The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Rose Garden Husband, by Margaret Widdemer
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Title: The Rose Garden Husband
Author: Margaret Widdemer
Release Date: September 16, 2008 [EBook #26635]
Language: English
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THE
ROSE-GARDEN HUSBAND
BY
MARGARET WIDDEMER
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
WALTER BIGGS
NEW YORK GROSSET & DUNLAP PUBLISHERS
COPYRIGHT 1914, BY J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY
COPYRIGHT 1915, BY J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY
PUBLISHED, JANUARY 27, 1915
SECOND PRINTING, FEBRUARY 6, 1915
THIRD PRINTING, MARCH 12, 1915
FOURTH PRINTING, APRIL 23, 1915
FIFTH PRINTING, JUNE 10, 1915
SIXTH PRINTING, AUGUST 6, 1915
SEVENTH PRINTING, OCTOBER 21, 1915
EIGHTH PRINTING, MAY 1, 1916
NINTH PRINTING, OCTOBER 30, 1916
* * * * *
[Illustration: "YOU KNOW, I MARRIED YOU PRINCIPALLY FOR A ROSE-GARDEN,
AND THAT'S _LOVELY_!"
_Page 172_]
* * * * *
IN LOVING MEMORY
OF
HOWARD TAYLOR WIDDEMER
* * * * *
THE ROSE-GARDEN HUSBAND
I
The Liberry Teacher lifted her eyes from a half-made catalogue-card,
eyed the relentlessly slow clock and checked a long wriggle of purest,
frankest weariness. Then she gave a furtive glance around to see if the
children had noticed she was off guard; for if they had she knew the
whole crowd might take more liberties than they ought to, and have to be
spoken to by the janitor. He could do a great deal with them, because he
understood their attitude to life, but that wasn't good for the Liberry
Teacher's record.
It was four o'clock of a stickily wet Saturday. As long as it is
anything from Monday to Friday the average library attendant goes around
thanking her stars she isn't a school-teacher; but the last day of the
week, when the rest of the world is having its relaxing Saturday off and
coming to gloat over you as it acquires its Sunday-reading best seller,
if you work in a library you begin just at noon to wish devoutly that
you'd taken up scrubbing-by-the-day, or hack-driving, or porch-climbing
or--anything on earth that gave you a weekly half-holiday!
So the Liberry Teacher braced herself severely, and put on her
reading-glasses with a view to looking older and more firm. "Liberry
Teacher," it might be well to explain, was not her official title. Her
description on the pay-roll ran "Assistant for the Children's
Department, Greenway Branch, City Public Library." Grown-up people, when
she happened to run across them, called her Miss Braithwaite. But
"Liberry Teacher" was the only name the children ever used, and she saw
scarcely anybody but the children, six days a week, fifty-one weeks a
year. As for her real name, that nobody ever called her by, _that_ was
Phyllis Narcissa.
She was quite willing to have such a name as that buried out of sight.
She had a sense of fitness; and such a name belonged back in an old New
England parsonage garden full of pink roses and nice green caterpillars
and girl-dreams, and the days before she was eighteen: not in a smutty
city library, attached to a twenty-five-year-old young woman with
reading-glasses and fine discipline and a woolen shirt-waist!
It wasn't that the Liberry Teacher didn't like her position. She not
only liked it, but she had a great deal of admiration for it, because it
had been exceedingly hard to get. She had held it firmly now for a whole
year. Before that she had been in the Cataloguing, where your eyes hurt
and you get a little pain between your shoulders, but you sit down and
can talk to other girls; and before that in the Circulation, where it
hurts your feet and you get ink on your fingers, but you see lots of
funny things happening. She had started at eighteen years old, at thirty
dollars a month. Now she was twenty-five, and she got all of fifty
dollars, so she ought to have been a very happy Liberry Teacher indeed,
and generally she was. When the children wanted to specify her
particularly they described her as "the pretty one that laughs." But at
four o'clock of a wet Saturday afternoon, in a badly ventilated, badly
lighted room full of damp little unwashed foreign children, even the
most sunny-hearted Liberry Teacher may be excused for having thoughts
that are a little tired and cross and restless.
She flung herself back in her desk-chair and watched, with brazen
indifference, Giovanni and Liberata Bruno stickily pawing the colored
Bird Book that was supposed to be looked at only under supervision; she
ignored the fact that three little Czechs were fighting over the wailing
library cat; and the sounds of conflict caused by Jimsy Hoolan's desire
to get the last-surviving Alger book away from John Zanowski moved her
not a whit. The Liberry Teacher had stopped, for five minutes, being
grown-up and responsible, and she was wishing--wishing hard and
vengefully. This is always a risky thing to do, because you never know
when the Destinies may overhear you and take you at your exact word.
With the detailed and careful accuracy one acquires in library work, she
was wishing for a sum of money, a garden, and a husband--but
principally a husband. This is why:
That day as she was returning from her long-deferred twenty-minute
dairy-lunch, she had charged, umbrella down, almost full into a pretty
lady getting out of a shiny gray limousine. Such an unnecessarily pretty
lady, all furs and fluffles and veils and perfumes and waved hair! Her
cheeks were pink and her expression was placid, and each of her
white-gloved hands held tight to a pretty picture-book child who was
wriggling with wild excitement. One had yellow frilly hair and one had
brown bobbed hair, and both were quaintly, immaculately, expensively
kissable. They were the kind of children every girl wishes she could
have a set like, and hugs when she gets a chance. Mother and children
were making their way, under an awning that crossed the street, to the
matinee of a fairy-play.
The Liberry Teacher smiled at the children with more than her accustomed
goodwill, and lowered her umbrella quickly to let them pass. The mother
smiled back, a smile that changed, as the Liberry Teacher passed, to
puzzled remembrance. The gay little family went on into the theatre, and
Phyllis Braithwaite hurried on back to her work, trying to think who the
pretty lady could have been, to have seemed to almost remember her.
Somebody who took books out of the library, doubtless. Still the pretty
lady's face did not seem to fit that conjecture, though it still worried
her by its vague familiarity. Finally the solution came, just as Phyllis
was pulling off her raincoat in the dark little cloak-room. She nearly
dropped the coat.
"Eva Atkinson!" she said.
Eva Atkinson!... If it had been anybody else but _Eva_!
You see, back in long-ago, in the little leisurely windblown New England
town where Phyllis Braithwaite had lived till she was almost eighteen,
there had been a Principal Grocer. And Eva Atkinson had been his
daughter, not so very pretty, not so very pleasant, not so very clever,
and about six years older than Phyllis. Phyllis, as she tried vainly to
make her damp, straight hair go back the way it should, remembered
hearing that Eva had married and come to this city to live. She had
never heard where. And this had been Eva--Eva, by the grace of gold,
radiantly complexioned, wonderfully groomed, beautifully gowned, and
looking twenty-four, perhaps, at most: with a car and a placid
expression and _heaps_ of money, and pretty, clean children! The Liberry
Teacher, severely work-garbed and weather-draggled, jerked herself away
from the small greenish cloak-room mirror that was unkind to you at your
best.
She dashed down to the basement, harried by her usual panic-stricken
twenty-minutes-late feeling. She had only taken one glance at herself in
the wiggly mirror, but that one had been enough for her peace of mind,
supposing her to have had any left before. She felt as if she wanted to
break all the mirrors in the world, like the wicked queen in the French
fairy-tale.
Most people rather liked the face Phyllis saw in the mirror; but to her
own eyes, fresh from the dazzling vision of that Eva Atkinson who had
been dowdy and stupid in the far-back time when seventeen-year-old
Phyllis was "growin' up as pretty as a picture," the tired,
twenty-five-year-old, workaday face in the green glass was _dreadful_.
What made her feel worst--and she entertained the thought with a
whimsical consciousness of its impertinent vanity--was that she'd had so
much more raw material than Eva! And the world had given Eva a chance
because her father was rich. And she, Phyllis, was condemned to be tidy
and accurate, and no more, just because she had to earn her living. That
face in the greenish glass, looking tiredly back at her! She gave a
little out-loud cry of vexation now as she thought of it, two hours
later.
"I must have looked to Eva like a battered bisque doll--no wonder she
couldn't place me!" she muttered crossly.
And it must be worse and more of it now, because in the interval between
two and four there had been many little sticky fingers pulling at her
sleeves and skirt, and you just _have_ to cuddle dear little library
children, even when they're not extra clean; and when Vera Aronsohn
burst into heartbroken tears on the Liberry Teacher's blue woolen
shoulder because her pet fairy-book was missing, she had caught several
strands of the Teacher's yellow hair in her anguish, much to the hair's
detriment.
It was straight, heavy hair, and it would have been of a dense and
fluffy honey-color, only that it was tarnished for lack of the constant
sunnings and brushings which blonde hair must have to stay its best
self. And her skin, too, that should have been a living rose-and-cream,
was dulled by exposure to all weathers, and lack of time to pet it with
creams and powders; perhaps a little, too, by the very stupid things to
eat one gets at a dairy-lunch and boarding-house. Some of the assistants
did interesting cooking over the library gas-range, but the Liberry
Teacher couldn't do that because she hadn't time.
She went on defiantly thinking about her looks. It isn't a noble-minded
thing to do, but when you might be so very, very pretty if you only had
a little time to be it in--"Yes, I _might_!" said Phyllis to her
shocked self defiantly.... Yes, the shape of her face was all right
still. Hard work and scant attention couldn't spoil its pretty oval. But
her eyes--well, you can't keep your eyes as blue and luminous and
childlike as they were back in the New England country, when you have
been using them hard for years in a bad light. And oh, they had been
such _nice_ eyes when she was just Phyllis Narcissa at home, so long and
blue and wondering! And now the cataloguing had heavied the lids and
etched a line between her straight brown brows. They weren't decorative
eyes now ... and they filled with indignant self-sympathy. The Liberry
Teacher laughed at herself a little here. The idea of eyes that cried
about themselves was funny, somehow.
"Direct from producer to consumer!" she quoted half-aloud, and wiped
each eye conscientiously by itself.
"Teacher! I want a liberry called 'Bride of Lemon Hill!' demanded a
small citizen just here. The school teacher, she says I must to have
it!"
Phyllis thought hard. But she had to search the pinned-up list of
required reading for schools for three solid minutes before she bestowed
"The Bride of Lammermoor" on a thirteen-year-old daughter of Hungary.
"This is it, isn't it, honey?" she asked with the flashing smile for
which her children, among other things, adored her.
"Yes, ma'am, thank you, teacher," said the thirteen-year-old gratefully;
and went off to a corner, where she sat till closing time entranced over
her own happy choice, "The Adventures of Peter Rabbit," with colored
pictures dotting it satisfactorily. The Liberry Teacher knew that it was
her duty to go over and hypnotize the child into reading something which
would lead more directly to Browning and Strindberg. But she didn't.
"Poor little wop!" she thought unacademically. "Let her be happy in her
own way!"
And the Liberry Teacher herself went on being unhappy in _her_ own way.
"I'm just a battered bisque doll!" she repeated to herself bitterly.
But she was wrong. One is apt to exaggerate things on a workaday
Saturday afternoon. She looked more like a pretty bisque figurine; slim
and clear-cut, and a little neglected, perhaps, by its owners, and
dressed in working clothes instead of the pretty draperies it should
have had; but needing only a touch or so, a little dusting, so to speak,
to be as good as ever.
"Eva _never_ was as pretty as I was!" her rebellious thoughts went on.
You think things, you know, that you'd never say aloud. "I'm sick of
elevating the public! I'm sick of working hard fifty-one weeks out of
fifty-two for board and lodging and carfare and shirtwaists and the
occasional society of a few girls who don't get any more out of life
than I do! I'm sick of libraries, and of being efficient! I want to be a
real girl! Oh, I wish--I wish I had a lot of money, and a rose-garden,
and a _husband_!"
