CHAPTER XVIENGAGED TO BE MARRIED
CHAPTER XVI
ENGAGED TO BE MARRIED
All over the half-finished house the workmen began to lay down their tools. Paul Hollister’s face broke into a good-humored smile as a moment later he caught the faraway five-o’clock whistles calling from the city. He was in a very happy mood these days and the best aspect of the phenomena of the world was what impressed him most. As the workmen disappeared down the driveway to the main road, running to catch the next trolley-car to Endbury, he looked after them with little of the usual exasperation of the house-builder whose work they were slighting, but with an agreeable sense of their extreme inferiority to him in the matter of fixity of purpose. He felt that they symbolized the weakness of most of humanity, and promised himself with a comfortable confidence an easy and lifelong victory over such feeble adversaries. Of late, business had been going even better than ever.
The days had begun to grow appreciably longer with the approach of spring, and there had been several noons of an almost summer-like mildness, but now, in spite of the fact that the sun was still shining, the first chill of the late March evening dropped suddenly upon the bare-raftered structure whose open windows and door-spaces offered no barrier to the damp breeze. Hollister stirred from his pleasant reverie and began to walk briskly about, inspecting the amount of work accomplished since his last visit. He kept very close track of the industry of his workmen and the competence of his contractor, and Lydia’s father admired greatly the way in which his future son-in-law did not allow himself to be “done” by those past masters ofthe art. It argued well for the future, Judge Emery thought, and he called Lydia’s attention to the trait with approval.
Before the wide aperture which was to be the front door, the owner of the house stopped and looked eagerly out toward the road. It was near the time when Lydia had promised to be there, and he meant to see her and run to meet her when she first turned in upon the ground that was to be her home. It was the first time that Lydia had happened to visit the new house alone. Either her mother or Hollister’s sister had accompanied her on the two or three other occasions, but to-day she telephoned that Mrs. Emery had been really out-and-out forbidden by Dr. Melton to get out of bed for two or three days, and as for Madeleine—at this point Madeleine had snatched the receiver from Lydia’s hand and had informed her brother that Madeleine was going to be busy withheryoung man and couldn’t get off to chaperone people that had been as long engaged as he and Lydia.
That was part of the bright color of the world to Paul—his sister’s recent engagement to their uncle’s partner in the iron works, a very prosperous, young-old bachelor of fifty-odd, whose intense preoccupation with business had never been pierced by any consciousness of the other sex until Madeleine had, as she proclaimed in her own vernacular, “taken a club to him.” It was a very brilliant match for her, and justified her own prophecy concerning herself that she was not to be satisfied with any old-fashioned, smooth-running course for true love. “It must shoot the chutes, or nothing,” she was accustomed to say, in her cheerful, high-spirited manner.
Paul thought, with self-approval, that, for orphans of the poorer branch of the Hollister family, he and Madeleine had not done badly with their lives thus far.
He looked again impatiently toward the entrance to the grounds. A trolley-car had just rattled by on the main road. If Lydia was on it, she would appear at that turning under the trees. No; evidently she had not been onthat one. The harsh jar of the trolley’s progress died away in the distance and no Lydia appeared. He had fifteen minutes to wait for the next one.
He drew out a note-book and began jotting down some ideas about the disposition of the five acres surrounding the house. He was ambitious to have the appearance of a country estate and avoid the “surburban” look which would be so fatally easy to acquire in the suburban place. He decided that he would not as yet fence in his land. The house was the last one of a group of handsome residences that had lately sprung up in the vicinity of the new Country Club, and to the south was still open country, so that without a fence, he reflected, he could have himself, and convey tacitly to others, the illusion of owning the wide sweep of meadow and field which stretched away a mile or more to a group of beech trees.
He jumped down lightly from the porch, as yet but sketchily outlined in joists and rafters, and stood in a litter of shavings, bits of board and piles of yellow earth, with a kindling eye. He had that happy prophetic vision of the home-builder which overlooks all present deficiencies and in an instant, with a confident magic, erects all that the slow years are to build. He saw a handsome, well-kept house, correctly colonial in style, grounds artfully laid out to increase the impression of space, a hospitable, smoothly run interior, artistic, homelike, admired.
A meadow-lark near him began to tinkle out its pretty silver notes. The sun set slowly below the smoky horizon; a dewy peace fell about the deserted place. Paul had his visions of other than material elements in his future and Lydia’s. Such a dream came to him there, standing in the dusk before the germ of his home to be. He saw himself an alert man of forty-five, a good citizen, always on the side of civic honor; a good captain of industry, quick to see and reward merit; a good husband who loved and cherished his wife as on the day he married her, and protected her from all the asperities of reality; a good father—he had almost an actual vision of the childrenwho would carry on his work in life—girls of Lydia’s beauty and sweetness, boys with his energy and uprightness—and there was Lydia, too, the Lydia of twenty years from now—in the full bloom of physical allurement still, a gracious hostess, a public-spirited matron, lending the luster of his name to all worthy charities indorsed by the best people, laying down with a firm good taste dictates as to the worthy social development of the town. Before this vision there rose up in him the ardent impulse to immediate effort which is the sign manual of the man of action. He stirred and flung his arm out.
“It’s all up to me,” he said aloud. “I can do it if I go after it hard enough. I’ve got to make good for Lydia’s sake and mine. She must have the best I can get—the very best I know how to get for her.”
A sound behind him made him catch his breath. He was trembling as he turned about and saw Lydia coming swiftly up the driveway. “Good Heavens, how I love her!” he thought as he ran down to meet her.
