The Squirrel-Cage Part 25

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 close community 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 s.e.xes, 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, n.o.ble things I _feel_ in 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 pa.s.sed 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 rea.s.sured him, smiling; "but we must pitch in and finish it. Why, that's just it, Paul--" she was struck with the aptness of her ill.u.s.tration--"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 finis.h.i.+ng, 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 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 of glory. 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 const.i.tution, 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 for _me_."

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 G.o.dfather protested against a new undertaking. "When you get going, you _can't_ stop," 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 a charmed 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 das.h.i.+ng, 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: "_You_ may 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--_the_ Mrs. 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 s.n.a.t.c.h 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, what _have_ you 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, _makes_ it 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 so _morbid_! 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 make the 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 you _said_; it was what it _meant_!" 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 a _little_ warning. 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 pa.s.sing my lips was about her collar's being a little crooked,--and just now she told me, as though it was 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?"