She put back a mesh of her wind-blown hair to look at him intently, and to say again in wonder, “I’m not anything. What can you think I—what can you hope—”
They were standing now on the walk before her father’s house. “I can hope—” his voice shook, “I can hope that you may make me into a man worthy to help you to be the best that’s in you.”
Lydia put out her hand impulsively. It did not tremble. She looked at him with radiant, steady eyes. He raised the slim, gloved fingers to his lips. “Whether to leave you, or to try to—Oh, I would give my life to know how best to serve you,” he said huskily. He turned away, the sound of his steps ringing loud in the silent street.
Lydia went slowly up the walk and into the empty hall. She stood an instant, her hands clasped before her breast, her eyes closed, her face still and clear. Then she moved upstairs like one in a dream.
As she passed her mother’s door she started violently, and for an instant had no breath to answer. Some one had called her name laughingly.
Finally, “Yes,” she answered without stirring.
“Oh, come in, come in!” cried Marietta mockingly. “We know all about everything. We heard you come up the street, and saw you philandering on the front walk. And for all it’s so dark, we made out that Paul kissed your hand when he went away.”
There was a silence in the hall. Then Lydia appeared in the door. Mrs. Emery gave a scream. “Why, Lydia! what makes you look so queer?”
They turned startled, inquiring, daunting faces upon her. It was the baptism of fire to Lydia. The battle, inevitable for her, had begun. She faced it; she did not take refuge in the safe, silent lie which opened before her, but her courage was a piteous one. In her utter heartsick shrinkingfrom the consequences of her answer she had a premonition of the weakness that was to make the combat so unequal. “It was not Paul,” she said, pale in the doorway; “it was Daniel Rankin.”
BOOK II
IN THE LOCOMOTIVE CAB
CHAPTER XIWHAT IS BEST FOR LYDIA
CHAPTER XI
WHAT IS BEST FOR LYDIA
The girls who were to be débutantes that season, the “crowd” or (more accurately to quote Madeleine Hollister’s racy characterization) “the gang,” stood before Hallam’s drug store, chattering like a group of bright-colored paroquets. They had finished three or four ice-cream sodas apiece, and now, inimitably unconscious that they were on the street corner, they were “getting up” a matinée party for the performance of the popular actress whom, at that time, it was the fashion for all girls of their age and condition to adore. They had worked themselves up to a state of hysteric excitement over the prospect.
A tall brown-eyed blonde, with the physical development of a woman and the facial expression of a child of twelve, cried out, “I feel as though I should swoon for joy to see that darling way she holds her hands when the leading man’s making love to her—so sort of helpless—like this—”
“Oh, Madeleine, that’s not abitthe way. It’s so!”
The first speaker protested, “Well, I guess I ought to be able to do it. I’ve practiced forhoursin front of the glass doing it.”
“For mercy’s sake that’s nothing. So have I. Who hasn’t?”
Madeleine referred the question to Lydia, “Lyd has seen her later than anybody. She saw her in London. Just think of going to the theater in London—as if it was anywhere.She says they’re crazy about her over there.”
“Oh, wild!” Lydia told them. “Her picture’s in every single window!”
“Which one? Which one?” they clamored, hanging on her answer breathlessly.
“That fascinating one with the rose, where she’s holding her head sideways and—” Oh, yes, they had that one, their exclamation cut her short, relieved that their collections were complete.
“Lyd met a woman on the steamer coming back whose sister-in-law has the same hairdresser,” Madeleine went on.
They were electrified. “Oh,honestly? Is it her own?” They trembled visibly before solution of a problem which had puzzled them, as they would have said, “for eternities.”
“Every hair,” Lydia affirmed, “and naturally that color.”
Their enthusiasm was prodigious, “How grand! How perfectly grand!”
They turned on Lydia with reproaches. “Here you’ve been back two months and we haven’t got a bit of good out of you. Think of your having known that, all this—”
“Her mother’s sick, you know,” Madeleine Hollister explained.
“She hasn’t been so sick but what Lydia could get out to go buggy-riding with your brother Paul ever since he got back this last time.”
Lydia, as though she wished to lose herself, had been entering with a feverish intensity into the spirit of their lively chatter; but now, instead of responding with some prompt, defensive flippancy, she colored high and was silent. A clock above them struck five. “Oh, I must get on,” she cried; “I’m down here, you know, to walk home with Father.”
They laughed loudly, “Oh, yes, we know all about this sudden enthusiasm for Poppa’s society. Where are you going to meet Paul?”
Lydia looked about at the crush of drays, trolley-cars,and delivery-wagons jamming the busy street, “Well, not here down-town,” she replied, her tone one of satisfied security.