He was trembling when he took her in his arms, folding her in that close embrace of surprised rapture at finding everything real, and no dream, which is the unique joy of betrothal. He would not let her speak for a moment, pressing his lips upon hers. When he released her, she cried in a whisper, “Oh, it’s wonderful how when you’re close to me everything else just isn’t in the world!”
“That’s being in love, Lydia,” Paul told her with a grave thankfulness.
“I don’t mean,” she went on, with her ever-present effort to express honestly her meaning, “I don’t mean just—just being really close—having your arms around me, though that always makes me forget things, too—but being—feelingclose, you know—inside. Not having any inner corner where we’re not together—the way we are now—the way I knew we should be when I saw you running down to meet me. I always know the minute I see you whether it’s going to be this way.” She added, a little wistfully, “Sometimes, you know, it isn’t.”
Paul lifted her up to the porch and led her across into the hallway. Here he took her in his arms again and said with a shaken accent: “Dearest Lydia, dearest! I wish it were always the way you want it—”
Lydia dropped her head back on his shoulder and looked at him earnestly. In the half-light, white and clear from the freshly plastered walls, her face was like alabaster. “Dear Paul, isn’t that what getting married means—to learn how to be really, really close to each other all the time. There isn’t anything else worth getting married for, is there?Isthere?”
Her lover looked down into her eyes, into her sweet, earnest face, and could not speak. Finally, his hand at his throat, “Oh, Lydia, you’re too good for me!” he said huskily. “You’re too good for any man!”
“No, no, no!” she protested with a soft energy. “I’m weak, as weak as water. You must give me a lot of your strength or I’ll go under.”
“God knows I’ll give you anything I have.”
“Then, never let things come between us—never, never, never! I’m all right as long as I’m close to you. If we just keep that, nothing else can matter.”
They were silent, standing with clasped hands in the passage-way that was to be the thoroughfare of their common life. It was a moment that was to come back many times to Lydia’s memory during later innumerable, hurried daily farewells. The thought of the significance of the place came to her mind now. She said softly, “This must be a foretaste of what we’re to have under this roof. How good it seems not to be in a hurry to—”
With a start Paul came to himself from his unusual forgetfulness of his surroundings. “Weoughtto be in a hurry now, dearest. Dr. Melton keeps me stirred up all the time to take care of you, and I’m sure I’m not doing that to let you stand here in this cold evening air. Come, let me show you—the closet under the stairs, you know, and the place for the refrigerator.”
Lydia yielded to his care for her with her sweet passivity,echoed his opinion about the details, and ran beside him down the driveway, to catch the next car to Endbury, with a singular light grace for a tall woman encumbered with long skirts.
In spite of their haste, they missed the car and were obliged to wait for a quarter of an hour beside the tracks. They talked cheerfully on indifferent topics, the sense of intimate comradeship gilding all they said. In their hearts was fresh the memory of the scene in the new house. They looked at each other and smiled happily in the intervals of their talk.
Paul was recapitulating to Lydia the advantages of the location of their house. “We are in the vanguard of a new movement in American life,” he said, “the movement away from the cities. Madeleine tells me that she and Lowder are planning a house at the other end of this street, and you can be sure they know what they are about.”
Lydia did not dissent from this opinion of her future sister-in-law, but she interrupted Paul a moment later, to say fondly, “Oh, but I’m glad that you aren’t fifty-five and bald and with lots of money!”
Paul laughed. “Madeleine’ll get on all right. She knows what she’s about. It’s a pair of them.”
“Well, I am church-thankful that that is not whatweare about!” exclaimed Lydia.
Her lover voiced the extreme content with his lot which had been his obsession that day. “We haveeverything, darling. We shall have all that Madeleine and old Lowder have and we have now all this heavenly happiness that they’ll never know—or miss,” he added, giving them their due.
“I didn’t mean that,” protested Lydia. “It seems to me that being like them and being like us are two contradictory things. Youcan’tbe both and have the things that go with both. And what I’m so thankful for is that we’re us and not them.”
Paul laughed. “You just see if there’s anything so contradictory.Trust me. You just see if you don’t beat Madeleine on her own ground yet.”
“I don’twant—” began Lydia; but Paul had gone back to his first theme and was expanding it for her benefit. “Yes; we’re getting the English idea. In twenty years from now you’ll find the social center of every moderate-sized American city shifted to some such place as this.”
Lydia craned her neck down the tracks impatiently. “I hope we don’t miss a trolley car every day of those twenty years,” she said, laughing.
“We’ll have an automobile,” he said. Then, reflecting that this was a somewhat exaggerated prophecy, he went on, with the honesty he meant always to show Lydia (so far as should be wise), “No; I’m afraid we sha’n’t, either—not for some time. It’ll take several years to finish paying altogether for the house, and we’ll have to pull hard to keep up our end for a time. But we’re young, so much won’t be expected of us—and if we just dig in for a few years now while we’re fresh, we can lie back and—”
“Well,gracious!” said Lydia, “who wants an automobile, anyhow! Only I wish the trolley didn’t take so long. It’s going to take the best part of an hour, you know; the ten or twelve minutes to get here from the house, the two or three minutes to wait, the thirty minutes on the car, the ten minutes to your office—and then all that turned inside out when you come back in the evening.”
“Oh, I’ll be able to do a lot of business figuring in that time. It won’t be wasted.”
They fell into happy picture-making of their future. Lydia wanted to have chickens and a garden, she said. She’d always wanted to be a farmer’s wife—an idea that caused Paul much laughter. They revised the plans for the furnishing of the hall—the china closet could stand against the west wall of the dining-room; why had they not thought of that before? The little room upstairs was to be a sewing-room “Although I hate sewing,” cried Lydia, “and nowadays, when ready-mades are so cheap and good—”
“Nobody expected you to make yourself tailored street dresses,” said Paul; “but don’t I all the time hear Madeleine and my aunt saying how the ‘lastchicof a costume, the little indefinable touches that give a toilet distinction,’ they have to fuss up themselves out of bits of lace and ribbon and fur and truck?” He was quoting, evidently, with an amused emphasis.
