The Squirrel-Cage Part 49

Lydia seized his hands. Her own were hot and burning. "Rest! I can't rest with all this unsettled! I go over and over it--how can I sleep!

How can you think that your little opiates will make me forget that my children may be helpless, with no one to protect them--" She looked about her wildly. "Why, little Ariadne may be given to _Madeleine_!" Her horrified eyes rested again on her G.o.dfather. She drew him to her. "Oh, help me! You've always been kind to me. Help me now!"

There was a silence, the two exchanging a long gaze. The man's forehead was glistening wet. Finally, his breath coming short, he said: "Yes; I will help you," and, his eyes still on hers, put out a hand toward Rankin.

The younger man was beside them in a stride. He took the hand offered him, but his gaze also was on the white face of the woman between them.

"We will do it together," he told her. "Rest a.s.sured. It shall be done."

The corners of Lydia's mouth twitched nervously. "You are a good man,"

she said to her G.o.dfather. She looked at Rankin for a moment without speaking, and then turned toward the house, wavering. "Will you help me back?" she said to the doctor, her voice quite flat and toneless; "I am horribly tired."

When the doctor came back again to the arbor, Mrs. Sandworth was with him, her bearing, like his, that of a person in the midst of some cataclysmic upheaval. It was evident that her brother had told her.

Without greeting Rankin, she sat down and fixed her eyes on his face.

She did not remove them during the talk that followed.

The doctor stood by the table, drumming with his fingers and grimacing.

"You must know," he finally made a beginning with difficulty, "I don't know whether you realize, not being a physician, that she is really not herself. She has for the present a mania for providing as she thinks best for her children's future. Of course no one not a monomaniac would so entirely ignore your side, would conceive so strange an idea. She is so absorbed in her own need that she does not realize what an unheard-of request she is making. To burden yourself with two young children--to mortgage all your future--"

Rankin broke in with a shaking voice and a face of exultation: "Good G.o.d, Doctor! Don't grudge me this one chance of my life!"

The doctor stared, bewildered. "What are you talking about?" he asked.

"About myself. I don't do it often--let me now. Do you think I haven't realized all along that what you said of me is true--that I have done nothing? Done nothing but succeed smugly in keeping myself in comfort outside the modern economic treadmill! What else could I do? I'm no orator, to convince other people. I haven't any universal panacea to offer! I'm only an inarticulate countryman, a farmer's son, with the education the state gives everyone--who am I, to try to lead? Apparently there was nothing for me to do but ign.o.bly to take care of myself--but now, G.o.d be thanked! I have my chance. Someone has been hurt in their infernal squirrel-cage, and I can help--"

The older man was looking at him piercingly, as though struck by a sudden thought. He now cut him short with, "You're not deceiving yourself with any notion that she--"

The other answered quickly, with a smile of bitter humility: "You have seen her look at me. She does not know whether I am a human being or not--I am to her any strong animal, a horse, an ox--any force that can carry Ariadne safely!" He added, in another tone, his infinitely gentle tone: "I see in that the extremity of her anxiety."

The doctor put his hand on the other man's powerful arm. "Do you realize what you are proposing to yourself? You are human. You are a young man.

Are you strong enough to keep to it?"

Rankin looked at him. Mrs. Sandworth leaned forward.

"I am," said Rankin finally.

The words echoed in a long silence.

The younger man stood up. "I am going to see a lawyer," he announced in a quiet voice of return to an everyday level. "Until then, we have all more to think over than to talk about, it seems to me."

After he had left them the brother and sister did not speak for a time.

Then the doctor said, irritably: "Julia, say something, for Heaven's sake. What did you think of what he said?"

"I didn't hear what he said," answered Mrs. Sandworth; "I was looking at him."

"Well?" urged her brother.

"He is a good man," she said.

A sense that she was holding something in reserve kept him silent, gazing expectantly at her.

