An Old Chester Secret Part 2

Doctor Lavendar looked at his two gold pieces thoughtfully. "Lydia," he said, "it's like walking on a tight rope." Then he chuckled, dismissed the subject, and spread out his eagles on the table. "Look at 'em!

Aren't they pretty? You see how glad Mary's young man was to get her.

I'll go halves with you!"

Her recoil as he handed her one of the gold pieces made him give her a keen look; but all she said was: "Oh _no_! I wouldn't touch it!" Then she seemed to get herself together: "I don't need it, thank you, sir,"

she said.

When she went away Doctor Lavendar, looking after her, thrust out his lower lip. "_Lydia_ not 'need' an eagle?" he said. "How long since?" And after a while he added, "Now, what on earth--?"

Old Chester, too, said, "What on earth--?" when, in December, Miss Lydia turned the key in her front door and, with her carpetbag and bandbox, took the morning stage for Mercer.

And we said it again, a few weeks later, when Mrs. Barkley received a letter in which Miss Lydia said she had been visiting friends in Indiana and had been asked by them to take care of a beautiful baby boy, and she was bringing him home with her, and she hoped Mrs. Barkley would give her some advice about taking care of babies, for she was afraid she didn't know much--("'Much'?" Mrs. Barkley snorted. "She knows as much about babies as a wildcat knows about tatting!")--and she was, as ever, Mrs. Barkley's affectionate Lyddy.

The effect of this letter upon Old Chester can be imagined. Mrs. Drayton said, "What I would like to know is, _whose baby is it_?"

Mrs. Barkley said in a deep ba.s.s: "Where will Lyddy get the money to take care of it? As for advising her, I advise her to leave it on the doorstep of its blood relations!"

Doctor Lavendar said: "Ho, hum! Do you remember what the new Mr. Smith said about her when she gave her party? Well, I agree with him!" Which (if you recall Mr. Smith's exact words) was really a shocking thing for a minister of the gospel to say!

Mrs. William King said, firmly, that she called it murder, to intrust a child to Miss Lydia Sampson. "She'll hold it upside down and never know the difference," said Mrs. King; and then, like everybody else, she asked Mrs. Drayton's question "Whose baby is it?"

There were many answers, mostly to the effect that Lydia was so scatterbrained--as witness her "party," and her blue-silk dress, and her broken engagements, etc., etc., that she was perfectly capable of letting anybody shove a foundling into her arms! Mrs. Drayton's own answer to her question was that the whole thing looked queer--"not that I would imply anything against poor Lydia's character, but it looks _queer_; and if you count back--"

Miss Lydia's reply--for of course the question was asked her as soon as she and the baby, and the bandbox and the carpetbag got off the stage one March afternoon--Miss Lydia's answer was brief:

"A friend's."

She did emerge from her secrecy far enough to say to Mrs. Barkley that she was to receive "an honorarium" for the support of the little darling. "Of course I won't spend a cent of it on myself," she added, simply.

"Is it a child of shame?" said Mrs. Barkley, sternly.

Miss Lydia's shocked face and upraised, protesting hands, answered her: "My baby's parents were married persons! After they--pa.s.sed on, a friend of theirs intrusted the child to me."

"When did they die?"

Miss Lydia reflected. "I didn't ask the date."

"Well, considering the child's age, the mother's death couldn't have been very long ago," Mrs. Barkley said, dryly.

And Miss Lydia said, in a surprised way, as if it had just occurred to her: "Why, no, of course not! It was an accident," she added.

"For the mother?"

"For both parents," said Miss Sampson, firmly. And that was all Old Chester got out of her.

"Well," said Mrs. Drayton, "_I_ am always charitable, but uncharitable persons might wonder. . . . It was last May, you know, that that Rives man deserted her at the altar."

