Chapter 12

THE SHADOW OF THE COMING EVENT

Judge Emery looked tired and old as he sat down heavily at his dinner-table opposite his pretty daughter. The discomfort and irregularity of the household for the last two weeks had worn on the nerves of a very busy man who needed all of his strength for his work. It seemed an evil fate of his, he reflected as he took his napkin out of its ring, that whenever he was particularly hard-pressed in his profession, domestic turmoil was sure to set in. He was now presiding over a suit between the city and the electric railway company, involving many intricate details of electrical engineering and accounting methods. Until that suit was settled, he felt that it was unreasonable for his family to expect him to give time or attention to anything else.

In the absence of other vital interests in his life, he had come to focus all his faculties on his profession. On the adroitness of clever attorneys he expended the capacity for admiration which, as his life was arranged, found no other outlet; and, belonging to the generation before golf and bridge and tennis had brought games within the range of serious-minded adults, he had the same intent curiosity about the outcome of a legal contest that another man might have felt in the outcome of a Newport tournament. His wife had long ago learned, so she said, that any attempt to catch his mental eye while an interesting trial was in progress was as unavailing as to try to call a street gamin away from a knot-hole in a fence around a baseball field.

She knew him and all his capabilities very well, his wife told herself, and so used was she to the crystallized form in which she had for so many years beheld him, that she dismissed, as typically chimerical "notions," the speculations of her doctor--also a lifelong friend of her husband's--as to what Judge Emery might have become if--the doctor spoke in his usual highly figurative and fantastic jargon--"he had not had to hurry so with that wheel in his cage." "When I first knew Nat Emery," he once said, "he was sitting up till all hours reading _Les Miserables_, and would knock you down if you didn't bow your head at the mention of Thackeray. He might have liked music, too. An American isn't inherently incapable of that, I suppose." At which he had turned on sixteen-year-old Lydia with, "Which would you rather have, Lyddy; a husband with a taste for Beethoven or one that'd make you five thousand a year?" Lydia had shudderingly made the answer of sixteen years, that she never intended to have a husband of any kind whatever, and Mrs. Emery had rebuked the doctor later for "putting ideas in girls' heads." It was an objection at which he had laughed long and loud.

Mrs. Emery liked her doctor in spite of not understanding him; but she loved her husband because she knew him through and through. In his turn, Judge Emery bestowed on his wife an esteem the warmth of which was not tempered by his occasional amusement at her--an amusement which Mrs. Emery was far from suspecting. He did heartily and unreservedly admire her competence; though he never did justice to her single-handed battle against the forces of ignorance and irresponsibility in the kitchen until an illness of hers showed that the combat must be continuous, though his wisdom in selecting an ambitious wife had shielded him, as a rule, from the uproar of the engagement.

This evening, as he looked across the white table-cloth at his daughter, he had a sudden qualm of doubt, not unusual in parents, as to the capacity of the younger generation to carry on the work begun by the older. Of course, he reassured himself, this had scarcely been a fair trial. The child had been plunged into the business the day after her return, with the added complication of her mother's illness; but, even making all allowances, he had been dismayed by the thorough-going domestic anarchy that had ensued. He was partly aware that what alarmed him most was Lydia's lack of zest in the battle, an unwillingness to recognize its inevitability and face it; a strange, apparently willful, blindness to the value of victory. Her father was disturbed by this failure to acquiesce in the normal, usual standard of values. He recalled with apprehension the revolutionary sayings and doings of his second son, which had been the more disconcerting because they flowed from the young reactionary in such a gay flood of high spirits. Harry had no more shared the reverent attitude of his family toward household æsthetics than toward social values. A house was a place to keep the weather from you, he had said laughingly. If you could have it pretty and well-ordered without too much bother, well and good; but might the Lord protect him from everlastingly making omelets to look at and not to eat.

Lydia, to be sure, had ventured no irreverent jokes, and, so far as her father could see, had never conceived them; but a few days before she had suggested seriously, "Why can't we shut up all of the house we don't really use, and not have to take care of those big parlors and the library when you and I are always in the dining-room or upstairs with Mother, now she's sick?"

Judge Emery had thought of the grade of society which keeps its "best room" darkened and closed, of the struggles with which his wife had dragged the family up out of that grade, and was appalled at Lydia's unconscious reversion to type. "Your mother would feel dreadfully to have you do that; you know she thinks it very bad form--very green."

Lydia had not insisted; it ran counter to every instinct in Lydia to insist on anything. She had succumbed at the first of his shocked tones of surprise; but the suggestion had shown him a glimpse of workings in her mind which made him uneasy.

However, to-night there were several cheering circumstances. The doctor had left word that, in all probability, Mrs. Emery would be quite herself in ten days--a shorter time than he had feared. Lydia was really charming in a rose-colored dress that matched the dewy flush in her cheeks; the roast looked cooked as he liked it, and he had heard some warm words that day about the brilliancy of young Paul Hollister's prospects. He took a drink of ice-water, tucked his napkin in the top of his vest--a compromise allowed him by his wife at family dinners, and smiled at his daughter. "Your mother tells me that you've had a letter from Paul, saying that he'll be back shortly," he said with a jocosely significant emphasis. "I suppose we shall hardly be able to get a glimpse of you after he's in town again."

