Chapter 29

A BLACK MILESTONE

What happened was, in the first week of October, the sudden death of her father. It was sudden only to his wife and daughter, whom, as always, the Judge had tried to spare, at all costs, the knowledge of anything unpleasant. Dr. Melton thought that perhaps the strong man's incredulity of anything for him to fear had a good deal to do with his repeated refusals to allow his wife or daughter to be warned of the danger of apoplexy. Without that hypothesis, it seemed incredible, he told Mrs. Sandworth, that so kind a man could be so cruel.

"Everything's incredible," murmured Mrs. Sandworth, her handkerchief at her eyes, her loving heart aching for the newly-made widow, her lifelong friend.

Her brother did not answer. He sat, gnawing savagely on his finger nails, his thoughts centered, as always, on his darling Lydia--fatherless.

He had prided himself on his acute insight into human nature in general, and upon his specialized, intensified knowledge of those two women whom he had known so long and studied so minutely; but "I've been a conceited blockhead, and vanity's treacherous as well as damnable," he cried out to his sister some days later, amazed beyond expression at the way in which their loss affected Lydia and her mother.

Mrs. Emery's attitude was a revelation to him, a revelation that left him almost as angrily full of grief as she herself. He had thought best on the whole not to disclose to her the substance of the several conversations he had had with his dead friend on the subject of finances. With two prosperous sons, the widow would be well taken care of, he thought, perhaps adding with a little acridity, "just as she always has been, without a thought on her part." But when Mrs. Emery, divining the truth with an awful intuition, came flying to him after the settlement, he was not proof against the fury of her interrogations. If she wanted to know, he would tell her, he thought grimly to himself.

"There is nothing left," she began, bursting into his office, "but the house, which has a mortgage, and the insurance--nothing! Nothing!"

It was rather soon for her to be resentful, the doctor thought bitterly, misreading the misery on her face. "No," he said.

"Had the Judge lost any money--do you know?"

"No; I think not."

"But where--what--we had at one time five thousand dollars at least in the savings bank. I happened to know of that small account. I supposed of course there was more. There is no trace of even that, the administrator says."

"That went into the extra expenses of the year Lydia made her début. And her wedding cost a great deal, he told me one day--and her trousseau--and other expenses at that time."

Used as the doctor was to the universal custom of divided interests among his well-to-do patients, it did not seem too strange to him to be giving information about her own affairs to this gray-haired matron. She was not the first widow to whom he had been forced to break bad news of her husband's business.

Mrs. Emery stared at him, her dry lips apart, a glaze over her eyes. He thought her expression strange. As she said nothing, he added, with a little sour pleasure in defending his dead friend, even if it should give a prick to a survivor, "The Judge was so scrupulously honest, you know." The widow sat down and laid her arms across the table, still staring hard at the doctor. It came to him that she was not looking at him at all, but at some devastating inner sight, which seared her heart, but from which she could not turn away her eyes. He himself turned away, beginning to be aware of some passion within her beyond his divination. There was a long silence.

Finally, "That was the reason he would not stop working," said the woman in a voice which made the physician whirl about. He looked sharply into her face, and what he saw there took him in one stride to her side. She kept her stony eyes still on the place where he had been--eyes that saw only, as though for the first time, some long procession of past events.

"I see everything now," she went on with the same flat intonation. "He _could_ not stop. That was the reason why he would never rest."

She got slowly to her feet, smoothing over and over one side of her skirt with a strange automatic gesture. She was looking full into the doctor's face now. "I have killed him," she said quietly, and fell as though struck down by a blow from behind.

Her long, long illness was spent in the Melton's home, with the doctor in attendance and Julia Sandworth, utterly devoted, constantly at hand. The old Emery house, the outward symbol of her married life, was sold, and the big "yard" cut up into building lots long before she was able to sit up. Lydia came frequently, but, acting on the doctor's express command, never brought Ariadne. The outbreaks of self-reproach and embittered grief that were likely to burst upon the widow, even in the midst of one of her quiet, listless days, were not, he said, for a child to see or hear, especially such a sensitive little thing as Ariadne. Those wild bursts of remorse were delirious, he told Lydia, but to his sister he said he wished they were. "I imagine they are the only times when she comes really to herself," he added sadly.

The especial agony for the sick woman was that nothing of what had happened seemed to her now in the least necessary. "Why, if I had only known--if I had only dreamed how things were--" she cried incessantly to those about her. "What did I care about anything compared with Nat! I loved my husband! What did I care--if I had only dreamed that--if I had only known what I was doing!"

Dr. Melton labored in heartsick pity to remove her fixed idea, which soon became a monomania, that she alone was to blame for the Judge's death. It now seemed to him, in his sympathy with her grief, that she had been like a child entrusted with some frail, priceless object and not warned of its fragility. She herself cried out constantly with astonished hatred upon a world that had left her so.

"If anyone had warned me--had given me the least idea that it was so serious--I could have lived in three rooms--we had been poor--what did I care for anything but Nathaniel! I only did all those things because--because there was nothing else to do!"

Lydia tried to break the current with a reminder of the sweet memories of the past. "Father loved you so! He loved to give you what you wanted, Mother dear."

