Chapter 10

LYDIA'S GODFATHER

Lydia stood where he left her, listening to the sound of his footsteps die down the walk outside. She was still standing there when, some time later, the door to the dining-room behind her opened and a tiny elderly man trotted across the hall to the stairs. Lydia recognized him before he saw that she was there, so that he exclaimed in surprise and pleasure as she came running toward him, her face quivering like a child's about to weep.

"Oh, dear Godfather!" she cried, as she flung herself on him; "I'm so glad you've come! I never wanted so much to see you!"

He was startled to feel that she was trembling and that her cheek against his forehead, for she was taller than he, was burning hot. "Good gracious, my dear!" he said, in the shrill voice his size indicated, "anybody'd think you were the patient I came to see."

His voice, though high, was very sweet--a quality that made it always sound odd, almost foreign, in the midst of the neutral, colorless middle-western tones about him. He spoke with a Southern accent, dropping his _r's_, clipping some vowels and broadening others, but there was no Southern drawl in the clicking, telegraphic speed of his speech. He now looked up at his tall godchild and said without a smile: "If you'll kindly come down here where I can get at you, I'll shake you for being so foolish. You needn't be alarmed about your mother."

Lydia recoiled from the little man as impulsively as she had rushed upon him. "Why, how _awful_!" she accused herself, horrified. "I'd _forgotten_ Mother!"

Dr. Melton took off his hat and laid it on the hall shelf. "I will climb up on a chair to shake you," he continued cheerfully, "if already, in less than twenty-four hours, you're indulging in nerves, as these broken and meaningless ejaculations seem to indicate."

He picked up a palm-leaf fan, lost himself in a big hall-chair, and began to fan himself vigorously. He looked very hot and breathless, but he flowed steadily on.

"I can't diagnose you yet, you know, without looking at you, the way I do your mother, so you'll have to give me some notion of what's the occasion of these alternate seizures and releases of a defenseless Lilliputian godfather." He made a confident gesture toward the upper part of the house with his fan. "About your mother--I know without going upstairs that she is floored with one or another manifestation of the great disease of social-ambitionitis. But calm yourself. It's not so bad as it seems when you've got the right doctor. I've practiced for thirty years among Endbury ladies. They can't spring anything new on me. I've taken your mother through doily fever induced by the change from table-cloths to bare tops, through portière inflammation, through afternoon tea distemper, through _art-nouveau_ prostration and mission furniture palsy, not to speak of a horrible attack of acute insanity over the necessity for having her maids wear caps. I think you can trust me, whatever dodge the old malady is working on her."

He had run on volubly, to give Lydia time to recover herself, his keen blue eyes fixing her, and now, as she wavered into something like a smile at his chatter, he shot a question at her with a complete change of manner: "But what's the matter with _you_?"

Lydia started as though he had suddenly clapped her on the shoulder. "I--why, I--just--" she hesitated, "why, I don't know what _is_ the matter with me." She brought it out with the most honest surprise in the world.

Dr. Melton's approval of this answer was immense. "Why, Lydia, I'm proud of you! You're one in a thousand. You'll break the hearts of everyone who knows you by turning out a sensible woman if you don't look out. I don't believe there's another girl in Endbury who would have had the nerve to tell the truth and not fake up a headache, or a broken heart, or _Weltschmerz_, or some such trifle, for a reason." He pulled himself up to his feet. "Of course, you don't know what's the matter with you, my dear. _I_ do. _I_ know everything, and can't do a thing. That's me! Physically, you're upset by Endbury heat after an ocean voyage, and mentally it's the reaction caused by your subsidence into private life after being the central figure of the returned traveler. Last evening, now, with that mob of friends and the family pawing at you and trying to cram-jam you back into the Endbury box and shut the lid down--_that_ was enough to kill anybody with a nerve in her body. What's the history of the morning? I hope you slept late."

Lydia shook her head. "No; I was up ever so early.--Marietta came over to borrow the frames for drying curtains, and stayed to breakfast."

Something about her accent struck oddly on the trained sensitiveness of the physician's ear. Her tone rang empty, as with something kept back.

"Marietta's been snapping at you," he diagnosed rapidly.

"Well, a little," Lydia admitted.

The doctor laid the palm-leaf fan aside and took Lydia's slim fingers in both his firm, sinewy hands. "My dear, I'm going to do as I have always done with you, and talk with you as though you were a grown-up person and could take your share in understanding and bearing family problems. Your sister Marietta is not a very happy woman. She has too many of your father's brains for the life she's been shunted into. She might be damming up a big river with a finely constructed concrete dam, and what she is giving all her strength to is trying to hold back a muddy little trickle with her bare hands. The achievement of her life is to give on a two-thousand-a-year income the appearance of having five thousand like your father. She does it; she's a remarkably forceful woman, but it frets her. She ought to be in better business, and she knows it, though she won't admit it. So, don't you mind if she's sharp-tongued once in a while. It's when she feels the muddy water oozing through her fingers."

He fancied that Lydia's eyes on his were a little blank, perhaps absent, and broke off with a short laugh. He was quite hardened to the fact that people never understood his fanciful metaphors, but Lydia, as a child, had used to have a curious intuitive divination of his meaning. After his laugh he sighed and turned the talk.

"Well, and has Flora Burgess been after you to get your impression of Endbury as compared with Europe? Your mother said she wanted an interview with you for next Sunday's _Society Notes_."

Lydia smiled. The subject was an old joke with them. "No; she hasn't appeared yet. I haven't seen her--not since my birthday a year ago, the time she described the supper-table as a 'glittering, scintillating mass of cut-glass and silver, and yet without what could really be called ostentation.' Isn't she delicious! How is the little old thing, anyway?"

"Still trotting industriously about Endbury back yards sowing the dragon's teeth of her idiotic ideas and standards."

"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 Cassandra!" 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 passed since she had run out into the dawn. For an instant she had the naïve, 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 passed 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 nobody 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.