The Squirrel-Cage Part 23

Lydia said nothing, either then or when, after a long pause, he said that he would leave the car at the next station.

"It has been very pleasant to see you again," he said, bending over his tool-box, "and you mustn't lay it up against me that I haven't congratulated you on your engagement. Of course you know how I wish you all happiness."

"Thank you," said Lydia.

Ahead of the car, some lights suddenly winking above the horizon announced the approach of Hardville. Rankin stood up, slipped on his rough overcoat, and sat down again. He drew a long breath, and began evenly: "I know you won't misunderstand me if I try to say one more thing. I probably won't see you again for years, and it would be a great joy to me to be sure that you know how hearty is my good-will to you.

I'm afraid you can't think of me without pain, because I was the cause of such discomfort to you, but I know you are too generous to blame me for what was an involuntary hurt. Of course I ought to have known how your guardians would feel about your knowing me--"

"Oh, _why_ should you be so that all that happened!" cried Lydia suddenly. "If it was too hard for me, why couldn't you have made it easier--thought differently--acted like other people. _Would_ you--if I hadn't--if we had gone on knowing each other?"

Rankin turned very white. "No," he said; "I couldn't."

"It seems to me," said Lydia hurriedly, "that, without being willing to concede anything to their ideas, you ask a great deal of your friends."

"Yes," said Rankin, "I do. It's a hard struggle I'm in with myself and the world--oh, evidently much too hard for you even to look at from a distance." His voice broke. "The best thing I can do for you is to stay away--" He rose, and stepped into the aisle. "But you are so kind--you will let me serve you in any other way, if I can--ever. If I can ever do something that's hard for you to do--you must know that I stand as ready as even Dr. Melton to do it for you if I can."

Indeed, for the moment, as Lydia looked up into his kind, strong face, his impersonal tenderness made him seem almost such an old, tried friend as her G.o.dfather; almost as unlikely to expect any intimate personal return from her.

"You must remember," he went on, "the great joy it gave us both to-day even to see an act of kindness. Give me an opportunity to do one for you if I ever can."

It already seemed to Lydia as though he had gone away from her, as though this were but a beneficent memory of him lingering by her side.

She hardly noticed when he left her alone in the car.

The conductor started up, wakened by the silence, and announced wildly, "Wardsboro', Wardsboro'!"

"No, it ain't; it's the first stop in Hardville," contradicted the motorman, sticking his head in through the door. "Turn on them lights!"

As the gla.s.s bulbs leaped to a dazzling glare, Lydia blinked and looked away out of the window. A moment later an arm laid about her neck made her bound up in amazement and confront a small, middle-aged woman, with a hat too young for her tired, sallow face, with a note-book in her hand and an apologetic expression of affection in her light blue eyes.

"I'm sorry I startled you, Miss Lydia," she said. "I keep forgetting you're not still a little girl I can pick up and hug."

"Oh, you!" breathed the girl, sitting down again. "I didn't think there was anybody in the car with me, you see."

"Have you come all the way from Endbury alone, then?" asked Miss Burgess, looking about her suspiciously.

"No, I have not," said Lydia uncompromisingly. "Mr. Rankin, the cabinet-maker, has been with me till just now."

Miss Burgess sat down hastily in the vacant seat by Lydia. "And he's coming back?" she inquired.

"No; he got off at Hardville. This _is_ Hardville, isn't it?"

"Yes. I happened to be out reporting a big church bazaar here." She settled back comfortably. "What a nice chance for a cozy little visit I shall have with you. These long trips on the Interurban are fine for talking. Unless I shall tire you? Did Mr. Rankin talk much? What does he talk _about_, anyhow? He's always so rude to me that I've never heard him say a word except about his work."

Lydia considered for a moment. "We talked about the street-car conductors having such long hours to work," she said, "and later about whether people have more bad in them than good."

"Oh!" said Miss Burgess.

Lydia smiled faintly, the ghost of her whimsical little look of mockery.

"We decided that they have more good," she said.

Miss Burgess cast about her for a suitable comment. At last, "Really!"

she said.

CHAPTER XVI

ENGAGED TO BE MARRIED

All over the half-finished house the workmen began to lay down their tools. Paul Hollister's face broke into a good-humored smile as a moment later he caught the faraway five-o'clock whistles calling from the city.

He was in a very happy mood these days and the best aspect of the phenomena of the world was what impressed him most. As the workmen disappeared down the driveway to the main road, running to catch the next trolley-car to Endbury, he looked after them with little of the usual exasperation of the house-builder whose work they were slighting, but with an agreeable sense of their extreme inferiority to him in the matter of fixity of purpose. He felt that they symbolized the weakness of most of humanity, and promised himself with a comfortable confidence an easy and lifelong victory over such feeble adversaries. Of late, business had been going even better than ever.

The days had begun to grow appreciably longer with the approach of spring, and there had been several noons of an almost summer-like mildness, but now, in spite of the fact that the sun was still s.h.i.+ning, the first chill of the late March evening dropped suddenly upon the bare-raftered structure whose open windows and door-s.p.a.ces offered no barrier to the damp breeze. Hollister stirred from his pleasant reverie and began to walk briskly about, inspecting the amount of work accomplished since his last visit. He kept very close track of the industry of his workmen and the competence of his contractor, and Lydia's father admired greatly the way in which his future son-in-law did not allow himself to be "done" by those past masters of the art. It argued well for the future, Judge Emery thought, and he called Lydia's attention to the trait with approval.

