Lydia of the Pines Part 49

Kent would never have thought of this, Lydia said to herself with a vague pang. When they had finished Billy gravely took Lydia's coat from the hook and said, "Come, woman, and walk in the gloaming with your humble servant."

Lydia giggled and obeyed. There was still snow, in the hollows but the road was clear and frozen hard. They walked briskly till a rise in the road gave them a view of the lake and a scarlet rift in the sky where the sun had sunk in a bank of clouds.

"Now, Lydia," said Billy, "answer my question. Are you for or against Indian graft?"

"I just won't take sides," announced Lydia, obstinately.

Billy stepped round in front of the young girl and put both hands gently on her shoulders. "Look at me, Lydia," he said. "You have to take sides! You can't escape it. You mean too much to too many of us men. You've got to take a perfectly clear stand on questions like this. It means too much to America for you not to. Your influence counts, in that way if in no other, don't you see."

Lydia's throat tightened. "I won't take sides against Mr. Levine," she repeated.

"Do you mean that you don't want me to expose Marshall?" asked Billy.

"You've no right to ask me that." Lydia's voice was cross.

"But I have. Lydia, though you don't want it, my life is yours. No matter whether we can ever be anything else, we are friends, aren't we, friends in the deepest sense of the word,--aren't we, Lydia?"

Lydia stared at Billy in silence. Perhaps it was the glow from the west that helped to deepen and soften his gray eyes, for there was nothing searching in them now. There was a depth and loyalty in them and a something besides that reminded her vaguely of the way John Levine looked at her. A crow cawed faintly from the woods and the wind fluttered Billy's hair.

Friendship! Something very warm and high and fine entered Lydia's heart.

"Yes, we are friends. Billy," she said slowly. "But oh, Billy, don't make me decide that!"

"Lydia, you must! You can't have a friend and not share his problems and you can't live in a community and not share its problems, if you're going to be worth anything to the world."

"But if the problems really meant anything to you," protested Lydia, "you wouldn't depend on some girl to shove you into them."

"But men do. They are built that way. Not _some_ girl but _the girl_.

Every great cause was fought for some woman! Oh, Lydia, Lydia!"

"Billy," Lydia looked away from him to the lake, "you'll have to let me think about it. You see, it's deciding my att.i.tude toward all my friends, even toward Dad. And I hadn't intended ever to decide."

"And will you tell me, to-morrow, or next day, Lydia?"

"I'll tell you as soon as I decide," she answered.

Amos brought John Levine home with him for supper. It seemed to Lydia that Levine never had been dearer to her than he was that evening.

After supper, they drew up around the base burner in the old way, while the two men smoked. Lizzie sat rocking and rubbing her rheumatism-racked old hands and Adam, who snored worse as he grew old, wheezed with his head baking under the stove. Levine did not talk of the Indians, to Lydia's relief, but of Washington politics. As the evening drew to a close, and Amos went out to his chickens as usual after Lizzie had gone to bed, John turned to Lydia.

"What are you reading, these days, young Lydia?"

"Browning--'The Ring and the Book,'" replied Lydia.

John shook his head. "Really grown up, aren't you, Lydia? Do you enjoy being a young lady?"

"Yes, I do, only I miss the old days when I saw so much of you."

"Do you, my dear?" asked Levine, eagerly. "In what ways do you miss me?"

"Oh, every way! No one will ever understand me as you do."

"Oh, I don't know. There are Billy and Kent."

Lydia shook her head, though Billy's face in the moonlight after the graduation party, returned unexpectedly to her memory as she did so.

"There'll never be any one like you." Then moved by a sudden impulse she leaned toward him and said, "No matter what happens, you will always know that I love you, won't you, Mr. Levine?"

John looked at the wistful face, keenly. "Why, what could happen, young Lydia?"

"Oh, lots of things! I'm grown up now and--and I have to make decisions about the rightness and the wrongness of things. But no matter what I decide, _nothing_ can change my love for you."

"Lydia, come here," said Levine, abruptly.

In the old way, Lydia came to his side and he pulled her down to the arm of his chair. For a moment they sat in silence, his arm about her, her cheek against his hair, staring into the glowing stove.

"When you were just a little tot," said Levine at last, "you were full of gumption and did your own thinking. And I've been glad to see you keep the habit. Always make your own decisions, dear. Don't let me or any one else decide matters of conscience for you. 'To thine own self be true and it must follow as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.' Eh, little girl?"

He rose as he heard Amos coming in the back door, and with his hand under Lydia's chin, he looked long and earnestly into her eyes. Then as Billy had done earlier in the evening, he sighed, "Oh, Lydia!

Lydia!" and turned away.

CHAPTER XV

THE INVESTIGATION BEGINS

"Nothing is so proud or so brave as the young pine when it first tops the rest of the forest."--_The Murmuring Pine_.

For several days Lydia was unhappy and absent-minded. At first, in her thoughts she was inclined to blame Billy for forcing this turmoil of mind on her. But, a little later, she admitted to herself that for years, something within her had been demanding that she take a stand on the Indian question something to which Charlie Jackson and Billy had appealed, something which Kent and John Levine had ignored. Yet neither Charlie nor Billy had really forced her to a decision.

Lydia was grown up. All her young life she had carried the responsibilities and had faced the home tragedies that come usually only to grown folk. Now, in her young womanhood it was natural and inevitable that she should turn to the larger responsibilities of the living world about her in order to satisfy the larger needs of her maturity.

Yet, still old affection fought with new clarity of vision. Old loyalty quarreled with new understanding. Bit by bit she went over her thinking life, beginning with her first recollection of Charlie Jackson in the cla.s.s in Civil Government, and all that was feminine and blind devotion in her fought desperately with all that education and her civic-minded forefathers had given her.

Coming home from her last recitation, one mild afternoon, she stopped at the gate and looked up into the pine tree. Its scent carried her back to the cloistered wood on the reservation and once more the desire for the soil was on her. She leaned against the giant tree trunk and looked out over the lake, steel blue and cold in the March sunshine.

And there with the lowing of the Norton herds and the hoa.r.s.e call of the crows mingling with the soft voice of the pine and the lapping of the lake, she made her decision. For clearly as though the pine had put it into words, something said to Lydia that it was not her business to decide whether or not the Indians deserved to live. It was her business to recognize that in their method of killing the Indians, the whites had been utterly dishonorable. That her refusing to take a stand could not exonerate them. History would not fail to record the black fact against her race that, a free people, the boasted vanguard of human liberty, Americans had first made a race dependent, then by fraud and faithlessness, by cruelty and debauchery, were utterly destroying it. And finally, that by closing her eyes to the facts, because of her love for Levine, she was herself sharing the general taint.

It was Lydia's first acknowledgment of her responsibility to America, and it left her a little breathless and trembling. She turned back to the road and made her way swiftly to the Norton place. She did not go into the house, but down the lane where she could see Billy putting up the bars after the cattle. He waited for her, leaning against the rails.

"Billy," she said, panting, her cheeks bright and her yellow hair blowing, "I'm against the Indian grafting."

Billy put out his hand, solemnly, and the two shook hands. For all Billy was four years older than Lydia, they both were very, very young.

So young that they believed that they could fight single-handed the whole world of intrigue and greed in which their little community was set. So young that they trembled and were filled with awe at the vast importance of their own dreams. And yet, futile as they may seem, it is on young decisions such as these that the race creeps upward!

"What are you going to do, Billy?" asked Lydia.