather than of what she
was saying, and, like all of her sisterhood, this was treatment which
she thoroughly understood. For the moment she forgot that he was the man
who had startled and almost shocked her by his unabashed presentation,
in a conversation with a young lady, of ideas and convictions. She
leaned back in her chair and put on some of the gracefully imperious
airs of regnant American young-ladyhood. "You must show me all about how
you live, and everything," she commanded prettily. "I've been so curious
about it--and now here I am."
She was enchantingly unconscious of the possibility of her having seemed
to seek him out. "What a perfectly beautiful piece of wood you have in
that chair-back." She laid her ungloved, rosy finger-tips on a dark
piece of oak. "And so this is where you work?"
"I work everywhere," he told her. "I do all that's done, you see."
"You must have to walk quite a ways to get your meals, don't you?" Lydia
turned her white neck to glance inside the house.
Rankin's mouth twitched humorously. "You'll never understand me," he
said lightly. "I get my meals myself, here."
Lydia turned on him sharply. "You don't _cook_!" she cried out.
"And wash dishes, and make my bed, and sweep my floor, and, once in a
great while, dust."
The romantic curiosity died out of the girl's eyes into a shocked
wonder. She glanced at his large brown hands, and seemed about to speak.
Nothing came from her lips finally, however, beyond the pregnant "Well!"
which seemed the only expression in her vocabulary for extreme surprise.
Rankin threw back his head, showing a triangle of very white throat
above his loose collar, and laughed aloud. The sound of his mirth was so
infectious that Lydia laughed with him, though half uneasily.
"It's so funny," he explained, "to see the picture of myself I gather
from your shocked and candid eyes. I'm so used to my queer ideas
nowadays that I forget that what seems perfectly natural to me still
seems perfectly crazy to others."
"Well, not _crazy_." Lydia proffered this negation in so halting an
accent that Rankin burst into another peal of laughter. "But it must be
horrid for you to wash dishes and cook!" protested Lydia, feeling
resentful that her inculcated horror of a man's "lowering himself" to
woman's work should be taken with so little seriousness. She tried to
rearrange a mental picture which the other was continually destroying.
"But I suppose it's very picturesque. You cook over an open fire, I
imagine."
There was a humorous glint in his eye, "I cook over the best brand of
oil-stove that money can buy," he told her, relentlessly, watching her
wince from the sordid image. "I have all the conveniences I can think
of. All I'm trying to do is to get myself fed with the least expenditure
of gray matter and time on my part, and as things are now arranged in
this particular corner of the country I find I can do it best this way.
It's more work trying to persuade somebody who doesn't want to wait on
me than to jump up and do it myself. Also, having brains, I can
certainly cook like a house afire."
At this, Lydia was overcome by that openness to conviction from
unexpected sources which gave her mother one of her great anxieties for
her. "Well, honestly, do you know," she said unexpectedly, "there is a
lot in that. I've thought ever so many times in the last two weeks that
if Father would let me wait on the table, for instance, I could get on
ever so much easier."
"And I'll just warrant," the man went on, "that I've had more time to
myself lately than you have, for all I've my living to earn as well as
the housework."
"My goodness!" cried Lydia, repudiating the comparison. "That needn't be
saying much for you, for I haven't had a minute--not even to sit with
Mother as much as I ought."
"What did you have to do that kept you from that?"
"Oh, you're no housekeeper, that's evident, or you wouldn't ask. A man
_never_ has any idea about the amount of work there is to do in a house.
Why, set the table, and sweep the parlors, and change the flower vases,
and dust, and pick up, and dust--I don't know what makes things get so
dusty. We've got an awfully big house, you know, and of course I want to
keep everything as nice as if Mother were up. Everybody expects me to do
that!"
"I had a great-aunt," began Rankin with willful irrelevancy, "a very
wonderful old woman who taught me most of what I value. She was
considered cracked, so maybe that's why I am a freak, and she was as
wise as wise! And she had stories that fitted every occasion. One that
she used to tell was about a farmer cousin of hers, who had a team of
spirited young horses that he was breaking. Everybody warned him that if
they ever ran away they'd be spoiled for life, and he got carefuller and
carefuller of them. One day he and his father were haying beside a
river, and the father, who couldn't swim a stroke, fell in. The horses
were frightened by the splash and began to prance, and the son ran to
their heads, beside himself with fear. The old man came to the top and
screamed, 'Help! help!' and the son answered, fairly jumping up and down
in his anguish of mind over his poor old father's fate, 'Oh, help,
somebody! Somebody come and help! I can't leave my horses!'"
He stopped. Lydia slid helplessly into the naive question, "Well, did
his father drown?" before the meaning of the little parable struck her.
She began to laugh, with her gay, sweet inability to resent a joke made
at her own expense. "Don't you think you are a good hand at
sermon-making!" she mocked him. "It's all very well to preach, but just
you tell me what you would have done in my place."
"I should have left those big rooms, filled with things to dust, and let
the dust lie on them--even such an awful thing as that!"
Lydia considered this with honest surprise. "Why, do you know, it never
occurred to me I could do that!"
Rankin nodded. "It's a common hallucination," he explained. "I've had
it. I have to struggle against it still."
"Hallucination?"
"The notion that you belong to the things that belong to you."
Lydia looked at him sidewise out of her clear dark eyes. She was
beginning to feel more at home in his odd repertory of ideas. "I
wonder," she mused, "if that's why I always feel so much freer and
happier in old clothes--that I don't forget that they're for me and I'm
not for them. But really, you know, dressmakers and mothers and folks
get you to thinking that you are for clothes--you're made to show them
off." Rankin vouchsafed no opinion as to this problem of young-ladyhood.
"Here's your sister's rain," he said instead, pointing across the
clearing, where against the dark tree-trunks fine, clear lines slanted
down to the dry grass. Lydia rose in some agitation. "Why, I didn't
really think it would rain! I thought it was just Marietta's--" She
glanced down in dismay at her thin low shoes and the amber-colored silk
of her ruffled skirt.
Rankin stood up eagerly. "Ah, I've a chance to do you a service. Just
step in, won't you, a moment and let me skirmish around and see what a
bachelor's establishment can offer to a beautiful young lady who mustn't
get wet."
Lydia moved into the wide, low room, saying deprecatingly, "It wouldn't
hurt _me_ to get wet, you know. But this dress just came from Paris, and
I haven't had a chance to show it to anybody yet."
Rankin laughed, hastening to draw up a chair before the hearth, where a
few embers still glowed, their presence explained by the autumnal chill
which now struck sharply across the room from the open door as the rain
began to patter on the roof. The girl looked about her in silence,
apparently with surprise.
"Well, how do you like it?" asked the master of the house, throwing some
dry twigs on the fire so that the flame, leaping up, lighted the
corners, already dusky with the approach of evening. "It's not very
tidy, is it?" He began rummaging in a recess in the wall, tumbling out
coats and shoes and hats in his haste. Finally, "There!" he cried in
triumph, shaking out a rain-coat, "That will keep your pretty French
finery dry."
He turned back to the girl, who was sitting very straight in her chair,
peering about her with wide eyes and a strange expression on her face.
"Why, what's the matter?" he asked.
[Illustration: "You say beautiful things!" he replied quietly. "My
rough quarters are glorified for me."]
Lydia stood up, with a quick indrawn breath. "I don't know," she said,
"what it is. It seems as though I'd been here before. It looks so
familiar to me--so good--" She went closer to where, still holding out
the rain-coat, he stood on the other side of a table strewn with papers.
She leaned on this, fingering a pen and looking at him with a shy
eagerness. She was struggling, as so often, with an indefinable feeling
which she had no words to express. "Don't you know," she went on, "every
once in a while you see somebody--an old man or woman, perhaps, on the
street cars, in the street--and somehow the face goes home to you. It
seems as though you'd been waiting to see that face again. Well, it's
just so with this room. It has a face. I like it very--" She broke off,
helplessly inarticulate before the confusion of her thoughts, and looked
timidly at the man. She was used to kindly, amused laughter when she
tried, stumblingly, to phrase some of the quickly varying impressions
which made her life so full of invisible incidents.
But Rankin did not laugh, even kindly. His clear eyes were more than
serious. They seemed to show him moved to an answering emotion. "You say
beautiful things!" he replied quietly. "My rough quarters are glorified
for me. I've been fond of them before--they're the background to a good
many inward struggles and a considerable amount of inward peace, but
now--" He looked about him with new eyes, noting the dull gleam of gold
with which the chestnut ceiling answered the searching flicker of the
fire, the brighter sparkles which were struck out from the gilded
lettering on the books which lined the walls, and the diamond-like
flashes from the polished steel of the tools on the work-bench at the
other end of the room. There was a pause in which the silence within the
house brought out the different themes composing the rich harmony of the
rain, the steady, resonant downpour on the roof, the sweet whispers of
the dried grass under the torrent, the muted thuddings of the big drops
on the beaten earth of the veranda floor, and the hurried liquid
overflow of the eaves. It was still light enough to see the fine color
of the leather that covered the armchairs, and the glossy black of a
piano, heaped with a litter of music. Near the piano, leaning against
the wall, a violoncello curved its brown crook-neck over the shapeless
bag that sheltered it.
Lydia pointed to it. "You're musical!" she said, as if she had made an
important discovery.
Rankin roused himself, followed the direction of her gaze, and shook
his head. "No; I can't play a note," he said cheerfully, laying the
rain-coat down and going to look over the pile of overshoes in a box;
"but I like it. My queer old great-aunt left me that 'cello. It had
belonged to her grandfather. I believe being so old makes it quite
valuable. The piano belongs to an old German friend of mine who has seen
better days and has now no place to keep it. Two or three times a week
he comes out here with an old crony who plays the 'cello, and they make
music till they get to crying on each other's necks."
"Do you cry, too?" Lydia smiled at the picture.
Rankin came back to the fire with a pair of rubbers in his hand. "No;
I'm an American. I only blow my nose hard," he said gravely.
"Well, it must be lovely!" She sighed this out ardently, sinking back in
her chair. "I love music so it 'most kills me, but I don't get very much
of it. I took piano lessons when I was little, but there were always so
many other things to do I never got time to practice as much as I wanted
to, and so I didn't get very far. Anyhow, after I heard a good orchestra
play, my little tinklings were worse than nothing. I wish I could hear
more. But perhaps it's just as well, Mother says. It always gets me so
excited. I'm sure I should cry, along with the Germans."
"They would like that," observed her host, "above everything."
"Father keeps talking about getting one of those player-pianos, but
Mother says they are so new you can't tell what they are going to be.
She says they may get to be too common."
Rankin looked at her hard. "Would you like one?" He asked this trivial
question with a singular emphasis.
"Why, I haven't really thought," said Lydia, considering the matter.
The man looked oddly anxious for her answer.
Finally, "Why, it depends on how much music you can make with them. If
they are really good, I should want one, of course."
Rankin smiled, drew a long breath, and fell sober again as if at a
sudden thought.
"I don't see any oil-stove," said the girl, skeptically, looking about
her.
"Oh, I have a regular kitchen. It's there," he nodded back of him; "and
two rooms beside for me and for Dr. Melton or my Germans, or some of my
other freak friends when they stay too long and miss the last trolley in
to town. Oh, I have lots of room."
"It looks really rather nice, now I'm here and all," Lydia vaguely
approved; "though I don't see why you couldn't have gone on more like
other folks and just changed some things--not been so _awfully_ queer!"
Rankin was kneeling before her, holding out a pair of rubbers. At this
remark he sat back on his heels, and began: "My great-aunt said that
there was a man in her town who had such a terrible temper that his wife
was in perfect terror of him, and finally actually died of fear.
Everybody was paralyzed with astonishment when, two or three years
after, one of the nicest girls in town married him. People told her she
was crazy, but she just smiled and said she guessed she could get along
with him all right. Everything went well for a week or two, and then one
day he said the tea was cold and not fit for a pig to drink, and threw
the cup on the floor. She threw hers down and broke it all to smash. He
stared and glared, and threw his plate down. She set her lips and banged
her own plate on the hearth. He threw his knife and fork through the
window. She threw hers after, and added the water-pitcher for good
measure."
Lydia's astonishment at this point was so heartfelt that the raconteur
broke off, laughed, and ended hastily, "I spare you the rest of the
dinner-service. The upshot of it was that every dish in the house was
smashed and not a word spoken. Then the man called for his carriage (he
was a rich man--that sort usually is), drove to the nearest china-store,
bought a new set, better than the old, took it back, and lived in peace
and harmony with his wife ever after. And here is the smallest pair of
rubbers I can find, and I shall have to tie these on!"
Lydia watched the operation in silence. As he finished it and rose to
his feet again, "What was that all about?" she inquired simply.
"Compromise," he answered. "There are occasions when it doesn't do any
good."
"Does it do such a lot of good to go off in the woods by yourself and do
your own cooking?" asked Lydia with something of her father's shrewd
home-thrusting accent. "What would happen if everybody did that?"
Rankin laughed. "Everybody'd have a good time, for one thing," he
answered, adding, more seriously, "The house of Rimmon may be all right
for some people, but _my_ head isn't clear enough."
Lydia looked frankly at a loss. She did not belong to the alert, quickly
"bluffing" type of young lady. "Rimmon?" she asked.
"He's in the Bible."
"That's a good reason why I've never heard of him," she said ruefully.
"All I meant by him was that people who conform outwardly to a standard
they don't really believe in, are in danger of getting most awfully
mixed up. And certainly they don't stand any chance of convincing
anybody else that there's anything the matter with the standard. What's
needed isn't to upset everything in a heap, but to call people's
attention to the fact that things could be a lot better than they are.
And that's hard to do. And who ever called more people's attention to
that fact than an impractical, unbalanced nobleman who took to cobbling
shoes for the peace of his soul? There wasn't a particle of sense to
what Tolstoi _did_, but--" He stopped, hesitating in an uncertainty that
Lydia understood with a touching humility.
"Oh, you needn't explain who Tolstoi is. I've heard of him."
"Well, you mustn't imagine I'm anything like Tolstoi!" cried the young
man, laughing aloud at the idea, "for I don't take a bit of stock in
his deification of working with your muscles. That was an exaggeration
he fell into in his old age because he'd been denied his fair share of
manual work when he was young. If he'd had to split kindlings and tote
ashes and hoe corn when he was a boy, I bet he wouldn't have thought
there was anything so sanctifying about callouses on your hands!"
"Oh, dear! You're awfully confusing to me," complained Lydia. "You
always seem to be making fun of something I thought just the minute
before you believed in."
Rankin looked intensely serious. "There isn't an impression I'd be
sorrier to give you," he said earnestly. "Perhaps the trouble is that
you don't as yet know much about the life I've got out of."
"I've lived in Endbury all my life," protested Lydia.
"There may still be something for you to learn about the lives of its
men," suggested her companion.
"If you think it's so wrong, why don't you reform it?" Lydia launched
this challenge suddenly at him with the directness characteristic of her
nation.
"I have to begin with reforming myself," he said, "and that's job enough
to last me a long while. I have to learn not to care about being
considered a failure by all the men of my own age who are passing me by;
and I don't mind confessing to you that that is not always easy--though
you mustn't tell Dr. Melton I'm so weak. I have to train myself to see
that they are not really getting _up_ so fast, but only _scrambling_
fast over slipping, sliding stones; and then I have to try to find some
firm ground where I can make a path of my own, up which I can plod in my
own way."
The tone of the young people, as they talked with their innocent
grandiloquence of these high matters, might have been taken for that of
a couple deep in some intimate discussion, so honestly serious and moved
was it. There was a silence now, also like the pause in a profoundly
personal talk, in which they looked long into each other's eyes.
The clock struck five. Lydia sprang to her feet. "Oh, I must hurry on!
I told Marietta to telephone home that I'd be there at six."
She still preserved her charming unconsciousness of the
unconventionality of her situation. A European girl, brought up in the
strictest ignorance of the world, would still have had intuitions to
make her either painfully embarrassed or secretly delighted with this
impromptu visit to a young bachelor; but Lydia, who had been allowed to
read "everything" and the only compromise to whose youth had been fitful
attempts of the family to remember "not to talk too much about things
before Lydia," was clad in that unearthly innocence which the advancing
tide of sophistication has still left in some parts of the United
States--that sweet, proud, pathetic conviction of the American girl that
evil is not a vital force in any world that she knows. The young man
before her smiled at her in as artless an unconsciousness as her own.
They might have been a pair of children.
"You've plenty of time," he assured her. "Though I live so far out of
the world, the Garfield Avenue trolley line is only five minutes' walk
away. Oh, I'm prosaic and commonplace, with my oil-stove and trolley
cars. There's nothing of the romantic reactionary about me, I'm afraid."
He wrapped the rain-coat about her and took an umbrella.
"Don't you lock up your house when you go away?" asked Lydia.
"The poor man laughs in the presence of thieves," quoted Rankin.
They stood on the veranda now, looking out into the blue twilight. The
rain drummed noisily on the roof and the soft swish of its descent into
the grass rose to a clear, sibilant note. The wind had died down
completely, and the raindrops fell in long, straight lines like an
opaque, glistening wall, which shut them off from the rest of the world.
Back of them, the fire lighted up the empty chair that Lydia had left.
She glanced in, and, moved by one of her sudden impulses, ran back for
a moment to cast a rapid glance about the quiet room.
When she returned to take Rankin's arm as he held the open umbrella, she
looked up at him with shining eyes. "I have made friends with it--your
living-room," she said.
As they made their way along the footpath, she went on, "When I get into
the trolley car I shall think I have dreamed it--the little house in the
clearing--so peaceful, so--just look at it now. It looks like a little
house in a child's fairy-tale." They paused on the edge of the clearing
and looked back at the pleasant glow shimmering through the windows,
then plunged into the strip of forest that separated the clearing from
the open farming country and the main road to Endbury.
Neither of them spoke during this walk. The rain pattered swiftly,
varying its monotonous refrain as it struck the umbrella, the leaves,
the little brook that ran beside them, or the stony path. Lydia clung to
Rankin's arm, peering about her into the dim caves of twilight with a
happy, secure excitement. After her confinement to the house for the
last fortnight, merely to be out of doors was an intoxication for her,
and ever since she had left her sister and begun her wanderings in the
painted woods she had felt the heroine of an impalpable adventure. The
silent flight through the dripping trees was a fitting end. Except for
breaking in upon the music of the rain, she would have liked to sing
aloud.
She thought, flittingly, how Marietta would laugh at her manufacturing
anything romantic out of the commonplace facts of the insignificant
episode, but even as she turned away from her sister's imagined mocking
smile, she felt an odd certainty that to Rankin there was also a glamour
about their doings. It was as though the occasional contact of their
bodies as they moved along the narrow path were a wordless
communication.
He said nothing, but as they emerged upon the long treeless road,
stretching away over the flat country to where the lights of Endbury
glowed tremulously through the rain, he looked at his companion with a
quick intensity, as though it were the first time he had really seen
her.
It was that man's look which makes a woman's heart beat faster, even if
she is as inexperienced as Lydia. She was already tingling with an
undefined emotion, and the shock of their meeting eyes made her face
glow. It shone through the half-light as though a lamp had been lighted
within.
They stood silently waiting for the car which flashed a headlight toward
them far down the track. As it drew near, bounding over the rails,
humming like a great insect, and bringing visibly nearer and nearer the
end of their time together, Lydia was aware that Rankin was in the grasp
of an emotion that threatened to become articulate. The steady advance
of the car was forcing him to a speech against which he struggled in
vain. Lydia began to quiver. She felt an expectancy of something lovely,
moving, new to her, which grew tenser and tenser, as though her nerves
were the strings of an instrument being pulled into tune for a melody.
Standing there in the cold, rainy twilight, she had a moment of the
exultation she had thought was to be so common in her Endbury career.
She felt warmed through with the consciousness of being lovely, admired,
secure, supremely fortunate, just as she had thought she would feel; but
she had not been able to imagine the extraordinary happiness that this,
or some unrecognized element of the moment, gave to her.
The car was almost upon them; the blinding glare of the headlight showed
their faces with startling suddenness. She saw in Rankin's eyes a
tenderness that went to her heart. She leaned to him from the steps of
the car to which he swung her--she leaned to him with a sweet,
unconscious eagerness. In the instant before the car moved forward, as
he stood gazing up at her, he spoke at last.
The words hummed meaningless in Lydia's ears, and it was not until some
time after, in the garish white brilliance of the car, that she
convinced herself that she had heard aright. Even then, though she still
saw his face raised to hers, the raindrops glistening on his hair and
beard, even though she still heard the fervor of his voice, she remained
incredulous before the enigma of his totally unexpected words. He had
said, with a solemn note of pity in his voice: "Ah, my poor child, I am
so horribly, horribly sorry for you!"
CHAPTER VIII
THE SHADOW OF THE COMING EVENT
Judge Emery looked tired and old as he sat down heavily at his
dinner-table opposite his pretty daughter. The discomfort and
irregularity of the household for the last two weeks had worn on the
nerves of a very busy man who needed all of his strength for his work.
It seemed an evil fate of his, he reflected as he took his napkin out of
its ring, that whenever he was particularly hard-pressed in his
profession, domestic turmoil was sure to set in. He was now presiding
over a suit between the city and the electric railway company, involving
many intricate details of electrical engineering and accounting methods.
Until that suit was settled, he felt that it was unreasonable for his
family to expect him to give time or attention to anything else.
In the absence of other vital interests in his life, he had come to
focus all his faculties on his profession. On the adroitness of clever
attorneys he expended the capacity for admiration which, as his life was
arranged, found no other outlet; and, belonging to the generation before
golf and bridge and tennis had brought games within the range of
serious-minded adults, he had the same intent curiosity about the
outcome of a legal contest that another man might have felt in the
outcome of a Newport tournament. His wife had long ago learned, so she
said, that any attempt to catch his mental eye while an interesting
trial was in progress was as unavailing as to try to call a street gamin
away from a knot-hole in a fence around a baseball field.
She knew him and all his capabilities very well, his wife told herself,
and so used was she to the crystallized form in which she had for so
many years beheld him, that she dismissed, as typically chimerical
"notions," the speculations of her doctor--also a lifelong friend of
her husband's--as to what Judge Emery might have become if--the doctor
spoke in his usual highly figurative and fantastic jargon--"he had not
had to hurry so with that wheel in his cage." "When I first knew Nat
Emery," he once said, "he was sitting up till all hours reading _Les
Miserables_, and would knock you down if you didn't bow your head at the
mention of Thackeray. He might have liked music, too. An American isn't
inherently incapable of that, I suppose." At which he had turned on
sixteen-year-old Lydia with, "Which would you rather have, Lyddy; a
husband with a taste for Beethoven or one that'd make you five thousand
a year?" Lydia had shudderingly made the answer of sixteen years, that
she never intended to have a husband of any kind whatever, and Mrs.
Emery had rebuked the doctor later for "putting ideas in girls' heads."
It was an objection at which he had laughed long and loud.
Mrs. Emery liked her doctor in spite of not understanding him; but she
loved her husband because she knew him through and through. In his turn,
Judge Emery bestowed on his wife an esteem the warmth of which was not
tempered by his occasional amusement at her--an amusement which Mrs.
Emery was far from suspecting. He did heartily and unreservedly admire
her competence; though he never did justice to her single-handed battle
against the forces of ignorance and irresponsibility in the kitchen
until an illness of hers showed that the combat must be continuous,
though his wisdom in selecting an ambitious wife had shielded him, as a
rule, from the uproar of the engagement.
This evening, as he looked across the white table-cloth at his daughter,
he had a sudden qualm of doubt, not unusual in parents, as to the
capacity of the younger generation to carry on the work begun by the
older. Of course, he reassured himself, this had scarcely been a fair
trial. The child had been plunged into the business the day after her
return, with the added complication of her mother's illness; but, even
making all allowances, he had been dismayed by the thorough-going
domestic anarchy that had ensued. He was partly aware that what alarmed
him most was Lydia's lack of zest in the battle, an unwillingness to
recognize its inevitability and face it; a strange, apparently willful,
blindness to the value of victory. Her father was disturbed by this
failure to acquiesce in the normal, usual standard of values. He
recalled with apprehension the revolutionary sayings and doings of his
second son, which had been the more disconcerting because they flowed
from the young reactionary in such a gay flood of high spirits. Harry
had no more shared the reverent attitude of his family toward household
aesthetics than toward social values. A house was a place to keep the
weather from you, he had said laughingly. If you could have it pretty
and well-ordered without too much bother, well and good; but might the
Lord protect him from everlastingly making omelets to look at and not to
eat.
Lydia, to be sure, had ventured no irreverent jokes, and, so far as her
father could see, had never conceived them; but a few days before she
had suggested seriously, "Why can't we shut up all of the house we don't
really use, and not have to take care of those big parlors and the
library when you and I are always in the dining-room or upstairs with
Mother, now she's sick?"
Judge Emery had thought of the grade of society which keeps its "best
room" darkened and closed, of the struggles with which his wife had
dragged the family up out of that grade, and was appalled at Lydia's
unconscious reversion to type. "Your mother would feel dreadfully to
have you do that; you know she thinks it very bad form--very green."