A confused and conscious stir among her companions and a burst of talk from them cut her short. They cried variously, according to their temperaments, “Oh, there he comes now!” “I think it’s mean Lydia’s gobbling him up from under our noses!” “I used to have a ride or two behind that gray while Lydia was away!” “My! Isn’t he a good-looker!”
They had all turned like needles to the north, and stared as the spider-light wagon, glistening with varnish, bore down on them, looking singularly distinguished and costly among the dingy business-vehicles which made up the traffic of the crowded street. The young driver guided the high-stepping gray with a reckless, competent hand through the most incredibly narrow openings and sent his vehicle up against the flower-like group of girls, laughing as he drew rein, at the open, humorous outcry against him. A chorus of eager recrimination rose to his ears, “Now, Mr. Hollister, this is the first time Lydia’s been out with our crowd since she came home!” “You might let her alone!” “Go away, Paul, you greedy thing!” “I haven’t asked Lydia a single thing about her European trip!”
“Well, maybe you think,” he cried, springing out to the sidewalk, “that I’ve been spending the last year traveling around Europe with Lydia! I haven’t heard any more than you have.” He threw aside the lap-robe of supple broadcloth, and offered his hand to Lydia. A flash of resentment at the cool silence of this invitation sprang up in the girl’s eyes. There was in her face a despairing effort at mutiny. Her hands nervously opened and shut the clasp of the furs at her throat. She tried to look unconscious, to look like the other girls, to laugh, not to know his meaning, to turn away.
The young man plunged straight through these pitiful cobwebs. “Why, come on, Lydia,” he cried with a good-humored pointedness, “I’ve been all over town looking foryou.” She backed away, looking over her shoulder, as if for a lane of escape, flushing, paling. “Oh, no, no thank you, Paul. Notthisafternoon!” she cried imploringly, with a soft fury of protest, “I’m on my way to Father’s office. I want to walk home with him. I want to see him. I thought it would be nice to walk home with him. I see so little of him! I thought it would be nice to walk home with him.” She was repeating herself, stammering and uncertain, but achieving nevertheless a steady retreat from the confident figure standing by the wagon.
This retreat was cut short by his next speech. “Oh, I’ve just come from your father. I went to his office, thinking you might be there. He said to tell you and your mother that he won’t be home to dinner to-night at all. He’s got some citations on hand he has to verify.”
Lydia had stopped her actual recoil at his first words and now stood still, but she still tugged at the invisible chain which held her. She was panting a little. She shook her head. “Well—anyhow—I want to see him!” she insisted with a transparently aimless obstinacy like a frightened child’s. “I want to see my father.” Paul laughed easily, “Well, you’d better choose some other time if you want to get anything out of him. He had turned everybody out and was just settling to work with a pile of law-books before him. You know how your father looks under those circumstances!” He held the picture up to her, relentlessly smiling.
Lydia’s lips quivered, but she said nothing.
Paul went on soothingly, “I’ve only come to take you straight home, anyhow. Your mother wants you. She said she had one of those fainting turns again. She said to be sure to bring you.”
At the mention of her mother’s name, Lydia turned quite pale. She began to walk slowly back towards the wagon. There was angry, helpless misery in her dark eyes, but there was no longer any resistance. “Oh, if Mother needs me—” she murmured. She took the offered hand, stepped into thewagon and even went through some fitful pretense of responding to the chorus of facetious good-bys which rose from the group they were leaving.
She said little or nothing in answer to the young man’s kind, cheerful talk, as they drove along one main thoroughfare after another, conspicuous by the brilliant, prosperous beauty of their well-fed youth and their handsome garb, pointed out by people on the sidewalks, constantly nodding in response to greetings from acquaintances. Lydia flushed deeply at the first of these salutations, a flush which grew deeper and deeper as these features of their processional advance repeated themselves. She put her hand to her throat from time to time as though it ached and when the red rubber-tired wheels turned noiselessly in on the asphalt of her home street, she threw the lap-robe brusquely back from her knees as though for an instant escape.
The young man’s pleasant chat stopped. “Look here, Lydia,” he said in another tone, one that forced her eyes to meet his, “look here, don’t you forget one thing!” His voice was deep with the sincerest sympathy, his eyes full of emotion, “Don’t you forget, little Lydia, that nobody’s sorrier for you than I am! And I don’t want anything that—” he cried out in sudden passion—“Good Lord, I’d be cut to bits before I’d evenwantanything that wasn’t best for you!” He looked away and mastered himself again to quiet friendliness, “You know that,don’t you, Lydia? You know that all I want is for you to have the most successful life anyone can?”