Lydia leaned to him, her eyes wide in a mock solemnity. “Paul, I have a horrible confession to make to you. Iloathethe ‘lastchic, the little indefinable touches that give a toilet,’ and so forth! It makes me sick to spend my time on them. What difference does it make to real folks if their toiletsaren’t‘and so forth!’”
She looked so deliciously whimsical with her down-drawn face of rebellious contrition that Paul was enchanted. “And this I learn when it’s too late for me to draw back!” he cried in horror. “Woman! woman! this tardy confession”
“Oh, there are lots of other confessions. Just wait.”
“Out with them!”
“I don’t knowanything.”
“That’s something,” admitted Paul.
“And you must teach me.”
“Oh, this docile little 1840 wife! Don’t you know the suffragists will get you if you talk meek like that? What do you want to know? Volts, and dynamos, and induction coils?”
“Everything,” said Lydia comprehensively, “that you know. Books, politics, music—”
“Lord! what a hash! What makes you think I know anything about such things?”
“Why, you went through Cornell. You must know about books. And you’re a man, you must know about politics; and as for music, we’ll learn about that together. Aunt Julia and Godfather are going to give us a piano-player—though I know they can’t afford it, the dears!”
“Peoplearegood to us.” Paul’s flush of gratitude for his good fortune continued.
“You like music, don’t you?” asked Lydia.
“I guess so; I don’t know much about it. Some crazy German post-grads at Cornell used to make up a string quartette among themselves and play some things I liked to hear—I guess it was pretty good music, too. They were sharks on it, I know. Yes; now I think of it, I used to like it fine. Maybe if I heard more—”
“Oh, the evenings together!” breathed Lydia. “Doesn’t it take your breath away to think of them? We’ll read together—”
Paul saw the picture. “Yes; there’re lots of books I’ve always meant to get around to.”
They were silent, musing.
Then Paul laughed aloud. Lydia started and looked at him inquiringly.
“Oh, I was just thinking how old married folks would laugh to hear us infants planning our little castles in Spain. You know how they always smile at such ideas, and say every couple starts out with them and after about six months gets down to concentrating on keeping up the furnace fire and making sure the biscuits are good.”
Lydia laid her hand eagerly on his arm. “But don’t let’s, Paul! Please,pleasedon’t let us! Just because everybody else does is no reason why wehaveto. You’re always saying folks can make things go their way if they try hard enough—you’re so clever and—”
“Oh, I’m a wonder, I know! You needn’t tell me how smart I am.”
“But, Paul, I’m in earnest—I mean it—”
The car had arrived by this time and he swung her up to the platform. Like other moderns they were so accustomed to spend a large part of their time in being transported from place to place that they were quite at home in the noisy public conveyance, and after a pause to pay fares, remove wraps, and nod to an acquaintance or two, they went on with their conversation as though they were alone. People looked approvingly at the comely, well-dressed young couple, so naïvely absorbed in each other, and speculatedas to whether they were just married or just about to be.
After they were deposited at the corner nearest the Emery house, the change to the silent street, up which they walked slowly, reluctant to separate, took them back to their first mood of this loveliest of all their hours together—the sweet intimacy of their first meeting in the new house.
Lydia felt herself so wholly in sympathy with Paul that she was moved to touch upon something that had never been mentioned between them. “Paul, dear,” she said, her certainty that he would understand, surrounding her with an atmosphere of spiritual harmony which she recognized was the thing in all the world which mattered most to her, “Paul dear, I never told you—there’s nothing to tell, really—but when I went to the Mallory’s house-party in February I rode from here to Hardville with Mr. Rankin and had a long talk with him. You don’t mind, do you?”
Her lover drew her hand within his arm and gave it an affectionate pressure. “You may not know things, Lydia, as you say, but you are thenicestgirl! the straightest! I knew that at the time—Miss Burgess told me. But I’m glad you’ve given me a chance to say how sorry I was for you last autumn when everybody was pestering you so about him. I knew how you felt—better than you did, I’ll bet I did! I wasn’t a bit afraid. I knew you could never care for anybody but me. Why, you’remine, Lydia, I’m yours, and that’s all there is to it. You know it as well as I do.”
“I know it when I’m with you,” she told him with a bravely honest, unspoken reservation.
He laughed his appreciation of her insistent sincerity. “Well, when you’re married won’t you be with me all the time? So that’s fixed! And as for meeting somebody by accident on the street-cars—why, you foolish darling, you’re not marrying a Turk, or an octopus—but an American.”
Lydia was silent, but her look was enough to fill the pause richly. She was savoring to the full the joy of closecommunity of spirit which had been so rare in her pleasant life of material comfort, and she was saying a humble prayer that she might be good enough to be worthy of it, that she might be wise enough to make it the daily and hourly atmosphere of her life with Paul.
“What are you thinking about, darling?” asked the other.
“I was thinking how lovely it’s going to be to be really married and come to know each other well. We don’t know each other at all yet,really, you know.”
