"NO, NO; I CAN'T--SEE HIM--I CAN'T SEE HIM ANY MORE--"“NO, NO; I CAN'T—SEE HIM—I CAN'T SEE HIM ANY MORE—”
“How can we avoid that awful jam-up there is on the stairs when people begin to—”
Mrs. Sandworth made her way to the corner where Lydia stood, presenting a faultlessly fitted back to the world so that Madame Boyle might, with a fat, moist forefinger, indicate the spot where a “soupçon” of gold was needed.
“Please, ma’am, the gentleman said I was to wait for an answer,” said the messenger boy beside her.
“And she hasn’treadit, yet!” Madeleine was horrified to remember this fact.
“Turn around, Lydia,” said Mrs. Sandworth.
Lydia’s white lids fluttered. The eyes they revealed were lustrous and quite blank. Madeleine darted away, crying, “I’m going to get pen and paper for you to write your note right now.”
“Lydia,” said Mrs. Sandworth, in a low tone, “Daniel Rankin wants to speak with you again. Your godfather is waiting here in the hall to know if you’ll see him. He didn’t want toforcean interview on you if you didn’t want it. He wants to see you but he wanted you to decide in perfectfreedom—”
The tragic, troubled, helpless face that Lydia showed at this speech was a commentary on the last word. She looked around the room, her eyebrows drawn into a knot, one hand at her throat, but she did not answer. Her aunt thought she had not understood. “Just collect your thoughts, Lydia—”
The girl beat one slim fist inside the other with a sudden nervous movement. “But that’s what I can’t do, Aunt Julia. You know how easily I get rattled—I don’t know what I’m—Ican’tcollect my thoughts.”
As the older woman opened her lips to speak again she cut her short with a broken whispered appeal. “No, no; I can’t—see him—? I can’t stand any more—tell him I guess I’ll be all right—it’s settled now—Mother’s told all these—I like Paul. Idolike him! Mother’s toldeverybody here—no, no—I can’t, Aunt Julia! Ican’t!”
Mrs. Sandworth, her eyes full of tears, opened her arms impulsively, but Lydia drew back. “Oh, let me alone!” she wailed. “I’m so tired!”
Madame Boyle caught this through the clatter of voices. “Why, poor Maddemwaselle!” she cried, her kindly, harassed, fatigued face melting. “Sit down. Sit down. I can show the ladies about this collar just as well that way—if they’ll ever look.”
Mrs. Sandworth had disappeared.
Madeleine, coming with the pen and ink, was laughing as she told them, “I didn’t know Dr. Melton was in the house. I ran into him pacing up and down in the hall like a little bear, and just now I saw him—isn’t he too comical! He must have heard our chatter—I saw him running down the walk as fast as he could go it, his fingers in his ears as if he were trying to get away from a dynamite bomb before it went bang.”
“He hasn’t much patience with many necessary details of life,” said Mrs. Emery with dignity. She turned her criticism of her doctor into a compliment to her brother’s widow by adding, “Whatever he would do without Julia to look after him, I’m sure none of us can imagine.”
“He is a very original character,” said Miss Burgess, discriminatingly.
Madeleine dismissed the subject with a compendious, “He’s the most killingly, screamingly funny little man that ever lived!”
“Now,ladies,” implored Madame Boyle, “one more row—not solid—just a soupçon—”
CHAPTER XIVMID-SEASON NERVES
CHAPTER XIV
MID-SEASON NERVES
“If I should wait and read my paper here instead of on the cars, do you suppose Lydia would be up before I left?” asked the Judge as he put his napkin in the ring and pushed away from the breakfast table.
Mrs. Emery looked up, smiling, from a letter, “‘Of course such a great favorite as Miss Emery,’” she read aloud, “‘will be hard to secure, but both the Governor and I feel that our party wouldn’t be complete without her. We’re expecting a number of other Endbury young people.’ And do you know who writes that?” she asked triumphantly of her husband.
“How should I?” answered the Judge reasonably.
“Mrs. Ex-Governor Mallory, to be sure. It’s their annual St. Valentine’s day house-party at their old family estate in Union County.”
The Judge got up, laughing. “Old family estate,” he mocked.
“They are one of the oldest and best families in this State,” cried his wife.
“The Governor’s an old blackguard,” said her husband tolerantly.
“The Mallorys—the Hollisters—Lydia is certainly,” began Mrs. Emery, complacently.
Lydia’s father laughed again. “Oh, with you and Flora Burgess as manager and press agent—! You haven’t answered my question about whether if I waited and—”
“No, she wouldn’t,” said Mrs. Emery decisively. “After dancing so late nights, I want her to sleep every minute she’s not wanted somewhere.Ihave the responsibility oflooking after her health, you know. I hope she’ll sleep now till just time to get up and dress for Marietta’s lunch-party at one o’clock.”
The father of the family frowned. “Is Marietta giving another lunch-party for Lydia? They can’t afford to do so much. Marietta’s—”
“This is a great chance for Marietta—poor girl! she hasn’t many such chances—Lydia’s carrying everything before her so, I mean.”
“How does Marietta get into the game?” asked her father obtusely.
Mrs. Emery hesitated a scarcely perceptible instant, a hesitation apparently illuminating to her husband. He laughed again, the tolerant, indifferent laugh he had for his women-folks’ goings-on. “She thinks she can go up as the tail to Lydia’s kite, does she? She’d better not be too sure. If I don’t miss my guess, Paul’ll have a word or two to say about carrying extra weight. Gosh! Marietta’s a fool some ways for a woman that has her brains.”