He leaned to her imploring in his turn.
She drew a quick breath, and moved her head from side to side restlessly. Then drawn by the steady insistence of his eyes, she said, as if touched by his patient, determined kindness, “Oh, yes, yes, Paul, I realize how awfully good you’re being to me! I wish I could—but—yes, of course I see how good you are to me!”
He laid his hand an instant over hers, withdrawing it before she herself could make the action. “It makes mehappy to have you know I want to be,” he said simply, “now that’s all. You needn’t be afraid. I shan’t bother you.”
They were in front of the Emery house now. He did not try to detain her longer. He helped her down, only repeating as she gave him her gloved hand an instant, “That’s what I’m for—to be good to you.”
The wagon drove off, the young man refraining from so much as a backward glance.
The girl turned to the house and stood a moment, opening and shutting her hands. When she moved, it was to walk so rapidly as almost to run up the walk, up the steps, into the hall and into her mother’s presence, where, still on the crest of the wave of her resolution, she cried, “Mother, did you really send Paul for me again. Did youreally?”
“Why, yes, dear,” said Mrs. Emery, surprised, sitting up on the sofa with an obvious effort; “did somebody say I didn’t?”
“I hoped you didn’t!” cried Lydia bitterly; “it was—horrid! I was out with all the girls in front of Hallam’s—everybody was so—they all laughed so when—they looked at me so!”
Mrs. Emery spoke with dignity, “Naturally I couldn’t know where he would find you.”
“But, Mother, youdidknow that every afternoon for two weeks you’ve—it’s been managed so that I’ve been out with Paul.”
Mrs. Emery ignored this and went on plaintively, “I didn’t see that it was so unreasonable for an invalid to send whoever she could find after her only daughter because she was feeling worse.”
Lydia’s frenzy carried her at once straight to the exaggeration which is the sure forerunner of defeat in the sort of a conflict which was engaging her. “Areyou feeling any worse?” she cried in a despairing incredulity which was instantly marked as inhumanly unfilial by the scared revulsion on her face as well as Mrs. Emery’s pale glare ofhorror. “Oh, I didn’t mean that!” she cried, running to her mother; “I’m sorry, Mother! I’m sorry!”
The tears began running down Mrs. Emery’s cheeks, “I don’t know my little Lydia any more,” she said weakly, dropping her head back on the pillow.
“I don’t know myself!” cried Lydia, sobbing violently, “I’m so unhappy!”
Mrs. Emery took her in her arms with a forgiveness which dropped like a noose over Lydia’s neck, “There, there, darling! Mother knows you didn’t mean it! But you must remember, Lydia dearest, if you’re unhappy these days, so is your poor mother.”
“I’m making you so!” sobbed Lydia, “I know it! something like this happens every day! It’s why you don’t get well faster! I’m making you unhappy!”
“It doesn’t make any difference about me!” Mrs. Emery heroically assured her, “I don’t want you to be influenced by thinking about my feelings, Lydia. Above everything in the world, I don’t want you to feel theslightestpressure from me—or any one of the family. Oh, darling, all I want—all any of us want, is what is best for our little Lydia!”
CHAPTER XIIA SOP TO THE WOLVES
CHAPTER XII
A SOP TO THE WOLVES
Six o’clock had struck when Mrs. Sandworth came wearily back from her Christmas shopping. It was only the middle of November, but each year she began her preparations for that day of rejoicing earlier and earlier, in a vain attempt to avoid some of the embittering desolation of confusion and fatigue which for her, as for all her acquaintances, marked the December festival. She let herself down heavily from the trolley-car which had brought her from the business part of Endbury back to what was known as the “residential section,” a name bestowed on it to the exclusion of several other much larger divisions of town devoted exclusively to the small brick buildings blackened by coal smoke in which ordinary people lived.
As she walked slowly up the street, her arms were full of bundles, her heart full of an ardent prayer that she might find her brother either out or in a peaceable mood. She loved and admired Dr. Melton more than anyone else in the world, but there were moments when the sum total of her conviction about him was an admission that his was not a reposeful personality. For the last fortnight, this peculiarity had been accentuated till Mrs. Sandworth’s loyalty had cracked at every seam in order not to find him intolerable to live with. Moreover, her own kind heart and intense partiality for peace in all things had suffered acutely from the same suspense that had wrought the doctor to his wretched fever of anxiety. It had been a time of torment for everybody—everybody was agreed on that; and Mrs. Sandworth had felt that life in the same house with Lydia’s godfather had given her more than her share of misery.
