“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.”
CHAPTER XXVI