Paul was brought up short, as so often with Lydia, by an odd, disconcerted feeling, half pleasure, half shock, from the discovery in her of pages that he had not read, germs of ideas that had not come from him. “Why, darling Lydia, what do you mean? We know each other through and through!” he now protested. It gave a tang of the unexpected to her uniform sweetness, this always having a corner still to turn which kept her out of his sight. Paul was used to seeing most women achieve this effect of uncertainty by the use of coquetry, and in the free-and-easy give and take between young America of both sexes, he had learned with a somewhat cynical shrewdness to discount it. He entered into the game, but, in his own phrase, he always knew what he was about. Lydia, on the contrary, often penetrated his armor by one of these shafts, barbed by her complete unconsciousness of any intent. He felt now, with a momentary anguish, that he could never be sure of her belonging quite to him until they were married, and cried out upon her idea almost angrily, “I don’t know what you mean! We know each other now.”
“Oh, no, we don’t,” she insisted. “There are lots of queer fancies in me that you’ll only find out by living with me—and, Oh, Paul! the fine, noble things Ifeelin you! But I can see the whole of them only by seeing you day by day. And then there are lots of things that aren’t in us, really, yet, but only planted. They’ll grow—we’ll grow—Paul, to-day is an epoch. We’ve passed a new milestone.”
“How do you mean?” he asked.
“The way we’ve felt—the way we’ve talked—of real things—out there in our own—” She laughed a little, a serene murmur of drollery which came to her when she was at peace. “We’ve been engaged since November, but we only got engaged to be married to-day—just as our wedding’s to be in June, but goodness knows when our marriage will be.”
Paul smiled at her tenderly. “If I’d known the date was so uncertain as that I shouldn’t have dared to go so far in my house-building.”
“Oh, it’s all right so far,” she reassured him, smiling; “but we must pitch in and finish it. Why, that’s just it, Paul—” she was struck with the aptness of her illustration—“that’s just it. We’ve got the rafters and joists up now; maybe before we’re married, if we’re good, we can get the roof on so it won’t rain on us; but all the finishing, all that makes it good to live in, has got to be done after the wedding.”
He did not know exactly what she was talking about, but he made up for vagueness by fervor. “After we are married,” he cried, “I’ll move mountains and turn stones to gold.”
“But the first thing to do is to lay floors for us to walk on,” Lydia told him.
For answer, he drew her into his arms and closed her mouth with a kiss.
CHAPTER XVIICARD-DEALING AND PATENT CANDLES
CHAPTER XVII
CARD-DEALING AND PATENT CANDLES
Spring had come with its usual hotly advancing rush upon the low-lying, sheltered southerly city. There had been a few days of magical warmth, full of spring madness, when every growing thing had expanded leaves with furious haste, when the noise of children playing in the street sounded loud through newly-opened windows, when, even on city streets, every breath of the sweet, lively air was an intoxicating potion. Then, with a bound, the heat was there. Evenings and nights were still cool, but noons were as oppressive as in July. The scarcely expanded leaves hung limp in a summer heat.
All during that eventful winter, Mrs. Emery had frequently remarked to her sister-in-law that Lydia’s social career progressed positively with such brilliancy that it was like “something you read about.” Mrs. Sandworth invariably added the qualifying clause, “But in a very nice book, you know, with only nice people in it, where everything comes out nicely at the end.” Her confidence in literature as a respectable source of pleasure was not so guileless as Mrs. Emery’s. It had been cruelly shaken by dipping into some of the Russian novels of the doctor’s.
Not infrequently the two ladies felt, with a happy importance, that they were the authors of the book and that the agreeable episodes and dramatic incidents which had kept the flow of the narrative so sparkling were the product of their own creative genius. When April came on, and Lydia agreed to the announcement of her engagement, they felt the need of some remarkable way of signaling that important event and of closing her season with a burst ofglory. For her season had to end! Dr. Melton said positively that if Lydia had another month of the life she had been leading he would not be responsible for the consequences. “She has a fine constitution, inherited from her farmer grandparents,” he said, smiling to see Mrs. Emery wince at this uncompromising statement of Lydia’s ancestry, “but her nervous organization is too fine for her own good. And I warn you right now that if you get her nerves once really jangled, I shall take to the woods. You can just give the case to another doctor. It would be too much forme.”
The girl herself insisted that she felt perfectly well and able to stand more than when she first began going out. She affirmed this with some impatience, her eyes very bright, her cheeks flushed, whenever her godfather protested against a new undertaking. “When you get going, youcan’tstop,” she told him, shaking off his detaining hand. Mrs. Emery told the doctor that he’d forgotten the time when he was young or he’d remember that all girls who’d been popular at all—let alone a girl like Lydia—looked thin and worn by the end of the season; but during the last week of April, when the first hot days had arrived, a small incident surprised her into thinking that perhaps the doctor had some right on his side.
Not that there was in itself anything so very alarming about a nervous explosion from a girl so high-strung and susceptible as Lydia. The startling thing was that this explosion proceeded, so far as her mother could see, from nothing at all, from the idlest of chance remarks by Mrs. Sandworth, as always, whitely innocent of the smallest intention to wound.
She and Mrs. Emery were much given to watching Lydia dress for the innumerable engagements that took her away from the house. They made a pretext of helping her, but in truth they were carried away by the delight in another’s beauty which is more common among women than is generally imagined. They took the profoundest interest in the selection of the toilet she should wear, and regarded with acharmed surprise the particular aspect of Lydia’s slim comeliness which it brought out. They could not decide whether they liked her best in clinging, picture costumes, big hats, plumes, trailing draperies, and the like, or dashing, jaunty effects. Once in the winter, after she had left them on her way to an evening skating party and they had seen her from the window join Hollister and add her skates to those glittering on his shoulder, Mrs. Sandworth promulgated one of her unexpected apothegms: “Do you know what we are, Susan Emery? We’re a couple of old children playing with a doll.” Mrs. Emery protested with an instant, reproving self-justification: “Youmay be—you’re not her mother; but I understand Lydia through and through.”