Lydia had not insisted; it ran counter to every instinct in Lydia to
insist on anything. She had succumbed at the first of his shocked tones
of surprise; but the suggestion had shown him a glimpse of workings in
her mind which made him uneasy.
However, to-night there were several cheering circumstances. The doctor
had left word that, in all probability, Mrs. Emery would be quite
herself in ten days--a shorter time than he had feared. Lydia was really
charming in a rose-colored dress that matched the dewy flush in her
cheeks; the roast looked cooked as he liked it, and he had heard some
warm words that day about the brilliancy of young Paul Hollister's
prospects. He took a drink of ice-water, tucked his napkin in the top of
his vest--a compromise allowed him by his wife at family dinners, and
smiled at his daughter. "Your mother tells me that you've had a letter
from Paul, saying that he'll be back shortly," he said with a jocosely
significant emphasis. "I suppose we shall hardly be able to get a
glimpse of you after he's in town again."
At this point, beginning to carve the roast, he had a sinking
premonition that it was going to be very tough, and though he heroically
resisted the ejaculation of embittered protest that rose to his lips,
this magnanimity cost him so dear that he did not think of Lydia again
till after he had served her automatically, dashing the mashed potato on
her plate with the gesture of an angry mason slapping down a trowelful
of mortar. It seemed to him at the moment that the past three weeks had
been one succession of tough roasts. He took another drink of ice-water
before he gloomily began on his first mouthful. It was worse than he
feared, and he was in no mood to be either very imaginative or very
indulgent to a girl's whims when Lydia said, suddenly and stiffly, "I
wish you wouldn't speak so about Paul. I don't know what makes everybody
tease me so about him!"
Her father was chewing grimly. "I don't know why they shouldn't, I'm
sure," he said. "Young folks can't expect everybody to keep their eyes
shut and draw no conclusions. Of course I understand Paul's not saying
anything definite till now, on account of your being so young."
Something of Marietta's unsparing presentation of facts was inherited
from her father, though, under his wife's tutelage, he usually spared
Lydia when he thought of it. At this time he was speaking almost
absently, his attention divided between the exceptions to his rulings
taken by the corporation counsel and the quality of his dinner; both
disturbing to his quiet. He finally gave up the attempt at mastication
and swallowed the morsel bodily, with a visible gulp. As he felt the
consequent dull lump of discomfort, he allowed himself his first
articulate protest. "Good Heavens! What meat!"
Lydia had grown quite pale. She pushed back her plate and looked at her
father with horrified eyes. "Father! What a thing to say!" she finally
cried out. "You make me ashamed to look him--to look anybody in the
face. Why, I never dreamed of such a thing! I never--"
Judge Emery was very fond of his pretty daughter, and at this appeal
from what he felt to be a very mild expression of justified discontent,
he melted at once. "Now, never mind, Lydia, it won't kill me. Only as
soon as your mother gets about again, for the Lord's sake have her take
you to a butcher shop and learn to select meats."
Lydia looked at him blankly. She had the feeling that her father was so
remote from her that she could hardly see him. She opened her lips to
speak, but at that moment the maid--the latest acquisition from the
employment agency, a slatternly Irish girl--went through the dining-room
on her way to answer the door-bell, and her father's amused comment cut
her short. "Lydia, you'll have your guests thinking they're at a lunch
counter if you let that girl go on wearing that agglomeration of hair."
The maid reappeared, sidling into the room, half carrying, half dragging
a narrow, tall green pasteboard box, higher than herself but still not
long enough for its contents, which protruded in leafy confusion from
one end. "It's for you," she said bluntly, depositing it beside Lydia
and retreating into the kitchen.
Lydia looked at it in wonder, turning to crimson confusion when her
father said: "From Paul, I suppose. Very nice, I'm sure. Ring the bell
for dessert before you open it. Of course you're in a hurry to read the
card." He smiled with a tender amusement at the girl, who met his eyes
with a look of fright. She opened the box, from which arose a column of
strong, spicy odor, almost like something visible, and naively read the
card aloud: "To the little girl grown up at last--to the young lady I've
waited so long to see."
She laid the card down beside her plate and kept her eyes upon it,
hanging her head in silence. Her father began to consume his dessert
rapidly. The cream in it was delicious, and he ate with appreciation. To
him, as to many middle-aged Americans, the two vital parts of a meal
were the meat and the dessert. The added pleasures or comforting
consolations of soup, salads, vegetables, entrees, made dishes, were not
for him. He ate them, but with a robust indifference. "Meat's business,"
he was wont to say, "and dessert's fun. The rest of one's victuals is
society and art and literature and such--things to leave to the women."
He now stopped his consumption of his dessert and recalled himself with
an effort to his daughter's impalpable difficulties. She was murmuring,
"But, Father--you must be mistaken-- Why, nobody so much as hinted at
such a--"
"That's your mother's doings. She'd be furious now if she knew I'd
spoken right out. But you don't want to be treated like a little girl
all your life, do you?" He laughed at her speechless embarrassment with
a kind obtuseness to the horror of youth at seeing its shy fastnesses of
reserve laid open to indifferent feet. Divining, however, through his
affection for her, that she was really more than pleasantly startled by
his bluntness, he began to make everything smooth by saying: "There
aren't many girls in Endbury who don't envy my little Lydia, I guess.
Paul is considered--"
At this point Lydia rose hurriedly and actually ran away from the sound
of his voice. She fled upstairs so rapidly that he heard the click of
her heel on the top step before he could draw his breath. He laughed
uneasily, finished his dessert in one or two huge mouthfuls, and
followed her. He was recalled by the ringing of the telephone bell, and
when he went upstairs again he was smiling broadly. With his lawyer's
caution, he waited a moment outside his wife's room, where he heard
Lydia's voice, to see if her mother had hit upon some happy inspiration
to quiet the girl's exaggerated maidenly shyness. He had the tenderest
indulgence to his daughter's confusion, but he was not without a
humorous, middle-aged realization of the extremely transitory nature of
this phase of youth. He had lived long enough to see so many blushing
girls transformed into matter-of-fact matrons that the inevitable end of
the business was already present to his mind. He was vastly relieved
that Lydia had a mother to understand her fancies, and upon his wife,
whom he would not have trusted to undertake the smallest business
transaction without his advice, he transferred, with a sigh of content,
the entire responsibility of wisely counseling their daughter. "Thank
the Lord, that's not my job!" he had often said about some knotty point
in the up-bringing of the children. Mrs. Emery had always answered that
she could not be too thankful for a "husband who was not a meddler."
The Judge now listened at the door to the conversation between the two
women with a grin of satisfaction.
"Why, my dear, what is there so terrible in having the handsomest and
most promising young man in Endbury devoted to you? You don't need to
marry him for years and years if you don't want to--or never, if you
don't like him enough." She laughed a little, teasingly, "Perhaps it's
all just our nonsense, and he never has thought of you in that way.
Maybe when he comes to see you he'll tell you about a beautiful girl in
Urbana or Cincinnati that he's engaged to--and _then_ what would your
silly father say?"
"Oh, if I could only think that," breathed Lydia, as though she had been
reprieved from a death sentence. "Of course! Father was just joking. But
he startled me so!"
"He was probably thinking of his horrid law business, darling. When a
big trial is on he wouldn't know me from Eve. He says _anything_ at such
times."
Judge Emery laughed noiselessly, and quite without resentment at this
wifely characterization.
Lydia went on: "It wasn't so much what he said, you know--as--oh, the
way he took it for granted--"
"Well, don't think about it any more, dear; just be your sweet natural
self when Paul comes to see you the first time--and don't let's talk any
more now. Mother gets tired so easily."
Lydia's remorseful outcry over having fatigued her mother seemed a good
occasion for Judge Emery's entrance into the room and for his
announcement. He felt that she would make an effort to control any
agitation she might feel, and indeed, beyond a startled gasp, she made
no comment on his news. Mrs. Emery herself was more obviously stirred to
emotion. "To-night? Why, I didn't think he'd be in town for several days
yet."
"He only got in at five o'clock this afternoon, he said."
The two parents exchanged meaning glances over this chronology, and Mrs.
Emery flushed and smiled. "Now, Lydia," she said, "it's a perfect shame
I'm not well enough to be there when he comes. It would make it easier
for you. But I wish you'd say honestly whether you'd rather have your
father there or see Paul alone."
Judge Emery's face took on an aggrieved look of alarm. "Good gracious,
my dear! What good would I be? You know I can't be tactful. Besides,
I've got an appointment with Melton."
Lydia rose from where she knelt by the bed. Her chin was quivering.
"Why, you make me feel so--so queer! Both of you!--As though it were
anything--to see Paul--when I've known him always."
Her mother seized on the role opened to them by this speech, and said
quickly: "Why, of course! Aren't we silly! I don't know what possesses
us. When he comes you just run along and see him, and say your father
and I are sorry not to be there."
During the next half-hour she made every effort, heroically though
obviously seconded by her husband, to keep the conversation in a light
and casual vein, but when the door-bell rang, they all three heard it
with a start. Mrs. Emery said, very carelessly, "There he is, dear. Run
along and remember me to him." But she pulled Lydia down to her,
straightened a bow on her waist with a twitch, loosened a lock of the
girl's shining dark hair, and kissed her with a sudden yearning fervor.
After they were alone, Judge Emery laughed aloud. "You're just as bad as
I am, Sarah. You don't _say_ anything, but--"
"Oh, I know," his wife said; "I can't help it!" She deliberated
unresignedly over the situation for a moment, and then, "It seems as
though I couldn't have it so, to be sick just now, when I'm needed so
much. This first month is so important! And Lydia's getting such a
different idea of things from what I meant, having this awful time with
servants, and all. I have a sort of feeling once in a while that she's
getting notions!" She pronounced the word darkly.
"Notions?" Judge Emery asked. He had never learned to interpret his
wife's obscurities when the mantle of intuitions fell on her.
"Oh, don't ask me what kind! I don't know. If I knew I could do
something about it. But she speaks queerly once in a while, and the
evening of the day she was out with Marietta in the Black Rock woods she
was-- Do you know, I think it's not good for Lydia to be outdoors too
much. It seems to go to her head so. She gets to looking like
Harry--almost reckless, and like some little scampering wild animal."
Judge Emery rose and buttoned his coat about his spare figure. "Maybe
she takes a back track, after some of my folks. You know there's one
line in my mother's family that was always crazy about the woods. My
grandfather on my mother's side used to go off just as regular as the
month of May came around, and--"
Mrs. Emery interrupted him with the ruthless and justifiable impatience
of people at the family history of their relations by marriage. "Oh, go
along! And stop and speak to Paul on your way out. Just drop in as you
pass the door. We don't want to really chaperone her. Nobody does that
yet--but--the Hollisters are so formal about their girls--well, you stop
in, anyhow. It's borne in on me that that'll look better, after all."
CHAPTER IX
FATHER AND DAUGHTER
In the midst of his conference with Dr. Melton, an hour later, it came
upon Judge Emery with a clap that he had forgotten this behest of his
wife's, plunged deep in legal speculations as he had been, the instant
he turned from her door. He brought his hand down on the table.
"What's the matter?" asked the little doctor, peering up at him.
"Oh, nothing important--women's cobwebs. I'm afraid I'll have to go,
though. We can take this up again to-morrow, can't we?"
"At your service," said the doctor; but he pulled with some exasperation
at a big pile of pamphlets still to be examined.
"It's something about Lydia's receiving a call from Paul Hollister, and
her mother wanting me to stop in as I left the house and say
good-evening--sort of represent the family--do the proper thing. Don't
it tickle you to see women who used to sleigh-ride from seven to eleven
every evening in a little cutter just big enough for one and a half,
begin to wonder if they hadn't better chaperone their girls when they
have callers in the next room?"
He stirred up the pamphlets with a discontented look. "Confound it, I
wish I could stay! Which one of those has the statistics about the
accidents when the men aren't allowed one day in seven?"
"See here, Emery!" In spite of his evident wish to exhort, the doctor
continued sitting as he spoke. He was so short that to rise could have
given him no perceptible advantage over the tall lawyer. "See here; do
you know that you have a most unusual girl for a daughter?"
"I have heard people say that I have a glimmering notion of her merits,"
said the other with a humorous gravity.
"Oh, I don't mean pretty, and appealing, and with a good complexion, and
all that--and I don't mean you don't spoil her most outrageously. I mean
she's got the oddest make-up for a modern American girl--she's simple."
"I don't see anything odd about her--or simple!" Her father resented the
adjectives with some warmth.
Dr. Melton answered with his usual free-handed use of language: "Well,
it's because, like everybody else old and spoiled and stodgy and
settled, you've no eyes in your head when it comes to something
important, like young people. Because they're all smooth and rosy you
think they're all alike." He rushed on, delivering himself as always
with restless vivacity of gesture, "I tell you youth is one of the most
wastefully ignored forces in the world! Talk about our neglecting to get
the good out of our water-power! The way we shut off the capacity of
youth to see things as they are, before it gets purblind with our own
cowardly unreason--why, it's as if we tried to make water run uphill
instead of turning our mill-wheels with its natural energy."
Judge Emery had listened to a word or two of this harangue and then had
looked for and found his hat and coat, with which he had invested
himself, and now stood ready for the street, one hand on the knob of the
door. "Well, good-night to you," he said pleasantly, as though the
doctor were not speaking; "I'll try to see you to-morrow."
Dr. Melton jumped to his feet, laughing, ran across the room and caught
at the other's arm. "Don't blame me. Much preaching of true gospel to
deaf ears has made me yell all the time. You know you don't really hear
me, any more than anyone else."
"There's no doubt about that, I don't!" acquiesced the Judge frankly.
"I will run on, though I know it never does any good. How'd I begin
this time? What started me off? What was I saying?"
"You were saying that Lydia was queer and half-witted," said the Judge
moderately.
"I said she was simple--and by that I mean she's so wise you'd better
look out or she'll find you out. She's as dangerous as a bomb. She has a
scent for essentials. She can tell 'em from all our flummery. I'm afraid
of her, and I'm afraid _for_ her! Remember the fate of the father in the
_Erl-King_! He thought, I dare say, that he was doing a fine thing for
his child, to hurry it along to a nice, warm, dry, safe place!"
Judge Emery broke in, impatient of this fantastic word-bandying. "Oh,
come, Melton, I can't stand here while you spin your paradoxes. I've got
to get home before young Hollister leaves or my wife won't like it."
"I'll go with you, then," cried the little doctor, clapping on his hat.
"You sha'n't escape me that way. I'm in full cry after the best figure
of speech I've hit on in months."
"Good Lord!" The lawyer looked down laughingly at his friend as the two
set off, a stork beside a sparrow. "You and your figures!"
"It came over me with a bang the other day that in Lydia we have in our
midst that society-destroying child in _The Kaiser's New Clothes_."
"Eh?" said Lydia's father blankly.
"You remember the last scene in that inimitable tale? Where the Kaiser
walks abroad with all the people shouting and hurrahing for the new
clothes, and not daring to trust their own eyes, and suddenly a little
child's voice is heard, 'But the Kaiser has nothing on!'"
"I don't know what you're talking about," said the Judge with a patient
indifference.
"Well, you will know when you hear Lydia say that some day. She
knows--she'll know! Perhaps you've done well to send her to that idiotic
finishing school."
"Don't lay it to me!" cried the Judge, laughing; "_I_ didn't send
her--or not send her. If you were married you'd know that fathers never
have anything to say about what their daughters do."
"More fools they!" rejoined the doctor pointedly. "But in this case
maybe it's all right. She's as ignorant as a Hottentot, of course, but
perhaps any real education might have spoiled her innate capacity to--"
"Oh, pshaw!" The Judge was vaguely uneasy. "You let Lydia alone. Talk
your nonsense about something else. There's nothing queer about Lydia,
thank heavens! She's just like all young ladies."
"That's a horrible thing to say about one's own daughter!" cried the
doctor, falling immediately into the lightly mournful, satirical vein
that was the alternative to his usual racing talk. "There won't be
anything queer about her long, that's fact. In real life the child is
never really allowed to complete that sentence. A hundred hands are
clapped over its mouth, and it's hustled, and shaken, and frightened,
and scolded, till it thinks there's something the matter with its
eyesight. And Lydia's a sweet, gentle child, who'll want to say whatever
pleases people she loves--that'll be another bandage over her eyes. And
she's not dowered with an innate fondness for shrieking out
contradictions at the top of her voice, and unless you've a real passion
for that you get silenced early in life."
The lawyer laughed with the good-natured contempt of a large, silent man
for a small, voluble one. "That's a tragedy you can't know much about
from experience, Melton. No cruel force ever silenced you."
He paused at the walk leading to his house. A big street light glowed
and sputtered over their heads. "Come in, won't you, and see Lydia?"
"No; no cruel force has ever _silenced_ me," the doctor mused, putting
his hands slowly into his pockets, "but it has bound me hand and foot. I
talk, and I talk, but do you ever see me doing anything different from
the worst fools of us all?"
"Are you coming in?" The Judge spoke with his absent tolerance of his
doctor's fancies.
"No, thank you, as the farmer said to the steeple-climber. I'm going
home to my lonely office to give thanks to Providence that I'm not
responsible for a daughter."
The Judge frowned. "Nonsense! Look at Marietta."
"I do," said the doctor.
"Well--?" The lawyer was challenging. In the long run the doctor rubbed
him the wrong way.
"I hope you make a better job of bandaging Lydia's eyes than you did
hers."
The Judge had turned toward the house. At this he stopped and made an
irritated gesture. "Melton, you are enough to give a logical man brain
fever. You're always proclaiming that parents have no real influence
over their children's lives--that it's fate, or destiny, or
temperament--and now--you blame me because Marietta's discontented over
her husband's small income."
The doctor looked up quickly, his face twitching. "You think that's the
cause of Marietta's discontent? By Heaven, I wish Lydia could go into a
convent."
Suddenly his many-wrinkled little face set like a mask of tragedy. "Oh,
Nat, you know what Lydia's always been to me--like my own--as
precious--Oh, take care of her! take care of her! See, Lydia can't
fight. She can't, even if she knew what was going on to fight against--"
His voice broke. He looked up at his tall friend and shivered.
Judge Emery clapped him on the shoulder with a rough friendliness. "No
wonder you do miracles in curing women, Marius. You must know their
insides. You talk like a mother in a fit of the nerves over a sick
child. In the Lord's name, what has Lydia to fight against? If there was
ever a creature with a happy, successful life before her-- Besides,
don't we all stand ready to do her fighting for her?"
Though the night was cool, the doctor took off his hat and wiped his
forehead. He looked up once as though he were about to speak, but in
the end he only put his hat back on his head, nodded, and went his way,
his quick, light, uneven tread waking a faint echo in the empty street.
As the Judge let himself in at the front door, a murmur of voices from
the brightly-lighted parlor struck gratefully on his ear. He was not too
late. "How are you, Hollister?" he called as he pulled off his overcoat.
"Glad to see you back. Let's hear all about the Urbana experience."
Hollister's dramatic interest in each engagement of his battle for
success was infectious. Those who knew him, whether they liked him or
not, waited for news of the results of his latest skirmish as they
waited for the installments of an exciting serial story.
As the older man entered, the tall, quick-moving young fellow came over
to the door and shook his hand with energy. The Judge reflected that
nobody but Hollister could so convey the effect that he was being made
kindly welcome in his own house; but he did not dislike this vigor of
personality. He sat down on the chair which his young guest indicated as
a suitable one, and rubbed his chin, smiling at his daughter. "Dr.
Melton sent his love to you, but he wouldn't come in."
Paul looked brightly at Lydia. "I should hope not! My first evening with
her! To share it with anybody! Except her father, of course!" He added
the last as an afterthought, more with the air of putting the Judge at
his ease than of excusing himself for an ungraceful slip of the tongue.
The Judge laughed, restraining an impulse to call out, "You're a wonder,
young man!" and said instead, "Well, let's hear the news."
Lydia said nothing, but her aspect, always vividly expressive of her
mood, struck her father as odd. As he glanced at her from time to time
during the ready, spirited narrative of the young "captain in the army
of electricity," as he had once called himself, Lydia's father felt a
qualm of uneasiness. Her lips were very red and a little open, as though
she were breathless from some exertion, and a deep flush stained her
cheeks. She looked at Paul while he talked animatedly to her father, but
when he addressed himself to her she looked down or away, meeting her
father's eyes with a curious effect of not seeing him at all. The Judge,
moved by the oblique, harassing intimations he had been forced to hear
from the doctor as to the possibility of his not understanding all that
was in his daughter's mind, was oppressed by that most nightmarish of
emotions for a man of clear-cut intellectual interests--an apprehension,
like an imperceptible, clinging cobweb, not to be brushed away. He
wished heartily that the next year were over and Lydia "safely married."
Daughters were so much more of a responsibility than sons. They forced
on one the reality of a world of intangible conditions which one could,
somehow, comfortably ignore with sons. And yet, how about Harry? Perhaps
if some one had not ignored with him--
"I should have been back ten days ago," Paul drew to the end of his
story, "but I simply had to wait to oversee those tests myself. Since
I've adopted that rule of personally checking the inspector's work,
we've been able to report forty per cent. fewer complaints of newly
installed dynamos to the general office. And you see in this case, from
the accident, what might have happened."
"By the Lord!" cried the lawyer, moved in spite of his preoccupations by
the story of danger the other had been relating, "I should think it
would turn your hair white every time a dynamo's installed. How did you
feel when the fly-wheel broke?"
"The fly-wheel isn't on the dynamo, of course," corrected Paul, "so I
don't feel responsible for it in a business way, and that's everything.
As for being frightened, why, it's all over so quickly. You don't have
time to take in what's happening. You're there or you're not. And if you
are, the best thing is to get busy with repairs," he added, with a
simple, manly depreciation of his courage. "You mustn't think it often
happens, you know; it's supposed never to."
He spoke of the personal side of the matter with a dry brevity which
contrasted effectively with the unconscious eloquence with which he had
previously brought before their eyes the tense excitement in the new
power-house when the wheels first stir to life in incredibly rapid
revolutions and the mysterious modern genii begins to rush through the
wires. At no time did Lydia's suitor show to better advantage than in
speaking of his profession. The alertness of his face and the prompt
decision of his speech suited the subject. His mouth fell into lines of
grimly fixed purpose which expressed even more than his words when he
spoke of the rivalry in endurance, patience and daring in the army of
young electrical engineers, all set, as he was, on crowding one another
out of the rapidly narrowing road to preferment and the few great golden
prizes of the profession.
This evening he was more than usually fervent. Judge Emery thought he
detected in him traces of the same excitement that flamed from Lydia's
cheeks. "I tell you, Judge, I was wrong when I spoke of the 'army' of
electricity. In the army advancement comes only from somebody's death,
and with us it's simply a question of who's got the most to give. He
gets the most back--and that's all there is to it. The company's bound
to have the man it can get the most work out of. If you can do two
ordinary men's work, you get two men's pay. See? There's no limit to the
application of that principle. Why, our field organizer on the Pacific
Coast is only a little older than I, and, by Jove! the work they say
he'll turn off is something marvelous! You wouldn't believe it. But you
can train yourself to it, like everything else. To be able to
concentrate--not to lose a detail--to put every ounce of your force into
it--that's the thing."
He brought one hand down inside the other, and sat for a moment in
silence as tense with stirring possibilities to the others as to
himself. The Judge felt moved to a most unusual sensation, as if he were
a loosened bowstring beside this twanging, taut intensity. He felt
slightly dismayed to have his unspoken principles carried to this _n_th
power. He had given the best of himself, all his thoughts, illusions,
hopes, endeavors, to his ideal of success, but his ambition had never
been concentrated enough to serve as a lens through which the rays of
his efforts might focus themselves into the single beam of devastating
heat on which Paul counted so certainly to burn away the obstacles
between himself and success. Various protesting comments rose to his
lips, which he kept back, disconcerted to find how much they resembled
certain remarks of Dr. Melton's.
The young man stirred, looked at Lydia, and smiled brilliantly. "I
mustn't keep this little sick-nurse up any later, I suppose," he said;
but for a moment he made no movement to go. He and Lydia exchanged a
gaze as long and silent as if they had been alone. It occurred to the
Judge that they both looked dazzled. When Paul rose he drew a long
breath and shook his head half humorously at his host. "You and I will
have to look to our guns, during the next season, to hold our own, won't
we? I've been making Lydia promise to reserve me three dances at every
single ball this winter, and I think I'm heroic not to insist on
more--but her first season--!"
Lydia said, with her pretty, light laugh, a little shaking now, "But
suppose you're out of town, setting up some new dynamo or something and
your three dances come along?"
Paul crossed the room to her, as if drawn irresistibly by the sound of
her voice. He stood by her, looking down into her eyes (he was very
tall), bending over her, smiling, pressing, confident, masterful.
"You're to sit out those three dances and think of me, and think of
me--of course! I shall be thinking of you."
Lydia's little tremulous air of archness dropped under this point-blank
rejoinder. She flushed, and looked at her father. That unimaginative
person started toward her as though she had called to him for help, and
then, ashamed of his inexplicable impulse, turned away confusedly and
disappeared into the hall.