On this dark November evening she was so tired that every inch of her soft plumpness ached. She had not prospered in her shopping. Things had not matched. She let herself into the front door with a sigh of relief at finding the hall empty. She looked cautiously into the doctor’s study and drew a long breath, peeped into the parlor and, almost smiling, went on cheerfully upstairs to her room. From afar, she saw the welcoming flicker of the coal fire in her grate, and felt a glow of surprised gratitude to the latest transient from the employment agency who was now occupying her kitchen. She did not often get one that was thoughtful about keeping up fires when nobody was at home. It would be delicious to get off her corset and shoes, let down her hair—there he was, bolt upright before the fire, his back to the door. She took in the significance of his tense attitude and prepared herself for the worst, sinking into a chair, letting her bundles slide at various tangents from her rounded surface, and surveying her brother with the utmost unresignation. “Well, what is it now?” she asked.
He had not heard her enter, and now flashed around, casting in her face like a hard-thrown missile, “Lydia’s engaged.”
All Mrs. Sandworth’s lassitude vanished. She flung herself on him in a wild outcry of inquiry—“Which one? Which one?”
He answered her angrily, “Which do you suppose? Doesn’t a steam-roller make some impression on a rose?”
“Oh!” she cried, enlightened; and then, with widespread solemnity, “Well, think—of—that!”
“Not if I can help it,” groaned the doctor.
“But that’s not fair,” his sister protested a moment later as she took in the rest of his speech.
“Heaven knows it’s not,” he agreed bitterly.
She stared. “I mean that Paul hasn’t been nearly so steam-rollery as usual.”
The doctor rubbed his face furiously, as though to brush off a disagreeable clinging web. “He hasn’t hadto be. There have been plenty of other forces to do his rolling for him.”
“If you mean her father—you know he’s kept his hands offreligiously.”
“He has that, damn him!” The doctor raged about the room.
A silent prayer for patience wrote itself on Mrs. Sandworth’s face. “You’re just as inconsistent as you can be!” she cried.
“I’m more than that,” he sighed, sitting down suddenly on a chair in the corner of the room; “I’m heartsick.” He shivered, thrust his hands into his pockets and surveyed his shoes gloomily.
One of Mrs. Sandworth’s cheerful capacities was for continuing tranquilly the minute processes of everyday life through every disturbance in the region of the emotions. Youhadto, she said, to get them done—anybody that lived with the doctor. She now took advantage of his silence to count over her packages, remove her wraps, loosen a couple of hooks at her waist and fluff up the roll of graying hair over her forehead. The doctor looked at her.
She answered him reasonably, “It wouldn’t help Lydia any if I took it off and threw it in the fire, would it? It’s my best one, too; the other’s at the hairdresser’s, getting curled.”
“It’s not,” the doctor broke out—“it’s not, Heaven be my judge! thatIwant to settle it. But I did want Lydia to settle it herself.”
“She has, at last,” Mrs. Sandworth reminded him, in a little surprise at his forgetting so important a fact.
“She hasnot!” roared the doctor.
His literal-minded sister looked aggrieved bewilderment. She felt a bitterness at having been stirred without due cause. “Marius, you’re unkind. What did you tell me she had for—when I’m so tired it seems as if I could lie down and die if I—”
Dr. Melton knew his sister. He made a rapid plungethrough the obscurity of her brain into her heart’s warm clarity, and, “Oh, Julia, if you had seen her!” he cried.
She leaned toward him, responsive to the emotion in his voice. “Tell me about it, poor Marius,” she said, yearning maternally over his pain.
“I can’t—if you had seen her—”
“But how did you hear? Did she tell you? When did—”
“I was there at five, and her mother met me at the door. She took me upstairs, a finger on her lip, and there she and Marietta said they guessed this afternoon would settle things. A week ago, she said, she’d had an up-and-down talk with that dreadful carpenter and as good as forbade him the house—”
Mrs. Sandworth had a gesture of intuition. “Oh, if they’ve managed to shut Lydia off from seeing him—”
The doctor nodded. “That’s what her mother counted on. She said she thought it a sign that Lydia was just infatuated with Rankin—her being so different after she’d seen him—so defiant—so unlike Lydia! But now she hadn’t seen him for a week, and her mother and Marietta had been ‘talking to her’—Julia!—and then Paul had come to see her every evening, and had been just right—firm and yet not exacting, and ever so gentle and kind—and this afternoon when he came Lydia cried and didn’t want to go down, but her mother said she mustn’t be childish, and Marietta had just taken her right down to the library and left her there with Paul, and there she was now.” The doctor started up and beat his thin, corded hand on the mantel. He could not speak. His sister got up and laid a tender hand on his shoulder. “Poor Marius!” she said again.