Mrs. Emery felt that if Lydia had overheard that remark of her aunt’s her excitement and resentment might have been natural; but the one which led to the distressing little scene in late April was as neutral as an ordinary morning salutation. The two were watching Lydia dress for a luncheon which Mrs. Hollister—theMrs. Hollister—was giving in her honor. It was about noon of a warm day, and the air that came in at the open windows was thrillingly alive with troubling, disquieting suggestions of the new life of spring. Lydia, however, showed none of the languor which the sudden heat had brought to the two elder women. She was a little late, and her hurry had sent a high color to her cheeks, the curves of which were refined to the most exquisite subtlety by the loss of flesh so deplored by Dr. Melton. She was used, by this time, to dressing in a hurry, but her fingers trembled a little, and she tried three times before she could coil her dark silky hair smoothly. She was frowning a little with the fixity of her concentration as she turned to snatch up her long gloves and she did not hear Mrs. Sandworth’s question until it had been repeated,
“I said, Lydia, is it to be bridge this afternoon?”
“I don’t know,” said Lydia with the full stop of absent indifference.
“Didn’t Mrs. Hollister say?”
“Maybe she did. I didn’t notice.” The girl was tugging at her glove.
“Well, anyhow,” said her mother, “since everybody’s giving you card-parties, I should think you’d want to practice up and learn how to deal better. It’s queer,” she went on to Mrs. Sandworth, “Lydia’s so deft about so many things, that she should deal cards so badly.”
“Oh, goodness! As if there was nothing better to do than that!” cried Lydia, beginning on the other glove.
“Well, whathaveyou to do that’s better?” asked her aunt in some astonishment. “Lydia, my dear, your collar is pinned the least bit crooked. Here, just let me—”
Lydia had stopped short, her glove dangling from her wrist. “Why, what a horrible thing to say!” She brought this out with a tragic emphasis, immensely disconcerting to her two elders.
“Horrible!” protested Mrs. Sandworth.
“Yes, horrible,” insisted the girl. She had turned very pale. “The very way you say it and don’t think anything about it,makesit horrible.”
Mrs. Sandworth began to doubt her own senses. “Why, what did I say?” she appealed to Mrs. Emery in bewildered interrogation, but before the latter could answer Lydia broke out: “If I really believed that, why, I’d—I’d—” She hesitated, obviously between tragic consequences, and then, to the great dismay of her companions, began to cry, still standing in the middle of the floor, her glove dangling from her slim, white wrist.
“Don’t Lydia! Oh, don’t, dear! You’ll make yourself look like a fright for the luncheon.” Mrs. Emery ran to her daughter with a solicitude in which there was considerable irritation. “You’re perfectly exhausting, taking everything that deadly serious way. Don’t be somorbid! You know your Aunt Julia didn’t mean anything. She never does!”
Lydia pulled away and threw herself on the bed, still sobbing, and protesting that she could not go to the luncheon; and in the end Mrs. Emery was obliged to makethe profoundest apologies over the telephone to a justly indignant hostess.
In the meantime Lydia was undressed and put to bed by Mrs. Sandworth, who dared not open her mouth. The girl still drew long, sobbing breaths, but before her aunt left the room she lay quiet, her eyes closed. The other was struck by the way her pallor brought out the thinness of her lovely face. She hovered helplessly for a moment over the bed. “Is there anything I can do for you, dearie?” she asked humbly.
Lydia shook her head. “Just let me be quiet,” she murmured.
At this, Mrs. Sandworth retreated to the door, from which she ventured a last “Lydia darling, you know I’m sorry if I said anything to hurt—”
Lydia raised herself on her elbow and looked at her solemnly. “It wasn’t what yousaid; it was what itmeant!” she said tragically.
With this cryptic utterance in her ears, Mrs. Sandworth fled downstairs, to find her sister-in-law turning away from the telephone with a frown. “Mrs. Hollister was very much provoked about it, and I don’t blame her. It’s hard to make her understand we couldn’t have given her alittlewarning. And—that’s the most provoking part—I didn’t dare say Lydia is really sick, when, as like as not, she’ll be receiving company this evening.”
“You wouldn’t want her sick, just so it would be easier to explain, would you?” asked Mrs. Sandworth with her eternal disconcerting innocence.
Mrs. Emery relieved her mind by snapping at her sister-in-law with the violence allowed to an intimate of many years’ standing, “Good gracious, Julia! you’re as bad as Lydia! Turning everything people say into something quite different—”
Mrs. Sandworth interrupted hastily, “Susan, tell me, for mercy’s sake, what did I say? The last thing I remember passing my lips was about her collar’s being a little crooked,—and just now she told me, as though itwas the crack of Doom, that it wasn’t what I said, but what it meant, that was so awful. What in the world does she mean?”
Mrs. Emery sank into a seat with a gesture of utter impatience. “Mean? Mean nothing! Didn’t you ever know an engaged girl before?”
“Well, I’m sure when I was engaged I never—”
“Oh, yes, you did; youmusthave. They all do. It’s nerves.”
But a moment later she contradicted her own assurance with a sigh of unresignation. “Oh, dear! why can’t Lydia be just bright and wholesome and fun-loving andnaturallike Madeleine Hollister!” She added darkly, “I just feel in my bones that this has something to do with that Rankin and his morbid ideas.”
Mrs. Sandworth was startled. “Good gracious! You don’t suppose she—”
“No; of course I don’t! I never thought of such a thing. You ought to see her when she is with Paul. She’s justfascinatedby him! But you know as well as I do that ideas go right on underneath all that!” Her tone implied a disapproval of their tenacity of life. “And yet, Lydia’s really nothing unusual! Before they get married and into social life, and settled down and too busy to think, most girls have a queer spell. Only most of them take it out on religion. Oh, why couldn’t she have met that nice young rector—if she had to meet somebody to put ideas into her head—instead of an anarchist.”