He stated this opinion with a detached, impersonal irresponsibility, and began to prepare himself for the plunge into the damp cold of the Endbury January. His wife preserved a dignified silence, and in the middle of a sentence of his later talk, which had again turned on his grievance about never seeing Lydia, she got up, went into the hall, and began to use the telephone for her morning shopping. Her conversation gave the impression that she was ordering veal cutlets, maidenhair ferns, wax floor-polish, chiffon ruching, and closed carriages, from one and the same invisible interlocutor, who seemed impartially unable to supply any of these needs without rather testy exhortation. Mrs. Emery was one of the women who are always well served by “tradespeople,” as she now called them, “and a good reason why,” she was wont to explain with self-gratulatory grimness.
The Judge waited, one hand on the door-knob, squaring his jaw over his muffler, and listening with a darkening face to the interminable succession of purchases. Aftera time he released the door-knob, loosened his muffler, and sat down heavily, his eyes fixed on his wife’s back.
After an interval, Mrs. Emery paused in the act of ringing up another number, looked over her shoulder, saw him there and inquired uneasily, “What are you waiting for? You’ll catch cold with all your things on. Isn’t Dr. Melton always telling you to be careful?”
She felt a vague resentment at his being there “after hours,” as she might have put it, so definitely had long usage accustomed her to a sense of solitary proprietorship of the house except at certain fixed and not very frequent periods. She almost felt that he was eavesdropping while she “ran her own business.” There was also his remark about Marietta and kites, unatoned for as yet. She had not forgotten that she “owed him one,” as Madeleine Hollister light-heartedly phrased the connubial balanced relationship which had come under her irreverent and keen observation. A cumulative sharpness from all these causes was in her voice as she remarked, “Didn’t I tell you that Lydia—”
Judge Emery’s voice in answer was as sharp as her own. “Look-y here, Susan, I bet you’ve ordered fifty dollars’ worth of stuff since you stood there.”
“Well, what if I have?” She was up in arms in an instant against his breaking a long-standing treaty between them—a treaty not tacit, but frequently and definitely stated.
They regulated their relations on a sound business basis, they were wont to say of themselves, the natural one, the right one. The husband earned the money, the wife saw that it was spent to the best advantage, and neither needed to bother his head or dissipate his energies about the other’s end of the matter. They had found it meant less friction, they said; fewer occasions for differences of opinion. Once, when they had been urging this system upon their son George, then about to marry, Dr. Melton had made the suggestion that there would be still fewer differences of opinion if married people agreed never to see each other after the ceremony in the church. There would be nofriction at all with that system, he added. It was one of his preposterous speeches which had become a family joke with the Emerys.
“Well, what if I have?” Mrs. Emery advanced defiantly upon her husband, with this remark repeated.
Judge Emery shared a well-known domestic peculiarity with other estimable and otherwise courageous men. He retreated precipitately before the energy of his wife’s counter-attack, only saying sulkily, to conceal from himself the fact of his retreat, “Well, we’re not millionaires, you know.”
“Did I ever think we were?” she said, smiling inwardly at his change of front. “If you stand right up to men, they’ll give in,” she often counseled other matrons. She began to look up another number in the telephone book.
“If you order fifty dollars’ worth every morning, besides—”
“Three-four-four—Weston,” remarked his wife to the telephone. To her husband she said conclusively, “I thought we were agreed to make Lydia’s first season everything it ought to be. And isn’t she being worth it? There hasn’t a girl come out in Endbury inyearsthat’s been so popular, or had so much—” She jerked her head around to the telephone—“Three-four-four—Weston? Is this Mr. Schmidt? I want Mr. Schmidt himself. Tell him Mrs. Emery—”
The Judge broke in, with the air of launching the most startling of arguments, “Well, my salary won’t stand it; that’s sure! If this keeps up I’ll have to resign from the bench and go into practice again.”
His wife looked at him without surprise. “Well, I’ve often thought that might be a very good thing.” She added, with good-humored impatience, “Oh, go along, Nathaniel. You know it’s just one of your bilious attacks, and you will catch cold sitting there with all your—Mr. Schmidt, I want to complain about the man who dished up the ice-cream at my last reception. I am going to give another one next week, and I want a different—”
“I won’t be back to lunch,” said her husband. The door slammed.
As he turned into the front walk it opened after him, and his wife called after him, “I’m going to give a dinner party for Lydia’s girl friends here this evening, so you’d better get your dinner down-town or at the Meltons’. I’ll telephone Julia that—”
The Judge stopped, disappointment, almost dismay, on his face. “I’m going to keep track from now on,” he called angrily, “of just how often I catch a glimpse of Lydia. I bet it won’t be five minutes a week.”
Mrs. Emery evidently did not catch what he said, and as evidently considered it of no consequence that she did not. She nodded indifferently and, drawing in her head, shut the door.
At the end of the next week the Judge announced that he had put down every time he and Lydia had been in a room together, and it amounted to just forty-five minutes, all told. Lydia, a dazzling vision in white and gold, had come downstairs on her way to a dance, and because Paul, who was to be her escort, was a little late, she told her father that now was his time for a “visit.” This question of “visiting” had grown to be quite a joke. Judge Emery clutched eagerly at anything in the nature of an understanding or common interest between them.
“Oh, I don’t know you well enough to visit with you,” he now said laughingly, “but I’ll look at you long enough so I’ll recognize you the next time I meet you on the street-car.”
Lydia sat down on his knee, lightly, so as not to crumple her gauzy draperies, and looked at her father with the whimsical expression that became her face so well. “I’m paying you back,” she said gayly. “I remember when I was a little girl I used to wonder why you came all the way out here to eat your meals. It seemed so much easier for you to get them near your office. Honest, I did.”