He drew a long breath. “I did not fly at their throats—I turned and ran like mad down the stairs and into the library. It was Rankin I wanted to kill for letting his pride come in—for leaving her there alone with those—I was ready to snatch Lydia up bodily and carry her off to—” He stopped short and laughed harshly. “I reachto Lydia’s shoulder,” he commented on his own speech. “That’s me. To see what’s to be done and—”
“Whatwasto be done?” asked Mrs. Sandworth patiently. She was quite used to understanding but half of what her brother said and had acquired a quiet art of untangling by tireless questionings the thread of narrative from the maze of his comments and ejaculations.
“There was nothing to be done. I was too late.”
“You didn’t burst in on them while Paul was kissing her or anything, did you?”
“Paul wasn’t there.”
“Not there! Why, Marius, you’re worse than usual. Didn’t you tell me her mother said—”
“He had been there—one look at Lydia showed that. She sat there alone in the dim light, her face as white—and when I came in she said, without looking to see who it was, ‘I’m engaged to Paul.’ She said it to her mother, who was right after me, of course, and then to Marietta.”
“Well—!” breathed Mrs. Sandworth as he paused; “so that was all there was to it?”
“Oh, no; they did the proper thing. They kissed her, and cried, and congratulated everybody, and her mother said, with an eye on me: ‘Darling, you’renotdoing this just because you know it’ll make us so very happy,areyou?’ Lydia said, ‘Oh, no; she supposed not,’ and started to go upstairs. But when Marietta said she’d go and telephone to Flora Burgess to announce it, Lydia came down like a flash. It wasnotto be announced she told them; she’ddieif they told anybody! Paul had promised solemnly not to tell anybody. Her mother said, of course she knew how Lydia felt about it. Itwasa handicap for a girl in her first season. Lydia was half-way up the stairs again, but at that she looked down at her mother—God!Julia, if a child of mine had ever looked at me like that—”
Mrs. Sandworth patted him vaguely. “Oh, people always look white and queer in the twilight, you know—even quitefloridcomplexions.”
The doctor made a rush to the door.
“But dinner must be ready to put on the table,” she called after him.
“Put it on, then,” he cried, and disappeared.
A plain statement was manna to Mrs. Sandworth. She had finished her soup, and was beginning on her hamburg steak when the doctor came soberly in, took his place, and began to eat in silence. She took up the conversation where they had left it.
“So it’s all over,” she commented, watching his plate to see that he did not forget to salt his meat and help himself to gravy.
“Nothing’s ever over in a human life,” he contradicted her. “Why do you suppose she doesn’t want it announced?”
“You don’t suppose she means to break it off later?”
“I haven’t any ideawhatshe means, any more than she has, poor child! But it’s plain that this is only to gain time—a sop to the wolves.”
“Wolves!” cried poor Mrs. Sandworth.
“Well, tigers and hyenas, perhaps,” he added moderately.
“They’re crazy about Lydia, that whole Emery family,” she protested.
“They are that,” he agreed sardonically. “But I don’t mean only her family. I mean unclean prowling standards of what’s what, as well as—”
“They’d lie down and let her walk over them! You know they would—”
“If they thought she was going in the right direction.”
Mrs. Sandworth gave him up, and drifted off into speculation. “I wonder what she could have found in that man to think of! A girl brought up as she’s been!”
“Perhaps she was only snatching a little sensible talk where she could get it.”
“But theydidn’ttalk sensibly. Marietta said Lydia tried, one of the times when they were going over it with her, Lydia tried to tell her mother some of the things they said that night when he took her home from here. Mariettasaid they were ‘too sickish!’ ‘Flat Sunday-school cant about wanting to be good,’ and all that sort of thing.”
“That certainly wouldn’t have temptedMariettafrom the path of virtue and sharp attention to a good match,” murmured the doctor. “Nobody can claim that there’s anything very seductive to the average young lady in Rankin’s fanaticism.”
“Oh, you admit he’s a fanatic!” Mrs. Sandworth seized on a valuable piece of driftwood which the doctor’s tempest had thrown at her feet.
“Everybody who’s worth his salt is a fanatic.”
“Not Paul. Everybody says he’s so sane and levelheaded.”
“There isn’t a hotter one in creation!”
“ThanPaul?”
“Than Paul.”
“Oh, Marius!” she reproached him for levity.
“He’s a fanatic for success.”
“Oh, I don’t callthat—”
“Nor nobody else in Endbury—but it is, all the same. And the only wonder is that Lydia should have been attracted by Rankin’s heretical brand and not by Paul’s orthodox variety. It shows she’s rare.”
“Good gracious, Marius! You talk as though it were a question of ideas or convictions.”