“Well, it’s certainly all past now,” Mrs. Sandworth reassured her.
“Yes; hasn’t it been a lovely winter! Everybody’s been so good to Lydia. Everything’s succeeded so! But I suppose Dr. Melton’s right. We ought to call her season over, except for the announcement party—and the wedding, of course—and oh, dear! There are so many things I’d planned to do I can’t possibly get in now. It seems strange a child of mine should be so queer and have such notions.”
However, after the two had talked over the plans for a great evening garden-party in the Emery “grounds” and Mrs. Emery’s creative eye had seen the affair in a vista of brilliant pictures, she felt more composed. She went up quietly to Lydia’s door and looked in.
The girl was lying on her back, her wide, dark eyes fixed on the ceiling. Something in the expression of her face gave her mother a throb of pain. She yearned over the foolish, unbalanced young thing, and her heart failed her, in that universal mother’s fear for her child of the roughnesses of life, through which she herself has passed safely and which have given savor to her existence. In her incapacity to conceive other roughnesses than those she could feel herself, she was, it is probable, much like the rest of humankind. She advanced to the bed, her tenderest mother-look on her face, and cut Lydia off from speech with gentle wisdom. “No, no, dear; don’t try to talk. You’re all tired out and nervous and don’t know—”
Lydia had begun excitedly: “I’ve been feeling it for a long time, but when Aunt Julia said right out that I didn’t know how to do anything better than—that I was only good to—”
Her mother laid a firm, gentle hand over the quivering mouth, and said in a soothing murmur, “Hush, hush! darling. It wasn’t anything your poor foolish Aunt Julia said. It isn’t anything, anyhow, but being up too much and having too much excitement. People get to thinking all kinds of queer things when they’re tired. Mother knows. Mother knows best.”
She had prepared a glass of bromide, and now, lifting Lydia as though she were still the child she felt her to be, she held it to her lips. “Here, Mother’s poor, tired little girl—take this and go to sleep; that’s all you need. Just trust Mother now.”
Lydia took the draught obediently, but she sighed deeply, and fixed her mother with eyes that were unrelentingly serious.
When Mrs. Emery looked in after half an hour, shesaw that Lydia was still awake, but later she fell asleep, and slept heavily until late in the afternoon.
On her appearance at the dinner-table, still languid and heavy-eyed, she was met with gentle, amused triumph. “There, you dear. Didn’t I tell you what you needed was sleep. There never was a girl who didn’t think a sick headache meant there was something wrong with her soul or something.”
Judge Emery laughed good-naturedly, as he sliced the roast beef, and said, with admiration for his wife, “It’s a good thing my high-strung little girl has such a levelheaded mother to look after her. Mother knows all about nerves and things. She’s had ’em—all kinds—and come out on top. Look at her now.”
Lydia took him at his word, and bestowed on her mother a long look. She said nothing, and after a moment dropped her eyes listlessly again to her plate. It was this occasion which Mrs. Emery chose to present to the Judge her plans for the expensive garden-party, so that in the animated and, at times, slightly embittered discussion that followed, Lydia’s silence was overlooked.
For the next few days she stayed quietly indoors, refusing and canceling engagements. Mrs. Emery said it was “only decent to do that much after playing Mrs. Hollister such a trick,” and Lydia did not seem averse. She sewed a little, fitfully, tried to play on the piano and turned away disheartened at the results of the long neglect—there had been no time in the season for practice—and wandered about the library, taking out first one book then another, reading a little and then sitting with brooding eyes, staring unseeingly at the page. Once her mother, finding her thus, inquired with some sharpness what book she was reading to set her off like that. “It’s a book by Maeterlinck,” said Lydia, “that Godfather gave me ever so long ago, and I’ve never had time to read it.”
“Do you like it? What’s it about?” asked her mother, suspiciously.
“I can’t understand it,” said Lydia, “when I’m reading it. But when I look away and think, I can, a little bit. I love it. It makes me feel like crying. It’s all about our inner life.”
“My dear Lydia, you put your hat right on and go over to have a little visit with Marietta. What you need is a little fresh air and some sensible talk. I’ve been too busy with my invitation list to visit with you as I ought. Marietta’ll be real glad to see you. Here’s your hat. Now, you run right along, and stop at Hallam’s on the way and get yourself an ice-cream soda. It’s hot, and that’ll do you good.”
As Lydia was disappearing docilely out of the door, her mother stopped before going back to her desk and the list of guests for the garden-party, which had been torturing her with perplexity, to say, “Oh, Lydia, don’t forget to ask Marietta to order the perforated candles.”
“Perforated—!” said Lydia blankly, pausing at the door.
“Yes; don’t you remember, the last time Mrs. Hollister called here she told us all about them.”
“No, I don’t remember,” said Lydia, with no shade of apology in her tone.
“Why, my dear! You’re getting so absent-minded! Do you mean to say you didn’t take in anything of what she was talking about? It’s a new kind, that has holes running through it so the melted wax runs down the inside! Why, we were talking about them the whole time she was here that last call.”
Lydia opened the door, observing vaguely, “Oh, yes; I do seem to remember something. It was a very dull visit, anyhow.”
Mrs. Emery returned to her list, pursing up her lips and wagging her head. “You’ll have to learn, dearie, that it’s little details like that that make the difference between success and failure.”
“We have electric light and gas,” said Lydia.
Mrs. Emery looked up in astonishment and a little vexation.She, too, had nerves these days. “Why, Lydia, what’s the matter with you? You know nobody uses those for table decoration.”
“Wecould,” said Lydia.
