The Squirrel-Cage Part 26

"Well, I'm sure when I was engaged I never--"

"Oh, yes, you did; you _must_ have. They all do. It's nerves."

But a moment later she contradicted her own a.s.surance with a sigh of unresignation. "Oh, dear! why can't Lydia be just bright and wholesome and fun-loving and _natural_ like 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 just _fascinated_ by 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 rea.s.sured 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 pa.s.sed 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, hus.h.!.+ 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 gla.s.s 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, she saw 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 G.o.dfather 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 n.o.body uses those for table decoration."

"_We_ could," 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 till _their_ first 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 happenings of 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 n.i.g.g.e.r--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, "New _what_?"

"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! They _save_ the 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.