“Ah, that was when I was still struggling to get my toes into a crack in the wall and climb up. I didn’t have timefor you then. And you’re very ungrateful to bring it up against me, for all I was doing was to wear my nose clear off on the grindstone so’s to be able to buy you such pretty trash as this.” He stroked the girl’s shimmering draperies, not thinking of what he was saying, smiling at her, delighted with her beauty, with her nearness to him, with this brief snatch of intimate talk.
“Ungrateful—yourself! What am I doing but wearing my nose off on the grindstone—Dr. Melton threatens nervous prostration every day—so’s to show off your pretty trash to the best advantage.Ihaven’t any time to bother withyounow!” she mocked him laughingly, her hands on his shoulders.
“Well, that sounds like a bargain,” he admitted, leaning back in his chair; “I suppose I’ve got to be satisfied if you are.Areyou satisfied?” he asked with a sudden seriousness. “How do you like Paul, now you know him better?”
Lydia flushed, and looked away in a tremulous confusion. “Why, when I’m with him I can’t think of another thing in the world,” she confessed in a low, ardent tone.
“Ah, well, then that’s all right,” said the Judge comfortably.
There was a pause, during which Lydia looked at the fire dreamily, and he looked at Lydia. The girl’s face grew more and more absent and brooding.
The door-bell rang. “There he is, I suppose,” said her father.
“But isn’t it a pity we couldn’t make connections?” she asked musingly. “Maybe I’d have liked you better with your nose on, better even than pretty trash.”
“Eh?” said Judge Emery. His blankness was so acute that he slipped for an instant back into a rusticity he had long ago left behind him. “What say, Lydia?” he asked.
“Yes, yes, Paul; I didn’t hear you come in,” called the girl, jumping up and beginning to put on her wraps.
The young man darted into the room to help her, saying over his shoulder: “Much obliged to you, Judge, for yourgood word to Egdon, March and Company. I got the contract for the equipment of their new factory to-day.”
The Judge screwed himself round in his chair till he could see Paul bending at Lydia’s feet, putting on her high overshoes. “That’s quite a contract, isn’t it?” he asked, highly pleased.
“The biggest I ever got my teeth into,” said Paul, straightening up. “I’m ashamed to have Lydia know anything about it, though. I didn’t bring a hack to take her to the dance.”
“Oh, I never thought you would,” cried Lydia, standing up and stamping her feet down in her overshoes—an action that added emphasis to her protest. “I’d rather walk, it’s such a little way. I like it better when I’m not costing people money.”
“You’re not like most of your sex,” said Paul. “Down in Mexico, when I was there on the Brighton job, I heard a Spanish proverb: ‘If a pretty woman smiles, some purse is shedding tears.’”
The two men exchanged laughing glances of understanding. Lydia frowned. “That is hateful—and horrid—and alie!” she cried energetically, finding that they paid no attention to her protest.
“Ididn’t invent it,” Paul exonerated himself lightly.
“But you laughed at it—you think it’s so—you—” She was trembling in a sudden resentment at once inexplicable and amusing to the other two.
“Highty-tighty! you little spitfire!” cried her father, laughing. “I seeyourfinish, my boy!”
“Good gracious, Lydia, how you do fly at a man! I take it back. I take it back.” Paul looked admiringly at his pretty sweetheart’s flashing eyes and crimson cheeks as he spoke.
She turned away and picked up her cloak without speaking.
“To tell the truth,” said Paul, going on with the conversation as though it had not been interrupted, and addressing his father-in-law-to-be, “every penny I can rake and scrapeis going into the house. Lydia’s such a sensible little thing I knew she’d think it better to have something permanent than an ocean of orchids and candy now. Besides, such a belle as she is gets them from everybody else.”
Mrs. Emery often pointed out to Lydia’s inexperience that it was rare to see a man so magnanimously free from jealousy as her fiancé.
“The architect and I were going over it to-day,” the young electrician went on, “and I decided, seeing this new contract means such a lot, that I would have the panels in the hall carved, after all—of course if you agree,” he turned to Lydia, but went on without waiting for an answer. “The effect will be much handsomer—will go with the rest of the house better.”
“They’d be lots harder to dust,” said Lydia dubiously, putting a spangled web of gold over her hair. The contrast between her aspect and the dingy suggestions of her speech made both men laugh tenderly. “When Titania takes to being practical—” laughed Paul.
Lydia went on seriously. “Honestly, Paul, I’m afraid the house is getting too handsome, anyhow—everything in it. It’s too expensive, I’m—”
“Nothing’s too good for you.” Paul said this with conviction. “And besides, it’s an asset. The mortgage won’t be so very large. And if we’re in it, we’ll just have to live up to it. It’ll be a stimulus.”
“I hope it doesn’t stimulate us into our graves,” said Lydia, as she kissed her father good-night.
“Well, your families aren’t paupers on either side,” said Paul.
A casual remark like this was the nearest approach he ever made to admitting that he expected Lydia to inherit money. He would have been shocked at the idea of allowing any question of money to influence his marriage, and would not have lifted a hand to learn the state of his future father-in-law’s finances. Still, it was evident to the most disinterested eye that there were plenty of funds behindthe Emery’s ample, comfortable mode of life, and on this point his eyes were keen, for all their delicacy.
As the young people paused at the door, Judge Emery took a note-book out of his pocket and elaborately made a note. “Fifty-five minutes in eight days, Lydia,” he called.