“Why, my dear child, I never knew before there was a contrary streak in you, like your father. What in the world possesses you all of a sudden to object to candles?”
“It’s not candles—it’s the idea of—Oh, all the fuss and bother, when everybody’s so tired, and the weather’s so hot, and it’s going to cost too much anyhow.”
“Well, what would you have us fuss and bother about, if not over having everything nice when we entertain?” Mrs. Emery’s air of enforced patience was strained.
Lydia surveyed her from the hall in silence. “That’s just it—that’s just it,” she said finally, and went away.
Mrs. Emery laid down her pen to laugh to herself over the queer ways of children. “They begin to have notions with their first teeth, and I suppose they don’t get over them tilltheirfirst baby begins to teethe.”
When Lydia arrived at her sister’s house, she found that competent housekeeper engaged in mending the lace curtains of her parlor. She had about her a battery of little ingenious devices to which she called Lydia’s attention with pride. “I’ve taught myself lace-mending just by main strength and awkwardness,” she observed, fitting a hoop over a torn place, “and it’s not because I have any natural knack, either. If there’s anything I hate to do, it’s to sew. But these curtains do go to pieces so. I wash them myself, to be careful, but they are so fine. Still,” she cast a calculating eye on the work before her, “I’ll be through by the end of this week, anyhow—if that new Swede will only stay in the kitchen that long!”
She bent her head over her work again, holding it up to the light from time to time and straining her eyes to catch the exact thread with her almost impalpably fine needle. Lydia sat and fanned herself, looking flushed and tired from the walk in the heat, and listening in silence to Mrs. Mortimer’s account of the various happeningsof her household: “And didn’t I find that good-for-nothing negro wench had been having that man—and goodness knows how many others—right here in the house. I told Ralph I never would have another nigger—but I shall. You can’t get anything else half the time. I tell you, Lydia, the servant problem is getting to be something perfectly terrible—it’s—”
Lydia broke in to say, “Why don’t you buy new ones?”
Mrs. Mortimer paused with uplifted needle to inquire wildly, “Newwhat?”
“New curtains, instead of spending a whole week in hot weather mending those.”
“Good gracious, child! Will you ever learn anything about the cost of living! I think it’s awful, the way Father and Mother have let you grow up! Why, it would take half a month’s salary to reproduce these curtains. I got them at a great bargain—but even then I couldn’t afford them. Ralph was furious.”
“You could buy muslin curtains that would be just as pretty,” suggested Lydia.
“Why, those curtains are the only things with the least distinction in my whole parlor! Theysavethe room.”
“From what?”
“From showing that there’s almost nothing in it that cost anything, to be sure! With them at the window, it would never enter people’s heads to think that I upholstered the furniture myself, or that the pictures are—”
“Why shouldn’t they think so, if you did?” Lydia proffered this suggestion with an air of fatigued listlessness, which, her sister thought, showed that she made it “simply to be contrary.” Acting on this theory, she answered it with a dignified silence.
There was a pause. Lydia tilted her head back against the chair, and looked out of the window at the new green leaves of the piazza vine. Mrs. Mortimer’s thin, white, rather large hands drew the shining little needle back and forth with a steady, hurrying industry. It came into her mind that their respective attitudes were symbolical oftheir lives, and she thought, glancing at Lydia’s drooping depression, that it would be better for her if she were obliged to work more. “Work,” of course, meant to Marietta those forms of activity which filled her own life. “Inever have any time for notions,” she thought, the desperate, hurrying, straining routine of her days rising before her and moving her, as always, to rebellion and yet to a martyr’s pride.
Lydia stirred from her listless pose and came over to her sister, sitting down on a stool at her feet. “Marietta, dear, please let me talk to you. I’m so miserable these days—and Mother won’t let me say a word to her. She says it’s spring fever, and being engaged, and the end of the season, and everything. Please,pleasebe serious, and let me tell you about it, and see if you can’t help me.”
Her tone was so broken and imploring that Mrs. Mortimer was startled. She was, moreover, flattered that Lydia should come to her for advice rather than to her parents. She put her arm around her sister’s shoulders, and said gently, “Why, yes, dear; of course; anything—”
“Then stop sewing and listen to me—”
“But I can sew and listen, too.”
“Oh, Etta,please! That’s just the kind of thing that gets me so wild. Just a little while!”
The harassed housekeeper cast an anxious eye on the clock, but loyally stifled the sigh with which she laid her work aside. Lydia apologized for interrupting her. “But I do want you to really think of what I am saying. Everybody’s always so busy thinking aboutthings! Oh, Etta, I’m just as unhappy as I can be—and so scared when I think about—about the future.”
Mrs. Mortimer’s face softened wonderfully. She stroked Lydia’s dark hair. “Why, poor dear little sister! Yes, yes, darling, I know all about it. I felt just so myself the month before I was married, and Mother couldn’t help me a bit. Either she had forgotten all about it, or else she never had the feeling. I just had to struggle along through without anybody to help me or to say a word.Oh, I’m so glad I can help my little sister.Don’tbe afraid, dear! There’s nothing so terrible about it; nothing to be scared of. Why, once you get used to it you find it doesn’t make a bit of difference to you. Everything’s just the same as before.”
Lydia lifted a wrinkled brow of perplexity to this soothing view of matrimony. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Etta!” she cried in a bewilderment that seemed to strike her as tragic.
“Why—why, being married! Wasn’t that what you meant?”
