The Squirrel-Cage Part 4

"I didn't think you could be real," said the man, "you looked so exactly the way this glorious morning made me feel."

"Why, that's just how you looked to me!" she cried, and flushed at the significance of her words.

Before her confusion the other turned away his quiet gray eyes, and said lightly, "Well, that's because we are the only people in all the world with sense enough to get up so early on a morning like this. I've been out tramping since dawn."

Lydia explained herself also. "I just couldn't sleep, it seemed so lovely. It's my first morning home, you know."

"Is it?" responded the man, with a vagueness he made no effort to conceal.

It came over Lydia with a shock that he did not know she had been away.

She felt hurt. It seemed ungracious for anyone in Endbury not to have missed her, not to share in the joyful excitement of her final return.

"I've been in Europe for a year," she told him, with a dignity that was a reproach.

"Oh, yes, yes; I remember now hearing Dr. Melton speak of it," he answered, with no shade of apology for his forgetfulness. He looked at her speculatively, as if wondering what note to strike for the continuation of their talk. Apparently he decided on the note of lightness. "Well, you're the most important person there is for me to-day," he told her unexpectedly.

Lydia arched her dark eyebrows inquiringly. She was always sensitively responsive, and now had forgotten, like a sweet-tempered child, her momentary pique.

He smiled suddenly, moved, as people often were, to an apparently irrelevant tenderness for her. His voice softened into a playfulness like that of a person speaking to an imaginative little girl. "Why, didn't you learn in school that all wise old nations have the belief that the first person you meet after you go out in the morning decides the fortune of the day for you? Now, what kind of a day are you going to give me?"

Lydia laughed. "Oh, you must tell first! You forget you're the first person I've seen this morning. I'll see what I can do for you after I've seen what you are going to do for me." She added, with a solemnity only half jocular, "But it's ever so much more important in my case, for you're the first person I meet as I begin my life in Endbury. Think what a responsibility for you! You ought to give me something extra nice beside, for not remembering me any better and never noticing that I had been away." She broke into a sunny mitigation of her own severity, "But you can have some grapes, even if you are not very flattering."

The man took the cl.u.s.ter she held out to him, but only eyed them as he answered, "Oh, I remember you very well. You're a niece of Mrs.

Sandworth's, or of her husband's, and Mrs. Sandworth is Dr. Melton's sister. You're the big-eyed little girl who used to sit in a corner and sew while the doctor and I talked, and now," he brought it out rotundly, "you've been to Europe for a year, and you're grown-up."

Lydia hung her head laughingly at his good-natured caricature. "Well, but I _have_, really and truly," she protested, "all of that. And I just guess you haven't had two such interesting things happen to you in such a short time as--" She stopped short, struck dumb by a sudden recollection. "Oh, I beg your pardon," she murmured; "I forgot about what they said you had--"

Her expression was so altered, she looked at him with so curious a change from familiarity to strangeness, that his steady eyes wavered a moment in startled surprise. "What's that?" he asked sharply; "I didn't catch what you said."

"Why, nothing--nothing--only they were telling me yesterday about how you--why, it just came over me that you _had_ had a great deal happen to you this last year, as well as I."

He looked a relieved and slightly annoyed comprehension of the case.

"Oh, that!" he summed it up for her with a grave brevity. "I have lost my father, and I have started life on a new footing during the past year."

Lydia fumbled for words that would be applicable and not wounding. "I was so sorry to hear that--about your father, I mean. And about the other--it must be very--_interesting_, I'm sure."

His silence and enigmatic gaze upon her moved her to a fluttered fear lest she seem ungracious. She added, with a droll little air of letting him see that she was not of the enemy, "I do hope some day you'll tell me all about it; it sounds so romantic."

The young man gave an inarticulate sound, and stroked his ruddy beard to conceal a smile. "It's not," he said briefly. He put his cap back on his head and looked down the street as though his thoughts were already away.

His lack of responsiveness came, Lydia thought, from her having wounded his feelings. "Oh, I'm sure you must have some good reason for doing such a _queer_ thing," she said hurriedly. Then, appalled by the words on which the haste of her good intentions had carried her, "Oh, I mean that it's very brave, heroic, of you to have the courage--perhaps something very sad happened to you, and to forget it you--"

The other broke into the laugh he had been trying to suppress. His gray eyes lighted up brilliantly with his mirth. "You're very kind," he said, "you're very kind, but rather imaginative. It doesn't take any courage; quite the reverse. And it's not a picturesque way of doing a retreat from active life. I hope and pray that it's to be a way of getting into it."

The girl's face of bewilderment at his tone moved him to add, a ripple of amus.e.m.e.nt still in his voice, "Ah, don't try to make me out. I don't belong in your world, you know; I'm real."

