CHAPTER VILYDIA’S GODFATHER
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 hisr’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, howawful!” she accused herself, horrified. “I’dforgottenMother!”
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 portière inflammation, through afternoon tea distemper, throughart-nouveauprostration 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 withyou?”
Lydia started as though he had suddenly clapped her on the shoulder. “I—why, I—just—” she hesitated, “why, I don’t know whatisthe 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 youby 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, orWeltschmerz, 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.Ido.Iknow 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—thatwas 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. Sheought 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’sSociety 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 naïve, 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 VIIOUTSIDE THE LABYRINTH
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 wayhome. 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 naïve astonishment, as though they were new to humanity.
“Yes; I’ve heard ladies say before that it’s quiteawful,” 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.”
“Whatdoyou 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 Iwouldget 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’tcook!” 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, notcrazy.” 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 topersuade 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 manneverhas 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, fellin. 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 naïve 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 hurtmeto 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.
"YOU SAY BEAUTIFUL THINGS!" HE REPLIED QUIETLY. "MY ROUGH QUARTERS ARE GLORIFIED FOR ME."“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 hergaze, 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 soawfullyqueer!”
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 everafter. 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, butmyhead 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 Tolstoidid, 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 Idon’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 gettingupso fast, but onlyscramblingfast 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 oneof 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 wherethe 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 tohers, 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!”