The Liberry Teacher was aghast at herself. She hadn't meant to wish such
a very unmaidenly thing so hard. She jumped up and dashed across the
room and began frantically to shelf-read books, explaining meanwhile
with most violent emphasis to the listening Destinies:
"I didn't--oh, I _didn_'t mean a _real_ husband. It isn't that I yearn
to be married to some good man, like an old maid or a Duchess novel.
I--I just want all the lovely things Eva has, or any girl that _marries_
them, without any trouble but taking care of a man. One man _couldn't_
but be easier than a whole roomful of library babies. I want to be
looked after, and have time to keep pretty, and a chance to make
friends, and lovely frocks with lots of lace on them, and just months
and months and months when I never had to do anything by a
clock--and--and a rose-garden!"
This last idea was dangerous. It isn't a good thing, if you want to be
contented with your lot, to think of rose-gardens in a stuffy city
library o' Saturdays; especially when where you were brought up
rose-gardens were one of the common necessities of life; and more
especially when you are tired almost to the crying-point, and have all
the week's big sisters back of it dragging on you, and all its little
sisters to come worrying at you, and--time not up till six.
But the Liberry Teacher went blindly on straightening shelves nearly as
fast as the children could muss them up, and thinking about that
rose-garden she wanted, with files of masseuses and manicures and French
maids and messenger-boys with boxes banked soothingly behind every bush.
And the thought became too beautiful to dally with.
"I'd marry _anything_ that would give me a rose-garden!" reiterated the
Liberry Teacher passionately to the Destinies, who are rather catty
ladies, and apt to catch up unguarded remarks you make. "_Anything_--so
long as it was a gentleman--and he didn't scold me--and--and--I didn't
have to associate with him!" her New England maidenliness added in
haste.
Then, for the librarian who cannot laugh, like the one who reads, is
supposed in library circles to be lost, Phyllis shook herself and
laughed at herself a little, bravely. Then she collected the most
uproarious of her flock around her and began telling them stories out of
the "Merry Adventures of Robin Hood." It would keep the children quiet,
and her thoughts, too. She put rose-gardens, not to say manicurists and
husbands, severely out of her head. But you can't play fast and loose
with the Destinies that way.
"Done!" they had replied quietly to her last schedule of requirements.
"We'll send our messenger over right away." It was not their fault that
the Liberry Teacher could not hear them.
II
He was gray-haired, pink-cheeked, curvingly side-whiskered and
immaculately gray-clad; and he did not look in the least like a
messenger of Fate.
The Liberry Teacher was at a highly keyed part of her narrative, and
even the most fidgety children were tense and open-mouthed.
"'And where art thou now?' cried the Stranger to Robin Hood. And Robin
roared with laughter. 'Oh, in the flood, and floating down the stream
with all the little fishes,' said he--" she was relating breathlessly.
"_Tea_-cher!" hissed Isaac Rabinowitz, snapping his fingers at her at
this exciting point. "Teacher! There's a guy wants to speak to you!"
"Aw, shut-_tup_!" chorused his indignant little schoolmates. "Can't you
see that Teacher's tellin' a story? Go chase yerself! Go do a tango
roun' de block!"
Isaac, a small Polish Jew with tragic, dark eyes and one suspender,
received these and several more such suggestions with all the calm
impenetrability of his race.
"Here's de guy," was all he vouchsafed before he went back to the
unsocial nook where, afternoon by faithful afternoon, he read away at a
fat three-volume life of Alexander Hamilton.
The Liberry Teacher looked up without stopping her story, and smiled a
familiar greeting to the elderly gentleman, who was waiting a little
uncertainly at the Children's Room door, and had obviously been looking
for her in vain. He smiled and nodded in return.
"Just a minute, please, Mr. De Guenther," said the Liberry Teacher
cheerfully.
The elderly gentleman nodded again, crossed to Isaac and his ponderous
volumes, and began to talk to him with that benign lack of haste which
usually means a very competent personality. Phyllis hurried somewhat
with Robin Hood among his little fishes, and felt happier. It was
always, in her eventless life, something of a pleasant adventure to
have Mr. De Guenther or his wife drop in to see her. There was usually
something pleasant at the end of it.
They were an elderly couple whom she had known for some years. They were
so leisurely and trim and gentle-spoken that long ago, when she was only
a timorous substitute behind the circle of the big charging-desk, she
had picked them both out as people-you'd-like-if-you-got-the-chance.
Then she had waited on them, and identified them by their cards as
belonging to the same family. Then, one day, with a pleased little
quiver of joy, she had found him in the city Who's Who, age, profession
(he was a corporation lawyer), middle names, favorite recreation, and
all. Gradually she had come to know them both very well in a waiting-on
way. She often chose love-stories that ended happily and had colored
illustrations for Mrs. De Guenther when she was at home having
rheumatism; she had saved more detective stories for Mr. De Guenther
than her superiors ever knew; and once she had found his black-rimmed
eye-glasses where he had left them between the pages of the Pri-Zuz
volume of the encyclopedia, and mailed them to him.
When she had vanished temporarily from sight into the nunnery-promotion
of the cataloguing room the De Guenthers had still remembered her. Twice
she had been asked to Sunday dinner at their house, and had joyously
gone and remembered it as joyously for months afterward. Now that she
was out in the light of partial day again, in the Children's Room, she
ran across both of them every little while in her errands upstairs; and
once Mrs. De Guenther, gentle, lorgnetted and gray-clad, had been shown
over the Children's Room. The couple lived all alone in a great,
handsome old house that was being crowded now by the business district.
She had always thought that if she were a Theosophist she would try to
plan to have them for an uncle and aunt in her next incarnation. They
suited her exactly for the parts.
But it's a long way down to the basement where city libraries are apt to
keep their children, and the De Guenthers hadn't been down there since
the last time they asked her to dinner. And here, with every sign of
having come to say something _very_ special, stood Mr. De Guenther!
Phyllis' irrepressibly cheerful disposition gave a little jump toward
the light. But she went on with her story--business before pleasure!
However, she did manage to get Robin Hood out of his brook a little more
quickly than she had planned. She scattered her children with a swift
executive whisk, and made so straight for her friend that she deceived
the children into thinking they were going to see him expelled, and they
banked up and watched with anticipatory grins.
"I do hope you want to see me especially!" she said brightly.
The children, disappointed, relaxed their attention.
Mr. De Guenther rose slowly and neatly from his seat beside the rather
bored Isaac Rabinowitz, who dived into his book again with alacrity.
"Good afternoon, Miss Braithwaite," he said in the amiably precise voice
which matched so admirably his beautifully precise movements and his
immaculate gray spats. "Yes. In the language of our young friend here,
'I am the guy.'"
Phyllis giggled before she thought. Some people in the world always make
your spirits go up with a bound, and the De Guenther pair invariably had
that effect on her.
"Oh, Mr. De Guenther!" she said, "I am shocked at you! That's slang!"
"It was more in the nature of a quotation," said he apologetically. "And
how are you this exceedingly unpleasant day, Miss Braithwaite? We have
seen very little of you lately, Mrs. De Guenther and I."
The Liberry Teacher, gracefully respectful in her place, wriggled with
invisible impatience over this carefully polite conversational opening.
He had come down here on purpose to see her--there must be something
going to happen, even if it was only a request to save a seven-day book
for Mrs. De Guenther! Nobody ever wanted _something_, any kind of a
something, to happen more wildly than the Liberry Teacher did that
bored, stickily wet Saturday afternoon, with those tired seven years at
the Greenway Branch dragging at the back of her neck, and the seven
times seven to come making her want to scream. So few things can
possibly happen to you, no matter how good you are, when you work by the
day. And now maybe something--oh, please, the very smallest kind of a
something would be welcomed!--was going to occur. Maybe Mrs. De Guenther
had sent her a ticket to a concert; she had once before. Or maybe, since
you might as well wish for big things while you're at it, it might even
be a ticket to an expensive seat in a real theatre! Her pleasure-hungry,
work-heavy blue eyes burned luminous at the idea.
"But I really shouldn't wish," she reminded her prancing mind belatedly.
"He may only have come down to talk about the weather. It mayn't any of
it be true."
So she stood up straight and gravely, and answered very courteously and
holding-tightly all the amiable roundabout remarks the old gentleman was
shoving forward like pawns on a chessboard before the real game begins.
She answered with the same trained cheerfulness she could give her
library children when her head and her disposition ached worst; and even
warmed to a vicious enthusiasm over the state of the streets and the
wetness of the damp weather.
"He knows lots of real things to say," she complained to herself, "why
doesn't he say them, instead of talking editorials? I suppose this is
his bedside--no, lawyers don't have bedside manners--well, his barside
manner, then----"
It is difficult to think and listen at the same time: by this time she
had missed a beautiful long paragraph about the Street-Cleaning
Department; and something else, apparently. For her friend was holding
out to her a note addressed to her flowingly in his wife's English hand,
and was saying,
"--which she has asked me to deliver. I trust you have no imperative
engagement for to-morrow night."
Something _had_ happened!
"Why, no!" said the Liberry Teacher delightedly. "No, indeed! Thank you,
and her, too. I'd love to come."
"Teacher!" clamored a small chocolate-colored citizen in a Kewpie
muffler, "my maw she want' a book call' 'Ugwin!' She say it got a yellow
cover an' pictures in it."
"Just a moment!" said Phyllis; and sent him upstairs with a note asking
for "Hugh Wynne" in the two-volume edition. She was used to translating
that small colored boy's demands. Last week he had described to her a
play he called "Eas' Limb", with the final comment, "But it wan't no
good. 'Twant no limb in it anywhar, ner no trees atall!"
"Do you have much of that?" Mr. De Guenther asked idly.
"Lots!" said Phyllis cheerfully. "You take special training in guesswork
at library school. They call them 'teasers'. They say they're good for
your intellect."
"Ah--yes," said Mr. De Guenther absently in the barside manner.
And then, sitting calmly with his silvery head against a Washington's
Birthday poster so that three scarlet cherries stuck above him in the
manner of a scalp-lock, he said something else remarkably real:
"I have--we have--a little matter of business to discuss with you
to-morrow night, my dear; an offer, I may say, of a different line of
work. And I want you to satisfy yourself thoroughly--thoroughly, my dear
child, of my reputableness. Mr. Johnstone, the chief of the city
library, whose office I believe to be in this branch, is one of my
oldest friends. I am, I think I may say, well known as a lawyer in this
my native city. I should be glad to have you satisfy yourself personally
on these points, because----" could it be that the eminently poised Mr.
De Guenther was embarrassed? "Because the line of work which I wish, or
rather my wife wishes, to lay before you is--is a very different line of
work!" ended the old gentleman inconclusively. There was no mistake
about it this time--he _was_ embarrassed.
"Oh, Mr. De Guenther!" cried Phyllis before she thought, out of the
fulness of her heart, catching his arm in her eagerness; "Oh, Mr. De
Guenther, _could_ the Very Different Line of Work have a--have a
_rose-garden_ attached to it anywhere?"
Before she was fairly finished she knew what a silly question she had
asked. How could any line of work she was qualified to do possibly have
rose-gardens attached to it? You can't catalogue roses on neat cards, or
improve their minds by the Newark Ladder System, or do anything at all
librarious to them, except pressing them in books to mummify; and the
Liberry Teacher didn't think that was at all a courteous thing to do to
roses. So Mr. De Guenther's reply quite surprised her.
"There--seems--to be--no good reason," he said, slowly and placidly,
as if he were dropping his words one by one out of a slot;--"why
there should not--be--a very satisfactory rose-garden, or
even--_two_--connected with it. None--whatever."
That was all the explanation he offered. But the Liberry Teacher asked
no more. "_Oh!_" she said rapturously.
"Then we may expect you to-morrow at seven?" he said; and smiled
politely and moved to the door. He walked out as matter-of-coursely as
if he had dropped in to ask the meaning of "circumflex," or who
invented smallpox, or the name of Adam's house-cat, or how long it would
take her to do a graduation essay for his daughter--or any such little
things that librarians are prepared for most days.