Paul took this movement as a frank statement of the older man's desire
to be, for the moment, rid of him. "Oh, I _am_ going, Judge," he called
after him, unabashed; "it is just a bit hard to tear myself away--I've
been waiting so long for her to get back!" To Lydia he went on, "I've
grown thin and pale waiting for you, while you--look at yourself, you
heartless little witch!"
He pointed across to a tall mirror in which they were reflected against
the rich background of his roses. For a moment both the beautiful young
creatures looked each into his own eyes, mysterious with youth's total
ignorance of its own meaning. Paul took Lydia's hand in his, and pointed
again to their reflections as they stood side by side. He tried to
speak, but for once his ready tongue was silent. Judge Emery came back
to the door, a weary patience on his white, tired face.
The young man turned away with a sigh and a smile. "Yes, yes, Judge, I'm
off. Good-night, Lydia. Don't forget the theater Wednesday night."
He crossed the room with a rapid, even step, shook hands with the Judge,
and got himself out of the room with an easy briskness which the older
man, mindful of his own rustic youth, was half-inclined to envy.
After he and Lydia were left alone he did not venture a word of comment,
lest he hit on the wrong thing. He went silently about, putting out the
lights, and locking the windows. Lydia stood where Paul had left her,
looking at her bright image in the mirror. When the last bulb went out,
the room was in a flickering twilight, the street arc-light blinking
uncertainly into the windows. Judge Emery stood waiting for his daughter
to move. He could scarcely see her form--her face not at all, but there
flashed suddenly upon him the memory of her appealing look toward him
earlier. It shook him as it had then. His heart yearned over her. He
would have given anything he possessed for the habit of intimate talk
with her. He put out his hands, but in the twilight she did not see the
gesture. He felt shy, abashed, horribly ill at ease, torn by his
tenderness, by his sense of remoteness. He said, uncertainly,
"Lydia--Lydia dear--"
She started. "Oh, yes, of course. It's late." She passed, brushed
lightly against him, as he stood trembling with the sense of her
dearness to him. She began to ascend the stairs. He had felt from her
the emanation of excitement, guessed that she was shivering like himself
before a crisis--and he could find no word to say.
She had passed him as though he were a part of the furniture. He had
never talked to her about--about things. He stood at the foot of the
stairs in the darkness, listening to her light, mounting footfall. Once
he opened his mouth to call to her, but the habit of a lifetime closed
it.
"She will talk to her mother," he told himself; "her mother will know
what to say." When he followed her up the stairs he was conscious
chiefly that he was immeasurably tired. Melton, perhaps, had something
on his side with his everlasting warnings about nervous breakdowns. He
could not stand long strains as he used to do.
He fell asleep tracing out the thread of the argument presented that day
by the counsel for the defense.
CHAPTER X
CASUS BELLI
Dr. Melton looked up in some surprise from his circle of lamplight as
his goddaughter came swiftly into the room. "Your mother worse?" he
queried sharply.
"No, no, dear Godfather. I just thought I'd come over and see you for a
while. I had a little headache--Marietta's back from Cleveland to-day,
and she and Flora Burgess are at the house--"
"You've said enough. I'm thankful that you have this refuge to fly to
from such--"
"Oh, Flora's not so bad as you make her out, the queer, kind little old
dowdy--only I didn't feel like talking 'parties,' and 'who's who,'
to-night--and their being with Mother made it all right for me to leave
her."
The doctor took off his eye-shade and showed his little wizened face
rather paler than usual. "That's a combination that would kill _me_, and
your mother not well yet--still, many folks, many tastes."
He looked at Lydia penetratingly. She had taken a chair before the
soft-coal fire and was staring at it rather moodily. "Well, Lydia, my
dear, and how does Endbury strike you now? Speaking of many tastes, what
are yours going to be like, I wonder?"
"I wonder," she repeated absently.
"Well, at least you know whether the young man who called on you last
night is to your taste?"
Lydia turned her face away and made a nervous gesture. "Oh, don't,
Godfather!"
"Very well, I won't," he said cheerfully, turning to his books with the
instinct of one who knows his womankind.
There was a long silence, broken only by the purring of the coal. Then
Lydia gave a laugh and went to sit on the arm of his chair. "Of course
that was what I came to see you about," she admitted, her sensitive lips
quivering into a smile that was not light-hearted; "but now I'm here I
find I haven't anything to say. Perhaps you'd better give me a pink pill
and send me home to forget all about everything."
Dr. Melton took her fingers and held them closely in his thin, sinewy
hands. "Oh, if I could--if I only could do something for you!" He
searched her face anxiously. "What did young Hollister say that makes
you so troubled?"
She sat down on the edge of his writing-table and reflected. "It wasn't
anything he _said_," she admitted. "He was all right, I guess. Father
had scared the life out of me before he came, by sort of taking it for
granted--Oh, you know--the silly way people do--"
"Yes."
"Well, Paul was as nice as could be about that, so far as words go-- He
didn't say a thing embarrassing or--or hard to answer, but he let me
_see_--all the same! He kept saying what an immense help I'd be to an
ambitious man. He said he didn't see why I shouldn't grow into the
leader of Endbury society, like the Mrs. Hollister, his aunt, that he
and his sister live with, you know."
"I suppose he's right," conceded the doctor, reluctantly.
"Well, while he was talking about it, it seemed all very well--you know
the way he goes at things--how he makes you feel as though he were a
locomotive going sixty miles an hour and you were inside the engine cab,
holding on for dear life?"
Dr. Melton shook his head. "Paul has given me a great variety of
sensations," he admitted, "but I can't say that he ever gave me quite
this locomotive-cab illusion you speak of."
"Well, he has me, lots of times," persisted Lydia. "It's awfully
exciting--you don't know where you're going, and you can't stop to
think, everything tears past you so fast and your breath is so blown out
of you. You feel like screaming. You forget everything else, you get
so--so stirred up and excited. But after it's over there's always a time
when things are flat. And this morning, and all day long, I've felt
very--different about what he wants and all. I don't believe I'm very
well, perhaps--or maybe--" she broke off, to say with emotion, "Oh,
Godfather, wouldn't it be too awful if I should turn out to be without
ambition." She pronounced the word with the reverence for its meaning
that had been drilled into her all her life, and looked at Dr. Melton
with troubled eyes.
He thrust his lips out with a grimace habitual to him in moments of
feeling, and for an instant said nothing. When he spoke his voice broke
on her name, as it had the night before when he had stood looking up at
her windows. "Oh, Lydia!--Oh, my dear, I'm terribly afraid of your
future!"
"I'm a little scared of it myself," she said tremulously, and hid her
face on his shoulder.
She was the first to speak. "Wouldn't Marietta just scream with laughter
at us?" she reminded him. "We _are_ foolish, too! There's nothing in the
world you could lay your finger on. There's nothing anyhow, I guess, but
nerves. I wouldn't dare breathe it to anybody else, but you always know
how I'm feeling, anyhow. It's as though--here I am, grown up, and
there's nothing for me to do that's worth while--even if--even
if--Paul--"
The doctor took a sudden resolution. "Why don't you talk to your father,
Lydia? Why don't you ask him about--"
He was cut short by Lydia's gesture of utter wonder. "_Father_? Don't
you know that there's a big trial on? He couldn't tell without figuring
up, if you should ask him quick, whether I'm fourteen or nineteen--or
nine! Mother wouldn't let me, anyhow, even if he could have any idea of
what I was driving at. She never let us bother him the least bit when
there was something big happening in his lawyering. I remember that
time I had pneumonia and nearly died, when I was a little girl, that she
told him I had just a cold; and he never knew any different for years
afterward, when I happened to say something about it. She didn't want
him worried when he needed all his wits for some important business."
The doctor looked at her with frowning intensity, and then down at his
papers. He seemed on the point of some forcible utterance, which he
restrained with many twitchings of his mouth. Finally he got up and went
to a window, staring out silently.
"I think I'll go and look up dear Aunt Julia," said Lydia.
"Very well, my dear," said the doctor over his shoulder. "She's in her
room, I think." In exactly the same mild tone, he added, "Damnation!"
"What did you say?" asked Lydia.
He turned toward her, and took up a book from the table. "I said
nothing, dear Lydia--I've nothing to say, I find."
Lydia broke into a light, mocking laugh--the doctor's volubility was an
old joke--and began to speak, when a woman's voice called, "Oh, Marius,
here's Mr.---- why, Lydia, how did you get in without my seeing you?"
She entered the room as she spoke--a middle-aged woman, with large blue
eyes and graying fair hair, who evidently did her duty by the prevailing
styles in dress with a comfortable moderation of effort. Lydia's mother,
as the sister of Mrs. Sandworth's long-dead husband, thought it
necessary, from time to time, to endeavor to stir her sister-in-law up
to a keener sense of what was due the world in the matter of personal
appearance; but Mrs. Sandworth, born a Melton, had the irritating
unconcern for social problems of that distinguished Kentucky family. She
cared only to please her brother Marius, she said, and he never cared
what she had on, but only what was in her mind--a remark that had once
caused Judge Emery to say, in a fit of exasperation with her wandering
wits, that if she ever had as little on as she had in her mind, he
guessed Melton would sit up and take notice.
Lydia now rushed at her aunt, exclaiming, "Oh, Aunt Julia, how _good_
you do look to me! The office door was open and I slipped in that way,
without ringing the bell."
"It's four years old, and never been touched, not even the sleeves,"
said the other deprecatingly.
Her brother laughed. "Who did you say was here--Oh, it's you, Rankin;
come in, come in."
The newcomer was half-way across the room before he saw Lydia. He
stopped, with a look of extreme pleasure and surprise, which Lydia
answered with a frank smile.
"Why, have you met my niece?" asked Mrs. Sandworth, looking from one to
the other.
"Oh, yes; Mr. Rankin's my oldest new friend in Endbury. I met him the
first day I was back."
"And when I set up the newel-post--"
"And I ran on to his house by accident the day Marietta and I were out
with little Pete, when it rained and I borrowed his overcoat and
umbrella--"
"And then I had to call to take them away, of course--"
They intoned their confessions like a gay antiphonal chant. A bright
color had come up in Lydia's cheeks. She looked very sunny and
good-humored, like a cheerful child, an expression which up to that year
had been habitual to her. Dr. Melton looked at her without speaking.
"So, you see," she concluded, "not to speak of several other
times--we're very well acquainted."
"Well, Marius! Did you ever!" Mrs. Sandworth appealed to her brother.
"Oh, I've known about it all along. Rankin and I have discussed Lydia as
well as other weighty matters, a great many times."
Mrs. Sandworth's easily diverted mind sped off into another channel.
"Yes, how you do discuss. I'm going to look right at the clock every
minute from now on, so's to be sure to remind you of that engagement at
Judge Emery's office at half-past nine. I know what happens when you and
Mr. Rankin get to talking."
"I'll not stay long; Miss Emery has precedence."
"Oh, don't mind me," said Lydia.
"They won't--nor anything else," her aunt assured her.
Rankin laughed at this characterization. The doctor did not seem to
hear. He was brooding, and drumming on the table. From this reverie he
was startled by the younger man's next statement.
"I've got an apprentice," he announced.
"Eh?" queried the doctor with unexpected sharpness.
"The fifteen-year-old son of my neighbor, Luigi Carfarone, who works on
the railroad. The boy's been bad--truant--street gamin--all that sort of
thing, and his mother, who comes in to clean for me sometimes, has been
awfully anxious about him. But it seems he has a passion for
tools--maybe his ancestors were mediaeval craftsmen. Anyhow, he's been
working for me lately, doing some of the simpler jobs, and really
learning fast. And he's been so interested he's forgotten all his
deviltry. So, yesterday, didn't he and his father and his mother and
about a dozen littler brothers and sisters all come in solemn
procession, dressed in their best, to dedicate him to me and my
profession, as they grandly call it."
"Oh, how perfectly lovely!" cried Lydia.
The doctor resumed his drumming morosely. "Of course you know the end of
that."
"You mean he'll get tired of it, and take to robbing chicken-roosts
again?"
"Not much! He'll like it, and stick to it, and bring others, and you'll
extend operations and build shops, and in no time you'll go the way of
all the world--a big factory, running night and day; you on the keen
jump every minute; dust an inch thick over your books and music; nerves
taut; head humming with business schemes to beat your competitors;
forget your wife most of the time except to give her money; making
profits hand over fist; suborning legislators to wink at your getting
special railroad rates for your stuff; can't remember how many children
you have; grand success; notable example of what can be done by
attention to business; nervous prostration at forty-five; Bright's
disease at fifty; leave a million."
Rankin burst into a great roar of boyish laughter at this prophetic
flight. The doctor gnawed his lower lip, and looked at him without
smiling. "I've got ten million blue devils on my back to-night," he
said.
"So I see--so I see." Rankin was still laughing, but as he continued to
look into his old friend's face his own grew grave by reflection. "You
don't believe all that?"
"Oh, you won't mean to. It'll come gradually." He broke out suddenly,
"Good Heavens, Rankin, give me a serious answer."
"Answer!" The cabinet-maker's bewilderment was immense. "Have you asked
me anything?"
The doctor turned away to his desk with the pettish gesture of a woman
whose inner thoughts are not divined.
"He makes me feel very thick-witted and dense," Rankin appealed to the
two women.
Mrs. Sandworth exonerated him from blame. "Oh, nobody ever can make out
what he's driving at. I never try." She took out a piece of crochet
work. "Lydia, they're at it now. I know the voice Marius gets on.
_Would_ you make this in shell stitch? It's much newer, of course, but
they say it don't wash so well." As Lydia's attention wavered, "Oh,
there's not a particle of use in trying to make out what they're saying.
They just go on and on."
Rankin was addressing himself to the doctor's back. "I don't, you know,
see anything wicked in making a lot of chairs by machinery instead of a
few by hand. I'm no handcraft faddist. I did that in the beginning only
because I had to begin somehow to earn my living honestly without being
too tied up to folks, and I couldn't think of any other way. But I
think, now that you've put the idea into my head--I think it would be a
good thing to gather the boys of the neighborhood around me--and, by
gracious! the girls too! That's one of my convictions--that girls need
very much the same treatment as boys. And if it should develop into a
large business (which I doubt strongly), what's the harm? The motive
lying back of it would be different from what I so fear and hate in big
businesses. You can bet your last cent on one thing, and that is that
the main idea would not be to make as much furniture as fast as
possible, as cheap as possible, but to make it good, and to make only as
much as would leave me and every last one of the folks that work for me
time and strength to live--'leisure to be good.' Who said that, anyway?
It's fine."
"_Hymn to Adversity_," supplied the doctor, who was better read in the
poets than the younger generation. He added, skeptically, "Could you,
though, do any such thing? Wouldn't it run _you_, once you got to
going?"
"Well, if worst came to worst--" began Rankin, then changing front, he
began again: "My great-aunt--"
The doctor fell back in his chair with a groan and a laugh.
"Yes; the same one you may have heard me mention before. She told me
that all through her childhood her family was saving and pulling
together to build a fine big house. They worked along for years until,
when she was a young lady, they finally accomplished it; built a big
three-story house that was the admiration of the countryside. Then they
moved in. And it took the women-folks every minute of their time, and
more, to keep it clean and in order; it cost as much to keep it up,
heated, furnished, repaired, painted, and everything the way a fine
house should be, as their entire living used to cost. The fine big
grounds they had laid out to go with the mansion took so much time to--"
"You see. You see. That's just what I meant," broke in the doctor.
"Well, I'm a near relative of my great-aunt's. One day, when all the
rest of the family was away, she set fire to the house and burned it to
the ground, with everything in it."
"She didn't!" broke in Mrs. Sandworth, who had been coaxed to a fitful
attention by the promise of a coherent story.
Rankin laughed. "Well, that was the way she told it to me, and I don't
doubt she _would_ have," he amended.
The doctor grunted, "Huh! But would _you_!" He went on, "You couldn't
compete with your rivals, anyhow, if you didn't concentrate everything
on making chairs. Don't you know the successful business man's best
advertisement? 'All of my life-strength I've put into the product I
offer you,' he says to the public, and it's true."
"Oh, well, if I couldn't do business there'd be an end of the matter,
and none of your horrible prophecies would come true."
"Your wife wouldn't let you."--Dr. Melton took up another line of
attack--"she'd want a motor-car and 'nice' associates and a fashionable
school for the children, and a home in the 'respectable' part of town."
Rankin's easy-going manner changed. He sat up and frowned. "There you
step on one of my corns, Doctor"--he did not apologize for the rustic
metaphor--"I don't believe a single, solitary identical word of that.
It's my most hotly held conviction that women are so much like humans
that you can't tell the difference with a microscope. I mean, if they're
interested in petty, personal things it's because they're not given a
fair chance at big, impersonal things. Everybody's jumping on the
American woman because she knows more about bridge-whist than about her
husband's business. _Why_ does she? Because he's satisfied to have
her--you can take my word for it! He likes her to be absorbed in clubs
and bridge and idiotic little dabblings in near-culture and pseudo-art,
just for the reason that a busy mother gives her baby a sticky feather
to play with. It keeps the baby busy. It keeps his wife's attention off
him. It's the American man just as much as the woman who's mortally
afraid of a sure-enough marriage with sure-enough shared interests. He
doesn't want to bother with children, or with the servant problem or the
questions of family life, and he doesn't want his wife bothering him in
his business any more than she wants him interfering with hers. That
idea of the matter is common to them both."
"That's a fine, chivalric view of the situation," said the doctor
sardonically. "Maybe if you'd practiced as long in as many American
families as I have, you might have a less idealistic view of your female
compatriots."
"I don't idealize 'em," cried Rankin. "Good Lord! Don't I say they're
just like men? They amount to something if they're given something worth
while to do--not otherwise."
"Don't you call bringing up children worth while?"
"You bet I do. So much so that I'd have the fathers take their full half
of it. I'd have men do more inside the house and less outside, and the
women the other way 'round."
The doctor recoiled at this. "Oh, you're a visionary. It couldn't be
done."
"It couldn't be done in a minute," admitted Rankin.
The doctor mused. "It's an interesting thought. But it's not for our
generation. A new idea is like a wedge. You have to introduce it by the
thin edge. The only way to get it started is by beginning with the
children. Adults are hopeless. There's never any use trying to change
them."
"Oh, you can't fool children," said Rankin. "It's no use teaching them
something you're not willing to make a try at yourself. They see through
that quick enough! What you're really after, is what they see and learn
to go after themselves. If anything's to be done, the adults must take
the first step."
"But, as society is organized, the idea is preposterous."
"Society's been organized a whole lot of different ways in its time. Who
tells me that it's bound to stay this way? I tell you right now, it
hasn't got _me_ bluffed, anyhow! My wife--if I ever have one--is going
to be my sure-enough wife, and my children, _my_ children. I won't
_have_ a business that they can't know about, or that doesn't leave me
strength enough to share in all their lives. I can earn enough growing
potatoes and doing odd jobs of carpentering for that!"
The doctor looked wonderingly at the other's kindling face. "Rankin,"
he asked irrelevantly, "aren't there _ever_ moments when you despair of
the world?"
The voice of the younger man had the fine tremor of sincerity as he
answered, "Why, good heavens, _no_, Doctor! That's why I dare criticize
it so."
The doctor looked with an intensity almost fierce into the other's
confident eyes. He laid his thin, sinewy hand on the other's big brown
fist, as though he would fain absorb conviction by contact. "But I'm
sick with the slowness of the progress you talk of--believe in," he
burst out finally. "It comes too late--the advance from our tragic
materialism; too late for so many that could have profited by it most."
He looked toward Lydia bending over her aunt's fancy work. Rankin
followed the direction of his eyes.
"Yes; that's what I mean," said the doctor heavily, rising from his
chair. "That and such thousands of others. Oh, for a Theseus to hunt
down this Minotaur of false standards and wretched ideas of success! I
see them, the precious youths and maidens, going in by thousands to his
den of mean aspirations, and not a hand is raised to warn them. They
must be silly and tragic because everyone else is!"
Rankin shook his head. "I think I'm proving that you don't have to go
into the labyrinth--that you can live in health and happiness outside."
"There's rather more than that to be done, you'll admit," said the
doctor with an uncompromising bitterness.
Rankin colored. "I don't pretend that it's much of anything--what I've
done."
The doctor did not deny him. He thrust out his lips and rubbed his hand
nervously over his face. Finally, "But you have done it, at least," he
brought out, "and I've only talked. As another doctor has said: 'I've
never taken a bribe; but there's a pale shade of bribery known as
prosperity.'"
They fell into a silence, broken by Mrs. Sandworth's asking, "Lydia,
have your folks got an old mythology book? I studied it at school, of
course, but it has sort of passed out of my mind. Was it the Minotaur
that sowed teeth and something else very odd came up that you wouldn't
expect?"
Lydia did not smile. "I don't know whether we have the book or not, but
Miss Slater told us the story of the Minotaur. There's a picture of
Theseus and Ariadne in Europe somewhere--Munich, I think--or maybe
Siena. It was where one of the girls had a sore throat, I remember, and
we had to stay quite a while. Miss Slater told us about it then."
The doctor stood up. "Julia, it's nearly half-past now. Who remembered
this time? I'm off, all of you. Rankin, see that Lydia gets home safely,
will you?"
"Oh, I must go too--now, with you." The girl jumped up. "I didn't
realize it was so late. They'll be wondering at home."
"Come along, then, both of you. I'll go with you to the corner where I
take my car."
The chill of the night air sent them along at a brisk gait, Lydia
swinging easily between them, her head on a level with Rankin's, the
doctor's hat on a level with her ear. She said nothing, and the two
talked across her, disjointed bits of an argument apparently under
endless discussion between them.
The doctor flung down, with a militant despondency, "It'd be no use
trying to do anything, even if you weren't so slothful and sedentary as
you are! It moves in a vicious circle. Because material success is what
the majority want, the majority'll go on wanting it. Hardy says
somewhere that it's innate in human nature not to desire the undesired
of others."
Rankin sang out a ringing "Aw, g'wan! It's innate in human nature to
murder and steal whenever it pleases, and I guess even Hardy'd admit
that those aren't the amusements of the majority quite so extensively as
they used to be--what? First thing you know people'll begin to desire
things because they're worth desiring and not because other folks have
them--even so astonishing a flight as that!" he made a boyish
gesture--"and what a grand time that'll be to live in, to be sure!"
They were waiting at the corner for the doctor's street car, which now
came noisily down toward them. He watched it advance, and proffered as a
valedictory, his gloom untempered to the last, "You're a wild man that
lives in the woods. I've doctored everybody in the world for thirty
years. Which knows human nature best?"
Rankin roared after him defiantly, waking the echoes and startling the
occupants of the car, "I do! I do! I do!"
The car bore the doctor away, a perversely melancholy little figure,
contemplating the young people blackly.
"Whatever do you suppose set him off so?" Rankin wondered aloud as they
resumed their rapid, swinging walk through the cold air.
"I'm afraid I did," Lydia surmised. "I had a wretched fit of the blues,
and I guess he must have caught them from me."
Rankin looked down at her keenly, his thoughts apparently quite altered
by her phrase. "Ah, he worries a great deal about you," he murmured.
Lydia laughed nervously, and said nothing. They walked swiftly in
silence. The stars were thick above them in the wind-swept autumn night.
Lydia tilted her head to look up at them once or twice. She saw Rankin's
face pale under the shadow of his broad-brimmed hat, his eyes meeting
hers in an intent regard like a wordless speech. The fine, cold, austere
wind swept them along like leaves, whipping their young pulses, chanting
loudly in the leafless branches of the maples, and filling the dark
spaces above with a great humming roar. They thrilled responsive to all
this and to the mood of high seriousness each divined in the other.
Lydia's voice, breaking in upon the intimate silence, continued the
talk, but it was with another note. The mute interval, filled with wind
and darkness and the light of stars, had swung them up to a higher
plane. She spoke with an artless sureness of comprehension--a
certainty--they were close in spirit at that moment, and she was not
frightened, not even conscious of it. "Why should the doctor worry?
_What is the matter?_ Marietta says the trouble with me is that I'm
spoiled with having everything that I want."
"_Have_ you everything you want?" Rankin's bluntness of interrogation
was unmitigated.
Lydia looked up at him swiftly, keenly. In his grave face there was that
which made her break out with an open quivering emotion she had not
shown even to the doctor's loving heart. "It's a weight on my very
soul--that there's nothing for me to look forward to--nothing, nothing
that's worth growing up to do. I haven't been taught anything--but I
know I want to be something better than--perhaps I can't be--but I want
to try! I want to try! That's not much to ask--just a chance to try--But
I don't even know how to get that. I don't even dare to speak
of--of--such things. People laugh and say it's Sunday-schooley fancies
that'll disappear, that I'll forget as I get into living. But I don't
want to forget. I'm afraid I shall. I want to keep trying. I don't
know--"
They did not slacken their swift advance as they talked. They looked at
each other seriously in the starlight.
