CHAPTER VIIITHE SHADOW OF THE COMING EVENT
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 formin 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 readingLes 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 hermother’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 æsthetics 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’stutelage, 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 youopen 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 naïvely 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, entrées, 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 beforehe 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—andthenwhat 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 saysanythingat 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 rôle 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’tsayanything, 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 IXFATHER AND DAUGHTER
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 perceptibleadvantage 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 afraidforher! Remember the fate of the father in theErl-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 inThe 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; “Ididn’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 eversilencedme,” 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 thoughhe 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 adeep 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 tohave his unspoken principles carried to thisnth 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, Iamgoing, 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 XCASUS BELLI
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 killme, 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 hesaid,” 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 mesee—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. “Wearefoolish, 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 inhis 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, howgoodyou 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 mediæval 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 doneby 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.Wouldyou 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 runyou, 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 beencoaxed 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 shewouldhave,” he amended.
The doctor grunted, “Huh! But wouldyou!” 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.Whydoes 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 offamily 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 gotmebluffed, anyhow! My wife—if I ever have one—is going to be my sure-enough wife, and my children,mychildren. I won’thavea business that they can’t know about, or that doesn’t leave me strength enough to share in all their lives. I can earn enough growing potatoes and doing odd jobs of carpentering for that!”
The doctor looked wonderingly at the other’s kindling face. “Rankin,” he asked irrelevantly, “aren’t thereevermoments when you despair of the world?”
The voice of the younger man had the fine tremor of sincerity as he answered, “Why, good heavens,no, Doctor! That’s why I dare criticize it so.”
The doctor looked with an intensity almost fierce into the other’s confident eyes. He laid his thin, sinewy hand on the other’s big brown fist, as though he would fain absorb conviction by contact. “But I’m sick with the slowness of the progress you talk of—believe in,” he burst out finally. “It comes too late—the advance from our tragic materialism; too late for so many that could have profited by it most.” He looked toward Lydia bending over her aunt’s fancy work. Rankin followed the direction of his eyes.
“Yes; that’s what I mean,” said the doctor heavily, rising from his chair. “That and such thousands of others. Oh, for a Theseus to hunt down this Minotaur of false standards and wretched ideas of success! I see them, the precious youths and maidens, going in by thousands to his den of mean aspirations, and not a hand is raised to warn them. They must be silly and tragic because everyone else is!”
Rankin shook his head. “I think I’m proving that you don’t have to go into the labyrinth—that you can live in health and happiness outside.”
“There’s rather more than that to be done, you’ll admit,” said the doctor with an uncompromising bitterness.
Rankin colored. “I don’t pretend that it’s much of anything—what I’ve done.”
The doctor did not deny him. He thrust out his lips and rubbed his hand nervously over his face. Finally, “But you have done it, at least,” he brought out, “and I’ve only talked. As another doctor has said: ‘I’ve never taken a bribe; but there’s a pale shade of bribery known as prosperity.’”
They fell into a silence, broken by Mrs. Sandworth’s asking, “Lydia, have your folks got an old mythology book?I studied it at school, of course, but it has sort of passed out of my mind. Was it the Minotaur that sowed teeth and something else very odd came up that you wouldn’t expect?”
Lydia did not smile. “I don’t know whether we have the book or not, but Miss Slater told us the story of the Minotaur. There’s a picture of Theseus and Ariadne in Europe somewhere—Munich, I think—or maybe Siena. It was where one of the girls had a sore throat, I remember, and we had to stay quite a while. Miss Slater told us about it then.”
The doctor stood up. “Julia, it’s nearly half-past now. Who remembered this time? I’m off, all of you. Rankin, see that Lydia gets home safely, will you?”
“Oh, I must go too—now, with you.” The girl jumped up. “I didn’t realize it was so late. They’ll be wondering at home.”
“Come along, then, both of you. I’ll go with you to the corner where I take my car.”
The chill of the night air sent them along at a brisk gait, Lydia swinging easily between them, her head on a level with Rankin’s, the doctor’s hat on a level with her ear. She said nothing, and the two talked across her, disjointed bits of an argument apparently under endless discussion between them.