And instead--his neat gray elderly back seemed to deny it--he had left
with her, the Liberry Teacher, her, dusty, tousled, shopworn Phyllis
Braithwaite, an invitation to consider a Line of Work which was so
mysteriously Different that she had to look up the spotless De Guenther
reputation before she came!
One loses track of time, staring at a red George Washington poster, and
wondering about a future with a sudden Different Line in it.... It was
ten minutes past putting-out-children time! She stared aghast at the
ruthless clock, then created two Monitors for Putting Out at one royal
sweep. She managed the nightly eviction with such gay expedition that it
almost felt like ten minutes ago when the place, except for the
pride-swollen monitors, was cleared. While these officers watched the
commonalty clumping reluctantly upstairs toward the umbrella-rack, the
Liberry Teacher paced sedately around the shelves, giving the books that
routine straightening they must have before seven struck and the horde
rushed in again. It was really her relieving officer's work, but the
Liberry Teacher felt that her mind needed straightening, too, and this
always seemed to do it.
She looked, as she moved slowly down along the shelves, very much like
most of the librarians you see; alert, pleasant, slender, a little
dishevelled, a little worn. But there was really no librarian there.
There was only Phyllis Narcissa--that dreaming young Phyllis who had had
to stay pushed out of sight all the seven years that Miss Braithwaite
had been efficiently earning her living.
She let her mind stray happily as far as it would over the possibilities
Mr. De Guenther had held out to her, and woke to discover herself trying
to find a place under "Domestic Economy--Condiments" for "Five Little
Peppers and How They Grew." She laughed aloud in the suddenly empty
room, and then lifted her head to find Miss Black, the night-duty girl
that week, standing in the doorway ready to relieve guard.
"Oh, Anna, see what I've done!" she laughed. Somehow everything seemed
merely light-hearted and laughable since Mr. De Guenther's most
fairy-tale visit, with its wild hints of Lines of Work. Anna Black came,
looked, laughed.
"In the 640's!" she said. "Well, you're liable to do nearly everything
by the time it's Saturday. Last Saturday, Dolly Graham up in the
Circulation was telling me, an old colored mammy said she'd lost her
mittens in the reading-room; and the first they knew Dolly was hunting
through the Woollen Goods classification, and Mary Gayley pawing the
dictionary wildly for m-i-t!"
"And they found the mittens hung around her neck by the cord," finished
the Liberry Teacher. "I know--it was a thrilling story. Well, good-by
till Monday, Anna Black. I'm going home now, to have some lovely prunes
and some real dried beef, and maybe a glass of almost-milk if I can
persuade the landlady I need it."
"Mine prefers dried apricots," responded Miss Black cheerfully, "but she
never has anything but canned milk in the house, thus sparing us the
embarrassment of asking for real. Good-by--good luck!"
But as the Liberry Teacher pinned her serviceable hat close, and
fastened her still good raincoat over her elderly sweater, neither
prunes nor mittens nor next week's work worried her at all. After all,
living among the fairy-stories with the Little People makes that
pleasant land where wanting is having, and all the impossibilities can
come true, very easy of access. Phyllis Braithwaite's mind, as she
picked her way down the bedraggled street, wandered innocently off in a
dream-place full of roses, till the muddy marble steps of her
boarding-place gleamed sloppily before her through the foggy rain.
She sat up late that night, doing improving things to the white net
waist that went with her best suit, which was black. As her needle
nibbled busily down the seams she continued happily to wonder about that
Entirely Different Line. It sounded to her more like a reportership on
a yellow journal than anything else imaginable. Or, perhaps, could she
be wanted to join the Secret Service?
"At any rate," she concluded light-heartedly, as she stitched the last
clean ruching into the last wrist-covering, sedate sleeve, "at any rate
I'll have a chance to-morrow to wear mother's gold earrings that I
mustn't have on in the library. And oh, how lovely it will be to have a
dinner that wasn't cooked by a poor old bored boarding-house cook or a
shiny tiled syndicate!"
And she went to bed--to dream of Entirely Different Lines all the colors
of the rainbow, that radiated out from the Circulation Desk like
tight-ropes. She never remembered Eva Atkinson's carefully prettied
face, or her own vivid, work-worn one, at all. She only dreamed that far
at the end of the pink Entirely Different Line--a very hard one to
walk--there was a rose-garden exactly like a patchwork quilt, where she
was to be.
III
When Phyllis woke next morning everything in the world had a
light-hearted, holiday feeling. Her Sundays, gloriously unoccupied,
generally did, but this was extra-special. The rain had managed to clear
away every vestige of last week's slush, and had then itself most
unselfishly retired down the gutters. The sun shone as if May had come,
and the wind, through the Liberry Teacher's window, had a springy,
pussy-willowy, come-for-a-walk-in-the-country feel to it. She found that
she had slept too late to go to church, and prepared for a joyful dash
to the boarding-house bathtub. There might be--who knew but there
actually might be--on this day of days, enough hot water for a real
bath!
"I feel as if everything was going to be lovely all day!" she said
without preface to old black Maggie, who was clumping her accustomed
bed-making way along the halls, with her woolly head tied up in her
Sunday silk handkerchief. Even she looked happier, Phyllis thought,
than she had yesterday. She grinned broadly at Phyllis, leaning
smilingly against the door in her kimona.
"Ah dunno, Miss Braithways," she said, and entered the room and took a
pillow-case-corner in her mouth. "Ah never has dem premeditations!"
Phyllis laughed frankly, and Maggie, much flattered at the happy
reception of her reply, grinned so widely that you might almost have
tied her mouth behind her ears.
"You sure is a cheerful person, Miss Braithways!" said Maggie, and went
on making the bed.
Phyllis fled on down the hall, laughing still. She had just remembered
another of old Maggie's compliments, made on one of the rare occasions
when Phyllis had sat down and sung to the boarding-house piano. (She
hadn't been able to do it long, because the Mental Science Lady on the
next floor had sent down word that it stopped her from concentrating,
and as she had a very expensive room there was nothing for the landlady
to do but make Phyllis stop.) Phyllis had come out in the hall to find
old Maggie listening rapturously.
"Oh, Miss Braithways!" she had murmured, rolling her eyes, "you
certainly does equalize a martingale!"
It had been a compliment Phyllis never forgot. She smiled to herself as
she found the bathroom door open. Why, the world was full of a number of
things, many of them funny. Being a Liberry Teacher was rather nice,
after all, when you were fresh from a long night's sleep. And if that
Mental Science Lady _wouldn't_ let her play the piano, why, her
thrilling tales of what she could do when her mind was unfettered were
worth the price. That story she told so seriously about how the pipes
burst--and the plumber wouldn't come, and "My dear, I gave those pipes
only half an hour's treatment, and they closed right up!" It was quite
as much fun--well, almost as much--hearing her, as it would have been to
play.
... All of the contented, and otherwise, elderly people who inhabited
the boarding-house with Phyllis appeared to have gone off without using
hot water, for there actually was some. The Liberry Teacher found that
she could have a genuine bath, and have enough water besides to wash her
hair, which is a rite all girls who work have to reserve for Sundays.
This was surely a day of days!
She used the water--alas for selfish human nature!--to the last warm
drop and went gayly back to her little room with no emotions whatever
for the poor other boarders, soon to find themselves wrathfully
hot-waterless. And then--she thoughtlessly curled down on the bed, and
slept and slept and slept! She wakened dimly in time for the one o'clock
dinner, dressed, and ate it in a half-sleep. She went back upstairs
planning a trolley-ride that should take her out into the country, where
a long walk might be had. And midway in changing her shoes she lay back
across the bed and--fell asleep again. The truth was, Phyllis was about
as tired as a girl can get.
She waked at dusk, with a jerk of terror lest she should have overslept
her time for going out. But it was only six. She had a whole hour to
prink in, which is a very long time for people who are used to being in
the library half-an-hour after the alarm-clock wakes them.
* * * * *
Some houses, all of themselves, and before you meet a soul who lives in
them, are silently indifferent to you. Some make you feel that you are
not wanted in the least; these usually have a lot of gilt furniture, and
what are called objects of art set stiffly about. Some seem to be having
an untidy good time all to themselves, in which you are not included.
The De Guenther house, staid and softly toned, did none of these things.
It gave the Liberry Teacher, in her neat, last year's best suit, a
feeling as of gentle welcome-home. She felt contented and _belonging_
even before quick-smiling, slender little Mrs. De Guenther came rustling
gently in to greet her. Then followed Mr. De Guenther, pleasant and
unperturbed as usual, and after him an agreeable, back-arching gray cat,
who had copied his master's walk as exactly as it can be done with four
feet.
All four sat amiably about the room and held precise and pleasant
converse, something like a cheerful essay written in dialogue, about
many amusing, intelligent things which didn't especially matter. The
Liberry Teacher liked it. It was pleasant beyond words to sit nestlingly
in a pluffy chair, and hear about all the little lightly-treated
scholarly day-before-yesterday things her father had used to talk of.
She carried on her own small part in the talk blithely enough. She
approved of herself and the way she was behaving, which makes very much
for comfort. There was only once that she was ashamed of herself, and
thought about it in bed afterwards and was mortified; when her eyes
filled with quick tears at a quite dry and unemotional--indeed, rather a
sarcastic--quotation from Horace on the part of Mr. De Guenther. But she
smiled, when she saw that they noticed her.
"That's the first time I've heard a Latin quotation since I came away
from home," she found herself saying quite simply in explanation, "and
Father quoted Horace so much every day that--that I felt as if an old
friend had walked in!"
But her hosts didn't seem to mind. Mr. De Guenther in his careful
evening clothes looked swiftly across at Mrs. De Guenther in her
gray-silk-and-cameo, and they both nodded little satisfied nods, as if
she had spoken in a way that they were glad to hear. And then dinner was
served, a dinner as different--well, she didn't want to remember in its
presence the dinners it differed from; they might have clouded the
moment. She merely ate it with a shameless inward joy.
It ended, still to a pleasant effortless accompaniment of talk about
books and music and pictures that Phyllis was interested in, and had
found nobody to share her interest with for so long--so long! She felt
happily running though everything the general, easy taking-for-granted
of all the old, gentle, inflexible standards of breeding that she had
nearly forgotten, down in the heart of the city among her obstreperous,
affectionate little foreigners.
They had coffee in the long old-fashioned salon parlor, and then Mr. De
Guenther straightened himself, and Mrs. De Guenther folded her veined,
ringed old white hands, and Phyllis prepared thrilledly to listen.
Surely now she would hear about that Different Line of Work.
There was nothing, at first, about work of any sort. They merely began
to tell her alternately about some clients of theirs, a Mrs. Harrington
and her son: rather interesting people, from what Phyllis could make
out. She wondered if she was going to hear that they needed a librarian.
"This lady, my client, Mrs. Harrington," continued her host gravely, "is
the one for whom I may ask you to consider doing some work. I say may,
but it is a practical certainty. She is absolutely alone, my dear Miss
Braithwaite, except for her son. I am afraid I must ask you to listen to
a long story about them."
It was coming!
"Oh, but I want to hear!" said Phyllis, with that quick, affectionate
sympathy of hers that was so winning, leaning forward and watching them
with the lighted look in her blue eyes. It all seemed to her tired,
alert mind like some story she might have read to her children, an
Arabian Nights narrative which might begin, "And the Master of the
House, ascribing praise unto Allah, repeated the following Tale."
"There have always been just the two of them, mother and son," said the
Master of the House. "And Allan has always been a very great deal to his
mother."
"Poor Angela!" murmured his wife.
"They are old friends of ours," her husband explained. "My wife and Mrs.
Harrington were schoolmates.
"Well, Allan, the boy, grew up, dowered with everything a mother could
possibly desire for her son, personally and otherwise. He was handsome
and intelligent, with much charm of manner."
"I know now what people mean by 'talking like a book,'" thought Phyllis
irreverently. "And I don't believe any one man _could_ be all that!"