At the end of a fortnight he proclaimed aloud that the record was too discouraging to keep any longer; he was losing ground instead of gaining. He had followed Mrs. Emery to her room one afternoon to make this complaint, and now moved about uneasily, trying to bestow his large, square figure where he would not be in the way of his wife, who was hurrying nervously about to pack Lydia’s traveling bag. She looked very tired and pale, and spoke as though near a nervous outbreak of some sort. Didn’t he know that Lydia had to start for the Mallory Valentine house-party this afternoon, she asked with an asperity not directed at the Judge’s complaint, for she considered that negligible, but at Lydia for being late. She often became so absorbed and fascinated by her own managerial capacity that she was vastly put out by lapses on the part of the object of it. She did not spare herself when it was a question of Lydia’s career. Without a thought of fatigue or her own personal tastes, she devoted herself with a fanatic zeal to furthering her daughter’s interests. It sometimes seemed very hard to bear that Lydia herself was so much less zealous in the matter.
When the girl came in now, flushed and guiltily breathless, Dr. Melton trotted at her heels, calling out excuses for her tardiness. “It’s my fault. I met her scurrying away from a card-party, and she was exactly on time. But I walked along with her and detained her.”
“It was the sunset,” said Lydia, hurrying to change her hat and wraps. “It was so fine that when Godfather called my attention to it, I juststood! I forgot everything! There may have been sunsets before this winter, but it seems as though I hadn’t had time to see one before—overthe ironworks, you know, where that hideous black smoke is all day, and the sun turned it into such loveliness—”
“You’ve missed your trolley-car,” said her mother succinctly.
“Oh, I’msorry!” cried Lydia, in a remorse evidently directed more toward displeasing her mother than the other consequences of her delay, for she asked in a moment, very meekly, “Will it make so very much difference if I don’t go till the next one?”
“You’ll miss the Governor. He was coming down to meet those on this car. You’ll have to go all alone. All the rest of the party were on this one.”
“Oh, I don’t care about that,” cried Lydia. “If that’s all—I’d ever so much rather go alone. I’m never alone a single minute, and it’ll rest me. The crowd would have been so noisy and carried on so—they always do.”
Her mother’s aggrieved disappointment did not disappear. She said nothing, bringing Lydia’s traveling wraps to her silently, and emanating disapproval until Lydia drooped and looked piteously at her godfather.
Dr. Melton cried out at this, “Look here, Susan Emery, you’re like the carpenter that was so proud of his good planing that he planed his boards all away to shavings.”
Mrs. Emery looked at him with a lack of comprehension of his meaning equaled only by her evident indifference to it.
“I mean—I thought what you were going in for was giving Lydia a good time this winter. You’re running her as though she were a transcontinental railway system.”
“You can’t accomplish anything without system in this world,” said Mrs. Emery. She added, “Perhaps Lydia will find, when she comes to ordering her own life, that she will miss her old mother’s forethought and care.”
Lydia flung herself remorsefully on her mother’s neck. “I’m sosorry, Mother dear,” she almost sobbed. Dr. Melton’s professional eye took in the fact that everyone in the room was high-strung and tense. “The middle-of-the-social-season symptom,” he called it to himself. “I’m sosorry, Mother,” Lydia went on. “I will be more careful next time. You aresogood to—to—”
“Good Heavens!” said Dr. Melton. “All the child did was to give herself a moment’s time to look at a fine spectacle, after spending all a precious afternoon on such a tragically idiotic pursuit as cards.”
“Oh,sunsets!” Mrs. Emery disposed of them with a word. “Come, Lydia.”
“I’ll go with her, and carry her bag,” said the doctor.
“You made such a good job of getting her here on time,” said Mrs. Emery, unappeased.
The Judge offered to go, as a means of one of his rare visits with Lydia, but his wife declared with emphasis that she didn’t care who went or didn’t go so long as she herself saw that Lydia did not take to star-gazing again. It ended by all four proceeding down the street together.
“You’re sure you remember everything, Lydia?” asked her mother.
“Let me see,” said the girl, laughing nervously. “Do I? The Governor’s wife is his second, so I’m to waste no time admiring the first set of children. They’re Methodists, so I’m to keep quiet about our being Episcopalians—”
“I guess we’re not Episcopalians enough to hurt,” commented her father, who had never taken the conversion of his women-folks very seriously.
“And it’s my pink crêpe for dinner and tan-colored suit if they have afternoon tea. And Mrs. Mallory is to be asked to visit us, but not her daughter, because of her impossible husband, and I’m to play my prettiest to the Governor, because he’s always needing dynamos and such in the works, and Paul—”
The big car came booming around the corner, and she stopped her category of recommendations. The doctor rushed in with a last one as they stepped hurriedly toward the rear platform: “And don’t forget that your host is the most unmitigated old rascal that ever stood in with two political machines at once.”
The Judge swung her up on the platform, the doctorgave her valise to the conductor, her mother waved her hand, and she was off.
The two men turned away. Not so Mrs. Emery. She was staring after the car in a fierce endeavor to focus her gaze on the interior. “Who was that man that jumped up so surprised to speak to Lydia?”
“I didn’t notice anybody,” said the Judge.
Dr. Melton spoke quickly. “Lydia’s getting in a very nervous state, my friends; I want you to know that. This confounded life is too much for her.”
“She doesn’t kill herself getting up in the morning,” complained her father. “It is a month now since I’ve seen her at breakfast.”
“I don’tlether get up,” said Mrs. Emery. “I guess if you’d been up till two every morning dancing split dances because you werethebelle of the season, you’d sleep late! Besides,” she went on, “she’ll be all right as soon as her engagement is announced. The excitement of that’ll brace her up.”
“Good Lord! It’s not more excitement she needs,” began Dr. Melton; but they had reached the house, and Mrs. Emery, obviously preoccupied, pulled her husband quickly in, dismissing the doctor with a nod.