At this point, beginning to carve the roast, he had a sinking premonition that it was going to be very tough, and though he heroically resisted the ejaculation of embittered protest that rose to his lips, this magnanimity cost him so dear that he did not think of Lydia again till after he had served her automatically, dashing the mashed potato on her plate with the gesture of an angry mason slapping down a trowelful of mortar. It seemed to him at the moment that the past three weeks had been one succession of tough roasts. He took another drink of ice-water before he gloomily began on his first mouthful. It was worse than he feared, and he was in no mood to be either very imaginative or very indulgent to a girl's whims when Lydia said, suddenly and stiffly, "I wish you wouldn't speak so about Paul. I don't know what makes everybody tease me so about him!"

Her father was chewing grimly. "I don't know why they shouldn't, I'm sure," he said. "Young folks can't expect everybody to keep their eyes shut and draw no conclusions. Of course I understand Paul's not saying anything definite till now, on account of your being so young."

Something of Marietta's unsparing presentation of facts was inherited from her father, though, under his wife's tutelage, he usually spared Lydia when he thought of it. At this time he was speaking almost absently, his attention divided between the exceptions to his rulings taken by the corporation counsel and the quality of his dinner; both disturbing to his quiet. He finally gave up the attempt at mastication and swallowed the morsel bodily, with a visible gulp. As he felt the consequent dull lump of discomfort, he allowed himself his first articulate protest. "Good Heavens! What meat!"

Lydia had grown quite pale. She pushed back her plate and looked at her father with horrified eyes. "Father! What a thing to say!" she finally cried out. "You make me ashamed to look him--to look anybody in the face. Why, I never dreamed of such a thing! I never--"

Judge Emery was very fond of his pretty daughter, and at this appeal from what he felt to be a very mild expression of justified discontent, he melted at once. "Now, never mind, Lydia, it won't kill me. Only as soon as your mother gets about again, for the Lord's sake have her take you to a butcher shop and learn to select meats."

Lydia looked at him blankly. She had the feeling that her father was so remote from her that she could hardly see him. She opened her lips to speak, but at that moment the maid--the latest acquisition from the employment agency, a slatternly Irish girl--went through the dining-room on her way to answer the door-bell, and her father's amused comment cut her short. "Lydia, you'll have your guests thinking they're at a lunch counter if you let that girl go on wearing that agglomeration of hair."

The maid reappeared, sidling into the room, half carrying, half dragging a narrow, tall green pasteboard box, higher than herself but still not long enough for its contents, which protruded in leafy confusion from one end. "It's for you," she said bluntly, depositing it beside Lydia and retreating into the kitchen.

Lydia looked at it in wonder, turning to crimson confusion when her father said: "From Paul, I suppose. Very nice, I'm sure. Ring the bell for dessert before you open it. Of course you're in a hurry to read the card." He smiled with a tender amusement at the girl, who met his eyes with a look of fright. She opened the box, from which arose a column of strong, spicy odor, almost like something visible, and naïvely read the card aloud: "To the little girl grown up at last--to the young lady I've waited so long to see."

She laid the card down beside her plate and kept her eyes upon it, hanging her head in silence. Her father began to consume his dessert rapidly. The cream in it was delicious, and he ate with appreciation. To him, as to many middle-aged Americans, the two vital parts of a meal were the meat and the dessert. The added pleasures or comforting consolations of soup, salads, vegetables, entrées, made dishes, were not for him. He ate them, but with a robust indifference. "Meat's business," he was wont to say, "and dessert's fun. The rest of one's victuals is society and art and literature and such--things to leave to the women."

He now stopped his consumption of his dessert and recalled himself with an effort to his daughter's impalpable difficulties. She was murmuring, "But, Father--you must be mistaken-- Why, nobody so much as hinted at such a--"

"That's your mother's doings. She'd be furious now if she knew I'd spoken right out. But you don't want to be treated like a little girl all your life, do you?" He laughed at her speechless embarrassment with a kind obtuseness to the horror of youth at seeing its shy fastnesses of reserve laid open to indifferent feet. Divining, however, through his affection for her, that she was really more than pleasantly startled by his bluntness, he began to make everything smooth by saying: "There aren't many girls in Endbury who don't envy my little Lydia, I guess. Paul is considered--"

At this point Lydia rose hurriedly and actually ran away from the sound of his voice. She fled upstairs so rapidly that he heard the click of her heel on the top step before he could draw his breath. He laughed uneasily, finished his dessert in one or two huge mouthfuls, and followed her. He was recalled by the ringing of the telephone bell, and when he went upstairs again he was smiling broadly. With his lawyer's caution, he waited a moment outside his wife's room, where he heard Lydia's voice, to see if her mother had hit upon some happy inspiration to quiet the girl's exaggerated maidenly shyness. He had the tenderest indulgence to his daughter's confusion, but he was not without a humorous, middle-aged realization of the extremely transitory nature of this phase of youth. He had lived long enough to see so many blushing girls transformed into matter-of-fact matrons that the inevitable end of the business was already present to his mind. He was vastly relieved that Lydia had a mother to understand her fancies, and upon his wife, whom he would not have trusted to undertake the smallest business transaction without his advice, he transferred, with a sigh of content, the entire responsibility of wisely counseling their daughter. "Thank the Lord, that's not my job!" he had often said about some knotty point in the up-bringing of the children. Mrs. Emery had always answered that she could not be too thankful for a "husband who was not a meddler."