"There was practically nothing," Mr. De Guenther went on, "which the
poor lad had not. That was one trouble, I imagine. If he had not been
highly intelligent he would not have studied so hard; if he had not been
strong and active he might not have taken up athletic sports so
whole-heartedly; and when I add that Allan possessed charm, money and
social status you may see that what he did would have broken down most
young fellows. In short, he kept studies, sports and social affairs all
going at high pressure during his four years of college. But he was
young and strong, and might not have felt so much ill effects from all
that; though his doctors said afterwards that he was nearly at the
breaking point when he graduated."
Phyllis bent closer to the story-teller in her intense interest. Why, it
_was_ like one of her fairy-tales! She held her breath to listen, while
the old lawyer went gravely on.
"Allan could not have been more than twenty-two when he graduated, and
it was a very short while afterwards that he became engaged to a young
girl, the daughter of a family friend. Louise Frey was her name, was it
not, love?"
"Yes, that is right," said his wife, "Louise Frey."
"A beautiful girl," he went on, "dark, with a brilliant color, and full
of life and good spirits. They were both very young, but there was no
good reason why the marriage should be delayed, and it was set for the
following September."
A princess, too, in the story! But--where had she gone? "The two of them
only," he had said.
"It must have been scarcely a month," the story went on--Mr. De Guenther
was telling it as if he were stating a case--"nearly a month before the
date set for the wedding, when the lovers went for a long automobile
ride, across a range of mountains near a country-place where they were
both staying. They were alone in the machine.
"Allan, of course, was driving, doubtless with a certain degree of
impetuosity, as he did most things.... They were on an unfrequented part
of the road," said Mr. De Guenther, lowering his voice, "when there
occurred an unforeseen wreckage in the car's machinery. The car was
thrown over and badly splintered. Both young people were pinned under
it.
"So far as he knew at the time, Allan was not injured, nor was he in any
pain; but he was held in absolute inability to move by the car above
him. Miss Frey, on the contrary, was badly hurt, and in suffering. She
died in about three hours, a little before relief came to them."
Phyllis clutched the arms of her chair, thrilled and wide-eyed. She
could imagine all the horror of the happening through the old lawyer's
precise and unemotional story. The boy-lover, pinioned, helpless,
condemned to watch his sweetheart dying by inches, and unable to help
her by so much as lifting a hand--could anything be more awful not only
to endure, but to remember?
"And yet," she thought whimsically, "it mightn't be so bad to have one
_real_ tragedy to remember, if you haven't anything else! All _I'll_
have to remember when I'm old will be bad little children and good
little children, and books and boarding-houses, and the recollection
that people said I was a very worthy young woman once!" But she threw
off the thought. It's just as well not to think of old age when all the
idea brings up is a vision of a nice, clean Old Ladies' Home.
"But you said he was an invalid?" she said aloud.
"Yes, I regret to say," answered Mr. De Guenther. "You see, it was found
that the shock to the nerves, acting on an already over-keyed mind and
body, together with some spinal blow concerning which the doctors are
still in doubt, had affected Allan's powers of locomotion." (Mr. De
Guenther certainly did like long words!) "He has been unable to walk
since. And, which is sadder, his state of mind and body has become
steadily worse. He can scarcely move at all now, and his mental attitude
can only be described as painfully morbid--yes, I may say _very_
painfully morbid. Sometimes he does not speak at all for days together,
even to his mother, or his attendant."
"Oh, poor boy!" said Phyllis. "How long has he been this way?"
"Seven years this fall," the answer came consideringly. "Is it not,
love?"
"Yes," said his wife, "seven years."
"_Oh!_" said the Liberry Teacher, with a quick catch of sympathy at her
heart.
Just as long as she had been working for her living in the big, dusty
library. Supposing--oh, supposing she'd had to live all that time in
such suffering as this poor Allan had endured and his mother had had to
witness! She felt suddenly as if the grimy, restless Children's Room,
with its clatter of turbulent little outland voices, were a safe, sunny
paradise in comparison.
Mr. De Guenther did not speak. He visibly braced himself and was visibly
ill-at-ease.
"I have told most of the story, Isabel, love," said he at last. "Would
you not prefer to tell the rest? It is at your instance that I have
undertaken this commission for Mrs. Harrington, you will remember."
It struck Phyllis that he didn't think it was quite a dignified
commission, at that.
"Very well, my dear," said his wife, and took up the tale in her swift,
soft voice.
"You can fancy, my dear Miss Braithwaite, how intensely his mother has
felt about it."
"Indeed, yes!" said Phyllis pitifully.
"Her whole life, since the accident, has been one long devotion to her
son. I don't think a half-hour ever passes that she does not see him.
But in spite of this constant care, as my husband has told you, he grows
steadily worse. And poor Angela has finally broken under the strain. She
was never strong. She is dying now--they give her maybe two months more.
"Her one anxiety, of course, is for poor Allan's welfare. You can
imagine how you would feel if you had to leave an entirely helpless son
or brother to the mercies of hired attendants, however faithful. And
they have no relatives--they are the last of the family."
The listening girl began to see. She was going to be asked to act as
nurse, perhaps attendant and guardian, to this morbid invalid with the
injured mind and body.
[Illustration: "NO," SAID MRS. DE GUENTHER GRAVELY. "YOU WOULD NOT. YOU
WOULD HAVE TO BE HIS WIFE"]
"But how would I be any better for him than a regular trained nurse?"
she wondered. "And they said he had an attendant."
She looked questioningly at the pair.
"Where does my part come in?" she asked with a certain sweet directness
which was sometimes hers. "Wouldn't I be a hireling too if--if I had
anything to do with it?"
"No," said Mrs. De Guenther gravely. "You would not. You would have to
be his wife."
IV
The Liberry Teacher, in her sober best suit, sat down in her entirely
commonplace chair in the quiet old parlor, and looked unbelievingly at
the sedate elderly couple who had made her this wild proposition. She
caught her breath. But catching her breath did not seem to affect
anything that had been said. Mr. De Guenther took up the explanation
again, a little deprecatingly, she thought.
"You see now why I requested you to investigate our reputability?" he
said. "Such a proposition as this, especially to a young lady who has no
parent or guardian, requires a considerable guarantee of good faith and
honesty of motive."
"Will you please tell me more about it?" she asked quietly. She did not
feel now as if it were anything which had especially to do with her. It
seemed more like an interesting story she was unravelling sentence by
sentence. The long, softly lighted old room, with its Stuarts and
Sullys, and its gracious, gray-haired host and hostess, seemed only a
picturesque part of it.... Her hostess caught up the tale again.
"Angela has been nearly distracted," she said. "And the idea has come to
her that if she could find some conscientious woman, a lady, and a
person to whom what she could offer would be a consideration, who would
take charge of poor Allan, that she could die in peace."
"But why did you think of asking me?" the girl asked breathlessly. "And
why does she want me married to him? And how could you or she be sure
that I would not be as much of a hireling as any nurse she may have
now?"
Mrs. De Guenther answered the last two questions together.
"Mrs. Harrington's idea is, and I think rightly, that a conscientious
woman would feel the marriage tie, however nominal, a bond that would
obligate her to a certain duty toward her husband. As to why we selected
you, my dear, my husband and I have had an interest in you for some
years, as you know. We have spoken of you as a girl whom we should like
for a relative----"
"Why, isn't that strange?" cried Phyllis, dimpling. "That's just what
I've thought about you!"
Mrs. De Guenther flushed, with a delicate old shyness.
"Thank you, dear child," she said. "I was about to add that we have not
seen you at your work all these years without knowing you to have the
kind heart and sense of honor requisite to poor Angela's plan. We feel
sure you could be trusted to take the place. Mr. De Guenther has asked
his friend Mr. Johnston, the head of the library, such things as we
needed to supplement our personal knowledge of you. You have everything
that could be asked, even to a certain cheerfulness of outlook which
poor Angela, naturally, lacks in a measure."
"But--but what about _me_?" asked Phyllis Braithwaite a little
piteously, in answer to all this.
They seemed so certain she was what they wanted--was there anything in
this wild scheme that would make _her_ life better than it was as the
tired, ill-paid, light-hearted keeper of a roomful of turbulent little
foreigners?
"Unless you are thinking of marriage--" Phyllis shook her head--"you
would have at least a much easier life than you have now. Mrs.
Harrington would settle a liberal income on you, contingent, of course,
of your faithful wardership over Allan. We would be your only judges as
to that. You would have a couple or more months of absolute freedom
every year, control of much of your own time, ample leisure to enjoy it.
You would give only your chances of actual marriage for perhaps five
years, for poor Allan cannot live longer than that at his present state
of retrogression, and some part of every day to seeing that Allan was
not neglected. If you bestow on him half of the interest and effort I
have known of your giving any one of a dozen little immigrant boys, his
mother has nothing to fear for him."
Mr. De Guenther stopped with a grave little bow, and he and his wife
waited for the reply.
The Liberry Teacher sat silent, her eyes on her slim hands, that were
roughened and reddened by constant hurried washings to get off the dirt
of the library books. It was true--a good deal of it, anyhow. And one
thing they had not said was true also: her sunniness and accuracy and
strength, her stock-in-trade, were wearing thin under the pressure of
too long hours and too hard work and too few personal interests. Her
youth was worn down. And--marriage? What chance of love and marriage had
she, a working-girl alone, too poor to see anything of the class of men
she would be willing to marry? She had not for years spent six hours
with a man of her own kind and age. She had not even been specially in
love, that she could remember, since she was grown up. She did not feel
much, now, as if she ever would be. All that she had to give up in
taking this offer was her freedom, such as it was--and those fluttering
perhapses that whisper such pleasant promises when you are young. But,
then, she wouldn't be young so _very_ much longer. Should she--she put
it to herself crudely--should she wait long, hard, closed-in years in
the faith that she would learn to be absolutely contented, or that some
man she could love would come to the cheap boarding-house, or the little
church she attended occasionally when she was not too tired, fall in
love with her work-dimmed looks at sight, and--marry her? It had not
happened all these years while her girlhood had been more attractive and
her personality more untired. There was scarcely a chance in a hundred
for her of a kind lover-husband and such dear picture-book children as
she had seen Eva Atkinson convoying. Well--her mind suddenly came up
against the remembrance, as against a sober fact, that in her passionate
wishings of yesterday she had not wished for a lover-husband, nor for
children. She had asked for a husband who would give her money, and
leisure to be rested and pretty, and--a rose-garden! And here,
apparently, was her wish uncannily fulfilled.
"Well, what are you going to do about it?" inquired the Destinies with
their traditional indifference. "We can't wait all night!"
She lifted her head and cast an almost frightened look at the De
Guenthers, waiting courteously for her decision. In reply to the look,
Mr. De Guenther began giving her details about the money, and the
leisure time, and the business terms of the contract generally. She
listened attentively. All that--for a little guardianship, a little
kindness, and the giving-up of a little piece of life nobody wanted and
a few little hopes and dreams!
Phyllis laughed, as she always did when there were big black problems to
be solved.
"After all, it's fairly usual," she said. "I heard last week of a woman
who left money along with her pet dog, very much the same way."
"Did you? Did you, dear?" asked Mrs. De Guenther, beaming. "Then you
think you will do it?"
The Liberry Teacher rose, and squared her straight young shoulders under
the worn net waist.
"If Mrs. Harrington thinks I'll do for the situation!" she said
gallantly,--and laughed again.
* * * * *
"It feels partly like going into a nunnery and partly like going into a
fairy-story," she said to herself that night as she wound her alarm.
"But--I wonder if anybody's remembered to ask the consent of the
groom!"
V
He looked like a young Crusader on a tomb. That was Phyllis's first
impression of Allan Harrington. He talked and acted, if a moveless man
can be said to act, like a bored, spoiled small boy. That was her
second.
Mrs. Harrington, fragile, flushed, breathlessly intense in her
wheel-chair, had yet a certain resemblance in voice and gesture to Mrs.
