The Squirrel-Cage Part 12

"She will talk to her mother," he told himself; "her mother will know what to say." When he followed her up the stairs he was conscious chiefly that he was immeasurably tired. Melton, perhaps, had something on his side with his everlasting warnings about nervous breakdowns. He could not stand long strains as he used to do.

He fell asleep tracing out the thread of the argument presented that day by the counsel for the defense.

CHAPTER X

CASUS BELLI

Dr. Melton looked up in some surprise from his circle of lamplight as his G.o.ddaughter came swiftly into the room. "Your mother worse?" he queried sharply.

"No, no, dear G.o.dfather. I just thought I'd come over and see you for a while. I had a little headache--Marietta's back from Cleveland to-day, and she and Flora Burgess are at the house--"

"You've said enough. I'm thankful that you have this refuge to fly to from such--"

"Oh, Flora's not so bad as you make her out, the queer, kind little old dowdy--only I didn't feel like talking 'parties,' and 'who's who,'

to-night--and their being with Mother made it all right for me to leave her."

The doctor took off his eye-shade and showed his little wizened face rather paler than usual. "That's a combination that would kill _me_, and your mother not well yet--still, many folks, many tastes."

He looked at Lydia penetratingly. She had taken a chair before the soft-coal fire and was staring at it rather moodily. "Well, Lydia, my dear, and how does Endbury strike you now? Speaking of many tastes, what are yours going to be like, I wonder?"

"I wonder," she repeated absently.

"Well, at least you know whether the young man who called on you last night is to your taste?"

Lydia turned her face away and made a nervous gesture. "Oh, don't, G.o.dfather!"

"Very well, I won't," he said cheerfully, turning to his books with the instinct of one who knows his womankind.

There was a long silence, broken only by the purring of the coal. Then Lydia gave a laugh and went to sit on the arm of his chair. "Of course that was what I came to see you about," she admitted, her sensitive lips quivering into a smile that was not light-hearted; "but now I'm here I find I haven't anything to say. Perhaps you'd better give me a pink pill and send me home to forget all about everything."

Dr. Melton took her fingers and held them closely in his thin, sinewy hands. "Oh, if I could--if I only could do something for you!" He searched her face anxiously. "What did young Hollister say that makes you so troubled?"

She sat down on the edge of his writing-table and reflected. "It wasn't anything he _said_," she admitted. "He was all right, I guess. Father had scared the life out of me before he came, by sort of taking it for granted--Oh, you know--the silly way people do--"

"Yes."

"Well, Paul was as nice as could be about that, so far as words go-- He didn't say a thing embarra.s.sing or--or hard to answer, but he let me _see_--all the same! He kept saying what an immense help I'd be to an ambitious man. He said he didn't see why I shouldn't grow into the leader of Endbury society, like the Mrs. Hollister, his aunt, that he and his sister live with, you know."

"I suppose he's right," conceded the doctor, reluctantly.

"Well, while he was talking about it, it seemed all very well--you know the way he goes at things--how he makes you feel as though he were a locomotive going sixty miles an hour and you were inside the engine cab, holding on for dear life?"

Dr. Melton shook his head. "Paul has given me a great variety of sensations," he admitted, "but I can't say that he ever gave me quite this locomotive-cab illusion you speak of."

"Well, he has me, lots of times," persisted Lydia. "It's awfully exciting--you don't know where you're going, and you can't stop to think, everything tears past you so fast and your breath is so blown out of you. You feel like screaming. You forget everything else, you get so--so stirred up and excited. But after it's over there's always a time when things are flat. And this morning, and all day long, I've felt very--different about what he wants and all. I don't believe I'm very well, perhaps--or maybe--" she broke off, to say with emotion, "Oh, G.o.dfather, wouldn't it be too awful if I should turn out to be without ambition." She p.r.o.nounced the word with the reverence for its meaning that had been drilled into her all her life, and looked at Dr. Melton with troubled eyes.

He thrust his lips out with a grimace habitual to him in moments of feeling, and for an instant said nothing. When he spoke his voice broke on her name, as it had the night before when he had stood looking up at her windows. "Oh, Lydia!--Oh, my dear, I'm terribly afraid of your future!"

