Chapter 37

WHAT IS BEST FOR THE CHILDREN?

Lydia lifted her face, white under the shadow of her disordered hair, and said: "It is Mr. Rankin who must take care of the children--Ariadne, and the baby if it lives."

She spoke in a low, expressionless voice, as though she had no strength to spare. Dr. Melton's hand on the table began to shake. He answered: "I have told you before, my dear, that there is no reason for your fixed belief that you will not live after the baby's birth. You must not dwell on that so steadily."

Lydia raised her heavy eyes once more to his. "I want him to have the children," she said.

The doctor took a step or two away from the table. He was now shaking from head to foot, and when he came back to the silent couple and took a chair between them he made two or three attempts at speech before he could command his voice. "It is very hard on me, Lydia, to--to have you turn from me to a--to a stranger." His voice had grotesque quavers.

Lydia raised a thin, trembling hand, and laid it on her godfather's sinewy fingers. She tried to smile into his face. "Dear Godfather," she said wistfully, "if it were only myself--but the children--"

"What do you mean, Lydia? What do you mean?" he demanded with tremulous indignation.

She dropped her eyes again and drew a long, sighing breath. "I haven't strength to explain to you all I mean," she said gently, "and I think you know without my telling you. You have always known what is in my heart."

"I had thought there was some affection for me in your heart," said the doctor, thrusting out his lips to keep them from trembling.

Lydia's drooping position changed slightly. She lifted her hands and folded them together on the table, leaning forward, and bending full on the doctor the somber intensity of her dark, deep-sunken eyes. "Dear Godfather, I have no time or strength to waste." The slowness with which she chose her words gave them a solemn weight. "I cannot choose. If it hurts you to have me speak truth, you must be hurt. You know what a failure I have made of my life, how I have missed everything worth having--"

Dr. Melton, driven hard by some overmastering emotion, drew back, and threw aside precipitately the tacit understanding he and Lydia had always kept. "Lydia, what are you talking about! You have been more than usually favored--you have been loved and cherished as few women--" His voice died away under Lydia's honest, tragic eyes.

She went on as though he had not spoken. "My children must know something different. My children must have a chance at the real things. If I die, who can give it to them? Even if I live, shall I be wise enough to give them what I had not wisdom or strength enough to get for myself?"

"You speak as though I were not in the world, Lydia," the doctor broke in bitterly, "or as though you hated and mistrusted me. Why do you look to a stranger to--"

"Could you do for my children what you have not done for yourself?" she asked him earnestly. "How much would you see of them? How much would you know of them? How much of your time would you be willing to sacrifice to learn patiently the inner lives of two little children? You would be busy all day, like the other people I know, making money for them to dress like other well-to-do children, for them to live in this fine, big house, for them to go to expensive private schools with the children of the people you know socially--for them to be as much as possible like the fatherless child I was."

Lydia clenched her thin hands and went on passionately: "I would rather my children went ragged and hungry than to be starved of real companionship."

The doctor made a shocked gesture. "But, Lydia, someone must earn the livings. You are--"

Lydia broke in fiercely: "They are not earning livings--they are earning more dresses and furniture and delicate food than their families need. They are earning a satisfaction for their own ambitions. They are willing to give their families anything but time and themselves."

"Lydia! Lydia! I never knew you to be cruel before! They can not help it--the way their lives are run. It's not that they wish to--they can not help it! It is against an economic law you are protesting."

"That economic law has been broken by _one_ person I know," said Lydia, "and that is the reason I--"

The doctor flushed darkly. The tears rose to his eyes. "Lydia, oh, my dear! trust me--trust me! I, too, will--I swear I will do all that you wish--don't turn away from me--trust me--!"

Lydia's mouth began to quiver. "Ah! don't make me say what must sound so cruel!"

The doctor stared at her hard. "Make you say, you mean, that you _don't_ trust me."

