The Squirrel-Cage Part 47

Mrs. Sandworth came to the door. "She's beginning to come to herself, I think. She stirs, and moves her hands about."

As she spoke, there was a scream from the bedroom: "My baby! My baby!"

Rankin sprang to his feet, holding Ariadne on one arm, and stepped quickly inside. "Here is the baby," he said in a quiet voice. "I was holding her all the time you slept. I will not let the Minotaur come near her."

Lydia looked at him long, with no sign of recognition. The room was intensely silent. A drop of blood showed on Dr. Melton's lower lip where his teeth gripped it.

"n.o.body else sees it," said Lydia in a hurried, frightened tone. "They won't believe me when I say it is there. They won't take care of Ariadne. They can't--"

"I see it," Rankin broke in. He went on steadily: "I will take care that it does not hurt Ariadne."

"Do you promise?" asked Lydia solemnly.

"I promise," said Rankin.

Lydia looked about her wonderingly, with blank eyes. "I think, then, I will lie down and rest a little," she said, in a thin, weak voice. "I feel very tired. I can't seem to remember what makes me so tired." She sank back on the pillows and closed her eyes. Her face was like a sick child's in its appealing, patient look of suffering. She looked up at Rankin again. "You will not go far?" she asked.

"I shall be close at hand," he answered.

"You are very kind," murmured Lydia, closing her eyes again. "I am sorry to be so much trouble to you--but it is so important about Ariadne. I am sorry to be so--you are--very--"

Melton touched the other man's arm and motioned him to the door.

CHAPTER x.x.xII

AS ARIADNE SAW IT

All that day, the tall, ruddy-haired man in working clothes sat in the hall, within sight, though not within hearing, of the sick room, playing with the rosy child, and exerting all his ingenuity to invent quiet games that they could play there "where Muvver tan see us"; Ariadne soon learned the reason for staying in one place so constantly. She was very happy that day. Never in her life had she had so enchanting a playfellow. He showed her a game to play with clothespins and tin plates from the kitchen--why, it was so much fun that 'Stas.h.i.+e herself had to join in as she went past. And he told one story after another without a sign of the usual grown-up fatigue. They had their lunch there at the end of the hall, on the little sewing-table with two dolls beside them and the new man made Ariadne laugh by making believe feed the dolls out of her doll's tea-set.

It was a little queer, of course, to stay right there all the time, and to have Muvver staring at them from the bedroom at the other end of the hall, and not to be allowed to do more than tiptoe in once or twice and kiss her without saying a word; but when Ariadne grew confused with trying to think this out, and the little eyes drooped heavily, the new man picked her up and tucked her away in his arms so comfortably that, though she meant to reach up and feel if his beard felt as red as it looked, she fell asleep before she could raise her hand.

When she woke up it was twilight, but she was still in his arms. She stirred sleepily, and he looked down and smiled at her. His face looked like an old friend's--as though she had always known it. He had a friendly smile. She was very happy. Uncle Marius came toward them, teetering on his toes, the way he always did. "I think it's safe to leave now, Rankin," he said. "She has fallen into a natural sleep."

The new man stood up, still holding Ariadne. How tall he was! She kept going up and up, and when she peered over his shoulder she found herself looking down on Uncle Marius' white head.

"How about to-morrow?" asked the new man.

"We'll see. We'll see," said Dr. Melton; and then they all went downstairs and had toast and boiled eggs for supper. Ariadne informed her companions, looking up from her egg with a yolky smile, "Daddy told Muvver the other day that 'Stas.h.i.+e had certainly learned to boil eggs something _fine_! And he laughed, but Muvver didn't. Was it a joke?"

"They are very good eggs indeed, and well boiled," the new man answered.

She loved the way in which he conversed with her.

"Ought we to give her some idea?" asked the doctor in a low voice.

"I would wait until she asks," said the other.

But Paul's child never asked. Once or twice she remarked that Daddy was away longer than usual "_vis_ time," but he had never been a very steadily recurrent phenomenon in her life, and soon her little brain, filled with new impressions, had forgotten that he ever used to come back.

There were many new impressions. A great deal was happening nowadays.