De Guenther--a resemblance which puzzled Phyllis till she placed it as
the mark of that far-off ladies' school they had attended together.
There was also a graceful, mincing white wolfhound which, contrary to
the accepted notion of invalids' faithful hounds, didn't seem to care
for his master's darkened sick-room at all, but followed the one sunny
spot in Mrs. Harrington's room with a wistful persistence. It was such a
small spot for such a long wolfhound--that was the principal thing which
impressed itself on Phyllis's frightened mind throughout her visit.
Mrs. De Guenther convoyed her to the Harrington house for inspection a
couple of days after she had accepted some one's proposal to marry Allan
Harrington. (Whether it counted as her future mother-in-law's proposal,
or her future trustee's, she was never sure. The only sure thing was
that it did not come from the groom.) She had borrowed a half-day from
the future on purpose, though she did not want to go at all. But the
reality was not bad; only a fluttering, emotional little woman who clung
to her hands and talked to her and asked useless questions with a
nervous insistence which would have been nerve-wearing for a steady
thing, but was only pitiful to a stranger.
You see strange people all the time in library work, and learn to place
them, at length, with almost as much accuracy as you do your books. The
fact that Mrs. Harrington was not long for this world did not prevent
Phyllis from classing her, in her mental card-catalogue, as a very
perfect specimen of the Loving Nagger. She was lying back, wrapped in
something gray and soft, when her visitors came, looking as if the
lifting of her hand would be an effort. She was evidently pitifully
weak. But she had, too, an ineradicable vitality she could summon at
need. She sprang almost upright to greet her visitors, a hand out to
each, an eager flood of words on her lips.
"And you are Miss Braithwaite, that is going to look after my boy?" she
ended. "Oh, it is so good of you--I am so glad--I can go in peace now.
Are you sure--sure you will know the minute his attendants are the least
bit negligent? I watch and watch them all the time. I tell Allan to ring
for me if anything ever is the least bit wrong--I am always begging him
to remember. I go in every night and pray with him--do you think you
could do that? But I always cry so before I'm through--I cry and cry--my
poor, helpless boy--he was so strong and bright! And you are sure you
are conscientious----"
At this point Phyllis stopped the flow of Mrs. Harrington's conversation
firmly, if sweetly.
"Yes, indeed," she said cheerfully. "But you know, if I'm not, Mr. De
Guenther can stop all my allowance. It wouldn't be to my own interest
not to fulfil my duties faithfully."
"Yes, that is true," said Mrs. Harrington. "That was a good thought of
mine. My husband always said I was an unusual woman where business was
concerned."
So they went on the principle that she had no honor beyond working for
what she would get out of it! Although she had made the suggestion
herself, Phyllis's cheeks burned, and she was about to answer sharply.
Then somehow the poor, anxious, loving mother's absolute preoccupation
with her son struck her as right after all.
"If it were my son," thought Phyllis, "I wouldn't worry about any
strange hired girl's feelings either, maybe. I'd just think about
him.... I promise I'll look after Mr. Harrington's welfare as if he were
my own brother!" she ended aloud impulsively. "Indeed, you may trust
me."
"I am--sure you will," panted Mrs. Harrington. "You look like--a good
girl, and--and old enough to be responsible--twenty-eight--thirty?"
"Not very far from that," said Phyllis serenely.
"And you are sure you will know when the attendants are neglectful? I
speak to them all the time, but I never can be sure.... And now you'd
better see poor Allan. This is one of his good days. Just think, dear
Isabel, he spoke to me twice without my speaking to him this morning!"
"Oh--must I?" asked Phyllis, dismayed. "Couldn't I wait till--till it
happens?"
Mrs. Harrington actually laughed a little at her shyness, lighting up
like a girl. Phyllis felt dimly, though she tried not to, that through
it all her mother-in-law-elect was taking pleasure in the dramatic side
of the situation she had engineered.
"Oh, my dear, you must see him. He expects you," she answered almost
gayly. The procession of three moved down the long room towards a door,
Phyllis's hand guiding the wheel-chair. She was surprised to find
herself shaking with fright. Just what she expected to find beyond the
door she did not know, but it must have been some horror, for it was
with a heart-bound of wild relief that she finally made out Allan
Harrington, lying white in the darkened place.
A Crusader on a tomb. Yes, he looked like that. In the room's half-dusk
the pallor of his still, clear-featured face and his long, clear-cut
hands was nearly the same as the whiteness of the couch-draperies. His
hair, yellow-brown and waving, flung back from his forehead like a
crest, and his dark brows and lashes made the only note of darkness
about him. To Phyllis's beauty-loving eyes he seemed so perfect an image
that she could have watched him for hours.
"Here's Miss Braithwaite, my poor darling," said his mother. "The young
lady we have been talking about so long."
The Crusader lifted his eyelids and let them fall again.
"Is she?" he said listlessly.
"Don't you want to talk to her, darling boy?" his mother persisted, half
out of breath, but still full of that unrebuffable, loving energy and
insistence which she would probably keep to the last minute of her
life.
"No," said the Crusader, still in those empty, listless tones. "I'd
rather not talk. I'm tired."
His mother seemed not at all put out.
"Of course, darling," she said, kissing him. She sat by him still,
however, and poured out sentence after sentence of question, insistence,
imploration, and pity, eliciting no answer at all. Phyllis wondered how
it would feel to have to lie still and have that done to you for a term
of years. The result of her wonderment was a decision to forgive her
unenthusiastic future bridegroom for what she had at first been ready to
slap him.
Presently Mrs. Harrington's breath flagged, and the three women went
away, back to the room they had been in before. Phyllis sat and let
herself be talked to for a little longer. Then she rose impulsively.
"May I go back and see your son again for just a minute?" she asked, and
had gone before Mrs. Harrington had finished her permission. She darted
into the dark room before her courage had time to fail, and stood by the
white couch again.
"Mr. Harrington," she said clearly, "I'm sorry you're tired, but I'm
afraid I am going to have to ask you to listen to me. You know, don't
you, that your mother plans to have me marry you, for a sort of
interested head-nurse? Are you willing to have it happen? Because I
won't do it unless you really prefer it."
The heavy white lids half-lifted again.
"I don't mind," said Allan Harrington listlessly. "I suppose you are
quiet and trustworthy, or De Guenther wouldn't have sent you. It will
give mother a little peace and it makes no difference to me."
He closed his eyes and the subject at the same time.
"Well, then, that's all right," said Phyllis cheerfully, and started to
go. Then, drawn back by a sudden, nervous temper-impulse, she moved back
on him. "And let me tell you," she added, half-laughing,
half-impertinently, "that if you ever get into my quiet, trustworthy
clutches you may have an awful time! You're a very spoiled invalid."
She whisked out of the room before he could have gone very far with his
reply. But he had not cared to reply, apparently. He lay unmoved and
unmoving.
Phyllis discovered, poising breathless on the threshold, that somehow
she had seen his eyes. They had been a little like the wolfhound's, a
sort of wistful gold-brown.
For some reason she found that Allan Harrington's attitude of absolute
detachment made the whole affair seem much easier for her. And when Mrs.
Harrington slipped a solitaire diamond into her hand as she went,
instead of disliking it she enjoyed its feel on her finger, and the
flash of it in the light. She thanked Mrs. Harrington for it with real
gratitude. But it made her feel more than ever engaged to marry her
mother-in-law.
She walked home rather silently with Mrs. De Guenther. Only at the foot
of the De Guenther steps, she made one absent remark.
"He must have been delightful," she said, "when he was alive!"
VI
After a week of the old bustling, dusty hard work, the Liberry Teacher's
visit to the De Guenthers' and the subsequent one at the Harringtons',
and even her sparkling white ring, seemed part of a queer story she had
finished and put back on the shelf. The ring was the most real thing,
because it was something of a worry. She didn't dare leave it at home,
nor did she want to wear it. She finally sewed it in a chamois bag that
she safety-pinned under her shirt-waist. Then she dismissed it from her
mind also. There is very little time in a Liberry Teacher's life for
meditation. Only once in a while would come to her the vision of the
wistful Harrington wolfhound following his inadequate patch of sunlight,
or of the dusky room where Allan Harrington lay inert and white, and
looking like a wonderful carved statue on a tomb.
She began to do a little to her clothes, but not very much, because she
had neither time nor money. Mr. De Guenther had wanted her to take some
money in advance, but she had refused. She did not want it till she had
earned it, and, anyway, it would have made the whole thing so real, she
knew, that she would have backed out.
"And it isn't as if I were going to a lover," she defended herself to
Mrs. De Guenther with a little wistful smile. "Nobody will know what I
have on, any more than they do now."
Mrs. De Guenther gave a scandalized little cry. Her attitude was
determinedly that it was just an ordinary marriage, as good an excuse
for sentiment and pretty frocks as any other.
"My dear child," she replied firmly, "you are going to have one pretty
frock and one really good street-suit _now_, or I will know why! The
rest you may get yourself after the wedding, but you must obey me in
this. Nonsense!--you can get a half-day, as you call it, perfectly well!
What's Albert in politics for, if he can't get favors for his friends!"
And, in effect, it proved that Albert was in politics to some purpose,
for orders came up from the Head's office within twenty minutes after
Mrs. De Guenther had used the telephone on her husband, that Miss
Braithwaite was to have a half-day immediately--as far as she could make
out, in order to transact city affairs! She felt as if the angels had
told her she could have the last fortnight over again, as a favor, or
something of the sort. A half-day out of turn was something nobody had
ever heard of. She was even too surprised to object to the frock part of
the situation. She tried to stand out a little longer, but it's a very
stoical young woman who can refuse to have pretty clothes bought for
her, and the end of it was a seat in a salon which she had always
considered so expensive that you scarcely ought to look in the window.
"Had it better be a black suit?" asked Mrs. De Guenther doubtfully, as
the tall lady in floppy charmeuse hovered haughtily about them,
expecting orders. "It seems horrible to buy mourning when dear Angela is
not yet passed away, but it would only be showing proper respect; and I
remember my own dear mother planned all our mourning outfits while she
was dying. It was quite a pleasure to her."
Phyllis kept her face straight, and slipped one persuasive hand through
her friend's arm.
"I don't believe I _could_ buy mourning, dear," she said. "And--oh, if
you knew how long I'd wanted a really _blue_ blue suit! Only, it would
have been too vivid to wear well--I always knew that--because you can
only afford one every other year. And"--Phyllis rather diffidently
voiced a thought which had been in the back of her mind for a long
time--"if I'm going to be much around Mr. Harrington, don't you think
cheerful clothes would be best? Everything in that house seems sombre
enough now."
"Perhaps you are right, dear child," said Mrs. De Guenther. "I hope you
may be the means of putting a great deal of brightness into poor Allan's
life before he joins his mother."
"Oh, don't!" cried Phyllis impulsively. Somehow she could not bear to
think of Allan Harrington's dying. He was too beautiful to be dead,
where nobody could see him any more. Besides, Phyllis privately
considered that a long vacation before he joined his mother would be
only the fair thing for "poor Allan." Youth sides with youth. And--the
clear-cut white lines of him rose in her memory and stayed there. She
could almost hear that poor, tired, toneless voice of his, that was yet
so deep and so perfectly accented.... She bought docilely whatever her
guide directed, and woke from a species of gentle daze at the
afternoon's end to find Mrs. De Guenther beaming with the weary rapture
of the successful shopper, and herself the proprietress of a turquoise
velvet walking-suit, a hat to match, a pale blue evening frock, a pale
green between-dress with lovely clinging lines, and a heavenly white
crepe thing with rosy ribbons and filmy shadow-laces--the negligee of
one's dreams. There were also slippers and shoes and stockings and--this
was really too bad of Mrs. De Guenther--a half-dozen set of lingerie,
straight through. Mrs. De Guenther sat and continued to beam joyously
over the array, in Phyllis's little bedroom.
"It's my present, dearie," she said calmly. "So you needn't worry about
using Angela's money. Gracious, it's been _lovely_! I haven't had such a
good time since my husband's little grand-niece came on for a week.
