The Squirrel-Cage Part 10

She laid the card down beside her plate and kept her eyes upon it, hanging her head in silence. Her father began to consume his dessert rapidly. The cream in it was delicious, and he ate with appreciation. To him, as to many middle-aged Americans, the two vital parts of a meal were the meat and the dessert. The added pleasures or comforting consolations of soup, salads, vegetables, entrees, made dishes, were not for him. He ate them, but with a robust indifference. "Meat's business,"

he was wont to say, "and dessert's fun. The rest of one's victuals is society and art and literature and such--things to leave to the women."

He now stopped his consumption of his dessert and recalled himself with an effort to his daughter's impalpable difficulties. She was murmuring, "But, Father--you must be mistaken-- Why, n.o.body so much as hinted at such a--"

"That's your mother's doings. She'd be furious now if she knew I'd spoken right out. But you don't want to be treated like a little girl all your life, do you?" He laughed at her speechless embarra.s.sment with a kind obtuseness to the horror of youth at seeing its shy fastnesses of reserve laid open to indifferent feet. Divining, however, through his affection for her, that she was really more than pleasantly startled by his bluntness, he began to make everything smooth by saying: "There aren't many girls in Endbury who don't envy my little Lydia, I guess.

Paul is considered--"

At this point Lydia rose hurriedly and actually ran away from the sound of his voice. She fled upstairs so rapidly that he heard the click of her heel on the top step before he could draw his breath. He laughed uneasily, finished his dessert in one or two huge mouthfuls, and followed her. He was recalled by the ringing of the telephone bell, and when he went upstairs again he was smiling broadly. With his lawyer's caution, he waited a moment outside his wife's room, where he heard Lydia's voice, to see if her mother had hit upon some happy inspiration to quiet the girl's exaggerated maidenly shyness. He had the tenderest indulgence to his daughter's confusion, but he was not without a humorous, middle-aged realization of the extremely transitory nature of this phase of youth. He had lived long enough to see so many blushing girls transformed into matter-of-fact matrons that the inevitable end of the business was already present to his mind. He was vastly relieved that Lydia had a mother to understand her fancies, and upon his wife, whom he would not have trusted to undertake the smallest business transaction without his advice, he transferred, with a sigh of content, the entire responsibility of wisely counseling their daughter. "Thank the Lord, that's not my job!" he had often said about some knotty point in the up-bringing of the children. Mrs. Emery had always answered that she could not be too thankful for a "husband who was not a meddler."

The Judge now listened at the door to the conversation between the two women with a grin of satisfaction.

"Why, my dear, what is there so terrible in having the handsomest and most promising young man in Endbury devoted to you? You don't need to marry him for years and years if you don't want to--or never, if you don't like him enough." She laughed a little, teasingly, "Perhaps it's all just our nonsense, and he never has thought of you in that way.

Maybe when he comes to see you he'll tell you about a beautiful girl in Urbana or Cincinnati that he's engaged to--and _then_ what would your silly father say?"

"Oh, if I could only think that," breathed Lydia, as though she had been reprieved from a death sentence. "Of course! Father was just joking. But he startled me so!"

"He was probably thinking of his horrid law business, darling. When a big trial is on he wouldn't know me from Eve. He says _anything_ at such times."

Judge Emery laughed noiselessly, and quite without resentment at this wifely characterization.

Lydia went on: "It wasn't so much what he said, you know--as--oh, the way he took it for granted--"

"Well, don't think about it any more, dear; just be your sweet natural self when Paul comes to see you the first time--and don't let's talk any more now. Mother gets tired so easily."

Lydia's remorseful outcry over having fatigued her mother seemed a good occasion for Judge Emery's entrance into the room and for his announcement. He felt that she would make an effort to control any agitation she might feel, and indeed, beyond a startled gasp, she made no comment on his news. Mrs. Emery herself was more obviously stirred to emotion. "To-night? Why, I didn't think he'd be in town for several days yet."

"He only got in at five o'clock this afternoon, he said."

The two parents exchanged meaning glances over this chronology, and Mrs.

Emery flushed and smiled. "Now, Lydia," she said, "it's a perfect shame I'm not well enough to be there when he comes. It would make it easier for you. But I wish you'd say honestly whether you'd rather have your father there or see Paul alone."

Judge Emery's face took on an aggrieved look of alarm. "Good gracious, my dear! What good would I be? You know I can't be tactful. Besides, I've got an appointment with Melton."

Lydia rose from where she knelt by the bed. Her chin was quivering.

"Why, you make me feel so--so queer! Both of you!--As though it were anything--to see Paul--when I've known him always."

Her mother seized on the role opened to them by this speech, and said quickly: "Why, of course! Aren't we silly! I don't know what possesses us. When he comes you just run along and see him, and say your father and I are sorry not to be there."

During the next half-hour she made every effort, heroically though obviously seconded by her husband, to keep the conversation in a light and casual vein, but when the door-bell rang, they all three heard it with a start. Mrs. Emery said, very carelessly, "There he is, dear. Run along and remember me to him." But she pulled Lydia down to her, straightened a bow on her waist with a twitch, loosened a lock of the girl's shining dark hair, and kissed her with a sudden yearning fervor.

