LITMIR.BIZ

      CHAPTER IV

      THE DAWN

      The morning after her return from Europe, Lydia awoke with a start, as though in answer to a call. The confusion of the last days had been such that she had for a moment the not uncommon experience of an entire blankness as to her whereabouts and identity. Realization of where and who she was came back to her with much more than the usual neutral relief at slipping into one’s own personality as into the first protection available against the vague horror of nihility. After an instant’s uncomfortable wandering in chaos, Lydia found herself with a thrill of exultation. She was not negatively relieved that she was somebody; she rejoiced to find herself Lydia Emery. She pounced on her own personality with a positive joy which for a moment moved her to a devout thanksgiving.

      It all seemed, as she said to herself, too good to be true—certainly more than she deserved. Among her unmerited blessings she quaintly placed being herself, but this was the less naïve in that she placed among her blessings nearly everything of which she was conscious in her world. Her world at this time was not a large one, and every element in it seemed to her ideal. Her loving, indulgent father, who always had a smile for her as he looked up over his newspaper at the table, and who, though she knew he was too good to be wealthy, always managed somehow to pay for dresses just a little prettier than other girls’ clothes; her devoted, idolizing mother, whose one thought was for her daughter’s pleasure; her rich big Brother George in Cleveland, whom she saw so seldom, but whose handsome presents testified to an affection that was to be numbered among the objects of her gratitude; good, sharp-tongued Sister Etta, who said such quick, bright things and ran her house so wonderfully; Aunt Julia, dear, dear Aunt Julia, whose warm heart was one of Lydia’s happiest homes, and Aunt Julia’s brother, Dr. Melton—ah, how could anyone be grateful enough for such an all-comprehending, quick-helping, ever-ready ally, teacher, mentor, playmate, friend and comrade as her godfather!

      As she lay in her soft white bed and looked about her pretty room with an ineffable sense of well-being, it seemed to her that everything that had happened to her was lovely and that the prospect of her future could contain only a crescendo of good-fortune. It was not that she imagined for herself a future remarkably different in detail from what was the past of the people about her. Even now at what she felt was the beginning of the first chapter, she knew the general events of the story before her; but this morning she was penetrated with the keenest sense of the unfathomable difference it made in those events in that they were about to happen to her. She had been passively watching the excited faces of people hurling themselves down-hill on toboggans, but now she was herself poised on the crest of the slope, tense with an excitement not only more real, but somehow more vital to the scheme of things, than that felt by other people who had made the thrilling trip before her.

      She lay still for a few moments, luxuriating in the innocent egotism of this view of her future, which was none the less absorbing for being so entirely unterrifying, and then sprang up, impatient to begin it. No one else in the house was awake. She saw with surprise that it was barely five o’clock. She wondered that she felt so little sleepy, since she had been up late the night before. All the family and connections had gathered, and she had talked with an eager breathlessness and had listened as eagerly to pick up all those details of home news which do not go into letters; those insignificant changes and events that make up the physiognomy of an existence, without which one cannot again become an integral part of a life once familiar. It had been a fatiguing, illuminating evening.

      A change of mood had come in the night. As she dressed she felt that, in some way, neither the fatigue nor the illumination had lasted on through the blankness of her sound young sleep. She felt restlessly fresh and vigorous, like a creature born anew with the morning light, and she did not feel herself as yet an integral part of the busy, absorbing life to which she had returned. The countless tendrils of Endbury feelings, standards, activities, brushed against her, but had not as yet laid hold on her. Europe had never been more real to her young-lady eyes than an immense World’s Exposition, rather overwhelmingly full of objects to be inspected, and now, here in Ohio, even that impression was dim and remote. But so, also, was Endbury; she had left the one, she had not yet arrived at the other. She felt herself for the moment in a neutral territory that was scarcely terrestrial.

      The silent house was a kingdom of delight to be rediscovered. She wandered about it, enchanted with the impressions which her solitude gave her leisure to savor and digest. She threw open a window, and was struck with the sweet freshness of the morning air, as though it were a joy new in the history of the world. She looked out on the lawn, with its dew-studded cobwebs, and felt her heart contract with pleasure. When she stepped out on the veranda, the look of the trees, the breath of the light wind across her cheek, the odor of dawn, all the indefinable personality of that early hour was like an enchantment about her.

      She ran out to her favorite arbor and plucked one of the heavy clusters of purple grapes, finding their cool acidity an exquisite surprise. She raised her face to the sky with wonder. She had never, it seemed to her, seen so pure yet colorful a sky. The horizon was still faintly flushed with the promise of a dawn already fulfilled in the fresh splendor of the sunbeams slanting across the fresh splendor of her own youth.

      Never again did Lydia see the things she saw that morning. Never again did she have so unquestioningly the happy child’s conception of the whole world as magically centered in indulgent kindness about herself. As she looked up the clean, empty street stretching away under the shade of its thrifty young trees, it seemed made only to lead her forward into the life for which she had been so long preparing herself. Endbury, with its shops, its bustle of factories so unmeaning to her, the great bulk of its inexplicable “business,” existed only as the theater upon the stage of which she was to play the leading rôle in the drama of life—she almost consciously thought of it in those terms—which, after some exciting and pleasurable incidents and a few thrilling situations, was to have a happy ending, none the less actual to her mind because lost in so vague a golden shimmer. Her father’s house, as familiar to her as her hand, took on a new and rich dignity as

Скачать книгу