There's nothing like dressing a girl, after all."
And Phyllis could only kiss her. But when her guest had gone she laid
all the boxes of finery under her bed, the only place where there was
any room. She would not take any of it out, she determined, till her
summons came. But on second thought, she wore the blue velvet
street-suit on Sunday visits to Mrs. Harrington, which became--she never
knew just when or how--a regular thing. The vivid blue made her eyes
nearly sky-color, and brightened her hair very satisfactorily. She was
taking more time and trouble over her looks now--one has to live up to a
turquoise velvet hat and coat! She found herself, too, becoming very
genuinely fond of the restless, anxiously loving, passionate, unwise
child who dwelt in Mrs. Harrington's frail elderly body and had almost
worn it out. She sat, long hours of every Sunday afternoon, holding Mrs.
Harrington's thin little hot hands, and listening to her swift,
italicised monologues about Allan--what he must do, what he must not do,
how he must be looked after, how his mother had treated him, how his
wishes must be ascertained and followed.
"Though all he wants now is dark and quiet," said his mother piteously.
"I don't even go in there now to cry."
She spoke as if it were an established ritual. Had she been using her
son's sick-room, Phyllis wondered, as a regular weeping-place? She could
feel in Mrs. Harrington, even in this mortal sickness, the tremendous
driving influence which is often part of a passionately active and not
very wise personality. That certitude and insistence of Mrs.
Harrington's could hammer you finally into believing or doing almost
anything. Phyllis wondered how much his mother's heartbroken adoration
and pity might have had to do with making her son as hopeless-minded as
he was.
Naturally, the mother-in-law-elect she had acquired in such a strange
way became very fond of Phyllis. But indeed there was something very gay
and sweet and honest-minded about the girl, a something which gave
people the feeling that they were very wise in liking her. Some people
you are fond of against your will. When people cared for Phyllis it was
with a quite irrational feeling that they were doing a sensible thing.
They never gave any of the credit to her very real, though almost
invisible, charm.
She never saw Allan Harrington on any of the Sunday visits. She was sure
the servants thought she did, for she knew that every one in the great,
dark old house knew her as the young lady who was to marry Mr. Allan.
She believed that she was supposed to be an old family friend, perhaps a
distant relative. She did not want to see Allan. But she did want to be
as good to his little, tensely-loving mother as she could, and reassure
her about Allan's future care. And she succeeded.
It was on a Friday about two that the summons came. Phyllis had thought
she expected it, but when the call came to her over the library
telephone she found herself as badly frightened as she had been the
first time she went to the Harrington house. She shivered as she laid
down the dater she was using, and called the other librarian to take her
desk. Fortunately, between one and four the morning and evening shifts
overlapped, and there was some one to take her place.
"Mrs. Harrington cannot last out the night," came Mr. De Guenther's
clear, precise voice over the telephone, without preface. "I have
arranged with Mr. Johnston. You can go at once. You had better pack a
suit-case, for you possibly may not be able to get back to your
boarding-place."
So it was to happen now! Phyllis felt, with her substitute in her place,
her own wraps on, and her feet taking her swiftly towards her goal, as
if she were offering herself to be made a nun, or have a hand or foot
cut off, or paying herself away in some awful, irrevocable fashion. She
packed, mechanically, all the pretty things Mrs. De Guenther had given
her, and nothing else. She found herself at the door of her room with
the locked suit-case in her hand, and not even a nail-file of the things
belonging to her old self in it. She shook herself together, managed to
laugh a little, and returned and put in such things as she thought she
would require for the night. Then she went. She always remembered that
journey as long as she lived; her hands and feet and tongue going on,
buying tickets, giving directions--and her mind, like a naughty child,
catching at everything as they went, and screaming to be allowed to go
back home, back to the dusty, matter-of-course library and the dreary
little boarding-house bedroom!
VII
They were all waiting for her, in what felt like a hideously quiet
semicircle, in Allan's great dark room. Mrs. Harrington, deadly pale,
and giving an impression of keeping herself alive only by force of that
wonderful fighting vitality of hers, lay almost at length in her
wheel-chair. There was a clergyman in vestments. There were the De
Guenthers; Mr. De Guenther only a little more precise than his every-day
habit was, Mrs. De Guenther crying a little, softly and furtively.
As for Allan Harrington, he lay just as she had seen him that other
time, white and moveless, seeming scarcely conscious except by an
effort. Only she noticed a slight contraction, as of pain, between his
brows.
"Phyllis has come," panted Mrs. Harrington. "Now it will be--all right.
You must marry him quickly--quickly, do you hear, Phyllis? Oh, people
never will--do--what I want them to----"
"Yes--yes, indeed, dear," said Phyllis, taking her hands soothingly.
"We're going to attend to it right away. See, everything is ready."
It occurred to her that Mrs. Harrington was not half as correct in her
playing of the part of a dying woman as she would have seen to it that
anyone else was; also, that things did not seem legal without the
wolfhound. Then she was shocked at herself for such irrelevant thoughts.
The thing to do was to keep poor Mrs. Harrington quieted. So she
beckoned the clergyman and the De Guenthers nearer, and herself sped the
marrying of herself to Allan Harrington.
... When you are being married to a Crusader on a tomb, the easiest way
is to kneel down by him. Phyllis registered this fact in her mind quite
blankly, as something which might be of use to remember in future....
The marrying took an unnecessarily long time, it seemed to her. It did
not seem as if she were being married at all. It all seemed to concern
somebody else. When it came to the putting on of the wedding-ring, she
found herself, very naturally, guiding Allan's relaxed fingers to hold
it in its successive places, and finally slip it on the wedding-finger.
And somehow having to do that checked the chilly awe she had had before
of Allan Harrington. It made her feel quite simply sorry for him, as if
he were one of her poor little boys in trouble. And when it was all over
she bent pitifully before she thought, and kissed one white, cold cheek.
He seemed so tragically helpless, yet more alive, in some way, since she
had touched his hand to guide it. Then, as her lips brushed his cheek,
she recoiled and colored a little. She had felt that slight roughness
which a man's cheek, however close-shaven, always has--the _man_-feel.
It made her realize unreasonably that it was a man she had married,
after all, not a stone image nor a sick child--a live man! With the
thought, or rather instinct, came a swift terror of what she had done,
and a swift impulse to rise. She was half-way risen from her knees when
a hand on her shoulder, and the clergyman's voice in her ear, checked
her.
"Not yet," he murmured almost inaudibly. "Stay as you are till--till
Mrs. Harrington is wheeled from the room."
Phyllis understood. She remained as she was, her body a shield before
Allan Harrington's eyes, her hand just withdrawing from his shoulder,
till she heard the closing of the door, and a sigh as of relaxed tension
from the three people around her. Then she rose. Allan lay still with
closed eyelids. It seemed to her that he had flushed, if ever so
faintly, at the touch of her lips on his cheek. She laid his hand on the
coverlet with her own roughened, ringed one, and followed the others
out, into the room where the dead woman had been taken, leaving him with
his attendant.
The rest of the evening Phyllis went about in a queer-keyed, almost
light-hearted frame of mind. It was only the reaction from the
long-expected terror that was over now, but it felt indecorous. It was
just as well, however. Some one's head had to be kept. The servants were
upset, of course, and there were many arrangements to be made. She and
Mr. De Guenther worked steadily together, telephoning, ordering,
guiding, straightening out all the tangles. There never was a wedding,
she thought, where the bride did so much of the work! She even
remembered to see personally that Allan's dinner was sent up to him. The
servants had doubtless been told to come to her for orders--at any rate,
they did. Phyllis had not had much experience in running a house, but a
good deal in keeping her head. And that, after all, is the main thing.
She had a far-off feeling as if she were hearing some other young woman
giving swift, poised, executive orders. She rather admired her.
After dinner the De Guenthers went. And Phyllis Braithwaite, the little
Liberry Teacher who had been living in a hall bedroom on much less money
than she needed, found herself alone, sole mistress of the great
Harrington house, a corps of servants, a husband passive enough to
satisfy the most militant suffragette, a check-book, a wistful
wolfhound, and five hundred dollars, cash, for current expenses. The
last weighed on her mind more than all the rest put together.
"Why, I don't know how to make Current Expenses out of all that!" she
had said to Mr. De Guenther. "It looks to me exactly like about ten
months' salary! I'm perfectly certain I shall get up in my sleep and try
to pay my board ahead with it, so I shan't have it all spent before the
ten months are up! There was a blue bead necklace," she went on
meditatively, "in the Five-and-Ten, that I always wanted to buy. Only I
never quite felt I could afford it. Oh, just imagine going to the
Five-and-Ten and buying at least five dollars' worth of things you
didn't need!"
"You have great discretionary powers--great discretionary powers, my
dear, you will find!" Mr. De Guenther had said, as he patted her
shoulder. Phyllis took it as a compliment at the time. "Discretionary
powers" sounded as if he thought she was a quite intelligent young
person. It did not occur to her till he had gone, and she was alone with
her check-book, that it meant she had a good deal of liberty to do as
she liked.
It seemed to be expected of her to stay. Nobody even suggested a
possibility of her going home again, even to pack her trunk. Mrs. De
Guenther casually volunteered to do that, a little after the housekeeper
had told her where her rooms were. She had been consulting with the
housekeeper for what seemed ages, when she happened to want some pins
for something, and asked for her suit-case.
"It's in your rooms," said the housekeeper. "Mrs. Harrington--the late
Mrs. Harrington, I should say----"
Phyllis stopped listening at this point. Who was the present Mrs.
Harrington? she wondered before she thought--and then remembered.
Why--_she_ was! So there was no Phyllis Braithwaite any more! Of course
not.... Yet she had always liked the name so--well, a last name was a
small thing to give up.... Into her mind fitted an incongruous, silly
story she had heard once at the library, about a girl whose last name
was Rose, and whose parents christened her Wild, because the combination
appealed to them. And then she married a man named Bull.... Meanwhile
the housekeeper had been going on.
... "She had the bedroom and bath opening from the other side of Mr.
Allan's day-room ready for you, madam. It's been ready several weeks."
"Has it?" said Phyllis. It was like Mrs. Harrington, that careful
planning of even where she should be put. "Is Mr. Harrington in his
day-room now?"
For some reason she did not attempt to give herself, she did not want to
see him again just now. Besides, it was nearly eleven and time a very
tired girl was in bed. She wanted a good night's rest, before she had to
get up and be Mrs. Harrington, with Allan and the check-book and the
Current Expenses all tied to her.
Some one had laid everything out for her in the bedroom; the filmy new
nightgown over a chair, the blue satin mules underneath, her plain
toilet-things on a dressing-table, and over another chair the exquisite
ivory crepe negligee with its floating rose ribbons. She took a hasty
bath--there was so much hot water that she was quite reconciled for a
moment to being a check-booked and wolf hounded Mrs. Harrington--and
slid straight into bed without even stopping to braid her loosened,
honey-colored hair.
It seemed to her that she was barely asleep when there came an urgent
knocking at her door.
"Yes?" she said sleepily, looking mechanically for her alarm-clock as
she switched on the light. "What is it, please?"
"It's I, Wallis, Mr. Allan's man, Madame," said a nervous voice. "Mr.
Allan's very bad. I've done all the usual things, but nothing seems to
quiet him. He hates doctors so, and they make him so wrought up--please
could you come, ma'am? He says as how all of us are all dead--oh,
_please_, Mrs. Harrington!"
There was panic in the man's voice.
"All right," said Phyllis sleepily, dropping to the floor as she spoke
with the rapidity that only the alarm-clock-broken know. She snatched
the negligee around her, and thrust her feet hastily into the blue satin
slippers--why, she was actually using her wedding finery! And what an
easily upset person that man was! But everybody in the house seemed to
have nerves on edge. It was no wonder about Allan--he wanted his
mother, of course, poor boy! She felt, as she ran fleetly across the
long room that separated her sleeping quarters from her husband's, the
same mixture of pity and timidity that she had felt with him before.