Lydia continued to look at him blankly. The obscurity of his remarks was in no way lessened by this last addition, but he vouchsafed no further explanation. "You've given me my breakfast," he said, holding up the grapes; "I mustn't keep you any longer from yours."

He waited for a moment for Lydia to respond to this speech, struck by a sudden realization that it might sound like an unceremonious hint to her to retire, rather than the dismissal of himself he intended. When she made no answer, he turned away with a somewhat awkward gesture of leave-taking. Lydia looked after him in silence.

CHAPTER V

THE DAY BEGINS

She watched him until he was out of sight, and although the vigorous, rhythmic swing of his broad shoulders was like another manifestation of the morning's joyous, buoyant spirit, it did not move her to a responsive alertness. After he had turned a corner, she lowered her eyes to the cl.u.s.ter of grapes she still held; a moment after, without any change in expression, she relaxed her grasp on them and let them fall, turning away and walking soberly back to the house. The dew had already disappeared from the gra.s.s. There was now no hint of the dawn's coolness; the day had begun.

Her father met her at the door with an exclamation about her early hours. He would really see something of her, he said, if she kept up this sort of thing. It would be too good to be true if he could breakfast with her every morning. Whereupon he rang for the coffee and unfolded his newspaper. Lydia did not notice his absorption in the news of the day, partly because she was trained from childhood up to consider reading the newspaper as the main occupation of a man at home, but more because on this occasion she was herself preoccupied. When Mrs. Mortimer came in on an errand and was prevailed upon to sit down for some breakfast with her father and sister, there was a little more conversation.

Mrs. Emery had not come down stairs. A slight indisposition which she had felt for several days seemed to have been augmented by the excitement of Lydia's return. She had slept badly, and was quite uncomfortable, she told her husband, and thought she would stay in bed and send for Dr. Melton. It seemed foolish, she apologized, but now that Lydia was back, she wanted to be on the safe side and lose no time.

After these facts had been communicated to her older daughter, Mrs.

Mortimer asked, "How in the world does it happen that you're up at this hour?"

Lydia answered that she had been inspecting the yard, which she had not seen the day before. She described quite elaborately her tour of investigation, without any mention of her encounter with her early caller, and only after a pause added carelessly, "Who do you suppose came along but that Mr. Rankin you were all talking about yesterday?"

Judge Emery laid down his paper. "What under the sun was he prowling about for at that hour?"

"He wasn't prowling," said Lydia. "He was fairly tearing along past the house so fast that he 'most ran over me before I saw him. I'd forgotten he is so handsome."

"Handsome!" Mrs. Mortimer cried out at the idea. "With that beard!"

"I like beards, sometimes," said Lydia.

"It makes a man look like a barbarian. I'd as soon wear a nose-ring as have Ralph wear a beard."

"Why, everybody who is anybody in Europe wears a beard, or a mustache, anyhow," opposed Lydia. "I got to liking to see them."

"Oh, of course if they do it in Europe, we provincial stay-at-homes haven't a word to say." Mrs. Mortimer had invented a peculiar tone which she reserved for speeches like this, the neutrality of which gave a sharper edge to the words.

"Now, Marietta, that's mean!" Lydia defended herself very energetically; "you know I didn't say it for that." There was a moment's pause, of which Marietta did not avail herself for a retraction, and then Lydia went on pensively, "Well, he may be handsome or not, but he's certainly not very polite."

"He didn't say anything to you, did he?" asked her father in surprise, laying down the paper he had raised again during the pa.s.sage between the sisters.

Lydia hastily proffered an explanation. "He couldn't help speaking; he almost ran into me, you know. I was standing under the maple tree in the corner as he came around from Garfield Avenue. He just took off his cap and said good morning, and what a fine day it was, and a few words like that."

"I don't see anything so impolite in that. Perhaps he wasn't European in his manners," suggested Mrs. Mortimer dryly. She had evidently arisen in the grasp of a mood, not uncommon with her, when an apparently causeless irritability drove her to say things for which she afterward suffered an honest but fruitless remorse. Dr. Melton had recently evolved for this characteristic of hers one of the explanations which the Emerys found so enigmatic. "Marietta," he said critically, "is in a perpetual state of nervous irritation from eye-strain. She has naturally excellent and normal eyesight, but she has always been trained to wear other people's spectacles. It puts her out of focus all the time, and that makes her snappy."

She had answered explicitly to this vague diagnosis, "Nonsense! The thing that makes me snappy is the lack of an oriental rug in our parlor."

"You're looking at that through Mrs. Gilbert's magnifying gla.s.ses,"

suggested the doctor.

"I'm not looking at it at all, and that's the trouble," Marietta had a.s.sured him.

"Absence makes the heart--" the doctor had the last word.