Rankin had given an indrawn exclamation as she finished, and after an
instant's pause he said, with a deep emotion, "Oh, perhaps--at least we
both want to try--_Be Ariadne for me!_ Help me to find the clue to
what's wrong in our lives, and perhaps--" He looked down at her, shaken,
drawing quick breaths. She answered his gaze silently, her face as
shining white as his.
He went on: "You shall decide what Ariadne may be or may come to be--I
will take whatever you choose to give--and bless you!"
She had a gesture of humility. "_I_ haven't anything to give."
His accent was memorable as he cried, "You have yourself--you--you! But
you are too gentle! It is hard for you--it will be too hard for you to
do what you feel should be done. I could perhaps do the things if you
would tell me--help you not to forget--not to let life make you forget
what is worth doing and learning!"
She put back a mesh of her wind-blown hair to look at him intently, and
to say again in wonder, "I'm not anything. What can you think I--what
can you hope--"
They were standing now on the walk before her father's house. "I can
hope--" his voice shook, "I can hope that you may make me into a man
worthy to help you to be the best that's in you."
Lydia put out her hand impulsively. It did not tremble. She looked at
him with radiant, steady eyes. He raised the slim, gloved fingers to his
lips. "Whether to leave you, or to try to--Oh, I would give my life to
know how best to serve you," he said huskily. He turned away, the sound
of his steps ringing loud in the silent street.
Lydia went slowly up the walk and into the empty hall. She stood an
instant, her hands clasped before her breast, her eyes closed, her face
still and clear. Then she moved upstairs like one in a dream.
As she passed her mother's door she started violently, and for an
instant had no breath to answer. Some one had called her name
laughingly.
Finally, "Yes," she answered without stirring.
"Oh, come in, come in!" cried Marietta mockingly. "We know all about
everything. We heard you come up the street, and saw you philandering on
the front walk. And for all it's so dark, we made out that Paul kissed
your hand when he went away."
There was a silence in the hall. Then Lydia appeared in the door. Mrs.
Emery gave a scream. "Why, Lydia! what makes you look so queer?"
They turned startled, inquiring, daunting faces upon her. It was the
baptism of fire to Lydia. The battle, inevitable for her, had begun. She
faced it; she did not take refuge in the safe, silent lie which opened
before her, but her courage was a piteous one. In her utter heartsick
shrinking from the consequences of her answer she had a premonition of
the weakness that was to make the combat so unequal. "It was not Paul,"
she said, pale in the doorway; "it was Daniel Rankin."
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
BOOK II
IN THE LOCOMOTIVE CAB
CHAPTER XI
WHAT IS BEST FOR LYDIA
The girls who were to be debutantes that season, the "crowd" or (more
accurately to quote Madeleine Hollister's racy characterization) "the
gang," stood before Hallam's drug store, chattering like a group of
bright-colored paroquets. They had finished three or four ice-cream
sodas apiece, and now, inimitably unconscious that they were on the
street corner, they were "getting up" a matinee party for the
performance of the popular actress whom, at that time, it was the
fashion for all girls of their age and condition to adore. They had
worked themselves up to a state of hysteric excitement over the
prospect.
A tall brown-eyed blonde, with the physical development of a woman and
the facial expression of a child of twelve, cried out, "I feel as though
I should swoon for joy to see that darling way she holds her hands when
the leading man's making love to her--so sort of helpless--like this--"
"Oh, Madeleine, that's not a _bit_ the way. It's so!"
The first speaker protested, "Well, I guess I ought to be able to do it.
I've practiced for _hours_ in front of the glass doing it."
"For mercy's sake that's nothing. So have I. Who hasn't?"
Madeleine referred the question to Lydia, "Lyd has seen her later than
anybody. She saw her in London. Just think of going to the theater in
London--as if it was anywhere. She says they're crazy about her over
there."
"_Oh, wild!_" Lydia told them. "Her picture's in every single window!"
"Which one? Which one?" they clamored, hanging on her answer
breathlessly.
"That fascinating one with the rose, where she's holding her head
sideways and--" Oh, yes, they had that one, their exclamation cut her
short, relieved that their collections were complete.
"Lyd met a woman on the steamer coming back whose sister-in-law has the
same hairdresser," Madeleine went on.
They were electrified. "Oh, _honestly_? Is it her own?" They trembled
visibly before solution of a problem which had puzzled them, as they
would have said, "for eternities."
"Every hair," Lydia affirmed, "and naturally that color."
Their enthusiasm was prodigious, "How grand! How perfectly grand!"
They turned on Lydia with reproaches. "Here you've been back two months
and we haven't got a bit of good out of you. Think of your having known
that, all this--"
"Her mother's sick, you know," Madeleine Hollister explained.
"She hasn't been so sick but what Lydia could get out to go buggy-riding
with your brother Paul ever since he got back this last time."
Lydia, as though she wished to lose herself, had been entering with a
feverish intensity into the spirit of their lively chatter; but now,
instead of responding with some prompt, defensive flippancy, she colored
high and was silent. A clock above them struck five. "Oh, I must get
on," she cried; "I'm down here, you know, to walk home with Father."
They laughed loudly, "Oh, yes, we know all about this sudden enthusiasm
for Poppa's society. Where are you going to meet Paul?"
Lydia looked about at the crush of drays, trolley-cars, and
delivery-wagons jamming the busy street, "Well, not here down-town," she
replied, her tone one of satisfied security.
A confused and conscious stir among her companions and a burst of talk
from them cut her short. They cried variously, according to their
temperaments, "Oh, there he comes now!" "I think it's mean Lydia's
gobbling him up from under our noses!" "I used to have a ride or two
behind that gray while Lydia was away!" "My! Isn't he a good-looker!"
They had all turned like needles to the north, and stared as the
spider-light wagon, glistening with varnish, bore down on them, looking
singularly distinguished and costly among the dingy business-vehicles
which made up the traffic of the crowded street. The young driver guided
the high-stepping gray with a reckless, competent hand through the most
incredibly narrow openings and sent his vehicle up against the
flower-like group of girls, laughing as he drew rein, at the open,
humorous outcry against him. A chorus of eager recrimination rose to his
ears, "Now, Mr. Hollister, this is the first time Lydia's been out with
our crowd since she came home!" "You might let her alone!" "Go away,
Paul, you greedy thing!" "I haven't asked Lydia a single thing about her
European trip!"
"Well, maybe you think," he cried, springing out to the sidewalk, "that
I've been spending the last year traveling around Europe with Lydia! I
haven't heard any more than you have." He threw aside the lap-robe of
supple broadcloth, and offered his hand to Lydia. A flash of resentment
at the cool silence of this invitation sprang up in the girl's eyes.
There was in her face a despairing effort at mutiny. Her hands nervously
opened and shut the clasp of the furs at her throat. She tried to look
unconscious, to look like the other girls, to laugh, not to know his
meaning, to turn away.
The young man plunged straight through these pitiful cobwebs. "Why, come
on, Lydia," he cried with a good-humored pointedness, "I've been all
over town looking for you." She backed away, looking over her shoulder,
as if for a lane of escape, flushing, paling. "Oh, no, no thank you,
Paul. Not _this_ afternoon!" she cried imploringly, with a soft fury of
protest, "I'm on my way to Father's office. I want to walk home with
him. I want to see him. I thought it would be nice to walk home with
him. I see so little of him! I thought it would be nice to walk home
with him." She was repeating herself, stammering and uncertain, but
achieving nevertheless a steady retreat from the confident figure
standing by the wagon.
This retreat was cut short by his next speech. "Oh, I've just come from
your father. I went to his office, thinking you might be there. He said
to tell you and your mother that he won't be home to dinner to-night at
all. He's got some citations on hand he has to verify."
Lydia had stopped her actual recoil at his first words and now stood
still, but she still tugged at the invisible chain which held her. She
was panting a little. She shook her head. "Well--anyhow--I want to see
him!" she insisted with a transparently aimless obstinacy like a
frightened child's. "I want to see my father." Paul laughed easily,
"Well, you'd better choose some other time if you want to get anything
out of him. He had turned everybody out and was just settling to work
with a pile of law-books before him. You know how your father looks
under those circumstances!" He held the picture up to her, relentlessly
smiling.
Lydia's lips quivered, but she said nothing.
Paul went on soothingly, "I've only come to take you straight home,
anyhow. Your mother wants you. She said she had one of those fainting
turns again. She said to be sure to bring you."
At the mention of her mother's name, Lydia turned quite pale. She began
to walk slowly back towards the wagon. There was angry, helpless misery
in her dark eyes, but there was no longer any resistance. "Oh, if Mother
needs me--" she murmured. She took the offered hand, stepped into the
wagon and even went through some fitful pretense of responding to the
chorus of facetious good-bys which rose from the group they were
leaving.
She said little or nothing in answer to the young man's kind, cheerful
talk, as they drove along one main thoroughfare after another,
conspicuous by the brilliant, prosperous beauty of their well-fed youth
and their handsome garb, pointed out by people on the sidewalks,
constantly nodding in response to greetings from acquaintances. Lydia
flushed deeply at the first of these salutations, a flush which grew
deeper and deeper as these features of their processional advance
repeated themselves. She put her hand to her throat from time to time as
though it ached and when the red rubber-tired wheels turned noiselessly
in on the asphalt of her home street, she threw the lap-robe brusquely
back from her knees as though for an instant escape.
The young man's pleasant chat stopped. "Look here, Lydia," he said in
another tone, one that forced her eyes to meet his, "look here, don't
you forget one thing!" His voice was deep with the sincerest sympathy,
his eyes full of emotion, "Don't you forget, little Lydia, that nobody's
sorrier for you than I am! And I don't want anything that--" he cried
out in sudden passion--"Good Lord, I'd be cut to bits before I'd even
_want_ anything that wasn't best for you!" He looked away and mastered
himself again to quiet friendliness, "You know that, _don't you_, Lydia?
You know that all I want is for you to have the most successful life
anyone can?"
He leaned to her imploring in his turn.
She drew a quick breath, and moved her head from side to side
restlessly. Then drawn by the steady insistence of his eyes, she said,
as if touched by his patient, determined kindness, "Oh, yes, yes, Paul,
I realize how awfully good you're being to me! I wish I could--but--yes,
of course I see how good you are to me!"
He laid his hand an instant over hers, withdrawing it before she herself
could make the action. "It makes me happy to have you know I want to
be," he said simply, "now that's all. You needn't be afraid. I shan't
bother you."
They were in front of the Emery house now. He did not try to detain her
longer. He helped her down, only repeating as she gave him her gloved
hand an instant, "That's what I'm for--to be good to you."
The wagon drove off, the young man refraining from so much as a backward
glance.
The girl turned to the house and stood a moment, opening and shutting
her hands. When she moved, it was to walk so rapidly as almost to run up
the walk, up the steps, into the hall and into her mother's presence,
where, still on the crest of the wave of her resolution, she cried,
"Mother, did you really send Paul for me again. Did you _really_?"
"Why, yes, dear," said Mrs. Emery, surprised, sitting up on the sofa
with an obvious effort; "did somebody say I didn't?"
"I hoped you didn't!" cried Lydia bitterly; "it was--horrid! I was out
with all the girls in front of Hallam's--everybody was so--they all
laughed so when--they looked at me so!"
Mrs. Emery spoke with dignity, "Naturally I couldn't know where he would
find you."
"But, Mother, you _did_ know that every afternoon for two weeks
you've--it's been managed so that I've been out with Paul."
Mrs. Emery ignored this and went on plaintively, "I didn't see that it
was so unreasonable for an invalid to send whoever she could find after
her only daughter because she was feeling worse."
Lydia's frenzy carried her at once straight to the exaggeration which is
the sure forerunner of defeat in the sort of a conflict which was
engaging her. "_Are_ you feeling any worse?" she cried in a despairing
incredulity which was instantly marked as inhumanly unfilial by the
scared revulsion on her face as well as Mrs. Emery's pale glare of
horror. "Oh, I didn't mean that!" she cried, running to her mother;
"I'm sorry, Mother! I'm sorry!"
The tears began running down Mrs. Emery's cheeks, "I don't know my
little Lydia any more," she said weakly, dropping her head back on the
pillow.
"I don't know myself!" cried Lydia, sobbing violently, "I'm so unhappy!"
Mrs. Emery took her in her arms with a forgiveness which dropped like a
noose over Lydia's neck, "There, there, darling! Mother knows you didn't
mean it! But you must remember, Lydia dearest, if you're unhappy these
days, so is your poor mother."
"I'm making you so!" sobbed Lydia, "I know it! something like this
happens every day! It's why you don't get well faster! I'm making you
unhappy!"
"It doesn't make any difference about me!" Mrs. Emery heroically assured
her, "I don't want you to be influenced by thinking about my feelings,
Lydia. Above everything in the world, I don't want you to feel the
_slightest_ pressure from me--or any one of the family. Oh, darling, all
I want--all any of us want, is what is best for our little Lydia!"
CHAPTER XII
A SOP TO THE WOLVES
Six o'clock had struck when Mrs. Sandworth came wearily back from her
Christmas shopping. It was only the middle of November, but each year
she began her preparations for that day of rejoicing earlier and
earlier, in a vain attempt to avoid some of the embittering desolation
of confusion and fatigue which for her, as for all her acquaintances,
marked the December festival. She let herself down heavily from the
trolley-car which had brought her from the business part of Endbury back
to what was known as the "residential section," a name bestowed on it to
the exclusion of several other much larger divisions of town devoted
exclusively to the small brick buildings blackened by coal smoke in
which ordinary people lived.
As she walked slowly up the street, her arms were full of bundles, her
heart full of an ardent prayer that she might find her brother either
out or in a peaceable mood. She loved and admired Dr. Melton more than
anyone else in the world, but there were moments when the sum total of
her conviction about him was an admission that his was not a reposeful
personality. For the last fortnight, this peculiarity had been
accentuated till Mrs. Sandworth's loyalty had cracked at every seam in
order not to find him intolerable to live with. Moreover, her own kind
heart and intense partiality for peace in all things had suffered
acutely from the same suspense that had wrought the doctor to his
wretched fever of anxiety. It had been a time of torment for
everybody--everybody was agreed on that; and Mrs. Sandworth had felt
that life in the same house with Lydia's godfather had given her more
than her share of misery.
On this dark November evening she was so tired that every inch of her
soft plumpness ached. She had not prospered in her shopping. Things had
not matched. She let herself into the front door with a sigh of relief
at finding the hall empty. She looked cautiously into the doctor's study
and drew a long breath, peeped into the parlor and, almost smiling, went
on cheerfully upstairs to her room. From afar, she saw the welcoming
flicker of the coal fire in her grate, and felt a glow of surprised
gratitude to the latest transient from the employment agency who was now
occupying her kitchen. She did not often get one that was thoughtful
about keeping up fires when nobody was at home. It would be delicious to
get off her corset and shoes, let down her hair--there he was, bolt
upright before the fire, his back to the door. She took in the
significance of his tense attitude and prepared herself for the worst,
sinking into a chair, letting her bundles slide at various tangents from
her rounded surface, and surveying her brother with the utmost
unresignation. "Well, what is it now?" she asked.
He had not heard her enter, and now flashed around, casting in her face
like a hard-thrown missile, "Lydia's engaged."
All Mrs. Sandworth's lassitude vanished. She flung herself on him in a
wild outcry of inquiry--"Which one? Which one?"
He answered her angrily, "Which do you suppose? Doesn't a steam-roller
make some impression on a rose?"
"Oh!" she cried, enlightened; and then, with widespread solemnity,
"Well, think--of--that!"
"Not if I can help it," groaned the doctor.
"But that's not fair," his sister protested a moment later as she took
in the rest of his speech.
"Heaven knows it's not," he agreed bitterly.
She stared. "I mean that Paul hasn't been nearly so steam-rollery as
usual."
The doctor rubbed his face furiously, as though to brush off a
disagreeable clinging web. "He hasn't had to be. There have been plenty
of other forces to do his rolling for him."
"If you mean her father--you know he's kept his hands off
_religiously_."
"He has that, damn him!" The doctor raged about the room.
A silent prayer for patience wrote itself on Mrs. Sandworth's face.
"You're just as inconsistent as you can be!" she cried.
"I'm more than that," he sighed, sitting down suddenly on a chair in the
corner of the room; "I'm heartsick." He shivered, thrust his hands into
his pockets and surveyed his shoes gloomily.
One of Mrs. Sandworth's cheerful capacities was for continuing
tranquilly the minute processes of everyday life through every
disturbance in the region of the emotions. You _had_ to, she said, to
get them done--anybody that lived with the doctor. She now took
advantage of his silence to count over her packages, remove her wraps,
loosen a couple of hooks at her waist and fluff up the roll of graying
hair over her forehead. The doctor looked at her.
She answered him reasonably, "It wouldn't help Lydia any if I took it
off and threw it in the fire, would it? It's my best one, too; the
other's at the hairdresser's, getting curled."
"It's not," the doctor broke out--"it's not, Heaven be my judge! that
_I_ want to settle it. But I did want Lydia to settle it herself."
"She has, at last," Mrs. Sandworth reminded him, in a little surprise at
his forgetting so important a fact.
"She has _not_!" roared the doctor.
His literal-minded sister looked aggrieved bewilderment. She felt a
bitterness at having been stirred without due cause. "Marius, you're
unkind. What did you tell me she had for--when I'm so tired it seems as
if I could lie down and die if I--"
Dr. Melton knew his sister. He made a rapid plunge through the
obscurity of her brain into her heart's warm clarity, and, "Oh, Julia,
if you had seen her!" he cried.
She leaned toward him, responsive to the emotion in his voice. "Tell me
about it, poor Marius," she said, yearning maternally over his pain.
"I can't--if you had seen her--"
"But how did you hear? Did she tell you? When did--"
"I was there at five, and her mother met me at the door. She took me
upstairs, a finger on her lip, and there she and Marietta said they
guessed this afternoon would settle things. A week ago, she said, she'd
had an up-and-down talk with that dreadful carpenter and as good as
forbade him the house--"
Mrs. Sandworth had a gesture of intuition. "Oh, if they've managed to
shut Lydia off from seeing him--"
The doctor nodded. "That's what her mother counted on. She said she
thought it a sign that Lydia was just infatuated with Rankin--her being
so different after she'd seen him--so defiant--so unlike Lydia! But now
she hadn't seen him for a week, and her mother and Marietta had been
'talking to her'--_Julia!_--and then Paul had come to see her every
evening, and had been just right--firm and yet not exacting, and ever so
gentle and kind--and this afternoon when he came Lydia cried and didn't
want to go down, but her mother said she mustn't be childish, and
Marietta had just taken her right down to the library and left her there
with Paul, and there she was now." The doctor started up and beat his
thin, corded hand on the mantel. He could not speak. His sister got up
and laid a tender hand on his shoulder. "Poor Marius!" she said again.
He drew a long breath. "I did not fly at their throats--I turned and ran
like mad down the stairs and into the library. It was Rankin I wanted to
kill for letting his pride come in--for leaving her there alone with
those--I was ready to snatch Lydia up bodily and carry her off to--" He
stopped short and laughed harshly. "I reach to Lydia's shoulder," he
commented on his own speech. "That's me. To see what's to be done and--"
"What _was_ to be done?" asked Mrs. Sandworth patiently. She was quite
used to understanding but half of what her brother said and had acquired
a quiet art of untangling by tireless questionings the thread of
narrative from the maze of his comments and ejaculations.
"There was nothing to be done. I was too late."
"You didn't burst in on them while Paul was kissing her or anything, did
you?"
"Paul wasn't there."
"Not there! Why, Marius, you're worse than usual. Didn't you tell me her
mother said--"
"He had been there--one look at Lydia showed that. She sat there alone
in the dim light, her face as white--and when I came in she said,
without looking to see who it was, 'I'm engaged to Paul.' She said it to
her mother, who was right after me, of course, and then to Marietta."
"Well--!" breathed Mrs. Sandworth as he paused; "so that was all there
was to it?"
"Oh, no; they did the proper thing. They kissed her, and cried, and
congratulated everybody, and her mother said, with an eye on me:
'Darling, you're _not_ doing this just because you know it'll make us so
very happy, _are_ you?' Lydia said, 'Oh, no; she supposed not,' and
started to go upstairs. But when Marietta said she'd go and telephone to
Flora Burgess to announce it, Lydia came down like a flash. It was _not_
to be announced she told them; she'd _die_ if they told anybody! Paul
had promised solemnly not to tell anybody. Her mother said, of course
she knew how Lydia felt about it. It _was_ a handicap for a girl in her
first season. Lydia was half-way up the stairs again, but at that she
looked down at her mother--_God!_ Julia, if a child of mine had ever
looked at me like that--"
Mrs. Sandworth patted him vaguely. "Oh, people always look white and
queer in the twilight, you know--even quite _florid_ complexions."
The doctor made a rush to the door.
"But dinner must be ready to put on the table," she called after him.
"Put it on, then," he cried, and disappeared.
A plain statement was manna to Mrs. Sandworth. She had finished her
soup, and was beginning on her hamburg steak when the doctor came
soberly in, took his place, and began to eat in silence. She took up the
conversation where they had left it.
"So it's all over," she commented, watching his plate to see that he did
not forget to salt his meat and help himself to gravy.
"Nothing's ever over in a human life," he contradicted her. "Why do you
suppose she doesn't want it announced?"
"You don't suppose she means to break it off later?"
"I haven't any idea _what_ she means, any more than she has, poor child!
But it's plain that this is only to gain time--a sop to the wolves."
"Wolves!" cried poor Mrs. Sandworth.
"Well, tigers and hyenas, perhaps," he added moderately.
"They're crazy about Lydia, that whole Emery family," she protested.
"They are that," he agreed sardonically. "But I don't mean only her
family. I mean unclean prowling standards of what's what, as well as--"
"They'd lie down and let her walk over them! You know they would--"
"If they thought she was going in the right direction."
Mrs. Sandworth gave him up, and drifted off into speculation. "I wonder
what she could have found in that man to think of! A girl brought up as
she's been!"
"Perhaps she was only snatching a little sensible talk where she could
get it."
"But they _didn't_ talk sensibly. Marietta said Lydia tried, one of the
times when they were going over it with her, Lydia tried to tell her
mother some of the things they said that night when he took her home
from here. Marietta said they were 'too sickish!' 'Flat Sunday-school
cant about wanting to be good,' and all that sort of thing."
"That certainly wouldn't have tempted _Marietta_ from the path of virtue
and sharp attention to a good match," murmured the doctor. "Nobody can
claim that there's anything very seductive to the average young lady in
Rankin's fanaticism."
"Oh, you admit he's a fanatic!" Mrs. Sandworth seized on a valuable
piece of driftwood which the doctor's tempest had thrown at her feet.
"Everybody who's worth his salt is a fanatic."
"Not Paul. Everybody says he's so sane and levelheaded."
"There isn't a hotter one in creation!"
"Than _Paul_?"
"Than Paul."
"Oh, Marius!" she reproached him for levity.
"He's a fanatic for success."
"Oh, I don't call _that_--"
"Nor nobody else in Endbury--but it is, all the same. And the only
wonder is that Lydia should have been attracted by Rankin's heretical
brand and not by Paul's orthodox variety. It shows she's rare."
"Good gracious, Marius! You talk as though it were a question of ideas
or convictions."
"That's a horrible conception," he admitted gravely.
"It's which one she's in love with!" Mrs. Sandworth emitted this with
solemnity.
The doctor stood up to go. "She's not in love with either," he
pronounced. "She's never been allowed the faintest sniff at reality or
life or experience--how can she be in love?"
"Well, they're in love with her," she triumphed for her sex.
"I don't know anything about Paul's inner workings, and as for Rankin, I
don't know whether he's in love with her or not. He's sorry for
her--he's touched by her--"
Mrs. Sandworth felt the ground slip from beneath her feet. "Good
gracious me! If he's not in love with her, nor she with him, what are
you making all this fuss about?"
The doctor thrust out his lips. "I'm only protesting in my usual feeble,
inadequate manner, after the harm's all done, at idiots and egotists
laying their dirty hands on a sacred thing--the right of youth to its
own life--"
"Well, if you call that a feeble protest--!" she called after him.
He reappeared, hat in hand. "It's nothing to what I'd like to say. I
will add that Daniel Rankin's a man in a million."
Mrs. Sandworth responded, rather neatly for her, that she should hope so
indeed, and added, "But, Marius, she couldn't have married him--really!
Mercy! What had he to offer her--compared with Paul? Everybody has
always said what a _suitable_ marriage--"
Dr. Melton crammed his hat on his head fiercely and said nothing.
"But it's so," she insisted.
"He hasn't anything to offer to Marietta, perhaps."
"Marietta's _married_!" Mrs. Sandworth kept herself anchored fast to the
facts of any case under discussion.
"_Is_ she?" queried the doctor with a sincerity of interrogation which
his sister found distracting.
"Oh, Marius!" she reproached him again; and then helplessly, "How did we
get on to Marietta, anyhow? I thought we were talking of Lydia's
engagement."
"I was," he assured her.
"And I was going to ask you really seriously, just straight out, what
you are so down on the Emerys for? What have they done that's so bad?"
"They've brought her up so that now in her time of need she hasn't a
weapon to resist them."
