Part 16 (1/2)

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 grat.i.tude 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 n.o.body 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 att.i.tude 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 la.s.situde 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, d.a.m.n 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 s.h.i.+vered, 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--”