The Squirrel-Cage Part 29

She tried to revert to the question once or twice later, but now Paul alternated between shaming her laughingly for her gullibility and making fun of her "countrified" interest in the affairs of her servants. "But, Paul, Mrs. O'Hern says that Patsy doesn't _want_ to drink and--and go to those awful houses--his father died of it--only Ellen makes him, by--"

Paul tried to close the discussion with a little impatience at her attempt to press the matter. "Every Irish boy drinks more or less, you little goose. That's nothing! Of course it's too bad to have you _see_ a drunken man, but it's nothing so tragic. If he didn't drink here, he would somewhere else. The only thing we have to complain about that I can see, is having the cook's followers drunk--but Ellen's such a miracle of competence we must overlook that. As for the rest of Mrs.

O'Hern's dirty stories, they're spite work evidently." As Lydia looked up at him, her face still anxious and drawn, he ended finally, "Good gracious, Lydia, don't you suppose I know--that my experience of the world has taught me more about human nature than you know? You act to me as though you trusted your washwoman's view of things more than your husband's. And now what you want to do, anyhow, is to get some rest. You hop into bed, little rabbit, and go to sleep. Don't wait for me; I've got a lot of figuring to do."

When he went to bed, a couple of hours later, Lydia was lying quietly with closed eyes, and he did not disturb her; but afterward he woke out of a sound sleep and sat up with a sense that something was wrong. He listened. There was not a sound in the room or in the house. Apparently Lydia was not wakened by his startled movement. She lay in a profound immobility.

But something about her very motionlessness struck a chill to his heart.

Women in her condition sometimes had seizures in the night, he had heard. With a shaking hand, he struck a match and leaned over her. He gave a loud, shocked exclamation to see that her eyes were open, steady and fixed, like wide, dark pools. He threw the match away, and took her in his arms with a fond murmur of endearments. "Why, poor little girl!

Do you lie awake and worry about what's to come?"

Lydia drew a painful breath. "Yes," she said; "I worry a great deal about what's to come."

He kissed her gently, ardently, gently again. "You mustn't do that, darling! You're all right! Melton said there wasn't one chance in a thousand of anything but just the most temporary illness, without any complications. It won't be so bad--it'll be soon over, and think what it means to us--dearest--dearest--dearest!"

Lydia lay quiet in his arms. She had been still so long that he thought her asleep, when she said, in a whisper: "I hope it won't be a girl!"

CHAPTER XIX

LYDIA'S NEW MOTTO

Lydia's two or three big receptions, of which her mother had spoken with so casual a confidence, came off, while not exactly with nonchalant ease, still, on the whole, creditably. It is true that Dr. Melton had stormed at Lydia one sunny day in spring, finding her bent over her desk, addressing invitations.

"It's April, child!" he cried, "April! The crocuses are out and the violets are almost here--and, what is more important, your day of trial gets closer with every tick of the clock. Come outdoors and take a walk with me."

"Oh, I can't!" Lydia was aghast at the idea, looking at a mountain of envelopes before her.

"Here! I'll help you finish those, and then we'll--"

"No, no, _no_!" In Lydia's negation was a touch of the irritation that was often during these days in her att.i.tude toward her G.o.dfather. "I can't! Please don't tease me to! The curtains to the spare room have to be put up, and the bed draperies somehow fixed. A stray dog got in there when he was wet and muddy and went to sleep on my best lace bedspread."

Dr. Melton had not practiced for years among Endbury ladies without having some knowledge of them and a corresponding readiness of mind in meeting the difficulties they declared insurmountable. "I'll buy you a white ma.r.s.eilles bedspread on our way back from the walk," he offered gravely.

"Oh, I've got plenty of plain white ones," she admitted incautiously, "but they don't go with the scheme of the room--and the first reception's only two days off."

