“Oh, I remember, you don’t like her,” said Lydia. “She always seems just funny to me—funny and pathetic. She’s so dowdy, and reverential to folks with money, and enjoys other people’s good times so terrifically.”
“She’s like some political bosses—admirable in private life, but a menace to the community just the same.”
Lydia laughed involuntarily, in spite of her preoccupation. “Flora Burgess a menace to the community!”
The doctor turned away and began to mount the stairs. “Me and Cassandra!” he called over his shoulder in his high, sweet treble. “Just you wait and see!”
He disappeared down the upper hall, finding his way about the darkened house with a familiarity that betokened long practice.
Lydia sat down on the bottom step to wait for his return. The clock in the dining-room struck twelve. It came over her with a clap that but half a day had passed since she had run out into the dawn. For an instant she had the naïve, melodramatic instinct of youth to deck out its little events in the guise of crises. She began to tell herself with gusto that she had passed some important turning-point in her life; when, as was not infrequent with her, she lost the thread of her thought in a sudden mental confusion which, like a curtain of fog, shut her off from definite reflection. Complicated things that moved rapidly always tired Lydia. She had an enormous capacity for quiet and tranquillity. To-day she felt that more complicated things were moving rapidly inside her head than ever before—as though she had tried to keep track of the revolutions of a wheel and had lost her count and could now only stare stupidly at the spokes, whirling till they blended into one blur. What was this Endbury life she had come back to? What in the world had that man been talking about? What a strange person he was! How very bright his eyes were when he looked at you—as though he were, somehow, seeing you more than most people did. What did the doctor mean by all that about Marietta? It had never occurred to her that the life of anyone about her might have been different from what it was. What else was there for people to do but what everybody else did? It was all very unsettling and, in this heat and loneliness, daunting.
Through this vague discomfort there presently pierced a positive apprehension of definite unpleasantness. She would have to tell her mother that she had spent the whole morning talking to Mr. Rankin, and her mother would be cross, and would say such—Lydia remembered as in a distant dream her supreme content with life of only a few hours earlier. It seemed a very bewildering matter to her now.
Ought she so certainly to tell her mother? She lingered for a moment over this possibility. Then, “Oh, of course!” she said aloud, flushing with an angry shame at her moment’s parley with deceit.
She heard her mother’s door open and turned to see the doctor running down the stairs, his wrinkled little face very grave. “You were right, Lydia, to be anxious about your mother, and I am an old fool! There is no fool like a fluent fool! I’m afraid she’s in for quite a siege. There’s no danger, thank Heaven! but I don’t believe she can be about for a month or more. I’m going to ’phone for a trained nurse. Just see that nobody disturbs her, will you?”
He darted away, leaving Lydia leaning against the newel-post, gasping. The clock in the dining-room chimed the quarter-hour. She cried out to herself, as she climbed the stairs heavily, that she could not stand it to have things happen to her so fast. If all Endbury days were going to be like this one—