She drew the Judge hurriedly into the hall, and, “It was that Rankin!” she cried, the slam of the door underscoring her words, “andIbelieve Marius Melton knew he was going on that car and made Lydia late on purpose.”
Judge Emery was in the state in which of late the end of the day’s work found him—overwhelmingly fatigued. He had not an ounce of superfluous energy to answer his wife’s tocsin. “Well, what if it was?” he said.
“They’ll be an hour and a half together—alone—more alone than anywhere except on a desert island. Alone—an hour and a half!”
“Oh, Susan! If Paul can’t in three months make more headway than Rankin can tear down in an hour and a half—”
She raged at him, revolted at the calmness with which he was unbuttoning his overcoat and unwinding his muffler, “You don’t understand—anything! I’m not afraid she’ll elope with him—Paul’s got her too solid for that—Rankin probably won’t say anything ofthatkind! But he’ll put notions in her head again—she’s so impressionable. And she says queer things now, once in a while, if she’s left alone a minute. She needs managing. She’s not like that levelheaded, sensible Madeleine Hollister. Lydia has to be guided, and you don’t see anything—you leave it all to me.”
She was almost crying with nervous exhaustion. That Lydia’s course ran smooth through a thousand complications was not accomplished without an incalculable expenditure of nervous force on her mother’s part. Dr. Melton had several times of late predicted that he would have his old patient back under his care again. Judge Emery, remembering this prophecy, was now moved by his wife’s pale agitation to a heart-sickening mixture of apprehension for her and of recollection of his own extreme discomfort whenever she was sick. He tried to soothe her. “But, Susan, there’s nothing we can do about it,” he said reasoningly, hanging up his overcoat, blandly ignorant that her irritation came largely from his failure to fall in with her conception of the moment as a tragic one.
“You couldcaresomething about it,” she said bitterly, standing with all her wraps on. The telephone bell rang. She motioned him back. “No; I might as well go first as last. It’ll be something I’d have to see about, anyway.”
As he hesitated in the middle of the hall, longing to betake himself to a deep easy chair and a moment’s relaxation, and not daring to do so, he was startled by an electric change in his wife’s voice. “You’re at Hardville, you say? Oh, Flora Burgess, I could go down on my knees in thanksgiving. I want you to run right out as fast as you can and get on the next Interurban car from Endbury. Lydia’s on it—” she cast caution from her desperately—“and I’vejust heard that there’s somebody I don’t want her to talk to—you know—carpenters—run—fly—never mind what they say! Make them talk to you, too!”
She turned back to her husband, transfigured with triumph. “I guess that’ll put a spoke inhiswheel!” she cried. “Flora Burgess’s at Hardville, and that’s only half an hour from here. I guess they can’t get very far in half an hour.”
The Judge considered the matter with pursed lips. “I wish it hadn’t happened,” he mused, as unresponsive to his wife’s relief as he had been to her anxiety. “At first, I mean—last autumn—at all.”
His wife caught him up with a good humor gay with relief. “Oh, give you time, Nat, and you come round to seeing what’s under your nose. I was wishing it hadn’t happened long before I knew it had. I breathed it in the air before we ever knew she’d so much as seen him.”
“Melton says he thinks the fellow has a future before him—”
“Oh, Marius Melton! How many of his swans have stuffed feather pillows!”
The Judge demurred. “I often wish I could think hewas—but Melton’s no fool.” He added, uneasily, “He’s been pestering me again about taking a long rest—says I’m really out of condition.”
“Perhaps a change of work would do you good—to be in active practice again. You could be your own master more—take more vacations, maybe.”
The Judge surveyed her with a whimsical smile. “I’d make a lot more money in practice,” he admitted.
If she heard this comment she made no sign, but went on, “You do work too constantly, too. I’ve always said so! If you’d be willing to take a little more relaxation—go out more—”
Judge Emery shuddered. “Endbury tea-parties—!”
His wife, half-way up the stairs, laughed down at him. “Tea-parties! There hasn’t been a tea-party given in Endbury since we were wearing pull-backs.”
The laugh was so good-natured that the Judge hoped for a favorable opening and ventured to say irrelevantly, as though reverting automatically to a subject always in his mind, “But, honest, Susie, can’t we shave expenses down some? This winter is costing—”
She turned on him, not resentfully this time, but with a solemn appeal. “Why, Nat! Lydia’s season! The last winter we’ll have her with us, no doubt! I’d go on bread and water afterward to give her what she wants now—wouldn’tyou? What are we old folks good for but to do our best by our children?”
The Judge looked up at her, baffled, inarticulate. “Oh, of course,” he agreed helplessly, “we want to do the best by our children.”
CHAPTER XVA HALF-HOUR’S LIBERTY
CHAPTER XV
A HALF-HOUR’S LIBERTY
Inside the big Interurban car Lydia and Rankin were talking with a freedom that enormously surprised Lydia. The man had started up with an exclamation of pleasure, had taken her bag, found a vacant seat, put her next the window and sat down by her before Lydia, quite breathless with the shock of seeing him, could do more than notice how vigorous he looked, his tall, spare figure alert and erect, his ruddy hair and close-clipped beard contrasting vividly with his dark-blue flannel shirt and soft black hat. He was on a business trip, evidently, for on his knees he held a tool-box with large ungloved hands, roughened and red.
With his usual sweeping disregard of conventional approaches, he plunged boldly into the matter with which their thoughts were at once occupied. “So this was why Dr. Melton insisted I should take this car. Well, I’m grateful to him! It gives me a chance to relieve my mind of a weight of remorse I’ve been carrying around.”
Lydia looked at him, relieved and surprised at the hearty spontaneity of this opening.