The Judge now listened at the door to the conversation between the two women with a grin of satisfaction.

"Why, my dear, what is there so terrible in having the handsomest and most promising young man in Endbury devoted to you? You don't need to marry him for years and years if you don't want to--or never, if you don't like him enough." She laughed a little, teasingly, "Perhaps it's all just our nonsense, and he never has thought of you in that way. Maybe when he comes to see you he'll tell you about a beautiful girl in Urbana or Cincinnati that he's engaged to--and _then_ what would your silly father say?"

"Oh, if I could only think that," breathed Lydia, as though she had been reprieved from a death sentence. "Of course! Father was just joking. But he startled me so!"

"He was probably thinking of his horrid law business, darling. When a big trial is on he wouldn't know me from Eve. He says _anything_ at such times."

Judge Emery laughed noiselessly, and quite without resentment at this wifely characterization.

Lydia went on: "It wasn't so much what he said, you know--as--oh, the way he took it for granted--"

"Well, don't think about it any more, dear; just be your sweet natural self when Paul comes to see you the first time--and don't let's talk any more now. Mother gets tired so easily."

Lydia's remorseful outcry over having fatigued her mother seemed a good occasion for Judge Emery's entrance into the room and for his announcement. He felt that she would make an effort to control any agitation she might feel, and indeed, beyond a startled gasp, she made no comment on his news. Mrs. Emery herself was more obviously stirred to emotion. "To-night? Why, I didn't think he'd be in town for several days yet."

"He only got in at five o'clock this afternoon, he said."

The two parents exchanged meaning glances over this chronology, and Mrs. Emery flushed and smiled. "Now, Lydia," she said, "it's a perfect shame I'm not well enough to be there when he comes. It would make it easier for you. But I wish you'd say honestly whether you'd rather have your father there or see Paul alone."

Judge Emery's face took on an aggrieved look of alarm. "Good gracious, my dear! What good would I be? You know I can't be tactful. Besides, I've got an appointment with Melton."

Lydia rose from where she knelt by the bed. Her chin was quivering. "Why, you make me feel so--so queer! Both of you!--As though it were anything--to see Paul--when I've known him always."

Her mother seized on the rôle opened to them by this speech, and said quickly: "Why, of course! Aren't we silly! I don't know what possesses us. When he comes you just run along and see him, and say your father and I are sorry not to be there."

During the next half-hour she made every effort, heroically though obviously seconded by her husband, to keep the conversation in a light and casual vein, but when the door-bell rang, they all three heard it with a start. Mrs. Emery said, very carelessly, "There he is, dear. Run along and remember me to him." But she pulled Lydia down to her, straightened a bow on her waist with a twitch, loosened a lock of the girl's shining dark hair, and kissed her with a sudden yearning fervor.

After they were alone, Judge Emery laughed aloud. "You're just as bad as I am, Sarah. You don't _say_ anything, but--"

"Oh, I know," his wife said; "I can't help it!" She deliberated unresignedly over the situation for a moment, and then, "It seems as though I couldn't have it so, to be sick just now, when I'm needed so much. This first month is so important! And Lydia's getting such a different idea of things from what I meant, having this awful time with servants, and all. I have a sort of feeling once in a while that she's getting notions!" She pronounced the word darkly.

"Notions?" Judge Emery asked. He had never learned to interpret his wife's obscurities when the mantle of intuitions fell on her.

"Oh, don't ask me what kind! I don't know. If I knew I could do something about it. But she speaks queerly once in a while, and the evening of the day she was out with Marietta in the Black Rock woods she was-- Do you know, I think it's not good for Lydia to be outdoors too much. It seems to go to her head so. She gets to looking like Harry--almost reckless, and like some little scampering wild animal."

Judge Emery rose and buttoned his coat about his spare figure. "Maybe she takes a back track, after some of my folks. You know there's one line in my mother's family that was always crazy about the woods. My grandfather on my mother's side used to go off just as regular as the month of May came around, and--"

Mrs. Emery interrupted him with the ruthless and justifiable impatience of people at the family history of their relations by marriage. "Oh, go along! And stop and speak to Paul on your way out. Just drop in as you pass the door. We don't want to really chaperone her. Nobody does that yet--but--the Hollisters are so formal about their girls--well, you stop in, anyhow. It's borne in on me that that'll look better, after all."