LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

of course, only you do have to manage her. And she’ll be in a very unsettled state for the first week or two after she gets home after such a long absence. The impressions she gets then—well, I wish he were here!”

      Mrs. Mortimer waved her hand toward the roses.

      “Of course, of course,” assented her mother, subsiding peaceably down the scale from anxiety to confidence with the phrase. She looked at the monstrous flowers with the gaze of acquired admiration so usual in her eyes. “They don’t look much like roses, do they?” she remarked irrelevantly.

      Mrs. Mortimer turned in the doorway, her face expressing an extreme surprise. “Good gracious, no,” she cried. “Why, of course not. They cost a dollar and a half apiece.”

      She did not stop to hear her mother’s vaguely assenting reply. Mrs. Emery heard her firm, rapid tread go down the hall to the front door and then suddenly stop. Something indefinable about the pause that followed made the mother’s heart beat thickly. “What is it, Marietta?” she called, but her voice was lost in Mrs. Mortimer’s exclamation of surprise, “Why it can’t be—why, Lydia!”

      As from a great distance, the mother heard a confused rush in the hall, and then, piercing through the dreamlike unreality of the moment, came the sweet, high note of a girl’s voice, laughing, but with the liquid uncertainty of tears quivering through the mirth. “Oh, Marietta! Where’s Mother? Aren’t you all slow-pokes—not a soul to meet us at the train—where’s Mother? Where’s Mother? Where’s—” The room swam around Mrs. Emery as she stood up looking toward the door, and the girl who came running in, her dark eyes shining with happy tears, was not more real than the many visions of her that had haunted her mother’s imagination during the lonely year of separation. At the clasp of the young arms about her face took light as from an inner source, and breath came back to her in a sudden gasp. She tried to speak, but the only word that came was “Lydia! Lydia! Lydia!”

      The girl laughed, a half-sob breaking her voice as she answered whimsically, “Well, who did you expect to see?”

      Mrs. Mortimer performed her usual function of relieving emotional tension by putting a strong hand on Lydia’s shoulder and spinning her about. “Come! I want to see if it is you—and how you look.”

      For a moment the ardent young creature stood still in a glowing quiet. She drank in the dazzled gaze of admiration of the two women with an innocent delight. The tears were still in Mrs. Emery’s eyes, but she did not raise a hand to dry them, smitten motionless by the extremity of her proud satisfaction. Never again did Lydia look to her as she did at that moment, like something from another sphere, like some bright, unimaginably happy being, freed from the bonds that had always weighed so heavily on all the world about her mother.

      Before she could draw breath, Lydia moved and was changed. Her mother saw suddenly, with that emotion which only mothers know, reminiscences of little-girlhood, of babyhood, even of long-dead cousins and aunts, in the lovely face blooming under the wide hat. She felt the sweet momentary confusion of individuality, the satisfied sense of complete ownership which accompanies a strong belief in family ties. Lydia was not only altogether entrancing, but she was of the same stuff with those who loved her so dearly. It gave a deeper note to her mother’s passion of affectionate pride.

      The girl turned with a pretty, defiant tilt of her head. “Well, and how do I look?” she asked; and before she could be answered she flew at Mrs. Mortimer with a gentle roughness, clasping her arms around her waist until the matron gasped. “You look too good to be true—both of you—if you are such lazybones that you wouldn’t go to the station to meet the prodigal daughter!”

      “Well, if you will come on an earlier train than you telegraphed—” began Mrs. Mortimer, “Everybody’s getting ready to meet you with a brass band. What did you do with Father?”

      The girl moved away, putting her hands up to her hat uncertainly as though about to take out the hat-pins. There was between the three a moment of that constraint which accompanies the transition from emotional intensity down to an everyday level. In Lydia’s voice there was even a little flatness as she answered, “Oh, he put me in the hack and went off to see about business. I heard him ’phoning something to somebody about a suit. We got through the customs sooner than we thought we could, you see, and caught an earlier train.”

      Mrs. Emery turned her adoring gaze from Lydia’s slim beauty and looked inquiringly at her elder daughter. Mrs. Mortimer understood, and nodded.

      “What are you two making faces about?” Lydia turned in time to catch the interchange of glances.

      Mrs. Emery hesitated. Marietta spoke with a crisp straightforwardness which served as well in this case as nonchalance for keeping her remark without undue significance. “We were just wondering if now wasn’t a good time to show you what Paul Hollister did for your welcome home. He couldn’t be here himself, so he sent those.” She nodded toward the bouquet.

      As Lydia turned toward the flowers her two elders fixed her with the unscrupulously scrutinizing gaze of blood-relations; but their microscopic survey showed them nothing in the girl’s face, already flushed and excited by her home-coming, beyond a sudden amused surprise at the grotesque size of the tribute.

      “Why, for mercy’s sake! Did you ever see such monsters! They are as big as my head! Look!” She whirled her hat from the pretty disorder of her brown hair and poised it on the topmost of the great flowers, stepping back to see the effect and laughing, “They don’t look any more like roses, do they?” she added, turning to her mother. Mrs. Emery’s answer rose so spontaneously to her lips that she was not aware that she was echoing Marietta. “Good gracious, no; of course not. They cost a dollar and a half apiece.”

      Lydia neither assented to nor dissented from this apothegm. It started another train of thought in her mind. “As much as all that! Why, Paul oughtn’t to be so extravagant! He can’t afford it, and I should have liked something else just as—”

      Her sister broke in with an ample gesture of negation. “You don’t know Paul. If he goes on the way he’s started—he’s district sales manager for southern Ohio already.”

      Lydia paid to this information the passing tribute of a moment’s uncomprehending surprise. “Think of that! The last time Paul told me about himself he was working day and night in Schenectady, learning the business, and getting—oh, I don’t know—fifty cents an hour, or some such starvation wages.”

      Mrs. Mortimer’s bitterly acquired sense of values revolted at this. “What are you talking about, Lydia? Fifty cents an hour starvation wages!”

      “Well, perhaps it was five cents an hour. I don’t remember. And he worked with his hands and was always in danger of getting shot through with a million volts of electricity or mashed with a breaking fly-wheel or something. He said electricians were the soldiers of modern civilization. I told that to a German woman we met on the boat when she said Americans have no courage because they don’t fight duels. The idea!”

      She began pulling off her gloves, with a quick energetic gesture. Mrs. Mortimer went on, “Well, he certainly has a brilliant future before him. Everybody says that—” She stopped, struck by her rather heavy emphasis on the theme and by a curious look from Lydia. The girl did not blush, she did not seem embarrassed, but for a moment the childlike clarity of her look was clouded by an expression of consciousness.

      Mrs. Emery made a rush upon her, drawing her away toward the door with a displeased look at Marietta. “Never mind about Paul’s prospects,” she said. “With Lydia just this minute home, to begin gossiping about the neighbors! Come up to your room, darling, and see the little outdoor sitting-room we’ve had fixed over the porch.”

      Mrs. Mortimer was not given to bearing chagrin, even a passing one, with undue self-restraint. She threw into the intonation of her next sentence her resentment at the rebuke from her mother. “I still live, you know, even if Lydia has come home!” As Mrs. Emery turned with a look of apology, she added, “Oh, I only wanted to make you turn around

Скачать книгу