She drew a little, pitiful breath, and turned away her head. "Yes; that is what I mean," she said. She went on hurriedly, putting up appealing hands to soften her words, "You see--it's the children--I _must_ do what is best for them. It must be done once for all. Suppose you found you couldn't now, after all these years, turn about and be different? Suppose you found you couldn't arrange a life that the children could be a part of, and help in, and really do their share and live with you. You _mean_ to--I'm sure you mean to! But you never _have_ yet! How dare I let you try if you are not sure? I can't come back if I am dead, you know, and make a new arrangement. Mr. Rankin has proved that he can--"

At the name, the doctor's face darkened. He shot a black look at the younger man sitting beside him in his strange silence. "What has Rankin done?" he asked bitterly. "I should say the very point about him is that he has done nothing."

"He has tried, he has tried, he is trying," cried Lydia, beating her hands on the table. "Think! Of all the people I know, he is the only one who is even trying. That was all I wanted myself. That is all I dare ask for my children--a chance to try."

"To try what?" asked the doctor challengingly.

"To try not to have life make them worse instead of better. That's not much to ask--but nobody I know, but one only has--"

"Simplicity and right living don't come from camping out in a shed," said the doctor angrily. "Externals are nothing. If the heart is right and simple--"

"If the heart is right and simple, nothing else matters. That is what I say," answered Lydia.

Dr. Melton gave a gesture of cutting the question short. "Well, of course it's quite impossible! Rankin can't possibly have any claim on your children in the event of your death. Think of all your family, who would be--"

"_I think of them_," said Lydia with an accent so strange that the doctor was halted. "Oh, I have thought of them!" she said again. She put her hands over her eyes. "Could I not make a will, and appoint as guardian--" she began to ask.

Dr. Melton cut her short with a sound like a laugh, although his face was savage. "Did you never hear of wills being contested? How long do you suppose a will you make under the present circumstances would stand against an attack on it by your family and the Hollisters, with their money and influence!"

"Oh! Oh!" moaned Lydia, "and I shall not be here to--"

Rankin stirred throughout all his great height and broke his silence. He said to Lydia: "There is some way--there must be some way. I will find it."

Lydia took down her hands and showed a face so ravaged by the emotions of the colloquy that the physician in her godfather sprang up through the wounded jealousy of the man. "Lydia, my dear, you must stop--this is idiotic of me to allow you--not another word. You must go into the house this instant and lie down and rest--"

He bent over her with his old, anxious, exasperated, protecting air. Lydia seized his hands. Her own were hot and burning. "Rest! I can't rest with all this unsettled! I go over and over it--how can I sleep! How can you think that your little opiates will make me forget that my children may be helpless, with no one to protect them--" She looked about her wildly. "Why, little Ariadne may be given to _Madeleine_!" Her horrified eyes rested again on her godfather. She drew him to her. "Oh, help me! You've always been kind to me. Help me now!"

There was a silence, the two exchanging a long gaze. The man's forehead was glistening wet. Finally, his breath coming short, he said: "Yes; I will help you," and, his eyes still on hers, put out a hand toward Rankin.

The younger man was beside them in a stride. He took the hand offered him, but his gaze also was on the white face of the woman between them. "We will do it together," he told her. "Rest assured. It shall be done."

The corners of Lydia's mouth twitched nervously. "You are a good man," she said to her godfather. She looked at Rankin for a moment without speaking, and then turned toward the house, wavering. "Will you help me back?" she said to the doctor, her voice quite flat and toneless; "I am horribly tired."

* * * * *

When the doctor came back again to the arbor, Mrs. Sandworth was with him, her bearing, like his, that of a person in the midst of some cataclysmic upheaval. It was evident that her brother had told her. Without greeting Rankin, she sat down and fixed her eyes on his face. She did not remove them during the talk that followed.