Poor boy! Poor, silent, beautiful statue, with his one friend gone! She
opened the door and entered swiftly into his room.
She was not thinking about herself at all, only of how she could help
Allan, but there must have been something about her of the picture-book
angel to the pain-racked man, lying tensely at length in the room's
darkest corner. Her long, dully gold hair, loosening from its twist,
flew out about her, and her face was still flushed with sleep. There was
a something about her that was vividly alight and alive, perhaps the
light in her blue eyes.
From what the man had said Phyllis had thought Allan was delirious, but
she saw at once that he was only in severe pain, and talking more
disconnectedly, perhaps, than the slow-minded Englishman could follow.
He did not look like a statue now. His cheeks were burning with evident
pain, and his yellow-brown eyes, wide-open, and dilated to darkness,
stared straight out. His hands were clenching and unclenching, and his
head moved restlessly from side to side. Every nerve and muscle, she
could see, was taut.
"They're all dead," he muttered. "Father and Mother and Louise--and
I--only I'm not dead enough to bury. Oh, God, I wish I was!"
That wasn't delirium; it was something more like heart-break. Phyllis
moved closer to him, and dropped one of her sleep-warm hands on his
cold, clenched one.
"Oh, poor boy!" she said. "I'm so sorry--so sorry!" She closed her hands
tight over both his.
Some of her strong young vitality must have passed between them and
helped him, for almost immediately his tenseness relaxed a little, and
he looked at her.
"You--you're not a nurse," he said. "They go around--like--like
a--vault----"
She had caught his attention! That was a good deal, she felt. She
forgot everything about him, except that he was some one to be
comforted, and her charge. She sat down on the bed by him, still holding
tight to his hands.
"No, indeed," she said, bending nearer him, her long loose hair falling
forward about her resolutely-smiling young face. "Don't you remember
seeing me? I never was a nurse."
"What--are you?" he asked feebly.
"I'm--why, the children call me the Liberry Teacher," she answered. It
occurred to her that it would be better to talk on brightly at random
than to risk speaking of his mother to him, as she must if she reminded
him of their marriage. "I spend my days in a basement, making bad little
boys get so interested in the Higher Culture that they'll forget to
shoot crap and smash windows."
One of the things which had aided Phyllis to rise from desk-assistant to
one of the Children's Room librarians was a very sweet and carrying
voice--a voice which arrested even a child's attention, and held his
interest. It held Allan now; merely the sound of it, seemingly.
"Go on--talking," he murmured. Phyllis smiled and obeyed.
"Sometimes the Higher Culture doesn't work," she said. "Yesterday one of
my imps got hold of a volume of Shaw, and in half an hour his aunt
marched in on me and threatened I don't know what to a library that
'taught chilren to disrespect their lawful guardeens.'"
"I remember now," said Allan. "You are the girl in the blue dress. The
girl mother had me marry. I remember."
"Yes," said Phyllis soothingly, and a little apologetically. "I know.
But that--oh, please, it needn't make a bit of difference. It was only
so I could see that you were looked after properly, you know. I'll never
be in the way, unless you want me to do something for you."
"I don't mind," he said listlessly, as he had before.... "_Oh, this
dreadful darkness, and mother dead in it somewhere!_"
"Wallis," called Phyllis swiftly, "turn up the lights!"
The man slipped the close green silk shades from the electric bulbs.
Allan shrank as if he had been hurt.
"I can't stand the glare," he cried.
"Yes, you can for a moment," she said firmly. "It's better than the
ghastly green glow."
It was probably the first time Allan Harrington had been contradicted
since his accident. He said nothing more for a minute, and Phyllis
directed Wallis to bring a sheet of pink tissue paper from her
suit-case, where she remembered it lay in the folds of some new muslin
thing. Under her direction still, he wrapped the globes in it and
secured it with string.
"There!" she told Allan triumphantly when Wallis was done. "See, there
is no glare now; only a pretty rose-colored glow. Better than the green,
isn't it?"
Allan looked at her again. "You are--kind," he said. "Mother said--you
would be kind. Oh, mother--mother!" He tried uselessly to lift one arm
to cover his convulsed face, and could only turn his head a little
aside.
"You can go, Wallis," said Phyllis softly, with her lips only. "Be in
the next room." The man stole out and shut the door softly. Phyllis
herself rose and went toward the window, and busied herself in braiding
up her hair. There was almost silence in the room for a few minutes.
"Thank--you," said Allan brokenly. "Will you--come back, please?"
She returned swiftly, and sat by him as she had before.
"Would you mind--holding my wrists again?" he asked. "I feel quieter,
somehow, when you do--not so--lost." There was a pathetic boyishness in
his tone that the sad, clear lines of his face would never prepare you
for.
Phyllis took his wrists in her warm, strong hands obediently.
"Are you in pain, Allan?" she asked. "Do you mind if I call you Allan?
It's the easiest way."
He smiled at her a little, faintly. It occurred to her that perhaps the
novelty of her was taking his mind a little from his own feelings.
"No--no pain. I haven't had any for a very long time now. Only this
dreadful blackness dragging at my mind, a blackness the light hurts."
"_Why!_" said Phyllis to herself, being on known ground here--"why, it's
nervous depression! I believe cheering-up _would_ help. I know," she
said aloud; "I've had it."
"You?" he said. "But you seem so--happy!"
"I suppose I am," said Phyllis shyly. She felt a little afraid of "poor
Allan" still, now that there was nothing to do for him, and they were
talking together. And he had not answered her question, either;
doubtless he wanted her to say "Mr. Allan" or even "Mr. Harrington!" He
replied to her thought in the uncanny way invalids sometimes do.
"You said something about what we were to call each other," he murmured.
"It would be foolish, of course, not to use first names. Yours is Alice,
isn't it?"
Phyllis laughed. "Oh, worse than that!" she said. "I was named out of a
poetrybook, I believe--Phyllis Narcissa. But I always conceal the
Narcissa."
"Phyllis. Thank you," he said wearily. ... "_Phyllis, don't let go!
Talk_ to me!" His eyes were those of a man in torment.
"What shall I talk about?" she asked soothingly, keeping the two cold,
clutching hands in her warm grasp. "Shall I tell you a story? I know a
great many stories by heart, and I will say them for you if you like. It
was part of my work."
"Yes," he said. "Anything."
Phyllis arranged herself more comfortably on the bed, for it looked as
if she had some time to stay, and began the story she knew best, because
her children liked it best, Kipling's "How the Elephant Got His Trunk."
"A long, long time ago, O Best Beloved...."
Allan listened, and, she thought, at times paid attention to the words.
He almost smiled once or twice, she was nearly sure. She went straight
on to another story when the first was done. Never had she worked so
hard to keep the interest of any restless circle of children as she
worked now, sitting up in the pink light in her crepe wrappings, with
her school-girl braids hanging down over her bosom, and Allan
Harrington's agonized golden-brown eyes fixed on her pitying ones.
"You must be tired," he said more connectedly and quietly when she had
ended the second story. "Can't you sit up here by me, propped on the
pillows? And you need a quilt or something, too."
This from an invalid who had been given nothing but himself to think of
this seven years back! Phyllis's opinion of Allan went up very much. She
had supposed he would be very selfish. But she made herself a bank of
pillows, and arranged herself by Allan's side so that she could keep
fast to his hands without any strain, something as skaters hold. She
wrapped a down quilt from the foot of the bed around her mummy-fashion
and went on to her third story. Allan's eyes, as she talked on, grew
less intent--drooped. She felt the relaxation of his hands. She went
monotonously on, closing her own eyes--just for a minute, as she
finished her story.
VIII
"I've overslept the alarm!" was Phyllis's first thought next morning
when she woke. "It must be--" Where was she? So tired, so very tired,
she remembered being, and telling some one an interminable story.... She
held her sleepy eyes wide open by will-power, and found that a silent
but evidently going clock hung in sight. Six-thirty. Then she hadn't
overslept the alarm. But ... she hadn't set any alarm. And she had been
sleeping propped up in a sitting position, half on--why, it was a
shoulder. And she was rolled tight in a terra-cotta down quilt. She sat
up with a jerk--fortunately a noiseless one--and turned to look. Then
suddenly she remembered all about it, that jumbled, excited,
hard-working yesterday which had held change and death and marriage for
her, and which she had ended by perching on "poor Allan Harrington's"
bed and sending him to sleep by holding his hands and telling him
children's stories. She must have fallen asleep after he did, and slid
down on his shoulder. A wonder it hadn't disturbed him! She stole
another look at him, as he lay sleeping still, heavily and quietly.
After all, she was married to him, and she had a perfect right to recite
him to sleep if she wanted to. She unrolled herself cautiously, and slid
out like a shadow.
She almost fell over poor Wallis, sleeping too in his clothes outside
the door, on Allan's day couch. He came quickly to his feet, as if he
were used to sudden waking.
"Don't disturb Mr. Harrington," said Phyllis as staidly as if she had
been giving men-servants orders in her slipper-feet all her life. "He
seems to be sleeping quietly."
"Begging your pardon, Mrs. Harrington, but you haven't been giving him
anything, have you?" asked Wallis. "He hasn't slept without a break for
two hours to my knowledge since I've been here, not without medicine."
"Not a thing," said Phyllis, smiling with satisfaction. "He must have
been sleeping nearly three hours now! I read him to sleep, or what
amounted to it. I got his nerves quiet, I think. Please kill anybody
that tries to wake him, Wallis."
"Very good, ma'am," said Wallis gravely. "And yourself, ma'am?"
"I'm going to get some sleep, too," she said. "Call me if there's
anything--useful."
She meant "necessary," but she wanted so much more sleep she never knew
the difference. When she got into her room she found that there also she
was not alone: the wistful wolfhound was curled plaintively across her
bed, which he overlapped. From his nose he seemed to have been dipping
largely into the cup of chocolate somebody had brought to her, and which
she had forgotten to drink when she found it, on her first retiring.
"You aren't a _bit_ high-minded," said Phyllis indignantly. She was too
sleepy to do more than shove him over to the back of the bed. "All--the
beds here are so--_full_," she complained sleepily; and crawled inside,
and never woke again till nearly afternoon.
There was all the grave business to be done, in the days that followed,
of taking Mrs. Harrington to a quiet place beside her husband, and
drawing together again the strings of the disorganized household.
Phyllis found herself whispering over and over again:
"The sweeping up the heart
And putting love away
We shall not need to use again.
Until the Judgment Day."
And with all there was to see after, it was some days before she saw
Allan again, more than to speak to brightly as she crossed their common
sitting-room. He did not ask for her. She looked after his comfort
faithfully, and tried to see to it that his man Wallis was all he should
be--a task which was almost hopeless from the fact that Wallis knew much
more about his duties than she did, even with Mrs. Harrington's
painstakingly detailed notes to help her. Also his attitude to his
master was of such untiring patience and worship that it made Phyllis
feel like a rude outsider interfering between man and wife.
However, Wallis was inclined to approve of his new mistress, who was
not fussy, seemed kind, and had given his beloved Mr. Allan nearly three
hours of unbroken sleep. Allan had been a little better ever since.
Wallis had told Phyllis this. But she was inclined to think that the
betterment was caused by the counter-shock of his mother's death, which
had shaken him from his lethargy, and perhaps even given his nerves a
better balance. And she insisted that the pink paper stay on the
electric lights.
After about a week of this, Phyllis suddenly remembered that she had not
been selfish at all yet. Where was her rose-garden--the garden she had
married the wolfhound and Allan and the check-book for? Where were all
the things she had intended to get? The only item she had bought as yet
ran, on the charge account she had taken over with the rest, "1 doz.
checked dish-towels"; and Mrs. Clancy, the housekeeper's, pressing
demand was responsible for these.
