Chapter 16

A SOP TO THE WOLVES

Six o'clock had struck when Mrs. Sandworth came wearily back from her Christmas shopping. It was only the middle of November, but each year she began her preparations for that day of rejoicing earlier and earlier, in a vain attempt to avoid some of the embittering desolation of confusion and fatigue which for her, as for all her acquaintances, marked the December festival. She let herself down heavily from the trolley-car which had brought her from the business part of Endbury back to what was known as the "residential section," a name bestowed on it to the exclusion of several other much larger divisions of town devoted exclusively to the small brick buildings blackened by coal smoke in which ordinary people lived.

As she walked slowly up the street, her arms were full of bundles, her heart full of an ardent prayer that she might find her brother either out or in a peaceable mood. She loved and admired Dr. Melton more than anyone else in the world, but there were moments when the sum total of her conviction about him was an admission that his was not a reposeful personality. For the last fortnight, this peculiarity had been accentuated till Mrs. Sandworth's loyalty had cracked at every seam in order not to find him intolerable to live with. Moreover, her own kind heart and intense partiality for peace in all things had suffered acutely from the same suspense that had wrought the doctor to his wretched fever of anxiety. It had been a time of torment for everybody--everybody was agreed on that; and Mrs. Sandworth had felt that life in the same house with Lydia's godfather had given her more than her share of misery.

On this dark November evening she was so tired that every inch of her soft plumpness ached. She had not prospered in her shopping. Things had not matched. She let herself into the front door with a sigh of relief at finding the hall empty. She looked cautiously into the doctor's study and drew a long breath, peeped into the parlor and, almost smiling, went on cheerfully upstairs to her room. From afar, she saw the welcoming flicker of the coal fire in her grate, and felt a glow of surprised gratitude to the latest transient from the employment agency who was now occupying her kitchen. She did not often get one that was thoughtful about keeping up fires when nobody was at home. It would be delicious to get off her corset and shoes, let down her hair--there he was, bolt upright before the fire, his back to the door. She took in the significance of his tense attitude and prepared herself for the worst, sinking into a chair, letting her bundles slide at various tangents from her rounded surface, and surveying her brother with the utmost unresignation. "Well, what is it now?" she asked.

He had not heard her enter, and now flashed around, casting in her face like a hard-thrown missile, "Lydia's engaged."

All Mrs. Sandworth's lassitude vanished. She flung herself on him in a wild outcry of inquiry--"Which one? Which one?"

He answered her angrily, "Which do you suppose? Doesn't a steam-roller make some impression on a rose?"

"Oh!" she cried, enlightened; and then, with widespread solemnity, "Well, think--of--that!"

"Not if I can help it," groaned the doctor.

"But that's not fair," his sister protested a moment later as she took in the rest of his speech.

"Heaven knows it's not," he agreed bitterly.

She stared. "I mean that Paul hasn't been nearly so steam-rollery as usual."

The doctor rubbed his face furiously, as though to brush off a disagreeable clinging web. "He hasn't had to be. There have been plenty of other forces to do his rolling for him."

"If you mean her father--you know he's kept his hands off _religiously_."

"He has that, damn him!" The doctor raged about the room.

A silent prayer for patience wrote itself on Mrs. Sandworth's face. "You're just as inconsistent as you can be!" she cried.

"I'm more than that," he sighed, sitting down suddenly on a chair in the corner of the room; "I'm heartsick." He shivered, thrust his hands into his pockets and surveyed his shoes gloomily.

One of Mrs. Sandworth's cheerful capacities was for continuing tranquilly the minute processes of everyday life through every disturbance in the region of the emotions. You _had_ to, she said, to get them done--anybody that lived with the doctor. She now took advantage of his silence to count over her packages, remove her wraps, loosen a couple of hooks at her waist and fluff up the roll of graying hair over her forehead. The doctor looked at her.

She answered him reasonably, "It wouldn't help Lydia any if I took it off and threw it in the fire, would it? It's my best one, too; the other's at the hairdresser's, getting curled."

"It's not," the doctor broke out--"it's not, Heaven be my judge! that _I_ want to settle it. But I did want Lydia to settle it herself."

"She has, at last," Mrs. Sandworth reminded him, in a little surprise at his forgetting so important a fact.

"She has _not_!" roared the doctor.

His literal-minded sister looked aggrieved bewilderment. She felt a bitterness at having been stirred without due cause. "Marius, you're unkind. What did you tell me she had for--when I'm so tired it seems as if I could lie down and die if I--"

Dr. Melton knew his sister. He made a rapid plunge through the obscurity of her brain into her heart's warm clarity, and, "Oh, Julia, if you had seen her!" he cried.