"Oh, Ma--" began Mrs. Sandworth despairingly.
"Well, then, I will tell you--I'll explain in words of one syllable.
Mind you, I don't undertake to settle the question--Heaven forbid! It
may be all right for Marietta Mortimer to kill herself body and soul by
inches to keep what bores her to death to have--a social position in
Endbury's two-for-a-cent society, but, for the Lord's sake, why do they
make such a howling and yelling just at the time when Lydia's got the
tragically important question to decide as to whether that's what _she_
wants? It's like expecting her to do a problem in calculus in the midst
of an earthquake."
Mrs. Sandworth had a mortal antipathy to figures of speech, acquired of
much painful experience with her brother's conversation. She sank back
in her chair and waved him off. "Calculus!" she cried, outraged;
"earthquakes! And I'm sure you're as unfair as can be! You can't say her
father's obscured any question. You _know_ he's not a dictatorial
father. His principle is not to interfere at all with his children."
"Yes; that's his principle all right. His specialties are in other
lines, and they have been for a long time. His wife has seen to that."
Mrs. Sandworth had one of her lucid divinations of the inner meaning of
a situation. "Oh, the poor Emerys! Poor Lydia! Oh, Marius, aren't you
glad we haven't any children!"
"Every child that's not getting a fair chance at what it ought to have,
should be our child," he said.
He went up to her and kissed her gently. "Good-night," he said.
"Where are you going?"
"To the Black Rock woods."
"Tell him--" she was inspired--"tell him to try to see Lydia again."
"I was going to do that. But she won't be allowed to. It's pretty late
now. She ought to have seen him a great many years ago--from the time he
was born."
"But she's ever so much younger than he," cried Mrs. Sandworth after
him, informingly.
CHAPTER XIII
LYDIA DECIDES IN PERFECT FREEDOM
The maid had announced to Mrs. Emery, finishing an unusually careful
morning toilet, that Miss Burgess, society reporter of the Endbury
_Chronicle_, was below. Before the mistress of the house could finish
adjusting her well-matched gray pompadour, a second arrival was
heralded, "The gentleman from the greenhouse, to see about Miss Lydia's
party decorations." And as the handsome matron came down the stairs a
third comer was introduced into the hall--Mme. Boyle herself, the best
dressmaker in town, who had come in person to see about the refitting of
the debutante's Paris dresses, the debutante having found the change
back to the climate of Endbury so trying that her figure had grown quite
noticeably thinner.
"It was the one thing necessary to make Maddemwaselle's tournoor exactly
perfect," Mme. Boyle told Mrs. Emery. Out of a sense of what was due her
loyal Endbury customers, Mme. Boyle assumed a guileless coloring of
Frenchiness, which was evidently a symbol, and no more intended for a
pretense of reality than the honestly false brown front that surmounted
her competent, kindly Celtic face.
Mrs. Emery stopped a moment by the newel-post to direct Madame to
Lydia's room and to offer up a devout thanksgiving to the kindly
Providence that constantly smoothed the path before her. "Oh, Madame,
just think if it had been a season when hips were in style!" As she
continued her progress to what she was beginning to contemplate calling
her drawing-room, she glowed with a sense of well-being which buoyed her
up like wings. In common with many other estimable people, she could
not but value more highly what she had had to struggle to retain, and
the exciting vicissitudes of the last fortnight had left her with a
sweet taste of victory in her mouth.
She greeted Miss Burgess with the careful cordiality due to an ally of
many years' standing, and with a manner perceptibly but indefinably
different from that which she would have bestowed on a social equal.
Mrs. Emery had labored to acquire exactly that tone in her dealings with
the society reporter, and her achievement of it was a fact which brought
an equal satisfaction to both women. Miss Burgess' mother was an
Englishwoman, an ex-housekeeper, who had transmitted to her daughter a
sense, rare as yet in America, of the beauty and dignity of class
distinctions. In her turn Miss Burgess herself, the hard-working,
good-natured woman of fifty who for twenty years had reported the doings
of those citizens of Endbury whom she considered the "gentry," had
toiled with the utmost disinterestedness to build up a feeling, or, as
she called it, a "tone," which, among other things, should exclude her
from equality. When she began she was, perhaps, the only person in town
who had an unerring instinct for social differences; but, like a kindly,
experienced actor of a minor role in theatricals, she had silently given
so many professional tips to the amateur principals in the play, and had
acted her own part with such unflagging consistency and good-will, that
she had often now the satisfaction of seeing one of her pupils move
through her role with a most edifying effect of having been born to it.
Long ago she had taken the Emerys to her warm heart and she had rejoiced
in all their upward progress with the sweet unenvious joy of an ugly
woman in a pretty, much-loved sister's successes. Lydia was to her, as
to Mrs. Emery, a bright symbol of what she would fain have been herself.
Miss Burgess' feeling for her somewhat resembled that devout affection
which, she had read, was felt by faithful old servants of great English
families for the young ladies of the house. The pathetic completeness of
her own insignificance of aspect had spared her any uneasy ambitions
for personal advancement, and it is probable that the vigor of her
character and her pleasure in industry were such that she had been
happier in her daily column and weekly five-column _Society Notes_ than
if she had been as successful a society matron as Mrs. Emery herself.
She lived the life of a creator, working at an art she had invented, in
a workroom of her own contriving, loyally drawing the shutters to shade
an unfortunate occurrence in one of the best families, setting forth a
partial success with its best profile to the public, and flooding with
light real achievements like Mrs. Hollister's rose party (_the_ Mrs.
Hollister--Paul's aunt, and Madeleine's). All that she wrote was read by
nearly every woman in Endbury. She was a person of importance, and a
very busy and happy old maid.
Mrs. Emery had a great taste for Miss Burgess' conversation, admiring
greatly her whole-hearted devotion to Endbury's social welfare. She had
once said of her to Dr. Melton, "There is what _I_ call a
public-spirited woman." He had answered, "I envy Flora Burgess with the
fierce embittered envy I feel for a cow"--an ambiguous compliment which
Mrs. Emery had resented on behalf of her old ally.
Now, as Mrs. Emery added to her greeting, "You'll excuse me just a
moment, won't you, I must settle some things with my decorator," Miss
Burgess felt a rich content in her hostess' choice of words. There
_were_ people in Endbury society who would have called him, as had the
perplexed maid, "the gentleman from the greenhouse." Later, asked for
advice, she had walked about the lower floor of the house with Mrs.
Emery and the florist, saturated with satisfaction in the process of
deciding where the palms should be put that were to conceal the
"orchestra" of four instruments, and with what flowers the mantels
should be "banked."
After the man had gone, they settled to a consideration of various
important matters which was interrupted by an impassioned call of Madame
Boyle from the stairs, "Could she bring Maddemwaselle down to show this
_perfect_ fit?"--and they glided into a rapt admiration of the
unwrinkled surface of peach-colored satin which clad Lydia's slender and
flexibly erect back. When she turned about so that Madame could show
them the truly exqueese effect of the trimming at the throat, her face
showed pearly shadows instead of its usual flower-like glow. As Madame
left the room for a moment, Miss Burgess said, with a kind, respectful
facetiousness, "I see that even fairy princesses find the emotions of
getting engaged a little trying."
Lydia started, and flushed painfully. "Oh, Mother--" she began.
Her mother cut her short. "My _dear_! Miss Burgess!" she pointed out, as
who should deplore keeping a secret from the family priest, "You know
she never breathes a word that people don't want known. And she had to
be told so she can know how to _put_ things all this winter."
"I'm sure it's the most wonderfully _suitable_ marriage," pronounced
Miss Burgess.
A ring at the door-bell was instantly followed by the bursting open of
the door and the impetuous onslaught of a girl, a tall, handsome,
brown-eyed blonde about Lydia's age, who, wasting no time in greetings
to the older women, flung herself on Lydia's neck with a wild outcry of
jubilation. "My dear! Isn't it dandy! Perfectly _dandy_! Paul met me at
the train last night and when he told me I nearly swooned for joy! Of
all the tickled sisters-in-law! I wanted to come right over here last
night, but Paul said it was a secret, and wouldn't let me." A momentary
failure of lung-power forced her to a pause in which she perceived
Lydia's attire. She recoiled with a dramatic rush. "Oh, you've got one
of them _on_! Lydia, how insanely swell you do look! Why, Mrs.
Emery"--she turned to Lydia's mother with a light-hearted
unconsciousness that she had not addressed her before--"she doesn't look
_real_, does she!"
There was an instant's pause as the three women gazed ecstatically at
Lydia, who had again turned her back and was leaning her forehead
against the window. Then the girl sprang at her again. "Well, my
goodness, Lydia! I just love you to pieces, of course, but if we were of
the same complexion I should certainly put poison in your candy. As it
is, me so blonde and you so dark--I tell you what--what we won't do this
winter--" She ran up to her again, putting her arms around her neck from
behind and whispering in her ear.
Miss Burgess turned to her hostess with her sweet, motherly smile.
"Aren't girls the _dearest_ things?" she whispered. "I love to see them
so young, and full of their own little affairs. I think it's dreadful
nowadays how so many of them are allowed to get serious-minded."
Madeleine was saying to Lydia, "You sly little thing--to land Paul
before the season even began! Where are you going to get your lingerie?
Oh, _isn't_ it fun? If I go abroad I'll smuggle it back for you. You
haven't got your ring yet, I don't suppose? Make him make it a ruby.
That's ever so much sweller than that everlasting old diamond. He's
something to land, too, Paul is, if I do say it--not, of course, that
we've either of us got any money, but," she looked about the handsomely
furnished house, "you'll have lots, and Paul'll soon be making it hand
over fist--and I'll be marrying it!" She ended with a triumphant
pirouette her vision of the future, and encountered Madame Boyle,
entering with a white and gold evening wrap which sent her into another
paroxysm of admiration. The dressmaker had just begun to say that she
thought another line of gold braid around the neck would--when Mrs.
Emery, looking out of the window, declared the caterer to be approaching
and that she _must_ have aid from her subordinates before he should
enter. "I do _not_ want to have that old red lemonade and sweet crackers
everybody has, and slabs of ice-cream floating around on your plate.
Think quick, all of you! What kind of crackers can we have?"
"Animal crackers," suggested Madeleine, with the accent of a remark
intended to be humorous, drawing Lydia into a corner. "Now, don't make
Lydia work. She's _It_ right now, and everything's to be done for her.
Madame, come over here with that cloak and let's see about the--and Oh,
you and Lydia, for the love of Heaven tell me what I'm to do about this
fashion for no hips, and me with a figure of eight! Lydia, the fit of
that thing is _sublime_!"
"Maddemwaselle, don't you see how a little more gold right here--"
"Here, Lydia," called her mother, "it wasn't the caterer after all; it's
flowers for you. Take it over there to the young lady in pink," she
directed the boy.
Madeleine seized on the box, and tore it open with one of her vigorous,
competent gestures. "_Orchids!_" she shouted in a single volcanic burst
of appreciation. "I never had orchids sent me in my life! Paul must have
telegraphed for them. You can't buy them in Endbury. And here's a note
that says it's to be answered at once, while the boy waits--Oh, my! Oh,
my!"
"Lydia, dear, here's the caterer, after all. Will you just please say
one thing. Would you rather have the coffee or the water-ices served
upstairs--Oh, here's your Aunt Julia--Julia Sandworth, I never needed
advice more."
Mrs. Sandworth's appearance was the chord which resolved into one burst
of sound all the various motives emitted by the different temperaments
in the room. Every one appealed to her at once.
"Just a touch of gold braid on the collar, next the face, don't you--"
"Why not a real supper at midnight, with creamed oysters and things, as
they do in the East?"
"Do _you_ see anything out of the way in publishing the details of Miss
Lydia's dress the day before? It gives people a chance to know what to
look for."
[Illustration: "No, no; I can't--see him--I can't see him any more--"]
"How can we avoid that awful jam-up there is on the stairs when people
begin to--"
Mrs. Sandworth made her way to the corner where Lydia stood, presenting
a faultlessly fitted back to the world so that Madame Boyle might, with
a fat, moist forefinger, indicate the spot where a "soupcon" of gold
was needed.
"Please, ma'am, the gentleman said I was to wait for an answer," said
the messenger boy beside her.
"And she hasn't _read_ it, yet!" Madeleine was horrified to remember
this fact.
"Turn around, Lydia," said Mrs. Sandworth.
Lydia's white lids fluttered. The eyes they revealed were lustrous and
quite blank. Madeleine darted away, crying, "I'm going to get pen and
paper for you to write your note right now."
"Lydia," said Mrs. Sandworth, in a low tone, "Daniel Rankin wants to
speak with you again. Your godfather is waiting here in the hall to know
if you'll see him. He didn't want to _force_ an interview on you if you
didn't want it. He wants to see you but he wanted you to decide in
perfect _freedom_--"
The tragic, troubled, helpless face that Lydia showed at this speech was
a commentary on the last word. She looked around the room, her eyebrows
drawn into a knot, one hand at her throat, but she did not answer. Her
aunt thought she had not understood. "Just collect your thoughts,
Lydia--"
The girl beat one slim fist inside the other with a sudden nervous
movement. "But that's what I can't do, Aunt Julia. You know how easily I
get rattled--I don't know what I'm--I _can't_ collect my thoughts."
As the older woman opened her lips to speak again she cut her short with
a broken whispered appeal. "No, no; I can't--see him--? I can't stand
any more--tell him I guess I'll be all right--it's settled now--Mother's
told all these--I like Paul. I _do_ like him! Mother's told everybody
here--no, no--I can't, Aunt Julia! I _can't_!"
Mrs. Sandworth, her eyes full of tears, opened her arms impulsively, but
Lydia drew back. "Oh, let me alone!" she wailed. "I'm so tired!"
Madame Boyle caught this through the clatter of voices. "Why, poor
Maddemwaselle!" she cried, her kindly, harassed, fatigued face melting.
"Sit down. Sit down. I can show the ladies about this collar just as
well that way--if they'll ever look."
Mrs. Sandworth had disappeared.
Madeleine, coming with the pen and ink, was laughing as she told them,
"I didn't know Dr. Melton was in the house. I ran into him pacing up and
down in the hall like a little bear, and just now I saw him--isn't he
too comical! He must have heard our chatter--I saw him running down the
walk as fast as he could go it, his fingers in his ears as if he were
trying to get away from a dynamite bomb before it went bang."
"He hasn't much patience with many necessary details of life," said Mrs.
Emery with dignity. She turned her criticism of her doctor into a
compliment to her brother's widow by adding, "Whatever he would do
without Julia to look after him, I'm sure none of us can imagine."
"He is a very original character," said Miss Burgess, discriminatingly.
Madeleine dismissed the subject with a compendious, "He's the most
killingly, screamingly funny little man that ever lived!"
"Now, _ladies_," implored Madame Boyle, "one more row--not solid--just a
soupcon--"
CHAPTER XIV
MID-SEASON NERVES
"If I should wait and read my paper here instead of on the cars, do you
suppose Lydia would be up before I left?" asked the Judge as he put his
napkin in the ring and pushed away from the breakfast table.
Mrs. Emery looked up, smiling, from a letter, "'Of course such a great
favorite as Miss Emery,'" she read aloud, "'will be hard to secure, but
both the Governor and I feel that our party wouldn't be complete without
her. We're expecting a number of other Endbury young people.' And do you
know who writes that?" she asked triumphantly of her husband.
"How should I?" answered the Judge reasonably.
"Mrs. Ex-Governor Mallory, to be sure. It's their annual St. Valentine's
day house-party at their old family estate in Union County."
The Judge got up, laughing. "Old family estate," he mocked.
"They are one of the oldest and best families in this State," cried his
wife.
"The Governor's an old blackguard," said her husband tolerantly.
"The Mallorys--the Hollisters--Lydia is certainly," began Mrs. Emery,
complacently.
Lydia's father laughed again. "Oh, with you and Flora Burgess as manager
and press agent--! You haven't answered my question about whether if I
waited and--"
"No, she wouldn't," said Mrs. Emery decisively. "After dancing so late
nights, I want her to sleep every minute she's not wanted somewhere. _I_
have the responsibility of looking after her health, you know. I hope
she'll sleep now till just time to get up and dress for Marietta's
lunch-party at one o'clock."
The father of the family frowned. "Is Marietta giving another
lunch-party for Lydia? They can't afford to do so much. Marietta's--"
"This is a great chance for Marietta--poor girl! she hasn't many such
chances--Lydia's carrying everything before her so, I mean."
"How does Marietta get into the game?" asked her father obtusely.
Mrs. Emery hesitated a scarcely perceptible instant, a hesitation
apparently illuminating to her husband. He laughed again, the tolerant,
indifferent laugh he had for his women-folks' goings-on. "She thinks she
can go up as the tail to Lydia's kite, does she? She'd better not be too
sure. If I don't miss my guess, Paul'll have a word or two to say about
carrying extra weight. Gosh! Marietta's a fool some ways for a woman
that has her brains."
He stated this opinion with a detached, impersonal irresponsibility, and
began to prepare himself for the plunge into the damp cold of the
Endbury January. His wife preserved a dignified silence, and in the
middle of a sentence of his later talk, which had again turned on his
grievance about never seeing Lydia, she got up, went into the hall, and
began to use the telephone for her morning shopping. Her conversation
gave the impression that she was ordering veal cutlets, maidenhair
ferns, wax floor-polish, chiffon ruching, and closed carriages, from one
and the same invisible interlocutor, who seemed impartially unable to
supply any of these needs without rather testy exhortation. Mrs. Emery
was one of the women who are always well served by "tradespeople," as
she now called them, "and a good reason why," she was wont to explain
with self-gratulatory grimness.
The Judge waited, one hand on the door-knob, squaring his jaw over his
muffler, and listening with a darkening face to the interminable
succession of purchases. After a time he released the door-knob,
loosened his muffler, and sat down heavily, his eyes fixed on his wife's
back.
After an interval, Mrs. Emery paused in the act of ringing up another
number, looked over her shoulder, saw him there and inquired uneasily,
"What are you waiting for? You'll catch cold with all your things on.
Isn't Dr. Melton always telling you to be careful?"
She felt a vague resentment at his being there "after hours," as she
might have put it, so definitely had long usage accustomed her to a
sense of solitary proprietorship of the house except at certain fixed
and not very frequent periods. She almost felt that he was eavesdropping
while she "ran her own business." There was also his remark about
Marietta and kites, unatoned for as yet. She had not forgotten that she
"owed him one," as Madeleine Hollister light-heartedly phrased the
connubial balanced relationship which had come under her irreverent and
keen observation. A cumulative sharpness from all these causes was in
her voice as she remarked, "Didn't I tell you that Lydia--"
Judge Emery's voice in answer was as sharp as her own. "Look-y here,
Susan, I bet you've ordered fifty dollars' worth of stuff since you
stood there."
"Well, what if I have?" She was up in arms in an instant against his
breaking a long-standing treaty between them--a treaty not tacit, but
frequently and definitely stated.
They regulated their relations on a sound business basis, they were wont
to say of themselves, the natural one, the right one. The husband earned
the money, the wife saw that it was spent to the best advantage, and
neither needed to bother his head or dissipate his energies about the
other's end of the matter. They had found it meant less friction, they
said; fewer occasions for differences of opinion. Once, when they had
been urging this system upon their son George, then about to marry, Dr.
Melton had made the suggestion that there would be still fewer
differences of opinion if married people agreed never to see each other
after the ceremony in the church. There would be no friction at all
with that system, he added. It was one of his preposterous speeches
which had become a family joke with the Emerys.
"Well, what if I have?" Mrs. Emery advanced defiantly upon her husband,
with this remark repeated.
Judge Emery shared a well-known domestic peculiarity with other
estimable and otherwise courageous men. He retreated precipitately
before the energy of his wife's counter-attack, only saying sulkily, to
conceal from himself the fact of his retreat, "Well, we're not
millionaires, you know."
"Did I ever think we were?" she said, smiling inwardly at his change of
front. "If you stand right up to men, they'll give in," she often
counseled other matrons. She began to look up another number in the
telephone book.
"If you order fifty dollars' worth every morning, besides--"
"Three-four-four--Weston," remarked his wife to the telephone. To her
husband she said conclusively, "I thought we were agreed to make Lydia's
first season everything it ought to be. And isn't she being worth it?
There hasn't a girl come out in Endbury in _years_ that's been so
popular, or had so much--" She jerked her head around to the
telephone--"Three-four-four--Weston? Is this Mr. Schmidt? I want Mr.
Schmidt himself. Tell him Mrs. Emery--"
The Judge broke in, with the air of launching the most startling of
arguments, "Well, my salary won't stand it; that's sure! If this keeps
up I'll have to resign from the bench and go into practice again."
His wife looked at him without surprise. "Well, I've often thought that
might be a very good thing." She added, with good-humored impatience,
"Oh, go along, Nathaniel. You know it's just one of your bilious
attacks, and you will catch cold sitting there with all your--Mr.
Schmidt, I want to complain about the man who dished up the ice-cream at
my last reception. I am going to give another one next week, and I want
a different--"
"I won't be back to lunch," said her husband. The door slammed.
As he turned into the front walk it opened after him, and his wife
called after him, "I'm going to give a dinner party for Lydia's girl
friends here this evening, so you'd better get your dinner down-town or
at the Meltons'. I'll telephone Julia that--"
The Judge stopped, disappointment, almost dismay, on his face. "I'm
going to keep track from now on," he called angrily, "of just how often
I catch a glimpse of Lydia. I bet it won't be five minutes a week."
Mrs. Emery evidently did not catch what he said, and as evidently
considered it of no consequence that she did not. She nodded
indifferently and, drawing in her head, shut the door.
At the end of the next week the Judge announced that he had put down
every time he and Lydia had been in a room together, and it amounted to
just forty-five minutes, all told. Lydia, a dazzling vision in white and
gold, had come downstairs on her way to a dance, and because Paul, who
was to be her escort, was a little late, she told her father that now
was his time for a "visit." This question of "visiting" had grown to be
quite a joke. Judge Emery clutched eagerly at anything in the nature of
an understanding or common interest between them.
"Oh, I don't know you well enough to visit with you," he now said
laughingly, "but I'll look at you long enough so I'll recognize you the
next time I meet you on the street-car."
Lydia sat down on his knee, lightly, so as not to crumple her gauzy
draperies, and looked at her father with the whimsical expression that
became her face so well. "I'm paying you back," she said gayly. "I
remember when I was a little girl I used to wonder why you came all the
way out here to eat your meals. It seemed so much easier for you to get
them near your office. Honest, I did."
"Ah, that was when I was still struggling to get my toes into a crack in
the wall and climb up. I didn't have time for you then. And you're very
ungrateful to bring it up against me, for all I was doing was to wear my
nose clear off on the grindstone so's to be able to buy you such pretty
trash as this." He stroked the girl's shimmering draperies, not thinking
of what he was saying, smiling at her, delighted with her beauty, with
her nearness to him, with this brief snatch of intimate talk.
"Ungrateful--yourself! What am I doing but wearing my nose off on the
grindstone--Dr. Melton threatens nervous prostration every day--so's to
show off your pretty trash to the best advantage. _I_ haven't any time
to bother with _you_ now!" she mocked him laughingly, her hands on his
shoulders.
"Well, that sounds like a bargain," he admitted, leaning back in his
chair; "I suppose I've got to be satisfied if you are. _Are_ you
satisfied?" he asked with a sudden seriousness. "How do you like Paul,
now you know him better?"
Lydia flushed, and looked away in a tremulous confusion. "Why, when I'm
with him I can't think of another thing in the world," she confessed in
a low, ardent tone.
"Ah, well, then that's all right," said the Judge comfortably.
There was a pause, during which Lydia looked at the fire dreamily, and
he looked at Lydia. The girl's face grew more and more absent and
brooding.
The door-bell rang. "There he is, I suppose," said her father.
"But isn't it a pity we couldn't make connections?" she asked musingly.
"Maybe I'd have liked you better with your nose on, better even than
pretty trash."
"Eh?" said Judge Emery. His blankness was so acute that he slipped for
an instant back into a rusticity he had long ago left behind him. "What
say, Lydia?" he asked.
"Yes, yes, Paul; I didn't hear you come in," called the girl, jumping up
and beginning to put on her wraps.
The young man darted into the room to help her, saying over his
shoulder: "Much obliged to you, Judge, for your good word to Egdon,
March and Company. I got the contract for the equipment of their new
factory to-day."
The Judge screwed himself round in his chair till he could see Paul
bending at Lydia's feet, putting on her high overshoes. "That's quite a
contract, isn't it?" he asked, highly pleased.
"The biggest I ever got my teeth into," said Paul, straightening up.
"I'm ashamed to have Lydia know anything about it, though. I didn't
bring a hack to take her to the dance."
"Oh, I never thought you would," cried Lydia, standing up and stamping
her feet down in her overshoes--an action that added emphasis to her
protest. "I'd rather walk, it's such a little way. I like it better when
I'm not costing people money."
"You're not like most of your sex," said Paul. "Down in Mexico, when I
was there on the Brighton job, I heard a Spanish proverb: 'If a pretty
woman smiles, some purse is shedding tears.'"