Every morning something different, every day new people going and coming. Aunt Marietta, Auntie Madeleine, Uncle George from Cleveland, whom she'd seen only once or twice before, and Great-Aunt Hollister, whom she knew very well and feared as well as she knew her. After a time even the husbands began to appear, the husbands she had seen so rarely; Aunt Marietta's husband, and Aunt Madeleine's--fat, bald Mr. Lowder, who smelled of tobacco and soap and took her up on his lap--as much as he had--and gave her a big round dollar and kissed her behind her ear and smiled at her very kindly and held her very close. He said he liked little girls, and he wished Auntie Madeleine would get him one some day for a Christmas present. She informed him, filled with admiration at the extent of her own knowledge, that he couldn't get a Christmas present some day, but only just Christmas Day.

Mostly, however, they paid no attention to her, these many aunts and uncles who came and went. And, oddly enough, Uncle Marius always shut the door to Muvver's room when they came, and wouldn't let them, no matter how much they wanted to, go in and see Muvver, who was, she gathered, very sick. Ariadne didn't see, really, why they came at all, since they couldn't see Muvver and they certainly never so much as looked at 'Stas.h.i.+e, dear darling 'Stas.h.i.+e--more of a comfort these queer days than ever before--and they never, never spoke to the new man, who came and went as though n.o.body knew he was there. They would look right at him and never see him. Everything was very hard for a little girl to understand, and she dared ask no questions.

Everybody seemed to be very angry, and yet not at her. Indeed, she took the most prodigious care to avoid doing anything naughty lest she concentrate on herself this now widely diffused disapprobation. Never in her life had she tried so hard to be good, but n.o.body paid the least attention to her--n.o.body but the new man and 'Stas.h.i.+e, and they weren't the angry ones. The others stood about in groups in corners, talking in voices that started in to be low and always got loud before they stopped. Ariadne added several new words to her vocabulary at this time, from hearing them so constantly repeated. When her dolls were bad now, she shook them and called them "Indecent! indecent!" and asked them, with as close an imitation as she could manage, of Great-Aunt Hollister's tone, "What _do_ you suppose people are thinking! What _do_ you suppose people are thinking!" Or she knocked them into a corner and said "Shocking! Shocking!"

One day she stopped Uncle Marius, hurrying past her up the stairs, and asked him: "What are you thinking of, Uncle Marius?"

"What am I thinking of? What do you mean?" he repeated, his face and eyes twitching the way they did when he couldn't understand something right off.

"Why, Auntie Madeleine keeps asking everybody all the time, 'What _can_ the doctor be thinking of?' I just wondered."

He bent to kiss her raspingly--there were stiff little stubby white hairs coming out all over his face--and he said, as he trotted on up the stairs, "I am thinking of making sure that you have a mother, my poor dear."

And then there was a bigger change one day. She went to bed in her own little crib, and when she woke up she wasn't there at all, but in a big bed in a room at Aunt Julia's; and Aunt Julia was smiling at her, and hugging her, and saying she was so glad she had come to live with her and Uncle Marius for a while. Ariadne found out that Uncle Marius had brought her and Muvver the night before in a carriage all the way from Bellevue. She regretted excessively that she had not been awake to enjoy the adventure.

At Aunt Julia's, things were quieter. All at once the other people, the other uncles and aunts, had disappeared. That, of course, was because she and Muvver were at Aunt Julia's. She conceived of the house in Bellevue as still filled with their angry faces and voices, still echoing to "Indecent! indecent!" and "What _do_ you suppose people are saying?"

There was a long, long time after this when nothing special happened.

The new man continued to come here, and his visits were the only events in Ariadne's quiet days. Apparently he came to see Ariadne, for he never went to see Muvver at all, as he used to do in Bellevue. He took Ariadne out in the back yard as the weather began to get warmer, and showed her lots of outdoor plays. He was as nice as ever, only a good deal whiter; and that was odd, for they were now in May, and from playing outdoors all the time Ariadne herself was as brown as a berry. At least, that was what Aunt Julia said. Ariadne accepted it with her usual patient indulgence of grown-ups' mistakes. There was not, of course, a single berry that was anything but red or black, or at least a sort of blue, like huckleberries in milk. She and 'Stas.h.i.+e had gone over them, one by one; they knew.