He misunderstood her expression. “You don’t mind, do you, my speaking to you about last fall—my saying I am so very sorry I made you all the trouble Dr. Melton tells me I did? I’m really very sorry!”
Nothing could have more completely disarmed Lydia’s acquired fear of him as the bogey-man of her mother’s exhortations. It is true that she was, as she put it to herself, somewhat taken down by the contrast between her secret thought of him as a wounded, rejected suitor, and this clear-eyed, self-possessed, friendly reality before her;but, after a momentary feeling of pique, coming from a sense of the romantic, superficially grafted on her natural good feeling, she was filled with an immense relief. Lydia was no man-eater. In spite of traditional wisdom, she, like a considerable number of her contemporaries, was as far removed from this stage of feminine development as from a Stone-age appetite for raw meat. She now drew a long breath of the most honest satisfaction that she had done him no harm, and smiled at Rankin. He waited for her to speak, and she finally said: “It’s awfully good of you to put it that way! I’ve been afraid you must have been angry with me and hurt that I—so you didn’t mind at all!”
Rankin smiled at little ruefully at her swift conclusion. “I believe in telling the truth, even to young ladies, and I can not say I didn’t mind at all—or that I don’t now. But I am convinced that you were right in dropping me—out of the realm of acquaintances.” His assumption was, Lydia saw with gratitude, that they were talking simply about a possible acquaintanceship between them. “It’s evidently true—what I told you the very first time I saw you. We don’t belong in the same world.”
As he said this, he looked at her with an expression Lydia thought severe. She protested, “What makes you so sure?”
“Because to live in my world—even to step into it from time to time—requires the courage to believe in it.”
“And you think I didn’t?” asked Lydia. It was an inestimable comfort to her to have brought into the light the problem that had so long lain in the back of her head, a confused mass of dark conjecture.
“Did you?” he asked steadily. “You ought to know.”
There was silence, while Lydia turned her head away and looked at the brown, flat winter landscape jerking itself past the windows as the car began to develop speed in the first long, open space between settlements. She was trying to remember something distinct about the nightmare of misery that had followed her admission of the identity ofthe man who had kissed her hand that starry night in October, but from the black chaos of her recollection she brought out only, “Oh, you don’t realize how things are with a girl—how many million little ways she’s bound and tied down, just from everybody in the family loving her as—”
“Oh, yes, I do; I prove I do by saying that you were probably right in yielding so absolutely to that overwhelming influence. If you hadn’t the strength to break through it decisively even once, you certainly couldn’t have gotten any satisfaction out of doing things contrary to it. So it’s all right, you see.”
Lydia’s drooping face did not show that she derived the satisfaction from this view of her limitations that her companion seemed to expect. “You mean I’m a poor-spirited, weak thing, who’d better never try to take a step of my own,” she said with a sorry smile.
“I don’t mean anything unkind,” he told her gently. “I’ve succeeded in convincing myself that your action of last autumn was the result of a deep-rooted instinct for self-preservation—and that’s certainly most justifiable. It meant I’d expected too harsh a strength from you—” he went on with a whimsical smile, which even the steadiness of his eyes did not keep from sadness—“as though I’d hoped you could lift a thousand-pound weight, like the strong woman in the side-show.”
She responded to his attempt at lightness with as plain an undercurrent of seriousness as his own. “Why do you live so that people have to lift thousand-pound weights before they dare so much as say good-morning to you?”
“Because I don’t dare live any other way,” he answered.
“It’s hard on other people,” Lydia ventured, but retreated hastily before the first expression of upbraiding she had seen in his eyes. He had so suddenly turned grave with the thought that it had been harder on him than on anyone else that she cried out hurriedly, “But you didn’t help a bit—you left it all to me—”
She stopped, her face burning in uncertainty of the meaning of her words.
Rankin’s answer came with the swiftness of one who has meditated long on a question. “I’m glad you’ve given me a chance to say what—I’ve wished you might know. I thought it over and over at the time—and since—and I’m sure it would not have been honorable—or delicate—or right,notto leave it all to you. That much was yours to decide—whether you would take the first step. It would have been a crime to have hurried or urged you beyond what lay in your heart to do—or to have overborne you against some deep-lying, innate instinct.”
Lydia’s voice was shaking in self-pity as she cried out, “Oh, if you knew what the others—nobodyelsewas afraid to hurry or urge me to—”
She stopped and looked away, her heart beating rapidly with a flood of recollections. Rankin’s lips opened, but he shut them firmly, as though he did not trust himself to speak. His large red hands closed savagely on the handle of his tool-box. There was a silence between them.
The car began to move more slowly, and the conductor, standing up from the seat where he had been dozing, remarked in a conversational tone to a woman with two children near him, “Gardenton—this is the cross-roads to Gardenton.” Later, as the car stood still under the singing vibration of the trolley-wire overhead, he added in the general direction of Lydia and Rankin, now the only passengers, “Next stop is Wardsboro’!” His voice came to them with a singular clearness in the quiet of the momentary stop. They were in the midst of a mournful expanse of bare ploughed fields, frozen and brown. The motorman released his brake, letting the brass arm swing noisily about, the conductor sat down again, and as the car began to move forward again he closed his eyes. He looked very tired and, now that an almost instant sleep had relaxed his features, pathetically young.
“How pale he is,” said Lydia, wishing to break the silence with a harmless remark. “He looks tired to death.”
“He probably is just that,” said Rankin, wincing. “It’s sickening, the way they work. Seven days a week, most of them, you know.”
“No; I didn’t know,” cried Lydia, shocked. “Why, that’s awful. When do they see their families?”