The two men exchanged laughing glances of understanding. Lydia frowned.
"That is hateful--and horrid--and a _lie_!" she cried energetically,
finding that they paid no attention to her protest.
"_I_ didn't invent it," Paul exonerated himself lightly.
"But you laughed at it--you think it's so--you--" She was trembling in a
sudden resentment at once inexplicable and amusing to the other two.
"Highty-tighty! you little spitfire!" cried her father, laughing. "I see
_your_ finish, my boy!"
"Good gracious, Lydia, how you do fly at a man! I take it back. I take
it back." Paul looked admiringly at his pretty sweetheart's flashing
eyes and crimson cheeks as he spoke.
She turned away and picked up her cloak without speaking.
"To tell the truth," said Paul, going on with the conversation as though
it had not been interrupted, and addressing his father-in-law-to-be,
"every penny I can rake and scrape is going into the house. Lydia's
such a sensible little thing I knew she'd think it better to have
something permanent than an ocean of orchids and candy now. Besides,
such a belle as she is gets them from everybody else."
Mrs. Emery often pointed out to Lydia's inexperience that it was rare to
see a man so magnanimously free from jealousy as her fiance.
"The architect and I were going over it to-day," the young electrician
went on, "and I decided, seeing this new contract means such a lot, that
I would have the panels in the hall carved, after all--of course if you
agree," he turned to Lydia, but went on without waiting for an answer.
"The effect will be much handsomer--will go with the rest of the house
better."
"They'd be lots harder to dust," said Lydia dubiously, putting a
spangled web of gold over her hair. The contrast between her aspect and
the dingy suggestions of her speech made both men laugh tenderly. "When
Titania takes to being practical--" laughed Paul.
Lydia went on seriously. "Honestly, Paul, I'm afraid the house is
getting too handsome, anyhow--everything in it. It's too expensive,
I'm--"
"Nothing's too good for you." Paul said this with conviction. "And
besides, it's an asset. The mortgage won't be so very large. And if
we're in it, we'll just have to live up to it. It'll be a stimulus."
"I hope it doesn't stimulate us into our graves," said Lydia, as she
kissed her father good-night.
"Well, your families aren't paupers on either side," said Paul.
A casual remark like this was the nearest approach he ever made to
admitting that he expected Lydia to inherit money. He would have been
shocked at the idea of allowing any question of money to influence his
marriage, and would not have lifted a hand to learn the state of his
future father-in-law's finances. Still, it was evident to the most
disinterested eye that there were plenty of funds behind the Emery's
ample, comfortable mode of life, and on this point his eyes were keen,
for all their delicacy.
As the young people paused at the door, Judge Emery took a note-book out
of his pocket and elaborately made a note. "Fifty-five minutes in eight
days, Lydia," he called.
At the end of a fortnight he proclaimed aloud that the record was too
discouraging to keep any longer; he was losing ground instead of
gaining. He had followed Mrs. Emery to her room one afternoon to make
this complaint, and now moved about uneasily, trying to bestow his
large, square figure where he would not be in the way of his wife, who
was hurrying nervously about to pack Lydia's traveling bag. She looked
very tired and pale, and spoke as though near a nervous outbreak of some
sort. Didn't he know that Lydia had to start for the Mallory Valentine
house-party this afternoon, she asked with an asperity not directed at
the Judge's complaint, for she considered that negligible, but at Lydia
for being late. She often became so absorbed and fascinated by her own
managerial capacity that she was vastly put out by lapses on the part of
the object of it. She did not spare herself when it was a question of
Lydia's career. Without a thought of fatigue or her own personal tastes,
she devoted herself with a fanatic zeal to furthering her daughter's
interests. It sometimes seemed very hard to bear that Lydia herself was
so much less zealous in the matter.
When the girl came in now, flushed and guiltily breathless, Dr. Melton
trotted at her heels, calling out excuses for her tardiness. "It's my
fault. I met her scurrying away from a card-party, and she was exactly
on time. But I walked along with her and detained her."
"It was the sunset," said Lydia, hurrying to change her hat and wraps.
"It was so fine that when Godfather called my attention to it, I just
_stood_! I forgot everything! There may have been sunsets before this
winter, but it seems as though I hadn't had time to see one before--over
the ironworks, you know, where that hideous black smoke is all day, and
the sun turned it into such loveliness--"
"You've missed your trolley-car," said her mother succinctly.
"Oh, I'm _sorry_!" cried Lydia, in a remorse evidently directed more
toward displeasing her mother than the other consequences of her delay,
for she asked in a moment, very meekly, "Will it make so very much
difference if I don't go till the next one?"
"You'll miss the Governor. He was coming down to meet those on this car.
You'll have to go all alone. All the rest of the party were on this
one."
"Oh, I don't care about that," cried Lydia. "If that's all--I'd ever so
much rather go alone. I'm never alone a single minute, and it'll rest
me. The crowd would have been so noisy and carried on so--they always
do."
Her mother's aggrieved disappointment did not disappear. She said
nothing, bringing Lydia's traveling wraps to her silently, and emanating
disapproval until Lydia drooped and looked piteously at her godfather.
Dr. Melton cried out at this, "Look here, Susan Emery, you're like the
carpenter that was so proud of his good planing that he planed his
boards all away to shavings."
Mrs. Emery looked at him with a lack of comprehension of his meaning
equaled only by her evident indifference to it.
"I mean--I thought what you were going in for was giving Lydia a good
time this winter. You're running her as though she were a
transcontinental railway system."
"You can't accomplish anything without system in this world," said Mrs.
Emery. She added, "Perhaps Lydia will find, when she comes to ordering
her own life, that she will miss her old mother's forethought and care."
Lydia flung herself remorsefully on her mother's neck. "I'm so _sorry_,
Mother dear," she almost sobbed. Dr. Melton's professional eye took in
the fact that everyone in the room was high-strung and tense. "The
middle-of-the-social-season symptom," he called it to himself. "I'm so
sorry, Mother," Lydia went on. "I will be more careful next time. You
are _so_ good to--to--"
"Good Heavens!" said Dr. Melton. "All the child did was to give herself
a moment's time to look at a fine spectacle, after spending all a
precious afternoon on such a tragically idiotic pursuit as cards."
"Oh, _sunsets_!" Mrs. Emery disposed of them with a word. "Come, Lydia."
"I'll go with her, and carry her bag," said the doctor.
"You made such a good job of getting her here on time," said Mrs. Emery,
unappeased.
The Judge offered to go, as a means of one of his rare visits with
Lydia, but his wife declared with emphasis that she didn't care who went
or didn't go so long as she herself saw that Lydia did not take to
star-gazing again. It ended by all four proceeding down the street
together.
"You're sure you remember everything, Lydia?" asked her mother.
"Let me see," said the girl, laughing nervously. "Do I? The Governor's
wife is his second, so I'm to waste no time admiring the first set of
children. They're Methodists, so I'm to keep quiet about our being
Episcopalians--"
"I guess we're not Episcopalians enough to hurt," commented her father,
who had never taken the conversion of his women-folks very seriously.
"And it's my pink crepe for dinner and tan-colored suit if they have
afternoon tea. And Mrs. Mallory is to be asked to visit us, but not her
daughter, because of her impossible husband, and I'm to play my
prettiest to the Governor, because he's always needing dynamos and such
in the works, and Paul--"
The big car came booming around the corner, and she stopped her category
of recommendations. The doctor rushed in with a last one as they stepped
hurriedly toward the rear platform: "And don't forget that your host is
the most unmitigated old rascal that ever stood in with two political
machines at once."
The Judge swung her up on the platform, the doctor gave her valise to
the conductor, her mother waved her hand, and she was off.
The two men turned away. Not so Mrs. Emery. She was staring after the
car in a fierce endeavor to focus her gaze on the interior. "Who was
that man that jumped up so surprised to speak to Lydia?"
"I didn't notice anybody," said the Judge.
Dr. Melton spoke quickly. "Lydia's getting in a very nervous state, my
friends; I want you to know that. This confounded life is too much for
her."
"She doesn't kill herself getting up in the morning," complained her
father. "It is a month now since I've seen her at breakfast."
"I don't _let_ her get up," said Mrs. Emery. "I guess if you'd been up
till two every morning dancing split dances because you were _the_ belle
of the season, you'd sleep late! Besides," she went on, "she'll be all
right as soon as her engagement is announced. The excitement of that'll
brace her up."
"Good Lord! It's not more excitement she needs," began Dr. Melton; but
they had reached the house, and Mrs. Emery, obviously preoccupied,
pulled her husband quickly in, dismissing the doctor with a nod.
She drew the Judge hurriedly into the hall, and, "It was that Rankin!"
she cried, the slam of the door underscoring her words, "and _I_ believe
Marius Melton knew he was going on that car and made Lydia late on
purpose."
Judge Emery was in the state in which of late the end of the day's work
found him--overwhelmingly fatigued. He had not an ounce of superfluous
energy to answer his wife's tocsin. "Well, what if it was?" he said.
"They'll be an hour and a half together--alone--more alone than anywhere
except on a desert island. Alone--an hour and a half!"
"Oh, Susan! If Paul can't in three months make more headway than Rankin
can tear down in an hour and a half--"
She raged at him, revolted at the calmness with which he was
unbuttoning his overcoat and unwinding his muffler, "You don't
understand--_anything_! I'm not afraid she'll elope with him--Paul's got
her too solid for that--Rankin probably won't say anything of _that_
kind! But he'll put notions in her head again--she's so impressionable.
And she says queer things now, once in a while, if she's left alone a
minute. She needs managing. She's not like that levelheaded, sensible
Madeleine Hollister. Lydia has to be guided, and you don't see
anything--you leave it all to me."
She was almost crying with nervous exhaustion. That Lydia's course ran
smooth through a thousand complications was not accomplished without an
incalculable expenditure of nervous force on her mother's part. Dr.
Melton had several times of late predicted that he would have his old
patient back under his care again. Judge Emery, remembering this
prophecy, was now moved by his wife's pale agitation to a
heart-sickening mixture of apprehension for her and of recollection of
his own extreme discomfort whenever she was sick. He tried to soothe
her. "But, Susan, there's nothing we can do about it," he said
reasoningly, hanging up his overcoat, blandly ignorant that her
irritation came largely from his failure to fall in with her conception
of the moment as a tragic one.
"You could _care_ something about it," she said bitterly, standing with
all her wraps on. The telephone bell rang. She motioned him back. "No; I
might as well go first as last. It'll be something I'd have to see
about, anyway."
As he hesitated in the middle of the hall, longing to betake himself to
a deep easy chair and a moment's relaxation, and not daring to do so, he
was startled by an electric change in his wife's voice. "You're at
Hardville, you say? Oh, Flora Burgess, I could go down on my knees in
thanksgiving. I want you to run right out as fast as you can and get on
the next Interurban car from Endbury. Lydia's on it--" she cast caution
from her desperately--"and I've just heard that there's somebody I
don't want her to talk to--you know--_carpenters_--run--fly--never mind
what they say! Make them talk to you, too!"
She turned back to her husband, transfigured with triumph. "I guess
that'll put a spoke in _his_ wheel!" she cried. "Flora Burgess's at
Hardville, and that's only half an hour from here. I guess they can't
get very far in half an hour."
The Judge considered the matter with pursed lips. "I wish it hadn't
happened," he mused, as unresponsive to his wife's relief as he had been
to her anxiety. "At first, I mean--last autumn--at all."
His wife caught him up with a good humor gay with relief. "Oh, give you
time, Nat, and you come round to seeing what's under your nose. I was
wishing it hadn't happened long before I knew it had. I breathed it in
the air before we ever knew she'd so much as seen him."
"Melton says he thinks the fellow has a future before him--"
"Oh, Marius Melton! How many of his swans have stuffed feather pillows!"
The Judge demurred. "I often wish I could think he _was_--but Melton's
no fool." He added, uneasily, "He's been pestering me again about taking
a long rest--says I'm really out of condition."
"Perhaps a change of work would do you good--to be in active practice
again. You could be your own master more--take more vacations, maybe."
The Judge surveyed her with a whimsical smile. "I'd make a lot more
money in practice," he admitted.
If she heard this comment she made no sign, but went on, "You do work
too constantly, too. I've always said so! If you'd be willing to take a
little more relaxation--go out more--"
Judge Emery shuddered. "Endbury tea-parties--!"
His wife, half-way up the stairs, laughed down at him. "Tea-parties!
There hasn't been a tea-party given in Endbury since we were wearing
pull-backs."
The laugh was so good-natured that the Judge hoped for a favorable
opening and ventured to say irrelevantly, as though reverting
automatically to a subject always in his mind, "But, honest, Susie,
can't we shave expenses down some? This winter is costing--"
She turned on him, not resentfully this time, but with a solemn appeal.
"Why, Nat! Lydia's season! The last winter we'll have her with us, no
doubt! I'd go on bread and water afterward to give her what she wants
now--wouldn't _you_? What are we old folks good for but to do our best
by our children?"
The Judge looked up at her, baffled, inarticulate. "Oh, of course," he
agreed helplessly, "we want to do the best by our children."
CHAPTER XV
A HALF-HOUR'S LIBERTY
Inside the big Interurban car Lydia and Rankin were talking with a
freedom that enormously surprised Lydia. The man had started up with an
exclamation of pleasure, had taken her bag, found a vacant seat, put her
next the window and sat down by her before Lydia, quite breathless with
the shock of seeing him, could do more than notice how vigorous he
looked, his tall, spare figure alert and erect, his ruddy hair and
close-clipped beard contrasting vividly with his dark-blue flannel shirt
and soft black hat. He was on a business trip, evidently, for on his
knees he held a tool-box with large ungloved hands, roughened and red.
With his usual sweeping disregard of conventional approaches, he plunged
boldly into the matter with which their thoughts were at once occupied.
"So this was why Dr. Melton insisted I should take this car. Well, I'm
grateful to him! It gives me a chance to relieve my mind of a weight of
remorse I've been carrying around."
Lydia looked at him, relieved and surprised at the hearty spontaneity of
this opening.
He misunderstood her expression. "You don't mind, do you, my speaking to
you about last fall--my saying I am so very sorry I made you all the
trouble Dr. Melton tells me I did? I'm really very sorry!"
Nothing could have more completely disarmed Lydia's acquired fear of him
as the bogey-man of her mother's exhortations. It is true that she was,
as she put it to herself, somewhat taken down by the contrast between
her secret thought of him as a wounded, rejected suitor, and this
clear-eyed, self-possessed, friendly reality before her; but, after a
momentary feeling of pique, coming from a sense of the romantic,
superficially grafted on her natural good feeling, she was filled with
an immense relief. Lydia was no man-eater. In spite of traditional
wisdom, she, like a considerable number of her contemporaries, was as
far removed from this stage of feminine development as from a Stone-age
appetite for raw meat. She now drew a long breath of the most honest
satisfaction that she had done him no harm, and smiled at Rankin. He
waited for her to speak, and she finally said: "It's awfully good of you
to put it that way! I've been afraid you must have been angry with me
and hurt that I--so you didn't mind at all!"
Rankin smiled at little ruefully at her swift conclusion. "I believe in
telling the truth, even to young ladies, and I can not say I didn't mind
at all--or that I don't now. But I am convinced that you were right in
dropping me--out of the realm of acquaintances." His assumption was,
Lydia saw with gratitude, that they were talking simply about a possible
acquaintanceship between them. "It's evidently true--what I told you the
very first time I saw you. We don't belong in the same world."
As he said this, he looked at her with an expression Lydia thought
severe. She protested, "What makes you so sure?"
"Because to live in my world--even to step into it from time to
time--requires the courage to believe in it."
"And you think I didn't?" asked Lydia. It was an inestimable comfort to
her to have brought into the light the problem that had so long lain in
the back of her head, a confused mass of dark conjecture.
"Did you?" he asked steadily. "You ought to know."
There was silence, while Lydia turned her head away and looked at the
brown, flat winter landscape jerking itself past the windows as the car
began to develop speed in the first long, open space between
settlements. She was trying to remember something distinct about the
nightmare of misery that had followed her admission of the identity of
the man who had kissed her hand that starry night in October, but from
the black chaos of her recollection she brought out only, "Oh, you don't
realize how things are with a girl--how many million little ways she's
bound and tied down, just from everybody in the family loving her as--"
"Oh, yes, I do; I prove I do by saying that you were probably right in
yielding so absolutely to that overwhelming influence. If you hadn't the
strength to break through it decisively even once, you certainly
couldn't have gotten any satisfaction out of doing things contrary to
it. So it's all right, you see."
Lydia's drooping face did not show that she derived the satisfaction
from this view of her limitations that her companion seemed to expect.
"You mean I'm a poor-spirited, weak thing, who'd better never try to
take a step of my own," she said with a sorry smile.
"I don't mean anything unkind," he told her gently. "I've succeeded in
convincing myself that your action of last autumn was the result of a
deep-rooted instinct for self-preservation--and that's certainly most
justifiable. It meant I'd expected too harsh a strength from you--" he
went on with a whimsical smile, which even the steadiness of his eyes
did not keep from sadness--"as though I'd hoped you could lift a
thousand-pound weight, like the strong woman in the side-show."
She responded to his attempt at lightness with as plain an undercurrent
of seriousness as his own. "Why do you live so that people have to lift
thousand-pound weights before they dare so much as say good-morning to
you?"
"Because I don't dare live any other way," he answered.
"It's hard on other people," Lydia ventured, but retreated hastily
before the first expression of upbraiding she had seen in his eyes. He
had so suddenly turned grave with the thought that it had been harder on
him than on anyone else that she cried out hurriedly, "But you didn't
help a bit--you left it all to me--"
She stopped, her face burning in uncertainty of the meaning of her
words.
Rankin's answer came with the swiftness of one who has meditated long on
a question. "I'm glad you've given me a chance to say what--I've wished
you might know. I thought it over and over at the time--and since--and
I'm sure it would not have been honorable--or delicate--or right, _not_
to leave it all to you. That much was yours to decide--whether you would
take the first step. It would have been a crime to have hurried or urged
you beyond what lay in your heart to do--or to have overborne you
against some deep-lying, innate instinct."
Lydia's voice was shaking in self-pity as she cried out, "Oh, if you
knew what the others--nobody _else_ was afraid to hurry or urge me to--"
She stopped and looked away, her heart beating rapidly with a flood of
recollections. Rankin's lips opened, but he shut them firmly, as though
he did not trust himself to speak. His large red hands closed savagely
on the handle of his tool-box. There was a silence between them.
The car began to move more slowly, and the conductor, standing up from
the seat where he had been dozing, remarked in a conversational tone to
a woman with two children near him, "Gardenton--this is the cross-roads
to Gardenton." Later, as the car stood still under the singing vibration
of the trolley-wire overhead, he added in the general direction of Lydia
and Rankin, now the only passengers, "Next stop is Wardsboro'!" His
voice came to them with a singular clearness in the quiet of the
momentary stop. They were in the midst of a mournful expanse of bare
ploughed fields, frozen and brown. The motorman released his brake,
letting the brass arm swing noisily about, the conductor sat down again,
and as the car began to move forward again he closed his eyes. He looked
very tired and, now that an almost instant sleep had relaxed his
features, pathetically young.
"How pale he is," said Lydia, wishing to break the silence with a
harmless remark. "He looks tired to death."
"He probably is just that," said Rankin, wincing. "It's sickening, the
way they work. Seven days a week, most of them, you know."
"No; I didn't know," cried Lydia, shocked. "Why, that's awful. When do
they see their families?"
"They don't. One of them, whose house isn't far from mine, told me that
he hadn't seen his children, except asleep, for three weeks."
"But something ought to be done about it!" The girl's deep-lying
instinct for instant reparation rose up hotly.
"Are they so much worse off than most American business men?" queried
Rankin. "Do any of them feel they can take the time to see much more
than the outside of their children; and isn't seeing them asleep about
as--"
Lydia cut him short quickly. "You're always blaming them for that," she
cried. "You ought to pity them. They can't help it. It's better for the
children to have bread and butter, isn't it--"
Rankin shook his head. "I can't be fooled with that sort of talk--I've
lived with too many kinds of people. At least half the time it isn't a
question of bread and butter. It's a question of giving the children
bread and butter and sugar rather than bread and butter and father. Of
course, I'm a fanatic on the subject. I'd rather leave off even the
butter than the father--let alone the sugar."
"But here's this very motorman you know about--what could he do?"
"They're not forced by the company to work seven days a week--only
they're not given pay enough to let them take even one day off without
feeling it. This very motorman I was talking with got to telling me why
he was working so extra hard just then. His oldest daughter is going to
graduate from the high school and he wants to give her a fine graduating
dress, as good as anybody's, and a graduating 'present.' It seems that's
the style now for graduating girls. He said he and his wife wanted her
always to remember that day as a bright spot, and not as a time when
she was humiliated by being different from other girls."
"Well, my goodness! you're not criticizing them for that, are you? I
think it was just as sweet and lovely of them as can be to realize how a
girl feels."
Rankin looked at her, smiled slightly, and said nothing. His silence
made Lydia thoughtful. After a time, "I see what you mean, of course,"
she said slowly, "that it would be _better_ for her, perhaps--but if he
_loves_ her, her father _wants_ to do things for her."
Rankin's roar of exasperation at this speech was so evidently directed
at an old enemy of an argument that Lydia was only for an instant
startled by it. "I _don't_ say he can do too much for her," he cried.
"He can't! Nobody can do too much for anybody else if it's the right
thing."
"And what in the world do you think _would_ be the right thing in this
case?" Lydia put the question as a poser.
"Why, of course, to pamper her vanity; to feed her moral cowardice; to
make her more afraid than ever of senseless public opinion; to deprive
her of a fine exercise for her spiritual force; to shut her off from a
sense of her material situation in life until the knowledge of it will
come as a tragedy to her; to let her grow up without any knowledge of
her father's point of view--"
"There, there! That's enough!" said Lydia.
"I didn't need to be so violent about it, that's a fact," apologized
Rankin.
"But you're talking of people the way they ought to be," objected Lydia,
apparently drawing again from a stock of inculcated arguments. "Do you
really, honestly, suppose that that girl would rather have an
opportunity to do something for her parents and--and--and all that, than
have a fine dress that would cost a lot and make the other girls
envious?"
"Oh, Lydia!" cried her companion, not noticing the betrayal of a mental
habit in the slipping out of her name. "You're just in a state of
saturated solution of Dr. Melton. Don't you believe a word he says
about folks. They're lots better than he thinks. The only reason anybody
has for raging at them for being a bad lot is because they are such a
good lot! They are so chuck-full of good possibilities! There's so much
more good in them than bad. You think that, don't you? You _must_!
There's nothing to go on, if you don't."
As Lydia began to answer she felt herself, as once or twice before when
with Rankin, suddenly an immeasurable distance from her usual ways of
mental life. She looked about her upon a horizon very ample and quite
strange, without being able to trace the rapid steps that had carried
her away from the close-walled room full of knickknacks and trifles,
where she usually lived. She drew a deep breath of surprise and changed
her answer to an honest "I don't believe I know whether I believe you or
not. I don't think I ever thought of it before."
"What _do_ you think about?" The question was evidently too sincere an
interrogation to resent.
The girl made several beginnings at an answer, stopped, looked out of
the window, looked down at her shoe-tip, and finally burst into her
little clear trill of amusement. "I don't," she said, looking full at
Rankin, her eyes shining. "You've caught me! I can't remember a single
time in my day when I think about anything but hurrying to get dressed
in time to be at the next party promptly. Maybe some folks can think
when they're hurrying to get dressed, but I can't."
Rankin was very little moved to hilarity by this statement, but he was
too young to resist the contagion of Lydia's mirth, and laughed back at
her, wondering at the mobility of her ever-changing face.
"If you don't think, what do you _do_?" he interrogated with mock
relentlessness.
"Nothing," said Lydia recklessly, still laughing.
"What do you feel?" he went on in the same tone, but Lydia's face
changed quickly.
"Oh--lots!" she said uncertainly, and was silent.
The car began to pass some poor, small houses, and in a moment came to
a standstill in the midst of a straggling village. The young conductor
still slept on, his head fallen so far on his shoulder that his
breathing was difficult. The motorman, getting no signal to go on,
looked back through the window, putting his face close to the glass to
see, for it had grown dusky outside and the electric lights were not yet
turned on. After a look at the sleeping man he glanced apprehensively at
the two passengers, and then, apparently reassured that they were not
"company detectives," he pushed open the door. "This is Wardsboro'," he
told them as he went down the aisle, "and the next stop is Hardville."
He was a strong, burly man, and easily lifted the slight, boyish form of
the conductor to a more comfortable position, propping him up in a
corner of the seat. The young man did not waken, but his face relaxed
into peaceful lines of unconsciousness as his head fell back, and his
breathing became long and regular, like a sleeping child's. As the big
motorman went back to his post, he explained a little sheepishly to the
two, who had watched his operation in attentive silence, "It's against
the rules, I know, but there ain't anybody but you two here, and he
don't look as though he'd really got his growth yet. I got a boy ain't
sixteen that looks as old as he does, and ruggeder at that. I reckon the
long hours are too much for him."
