The Squirrel-Cage
by Dorothy Canfield Fisher · English · Gutenberg #23768 · 713,073 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Squirrel-Cage
Author: Dorothy Canfield Fisher
Illustrator: John Alonzo Williams
Release date: December 8, 2007 [eBook #23768]
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/23768
Credits: Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
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[Illustration: Paul stood by her, looking down into her eyes, bending
over her, smiling, pressing, confident, masterful. (Page 96)]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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
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