After they were alone, Judge Emery laughed aloud. "You're just as bad as I am, Sarah. You don't _say_ anything, but--"

"Oh, I know," his wife said; "I can't help it!" She deliberated unresignedly over the situation for a moment, and then, "It seems as though I couldn't have it so, to be sick just now, when I'm needed so much. This first month is so important! And Lydia's getting such a different idea of things from what I meant, having this awful time with servants, and all. I have a sort of feeling once in a while that she's getting notions!" She p.r.o.nounced the word darkly.

"Notions?" Judge Emery asked. He had never learned to interpret his wife's obscurities when the mantle of intuitions fell on her.

"Oh, don't ask me what kind! I don't know. If I knew I could do something about it. But she speaks queerly once in a while, and the evening of the day she was out with Marietta in the Black Rock woods she was-- Do you know, I think it's not good for Lydia to be outdoors too much. It seems to go to her head so. She gets to looking like Harry--almost reckless, and like some little scampering wild animal."

Judge Emery rose and b.u.t.toned his coat about his spare figure. "Maybe she takes a back track, after some of my folks. You know there's one line in my mother's family that was always crazy about the woods. My grandfather on my mother's side used to go off just as regular as the month of May came around, and--"

Mrs. Emery interrupted him with the ruthless and justifiable impatience of people at the family history of their relations by marriage. "Oh, go along! And stop and speak to Paul on your way out. Just drop in as you pa.s.s the door. We don't want to really chaperone her. n.o.body does that yet--but--the Hollisters are so formal about their girls--well, you stop in, anyhow. It's borne in on me that that'll look better, after all."

CHAPTER IX

FATHER AND DAUGHTER

In the midst of his conference with Dr. Melton, an hour later, it came upon Judge Emery with a clap that he had forgotten this behest of his wife's, plunged deep in legal speculations as he had been, the instant he turned from her door. He brought his hand down on the table.

"What's the matter?" asked the little doctor, peering up at him.

"Oh, nothing important--women's cobwebs. I'm afraid I'll have to go, though. We can take this up again to-morrow, can't we?"

"At your service," said the doctor; but he pulled with some exasperation at a big pile of pamphlets still to be examined.

"It's something about Lydia's receiving a call from Paul Hollister, and her mother wanting me to stop in as I left the house and say good-evening--sort of represent the family--do the proper thing. Don't it tickle you to see women who used to sleigh-ride from seven to eleven every evening in a little cutter just big enough for one and a half, begin to wonder if they hadn't better chaperone their girls when they have callers in the next room?"

He stirred up the pamphlets with a discontented look. "Confound it, I wish I could stay! Which one of those has the statistics about the accidents when the men aren't allowed one day in seven?"

"See here, Emery!" In spite of his evident wish to exhort, the doctor continued sitting as he spoke. He was so short that to rise could have given him no perceptible advantage over the tall lawyer. "See here; do you know that you have a most unusual girl for a daughter?"

"I have heard people say that I have a glimmering notion of her merits,"

said the other with a humorous gravity.

"Oh, I don't mean pretty, and appealing, and with a good complexion, and all that--and I don't mean you don't spoil her most outrageously. I mean she's got the oddest make-up for a modern American girl--she's simple."

"I don't see anything odd about her--or simple!" Her father resented the adjectives with some warmth.

Dr. Melton answered with his usual free-handed use of language: "Well, it's because, like everybody else old and spoiled and stodgy and settled, you've no eyes in your head when it comes to something important, like young people. Because they're all smooth and rosy you think they're all alike." He rushed on, delivering himself as always with restless vivacity of gesture, "I tell you youth is one of the most wastefully ignored forces in the world! Talk about our neglecting to get the good out of our water-power! The way we shut off the capacity of youth to see things as they are, before it gets purblind with our own cowardly unreason--why, it's as if we tried to make water run uphill instead of turning our mill-wheels with its natural energy."

Judge Emery had listened to a word or two of this harangue and then had looked for and found his hat and coat, with which he had invested himself, and now stood ready for the street, one hand on the k.n.o.b of the door. "Well, good-night to you," he said pleasantly, as though the doctor were not speaking; "I'll try to see you to-morrow."

Dr. Melton jumped to his feet, laughing, ran across the room and caught at the other's arm. "Don't blame me. Much preaching of true gospel to deaf ears has made me yell all the time. You know you don't really hear me, any more than anyone else."

"There's no doubt about that, I don't!" acquiesced the Judge frankly.

"I will run on, though I know it never does any good. How'd I begin this time? What started me off? What was I saying?"

"You were saying that Lydia was queer and half-witted," said the Judge moderately.

"I said she was simple--and by that I mean she's so wise you'd better look out or she'll find you out. She's as dangerous as a bomb. She has a scent for essentials. She can tell 'em from all our flummery. I'm afraid of her, and I'm afraid _for_ her! Remember the fate of the father in the _Erl-King_! He thought, I dare say, that he was doing a fine thing for his child, to hurry it along to a nice, warm, dry, safe place!"

Judge Emery broke in, impatient of this fantastic word-bandying. "Oh, come, Melton, I can't stand here while you spin your paradoxes. I've got to get home before young Hollister leaves or my wife won't like it."

"I'll go with you, then," cried the little doctor, clapping on his hat.

"You sha'n't escape me that way. I'm in full cry after the best figure of speech I've hit on in months."