"Do you know him?" asked Rankin.
The motorman turned his red, weather-beaten face to them from the
doorway where he stood, pulling on his clumsy gloves. "Who, me?" he
asked. "No; I never seen him till to-day. He's a new hand, I reckon." He
drew the door after him with a rattling slam, rang the bell for himself,
and started the car forward.
In the warm, vibrating solitude of the car, the two young people looked
at each other in a silent transport. Lydia's dark eyes were glistening,
and she checked Rankin, about to speak, with a quick, broken "No; don't
say a word! You'd spoil it!"
There was between them one of the long, vital silences, full of
certainty of a common emotion, which had once or twice before marked a
significant change in their relation. Finally, "That's something I shall
never forget," said Lydia.
Rankin looked at her in silence, and then, quickly, away.
"It's like an answer to what I was saying--a refutation of what Dr.
Melton thinks--about people--"
As Rankin still made no answer, she exclaimed in a ravished surprise,
"Why, I never saw anything so lovely--that made me so happy! I feel warm
all over!"
Indeed, her face shone through the dusk upon her companion, who could
now no longer constrain himself to look away from her. He said, his
voice vibrant with a deep note which instantly carried Lydia back to the
other time when she had heard it, under the stars of last October, "It's
only an instrument exquisitely in tune which can so respond--" He broke
off, closed his lips, and, turning away from her, gazed sightlessly out
at the dim, flat horizon, now the only outline visible in the twilight.
Lydia said nothing, either then or when, after a long pause, he said
that he would leave the car at the next station.
"It has been very pleasant to see you again," he said, bending over his
tool-box, "and you mustn't lay it up against me that I haven't
congratulated you on your engagement. Of course you know how I wish you
all happiness."
"Thank you," said Lydia.
Ahead of the car, some lights suddenly winking above the horizon
announced the approach of Hardville. Rankin stood up, slipped on his
rough overcoat, and sat down again. He drew a long breath, and began
evenly: "I know you won't misunderstand me if I try to say one more
thing. I probably won't see you again for years, and it would be a great
joy to me to be sure that you know how hearty is my good-will to you.
I'm afraid you can't think of me without pain, because I was the cause
of such discomfort to you, but I know you are too generous to blame me
for what was an involuntary hurt. Of course I ought to have known how
your guardians would feel about your knowing me--"
"Oh, _why_ should you be so that all that happened!" cried Lydia
suddenly. "If it was too hard for me, why couldn't you have made it
easier--thought differently--acted like other people. _Would_ you--if I
hadn't--if we had gone on knowing each other?"
Rankin turned very white. "No," he said; "I couldn't."
"It seems to me," said Lydia hurriedly, "that, without being willing to
concede anything to their ideas, you ask a great deal of your friends."
"Yes," said Rankin, "I do. It's a hard struggle I'm in with myself and
the world--oh, evidently much too hard for you even to look at from a
distance." His voice broke. "The best thing I can do for you is to stay
away--" He rose, and stepped into the aisle. "But you are so kind--you
will let me serve you in any other way, if I can--ever. If I can ever do
something that's hard for you to do--you must know that I stand as ready
as even Dr. Melton to do it for you if I can."
Indeed, for the moment, as Lydia looked up into his kind, strong face,
his impersonal tenderness made him seem almost such an old, tried friend
as her godfather; almost as unlikely to expect any intimate personal
return from her.
"You must remember," he went on, "the great joy it gave us both to-day
even to see an act of kindness. Give me an opportunity to do one for you
if I ever can."
It already seemed to Lydia as though he had gone away from her, as
though this were but a beneficent memory of him lingering by her side.
She hardly noticed when he left her alone in the car.
The conductor started up, wakened by the silence, and announced wildly,
"Wardsboro', Wardsboro'!"
"No, it ain't; it's the first stop in Hardville," contradicted the
motorman, sticking his head in through the door. "Turn on them lights!"
As the glass bulbs leaped to a dazzling glare, Lydia blinked and looked
away out of the window. A moment later an arm laid about her neck made
her bound up in amazement and confront a small, middle-aged woman, with
a hat too young for her tired, sallow face, with a note-book in her
hand and an apologetic expression of affection in her light blue eyes.
"I'm sorry I startled you, Miss Lydia," she said. "I keep forgetting
you're not still a little girl I can pick up and hug."
"Oh, you!" breathed the girl, sitting down again. "I didn't think there
was anybody in the car with me, you see."
"Have you come all the way from Endbury alone, then?" asked Miss
Burgess, looking about her suspiciously.
"No, I have not," said Lydia uncompromisingly. "Mr. Rankin, the
cabinet-maker, has been with me till just now."
Miss Burgess sat down hastily in the vacant seat by Lydia. "And he's
coming back?" she inquired.
"No; he got off at Hardville. This _is_ Hardville, isn't it?"
"Yes. I happened to be out reporting a big church bazaar here." She
settled back comfortably. "What a nice chance for a cozy little visit I
shall have with you. These long trips on the Interurban are fine for
talking. Unless I shall tire you? Did Mr. Rankin talk much? What does he
talk _about_, anyhow? He's always so rude to me that I've never heard
him say a word except about his work."
Lydia considered for a moment. "We talked about the street-car
conductors having such long hours to work," she said, "and later about
whether people have more bad in them than good."
"Oh!" said Miss Burgess.
Lydia smiled faintly, the ghost of her whimsical little look of mockery.
"We decided that they have more good," she said.
Miss Burgess cast about her for a suitable comment. At last, "Really!"
she said.
CHAPTER XVI
ENGAGED TO BE MARRIED
All over the half-finished house the workmen began to lay down their
tools. Paul Hollister's face broke into a good-humored smile as a moment
later he caught the faraway five-o'clock whistles calling from the city.
He was in a very happy mood these days and the best aspect of the
phenomena of the world was what impressed him most. As the workmen
disappeared down the driveway to the main road, running to catch the
next trolley-car to Endbury, he looked after them with little of the
usual exasperation of the house-builder whose work they were slighting,
but with an agreeable sense of their extreme inferiority to him in the
matter of fixity of purpose. He felt that they symbolized the weakness
of most of humanity, and promised himself with a comfortable confidence
an easy and lifelong victory over such feeble adversaries. Of late,
business had been going even better than ever.
The days had begun to grow appreciably longer with the approach of
spring, and there had been several noons of an almost summer-like
mildness, but now, in spite of the fact that the sun was still shining,
the first chill of the late March evening dropped suddenly upon the
bare-raftered structure whose open windows and door-spaces offered no
barrier to the damp breeze. Hollister stirred from his pleasant reverie
and began to walk briskly about, inspecting the amount of work
accomplished since his last visit. He kept very close track of the
industry of his workmen and the competence of his contractor, and
Lydia's father admired greatly the way in which his future son-in-law
did not allow himself to be "done" by those past masters of the art. It
argued well for the future, Judge Emery thought, and he called Lydia's
attention to the trait with approval.
Before the wide aperture which was to be the front door, the owner of
the house stopped and looked eagerly out toward the road. It was near
the time when Lydia had promised to be there, and he meant to see her
and run to meet her when she first turned in upon the ground that was to
be her home. It was the first time that Lydia had happened to visit the
new house alone. Either her mother or Hollister's sister had accompanied
her on the two or three other occasions, but to-day she telephoned that
Mrs. Emery had been really out-and-out forbidden by Dr. Melton to get
out of bed for two or three days, and as for Madeleine--at this point
Madeleine had snatched the receiver from Lydia's hand and had informed
her brother that Madeleine was going to be busy with _her_ young man and
couldn't get off to chaperone people that had been as long engaged as he
and Lydia.
That was part of the bright color of the world to Paul--his sister's
recent engagement to their uncle's partner in the iron works, a very
prosperous, young-old bachelor of fifty-odd, whose intense preoccupation
with business had never been pierced by any consciousness of the other
sex until Madeleine had, as she proclaimed in her own vernacular, "taken
a club to him." It was a very brilliant match for her, and justified her
own prophecy concerning herself that she was not to be satisfied with
any old-fashioned, smooth-running course for true love. "It must shoot
the chutes, or nothing," she was accustomed to say, in her cheerful,
high-spirited manner.
Paul thought, with self-approval, that, for orphans of the poorer branch
of the Hollister family, he and Madeleine had not done badly with their
lives thus far.
He looked again impatiently toward the entrance to the grounds. A
trolley-car had just rattled by on the main road. If Lydia was on it,
she would appear at that turning under the trees. No; evidently she had
not been on that one. The harsh jar of the trolley's progress died away
in the distance and no Lydia appeared. He had fifteen minutes to wait
for the next one.
He drew out a note-book and began jotting down some ideas about the
disposition of the five acres surrounding the house. He was ambitious to
have the appearance of a country estate and avoid the "surburban" look
which would be so fatally easy to acquire in the suburban place. He
decided that he would not as yet fence in his land. The house was the
last one of a group of handsome residences that had lately sprung up in
the vicinity of the new Country Club, and to the south was still open
country, so that without a fence, he reflected, he could have himself,
and convey tacitly to others, the illusion of owning the wide sweep of
meadow and field which stretched away a mile or more to a group of beech
trees.
He jumped down lightly from the porch, as yet but sketchily outlined in
joists and rafters, and stood in a litter of shavings, bits of board and
piles of yellow earth, with a kindling eye. He had that happy prophetic
vision of the home-builder which overlooks all present deficiencies and
in an instant, with a confident magic, erects all that the slow years
are to build. He saw a handsome, well-kept house, correctly colonial in
style, grounds artfully laid out to increase the impression of space, a
hospitable, smoothly run interior, artistic, homelike, admired.
A meadow-lark near him began to tinkle out its pretty silver notes. The
sun set slowly below the smoky horizon; a dewy peace fell about the
deserted place. Paul had his visions of other than material elements in
his future and Lydia's. Such a dream came to him there, standing in the
dusk before the germ of his home to be. He saw himself an alert man of
forty-five, a good citizen, always on the side of civic honor; a good
captain of industry, quick to see and reward merit; a good husband who
loved and cherished his wife as on the day he married her, and protected
her from all the asperities of reality; a good father--he had almost an
actual vision of the children who would carry on his work in
life--girls of Lydia's beauty and sweetness, boys with his energy and
uprightness--and there was Lydia, too, the Lydia of twenty years from
now--in the full bloom of physical allurement still, a gracious hostess,
a public-spirited matron, lending the luster of his name to all worthy
charities indorsed by the best people, laying down with a firm good
taste dictates as to the worthy social development of the town. Before
this vision there rose up in him the ardent impulse to immediate effort
which is the sign manual of the man of action. He stirred and flung his
arm out.
"It's all up to me," he said aloud. "I can do it if I go after it hard
enough. I've got to make good for Lydia's sake and mine. She must have
the best I can get--the very best I know how to get for her."
A sound behind him made him catch his breath. He was trembling as he
turned about and saw Lydia coming swiftly up the driveway. "Good
Heavens, how I love her!" he thought as he ran down to meet her.
He was trembling when he took her in his arms, folding her in that close
embrace of surprised rapture at finding everything real, and no dream,
which is the unique joy of betrothal. He would not let her speak for a
moment, pressing his lips upon hers. When he released her, she cried in
a whisper, "Oh, it's wonderful how when you're close to me everything
else just isn't in the world!"
"That's being in love, Lydia," Paul told her with a grave thankfulness.
"I don't mean," she went on, with her ever-present effort to express
honestly her meaning, "I don't mean just--just being really
close--having your arms around me, though that always makes me forget
things, too--but being--_feeling_ close, you know--inside. Not having
any inner corner where we're not together--the way we are now--the way I
knew we should be when I saw you running down to meet me. I always know
the minute I see you whether it's going to be this way." She added, a
little wistfully, "Sometimes, you know, it isn't."
Paul lifted her up to the porch and led her across into the hallway.
Here he took her in his arms again and said with a shaken accent:
"Dearest Lydia, dearest! I wish it were always the way you want it--"
Lydia dropped her head back on his shoulder and looked at him earnestly.
In the half-light, white and clear from the freshly plastered walls, her
face was like alabaster. "Dear Paul, isn't that what getting married
means--to learn how to be really, really close to each other all the
time. There isn't anything else worth getting married for, is there?
_Is_ there?"
Her lover looked down into her eyes, into her sweet, earnest face, and
could not speak. Finally, his hand at his throat, "Oh, Lydia, you're too
good for me!" he said huskily. "You're too good for any man!"
"No, no, no!" she protested with a soft energy. "I'm weak, as weak as
water. You must give me a lot of your strength or I'll go under."
"God knows I'll give you anything I have."
"Then, never let things come between us--never, never, never! I'm all
right as long as I'm close to you. If we just keep that, nothing else
can matter."
They were silent, standing with clasped hands in the passage-way that
was to be the thoroughfare of their common life. It was a moment that
was to come back many times to Lydia's memory during later innumerable,
hurried daily farewells. The thought of the significance of the place
came to her mind now. She said softly, "This must be a foretaste of what
we're to have under this roof. How good it seems not to be in a hurry
to--"
With a start Paul came to himself from his unusual forgetfulness of his
surroundings. "We _ought_ to be in a hurry now, dearest. Dr. Melton
keeps me stirred up all the time to take care of you, and I'm sure I'm
not doing that to let you stand here in this cold evening air. Come, let
me show you--the closet under the stairs, you know, and the place for
the refrigerator."
Lydia yielded to his care for her with her sweet passivity, echoed his
opinion about the details, and ran beside him down the driveway, to
catch the next car to Endbury, with a singular light grace for a tall
woman encumbered with long skirts.
In spite of their haste, they missed the car and were obliged to wait
for a quarter of an hour beside the tracks. They talked cheerfully on
indifferent topics, the sense of intimate comradeship gilding all they
said. In their hearts was fresh the memory of the scene in the new
house. They looked at each other and smiled happily in the intervals of
their talk.
Paul was recapitulating to Lydia the advantages of the location of their
house. "We are in the vanguard of a new movement in American life," he
said, "the movement away from the cities. Madeleine tells me that she
and Lowder are planning a house at the other end of this street, and you
can be sure they know what they are about."
Lydia did not dissent from this opinion of her future sister-in-law, but
she interrupted Paul a moment later, to say fondly, "_Oh_, but I'm glad
that you aren't fifty-five and bald and with lots of money!"
Paul laughed. "Madeleine'll get on all right. She knows what she's
about. It's a pair of them."
"Well, I am church-thankful that that is not what _we_ are about!"
exclaimed Lydia.
Her lover voiced the extreme content with his lot which had been his
obsession that day. "We have _everything_, darling. We shall have all
that Madeleine and old Lowder have and we have now all this heavenly
happiness that they'll never know--or miss," he added, giving them their
due.
"I didn't mean that," protested Lydia. "It seems to me that being like
them and being like us are two contradictory things. You _can't_ be both
and have the things that go with both. And what I'm so thankful for is
that we're us and not them."
Paul laughed. "You just see if there's anything so contradictory. Trust
me. You just see if you don't beat Madeleine on her own ground yet."
"I don't _want_--" began Lydia; but Paul had gone back to his first
theme and was expanding it for her benefit. "Yes; we're getting the
English idea. In twenty years from now you'll find the social center of
every moderate-sized American city shifted to some such place as this."
Lydia craned her neck down the tracks impatiently. "I hope we don't miss
a trolley car every day of those twenty years," she said, laughing.
"We'll have an automobile," he said. Then, reflecting that this was a
somewhat exaggerated prophecy, he went on, with the honesty he meant
always to show Lydia (so far as should be wise), "No; I'm afraid we
sha'n't, either--not for some time. It'll take several years to finish
paying altogether for the house, and we'll have to pull hard to keep up
our end for a time. But we're young, so much won't be expected of
us--and if we just dig in for a few years now while we're fresh, we can
lie back and--"
"Well, _gracious_!" said Lydia, "who wants an automobile, anyhow! Only I
wish the trolley didn't take so long. It's going to take the best part
of an hour, you know; the ten or twelve minutes to get here from the
house, the two or three minutes to wait, the thirty minutes on the car,
the ten minutes to your office--and then all that turned inside out when
you come back in the evening."
"Oh, I'll be able to do a lot of business figuring in that time. It
won't be wasted."
They fell into happy picture-making of their future. Lydia wanted to
have chickens and a garden, she said. She'd always wanted to be a
farmer's wife--an idea that caused Paul much laughter. They revised the
plans for the furnishing of the hall--the china closet could stand
against the west wall of the dining-room; why had they not thought of
that before? The little room upstairs was to be a sewing-room "Although
I hate sewing," cried Lydia, "and nowadays, when ready-mades are so
cheap and good--"
"Nobody expected you to make yourself tailored street dresses," said
Paul; "but don't I all the time hear Madeleine and my aunt saying how
the 'last _chic_ of a costume, the little indefinable touches that give
a toilet distinction,' they have to fuss up themselves out of bits of
lace and ribbon and fur and truck?" He was quoting, evidently, with an
amused emphasis.
Lydia leaned to him, her eyes wide in a mock solemnity. "Paul, I have a
horrible confession to make to you. I _loathe_ the 'last _chic_, the
little indefinable touches that give a toilet,' and so forth! It makes
me sick to spend my time on them. What difference does it make to real
folks if their toilets _aren't_ 'and so forth!'"
She looked so deliciously whimsical with her down-drawn face of
rebellious contrition that Paul was enchanted. "And this I learn when
it's too late for me to draw back!" he cried in horror. "Woman! woman!
this tardy confession"
"Oh, there are lots of other confessions. Just wait."
"Out with them!"
"I don't know _anything_."
"That's something," admitted Paul.
"And you must teach me."
"Oh, this docile little 1840 wife! Don't you know the suffragists will
get you if you talk meek like that? What do you want to know? Volts, and
dynamos, and induction coils?"
"Everything," said Lydia comprehensively, "that you know. Books,
politics, music--"
"Lord! what a hash! What makes you think I know anything about such
things?"
"Why, you went through Cornell. You must know about books. And you're a
man, you must know about politics; and as for music, we'll learn about
that together. Aunt Julia and Godfather are going to give us a
piano-player--though I know they can't afford it, the dears!"
"People _are_ good to us." Paul's flush of gratitude for his good
fortune continued.
"You like music, don't you?" asked Lydia.
"I guess so; I don't know much about it. Some crazy German post-grads at
Cornell used to make up a string quartette among themselves and play
some things I liked to hear--I guess it was pretty good music, too. They
were sharks on it, I know. Yes; now I think of it, I used to like it
fine. Maybe if I heard more--"
"Oh, the evenings together!" breathed Lydia. "Doesn't it take your
breath away to think of them? We'll read together--"
Paul saw the picture. "Yes; there're lots of books I've always meant to
get around to."
They were silent, musing.
Then Paul laughed aloud. Lydia started and looked at him inquiringly.
"Oh, I was just thinking how old married folks would laugh to hear us
infants planning our little castles in Spain. You know how they always
smile at such ideas, and say every couple starts out with them and after
about six months gets down to concentrating on keeping up the furnace
fire and making sure the biscuits are good."
Lydia laid her hand eagerly on his arm. "But don't let's, Paul! Please,
_please_ don't let us! Just because everybody else does is no reason why
we _have_ to. You're always saying folks can make things go their way if
they try hard enough--you're so clever and--"
"Oh, I'm a wonder, I know! You needn't tell me how smart I am."
"But, Paul, I'm in earnest--I mean it--"
The car had arrived by this time and he swung her up to the platform.
Like other moderns they were so accustomed to spend a large part of
their time in being transported from place to place that they were quite
at home in the noisy public conveyance, and after a pause to pay fares,
remove wraps, and nod to an acquaintance or two, they went on with their
conversation as though they were alone. People looked approvingly at the
comely, well-dressed young couple, so naively absorbed in each other,
and speculated as to whether they were just married or just about to
be.
After they were deposited at the corner nearest the Emery house, the
change to the silent street, up which they walked slowly, reluctant to
separate, took them back to their first mood of this loveliest of all
their hours together--the sweet intimacy of their first meeting in the
new house.
Lydia felt herself so wholly in sympathy with Paul that she was moved to
touch upon something that had never been mentioned between them. "Paul,
dear," she said, her certainty that he would understand, surrounding her
with an atmosphere of spiritual harmony which she recognized was the
thing in all the world which mattered most to her, "Paul dear, I never
told you--there's nothing to tell, really--but when I went to the
Mallory's house-party in February I rode from here to Hardville with Mr.
Rankin and had a long talk with him. You don't mind, do you?"
Her lover drew her hand within his arm and gave it an affectionate
pressure. "You may not know things, Lydia, as you say, but you are the
_nicest_ girl! the straightest! I knew that at the time--Miss Burgess
told me. But I'm glad you've given me a chance to say how sorry I was
for you last autumn when everybody was pestering you so about him. I
knew how you felt--better than you did, I'll bet I did! I wasn't a bit
afraid. I knew you could never care for anybody but me. Why, you're
_mine_, Lydia, I'm yours, and that's all there is to it. You know it as
well as I do."
"_I know it when I'm with you_," she told him with a bravely honest,
unspoken reservation.
He laughed his appreciation of her insistent sincerity. "Well, when
you're married won't you be with me all the time? So that's fixed! And
as for meeting somebody by accident on the street-cars--why, you foolish
darling, you're not marrying a Turk, or an octopus--but an American."
Lydia was silent, but her look was enough to fill the pause richly. She
was savoring to the full the joy of close community of spirit which had
been so rare in her pleasant life of material comfort, and she was
saying a humble prayer that she might be good enough to be worthy of it,
that she might be wise enough to make it the daily and hourly atmosphere
of her life with Paul.
"What are you thinking about, darling?" asked the other.
"I was thinking how lovely it's going to be to be really married and
come to know each other well. We don't know each other at all yet,
_really_, you know."
Paul was brought up short, as so often with Lydia, by an odd,
disconcerted feeling, half pleasure, half shock, from the discovery in
her of pages that he had not read, germs of ideas that had not come from
him. "Why, darling Lydia, what do you mean? We know each other through
and through!" he now protested. It gave a tang of the unexpected to her
uniform sweetness, this always having a corner still to turn which kept
her out of his sight. Paul was used to seeing most women achieve this
effect of uncertainty by the use of coquetry, and in the free-and-easy
give and take between young America of both sexes, he had learned with a
somewhat cynical shrewdness to discount it. He entered into the game,
but, in his own phrase, he always knew what he was about. Lydia, on the
contrary, often penetrated his armor by one of these shafts, barbed by
her complete unconsciousness of any intent. He felt now, with a
momentary anguish, that he could never be sure of her belonging quite to
him until they were married, and cried out upon her idea almost angrily,
"I don't know what you mean! We know each other now."
"Oh, no, we don't," she insisted. "There are lots of queer fancies in me
that you'll only find out by living with me--and, Oh, Paul! the fine,
noble things I _feel_ in you! But I can see the whole of them only by
seeing you day by day. And then there are lots of things that aren't in
us, really, yet, but only planted. They'll grow--we'll grow--Paul,
to-day is an epoch. We've passed a new milestone."
"How do you mean?" he asked.
"The way we've felt--the way we've talked--of real things--out there in
our own--" She laughed a little, a serene murmur of drollery which came
to her when she was at peace. "We've been engaged since November, but we
only got engaged to be married to-day--just as our wedding's to be in
June, but goodness knows when our marriage will be."
Paul smiled at her tenderly. "If I'd known the date was so uncertain as
that I shouldn't have dared to go so far in my house-building."
"Oh, it's all right so far," she reassured him, smiling; "but we must
pitch in and finish it. Why, that's just it, Paul--" she was struck with
the aptness of her illustration--"that's just it. We've got the rafters
and joists up now; maybe before we're married, if we're good, we can get
the roof on so it won't rain on us; but all the finishing, all that
makes it good to live in, has got to be done after the wedding."
He did not know exactly what she was talking about, but he made up for
vagueness by fervor. "After we are married," he cried, "I'll move
mountains and turn stones to gold."
"But the first thing to do is to lay floors for us to walk on," Lydia
told him.
For answer, he drew her into his arms and closed her mouth with a kiss.
CHAPTER XVII
CARD-DEALING AND PATENT CANDLES
Spring had come with its usual hotly advancing rush upon the low-lying,
sheltered southerly city. There had been a few days of magical warmth,
full of spring madness, when every growing thing had expanded leaves
with furious haste, when the noise of children playing in the street
sounded loud through newly-opened windows, when, even on city streets,
every breath of the sweet, lively air was an intoxicating potion. Then,
with a bound, the heat was there. Evenings and nights were still cool,
but noons were as oppressive as in July. The scarcely expanded leaves
hung limp in a summer heat.
All during that eventful winter, Mrs. Emery had frequently remarked to
her sister-in-law that Lydia's social career progressed positively with
such brilliancy that it was like "something you read about." Mrs.
Sandworth invariably added the qualifying clause, "But in a very nice
book, you know, with only nice people in it, where everything comes out
nicely at the end." Her confidence in literature as a respectable source
of pleasure was not so guileless as Mrs. Emery's. It had been cruelly
shaken by dipping into some of the Russian novels of the doctor's.