The doctor flung down, with a militant despondency, “It’d be no use trying to do anything, even if you weren’t so slothful and sedentary as you are! It moves in a vicious circle. Because material success is what the majority want, the majority’ll go on wanting it. Hardy says somewhere that it’s innate in human nature not to desire the undesired of others.”
Rankin sang out a ringing “Aw, g’wan! It’s innate in human nature to murder and steal whenever it pleases, and I guess even Hardy’d admit that those aren’t the amusements of the majority quite so extensively as they used to be—what? First thing you know people’ll begin to desire things because they’re worth desiring and not because other folks have them—even so astonishing a flight as that!” he madea boyish gesture—“and what a grand time that’ll be to live in, to be sure!”
They were waiting at the corner for the doctor’s street car, which now came noisily down toward them. He watched it advance, and proffered as a valedictory, his gloom untempered to the last, “You’re a wild man that lives in the woods. I’ve doctored everybody in the world for thirty years. Which knows human nature best?”
Rankin roared after him defiantly, waking the echoes and startling the occupants of the car, “I do! I do! I do!”
The car bore the doctor away, a perversely melancholy little figure, contemplating the young people blackly.
“Whatever do you suppose set him off so?” Rankin wondered aloud as they resumed their rapid, swinging walk through the cold air.
“I’m afraid I did,” Lydia surmised. “I had a wretched fit of the blues, and I guess he must have caught them from me.”
Rankin looked down at her keenly, his thoughts apparently quite altered by her phrase. “Ah, he worries a great deal about you,” he murmured.
Lydia laughed nervously, and said nothing. They walked swiftly in silence. The stars were thick above them in the wind-swept autumn night. Lydia tilted her head to look up at them once or twice. She saw Rankin’s face pale under the shadow of his broad-brimmed hat, his eyes meeting hers in an intent regard like a wordless speech. The fine, cold, austere wind swept them along like leaves, whipping their young pulses, chanting loudly in the leafless branches of the maples, and filling the dark spaces above with a great humming roar. They thrilled responsive to all this and to the mood of high seriousness each divined in the other.
Lydia’s voice, breaking in upon the intimate silence, continued the talk, but it was with another note. The mute interval, filled with wind and darkness and the light of stars, had swung them up to a higher plane. She spoke with an artless sureness of comprehension—a certainty—they were close in spirit at that moment, and she was notfrightened, not even conscious of it. “Why should the doctor worry?What is the matter?Marietta says the trouble with me is that I’m spoiled with having everything that I want.”
“Haveyou everything you want?” Rankin’s bluntness of interrogation was unmitigated.
Lydia looked up at him swiftly, keenly. In his grave face there was that which made her break out with an open quivering emotion she had not shown even to the doctor’s loving heart. “It’s a weight on my very soul—that there’s nothing for me to look forward to—nothing, nothing that’s worth growing up to do. I haven’t been taught anything—but I know I want to be something better than—perhaps I can’t be—but I want to try! I want to try! That’s not much to ask—just a chance to try—But I don’t even know how to get that. I don’t even dare to speak of—of—such things. People laugh and say it’s Sunday-schooley fancies that’ll disappear, that I’ll forget as I get into living. But I don’t want to forget. I’m afraid I shall. I want to keep trying. I don’t know—”
They did not slacken their swift advance as they talked. They looked at each other seriously in the starlight.
Rankin had given an indrawn exclamation as she finished, and after an instant’s pause he said, with a deep emotion, “Oh, perhaps—at least we both want to try—Be Ariadne for me!Help me to find the clue to what’s wrong in our lives, and perhaps—” He looked down at her, shaken, drawing quick breaths. She answered his gaze silently, her face as shining white as his.
He went on: “You shall decide what Ariadne may be or may come to be—I will take whatever you choose to give—and bless you!”
She had a gesture of humility. “Ihaven’t anything to give.”
His accent was memorable as he cried, “You have yourself—you—you! But you are too gentle! It is hard for you—it will be too hard for you to do what you feelshould be done. I could perhaps do the things if you would tell me—help you not to forget—not to let life make you forget what is worth doing and learning!”