Chapter X: Lily’s Almost First Engagement

WHEN he came downstairs to his wife, five minutes later, he told her desperately to what he had consented.

“There isn’t any alternative,” he said, in his defence against Mrs. Dodge’s outcry. “It was going to happen anyhow, in spite of everything we could do, and she’s grown so _thin_—I hadn’t realized it, but she’s lost heaven knows how many pounds! You don’t want the child to _die_, do you? Well, when I saw her there, so worn and stricken, it came over me what _that_ alternative would mean to us! When it comes to risking her life, I give up. I’d give my own life to keep her from marrying this idiot, but not hers! There’s only one thing for us to do, and we’ve got to go through with it.”

“I can’t!”

“Yes, you can,” he told her, angrily. “And since we’ve got to do it we’ll do it right. Not another word to her from either of us in dispraise of her idiot. On the contrary! And he’s to be asked to dinner to-morrow night, and as often as she wants him afterward. Blast him, I’ll put him into my own office and try my darnedest to make it a job that’ll interest him. They can be married as soon as he’s saved enough to pay his own way. I’ll give her enough for hers. We’re beaten, Lydia. There’s nothing else to do.”

She protested despairingly, and in continued despair finally surrendered her “better judgment,” as she called it, to his weakness. Thus, after a painful evening of argument, they went unhappily to their uneasy beds, but woke in the morning determined to be thoroughbreds in the manner of their acceptance of Oswald Crabbe Osborne as their daughter’s betrothed.

Their encounter with him, when he came to dinner that evening in this recognized capacity, was an almost overwhelming trial of their gameness; but they succeeded in presenting the semblance of a somewhat strained beaming upon him, and were rewarded by the sight of a fading daughter blossoming again.

For Lily was radiant: her eyes and cheeks glowed; her feet danced; she was all light and love and gaiety. At the table she laughed at every nothing, caressed her father, patted her mother’s cheek again and again, and from her eyes poured sunshine upon her lover across the centrepiece of roses.

Crabbe received the sunshine with complacency, for he was accustomed to it; and although his position in regard to her father and mother was a novelty, he appeared to accept their change of front as something he had confidently expected all along. That is to say, he took it as a simple and natural matter, of course, and was not surprised to be shown every consideration by his former opponents.

In truth, they showed him more consideration than he was able to perceive. As was already well known to them, he had not the equipment for what is often spoken of as general conversation; his views upon religious, political, scientific, or literary subjects were tactfully not sought, because of his having omitted to acquire the information sometimes held to be a necessary preliminary to the formation of views;—in fact, as Lily’s parents were previously aware, he lacked even those vagrant symptoms of ambition, the views without the information. Therefore, Mr. and Mrs. Dodge kept the talk at first as weatherly, and then as personal, as they could make it, hoping he might shine a little, or at least that some faint spark might come from him to brighten their own impressions of him. They wanted to force themselves to like him; they had genuine yearnings to think better of him than had been their habit; but although they strove within themselves to attain these ends, they cannot be thought to have succeeded. The nearest Crabbe came to giving them a spark was when he spoke of his father; and even that apparent momentary gleam was not a happy one.

“He’s well,” Crabbe said, replying to Mrs. Dodge’s inquiry. “He’s usually well enough. He takes pretty good care of his health and all. I guess he’s a good deal surprised; but probably not enough to make him sick.”

“Isn’t he?” Mr. Dodge said, and he laughed hopefully, for it seemed to him that here was an unexpected hint of humour, something he had never attributed to the young man. “What would surprise him as much as that?”

“I don’t know, exactly,” Crabbe replied. “But he told me once he always got sick if anything surprised him too much. He says it injures his digestion. What he’s surprised about now, it was when I told him about Lily’s telephoning me this morning you were going to find me a position that would interest me. He certainly said he was surprised.”

Mr. Dodge’s expectations collapsed, though his expression remained indomitably genial. “I see,” he said. “Well, we’ll surprise him more by showing him how well you get on at the work.”

“I know I will,” Crabbe returned, simply. “I mean I’m certain to if it _is_ interesting. It’s just like I’ve been telling Lily: the only reason I ever had any trouble at all in business, it’s because the luck’s been all one way so far;—it kept against my getting anything to do that had any possibilities in it. But it’ll be different from now on, I guess. All anybody needs to do for me, Mr. Dodge, is to find me a position where I’ll feel some use in getting my brain to work.”

Mr. Dodge said he was sure of it, gave his attention to his plate for a few moments, and then, with the gallant assistance of his wife, returned to the weather. Later, when they were alone together in the library, where they could hear from the drawing-room the pretty sound of Lily’s prattling, and, at brief intervals, her happy laughter, the parents faced their misery.

“It’s unbelievable,” Mr. Dodge said, huskily. “You don’t run across these extreme cases of self-satisfied asininity more than a few times in your whole life, even counting all the hundreds and thousands of people you come in contact with. And to think you’ve got to take such a case into your _family_!”

“It’s your idea!” his wife reminded him.