Not infrequently the two ladies felt, with a happy importance, that they
were the authors of the book and that the agreeable episodes and
dramatic incidents which had kept the flow of the narrative so sparkling
were the product of their own creative genius. When April came on, and
Lydia agreed to the announcement of her engagement, they felt the need
of some remarkable way of signaling that important event and of closing
her season with a burst of glory. For her season had to end! Dr. Melton
said positively that if Lydia had another month of the life she had been
leading he would not be responsible for the consequences. "She has a
fine constitution, inherited from her farmer grandparents," he said,
smiling to see Mrs. Emery wince at this uncompromising statement of
Lydia's ancestry, "but her nervous organization is too fine for her own
good. And I warn you right now that if you get her nerves once really
jangled, I shall take to the woods. You can just give the case to
another doctor. It would be too much for _me_."
The girl herself insisted that she felt perfectly well and able to stand
more than when she first began going out. She affirmed this with some
impatience, her eyes very bright, her cheeks flushed, whenever her
godfather protested against a new undertaking. "When you get going, you
_can't_ stop," she told him, shaking off his detaining hand. Mrs. Emery
told the doctor that he'd forgotten the time when he was young or he'd
remember that all girls who'd been popular at all--let alone a girl like
Lydia--looked thin and worn by the end of the season; but during the
last week of April, when the first hot days had arrived, a small
incident surprised her into thinking that perhaps the doctor had some
right on his side.
Not that there was in itself anything so very alarming about a nervous
explosion from a girl so high-strung and susceptible as Lydia. The
startling thing was that this explosion proceeded, so far as her mother
could see, from nothing at all, from the idlest of chance remarks by
Mrs. Sandworth, as always, whitely innocent of the smallest intention to
wound.
She and Mrs. Emery were much given to watching Lydia dress for the
innumerable engagements that took her away from the house. They made a
pretext of helping her, but in truth they were carried away by the
delight in another's beauty which is more common among women than is
generally imagined. They took the profoundest interest in the selection
of the toilet she should wear, and regarded with a charmed surprise the
particular aspect of Lydia's slim comeliness which it brought out. They
could not decide whether they liked her best in clinging, picture
costumes, big hats, plumes, trailing draperies, and the like, or
dashing, jaunty effects. Once in the winter, after she had left them on
her way to an evening skating party and they had seen her from the
window join Hollister and add her skates to those glittering on his
shoulder, Mrs. Sandworth promulgated one of her unexpected apothegms:
"Do you know what we are, Susan Emery? We're a couple of old children
playing with a doll." Mrs. Emery protested with an instant, reproving
self-justification: "_You_ may be--you're not her mother; but I
understand Lydia through and through."
Mrs. Emery felt that if Lydia had overheard that remark of her aunt's
her excitement and resentment might have been natural; but the one which
led to the distressing little scene in late April was as neutral as an
ordinary morning salutation. The two were watching Lydia dress for a
luncheon which Mrs. Hollister--_the_ Mrs. Hollister--was giving in her
honor. It was about noon of a warm day, and the air that came in at the
open windows was thrillingly alive with troubling, disquieting
suggestions of the new life of spring. Lydia, however, showed none of
the languor which the sudden heat had brought to the two elder women.
She was a little late, and her hurry had sent a high color to her
cheeks, the curves of which were refined to the most exquisite subtlety
by the loss of flesh so deplored by Dr. Melton. She was used, by this
time, to dressing in a hurry, but her fingers trembled a little, and she
tried three times before she could coil her dark silky hair smoothly.
She was frowning a little with the fixity of her concentration as she
turned to snatch up her long gloves and she did not hear Mrs.
Sandworth's question until it had been repeated,
"I said, Lydia, is it to be bridge this afternoon?"
"I don't know," said Lydia with the full stop of absent indifference.
"Didn't Mrs. Hollister say?"
"Maybe she did. I didn't notice." The girl was tugging at her glove.
"Well, anyhow," said her mother, "since everybody's giving you
card-parties, I should think you'd want to practice up and learn how to
deal better. It's queer," she went on to Mrs. Sandworth, "Lydia's so
deft about so many things, that she should deal cards so badly."
"Oh, goodness! As if there was nothing better to do than that!" cried
Lydia, beginning on the other glove.
"Well, what _have_ you to do that's better?" asked her aunt in some
astonishment. "Lydia, my dear, your collar is pinned the least bit
crooked. Here, just let me--"
Lydia had stopped short, her glove dangling from her wrist. "Why, what a
horrible thing to say!" She brought this out with a tragic emphasis,
immensely disconcerting to her two elders.
"Horrible!" protested Mrs. Sandworth.
"Yes, horrible," insisted the girl. She had turned very pale. "The very
way you say it and don't think anything about it, _makes_ it horrible."
Mrs. Sandworth began to doubt her own senses. "Why, what did I say?" she
appealed to Mrs. Emery in bewildered interrogation, but before the
latter could answer Lydia broke out: "If I really believed that, why,
I'd--I'd--" She hesitated, obviously between tragic consequences, and
then, to the great dismay of her companions, began to cry, still
standing in the middle of the floor, her glove dangling from her slim,
white wrist.
"Don't Lydia! Oh, don't, dear! You'll make yourself look like a fright
for the luncheon." Mrs. Emery ran to her daughter with a solicitude in
which there was considerable irritation. "You're perfectly exhausting,
taking everything that deadly serious way. Don't be so _morbid_! You
know your Aunt Julia didn't mean anything. She never does!"
Lydia pulled away and threw herself on the bed, still sobbing, and
protesting that she could not go to the luncheon; and in the end Mrs.
Emery was obliged to make the profoundest apologies over the telephone
to a justly indignant hostess.
In the meantime Lydia was undressed and put to bed by Mrs. Sandworth,
who dared not open her mouth. The girl still drew long, sobbing breaths,
but before her aunt left the room she lay quiet, her eyes closed. The
other was struck by the way her pallor brought out the thinness of her
lovely face. She hovered helplessly for a moment over the bed. "Is there
anything I can do for you, dearie?" she asked humbly.
Lydia shook her head. "Just let me be quiet," she murmured.
At this, Mrs. Sandworth retreated to the door, from which she ventured a
last "Lydia darling, you know I'm sorry if I said anything to hurt--"
Lydia raised herself on her elbow and looked at her solemnly. "It wasn't
what you _said_; it was what it _meant_!" she said tragically.
With this cryptic utterance in her ears, Mrs. Sandworth fled downstairs,
to find her sister-in-law turning away from the telephone with a frown.
"Mrs. Hollister was very much provoked about it, and I don't blame her.
It's hard to make her understand we couldn't have given her a _little_
warning. And--that's the most provoking part--I didn't dare say Lydia is
really sick, when, as like as not, she'll be receiving company this
evening."
"You wouldn't want her sick, just so it would be easier to explain,
would you?" asked Mrs. Sandworth with her eternal disconcerting
innocence.
Mrs. Emery relieved her mind by snapping at her sister-in-law with the
violence allowed to an intimate of many years' standing, "Good gracious,
Julia! you're as bad as Lydia! Turning everything people say into
something quite different--"
Mrs. Sandworth interrupted hastily, "Susan, tell me, for mercy's sake,
what did I say? The last thing I remember passing my lips was about her
collar's being a little crooked,--and just now she told me, as though it
was the crack of Doom, that it wasn't what I said, but what it meant,
that was so awful. What in the world does she mean?"
Mrs. Emery sank into a seat with a gesture of utter impatience. "Mean?
Mean nothing! Didn't you ever know an engaged girl before?"
"Well, I'm sure when I was engaged I never--"
"Oh, yes, you did; you _must_ have. They all do. It's nerves."
But a moment later she contradicted her own assurance with a sigh of
unresignation. "Oh, dear! why can't Lydia be just bright and wholesome
and fun-loving and _natural_ like Madeleine Hollister!" She added
darkly, "I just feel in my bones that this has something to do with that
Rankin and his morbid ideas."
Mrs. Sandworth was startled. "Good gracious! You don't suppose she--"
"No; of course I don't! I never thought of such a thing. You ought to
see her when she is with Paul. She's just _fascinated_ by him! But you
know as well as I do that ideas go right on underneath all that!" Her
tone implied a disapproval of their tenacity of life. "And yet, Lydia's
really nothing unusual! Before they get married and into social life,
and settled down and too busy to think, most girls have a queer spell.
Only most of them take it out on religion. Oh, why couldn't she have met
that nice young rector--if she had to meet somebody to put ideas into
her head--instead of an anarchist."
"Well, it's certainly all past now," Mrs. Sandworth reassured her.
"Yes; hasn't it been a lovely winter! Everybody's been so good to Lydia.
Everything's succeeded so! But I suppose Dr. Melton's right. We ought to
call her season over, except for the announcement party--and the
wedding, of course--and oh, dear! There are so many things I'd planned
to do I can't possibly get in now. It seems strange a child of mine
should be so queer and have such notions."
However, after the two had talked over the plans for a great evening
garden-party in the Emery "grounds" and Mrs. Emery's creative eye had
seen the affair in a vista of brilliant pictures, she felt more
composed. She went up quietly to Lydia's door and looked in.
The girl was lying on her back, her wide, dark eyes fixed on the
ceiling. Something in the expression of her face gave her mother a throb
of pain. She yearned over the foolish, unbalanced young thing, and her
heart failed her, in that universal mother's fear for her child of the
roughnesses of life, through which she herself has passed safely and
which have given savor to her existence. In her incapacity to conceive
other roughnesses than those she could feel herself, she was, it is
probable, much like the rest of humankind. She advanced to the bed, her
tenderest mother-look on her face, and cut Lydia off from speech with
gentle wisdom. "No, no, dear; don't try to talk. You're all tired out
and nervous and don't know--"
Lydia had begun excitedly: "I've been feeling it for a long time, but
when Aunt Julia said right out that I didn't know how to do anything
better than--that I was only good to--"
Her mother laid a firm, gentle hand over the quivering mouth, and said
in a soothing murmur, "Hush, hush! darling. It wasn't anything your poor
foolish Aunt Julia said. It isn't anything, anyhow, but being up too
much and having too much excitement. People get to thinking all kinds of
queer things when they're tired. Mother knows. Mother knows best."
She had prepared a glass of bromide, and now, lifting Lydia as though
she were still the child she felt her to be, she held it to her lips.
"Here, Mother's poor, tired little girl--take this and go to sleep;
that's all you need. Just trust Mother now."
Lydia took the draught obediently, but she sighed deeply, and fixed her
mother with eyes that were unrelentingly serious.
When Mrs. Emery looked in after half an hour, she saw that Lydia was
still awake, but later she fell asleep, and slept heavily until late in
the afternoon.
On her appearance at the dinner-table, still languid and heavy-eyed, she
was met with gentle, amused triumph. "There, you dear. Didn't I tell you
what you needed was sleep. There never was a girl who didn't think a
sick headache meant there was something wrong with her soul or
something."
Judge Emery laughed good-naturedly, as he sliced the roast beef, and
said, with admiration for his wife, "It's a good thing my high-strung
little girl has such a levelheaded mother to look after her. Mother
knows all about nerves and things. She's had 'em--all kinds--and come
out on top. Look at her now."
Lydia took him at his word, and bestowed on her mother a long look. She
said nothing, and after a moment dropped her eyes listlessly again to
her plate. It was this occasion which Mrs. Emery chose to present to the
Judge her plans for the expensive garden-party, so that in the animated
and, at times, slightly embittered discussion that followed, Lydia's
silence was overlooked.
For the next few days she stayed quietly indoors, refusing and canceling
engagements. Mrs. Emery said it was "only decent to do that much after
playing Mrs. Hollister such a trick," and Lydia did not seem averse. She
sewed a little, fitfully, tried to play on the piano and turned away
disheartened at the results of the long neglect--there had been no time
in the season for practice--and wandered about the library, taking out
first one book then another, reading a little and then sitting with
brooding eyes, staring unseeingly at the page. Once her mother, finding
her thus, inquired with some sharpness what book she was reading to set
her off like that. "It's a book by Maeterlinck," said Lydia, "that
Godfather gave me ever so long ago, and I've never had time to read it."
"Do you like it? What's it about?" asked her mother, suspiciously.
"I can't understand it," said Lydia, "when I'm reading it. But when I
look away and think, I can, a little bit. I love it. It makes me feel
like crying. It's all about our inner life."
"My dear Lydia, you put your hat right on and go over to have a little
visit with Marietta. What you need is a little fresh air and some
sensible talk. I've been too busy with my invitation list to visit with
you as I ought. Marietta'll be real glad to see you. Here's your hat.
Now, you run right along, and stop at Hallam's on the way and get
yourself an ice-cream soda. It's hot, and that'll do you good."
As Lydia was disappearing docilely out of the door, her mother stopped
before going back to her desk and the list of guests for the
garden-party, which had been torturing her with perplexity, to say, "Oh,
Lydia, don't forget to ask Marietta to order the perforated candles."
"Perforated--!" said Lydia blankly, pausing at the door.
"Yes; don't you remember, the last time Mrs. Hollister called here she
told us all about them."
"No, I don't remember," said Lydia, with no shade of apology in her
tone.
"Why, my dear! You're getting so absent-minded! Do you mean to say you
didn't take in anything of what she was talking about? It's a new kind,
that has holes running through it so the melted wax runs down the
inside! Why, we were talking about them the whole time she was here that
last call."
Lydia opened the door, observing vaguely, "Oh, yes; I do seem to
remember something. It was a very dull visit, anyhow."
Mrs. Emery returned to her list, pursing up her lips and wagging her
head. "You'll have to learn, dearie, that it's little details like that
that make the difference between success and failure."
"We have electric light and gas," said Lydia.
Mrs. Emery looked up in astonishment and a little vexation. She, too,
had nerves these days. "Why, Lydia, what's the matter with you? You know
nobody uses those for table decoration."
"_We_ could," said Lydia.
"Why, my dear child, I never knew before there was a contrary streak in
you, like your father. What in the world possesses you all of a sudden
to object to candles?"
"It's not candles--it's the idea of--Oh, all the fuss and bother, when
everybody's so tired, and the weather's so hot, and it's going to cost
too much anyhow."
"Well, what would you have us fuss and bother about, if not over having
everything nice when we entertain?" Mrs. Emery's air of enforced
patience was strained.
Lydia surveyed her from the hall in silence. "That's just it--that's
just it," she said finally, and went away.
Mrs. Emery laid down her pen to laugh to herself over the queer ways of
children. "They begin to have notions with their first teeth, and I
suppose they don't get over them till _their_ first baby begins to
teethe."
When Lydia arrived at her sister's house, she found that competent
housekeeper engaged in mending the lace curtains of her parlor. She had
about her a battery of little ingenious devices to which she called
Lydia's attention with pride. "I've taught myself lace-mending just by
main strength and awkwardness," she observed, fitting a hoop over a torn
place, "and it's not because I have any natural knack, either. If
there's anything I hate to do, it's to sew. But these curtains do go to
pieces so. I wash them myself, to be careful, but they are so fine.
Still," she cast a calculating eye on the work before her, "I'll be
through by the end of this week, anyhow--if that new Swede will only
stay in the kitchen that long!"
She bent her head over her work again, holding it up to the light from
time to time and straining her eyes to catch the exact thread with her
almost impalpably fine needle. Lydia sat and fanned herself, looking
flushed and tired from the walk in the heat, and listening in silence to
Mrs. Mortimer's account of the various happenings of her household:
"And didn't I find that good-for-nothing negro wench had been having
that man--and goodness knows how many others--right here in the house. I
told Ralph I never would have another nigger--but I shall. You can't get
anything else half the time. I tell you, Lydia, the servant problem is
getting to be something perfectly terrible--it's--"
Lydia broke in to say, "Why don't you buy new ones?"
Mrs. Mortimer paused with uplifted needle to inquire wildly, "New
_what_?"
"New curtains, instead of spending a whole week in hot weather mending
those."
"Good gracious, child! Will you ever learn anything about the cost of
living! I think it's awful, the way Father and Mother have let you grow
up! Why, it would take half a month's salary to reproduce these
curtains. I got them at a great bargain--but even then I couldn't afford
them. Ralph was furious."
"You could buy muslin curtains that would be just as pretty," suggested
Lydia.
"Why, those curtains are the only things with the least distinction in
my whole parlor! They _save_ the room."
"From what?"
"From showing that there's almost nothing in it that cost anything, to
be sure! With them at the window, it would never enter people's heads to
think that I upholstered the furniture myself, or that the pictures
are--"
"Why shouldn't they think so, if you did?" Lydia proffered this
suggestion with an air of fatigued listlessness, which, her sister
thought, showed that she made it "simply to be contrary." Acting on this
theory, she answered it with a dignified silence.
There was a pause. Lydia tilted her head back against the chair, and
looked out of the window at the new green leaves of the piazza vine.
Mrs. Mortimer's thin, white, rather large hands drew the shining little
needle back and forth with a steady, hurrying industry. It came into her
mind that their respective attitudes were symbolical of their lives,
and she thought, glancing at Lydia's drooping depression, that it would
be better for her if she were obliged to work more. "Work," of course,
meant to Marietta those forms of activity which filled her own life.
"_I_ never have any time for notions," she thought, the desperate,
hurrying, straining routine of her days rising before her and moving
her, as always, to rebellion and yet to a martyr's pride.
Lydia stirred from her listless pose and came over to her sister,
sitting down on a stool at her feet. "Marietta, dear, please let me talk
to you. I'm so miserable these days--and Mother won't let me say a word
to her. She says it's spring fever, and being engaged, and the end of
the season, and everything. Please, _please_ be serious, and let me tell
you about it, and see if you can't help me."
Her tone was so broken and imploring that Mrs. Mortimer was startled.
She was, moreover, flattered that Lydia should come to her for advice
rather than to her parents. She put her arm around her sister's
shoulders, and said gently, "Why, yes, dear; of course; anything--"
"Then stop sewing and listen to me--"
"But I can sew and listen, too."
"Oh, Etta, _please_! That's just the kind of thing that gets me so wild.
Just a little while!"
The harassed housekeeper cast an anxious eye on the clock, but loyally
stifled the sigh with which she laid her work aside. Lydia apologized
for interrupting her. "But I do want you to really think of what I am
saying. Everybody's always so busy thinking about _things_! Oh, Etta,
I'm just as unhappy as I can be--and so scared when I think about--about
the future."
Mrs. Mortimer's face softened wonderfully. She stroked Lydia's dark
hair. "Why, poor dear little sister! Yes, yes, darling, I know all about
it. I felt just so myself the month before I was married, and Mother
couldn't help me a bit. Either she had forgotten all about it, or else
she never had the feeling. I just had to struggle along through without
anybody to help me or to say a word. Oh, I'm so glad I can help my
little sister. _Don't_ be afraid, dear! There's nothing so terrible
about it; nothing to be scared of. Why, once you get used to it you find
it doesn't make a bit of difference to you. Everything's just the same
as before."
Lydia lifted a wrinkled brow of perplexity to this soothing view of
matrimony. "I don't know what you're talking about, Etta!" she cried in
a bewilderment that seemed to strike her as tragic.
"Why--why, being married! Wasn't that what you meant?"
"Oh, no! _No!_ Nothing so definite as that! I couldn't be afraid of
Paul--why should I be? I'm just frightened of--everything--what
everybody expects me to do, and to go on doing all my life, and never
have any time but to just hurry faster and faster, so there'll be more
things to hurry about, and never talk about anything but _things_!" She
began to tremble and look white, and stopped with a desperate effort to
control herself, though she burst out at the sight of Mrs. Mortimer's
face of despairing bewilderment, "Oh, don't tell me you don't see at all
what I mean. I can't say it! But you _must_ understand! Can't we somehow
all stop--_now_! And start over again! You get muslin curtains and not
mend your lace ones, and Mother stop fussing about whom to invite to
that party--that's going to cost more than he can afford, Father
says--it makes me _sick_ to be costing him so much. And not fuss about
having clothes just so--and Paul have our house built little and plain,
so it won't be so much work to take care of it and keep it clean. I
would so much rather look after it myself than to have him kill himself
making money so I can hire maids that you _can't_--you say yourself you
can't--and never having any time to see him. Perhaps if we did, other
people might, and we'd all have more time to like things that make us
nicer to like--"
At this perturbing jumble of suggestions, Mrs. Mortimer's head whirled.
She took hold of the arms of her chair as if to steady herself, but,
conscientiously afraid of discouraging the girl's confidence, she nodded
gravely at her, as if she were considering the matter. Lydia sprang up,
her eyes shining. "Oh, you dear! You _do_ see what I mean! You see how
dreadful it is to look forward to just that--being so desperately
troubled over things that don't really matter--and--and perhaps having
children, and bringing them up to the same thing--when there must be so
many things that do matter!"
To each of these impassioned statements her sister had returned an
automatic nod. "I see what you mean," she now put in, a statement which
was the outward expression of a thought running, "Mercy! Dr. Melton's
right! She's perfectly wild with nerves! We must get her married as soon
as ever we can!"
Lydia went over to the window, and stood looking out as she talked, now
with an excited haste, now with a dragging note of fatigue in her voice.
Her need of sympathy was so great that she did a violence to the
reticence she had always kept, even with herself. She wondered aloud if
it were not perhaps Daniel Rankin and his queer ideas that lay at the
bottom of her trouble. She added, whirling about from the window, "For
mercy's sake! don't go and think I am in love with him, or anything! I
haven't so much as thought of him all winter! I see, now that Mother's
pointed it out to me, how domineering he really was to me last autumn.
I'm just crazy about Paul, too! When I'm with him he takes my breath
away! But maybe--maybe I can't forget Mr. Rankin's _ideas_! You know he
talked to me so much when I was first back--and if somebody would just
argue me out of them, the way he did into them! I don't believe I'd ever
have thought it queer to live the way we do, just to have more things
and get ahead of other people--if he hadn't put the idea into my head.
But nobody else will even _talk_ about it! They laugh when I try to."
She came over closer to the matron, and said imploringly, her voice
trembling, "I don't _want_ to be queer, Marietta! What makes me? I
don't like to have queer ideas, different from other people's--but every
once in a while it all comes over me with a rush--what's the _good_ of
all we do?"
Poor Lydia propounded this question as though it were the first time in
the world's history that it had passed the lips of humanity. Her
curious, puzzled distress rose up in a choking flood to her throat, and
she stopped, looking desperately at her sister.
Mrs. Mortimer nodded again, calmly, drew a long breath, and seemed about
to speak. Lydia gazed at her, her cheeks flushed, her eyes bright with
unshed tears--all one eager expectancy. The older woman's eyes wandered
suddenly for an instant. She darted forward, clapped her hands together
once, and then in rapid succession three or four times. Then rolling
triumphantly something between her thumb and forefinger, she turned to
Lydia. The little operation had not taken the third of a moment, but the
change in the girl's face was so great that Mrs. Mortimer was moved to
hasty, half-shamefaced, half-defiant apology. "I _was_ listening to you,
Lydia! I _was_ listening! But it's just the time of year when they lay
their eggs, and I have to fight them. Last year my best furs and Ralph's
dress suit were perfectly _riddled_! You know we can't afford new."
Lydia rose in silence and began pinning on her hat. Her sister, for all
her vexation over the ending of the interview, could hardly repress a
smile of superior wisdom at the other's face of tragedy. "Don't go,
Lyddie, don't go!" She tried to put her arms around the flighty young
thing. "Oh, dear Lydia, cultivate your sense of humor! That's all that's
the matter with you. There's nothing else! Look here, dear, there _are_
moths as well as souls in the world. People have to be on the lookout
for them,--for everything, don't you see?"
"They look out for _moths_, all right," said Lydia in a low tone. She
submitted, except for this one speech, in a passive silence to her
sister's combination of petting and exhortation, moving quietly toward
the door, and stepping evenly forward down the walk.
She had gone down to the street, leaving Mrs. Mortimer still calling
remorseful apologies, practical suggestions, and laughing comments on
her "tragedy way of taking the world." At the gate, she paused, and then
came back, her face like a mask under the shadow of her hat.
Marietta stood waiting for her with a quizzical expression. Under her
appearance of lightly estimating Lydia's depression as superficial, she
had been sensible of a not unfamiliar qualm of doubt as to her own
manner of life, an uneasy heaving of a subconscious self not always
possible to ignore; but, as was her resolute custom, she forced to the
front that perception of the ridiculous which she had urged on her
sister. She bit her lips, to conceal a smile at Lydia's mournful
emphasis as she went on: "I forgot to tell you, Marietta, what I was
sent over for. You're to be sure to order the perforated candles. It's
the kind that has holes down the middle, so the wax doesn't look mussy
on the outside, and it's very, very important to have the right kind of
candles."
Mrs. Mortimer, willfully amused, looked with an obstinate smile into her
sister's troubled eyes as Lydia hesitated, waiting, in spite of herself,
for the understanding word.
"You're a darling, Lyddie," said the elder woman, kissing her again;
"but you are certainly _too_ absurd!"
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
BOOK III
A SUITABLE MARRIAGE