The Squirrel-Cage Part 33

All this she said, not complainingly, but in her usual twittering manner of imparting information, as though it were an incident of a five-o'clock tea, but Lydia felt a pang of remorse for her usual thoughtless att.i.tude of exasperated hilarity over Miss Burgess'

peculiarities. She noticed that the kind, vacuous face was beginning to look more than middle-aged, and that the scanty hair above it was whitening rapidly.

"Why, bring your mother out here for the day, why don't you, any time!"

she said impulsively. "I can't have any social engagements, you know, the way I am, and Paul's away a good deal of the time, and 'Stas.h.i.+e and I can get you tea and eggs and toast, at least. I'd love to have her.

Now, any morning that threatens heat, just you telephone you're both coming to spend the day."

She felt quite strange at the thought that she had never seen the mother of this devoted, unselfish, affectionate, lifelong acquaintance.

But Miss Burgess, though moved almost to tears at Lydia's "kind thoughtfulness," clung steadfastly to her standards. She had always known that she must not presume on her "exceptional opportunities for acquaintance with Endbury's social leaders," she told Lydia, nor take advantage of any inadvertent kindness of theirs. Her mother would be the first one to blame her if she did; her mother knew the world very well.

She went away, murmuring broken thanks and protestations of devotion.

Lydia looked after her, disappointed. She had been quite stirred by the hope of giving some pleasure. There was little to break the long, lonely, monotonous expectancy of her life. And yet nothing surprised those who knew her better than her equable physical poise during this time of trial and discomfort. Everyone had expected so high-strung a creature to be "half-wild with nerves." But Lydia, although she continued to say occasional disconcerting things, seemed on the whole to be gaining maturity and firmness of purpose. Paul was away a great deal that summer and she had many long, solitary hours to pa.s.s--a singular contrast to the feverish hurry of the winter "season." Her old habit of involuntary questioning scrutiny came back and it is possible that her motto of "action at all costs" was pa.s.sed under a closer mental review than during the winter; but though she went frequently to see her G.o.dfather and Mrs. Sandworth, she did not break her silence on whatever thoughts were occupying her mind, except in one brief, questioning explosion. This was on the occasion of her last visit to Endbury before her confinement, a few days after her call from Flora Burgess. It had occurred to her that they might know something about the reporter's family and she stopped in after her shopping to inquire.

She found her aunt and her G.o.dfather sitting in the deeply shaded, old grape arbor in their back yard; Dr. Melton with a book, as always, Mrs.

Sandworth ungirdled and expansive, tinkling an ice-filled cup and crying out upon the weather.

"Sit down, Lydia, for mercy's sake, and cool off. Yes; we know all about her; she's a patient of Marius'. Have some lemonade! Isn't it fearful!

And Marius keeps reading improving books! It makes me so much hotter!

She's English, you know."

Dr. Melton looked up from his book to remark, with his usual judicial moderation, "I could strangle that old harridan with joy. She has been one of the most pernicious influences the women of this town have ever had."

"Flora Burgess' mother? Why, I never heard of her in the world until the other day."

"You can't smell sewer gas," said the doctor briefly.

Mrs. Sandworth laughed. "Marius almost killed himself last winter to pull her through pneumonia. He worked over her night and day. Oh, Marius is a great deal better than he talks--strangle--!"

"I'm a fool, if that's what you mean," said the doctor.

"What is the matter with Flora Burgess' mother?" asked Lydia.

"She's been a plague spot in this town for years--that lower-middle-cla.s.s old Briton, with her beastly ideas of caste--ever since she began sending out her daughter to preach her d.a.m.nable gospel to defenseless Endbury homes."

"Marius--my _dear_!" chided Mrs. Sandworth--"The Gospel--d.a.m.nable! You forget yourself!"

The doctor did not laugh. "They're the ones," he went on, "who first started this idiotic idea of there being a social stigma attached to living in any but just such parts of town."

"You live in just such a part of town yourself," said Lydia.

"My good-for-nothing, pretentious, fas.h.i.+onable patients wouldn't come to me if I didn't."

"Why do you have to have that kind of patients?"

Occasionally, of late, with her G.o.dfather, Lydia had displayed a certain uncompromising directness, rather out of character with her usual gentleness, which the doctor found very disconcerting. He was silent now.