Before the wide aperture which was to be the front door, the owner of the house stopped and looked eagerly out toward the road. It was near the time when Lydia had promised to be there, and he meant to see her and run to meet her when she first turned in upon the ground that was to be her home. It was the first time that Lydia had happened to visit the new house alone. Either her mother or Hollister's sister had accompanied her on the two or three other occasions, but to-day she telephoned that Mrs. Emery had been really out-and-out forbidden by Dr. Melton to get out of bed for two or three days, and as for Madeleine--at this point Madeleine had s.n.a.t.c.hed the receiver from Lydia's hand and had informed her brother that Madeleine was going to be busy with _her_ young man and couldn't get off to chaperone people that had been as long engaged as he and Lydia.

That was part of the bright color of the world to Paul--his sister's recent engagement to their uncle's partner in the iron works, a very prosperous, young-old bachelor of fifty-odd, whose intense preoccupation with business had never been pierced by any consciousness of the other s.e.x until Madeleine had, as she proclaimed in her own vernacular, "taken a club to him." It was a very brilliant match for her, and justified her own prophecy concerning herself that she was not to be satisfied with any old-fas.h.i.+oned, smooth-running course for true love. "It must shoot the chutes, or nothing," she was accustomed to say, in her cheerful, high-spirited manner.

Paul thought, with self-approval, that, for orphans of the poorer branch of the Hollister family, he and Madeleine had not done badly with their lives thus far.

He looked again impatiently toward the entrance to the grounds. A trolley-car had just rattled by on the main road. If Lydia was on it, she would appear at that turning under the trees. No; evidently she had not been on that one. The harsh jar of the trolley's progress died away in the distance and no Lydia appeared. He had fifteen minutes to wait for the next one.

He drew out a note-book and began jotting down some ideas about the disposition of the five acres surrounding the house. He was ambitious to have the appearance of a country estate and avoid the "surburban" look which would be so fatally easy to acquire in the suburban place. He decided that he would not as yet fence in his land. The house was the last one of a group of handsome residences that had lately sprung up in the vicinity of the new Country Club, and to the south was still open country, so that without a fence, he reflected, he could have himself, and convey tacitly to others, the illusion of owning the wide sweep of meadow and field which stretched away a mile or more to a group of beech trees.

He jumped down lightly from the porch, as yet but sketchily outlined in joists and rafters, and stood in a litter of shavings, bits of board and piles of yellow earth, with a kindling eye. He had that happy prophetic vision of the home-builder which overlooks all present deficiencies and in an instant, with a confident magic, erects all that the slow years are to build. He saw a handsome, well-kept house, correctly colonial in style, grounds artfully laid out to increase the impression of s.p.a.ce, a hospitable, smoothly run interior, artistic, homelike, admired.

A meadow-lark near him began to tinkle out its pretty silver notes. The sun set slowly below the smoky horizon; a dewy peace fell about the deserted place. Paul had his visions of other than material elements in his future and Lydia's. Such a dream came to him there, standing in the dusk before the germ of his home to be. He saw himself an alert man of forty-five, a good citizen, always on the side of civic honor; a good captain of industry, quick to see and reward merit; a good husband who loved and cherished his wife as on the day he married her, and protected her from all the asperities of reality; a good father--he had almost an actual vision of the children who would carry on his work in life--girls of Lydia's beauty and sweetness, boys with his energy and uprightness--and there was Lydia, too, the Lydia of twenty years from now--in the full bloom of physical allurement still, a gracious hostess, a public-spirited matron, lending the l.u.s.ter of his name to all worthy charities indorsed by the best people, laying down with a firm good taste dictates as to the worthy social development of the town. Before this vision there rose up in him the ardent impulse to immediate effort which is the sign manual of the man of action. He stirred and flung his arm out.

"It's all up to me," he said aloud. "I can do it if I go after it hard enough. I've got to make good for Lydia's sake and mine. She must have the best I can get--the very best I know how to get for her."

A sound behind him made him catch his breath. He was trembling as he turned about and saw Lydia coming swiftly up the driveway. "Good Heavens, how I love her!" he thought as he ran down to meet her.

He was trembling when he took her in his arms, folding her in that close embrace of surprised rapture at finding everything real, and no dream, which is the unique joy of betrothal. He would not let her speak for a moment, pressing his lips upon hers. When he released her, she cried in a whisper, "Oh, it's wonderful how when you're close to me everything else just isn't in the world!"

"That's being in love, Lydia," Paul told her with a grave thankfulness.

"I don't mean," she went on, with her ever-present effort to express honestly her meaning, "I don't mean just--just being really close--having your arms around me, though that always makes me forget things, too--but being--_feeling_ close, you know--inside. Not having any inner corner where we're not together--the way we are now--the way I knew we should be when I saw you running down to meet me. I always know the minute I see you whether it's going to be this way." She added, a little wistfully, "Sometimes, you know, it isn't."

Paul lifted her up to the porch and led her across into the hallway.

Here he took her in his arms again and said with a shaken accent: "Dearest Lydia, dearest! I wish it were always the way you want it--"

Lydia dropped her head back on his shoulder and looked at him earnestly.

In the half-light, white and clear from the freshly plastered walls, her face was like alabaster. "Dear Paul, isn't that what getting married means--to learn how to be really, really close to each other all the time. There isn't anything else worth getting married for, is there?

_Is_ there?"

Her lover looked down into her eyes, into her sweet, earnest face, and could not speak. Finally, his hand at his throat, "Oh, Lydia, you're too good for me!" he said huskily. "You're too good for any man!"