“That’s a horrible conception,” he admitted gravely.
“It’s which one she’s in love with!” Mrs. Sandworth emitted this with solemnity.
The doctor stood up to go. “She’s not in love with either,” he pronounced. “She’s never been allowed the faintest sniff at reality or life or experience—how can she be in love?”
“Well, they’re in love with her,” she triumphed for her sex.
“I don’t know anything about Paul’s inner workings, and as for Rankin, I don’t know whether he’s in love with her or not. He’s sorry for her—he’s touched by her—”
Mrs. Sandworth felt the ground slip from beneath herfeet. “Good gracious me! If he’s not in love with her, nor she with him, what are you making all this fuss about?”
The doctor thrust out his lips. “I’m only protesting in my usual feeble, inadequate manner, after the harm’s all done, at idiots and egotists laying their dirty hands on a sacred thing—the right of youth to its own life—”
“Well, if you call that a feeble protest—!” she called after him.
He reappeared, hat in hand. “It’s nothing to what I’d like to say. I will add that Daniel Rankin’s a man in a million.”
Mrs. Sandworth responded, rather neatly for her, that she should hope so indeed, and added, “But, Marius, she couldn’t have married him—really! Mercy! What had he to offer her—compared with Paul? Everybody has always said what asuitablemarriage—”
Dr. Melton crammed his hat on his head fiercely and said nothing.
“But it’s so,” she insisted.
“He hasn’t anything to offer to Marietta, perhaps.”
“Marietta’smarried!” Mrs. Sandworth kept herself anchored fast to the facts of any case under discussion.
“Isshe?” queried the doctor with a sincerity of interrogation which his sister found distracting.
“Oh, Marius!” she reproached him again; and then helplessly, “How did we get on to Marietta, anyhow? I thought we were talking of Lydia’s engagement.”
“I was,” he assured her.
“And I was going to ask you really seriously, just straight out, what you are so down on the Emerys for? What have they done that’s so bad?”
“They’ve brought her up so that now in her time of need she hasn’t a weapon to resist them.”
“Oh, Ma—” began Mrs. Sandworth despairingly.
“Well, then, I will tell you—I’ll explain in words of one syllable. Mind you, I don’t undertake to settle the question—Heaven forbid! It may be all right for MariettaMortimer to kill herself body and soul by inches to keep what bores her to death to have—a social position in Endbury’s two-for-a-cent society, but, for the Lord’s sake, why do they make such a howling and yelling just at the time when Lydia’s got the tragically important question to decide as to whether that’s whatshewants? It’s like expecting her to do a problem in calculus in the midst of an earthquake.”
Mrs. Sandworth had a mortal antipathy to figures of speech, acquired of much painful experience with her brother’s conversation. She sank back in her chair and waved him off. “Calculus!” she cried, outraged; “earthquakes! And I’m sure you’re as unfair as can be! You can’t say her father’s obscured any question. Youknowhe’s not a dictatorial father. His principle is not to interfere at all with his children.”
“Yes; that’s his principle all right. His specialties are in other lines, and they have been for a long time. His wife has seen to that.”
Mrs. Sandworth had one of her lucid divinations of the inner meaning of a situation. “Oh, the poor Emerys! Poor Lydia! Oh, Marius, aren’t you glad we haven’t any children!”
“Every child that’s not getting a fair chance at what it ought to have, should be our child,” he said.
He went up to her and kissed her gently. “Good-night,” he said.
“Where are you going?”
“To the Black Rock woods.”
“Tell him—” she was inspired—“tell him to try to see Lydia again.”
“I was going to do that. But she won’t be allowed to. It’s pretty late now. She ought to have seen him a great many years ago—from the time he was born.”
“But she’s ever so much younger than he,” cried Mrs. Sandworth after him, informingly.
CHAPTER XIIILYDIA DECIDES IN PERFECT FREEDOM
CHAPTER XIII
LYDIA DECIDES IN PERFECT FREEDOM
The maid had announced to Mrs. Emery, finishing an unusually careful morning toilet, that Miss Burgess, society reporter of the EndburyChronicle, was below. Before the mistress of the house could finish adjusting her well-matched gray pompadour, a second arrival was heralded, “The gentleman from the greenhouse, to see about Miss Lydia’s party decorations.” And as the handsome matron came down the stairs a third comer was introduced into the hall—Mme. Boyle herself, the best dressmaker in town, who had come in person to see about the refitting of the débutante’s Paris dresses, the débutante having found the change back to the climate of Endbury so trying that her figure had grown quite noticeably thinner.