"What I wanted! I wanted my husband. I want my husband!" the widow screamed like a person on the rack.

The doctor sent Lydia away with a hasty gesture. "You must not see her when she is violent," he said. "You would never forget it."

It was something he himself never forgot, used as he was to pitiful scenes in the life of suffering humanity. He was almost like a sick person himself, going about his practice with sunken eyes and gray face. His need for sympathy was so great that he abandoned the tacit silence about the Emerys which had existed between him and Rankin ever since Lydia's marriage, and, going out to the house in the Black Rock woods, unburdened to the younger man the horror of his heart.

"She's suffering," he cried. "She's literally heartbroken! She is! It's real! And what has she had to make up for it? Oh, it's monstrous! One thing she says keeps ringing in my ears. That gray-haired woman, a human being my own age--the silly, tragic, childish thing she keeps saying--'I only did all those things--I only wanted all those things--because there was nothing else!' _Nothing else!_" He turned on his host with a fierce "Good God! She's right. What else was there ever for--for any woman of her class--"

Rankin pushed his shivering, fidgeting visitor into a chair and, laying a big hand on his shoulder, said with a faint smile: "Maybe I can divert your mind for an instant with a story--another one of my great-aunt's, only it's an old one this time; you've probably heard it--about the old man who said to his wife on his death-bed, 'I've tried to be a good husband to you, dear. It's been hard on my teeth sometimes, but I've always eaten the crusts and let you have the soft bread.' You remember what the wife's answer was?"

"No," said the doctor frowning.

"It's the epitome of tragedy. She said, 'Oh, my dear, and I like crusts so!'"

The doctor stared into the fire. "Do you mean--there's work for them?"

"I mean work for them," repeated the younger man.

The word echoed in a long silence.

"It's the most precious possession we have," said Rankin finally. "We ought to share more evenly."

The doctor rose to go. "Generally I forget that we're of different generations," he said with apparent irrelevance, "but there are times when I feel it keenly."

"Why now especially?" Rankin wondered. "I've stated a doctrine that is yours, too."

"No; you wouldn't see, of course. Yes; it's my doctrine--in theory. I believe it, as people believe in Christianity. I should be equally loath to see anybody doubt it, or practice it. Ah, I'm a fool! Besides, I was born in Kentucky. And I'm sixty-seven years old."

He shut the door behind him with emphasis.

He was on his way to Bellevue to see Lydia. Knowing her tender heart, he had expected to see her drowned in grief over her father's death. Her dry-eyed quiet made him uneasy. That morning, he found her holding Ariadne on her knees and telling her in a self-possessed, low tone, which did not tremble, some stories of "when grandfather was a little boy."

"I don't want her to grow up without knowing something of my father," she explained to the doctor.

Her godfather laid a hand on her arm. "Don't keep the tears back so, Lydia," he implored.

She gave him as great a shock of surprise as her mother had done.

"If I could cry," she said quietly, "it would be because I feel so little sorrow. I do not miss my father at all--or hardly at all."

The doctor caught at his chair and stared.

"How should I?" she went on drearily. "I almost never saw him. I never spoke to him about anything that really mattered. I never let him know me--or anything I really felt."

"What are you talking about?" cried the doctor. "You always lived at home."

"I never lived with my father. He was always away in the morning before I was up. I was away, or busy, in the evening when he was there. On Sundays he never went to church as Mother and I did--I suppose now because he had some other religion of his own. But if he had I never knew what it was--or anything else that was in his mind or heart. It never occurred to me that I could. He tried to love me--I remember so many times now--and _that_ makes me cry!--how he tried to love me! He was so glad to see me when I got home from Europe--but he never knew anything that happened to me. I told you once before that when I had pneumonia and nearly died Mother kept it from him because he was on a big case. It was all like that--always. He never knew."

Dr. Melton broke in, his voice uncertain, his face horrified: "Lydia, I cannot let you go on! you are unfair--you shock me. You are morbid! I knew your father intimately. He loved you beyond expression. He would have done anything for you. But his profession is an exacting one. Put yourself in his place a little. It is all or nothing in the law--as in business."

"When you bring children into the world, you expect to have them cost you some money, don't you? You know you mustn't let them die of starvation. Why oughtn't you to expect to have them cost you thought, and some sharing of your life with them, and some time--real time, not just scraps that you can't use for business?"

As the doctor faced her, open-mouthed and silent, she went on, still dry-eyed, but with a quaver in her voice that was like a sob: "But, oh, the worst of my blame is for myself! I was a blind, selfish, self-centered egotist. I could have changed things if I had only tried harder. I am paying for it now. I am paying for it!"

She took her child up in her arms and bent over the dark silky hair. She whispered, "It's not that I have lost my father. I never had a father--but you!" She put out her hand and pressed the doctor's hard. "And my poor father had no daughter."

She set the child on the floor with a gesture almost violent, and cried out loudly, breaking for the first time her cheerless calm, "And now it is too late!"

Ariadne turned her rosy round face to her mother's, startled, almost frightened. Lydia knelt down and put her arms about the child. She looked solemnly into her godfather's eyes, and, as though she were taking a great and resolute oath, she said, "But it is not too late for Ariadne."