"Only fool persons would wonder anything like that about Lydia Sampson!"

said Mrs. Barkley, fiercely. . . . But even in Old Chester there were two or three fools, so for their especial benefit Mrs. Barkley, who had her own views about Miss Sampson's wisdom in undertaking the care of a baby, but who would not let that Drayton female speak against her, spread abroad the information that Miss Lydia's baby's parents, who had lived out West, had both been killed at the same time in an accident.

"What kind?"

"Carriage, I believe," said Mrs. Barkley; "but they left sufficient money to support the child. So," she added, "Old Chester need have no further anxiety about Lydia's poverty. Their names? Oh--Smith."

She had the presence of mind to tell Lydia she had named the baby, and though Miss Lydia gave a little start--for she had thought of some more distinguished name for her charge--"Smith," and the Western parents and the carriage accident pa.s.sed into history.

CHAPTER II

DURING the first year that the "Smith" baby lived outside the brick wall of Mr. Smith's place, the iron gates of the driveway were not opened, because business obliged Mr. Smith to be in Europe. (Oh, said Old Chester, so that was why Mary's wedding had to be hurried up?) When he returned to his native land he never, as he drove past, looked at the youngster playing in Miss Lydia's dooryard. Then once Johnny (he was three years old) ran after his ball almost under the feet of the Smith horses, and as he was pulled from between the wheels his grandfather couldn't help seeing him.

"Don't do that tomfool thing again!" the old man shouted, and Johnny, clasping his recovered ball, grinned at him.

"He sinks Johnny 'f'aid," the little fellow told Miss Lydia.

A month or two afterward Johnny threw a stone at the victoria and involuntarily Mr. Smith glanced in the direction from which it came.

But, of course, human nature being like story books, he did finally notice his grandson. At intervals he spoke to Miss Lydia, and when Johnny was six years old he even stopped one day long enough to give the child a quarter. Mr. Smith had aged very much after his daughter's marriage--and no wonder, Old Chester said, for he must be lonely in that big house, and Mary never coming to see him! Such behavior on the part of a daughter puzzled Old Chester. We couldn't understand it--unless it was that Mr. Smith didn't get along with his son-in-law? And Mary, of course, didn't visit her father because a dutiful wife always agrees with her husband! A sentiment which places Old Chester chronologically.

The day that Mr. Smith bestowed the quarter upon his grandson he spoke of his daughter's "dutifulness" to Miss Lydia. Driving toward his house, he overtook two trudging figures, pa.s.sed them by a rod or two, then called to the coachman to stop. "I'll walk," he said, briefly, and waited, in the dust of his receding carriage until Miss Lydia and her boy reached him. Johnny was trudging along, pulling his express wagon, which was full of apples picked up on the path below an apple tree that leaned over the girdling wall of the Smith place.

As Miss Lydia approached her landlord her heart came up in her throat; it always did when she saw him, because she remembered the Olympian thunders he had loosed on that awful night six years ago.

"How do?" said Mr. Smith. His dark eyes under bristling, snow-white eyebrows blazed at her. He didn't notice the little boy.

"How do you do?" said Miss Lydia, in a small voice. She looked tousled and breathless and rather spotted, and so little that Mr. Smith must have felt he could blow her away if he wanted to. Apparently he didn't want to. He only said:

"You--ah, never hear from--ah, my daughter, I suppose, Miss Sampson?"

"No, sir," said Miss Lydia.

"She doesn't care to visit me without her husband, and I won't have him under my roof!" His lip lifted for an instant and showed his teeth. "I see her when I go to Philadelphia, and she writes me duty letters occasionally, but she never mentions--"

"Doesn't she?" said Miss Lydia.

"I don't, either. But I just want to say that if you ever need any--ah, extra--"

"I don't, thank you."

Then, reluctantly, the flashing black eyes looked down at Johnny.

"Doesn't resemble--anybody? Well, young man!"

"Say, 'How do you do?' Johnny," Miss Lydia commanded, faintly.

"How do?" Johnny said, impatiently. He was looking over his apples and, discovering some bruised ones, frowned and threw them away.

"Where did you get your apples?" said Mr. Smith.