Dr. Melton fixed her with an ironical and melancholy smile: "Now, Lydia, I did think you had it in you to realize that your health and the strength of your child are worth more than--"

Lydia sprang up and confronted him with an apparent anger of face and accent that was contradicted by her trembling chin and suffused eyes.

"Oh, go away!" she commanded him, shaking her head and motioning him off. "Don't talk so to me! I can't help it--what I do! Everything's a part of the whole system, and I'm in that up to my neck--you know I am.

If that's right, why, everything's all right, just the way everybody thinks it is. And if it's wrong--" She caught her breath, and turned back to her desk. "If it's wrong, what good would be done by little dribbling compromises of an occasional walk." She sat down wearily, and leaned her head on her hand. "I just wish you wouldn't keep me so stirred up--when I'm trying so _hard_ to settle down!"

Dr. Melton seemed to divine perfectly the significance of this incoherent outbreak. He thrust out his lips in his old grimace that denoted emotion, and observed the speaker in a frowning silence. When she finished, he nodded: "You are right, Lydia, I do no good." He twirled his hat about between his fingers, looking absently into the crown, and added, "But you must forgive me, I love you very dearly."

Lydia ran over to him, conscience-stricken. He took her embrace and remorseful kiss quietly. "Don't be sorry, Lydia dear. You have just shown me, as in a flash of lightning, how much more powerful a grasp on reality you have than I."

Lydia recoiled from him with an outcry of exasperation. "I! Why, I'm almost an idiot! I haven't a grasp on anything! I can't see an inch before my nose. I'm in a perfect nightmare of perplexity all the time because I can't make out what I'm driving at--or ought to--"

She went on more quietly, with a reasoning air: "Only look here, G.o.dfather, it came over me the other night, when I couldn't sleep, that perhaps what's the trouble with me is that I'm _lazy_! I believe that's it! I don't want to work the way Marietta does, and Mother does, and even Madeleine does over her dresses and parties and things. It must be I'm a s.h.i.+rk, and expect to have an easier time than most people. That _must_ be it. What else can it be?"

The doctor made no protest against this theory, taking himself off in a silence most unusual with him. Lydia did not notice this; nor did she in the next two or three months remark that her G.o.dfather took quite literally and obeyed scrupulously her exhortation to leave her in peace.

She was in the grasp of this new idea. It seemed to her that in phrasing it she had hit upon the explanation of her situation which she had been so long seeking, and it was with a resolve to scourge this weakness out of her life that she now faced the future.

She found a satisfaction in the sweeping manner in which this new maxim could be applied to all the hesitations that had confused her. All her meditations heretofore had brought her nothing but uncertainty, but this new catchword of incessant activity drove her forward too resistlessly to allow any reflections as to whether she were going in the right direction. She yielded herself absolutely to that ideal of conduct which had been urged upon her all her life, and she found, as so many others find, oblivion to the problems of the spirit in this resolute refusal to recognize the spirit. It was perhaps during these next months of her life that she most nearly approximated the Endbury notion of what she should be.

She had yielded to Paul on the subject of the cook not only because of her timid distrust of her own inexperienced judgment but because of her intense reaction from the usual Endbury motto of "Husbands, hands off!"

She had wanted Paul to be interested in the details of the house as she hoped to know and be interested in what concerned him, and when he showed his interest in a request she could not refuse it. She hoped that she had made a good beginning for the habit of taking counsel with each other on all matters. But she thought and hoped and reflected very little during these days. She was enormously, incredibly busy, and on the whole, she hoped, successfully so. The receptions, at least, went off very well, everybody said.

Dr. Melton did not see his G.o.ddaughter again until he came with Mrs.

Sandworth to the last of these events. She was looking singularly handsome at that time, her color high, her eyes very large and dark, almost black, so dilated were the pupils. With the nicety of observation of a man who has lived much among women, the doctor noticed that her costume, while effective, was not adjusted with the exquisite feeling for finish that always pervaded the toilets of her mother and sister.