She leaned toward him, responsive to the emotion in his voice. "Tell me about it, poor Marius," she said, yearning maternally over his pain.

"I can't--if you had seen her--"

"But how did you hear? Did she tell you? When did--"

"I was there at five, and her mother met me at the door. She took me upstairs, a finger on her lip, and there she and Marietta said they guessed this afternoon would settle things. A week ago, she said, she'd had an up-and-down talk with that dreadful carpenter and as good as forbade him the house--"

Mrs. Sandworth had a gesture of intuition. "Oh, if they've managed to shut Lydia off from seeing him--"

The doctor nodded. "That's what her mother counted on. She said she thought it a sign that Lydia was just infatuated with Rankin--her being so different after she'd seen him--so defiant--so unlike Lydia! But now she hadn't seen him for a week, and her mother and Marietta had been 'talking to her'--_Julia!_--and then Paul had come to see her every evening, and had been just right--firm and yet not exacting, and ever so gentle and kind--and this afternoon when he came Lydia cried and didn't want to go down, but her mother said she mustn't be childish, and Marietta had just taken her right down to the library and left her there with Paul, and there she was now." The doctor started up and beat his thin, corded hand on the mantel. He could not speak. His sister got up and laid a tender hand on his shoulder. "Poor Marius!" she said again.

He drew a long breath. "I did not fly at their throats--I turned and ran like mad down the stairs and into the library. It was Rankin I wanted to kill for letting his pride come in--for leaving her there alone with those--I was ready to snatch Lydia up bodily and carry her off to--" He stopped short and laughed harshly. "I reach to Lydia's shoulder," he commented on his own speech. "That's me. To see what's to be done and--"

"What _was_ to be done?" asked Mrs. Sandworth patiently. She was quite used to understanding but half of what her brother said and had acquired a quiet art of untangling by tireless questionings the thread of narrative from the maze of his comments and ejaculations.

"There was nothing to be done. I was too late."

"You didn't burst in on them while Paul was kissing her or anything, did you?"

"Paul wasn't there."

"Not there! Why, Marius, you're worse than usual. Didn't you tell me her mother said--"

"He had been there--one look at Lydia showed that. She sat there alone in the dim light, her face as white--and when I came in she said, without looking to see who it was, 'I'm engaged to Paul.' She said it to her mother, who was right after me, of course, and then to Marietta."

"Well--!" breathed Mrs. Sandworth as he paused; "so that was all there was to it?"

"Oh, no; they did the proper thing. They kissed her, and cried, and congratulated everybody, and her mother said, with an eye on me: 'Darling, you're _not_ doing this just because you know it'll make us so very happy, _are_ you?' Lydia said, 'Oh, no; she supposed not,' and started to go upstairs. But when Marietta said she'd go and telephone to Flora Burgess to announce it, Lydia came down like a flash. It was _not_ to be announced she told them; she'd _die_ if they told anybody! Paul had promised solemnly not to tell anybody. Her mother said, of course she knew how Lydia felt about it. It _was_ a handicap for a girl in her first season. Lydia was half-way up the stairs again, but at that she looked down at her mother--_God!_ Julia, if a child of mine had ever looked at me like that--"

Mrs. Sandworth patted him vaguely. "Oh, people always look white and queer in the twilight, you know--even quite _florid_ complexions."

The doctor made a rush to the door.

"But dinner must be ready to put on the table," she called after him.

"Put it on, then," he cried, and disappeared.

A plain statement was manna to Mrs. Sandworth. She had finished her soup, and was beginning on her hamburg steak when the doctor came soberly in, took his place, and began to eat in silence. She took up the conversation where they had left it.

"So it's all over," she commented, watching his plate to see that he did not forget to salt his meat and help himself to gravy.

"Nothing's ever over in a human life," he contradicted her. "Why do you suppose she doesn't want it announced?"

"You don't suppose she means to break it off later?"

"I haven't any idea _what_ she means, any more than she has, poor child! But it's plain that this is only to gain time--a sop to the wolves."

"Wolves!" cried poor Mrs. Sandworth.

"Well, tigers and hyenas, perhaps," he added moderately.

"They're crazy about Lydia, that whole Emery family," she protested.

"They are that," he agreed sardonically. "But I don't mean only her family. I mean unclean prowling standards of what's what, as well as--"

"They'd lie down and let her walk over them! You know they would--"

"If they thought she was going in the right direction."

Mrs. Sandworth gave him up, and drifted off into speculation. "I wonder what she could have found in that man to think of! A girl brought up as she's been!"

"Perhaps she was only snatching a little sensible talk where she could get it."

"But they _didn't_ talk sensibly. Marietta said Lydia tried, one of the times when they were going over it with her, Lydia tried to tell her mother some of the things they said that night when he took her home from here. Marietta said they were 'too sickish!' 'Flat Sunday-school cant about wanting to be good,' and all that sort of thing."

