The Squirrel-Cage Part 7

"Oh, I remember, you don't like her," said Lydia. "She always seems just funny to me--funny and pathetic. She's so dowdy, and reverential to folks with money, and enjoys other people's good times so terrifically."

"She's like some political bosses--admirable in private life, but a menace to the community just the same."

Lydia laughed involuntarily, in spite of her preoccupation. "Flora Burgess a menace to the community!"

The doctor turned away and began to mount the stairs. "Me and Ca.s.sandra!" he called over his shoulder in his high, sweet treble. "Just you wait and see!"

He disappeared down the upper hall, finding his way about the darkened house with a familiarity that betokened long practice.

Lydia sat down on the bottom step to wait for his return. The clock in the dining-room struck twelve. It came over her with a clap that but half a day had pa.s.sed since she had run out into the dawn. For an instant she had the nave, melodramatic instinct of youth to deck out its little events in the guise of crises. She began to tell herself with gusto that she had pa.s.sed some important turning-point in her life; when, as was not infrequent with her, she lost the thread of her thought in a sudden mental confusion which, like a curtain of fog, shut her off from definite reflection. Complicated things that moved rapidly always tired Lydia. She had an enormous capacity for quiet and tranquillity.

To-day she felt that more complicated things were moving rapidly inside her head than ever before--as though she had tried to keep track of the revolutions of a wheel and had lost her count and could now only stare stupidly at the spokes, whirling till they blended into one blur. What was this Endbury life she had come back to? What in the world had that man been talking about? What a strange person he was! How very bright his eyes were when he looked at you--as though he were, somehow, seeing you more than most people did. What did the doctor mean by all that about Marietta? It had never occurred to her that the life of anyone about her might have been different from what it was. What else was there for people to do but what everybody else did? It was all very unsettling and, in this heat and loneliness, daunting.

Through this vague discomfort there presently pierced a positive apprehension of definite unpleasantness. She would have to tell her mother that she had spent the whole morning talking to Mr. Rankin, and her mother would be cross, and would say such--Lydia remembered as in a distant dream her supreme content with life of only a few hours earlier.

It seemed a very bewildering matter to her now.

Ought she so certainly to tell her mother? She lingered for a moment over this possibility. Then, "Oh, of course!" she said aloud, flushing with an angry shame at her moment's parley with deceit.

She heard her mother's door open and turned to see the doctor running down the stairs, his wrinkled little face very grave. "You were right, Lydia, to be anxious about your mother, and I am an old fool! There is no fool like a fluent fool! I'm afraid she's in for quite a siege.

There's no danger, thank Heaven! but I don't believe she can be about for a month or more. I'm going to 'phone for a trained nurse. Just see that n.o.body disturbs her, will you?"

He darted away, leaving Lydia leaning against the newel-post, gasping.

The clock in the dining-room chimed the quarter-hour. She cried out to herself, as she climbed the stairs heavily, that she could not stand it to have things happen to her so fast. If all Endbury days were going to be like this one--

She was for a moment brought to a standstill by a realization of depths within herself that she had not dreamed of. She realized, horrified, that on hearing the doctor's verdict her first thought--gone before it was formulated, but still her first thought--had been one of relief that now she need not tell her mother.

It had not occurred to her at all, nor did it now, that she either should or should not tell her father.

CHAPTER VII

OUTSIDE THE LABYRINTH

The Black Rock woods lay glowing under the cloudy autumn sky like a heap of live coals, the maples still quivering in scarlet, the chestnuts sunk into a clear yellow flame, the oaks, parched by the September heat, burnt out into rusty browns. Above them, the opalescent haze of October rose like a faint blue smoke, but within the woods the subdued light was richly colored, like that which pa.s.ses through the stained gla.s.s of a great cathedral. The first of the fallen leaves lay in pools of gold in the hollows of the brown earth, where the light breezes had drifted them.

It was, for the moment, singularly quiet, so, that, as Lydia walked quickly along the footpath, the pleasant rustle of her progress was the only sound she heard. Under a large chestnut she paused, gathering her amber-colored draperies about her and glancing uncertainly ahead to where the path forked. She looked a yellow leaf blown by some current of the air unfelt by the rest of the forest and caught against the rough bark of the tree. After hesitating for a moment, she drifted slowly along the right-hand path, looking about her with dreamy, dazzled eyes.

From time to time, she stopped and lifted her face to the light and color above her, and once she stood a long time leaning against a tree, stirring with the tip of her parasol a heap of burning maple leaves.

Under her drooping hat her face was almost vacant in a wide beat.i.tude of harmony with the spirit of day. When she walked on again it was with a lighter and lighter step, as though the silence had come to have a lovely meaning for her which she feared to disturb.

The path turned sharply after pa.s.sing through a thicket of ruddy brambles, and she found herself in a little clearing which the haze of the upper air descended to fill. The yellow chestnuts stood in a ring about the sunburnt gra.s.s. It was like a golden cup filled with some magic, impalpable draught.

Through this she now saw a rough little house, brown as an oak leaf, with a wide veranda, under which, before a work-bench, sat Daniel Rankin. His tanned arms moved rhythmically backward and forward, but his ruddy head was high, and his eyes, roving about the leafy walls of the clearing, caught sight of Lydia as soon as she had turned the corner.

She stopped short, with a startled gesture, on the edge of the woods, but remained standing quietly while Rankin sprang up from his seat and walked toward her smiling.

"Oh, Miss Emery," he called welcomingly. "I didn't recognize you for a minute. Every once in a while a young lady or a child loses her way from a picnic in the woods and stumbles into my settlement. I always have to hurry to show them there's no danger of the wild man who lives in that house eating them up." He came up to her now, and put out his hand with a frank pleasure.