The doctor stood by the table, drumming with his fingers and grimacing. "You must know," he finally made a beginning with difficulty, "I don't know whether you realize, not being a physician, that she is really not herself. She has for the present a mania for providing as she thinks best for her children's future. Of course no one not a monomaniac would so entirely ignore your side, would conceive so strange an idea. She is so absorbed in her own need that she does not realize what an unheard-of request she is making. To burden yourself with two young children--to mortgage all your future--"

Rankin broke in with a shaking voice and a face of exultation: "Good God, Doctor! Don't grudge me this one chance of my life!"

The doctor stared, bewildered. "What are you talking about?" he asked.

"About myself. I don't do it often--let me now. Do you think I haven't realized all along that what you said of me is true--that I have done nothing? Done nothing but succeed smugly in keeping myself in comfort outside the modern economic treadmill! What else could I do? I'm no orator, to convince other people. I haven't any universal panacea to offer! I'm only an inarticulate countryman, a farmer's son, with the education the state gives everyone--who am I, to try to lead? Apparently there was nothing for me to do but ignobly to take care of myself--but now, God be thanked! I have my chance. Someone has been hurt in their infernal squirrel-cage, and I can help--"

The older man was looking at him piercingly, as though struck by a sudden thought. He now cut him short with, "You're not deceiving yourself with any notion that she--"

The other answered quickly, with a smile of bitter humility: "You have seen her look at me. She does not know whether I am a human being or not--I am to her any strong animal, a horse, an ox--any force that can carry Ariadne safely!" He added, in another tone, his infinitely gentle tone: "I see in that the extremity of her anxiety."

The doctor put his hand on the other man's powerful arm. "Do you realize what you are proposing to yourself? You are human. You are a young man. Are you strong enough to keep to it?"

Rankin looked at him. Mrs. Sandworth leaned forward.

"I am," said Rankin finally.

The words echoed in a long silence.

The younger man stood up. "I am going to see a lawyer," he announced in a quiet voice of return to an everyday level. "Until then, we have all more to think over than to talk about, it seems to me."

* * * * *

After he had left them the brother and sister did not speak for a time. Then the doctor said, irritably: "Julia, say something, for Heaven's sake. What did you think of what he said?"

"I didn't hear what he said," answered Mrs. Sandworth; "I was looking at him."

"Well?" urged her brother.

"He is a good man," she said.

A sense that she was holding something in reserve kept him silent, gazing expectantly at her.

"How awfully he's in love with her!" she brought out finally. "That's the whole point. He's in love with her! All this talk about 'ways of living' and theories and things that they make so much of--it just amounts to nothing but that he's in love with her."

"Oh, you sentimental idiot!" cried the doctor. "I hoped to get some sense out of you."

"That's sense," said Mrs. Sandworth.

"It hasn't anything to do with the point! Why, as for that, Paul was in love with--"

"He was _not_!" cried Mrs. Sandworth, with a sudden loud certainty.

The doctor caught her meaning and considered it frowningly. When he spoke, it was to burst out pathetically: "_I_ have loved her all her life."

"Oh, you!" retorted his sister, with a sad conclusiveness.

Ariadne came running out to them. "I just went to look into Muvver's room, and she was sound asleep! Honest! She was!"

The child had heard enough of the doctor's long futile struggles with the horrors of Lydia's sleepless nights to divine that her news was important. She was rewarded with a startled look from her elders. "Come!" said the doctor.

They went into the house, and silently to Lydia's half-open door. She lay across the bed as she had dropped down when she came in, one long dark braid hanging to the floor. They stood looking at her almost with awe, as though they were observing for the first time the merciful miracle of sleep. Her bosom rose and fell in long, regular breaths. The drawn, haggard mask that had overlain her face so many months was dissolved away in an utter unconsciousness. Her eyelashes lay on a cheek like a child's; her mouth, relaxed and drooping, fell again into the lines they had loved in her when she was a little girl. She looked like a little girl again to them.

Mrs. Sandworth's hand went to her throat. She looked at her brother through misty eyes. He closed the door gently, and drew her away, making the gesture of a man who admits his own ignorance of a mystery.