The Squirrel-Cage Part 5

Lydia tried this morning at breakfast to obtain the same advantage over her sister. She flushed with a mixture of emotions and tried in a resentful silence to think of some definable cause for her accusation against Rankin's manners. Finally, "Well, I gave him a bunch of grapes, and he never so much as said thank you. He just took them and marched off."

"Perhaps he doesn't like grapes," suggested Mrs. Mortimer, grim to the last.

After breakfast, when Mrs. Mortimer and her father disappeared, Lydia found herself with a long morning before her. The doctor telephoned that he could not come before noon. Judge Emery, after his proprietary good-by kiss, advised her to be quiet and rest. She looked a little pale, he thought, and he was afraid that, after her cool ocean voyage, she would find the heat of an Ohio September rather trying. Indeed, as Lydia idled for a moment over the dismantled breakfast table she was by no means moved to activity. Dark shades were everywhere drawn down and the house was like a dimly-lighted cave, but through this attempt at protection the sun was making itself felt in a slowly rising, breathless, moist heat.

Lydia climbed the stairs to her mother's room. She was looking forward to a long visit, but finding the invalid asleep she turned away from the door rather blankly. She was as yet too much a stranger in her own home to have at hand the universal trivial half-dozen unfinished tasks that save idle women from the perils of uninterrupted thought. The ribbons were all run in her pretty underwear; she owed no notes to anyone, because she had been at home too short a time to have received any letters; her hair had been washed the last day on the steamer, and her new dresses needed no mending. Her trunks had been unpacked the day before by her mother's competent hands, which had also arranged every detail of her tasteful room until to touch it would disturb the effect.

Lydia began to experience that uneasy, unsettling discomfort that comes to modern people in ordinary modern life if some unusual circ.u.mstance throws them temporarily on their own resources. She lingered aimlessly for some time at the head of the stairs, and then, leaning heavily against the rail, began to descend slowly, one step at a time, to prolong the transit. Where the stairs turned she noticed a stain on the crisp sleeve of her white dress. It came, evidently, from one of the grapes she had eaten that morning under the maple tree. A current of cool air blew past her. It was the first relief from the stagnation of the sultry day and, sitting down on the landing, she lost herself in prolonged meditation.

In the obscurity of the darkened hall she was scarcely visible save as a spot of light showing dimly through the bal.u.s.trade, and she sat so still that the maid, stepping about below, did not see her. On her part, Lydia noticed but absently this slight stir of domestic activity, nor, after a time, louder but m.u.f.fled noises from the dining-room. Even when the door to the dining-room opened and quick, light steps came to the foot of the stairs, she did not heed them. A confused, hushed sound of someone busy about various small operations did not rouse her, and it was not until the fall of a large object, clattering noisily on the floor, that she became conscious that someone beside the maid was in the hall. She leaned forward, and saw that the object which had fallen was the newel-post of the stairs. It had evidently been detached from its fastenings by the workman who, with his back to her, now knelt over a tool-box, fumbling among the tools with resultant little metallic clicks.

Lydia ran down the stairs, finger on lip. "Hus.h.!.+ Don't make any more noise than you can help. Mother's still asleep." At his gaze of stupefaction she broke into her charming light laugh, "Why, I always seem to strike you speechless. What's the matter with me now?"

The other emerged from his surprise with a ready, smiling acceptance of her tone, "I was wondering if I oughtn't to apologize to you--if I should ever see you again--for being so curt this morning. And then you spring up out of the ground before me. Well, so I will apologize. I do.

I'm very sorry."

They adopted, as in the first part of their earlier talk, the half-humorous familiarity of people surprised in an unconventional situation, but, in spite of this, the young man's apology was not without the accent of serious sincerity.

Lydia responded heartily in kind. "Oh, it was I who was horrid.

And--wasn't it funny--I was just thinking--wondering if I should ever have a chance to try to make you see that I didn't mean to be so--" she hesitated, and fell back on iteration again--"so horrid."

The fas.h.i.+onable Endbury boarding-school had not provided its graduate with any embarra.s.sment of riches in the way of expression for various shades of meaning. He answered, lowering his voice as she did, "Oh, you were all right, but I was most objectionable with my impertinent laugh.

I'm sorry."

She challenged his sincerity, "Are you really, really?"

"Oh, really, really," he a.s.sured her.

"And you want to do something nice to make it up to me?"

"Anything," he promised, smiling at her as at a child.

"You've promised! You've promised!" She indulged herself in a noiseless hand-clasp. "Well, then, the forfeit is to tell me all about it."