“It was the one thing necessary to make Maddemwaselle’s tournoor exactly perfect,” Mme. Boyle told Mrs. Emery. Out of a sense of what was due her loyal Endbury customers, Mme. Boyle assumed a guileless coloring of Frenchiness, which was evidently a symbol, and no more intended for a pretense of reality than the honestly false brown front that surmounted her competent, kindly Celtic face.
Mrs. Emery stopped a moment by the newel-post to direct Madame to Lydia’s room and to offer up a devout thanksgiving to the kindly Providence that constantly smoothed the path before her. “Oh, Madame, just think if it had been a season when hips were in style!” As she continued her progress to what she was beginning to contemplate calling her drawing-room, she glowed with a sense of well-being which buoyed her up like wings. In commonwith many other estimable people, she could not but value more highly what she had had to struggle to retain, and the exciting vicissitudes of the last fortnight had left her with a sweet taste of victory in her mouth.
She greeted Miss Burgess with the careful cordiality due to an ally of many years’ standing, and with a manner perceptibly but indefinably different from that which she would have bestowed on a social equal. Mrs. Emery had labored to acquire exactly that tone in her dealings with the society reporter, and her achievement of it was a fact which brought an equal satisfaction to both women. Miss Burgess’ mother was an Englishwoman, an ex-housekeeper, who had transmitted to her daughter a sense, rare as yet in America, of the beauty and dignity of class distinctions. In her turn Miss Burgess herself, the hard-working, good-natured woman of fifty who for twenty years had reported the doings of those citizens of Endbury whom she considered the “gentry,” had toiled with the utmost disinterestedness to build up a feeling, or, as she called it, a “tone,” which, among other things, should exclude her from equality. When she began she was, perhaps, the only person in town who had an unerring instinct for social differences; but, like a kindly, experienced actor of a minor rôle in theatricals, she had silently given so many professional tips to the amateur principals in the play, and had acted her own part with such unflagging consistency and good-will, that she had often now the satisfaction of seeing one of her pupils move through her rôle with a most edifying effect of having been born to it.
Long ago she had taken the Emerys to her warm heart and she had rejoiced in all their upward progress with the sweet unenvious joy of an ugly woman in a pretty, much-loved sister’s successes. Lydia was to her, as to Mrs. Emery, a bright symbol of what she would fain have been herself. Miss Burgess’ feeling for her somewhat resembled that devout affection which, she had read, was felt by faithful old servants of great English families for the young ladies of the house. The pathetic completeness ofher own insignificance of aspect had spared her any uneasy ambitions for personal advancement, and it is probable that the vigor of her character and her pleasure in industry were such that she had been happier in her daily column and weekly five-columnSociety Notesthan if she had been as successful a society matron as Mrs. Emery herself.
She lived the life of a creator, working at an art she had invented, in a workroom of her own contriving, loyally drawing the shutters to shade an unfortunate occurrence in one of the best families, setting forth a partial success with its best profile to the public, and flooding with light real achievements like Mrs. Hollister’s rose party (theMrs. Hollister—Paul’s aunt, and Madeleine’s). All that she wrote was read by nearly every woman in Endbury. She was a person of importance, and a very busy and happy old maid.
Mrs. Emery had a great taste for Miss Burgess’ conversation, admiring greatly her whole-hearted devotion to Endbury’s social welfare. She had once said of her to Dr. Melton, “There is whatIcall a public-spirited woman.” He had answered, “I envy Flora Burgess with the fierce embittered envy I feel for a cow”—an ambiguous compliment which Mrs. Emery had resented on behalf of her old ally.
Now, as Mrs. Emery added to her greeting, “You’ll excuse me just a moment, won’t you, I must settle some things with my decorator,” Miss Burgess felt a rich content in her hostess’ choice of words. Therewerepeople in Endbury society who would have called him, as had the perplexed maid, “the gentleman from the greenhouse.” Later, asked for advice, she had walked about the lower floor of the house with Mrs. Emery and the florist, saturated with satisfaction in the process of deciding where the palms should be put that were to conceal the “orchestra” of four instruments, and with what flowers the mantels should be “banked.”
After the man had gone, they settled to a consideration ofvarious important matters which was interrupted by an impassioned call of Madame Boyle from the stairs, “Could she bring Maddemwaselle down to show thisperfectfit?”—and they glided into a rapt admiration of the unwrinkled surface of peach-colored satin which clad Lydia’s slender and flexibly erect back. When she turned about so that Madame could show them the truly exqueese effect of the trimming at the throat, her face showed pearly shadows instead of its usual flower-like glow. As Madame left the room for a moment, Miss Burgess said, with a kind, respectful facetiousness, “I see that even fairy princesses find the emotions of getting engaged a little trying.”