"That certainly wouldn't have tempted _Marietta_ from the path of virtue and sharp attention to a good match," murmured the doctor. "Nobody can claim that there's anything very seductive to the average young lady in Rankin's fanaticism."

"Oh, you admit he's a fanatic!" Mrs. Sandworth seized on a valuable piece of driftwood which the doctor's tempest had thrown at her feet.

"Everybody who's worth his salt is a fanatic."

"Not Paul. Everybody says he's so sane and levelheaded."

"There isn't a hotter one in creation!"

"Than _Paul_?"

"Than Paul."

"Oh, Marius!" she reproached him for levity.

"He's a fanatic for success."

"Oh, I don't call _that_--"

"Nor nobody else in Endbury--but it is, all the same. And the only wonder is that Lydia should have been attracted by Rankin's heretical brand and not by Paul's orthodox variety. It shows she's rare."

"Good gracious, Marius! You talk as though it were a question of ideas or convictions."

"That's a horrible conception," he admitted gravely.

"It's which one she's in love with!" Mrs. Sandworth emitted this with solemnity.

The doctor stood up to go. "She's not in love with either," he pronounced. "She's never been allowed the faintest sniff at reality or life or experience--how can she be in love?"

"Well, they're in love with her," she triumphed for her sex.

"I don't know anything about Paul's inner workings, and as for Rankin, I don't know whether he's in love with her or not. He's sorry for her--he's touched by her--"

Mrs. Sandworth felt the ground slip from beneath her feet. "Good gracious me! If he's not in love with her, nor she with him, what are you making all this fuss about?"

The doctor thrust out his lips. "I'm only protesting in my usual feeble, inadequate manner, after the harm's all done, at idiots and egotists laying their dirty hands on a sacred thing--the right of youth to its own life--"

"Well, if you call that a feeble protest--!" she called after him.

He reappeared, hat in hand. "It's nothing to what I'd like to say. I will add that Daniel Rankin's a man in a million."

Mrs. Sandworth responded, rather neatly for her, that she should hope so indeed, and added, "But, Marius, she couldn't have married him--really! Mercy! What had he to offer her--compared with Paul? Everybody has always said what a _suitable_ marriage--"

Dr. Melton crammed his hat on his head fiercely and said nothing.

"But it's so," she insisted.

"He hasn't anything to offer to Marietta, perhaps."

"Marietta's _married_!" Mrs. Sandworth kept herself anchored fast to the facts of any case under discussion.

"_Is_ she?" queried the doctor with a sincerity of interrogation which his sister found distracting.

"Oh, Marius!" she reproached him again; and then helplessly, "How did we get on to Marietta, anyhow? I thought we were talking of Lydia's engagement."

"I was," he assured her.

"And I was going to ask you really seriously, just straight out, what you are so down on the Emerys for? What have they done that's so bad?"

"They've brought her up so that now in her time of need she hasn't a weapon to resist them."

"Oh, Ma--" began Mrs. Sandworth despairingly.

"Well, then, I will tell you--I'll explain in words of one syllable. Mind you, I don't undertake to settle the question--Heaven forbid! It may be all right for Marietta Mortimer to kill herself body and soul by inches to keep what bores her to death to have--a social position in Endbury's two-for-a-cent society, but, for the Lord's sake, why do they make such a howling and yelling just at the time when Lydia's got the tragically important question to decide as to whether that's what _she_ wants? It's like expecting her to do a problem in calculus in the midst of an earthquake."

Mrs. Sandworth had a mortal antipathy to figures of speech, acquired of much painful experience with her brother's conversation. She sank back in her chair and waved him off. "Calculus!" she cried, outraged; "earthquakes! And I'm sure you're as unfair as can be! You can't say her father's obscured any question. You _know_ he's not a dictatorial father. His principle is not to interfere at all with his children."

"Yes; that's his principle all right. His specialties are in other lines, and they have been for a long time. His wife has seen to that."

Mrs. Sandworth had one of her lucid divinations of the inner meaning of a situation. "Oh, the poor Emerys! Poor Lydia! Oh, Marius, aren't you glad we haven't any children!"

"Every child that's not getting a fair chance at what it ought to have, should be our child," he said.

He went up to her and kissed her gently. "Good-night," he said.

"Where are you going?"

"To the Black Rock woods."

"Tell him--" she was inspired--"tell him to try to see Lydia again."

"I was going to do that. But she won't be allowed to. It's pretty late now. She ought to have seen him a great many years ago--from the time he was born."

"But she's ever so much younger than he," cried Mrs. Sandworth after him, informingly.