"I wasn't afraid," said Lydia; "I was startled for a minute, but I knew right away it must be your house. You described it to me, you know."

"It's very much flattered that you remember its portrait," said the owner. "Won't you honor it some more by sitting down in its veranda for a while? Or must I take you back to your picnic party at once?"

Lydia moved on, looking about her at the piles of boards, half hidden by vines, at the pool of clear water welling up through white sand in front of the house, and at the low rough building, partly covered with woodbine ruby-red against the weather-beaten wood.

"My picnic party's gone home," she explained. "It was only Marietta and her little boy, anyhow. My sister thought it was going to rain, and took the quickest way home. I told Marietta I'd walk across and take the Garfield Avenue trolley line. I must have taken a wrong turn in the path."

They had reached the veranda now, and Lydia sank into the chair which Rankin offered her. She smiled her thanks silently, her face still steeped in quiet ecstasy, and for a long time she said nothing. The quick responsiveness that was at all times her most marked characteristic answered this rare mood of Nature with an intensity almost frightening in its visible joy.

Rankin also said nothing, looking at her reflectively and stroking his close-clipped red beard. Above the faded brown of his work-shirt, his face glowed with color. In the silent interval of the girl's slow emergence from her reverie, his gaze upon her was so steady that when Lydia finally glanced up at him he could not for a moment look away. The limpid unconsciousness of her eyes changed into a startled look of inquiry, as though he had spoken and she had not understood. Then a flush rose to her cheeks, she looked down and away in a momentary confusion, moved in her chair, and began to talk at random.

"So this is where you live. It's lovely. It looks like a fairy story--the little house in the wood, you know--nothing seems real to-day--the woods--it makes me want to cry, they are so beautiful. I've been wondering and wondering what outdoors was looking like. You know poor Mother is sick, and though she's not so awfully sick, and of course we've a trained nurse for her, still I've had to be housekeeper and I haven't had time to breathe. The second girl left right off because of the extra work she thought sickness would make, but it seems to me we've had a million new second girls in the three weeks. It's been awful! I haven't had time to get out at all or to see anybody."

She was quite herself now, and confided her troubles with a nave astonishment, as though they were new to humanity.

"Yes; I've heard ladies say before that it's quite awful," agreed her companion gravely. He swung himself up to sit on his work-bench, his long legs stretched before him, just reaching the ground. "Envy me," he went on, smiling; "I don't have to have a second girl, or a first one, either."

"What _do_ you do?" asked Lydia, not waiting, however, for an answer, but continuing her relieved outpouring of her own perplexities. "It's perfectly desperate at home. I haven't had a minute's peace. This afternoon I just got wild, and said I _would_ get away from it for a minute, and just ran away. Father's nice about it, but he does look something fierce when he comes home and finds another one left. He says that Mother doesn't have to change more than two or three times a year!"

She presented this as the superlative of stability.

Rankin laughed again. Lydia felt more and more at her ease. He was evidently thinking of her pretty looks and ways rather than of what she was saying, and, like all of her sisterhood, this was treatment which she thoroughly understood. For the moment she forgot that he was the man who had startled and almost shocked her by his unabashed presentation, in a conversation with a young lady, of ideas and convictions. She leaned back in her chair and put on some of the gracefully imperious airs of regnant American young-ladyhood. "You must show me all about how you live, and everything," she commanded prettily. "I've been so curious about it--and now here I am."

She was enchantingly unconscious of the possibility of her having seemed to seek him out. "What a perfectly beautiful piece of wood you have in that chair-back." She laid her ungloved, rosy finger-tips on a dark piece of oak. "And so this is where you work?"

"I work everywhere," he told her. "I do all that's done, you see."

"You must have to walk quite a ways to get your meals, don't you?" Lydia turned her white neck to glance inside the house.

Rankin's mouth twitched humorously. "You'll never understand me," he said lightly. "I get my meals myself, here."

Lydia turned on him sharply. "You don't _cook_!" she cried out.

"And wash dishes, and make my bed, and sweep my floor, and, once in a great while, dust."

The romantic curiosity died out of the girl's eyes into a shocked wonder. She glanced at his large brown hands, and seemed about to speak.

Nothing came from her lips finally, however, beyond the pregnant "Well!"

which seemed the only expression in her vocabulary for extreme surprise.

Rankin threw back his head, showing a triangle of very white throat above his loose collar, and laughed aloud. The sound of his mirth was so infectious that Lydia laughed with him, though half uneasily.

"It's so funny," he explained, "to see the picture of myself I gather from your shocked and candid eyes. I'm so used to my queer ideas nowadays that I forget that what seems perfectly natural to me still seems perfectly crazy to others."

"Well, not _crazy_." Lydia proffered this negation in so halting an accent that Rankin burst into another peal of laughter. "But it must be horrid for you to wash dishes and cook!" protested Lydia, feeling resentful that her inculcated horror of a man's "lowering himself" to woman's work should be taken with so little seriousness. She tried to rearrange a mental picture which the other was continually destroying.

"But I suppose it's very picturesque. You cook over an open fire, I imagine."

There was a humorous glint in his eye, "I cook over the best brand of oil-stove that money can buy," he told her, relentlessly, watching her wince from the sordid image. "I have all the conveniences I can think of. All I'm trying to do is to get myself fed with the least expenditure of gray matter and time on my part, and as things are now arranged in this particular corner of the country I find I can do it best this way.

It's more work trying to persuade somebody who doesn't want to wait on me than to jump up and do it myself. Also, having brains, I can certainly cook like a house afire."

At this, Lydia was overcome by that openness to conviction from unexpected sources which gave her mother one of her great anxieties for her. "Well, honestly, do you know," she said unexpectedly, "there is a lot in that. I've thought ever so many times in the last two weeks that if Father would let me wait on the table, for instance, I could get on ever so much easier."