Lydia started, and flushed painfully. “Oh, Mother—” she began.
Her mother cut her short. “Mydear! Miss Burgess!” she pointed out, as who should deplore keeping a secret from the family priest, “You know she never breathes a word that people don’t want known. And she had to be told so she can know how toputthings all this winter.”
“I’m sure it’s the most wonderfullysuitablemarriage,” pronounced Miss Burgess.
A ring at the door-bell was instantly followed by the bursting open of the door and the impetuous onslaught of a girl, a tall, handsome, brown-eyed blonde about Lydia’s age, who, wasting no time in greetings to the older women, flung herself on Lydia’s neck with a wild outcry of jubilation. “My dear! Isn’t it dandy! Perfectlydandy! Paul met me at the train last night and when he told me I nearly swooned for joy! Of all the tickled sisters-in-law! I wanted to come right over here last night, but Paul said it was a secret, and wouldn’t let me.” A momentary failure of lung-power forced her to a pause in which she perceived Lydia’s attire. She recoiled with a dramatic rush. “Oh, you’ve got one of themon! Lydia, how insanely swell you do look! Why, Mrs. Emery”—she turned to Lydia’s mother with a light-hearted unconsciousness that she had not addressed her before—“she doesn’t lookreal, does she!”
There was an instant’s pause as the three women gazed ecstatically at Lydia, who had again turned her back and was leaning her forehead against the window. Then the girl sprang at her again. “Well, my goodness, Lydia! I just love you to pieces, of course, but if we were of the same complexion I should certainly put poison in your candy. As it is, me so blonde and you so dark—I tell you what—what we won’t do this winter—” She ran up to her again, putting her arms around her neck from behind and whispering in her ear.
Miss Burgess turned to her hostess with her sweet, motherly smile. “Aren’t girls thedearestthings?” she whispered. “I love to see them so young, and full of their own little affairs. I think it’s dreadful nowadays how so many of them are allowed to get serious-minded.”
Madeleine was saying to Lydia, “You sly little thing—to land Paul before the season even began! Where are you going to get your lingerie? Oh,isn’tit fun? If I go abroad I’ll smuggle it back for you. You haven’t got your ring yet, I don’t suppose? Make him make it a ruby. That’s ever so much sweller than that everlasting old diamond. He’s something to land, too, Paul is, if I do say it—not, of course, that we’ve either of us got any money, but,” she looked about the handsomely furnished house, “you’ll have lots, and Paul’ll soon be making it hand over fist—and I’ll be marrying it!” She ended with a triumphant pirouette her vision of the future, and encountered Madame Boyle, entering with a white and gold evening wrap which sent her into another paroxysm of admiration. The dressmaker had just begun to say that she thought another line of gold braid around the neck would—when Mrs. Emery, looking out of the window, declared the caterer to be approaching and that shemusthave aid from her subordinates before he should enter. “I donotwant to have that old red lemonade and sweet crackers everybody has, and slabs of ice-cream floating around on your plate. Think quick, all of you! What kind of crackers can we have?”
“Animal crackers,” suggested Madeleine, with the accent of a remark intended to be humorous, drawing Lydia into a corner. “Now, don’t make Lydia work. She’sItright now, and everything’s to be done for her. Madame, come over here with that cloak and let’s see about the—and Oh, you and Lydia, for the love of Heaven tell me what I’m to do about this fashion for no hips, and me with a figure of eight! Lydia, the fit of that thing issublime!”
“Maddemwaselle, don’t you see how a little more gold right here—”
“Here, Lydia,” called her mother, “it wasn’t the caterer after all; it’s flowers for you. Take it over there to the young lady in pink,” she directed the boy.
Madeleine seized on the box, and tore it open with one of her vigorous, competent gestures. “Orchids!” she shouted in a single volcanic burst of appreciation. “I never had orchids sent me in my life! Paul must have telegraphed for them. You can’t buy them in Endbury. And here’s a note that says it’s to be answered at once, while the boy waits—Oh, my! Oh, my!”
“Lydia, dear, here’s the caterer, after all. Will you just please say one thing. Would you rather have the coffee or the water-ices served upstairs—Oh, here’s your Aunt Julia—Julia Sandworth, I never needed advice more.”
Mrs. Sandworth’s appearance was the chord which resolved into one burst of sound all the various motives emitted by the different temperaments in the room. Every one appealed to her at once.
“Just a touch of gold braid on the collar, next the face, don’t you—”
“Why not a real supper at midnight, with creamed oysters and things, as they do in the East?”
“Doyousee anything out of the way in publishing the details of Miss Lydia’s dress the day before? It gives people a chance to know what to look for.”