“It isn’t! It’s not my idea; it’s a monstrous delusion that’s got hold of our girl and that we failed to show her _is_ a delusion. Well, since we couldn’t show her it is, and since opposing her in it was injuring her health, what’s left for us to do but to act as if it were a reality? It isn’t my idea to treat this moron as an angel and take him into our family: it’s the dreadful necessity that her delusion has forced upon us.”

“Thank you for not ending with, ‘Isn’t that logical?’” she said. “I’ve been under such a strain, keeping my face cordial at the table, I don’t believe I could have stood it!”

“Under a strain?” he echoed. “I should say so!” He gave her a commiserating and comradelike pat upon her shoulder as he passed behind her to get a book from the shelves. “We’ve both been under a strain, Lydia, and I’m afraid we’ve got to go on being under it.”

“Yes,” she agreed. “That’s the prospect—for the rest of our lives!”

“I’m afraid so.” Then, with grave faces, they settled down to their books, or, at least, tried to settle down to them, but looked into vague and troubled distance more than they read;—ever and anon, as Lily’s merriment was made ripplingly vocal in the drawing-room, the silence of the library would become intensified and then be broken by a mother’s sigh. But at ten o’clock the front door was heard to close with soft reluctance; and Lily left upon the air a trail of dance music in slender soprano as she skipped down the hall and into the library. She threw her arms about her mother, then about her father, kissing them in turn.

“Now you’ve let yourselves begin to know him,” she cried, “isn’t he wonderful? Isn’t he wonderful, Mamma? Isn’t he wonderful, Papa?”

The two thoroughbreds proved of what stuff heroism is made. They said Crabbe was wonderful. . . . Upon an evening two weeks later, Mr. Dodge, again alone with his wife in the library, reverted to this opinion. “I think Crabbe Osborne is more than wonderful,” he said. “I think he’s unique. I hate to be premature, but he’s been in my office for several days now, and, though they don’t say it, I can see that everyone there agrees with me. He couldn’t possibly have a duplicate.”

“Isn’t he ‘interested’ in anything you’ve offered him? Hasn’t he been able to get his ‘brain’ to work?”

“Not yet,” Mr. Dodge replied. “He’s a little discouraged about it, I’m afraid.”

“But you aren’t, are you?” She made this inquiry with a pointedness not wasted upon him, for he had already perceived the indications that thenceforth in their private hours, until death did them part, he was to be the defender of their acceptance of Crabbe Osborne. Mrs. Dodge adopted her husband’s policy, but could not relinquish her attitude of having been forced to it.

“I’m not discouraged about my daughter’s health and spirits,” he retorted, a little sharply. “I’m not discouraged about having done the right thing. The ‘right thing’? How often do I have to tell you it was the _only_ thing? Look what it’s done for Lily. She was literally pining away. How many weeks was it that we never once saw her smile? How many dozens and dozens of miserable, agonizing scenes did we have with her? How long was it that every day was only another of weeping and outcries—and untouched food on trays outside her door—and tears on untouched food on the table when she did come to the dining-room? I tell you, this house was nothing but a nightmare!”

“And how would you define most of our dinners during the last fortnight?”

He winced, but continued to defend himself. “At least we’ve reduced the nightmare. If our dinners with the moron are nightmares for us, they aren’t for Lily. Only two of us suffer, where it was nightmare for all three of us before. And it’s been easier for us this second week than it was the first one.”

“Not for me,” his wife said, dismally. “The more I see of him the more terrible it is to think of him as permanent.”

“But can’t you think only of Lily?”

“Indeed, I can! I’m doing just that!”

“Well, then,” he urged, “think of the difference in her these two weeks have made. Now she’s interested in everything, happy in everything. How many times did we try to get her to go to the country club dances and be with the other young people of the kind she liked and enjoyed before this spell came upon her? She said she ‘hated the horrible old place!’ because Crabbe Osborne couldn’t go there.”

“He didn’t mind that,” Mrs. Dodge remarked. “He went anyhow until they sent him a note reminding him he wasn’t a member. That was why Lily said she hated it and we couldn’t get her to go any more. I was surprised she decided to go to-night, since she knows he can’t be there.”

“There’s the very point I’m making,” her husband said. “Two weeks ago we’d both have thought it was the last thing in the world she’d consent to do, and this evening we didn’t even suggest it to her; she went of her own volition, and cheerfully, too! I ask you if that doesn’t show she’s a different creature. And isn’t it better for two to suffer than three?”

“I ask _you_,” she returned, sharply: “How short sighted are you? We’re giving her a recess from pain, yes; but what are we thrusting her into? When she does see him as he is, and finds herself bound to him for life, isn’t she going to turn to us then, when it’s too late, and say: ‘Why didn’t you save me?’”

“Oh, Lord!” the father groaned, and his gesture was that of a man who has tried to make the best of his misery, but abandons the effort. “I don’t know! I can’t see! When you put it like that, I don’t know whether we’re doing right or wrong.” He paced the library floor, walking heavily, his head down. “It’s a miserable thing any way you look at it,” he said. “I did have just one slight alleviation: it seemed to me I bore it a little better, having him at the dinner-table this week, than I did the week before. It seemed to me maybe it might be because I was getting to like him a little, perhaps.”