“Oh, no!No!Nothing so definite as that! I couldn’t be afraid of Paul—why should I be? I’m just frightened of—everything—what everybody expects me to do, and to go on doing all my life, and never have any time but to just hurry faster and faster, so there’ll be more things to hurry about, and never talk about anything butthings!” She began to tremble and look white, and stopped with a desperate effort to control herself, though she burst out at the sight of Mrs. Mortimer’s face of despairing bewilderment, “Oh, don’t tell me you don’t see at all what I mean. I can’t say it! But youmustunderstand! Can’t we somehow all stop—now! And start over again! You get muslin curtains and not mend your lace ones, and Mother stop fussing about whom to invite to that party—that’s going to cost more than he can afford, Father says—it makes mesickto be costing him so much. And not fuss about having clothes just so—and Paul have our house built little and plain, so it won’t be so much work to take care of it and keep it clean. I would so much rather look after it myself than to have him kill himself making money so I can hire maids that youcan’t—you say yourself you can’t—and never having any time to see him. Perhaps if we did, other people might, and we’d all have more time to like things that make us nicer to like—”
At this perturbing jumble of suggestions, Mrs. Mortimer’s head whirled. She took hold of the arms of herchair as if to steady herself, but, conscientiously afraid of discouraging the girl’s confidence, she nodded gravely at her, as if she were considering the matter. Lydia sprang up, her eyes shining. “Oh, you dear! Youdosee what I mean! You see how dreadful it is to look forward to just that—being so desperately troubled over things that don’t really matter—and—and perhaps having children, and bringing them up to the same thing—when there must be so many things that do matter!”
To each of these impassioned statements her sister had returned an automatic nod. “I see what you mean,” she now put in, a statement which was the outward expression of a thought running, “Mercy! Dr. Melton’s right! She’s perfectly wild with nerves! We must get her married as soon as ever we can!”
Lydia went over to the window, and stood looking out as she talked, now with an excited haste, now with a dragging note of fatigue in her voice. Her need of sympathy was so great that she did a violence to the reticence she had always kept, even with herself. She wondered aloud if it were not perhaps Daniel Rankin and his queer ideas that lay at the bottom of her trouble. She added, whirling about from the window, “For mercy’s sake! don’t go and think I am in love with him, or anything! I haven’t so much as thought of him all winter! I see, now that Mother’s pointed it out to me, how domineering he really was to me last autumn. I’m just crazy about Paul, too! When I’m with him he takes my breath away! But maybe—maybe I can’t forget Mr. Rankin’sideas! You know he talked to me so much when I was first back—and if somebody would just argue me out of them, the way he did into them! I don’t believe I’d ever have thought it queer to live the way we do, just to have more things and get ahead of other people—if he hadn’t put the idea into my head. But nobody else will eventalkabout it! They laugh when I try to.”
She came over closer to the matron, and said imploringly, her voice trembling, “I don’twantto be queer, Marietta!What makes me? I don’t like to have queer ideas, different from other people’s—but every once in a while it all comes over me with a rush—what’s thegoodof all we do?”
Poor Lydia propounded this question as though it were the first time in the world’s history that it had passed the lips of humanity. Her curious, puzzled distress rose up in a choking flood to her throat, and she stopped, looking desperately at her sister.
Mrs. Mortimer nodded again, calmly, drew a long breath, and seemed about to speak. Lydia gazed at her, her cheeks flushed, her eyes bright with unshed tears—all one eager expectancy. The older woman’s eyes wandered suddenly for an instant. She darted forward, clapped her hands together once, and then in rapid succession three or four times. Then rolling triumphantly something between her thumb and forefinger, she turned to Lydia. The little operation had not taken the third of a moment, but the change in the girl’s face was so great that Mrs. Mortimer was moved to hasty, half-shamefaced, half-defiant apology. “Iwaslistening to you, Lydia! Iwaslistening! But it’s just the time of year when they lay their eggs, and I have to fight them. Last year my best furs and Ralph’s dress suit were perfectlyriddled! You know we can’t afford new.”
Lydia rose in silence and began pinning on her hat. Her sister, for all her vexation over the ending of the interview, could hardly repress a smile of superior wisdom at the other’s face of tragedy. “Don’t go, Lyddie, don’t go!” She tried to put her arms around the flighty young thing. “Oh, dear Lydia, cultivate your sense of humor! That’s all that’s the matter with you. There’s nothing else! Look here, dear, therearemoths as well as souls in the world. People have to be on the lookout for them,—for everything, don’t you see?”
“They look out formoths, all right,” said Lydia in a low tone. She submitted, except for this one speech, in a passive silence to her sister’s combination of petting andexhortation, moving quietly toward the door, and stepping evenly forward down the walk.
She had gone down to the street, leaving Mrs. Mortimer still calling remorseful apologies, practical suggestions, and laughing comments on her “tragedy way of taking the world.” At the gate, she paused, and then came back, her face like a mask under the shadow of her hat.
Marietta stood waiting for her with a quizzical expression. Under her appearance of lightly estimating Lydia’s depression as superficial, she had been sensible of a not unfamiliar qualm of doubt as to her own manner of life, an uneasy heaving of a subconscious self not always possible to ignore; but, as was her resolute custom, she forced to the front that perception of the ridiculous which she had urged on her sister. She bit her lips, to conceal a smile at Lydia’s mournful emphasis as she went on: “I forgot to tell you, Marietta, what I was sent over for. You’re to be sure to order the perforated candles. It’s the kind that has holes down the middle, so the wax doesn’t look mussy on the outside, and it’s very, very important to have the right kind of candles.”
Mrs. Mortimer, willfully amused, looked with an obstinate smile into her sister’s troubled eyes as Lydia hesitated, waiting, in spite of herself, for the understanding word.
“You’re a darling, Lyddie,” said the elder woman, kissing her again; “but you are certainlytooabsurd!”
BOOK III
A SUITABLE MARRIAGE