“They don’t. One of them, whose house isn’t far from mine, told me that he hadn’t seen his children, except asleep, for three weeks.”
“But something ought to be done about it!” The girl’s deep-lying instinct for instant reparation rose up hotly.
“Are they so much worse off than most American business men?” queried Rankin. “Do any of them feel they can take the time to see much more than the outside of their children; and isn’t seeing them asleep about as—”
Lydia cut him short quickly. “You’re always blaming them for that,” she cried. “You ought to pity them. They can’t help it. It’s better for the children to have bread and butter, isn’t it—”
Rankin shook his head. “I can’t be fooled with that sort of talk—I’ve lived with too many kinds of people. At least half the time it isn’t a question of bread and butter. It’s a question of giving the children bread and butter and sugar rather than bread and butter and father. Of course, I’m a fanatic on the subject. I’d rather leave off even the butter than the father—let alone the sugar.”
“But here’s this very motorman you know about—what could he do?”
“They’re not forced by the company to work seven days a week—only they’re not given pay enough to let them take even one day off without feeling it. This very motorman I was talking with got to telling me why he was working so extra hard just then. His oldest daughter is going to graduate from the high school and he wants to give her a fine graduating dress, as good as anybody’s, and a graduating ‘present.’ It seems that’s the style now for graduating girls. He said he and his wife wanted her always to remember that day as a bright spot, and not as a timewhen she was humiliated by being different from other girls.”
“Well, my goodness! you’re not criticizing them for that, are you? I think it was just as sweet and lovely of them as can be to realize how a girl feels.”
Rankin looked at her, smiled slightly, and said nothing. His silence made Lydia thoughtful. After a time, “I see what you mean, of course,” she said slowly, “that it would bebetterfor her, perhaps—but if helovesher, her fatherwantsto do things for her.”
Rankin’s roar of exasperation at this speech was so evidently directed at an old enemy of an argument that Lydia was only for an instant startled by it. “Idon’tsay he can do too much for her,” he cried. “He can’t! Nobody can do too much for anybody else if it’s the right thing.”
“And what in the world do you thinkwouldbe the right thing in this case?” Lydia put the question as a poser.
“Why, of course, to pamper her vanity; to feed her moral cowardice; to make her more afraid than ever of senseless public opinion; to deprive her of a fine exercise for her spiritual force; to shut her off from a sense of her material situation in life until the knowledge of it will come as a tragedy to her; to let her grow up without any knowledge of her father’s point of view—”
“There, there! That’s enough!” said Lydia.
“I didn’t need to be so violent about it, that’s a fact,” apologized Rankin.
“But you’re talking of people the way they ought to be,” objected Lydia, apparently drawing again from a stock of inculcated arguments. “Do you really, honestly, suppose that that girl would rather have an opportunity to do something for her parents and—and—and all that, than have a fine dress that would cost a lot and make the other girls envious?”
“Oh, Lydia!” cried her companion, not noticing the betrayal of a mental habit in the slipping out of her name. “You’re just in a state of saturated solution of Dr. Melton.Don’t you believe a word he says about folks. They’re lots better than he thinks. The only reason anybody has for raging at them for being a bad lot is because they are such a good lot! They are so chuck-full of good possibilities! There’s so much more good in them than bad. You think that, don’t you? Youmust! There’s nothing to go on, if you don’t.”
As Lydia began to answer she felt herself, as once or twice before when with Rankin, suddenly an immeasurable distance from her usual ways of mental life. She looked about her upon a horizon very ample and quite strange, without being able to trace the rapid steps that had carried her away from the close-walled room full of knickknacks and trifles, where she usually lived. She drew a deep breath of surprise and changed her answer to an honest “I don’t believe I know whether I believe you or not. I don’t think I ever thought of it before.”
“Whatdoyou think about?” The question was evidently too sincere an interrogation to resent.
The girl made several beginnings at an answer, stopped, looked out of the window, looked down at her shoe-tip, and finally burst into her little clear trill of amusement. “I don’t,” she said, looking full at Rankin, her eyes shining. “You’ve caught me! I can’t remember a single time in my day when I think about anything but hurrying to get dressed in time to be at the next party promptly. Maybe some folks can think when they’re hurrying to get dressed, but I can’t.”
Rankin was very little moved to hilarity by this statement, but he was too young to resist the contagion of Lydia’s mirth, and laughed back at her, wondering at the mobility of her ever-changing face.
“If you don’t think, what do youdo?” he interrogated with mock relentlessness.
“Nothing,” said Lydia recklessly, still laughing.
“What do you feel?” he went on in the same tone, but Lydia’s face changed quickly.
“Oh—lots!” she said uncertainly, and was silent.
The car began to pass some poor, small houses, and in amoment came to a standstill in the midst of a straggling village. The young conductor still slept on, his head fallen so far on his shoulder that his breathing was difficult. The motorman, getting no signal to go on, looked back through the window, putting his face close to the glass to see, for it had grown dusky outside and the electric lights were not yet turned on. After a look at the sleeping man he glanced apprehensively at the two passengers, and then, apparently reassured that they were not “company detectives,” he pushed open the door. “This is Wardsboro’,” he told them as he went down the aisle, “and the next stop is Hardville.”
He was a strong, burly man, and easily lifted the slight, boyish form of the conductor to a more comfortable position, propping him up in a corner of the seat. The young man did not waken, but his face relaxed into peaceful lines of unconsciousness as his head fell back, and his breathing became long and regular, like a sleeping child’s. As the big motorman went back to his post, he explained a little sheepishly to the two, who had watched his operation in attentive silence, “It’s against the rules, I know, but there ain’t anybody but you two here, and he don’t look as though he’d really got his growth yet. I got a boy ain’t sixteen that looks as old as he does, and ruggeder at that. I reckon the long hours are too much for him.”
