Part 40 (1/2)

”John?”

”Mr. Dryden, that is.”

”He must be crushed and heartbroken,” Lydia said emphatically.

”Well, no, he isn't,” Martie said innocently. ”He isn't like other people. If she wants a divorce--John won't mind awfully. He's really--really unusual.”

”He must be,” Lydia said witheringly, and trembling a little with excitement, ”to let his own wife leave him while he writes letters asking the advice of a--a--another woman who is recently--recently widowed!”

Martie glanced at her, smiled a little, shrugged her shoulders, and calmly re-read her letter.

Lydia resumed her work, a flush on her cheeks.

”He can't have much respect for you, Martie,” she said quietly, after a busy silence.

Martie looked up, startled.

”John can't? Oh, but Lyddy, you don't know him! He's such an innocent goose; he absolutely depends upon me! Why, fancy, he's the man who wanted me to open the boarding-house so that he and his wife could live there--he's as simple as that!”

”As simple as what?” Lydia asked with her deadly directness.

”Well--I mean--that if there were anything--wrong in his feeling for me--” Martie floundered.

”Oh, Martie, Martie, Martie, I tremble for you!” Lydia said sadly. ”A married man, and you a married woman! My dear, can't you see how far you've drifted from your own better self to be able to laugh about it?”

”You goose!” Martie kissed the cool, lifeless cheek before she ran upstairs with her letter. John's straight-forward sentences kept recurring to her mind through many days. His letter seemed to bring a bracing breath of the big city. A day or two later she and Teddy chanced to be held in mid-street while the big Eastern pa.s.senger train thundered by, and she shut her fingers on John's letter in her pocket, and said eagerly, confidently, ”Oh, New York! I wish I was going back!”

But Lydia wore a grave face for several days, and annoyed and amused her younger sister with the att.i.tude that something was wrong.

Lydia had changed more than any one of them, Martie thought, although her life was what it had always been. She had been born in the old house, and had moved about it for these more than thirty years almost without an interruption. But in the last six years she had left girlhood forever behind; she was a prim, quiet, contentedly complaining woman now, a little too critical perhaps, a little self-righteous, but kind and good. Lydia's will was always for the happiness of others: Pa's comfort, Pauline's rights, and the wisest course for Martie and Sally to take occupied her mind and time far more than any personal interest of her own. But she had a limited vision of duty and convention, and even Sally fretted under her sway. Her father openly transferred his allegiance to Martie, and Lydia grieved over the palpable injustice without the slightest appreciation of its cause.

She was infinitely helpful in times of emergency, and would take charge of Sally's babies, if Sally were ill, or slave in Sally's nursery if all or any of the children were indisposed. But she was not so obliging if mere pleasure took Sally away from her maternal duties. Sally told Martie that there was no asking Lyd to help, either she did it voluntarily, or wild horses couldn't make her do it at all.

If her younger sisters entrusted their children to Aunt Lydia, she was an adoring and indulgent aunt. She loved to open her cookie jar for their raids, and to have them beg her favours or stories. But if Lydia had expressed the opinion that it was too cold for the children to go barefoot, and Martie or Sally revoked the decision, then Lydia wore a dark, resentful look for hours, and was apt to vent her disapproval on the children themselves.

”No, get out of my lap, Jimmy. I don't want a boy that runs to his Mama and doesn't trust his Auntie,” Lydia would say patiently, firmly, and kindly. Martie and Sally, wives for years, were able to refrain from any comment. To be silent when children are disciplined is one of the great lessons of marriage.

”But I don't believe that a woman who ever had had a baby COULD rebuff a child like that,” Martie told Sally. ”I don't know, though, some aunts are wonderful! Only that pleasant justice does seem wasted on a child; it merely stings without being comprehensible in the least!”

So the younger girls dismissed it philosophically. But it was one of the results of a life like Lydia's that human intercourse had no lighter phases for her. She must a.n.a.lyze and suspect and brood.

Wherever a possible slight was hidden Lydia found it. She sometimes disappeared for a few hours upstairs, and came back with reddened eyes.

Her father's devotion to Martie she bore with martyred sweetness. When they laughed together at dinner she listened with downcast eyes, a faint, pained smile on her lips.

”Would you like Martie to sit in Ma's place, Pa?” she asked one morning, when she was folding her napkin neatly into the orange-wood napkin-ring marked ”Souvenir of Santa Cruz.” Her father's surprised negative hardly interrupted the account he was giving his youngest daughter of the law-suit he had won years ago against old man Thomas.

But after breakfast Martie found Lydia crying into one of the ap.r.o.ns that Were hanging in the side-entry. ”It's nothing!” she gulped as Martie's warm arms went about her. ”Only--only I can't bear to have Ma forgotten already! You heard how Pa spoke-so short and so cold!”

”Oh, Lyddy, DARLING!” Martie protested, half-amused, half-sympathetic.

Lydia straightened herself resentfully.

”I suppose I'm foolish,” she said. ”I suppose the best thing for us all to do is to forget and laugh, and go on as if life and death were only a JOKE!”