Talk about facing the cannon's mouth! When Miss Sampson came into the new Mr. Smith's library he was sitting in a circle of lamplight at his big table, writing and smoking. He looked up at her with a resigned shrug. "Wants something done to her confounded house!" he thought. But he put down his cigar, got on his feet, and said, in his genial, wealthy way:
"Well, my good neighbor! How are you?"
Miss Lydia could only gasp, "Mr. Smith – " (there was a faint movement outside the library door and she knew Mary was listening). "Mr. Smith – "
"Sit down, sit down!" he said. "I am afraid you are troubled about something?"
She sat down on the extreme edge of a chair, and he stood in front of her, stroking his white beard and looking at her, amused and bored, and very rich – but not unkind.
"Mr. Smith – " she faltered. She swallowed two or three times, and squeezed her hands together; then, brokenly, but with almost no circumlocution, she told him..
There was a terrible scene in that handsome, shadowy, lamplit room. Miss Lydia emerged from it white and trembling; she fairly ran back to her own gate, stumbled up the mossy brick path to her front door, burst into her unlighted house, then locked the door and bolted it, and fell in a small, shaking heap against it, as if it barred out the loud anger and shame which she had left behind her in the great house among the trees.
While Mary had crouched in the hall, her ear against the keyhole, Miss Lydia Sampson had held that blazing-eyed old man to common sense. No, he must not carry the girl to Mercer the next day, and take the hound by the throat, and marry them out of hand. No, he must not summon the scoundrel to Old Chester and send for Doctor Lavendar. No, he must not have a private wedding… "They must be married in church and have white ribbons up the aisle," gasped Miss Lydia, "and – and rice. Don't you understand? And it isn't nice, Mr. Smith, to use such language before ladies."
It was twelve o'clock when Miss Lydia, in her dark entry, went over in her own mind the "language" which had been used; all he had vowed he would do, and all she had declared he should not do, and all Mary (called in from the hall) had retorted as to the cruel things that had been done to her and Carl "which had just driven them wild!" And then the curious rage with which Mr. Smith had turned upon his daughter when she cried out, "Father, make her promise not to tell!" At that the new Mr. Smith's anger touched a really noble note:
"What! Insult this lady by asking for a 'promise'? Good God! madam," he said, turning to Miss Sampson, "is this girl mine, to offer such an affront to a friend?"
At which Miss Lydia felt, just for an instant, that he was nice. But the next moment the thought of his fury at Mary made her feel sick. Remembering it now, she said to herself, "It was awful in him to show his teeth that way, and to call Mary —that." And again, "It wasn't gentlemanly in him to use an indelicate word about the baby." Miss Lydia's mind refused to repeat two of the new Mr. Smith's words. The dreadfulness of them made her forget his momentary chivalry for her. "Mary is only a child," she said to herself; "and as for the baby, I'll take care of the little thing; I won't let it know that its own grandfather called it – No, it wasn't nice in Mr. Smith to say such words before a young lady like Mary, or before me, either, though I'm a good deal older than Mary. I'm glad I told him so!" (Miss Lydia telling Zeus he wasn't "nice"!)
This September midnight was the first Secret which pounced upon Miss Lydia. The next was the new Mr. Smith's short and terrible interview with his prospective son-in-law: "You are never to set foot in this town." And then his order to his daughter: "Nor you, either, unless you come without that man. And there are to be no letters to or from Miss Sampson, understand that! I am not going to have people putting two and two together."
Certainly no such mental arithmetic took place at the very gay Smith wedding in the second week in September – a wedding with white ribbons up the aisle! Yes, and a reception at the big house! and rice! and old slippers!
But when the gayety was over, and the bride and groom drove off in great state, Miss Lydia waved to them from her front door, and then stood looking after the carriage with strange pitifulness in her face. How much they had missed, these two who, instead of the joy and wonder and mystery of going away together into their new world, were driving off, scarcely speaking to each other, tasting on their young lips the stale bitterness of stolen fruit! After the carriage was out of sight Miss Lydia walked down the road to the rectory, carrying, as was the habit of her exasperatingly generous poverty when calling on her friends, a present, a tumbler of currant jelly for Doctor Lavendar. But when the old man remonstrated, she did not, as usual, begin to excuse herself. She only said, point-blank:
"Doctor Lavendar, is it ever right to tell lies to save other people?"
Doctor Lavendar, jingling the happy bridegroom's two gold pieces in his pocket, said: "What? What?"
"Not to save yourself," said Miss Lydia; "I know you can't tell lies to save yourself."
Doctor Lavendar stopped jingling his gold pieces and frowned; then he said: "Miss Lydia, the truth about ourselves is the only safe way to live. If other folks want to be safe let them tell their own truths. It doesn't often help them for us to do it for 'em. My own principle has been not to tell a lie about other folks' affairs, but to reserve the truth. Understand?"
"I think I do," said Miss Lydia, faintly, "but it's difficult."
Doctor Lavendar looked at his two gold pieces thoughtfully. "Lydia," he said, "it's like walking on a tight rope." Then he chuckled, dismissed the subject, and spread out his eagles on the table. "Look at 'em! Aren't they pretty? You see how glad Mary's young man was to get her. I'll go halves with you!"
Her recoil as he handed her one of the gold pieces made him give her a keen look; but all she said was: "Oh no! I wouldn't touch it!" Then she seemed to get herself together: "I don't need it, thank you, sir," she said.
When she went away Doctor Lavendar, looking after her, thrust out his lower lip. "Lydia not 'need' an eagle?" he said. "How long since?" And after a while he added, "Now, what on earth – ?"
Old Chester, too, said, "What on earth – ?" when, in December, Miss Lydia turned the key in her front door and, with her carpetbag and bandbox, took the morning stage for Mercer.
And we said it again, a few weeks later, when Mrs. Barkley received a letter in which Miss Lydia said she had been visiting friends in Indiana and had been asked by them to take care of a beautiful baby boy, and she was bringing him home with her, and she hoped Mrs. Barkley would give her some advice about taking care of babies, for she was afraid she didn't know much – ("'Much'?" Mrs. Barkley snorted. "She knows as much about babies as a wildcat knows about tatting!") – and she was, as ever, Mrs. Barkley's affectionate Lyddy.
The effect of this letter upon Old Chester can be imagined. Mrs. Drayton said, "What I would like to know is, whose baby is it?"
Mrs. Barkley said in a deep bass: "Where will Lyddy get the money to take care of it? As for advising her, I advise her to leave it on the doorstep of its blood relations!"
Doctor Lavendar said: "Ho, hum! Do you remember what the new Mr. Smith said about her when she gave her party? Well, I agree with him!" Which (if you recall Mr. Smith's exact words) was really a shocking thing for a minister of the gospel to say!
Mrs. William King said, firmly, that she called it murder, to intrust a child to Miss Lydia Sampson. "She'll hold it upside down and never know the difference," said Mrs. King; and then, like everybody else, she asked Mrs. Drayton's question "Whose baby is it?"
There were many answers, mostly to the effect that Lydia was so scatterbrained – as witness her "party," and her blue-silk dress, and her broken engagements, etc., etc., that she was perfectly capable of letting anybody shove a foundling into her arms! Mrs. Drayton's own answer to her question was that the whole thing looked queer – "not that I would imply anything against poor Lydia's character, but it looks queer; and if you count back – "
Miss Lydia's reply – for of course the question was asked her as soon as she and the baby, and the bandbox and the carpetbag got off the stage one