"How awfully he's in love with her!" she brought out finally. "That's the whole point. He's in love with her! All this talk about 'ways of living' and theories and things that they make so much of--it just amounts to nothing but that he's in love with her."

"Oh, you sentimental idiot!" cried the doctor. "I hoped to get some sense out of you."

"That's sense," said Mrs. Sandworth.

"It hasn't anything to do with the point! Why, as for that, Paul was in love with--"

"He was _not_!" cried Mrs. Sandworth, with a sudden loud certainty.

The doctor caught her meaning and considered it frowningly. When he spoke, it was to burst out pathetically: "_I_ have loved her all her life."

"Oh, you!" retorted his sister, with a sad conclusiveness.

Ariadne came running out to them. "I just went to look into Muvver's room, and she was sound asleep! Honest! She was!"

The child had heard enough of the doctor's long futile struggles with the horrors of Lydia's sleepless nights to divine that her news was important. She was rewarded with a startled look from her elders.

"Come!" said the doctor.

They went into the house, and silently to Lydia's half-open door. She lay across the bed as she had dropped down when she came in, one long dark braid hanging to the floor. They stood looking at her almost with awe, as though they were observing for the first time the merciful miracle of sleep. Her bosom rose and fell in long, regular breaths. The drawn, haggard mask that had overlain her face so many months was dissolved away in an utter unconsciousness. Her eyelashes lay on a cheek like a child's; her mouth, relaxed and drooping, fell again into the lines they had loved in her when she was a little girl. She looked like a little girl again to them.

Mrs. Sandworth's hand went to her throat. She looked at her brother through misty eyes. He closed the door gently, and drew her away, making the gesture of a man who admits his own ignorance of a mystery.

CHAPTER x.x.xIV

THROUGH THE LONG NIGHT

"They must have gone crazy, simply crazy!" said Madeleine, making quick, excited gestures. "Mrs. Sandworth, of course--a person can hardly blame her for anything! She's a cipher with the rim off when the doctor has made up his mind. But, even so, shouldn't you think in common decency she'd have let us know what they were up to in time to prevent it? _I_ never heard a word of this sickening business of Ariadne's adoption till day before yesterday. Did _you_?" she ended half-suspiciously.

Mrs. Mortimer stopped her restless pace up and down the old-fas.h.i.+oned, high-ceilinged room, and made a gesture for silence. "I thought I heard something--up there," she explained, motioning to the upper part of the house. "I wonder what made Lydia so sure beforehand that she wouldn't live through this?"

"Well, I guess from what the nurse told me there _isn't_ much chance for her," said Madeleine in a hard voice. Her color was not so high as usual, her beautiful face looked grim, and she spoke in a bitter tone of seriousness that made her seem quite another person. Marietta's thin, dark countenance gave less indication of her mood, whatever it was. She looked sallow and worn, and only her black eyes, hot and gloomy, showed emotion.

Both women were silent a moment, listening to the sound of footsteps overhead. "It seems as though it _must_ be over soon now!" cried the childless one of the two, drawing in her breath sharply. "It makes me furious to think of women suffering so. Bertha Williamson was telling me the other day about when her little Walter was born--it made me _sick_!"

The matron looked at her and s.h.i.+vered a little, but made no response.

"The nurse says Lydia is mostly unconscious now. Perhaps the worst is over for her! Poor Lyd! What do you suppose made her act so?" went on Madeleine, moving about restlessly, her voice uncertain. She went to the window, and drew aside the shade to look out into the blackness. "Oh, I wish the men would come! What time is it, do you suppose? Yes, I see; half-past three. Oh, it _must_ be over soon! I wish they'd come! You telegraphed George, didn't you? Heavens! how it rains!"

"He was to come on the midnight train. Is your husband--"

"Oh, he was horrid about it--wanted me to do it all myself. He's in the midst of some big deal or other. But I told him he'd _have_ to come and help out, or I'd--I'd _kill_ him! He'll bring the lawyer."