Uncle Marius remembered to shave himself nowadays. In fact, everything was more normal. Ariadne began to forget about the exciting time in Bellevue. Muvver wasn't in bed all the time now, but sat up in a chair for part of the day and even, if one were ever so quiet, could listen to accounts of what happened in Ariadne's world and could be told how Aunt Julia said that 'Stas.h.i.+e was quite a help as second girl if you just remembered to put away the best china, and that they had had eight new cooks since Ariadne had been there, but the second _would_ have stayed, only her mother got sick. The others just left. But Aunt Julia didn't mind. When there wasn't any cook, if it happened to be 'Stas.h.i.+e's day off, they all had bread and milk for supper, just as she had, and they let her set the table, and she could do it ever so well only she forgot _some_ things, of course, and Uncle Marius never got mad. He just said he hoped eating bread and milk like her would make him as good as she was--and she _was_ good--oh, Muvver, she was trying ever so hard to be good--

"Come, dear," said Aunt Julia, "Mother's getting tired. We'd better go."

It was only after she went away, sometimes only when she lay awake in her strange big bed, that Ariadne remembered that Muvver never said a word, but only smoothed her hair and kissed her.

She and the new man used to play out in the old grape-arbor in the back yard, and it was there, one day in mid-May, that Uncle Marius came teetering out and called the new man to one side, only Ariadne could hear what they said. Uncle Marius said: "It's no use, Rankin. It's a fixed idea with her. She isn't violent any more, but she hasn't changed.

She is certainly a little deranged, but not enough for legal restraint.

She could take Ariadne and disappear any day. I'm in terror lest she do that. I've no authority to prevent her. She won't talk to me freely about what she is afraid of. She doesn't seem to trust me--_me_!"

Ariadne found the conversation as dull as all overheard grown-ups' talk, and tried to busy herself with a corn-cob house the new man had been showing her how to build. Two or three times lately he had taken her out to his little house in the woods and showed her a lot of tools, and told her what they were for, and said if she were older he would teach her how to use them. Ariadne's head was full of the happy excitement of those visits. Corn-cob houses were for babies, she thought now.

After a time, Uncle Marius went away, slamming the front gate after him and stamping away up the street as though he were angry, only he did all kinds of queer things without being angry. In fact, she had never seen him angry. Perhaps he and Muvver were different from other people and never were.

She looked up with a start. The new man had come back to the arbor, but he did not look like play. He looked queer, so queer that Ariadne's sensitive lower lip began to tremble and the corners of her mouth to draw down. She could _not_ remember having done anything naughty. She was frightened by the way he looked. And yet, he picked her up quite gently, and held her on his knee, and asked her if Muvver could walk about the house yet.

"Oh, yes," she told him, "and came down to dinner last night."

The new man put her down, and asked her with a "please" and "I'd be much obliged" as though she were a grown-up herself, if she would do something for him--go to Muvver and ask her if she felt strong enough to come down into the grape-arbor to see him. Tell her he had something very special to say to her.

Ariadne went, skipping and hopping in pleasurable excitement at her own importance, and returned triumphantly to say that Muvver said she would come. She wondered if he felt too grown-up for cob houses himself. He hadn't built it any higher when she was gone. He looked as if he hadn't even winked. While she stood wondering at his silence, his face got very white. He stood up looking toward the house. Muvver was coming out, very slowly, leaning on the railing to the steps--Muvver in the nightgowny dress Aunt Julia had made her, only it wasn't really nightgowny, because it was all over lace--Muvver with her hair in two braids over her shoulders and all mussed up where she'd been lying down. Ariadne wondered that she hadn't smoothed it a little. She knew what people would say to _her_ if she came around with her hair looking like that.

The man went forward to meet Muvver, and gave her his hand, and they neither of them smiled or said how do you do, but came back together toward the arbor. And when they got there Muvver sat down quick, as though she were tired, and laid her head back against the chair. The man lifted Ariadne up and kissed her--he had never done that before. Now she knew how his beard felt--very soft. She felt it against her face for a long time. And he told her to go into the house to 'Stas.h.i.+e.