“No,” Mrs. Dodge said, grimly. “It was because he was here five times the first week and only three the second.”

“Is that so?” He stopped his pacing and stood still. “So she asked him five times the first week and only three the second. Doesn’t that look as if maybe——”

“No, I’m afraid not,” his wife interrupted, unhesitatingly destroying this obscure germ of hope. “When you give a child a toy it’ll play with it more at first than it will later. That doesn’t mean the child won’t cry if you try to take the toy away, does it?”

“No, I suppose not.” He had relapsed into gloom again. “And I suppose my poor little alleviation was——”

“Your ‘alleviation,’” Mrs. Dodge informed him, “was in the diminished number of the acute attacks—three instead of five—and not because you began to feel any affection for the disease itself.”

“I’m afraid you’re right,” he said. “And I’m afraid you’ve found the correct definition for what afflicts us.” He sank into a chair, unhappily limp and relaxed, his arms hanging flaccidly over the arms of the chair. “Crabbe Osborne is our disease,” he said. “It’s a disease the more awful because when a child gets it the parents get it, too, and when they give the child an opiate they only stop her pain for a little while; and then the child and the parents, all three of ’em, have got to have the disease for the rest of their lives! And the greatest mystery of it all is that an absolutely chance boy, with no malice, no harm in him—a mere drifting bit of flesh and nothing, that we’d never heard of a year ago—that a meaningless thing like Crabbe Osborne should do all this to us!”

“It isn’t,” she said. “He has nothing whatever to do with it. It’s Lily’s imagination. Her imagination was in the state to get the disease, and it just happened this boy was the nearest thing at a crucial moment. It might as well have happened to be someone else.”

“If it _had_ only been any one else!” Mr. Dodge exclaimed. “I’m willing to agree with you, though: Crabbe just happened to be the fatal microbe. Well, he’s done for us, that’s sure!”

Mrs. Dodge glanced sidelong at him—she was making intermittent efforts to read, and a table and a lamp were between them. “‘Done for us?’ Well, you said there was no alternative, didn’t you? It’s your policy, isn’t it?”

“I suppose so,” he groaned. “I suppose so, Lydia.” Then, shaking his head ruefully, and with a grunt of desolate laughter in his throat, he said: “I know, of course, that you’re going to lash me with it—my ‘policy’—for the rest of our lives!”

But this was a prediction unfulfilled, for they had missed a clew that was in their hands; or, more accurately, it had been in their mouths, and they had actually spoken it. A toy withheld becomes the universe to a child, and a lover withheld is life and death; but toys and lovers freely given are another matter. What Mr. and Mrs. Dodge failed to see was the significant relation of five to three.

. . . The gloomy parents, despondently communing, were still in the library at midnight when Lily came home. They heard her laughter outside before the latchkey turned in the lock of the front door; and then, with the opening of the door, her voice sounded in a gay chattering like a run of staccato notes in an aria of spring. Accompanying it, interrupting it, there was heard a ’cello obbligato, a masculine voice, young and lively, and this short duet closed with Lily’s “See you day-after-to-morrow!”

She came dancing into the library, all white fur and flying silk.

“Oh, you mustn’t!” she cried. “You dear things, you mustn’t sit up for me!”

“We didn’t,” her mother said. “We were just reading. Who was it that brought you home? I asked your Aunt Sarah——”

“Oh, no! Aunt Sarah was there, but I didn’t want to trouble her to come out of her way.” Lily seated herself lightly on the arm of her mother’s chair, letting one cheerful foot swing and resting an affectionate hand upon Mrs. Dodge’s shoulder. “Freddie Haines brought me home. He’s a nice boy.”

“Is he?”

“I like him awf’ly,” said Lily. “I danced with lots of others, though, too. I didn’t want ’em to think I was only going to dance with nobody but Fred.”

“Didn’t you?”

“Freddie Haines is considerate,” said Lily. “He doesn’t mind my being an old engaged girl at all.” Upon this she looked across to meet her father’s frowning glance, and laughed. “Oh, Fred won’t tell; he’s never going to mention it. I didn’t forget I promised you to keep it under cover until we’re ready to have it announced. I haven’t told any one but Fred, and I’m not going to.” Here she jumped down from her mother’s chair, took an apple daintily from a bowl on the table, and skipped to the door, laughing reminiscently. “He didn’t take it seriously, anyhow!” she said as she went out. Then, humming a dance tune, she ran upstairs to her bed.

In the library the astounded parents gazed long upon each other, and the longer they gazed the wider were their eyes.

“Well, at least there’s this much to be said for me,” Lily’s father said, finally;—“when we decided to adopt my policy——”

“Your what?” cried Mrs. Dodge. “Your policy!”

He perceived that his policy was about to be claimed by another—not instantly, nor brazenly, but nevertheless with a slowly growing assurance that in time would browbeat him.

To-night his wife said, “Your _policy_!” The day would come when she would say, “_Your_ policy?”