Mrs. Sandworth's greater simplicity saw no difficulties in the way of an answer. "Because, Lydia, he's one of the Kentucky Meltons, and because, as I said, he talks a great deal worse than he is."

"Because I am a fool," said the doctor again. This time he flushed as he spoke.

"He doesn't like things common around him," went on Mrs. Sandworth, "any more than any gentleman does. And as for strangling old Mrs. Burgess, what good would that do? It can't be she who's influencing Endbury, because all it's trying to do is to be just like every other town in Ohio."

"In the Union!" amended Dr. Melton grimly. He subsided after this into one of his fidgety, grimacing, finger-nail-gnawing reveries. He was wondering whether he dared tell Lydia of a talk he had had that morning with her father. After a look at Lydia's flushed, tired face, he decided that he would better not; but as the two women fell into a discussion of the layette, the conversation, Mr. Emery's nervous voice, his sharp, impatient gestures, came back to him vividly. He looked graver and graver, as he did after each visit to his old friend, and after each fruitless exhortation to "go slow and rest more." Mr. Emery was in the midst of a very important trial and, as he had very reasonably reminded his physician, this was not a good time to relax his grasp on things.

"Now I'm back in practice, in compet.i.tion with younger men, I _can't_ sag back! It's absurd to ask it of me."

"You were a fool to go back into practice at your age."

"A fool! I've doubled my income."

"Yes; and your arteries--look here, suppose you were dead. The bar would get along without you, wouldn't it?"

"But I'm not dead," the other truthfully opposed to this fallacious supposition, and turned again to his papers.

The doctor shut his medicine case with a spiteful snap. "Don't fool yourself that it's devotion to the common weal that drives you ahead!

Don't make a pretty picture of yourself as working to the last in heroic service of your fellow-man! You know, as I know, that if you dropped out this minute, American jurisprudence would continue on its triumphant, misguided way quite as energetically as now."

Mr. Emery looked up, dropping for once the mask of humorous tolerance with which he was accustomed to hide any real preoccupation of his own.

"Look here, Melton, I'm too nervous to stand much fooling these days. If you want to know the reason why I'm going on, I'll tell you. I've got to. I need the money."

"Gracious powers! Did you get caught in that B. and R. slump?"

The Judge smiled a little bitterly. "No; I haven't lost any money--for a very good reason. I never was ahead enough to have any to lose. Haven't you any idea of what the cost of living the way we do--"

Dr. Melton interrupted him, wild-eyed: "Why, Nat Emery! You have yourself and your wife to feed and clothe and shelter--and you tell me that costs so much that you can't stop working when there's--"

"Oh, go away, Melton; you make me tired!" The Judge made a weary gesture of dismissal. "You're always talking like a child, or a preacher, about how things _might_ be! You know what an establishment like ours costs to keep up, as well as I do. I'm in it--we've sort of gradually got in deeper and deeper, the way folks do--and it would take a thousand times more out of me to break loose than to go on. You're an old fuss, anyhow.

I'm all right. Only for the Lord's sake leave me quiet now."

The doctor s.h.i.+vered and put his hand over his eyes as he remembered how, to his physician's eye, the increasing ill health of his old friend gleamed lividly from his white face.

Mrs. Sandworth brought him back to the present with an astonished "Good gracious! how anybody can even _pretend_ to s.h.i.+ver on a day like this!"

She added: "Look here, Marius, are you going to sit there and moon all the afternoon? Here's Lydia going already."

Seasoned to his eccentricities as she was, she was startled by his answer. "Julia," he said solemnly, "did you ever consider how many kinds of murder aren't mentioned in the statute books?"

"Marius! What ideas! Remember Lydia!"

"Oh, I remember Lydia!" he said soberly. He went to lay a hand fondly on her shoulder. "Are you really going, my dear? I'll walk along to the waiting-room with you."

"Don't talk her to death!" cried Mrs. Sandworth after them.

"I won't say a word," he answered.

It was a promise that he almost literally kept. He was in one of the exaggeratedly humble moods which alternated with his florid, talkative, c.o.c.k-sure periods.

Lydia, too, was quite thoughtful and subdued. They descended in a complete silence the dusty street, blazing in the late afternoon sun, and pa.s.sed into the inferno of a crowded city square in midsummer. As they stood before the waiting-room, Lydia asked suddenly: "G.o.dfather, how can we, any of us, do any better?"

"G.o.d knows!" he said, with a gesture of impotence, and went his way.