"All about what?"

"Goodness gracious! Don't you remember? That's what we were both horrid about. I asked you to tell me about it, and you--"

He remembered, evidently with an amus.e.m.e.nt not entirely free from annoyance. "Oh, I'm safe. I'll never see you to tell you."

She sat down on the bottom step and drew her white skirts about her.

"What's the matter with right now?" she asked, smiling.

"I've got to earn my living right now," he objected, beginning with a swift deftness to bore a tiny hole.

She was diverted for an instant. "What are you doing to our nice old newel-post?" she asked. "I thought they said you were going to set up the new sideboard."

"Oh, that's no job at all; it's done. Didn't you hear me pus.h.i.+ng and banging things around? Now I've the job before me of fitting the very latest thing in newel-posts in place of your old one."

The girl returned to her first attack. "Well, anyhow, if it's a long job, it's all the better. Go ahead and talk at the same time. You won't feel you're wasting time."

Their low-toned talk and the glimmering light of the hall made them seem oddly intimate. Lydia expressed this feeling while Rankin stood looking doubtfully at her, a little daunted by the pretty relentlessness of her insistence. "You see, you're not nearly so much a stranger to me as I am to you. Remember how I sewed and listened. I'm a grown-up little pitcher, and my ears are still large. I was remembering just now, before you came in, how strangely you used to talk to Dr. Melton, and I thought it wasn't so surprising, after all, your doing 'most anything queer."

Rankin laughed as he bent over his tools. "Little pitchers have tongues, too, I see."

Either Lydia felt herself more familiar with her interlocutor than before, or one result of her meditation had been the loss of her excessive fear of wounding his feelings. She spoke now quite confidently, "But, honestly, what in the world did you do it for?"

"It?" He made her define herself.

"Oh, you know! Give up everything--lose your chance in society, and poke off into the woods to be a common--" In spite of her new boldness she faltered here.

He supplied the word, with a flash of mirth. "Don't be afraid to say it right out--even such an awful term as workman, or carpenter. I can bear it."

"I knew it!" Lydia exclaimed. "As I was thinking it over on the stairs just now, I said to myself that probably you weren't a bit apologetic about it; probably you had some queer reason for being proud of yourself for doing it."

He cast a startled look at her. "You're the only person in Endbury with imagination enough to guess that."

"But why? why? why?" she urged him, her flexible eyebrows raised in the eagerness of her inquiry. "I feel just as though I were going to hear the answer to a perfectly maddeningly unanswerable riddle."

He had another turn in his attempt at evasion. "It wouldn't be polite to tell you the answer, for what I'm trying to do is to get out of being what everybody you know thinks is the only way to be--except Dr. Melton, of course."

"What's the matter with 'all the people I know,'" she challenged him explicitly.

He laughed and shook his head. "Oh, I've nothing new to say about them.

Everybody has said it, from Ecclesiastes to Tolstoi."

"They never say anything about just ordinary folks in Endbury that I know."

Rankin looked at her whimsically. "Oh, _don't_ they?"

"_Do_ they?" Lydia wondered at the possibility. Presently she brought out, as a patently absurd supposition, "You don't mean to say that Endbury people are wicked?"

"Do you think that none but wicked people are written about in serious books? No; Lord, no! I don't think they are wicked--just mistaken."

"What about? Now we're getting warm. I'll guess in a minute."

He looked a little sadly down at her bright, eager face. "I'm afraid you would never guess. It's all gone into your blood. You breathe it in and out as you live, every minute."

"What? what? what? You can't say it, you see, when it comes right down to the matter."

"Oh, yes, I can; I can ask you if it wouldn't be a tragedy if they should all be killing themselves to get what they really don't want and don't need, and starving for things they could easily have by just putting out their hands."

Lydia's blankness was immense.

He said, with ironic triumph: "You see, when I do say it you can't make anything out of it." After this he turned for a time all his attention to his work.

He had evidently reached a critical point in his undertaking. Lydia watched in silence the deft manipulations of his strong, brown fingers, wondering at the eager, almost sparkling, alertness with which he went from one step to another of the process that seemed unaccountably complicated to her. After he had finally lifted the heavy piece of wood into place, handling its great weight with a.s.surance, and had submitted the joint to the closest inspection, he gave a low whistle of satisfaction with himself, and stepped back to get the general effect.

As he did so he happened to glance at the girl, drooping rather listlessly on the stair. He paused instantly, with an exclamation of dismay.