"I'm a little scared of it myself," she said tremulously, and hid her face on his shoulder.

She was the first to speak. "Wouldn't Marietta just scream with laughter at us?" she reminded him. "We _are_ foolish, too! There's nothing in the world you could lay your finger on. There's nothing anyhow, I guess, but nerves. I wouldn't dare breathe it to anybody else, but you always know how I'm feeling, anyhow. It's as though--here I am, grown up, and there's nothing for me to do that's worth while--even if--even if--Paul--"

The doctor took a sudden resolution. "Why don't you talk to your father, Lydia? Why don't you ask him about--"

He was cut short by Lydia's gesture of utter wonder. "_Father_? Don't you know that there's a big trial on? He couldn't tell without figuring up, if you should ask him quick, whether I'm fourteen or nineteen--or nine! Mother wouldn't let me, anyhow, even if he could have any idea of what I was driving at. She never let us bother him the least bit when there was something big happening in his lawyering. I remember that time I had pneumonia and nearly died, when I was a little girl, that she told him I had just a cold; and he never knew any different for years afterward, when I happened to say something about it. She didn't want him worried when he needed all his wits for some important business."

The doctor looked at her with frowning intensity, and then down at his papers. He seemed on the point of some forcible utterance, which he restrained with many twitchings of his mouth. Finally he got up and went to a window, staring out silently.

"I think I'll go and look up dear Aunt Julia," said Lydia.

"Very well, my dear," said the doctor over his shoulder. "She's in her room, I think." In exactly the same mild tone, he added, "d.a.m.nation!"

"What did you say?" asked Lydia.

He turned toward her, and took up a book from the table. "I said nothing, dear Lydia--I've nothing to say, I find."

Lydia broke into a light, mocking laugh--the doctor's volubility was an old joke--and began to speak, when a woman's voice called, "Oh, Marius, here's Mr.---- why, Lydia, how did you get in without my seeing you?"

She entered the room as she spoke--a middle-aged woman, with large blue eyes and graying fair hair, who evidently did her duty by the prevailing styles in dress with a comfortable moderation of effort. Lydia's mother, as the sister of Mrs. Sandworth's long-dead husband, thought it necessary, from time to time, to endeavor to stir her sister-in-law up to a keener sense of what was due the world in the matter of personal appearance; but Mrs. Sandworth, born a Melton, had the irritating unconcern for social problems of that distinguished Kentucky family. She cared only to please her brother Marius, she said, and he never cared what she had on, but only what was in her mind--a remark that had once caused Judge Emery to say, in a fit of exasperation with her wandering wits, that if she ever had as little on as she had in her mind, he guessed Melton would sit up and take notice.

Lydia now rushed at her aunt, exclaiming, "Oh, Aunt Julia, how _good_ you do look to me! The office door was open and I slipped in that way, without ringing the bell."

"It's four years old, and never been touched, not even the sleeves,"

said the other deprecatingly.

Her brother laughed. "Who did you say was here--Oh, it's you, Rankin; come in, come in."

The newcomer was half-way across the room before he saw Lydia. He stopped, with a look of extreme pleasure and surprise, which Lydia answered with a frank smile.

"Why, have you met my niece?" asked Mrs. Sandworth, looking from one to the other.

"Oh, yes; Mr. Rankin's my oldest new friend in Endbury. I met him the first day I was back."

"And when I set up the newel-post--"

"And I ran on to his house by accident the day Marietta and I were out with little Pete, when it rained and I borrowed his overcoat and umbrella--"

"And then I had to call to take them away, of course--"

They intoned their confessions like a gay antiphonal chant. A bright color had come up in Lydia's cheeks. She looked very sunny and good-humored, like a cheerful child, an expression which up to that year had been habitual to her. Dr. Melton looked at her without speaking.

"So, you see," she concluded, "not to speak of several other times--we're very well acquainted."

"Well, Marius! Did you ever!" Mrs. Sandworth appealed to her brother.