An Old Chester Secret Part 8

"Well, no," said Miss Lydia.

"Lovely day," Mary said, breathing quickly; then she waved a trembling hand. "Good-by! Go on, Charles." Charles flicked his whip and off she rumbled in the very same old victoria in which her father had rolled by Miss Lydia's door in the September dusk some fifteen years before.

That night Johnny's mother said to her husband, almost in a whisper, "I--spoke to him."

He put a kindly arm around her. "Isn't he as fine a boy as you ever saw?"

After that Mrs. Robertson spoke to Johnny Smith frequently and Miss Lydia continued to lose flesh. The month that Mr. and Mrs. Robertson were to spend in Old Chester lengthened into two--into three. And while they were there wonderful things happened to Johnny in the way of presents--a lathe, a velocipede, a little engine to turn a wheel in the run at the foot of old Mr. Smith's pasture. Also, he and his aunt Lydia were invited to take supper with Mr. and Mrs. Robertson. "We'll have to ask _her_," Johnny's mother had said to Johnny's father, "because it would look queer to have him come by himself. Oh, Carl, I am beginning to hate her!"

"You mustn't, dear; she's good to him."

"_I_ want to be good to him!"

However, Miss Lydia, in her once-turned and twice-made-over blue silk, came and sat at the big table in the new Mr. Smith's dining room. She hardly spoke, but just sat there, the vein on her temple throbbing with fright, and listened to Johnny's mother pouring herself out in fatuous but pathetic flattery and in promises of all sorts of delights.

"Mary, my _dear_!" Carl Robertson protested, but he felt the pain of the poor, child-hungry woman at the other end of the table.

When Miss Lydia and Johnny walked home together in the darkness her boy said: "A fellow'd be lucky with a mother like that, wouldn't he? She'd give him everything he wanted. She'd give him a pony," Johnny said, wistfully.

"Yes," said Miss Lydia, faintly.

"Wish I had a mother who'd gimme a pony," Johnny said, with the brutal honesty of his s.e.x and years.

And Miss Lydia said again, "Yes."

"Maybe Mrs. Robertson'll gimme one," Johnny said, hopefully; "she's always giving me things!"

However, though Johnny's grat.i.tude consisted of a lively hope of benefits to come, he had some opinions of his own.

"She kisses me," he said to Miss Lydia, wrinkling up his nose. "I don't like kissing ladies."

Poor Mary couldn't help kissing him. The fresh, honest, ugly young face had become more wonderful to her than anything else on earth! But sometimes she looked at him and then at his father, and said to herself, "His eyes are not like Carl's, but his mouth is as Carl's used to be before he wore a beard; but n.o.body would know it now."

Mr. Robertson looked pleased when she told him, anxiously, that "it _was_ showing--the likeness. He has your mouth. And people might--"

"I wish to G.o.d I could own him," said Carl Robertson.

"Carl, he wants a pony! Buy one for him."

But Johnny didn't get his pony, because when Mr. Robertson told Miss Lydia he was thinking of buying a horse for his boy, she said:

"No; it isn't good for him, please, to have so many things."

"The idea of her interfering!" Mary told her husband.

CHAPTER V

"I'M going to invite him to visit us next winter," Mary said.

This was at the end of the summer, and the prospect of saying good-by to Johnny for almost a year was more than she could bear.

"My dear!" her husband protested, "if you got him under your own roof you wouldn't be able to hold on to yourself! I could, but you couldn't.

You'd tell him."

"I wouldn't! Why, I _couldn't_. Of course he can never know. . . . But I'm going to see--that woman, and tell her that I shall have him visit us."

"She'll not permit it."

"'Permit'!" Mary said. "Upon my word! My own child not '_permitted_'!"

"It's hard," Carl said, briefly.

"You want him, too," she said, eagerly; "I can see you do! Think of having him with us for a week! I could go into his room and--and pick up his clothes when he drops them round on the floor, the way boys do."

She was breathless at the thought of such happiness. "I'll tell her I'm going to have him come in the Christmas vacation. Oh, Carl"--her black, heavy eyes suddenly glittered with tears--"I want my baby," she said.

The words stabbed him; for a moment he felt that there was no price too great to pay for comfort for her. "We'll try it," he said, "but we'll have to handle Miss Lydia just right to get her to consent to it."

"'Consent'?" she said, fiercely. "Carl, I just hate her!" The long-smothered instinct of maternity leaped up and scorched her like a flame; she put her dimpled hands over her face and cried.

He tried to tell her that she wasn't just. "After all, dear, we disowned him. Naturally, she feels that he belongs to her."

But she could not be just: "He belongs to us! And she prejudices him against us. I know she does. I said to him yesterday that her clothes weren't very fashionable. I just said it for fun; and he said, 'You shut up!'"

"_What!_" Johnny's father said, amused and horrified.

"I believe she likes him to be rude to me," Mary said.

Her jealousy of Miss Lydia had taken the form of suspicion; if Johnny was impertinent, if that shabby Miss Lydia meant more to him than she did--the rich, beneficent, adoring Mrs. Robertson!--it must be because Miss Lydia "influenced" him. It was to counteract that influence that she planned the Christmas visit; if she could have him to herself, even for a week, with all the enjoyments she would give him, she was sure she could rout "that woman" from her place in his heart!

"I sha'n't ask for what is my own," she told Carl; "I'll just say I'm going to take him for the Christmas holidays. She won't dare to say he can't come!"

Yet when she went to tell Miss Lydia that Johnny was coming, her certainty that the shabby woman wouldn't "dare," faded.

Miss Lydia was in the kitchen, making cookies for her boy, and she could not instantly leave her rolling-pin when his mother knocked at the front door. Mary had not been at that door since the September night when she had crouched, sobbing, on the steps. And now again it was September, and again the evening primroses were opening in the dusk. . . . As she knocked, a breath of their subtle perfume brought back that other dusk, and for an instant she was engulfed in a surge of memory. She felt faint and leaned against the door, waiting for Miss Lydia's little running step in the hall. She could hardly speak when the door opened.

"Good--good evening," she said, in a whisper.

Miss Lydia, her frightened eyes peering at her caller from under that black frizette, could hardly speak herself. Mary was the one to get herself in hand first. "May I come in, Miss Sampson?"

"Why, yes--" said Miss Lydia, doubtfully, and dusted her floury hands together.

"I came to say," Mary began, following her back to the kitchen, "I came--"

"I'm making cookies for Johnny," Miss Lydia said, briskly, and Mary's soft hands clenched. Why shouldn't _she_ be making cookies for Johnny!