“Do you know him?” asked Rankin.
The motorman turned his red, weather-beaten face to them from the doorway where he stood, pulling on his clumsy gloves. “Who, me?” he asked. “No; I never seen him till to-day. He’s a new hand, I reckon.” He drew the door after him with a rattling slam, rang the bell for himself, and started the car forward.
In the warm, vibrating solitude of the car, the two young people looked at each other in a silent transport. Lydia’s dark eyes were glistening, and she checked Rankin, about to speak, with a quick, broken “No; don’t say a word! You’d spoil it!”
There was between them one of the long, vital silences, full of certainty of a common emotion, which had once ortwice before marked a significant change in their relation. Finally, “That’s something I shall never forget,” said Lydia.
Rankin looked at her in silence, and then, quickly, away.
“It’s like an answer to what I was saying—a refutation of what Dr. Melton thinks—about people—”
As Rankin still made no answer, she exclaimed in a ravished surprise, “Why, I never saw anything so lovely—that made me so happy! I feel warm all over!”
Indeed, her face shone through the dusk upon her companion, who could now no longer constrain himself to look away from her. He said, his voice vibrant with a deep note which instantly carried Lydia back to the other time when she had heard it, under the stars of last October, “It’s only an instrument exquisitely in tune which can so respond—” He broke off, closed his lips, and, turning away from her, gazed sightlessly out at the dim, flat horizon, now the only outline visible in the twilight.
Lydia said nothing, either then or when, after a long pause, he said that he would leave the car at the next station.
“It has been very pleasant to see you again,” he said, bending over his tool-box, “and you mustn’t lay it up against me that I haven’t congratulated you on your engagement. Of course you know how I wish you all happiness.”
“Thank you,” said Lydia.
Ahead of the car, some lights suddenly winking above the horizon announced the approach of Hardville. Rankin stood up, slipped on his rough overcoat, and sat down again. He drew a long breath, and began evenly: “I know you won’t misunderstand me if I try to say one more thing. I probably won’t see you again for years, and it would be a great joy to me to be sure that you know how hearty is my good-will to you. I’m afraid you can’t think of me without pain, because I was the cause of such discomfort to you, but I know you are too generous to blame me for what was an involuntary hurt. Of course I ought to have known how your guardians would feel about your knowing me—”
“Oh,whyshould you be so that all that happened!” cried Lydia suddenly. “If it was too hard for me, why couldn’t you have made it easier—thought differently—acted like other people.Wouldyou—if I hadn’t—if we had gone on knowing each other?”
Rankin turned very white. “No,” he said; “I couldn’t.”
“It seems to me,” said Lydia hurriedly, “that, without being willing to concede anything to their ideas, you ask a great deal of your friends.”
“Yes,” said Rankin, “I do. It’s a hard struggle I’m in with myself and the world—oh, evidently much too hard for you even to look at from a distance.” His voice broke. “The best thing I can do for you is to stay away—” He rose, and stepped into the aisle. “But you are so kind—you will let me serve you in any other way, if I can—ever. If I can ever do something that’s hard for you to do—you must know that I stand as ready as even Dr. Melton to do it for you if I can.”
Indeed, for the moment, as Lydia looked up into his kind, strong face, his impersonal tenderness made him seem almost such an old, tried friend as her godfather; almost as unlikely to expect any intimate personal return from her.
“You must remember,” he went on, “the great joy it gave us both to-day even to see an act of kindness. Give me an opportunity to do one for you if I ever can.”
It already seemed to Lydia as though he had gone away from her, as though this were but a beneficent memory of him lingering by her side. She hardly noticed when he left her alone in the car.
The conductor started up, wakened by the silence, and announced wildly, “Wardsboro’, Wardsboro’!”
“No, it ain’t; it’s the first stop in Hardville,” contradicted the motorman, sticking his head in through the door. “Turn on them lights!”
As the glass bulbs leaped to a dazzling glare, Lydia blinked and looked away out of the window. A moment later an arm laid about her neck made her bound up in amazement and confront a small, middle-aged woman, with a hat tooyoung for her tired, sallow face, with a note-book in her hand and an apologetic expression of affection in her light blue eyes. “I’m sorry I startled you, Miss Lydia,” she said. “I keep forgetting you’re not still a little girl I can pick up and hug.”
“Oh, you!” breathed the girl, sitting down again. “I didn’t think there was anybody in the car with me, you see.”
“Have you come all the way from Endbury alone, then?” asked Miss Burgess, looking about her suspiciously.
“No, I have not,” said Lydia uncompromisingly. “Mr. Rankin, the cabinet-maker, has been with me till just now.”
Miss Burgess sat down hastily in the vacant seat by Lydia. “And he’s coming back?” she inquired.
“No; he got off at Hardville. ThisisHardville, isn’t it?”
“Yes. I happened to be out reporting a big church bazaar here.” She settled back comfortably. “What a nice chance for a cozy little visit I shall have with you. These long trips on the Interurban are fine for talking. Unless I shall tire you? Did Mr. Rankin talk much? What does he talkabout, anyhow? He’s always so rude to me that I’ve never heard him say a word except about his work.”
Lydia considered for a moment. “We talked about the street-car conductors having such long hours to work,” she said, “and later about whether people have more bad in them than good.”
“Oh!” said Miss Burgess.
Lydia smiled faintly, the ghost of her whimsical little look of mockery. “We decided that they have more good,” she said.
Miss Burgess cast about her for a suitable comment. At last, “Really!” she said.