Lydia was trying with all her might to make herself over, but with the best will in the world she could not attain the prayerful concentration on the process of attiring herself, characteristic of the other women of her family.

"She forgot to put the barrette in her back hair," murmured Mrs.

Sandworth mournfully, as she and her brother emerged from the hand-shake of the last of the ladies a.s.sisting in receiving, "and there are two hooks of her cuff unfastened, and her collar's crooked. But I don't dare breathe a word to her about it. Since that time before her marriage when she--"

"Yes, yes, yes," her brother cut her short; "don't bring up that tragic episode again. I'd succeeded in forgetting it."

"You can call it tragic if you like," commented Mrs. Sandworth, looking about for an escape from the stranded isolation of guests who have just been pa.s.sed along from the receiving line; "but what it was all about was more than I ever could--" Her eyes fell again on Lydia, and she lost herself in a sweet pa.s.sion of admiration and pride. "Oh, isn't she the loveliest thing that ever drew the breath of life! Was there ever anybody else that could look so as though--as though they still had dew on them!"

She went on, with her bold inconsequence: "There is a queer streak in her. Sometimes I think she doesn't care--" She stopped to gaze at a striking costume just entering the room.

"What doesn't she care about?" asked the doctor.

Mrs. Sandworth was concentrating on sartorial details as much of her mind as was ever under control at one time, and, called upon for a development of her theory, was even more vague than usual. "Oh, I don't know--about what everybody cares about."

"She's likely to learn, if it's at all catching," conjectured the doctor grimly, looking around the large, handsome room. An impalpable effluvium was in the air, composed of the scent of flowers, the odor of delicate food, the sounds of a discreetly small orchestra behind palms in the hallway, the rustling of silks, and the pleasurable excitement of the crowd of prosperous-looking women, pleasantly elated by the opportunity for exhibiting their best toilets.

"To think of its being our little Lydia who's the center of all this!"

murmured Mrs. Sandworth, her loving eyes glistening with affectionate pride. "It really is a splendid scene, isn't it, Marius?"

"If they were all gagged, it might be. Lord! how they yell!"

"Oh, at a _reception_!" Mrs. Sandworth's accent denoted that the word was an explanation. "People have to, to make themselves heard."

"And why should they be so eager to accomplish that?" inquired the doctor. "Listen!"

Standing as they were, tightly pressed in between a number of different groups, their ears were a.s.saulted by a disjointed ma.s.s of stentorian conversation that gave a singular illusion as if it all came from one inconceivably voluble source, the individuality of the voices being lost in the screaming enunciation which, as Mrs. Sandworth had pointed out, was a prerequisite of self-expression under the circ.u.mstances.

They heard: "--_For over a month and the sleeves were too see you again at Mrs. Elliott's I'm pouring there from four I've got to dismiss one with little plum-colored bows all along five dollars a week and the was.h.i.+ng out, and still impossible! I was there myself all the time and they neither of thirty-five cents a pound for the most ordinary ferns and red carnations was all they had, and we thought it rather skimpy under the brought up in one big braid and caught down with at the Peterson's they were pink and white with_--"

"_Oh, no, Madeleine! that was at the Burlingame's_." Mrs. Sandworth took a running jump into the din and sank from her brother's sight, vociferating: "_The Petersons had them of old-gold, don't you remember, with little_--"

The doctor, worming his way desperately through the ma.s.ses of femininity, and resisting all attempts to engage him in the vocal fray, emerged at length into the darkened hall where the air was, as he told himself in a frenzied flight of the imagination, less like a combination of a menagerie and a perfume shop. Here, in a quiet corner, sat Lydia's father, alone. He held in one hand a large platter piled high with wafer-like sandwiches, which he was consuming at a Gargantuan rate, and as he ate he smiled to himself.

"Well, Mr. Ogre," said the doctor, sitting down beside him with a gasp of relief; "let a wave-worn mariner into your den, will you?"