"It's certainly time I was selfish," said Phyllis to the wolfhound, who
followed her round unendingly as if she had patches of sunshine in her
pocket: glorious patches, fit for a life-sized wolfhound. Perhaps he was
grateful because she had ordered him long daily walks. He wagged his
tail now as she spoke, and rubbed himself curvingly against her. He was
a rather affected dog.
So Phyllis made herself out a list in a superlatively neat library hand:
One string of blue beads.
One lot of very fluffy summer frocks with flowers on them.
One rose-garden.
One banjo and a self-teacher. (And a sound-proof room.)
One set Arabian Nights.
One set of Stevenson, all but his novels.
Ever so many Maxfield Parrish pictures full of Prussian-blue skies.
A house to put them in, with fireplaces.
A lady's size motor-car that likes me.
A plain cat with a tame disposition.
A hammock.
A sun-dial. (But that might be thrown in with the garden.)
A gold watch-bracelet.
All the colored satin slippers I want.
A room big enough to put all father's books up.
It looked shamelessly long, but Phyllis's "discretionary powers" would
cover it, she knew. Mrs. Harrington's final will, while full of advice,
had been recklessly trusting.
She could order everything in one afternoon, she was sure, all but the
house, the garden, the motor, which she put checks against, and the
plain cat, which she thought she could pick up in the village where her
house would be.
Next she went to see Allan. She didn't want to bother him, but she did
feel that she ought to share her plans with him as far as possible.
Besides, it occurred to her that she could scarcely remember what he was
like to speak to, and really owed it to herself to go. She fluffed out
her hair loosely, put on her pale-green gown that had clinging lines,
and pulled some daffodils through her sash. She had resolved to avoid
anything sombre where Allan was concerned--and the green gown was very
becoming. Then, armed with her list and a pencil, she crossed boldly to
the couch where her Crusader lay in the old attitude, moveless and with
half-closed eyes.
"Allan," she asked, standing above him, "do you think you could stand
being talked to for a little while?"
"Why--yes," said Allan, opening his eyes a little more. "Wallis,
get--Mrs. Harrington--a chair."
He said the name haltingly, and Phyllis wondered if he disliked her
having it. She dropped down beside him, like a smiling touch of spring
in the dark room.
"Do you mind their calling me that?" she asked. "If there's anything
else they could use----"
"Mother made you a present of the name," he said, smiling faintly. "No
reason why I should mind."
"All right," said Phyllis cheerfully. After all, there was nothing else
to call her, speaking of her. The servants, she knew, generally said
"the young madam," as if her mother-in-law were still alive.
"I want to talk to you about things," she began; and had to stop to deal
with the wolfhound, who was trying to put both paws on her shoulders.
"Oh, Ivan, _get_ down, honey! I _wish_ somebody would take a day off
some time to explain to you that you're not a lap-dog! Do you like
wolfhounds specially better than any other kind of dog, Allan?"
"Not particularly," said Allan, patting the dog languidly as he put his
head in a convenient place for the purpose. "Mother bought him, she
said, because he would look so picturesque in my sick-room. She wanted
him to lie at my feet or something. But he never saw it that
way--neither did I. Hates sick-rooms. Don't blame him."
This was the longest speech Allan had made yet, and Phyllis learned
several things from it that she had only guessed before. One was that
the atmosphere of embodied grief and regret in the house had been Mrs.
Harrington's, not Allan's--that he was more young and natural than she
had thought, better material for cheering; that his mother's devotion
had been something of a pressure on him at times; and that he himself
was not interested in efforts to stage his illness correctly.
What he really had said when the dog was introduced, she learned later
from the attached Wallis, was that he might be a cripple, but he wasn't
going to be part of any confounded tableau. Whereupon his mother had
cried for an hour, kissing and pitying him in between, and his night
had been worse than usual. But the hound had stayed outside.
Phyllis made an instant addition to her list. "One bull-pup, convenient
size, for Allan." The plain cat could wait. She had heard of publicity
campaigns; she had made up her mind, and a rather firm young mind it
was, that she was going to conduct a cheerfulness campaign in behalf of
this listless, beautiful, darkness-locked Allan of hers. Unknowingly,
she was beginning to regard him as much her property as the check-book,
and rather more so than the wolfhound. She moved back a little, and
reconciled herself to the dog, who had draped as much of his body as
would go, over her, and was batting his tail against her joyfully.
"Poor old puppy," she said. "I want to talk over some plans with you,
Allan," she began again determinedly. She was astonished to see Allan
wince.
"_Don't!_" he said, "for heaven's sake! You'll drive me crazy!"
Phyllis drew back a little indignantly, but behind the couch she saw
Wallis making some sort of face that was evidently intended for a
warning. Then he slipped out of the room, as if he wished her to follow
soon and be explained to. "Plans" must be a forbidden subject. Anyhow,
crossness was a better symptom than apathy!
"Very well," she said brightly, smiling her old, useful,
cheering-a-bad-child library smile at him. "It was mostly about things I
wanted to buy for myself, any way--satin slippers and such. I don't
suppose they _would_ interest a man much."
"Oh, that sort of thing," said Allan relievedly. "I thought you meant
things that had to do with me. If you have plans about me, go ahead, for
you know I can't do anything to stop you--but for heaven's sake, don't
discuss it with me first!"
He spoke carelessly, but the pity of it struck to Phyllis's heart. It
was true, he couldn't stop her. His foolish, adoring little desperate
mother, in her anxiety to have her boy taken good care of, had exposed
him to a cruel risk. Phyllis knew herself to be trustworthy. She knew
that she could no more put her own pleasures before her charge's welfare
than she could steal his watch. Her conscience was New-England rock.
But, oh! suppose Mr. De Guenther had chosen some girl who didn't care,
who would have taken the money and not have done the work! She shivered
at the thought of what Allan had escaped, and caught his hand
impulsively, as she had on that other night of terror.
"Oh, Allan Harrington, I _wouldn't_ do anything I oughtn't to! I know
it's dreadful, having a strange girl wished on you this way, but truly I
mean to be as good as I can, and never in the way or anything! Indeed,
you may trust me! You--you don't mind having me round, do you?"
Allan's cold hand closed kindly on hers. He spoke for the first time as
a well man speaks, quietly, connectedly, and with a little authority.
"The fact that I am married to you does not weigh on me at all, my dear
child," he said. "I shall be dead, you know, this time five years, and
what difference does it make whether I'm married or not? I don't mind
you at all. You seem a very kind and pleasant person. I am sure I can
trust you. Now are you reassured?"
"Oh, _yes_," said Phyllis radiantly, "and you _can_ trust me, and I
_won't_ fuss. All you have to do if I bore you is to look bored. You
can, you know. You don't know how well you do it! And I'll stop. I'm
going to ask Wallis how much of my society you'd better have, if any."
"Why, I don't think a good deal of it would hurt me," he said
indifferently. But he smiled in a quite friendly fashion.
"All right," said Phyllis again brightly. But she fell silent then.
There were two kinds of Allan, she reflected. This kind of Allan, who
was very much more grown-up and wise than she was, and of whom she still
stood a little in awe; and the little-boy Allan who had clung to her in
nervous dread of the dark the other night--whom she had sent to sleep
with children's stories. She wondered which was real, which he had been
when he was well.
"I must go now and have something out with Mrs. Clancy," she said,
smiling and rising. "She's perfectly certain carpets have to come up
when you put down mattings, and I'm perfectly certain they don't."
She tucked the despised list, to which she had furtively added her
bull-pup, into her sleeve, took her hand from his and went away. It
seemed to Allan that the room was a little darker.
IX
Outside the sitting-room door stood Wallis, who had been lying in wait.
"I wanted to explain, madam, about the plans," he said. "It worries Mr.
Allan. You see, madam, the late Mrs. Harrington was a great one for
plans. She had, if I may say so, a new one every day, and she'd argue
you deaf, dumb, and blind--not to speak ill of the dead--till you were
fair beat out fighting it. Then you'd settle down to it--and next day
there be another one, with Mrs. Harrington rooting for it just as hard,
and you, with your mouth fixed for the other plan, so to speak, would
have to give in to that. The plan she happened to have last always went
through, because she fought for that as hard as she had for the others,
and you were so bothered by then you didn't care what."
Wallis's carefully impersonal servant-English had slipped from him, and
he was talking to Phyllis as man to man, but she was very glad of it.
These were the sort of facts she had to elicit.
"When Mr. Allan was well," he went on, "he used to just laugh and say,
'All right, mother darling,' and pet her and do his own way--he was
always laughing and carrying on then, Mr. Allan--but after he was hurt,
of course, he couldn't get away, and the old madam, she'd sit by his
couch by the hour, and he nearly wild, making plans for him. She'd spend
weeks planning details of things over and over, never getting tired. And
then off again to the next thing! It was all because she was so fond of
him, you see. But if you'll pardon my saying so, madam"--Wallis was
resuming his man-servant manners--"it was not always good for Mr.
Allan."
"I think I understand," said Phyllis thoughtfully, as she and the
wolfhound went to interview Mrs. Clancy. So that was why! She had
imagined something of the sort. And she--she herself--was doubtless the
outcome of one of Mrs. Harrington's long-detailed plans, insisted on to
Allan till he had acquiesced for quiet's sake! ... But he said now he
didn't mind. She was somehow sure he wouldn't have said it if it had not
been true. Then Wallis's other words came to her, "He was always
laughing then," and suddenly there surged up in Phyllis a passionate
resolve to give Allan back at least a little of his lightness of heart.
He might be going to die--though she didn't believe it--but at least she
could make things less monotonous and dark for him; and she wouldn't
offer him plans! And if he objected when the plans rose up and hit him,
why, the shock might do him good. She thought she was fairly sure of an
ally in Wallis.
She cut her interview with Mrs. Clancy short. Allan, lying motionless,
caught a green flash of her, crossing into her room to dress, another
blue flash as she went out; dropped his eyelids and crossed his hands to
doze a little, an innocent and unwary Crusader. He did not know it, but
a Plan was about to rise up and hit him. The bride his mother had left
him as a parting legacy had gone out to order a string of blue beads, a
bull-pup, a house, a motor, a banjo, and a rose-garden; as she went she
added a talking machine to the list; and he was to be planted in the
very centre of everything.
"Seems like a nice girl, Wallis," said Allan dreamily. And the discreet
Wallis said nothing (though he knew a good deal) about his mistress's
shopping-list.
"Yes, Mr. Allan," he conceded.
* * * * *
It was Phyllis Harrington's firm belief that Mr. De Guenther could
produce anything anybody wanted at any time, or that if he couldn't his
wife could. So it was to him that she went on her quest for the
rose-garden, with its incidental house. The rest of the items she
thought she could get for herself. It was nearly the last of April, and
she wanted a well-heated elderly mansion, preferably Colonial, not too
unwieldily large, with as many rose-trees around it as her discretionary
powers would stand. And she wanted it as near and as soon as possible.
By the help of Mr. De Guenther, amused but efficient, Mrs. De Guenther,
efficient but sentimental; and an agent who was efficient merely, she
got very nearly what she wanted. Money could do a great deal more than a
country minister's daughter had ever had any way of imagining. By its
aid she found it possible to have furniture bought and placed inside a
fortnight, even to a list of books set up in sliding sectional cases.
She had hoped to buy those cases some day, one at a time, and getting
them at one fell swoop seemed to her more arrogantly opulent than the
purchase of the house and grounds--than even the big shiny victrola. She
had bought that herself, before there was a house to put it in, going on
the principle that all men not professional musicians have a concealed
passion for music that they can create themselves by merely winding up
something. And--to anticipate--she found that as far as Allan was
concerned she was quite right.
"But why do you take this very radical step, my dear?" asked Mrs. De
Guenther gently, as she helped Phyllis choose furniture.
"I am going to try the only thing Allan's mother seems to have
omitted," said Phyllis dauntlessly. "A complete change of surroundings."
"Oh, my dear!" breathed Mrs. De Guenther. "It may help poor Allan more
than we know! And dear Angela did discuss moving often, but she could
never bear to leave the city house, where so many of her dear ones have
passed away."
"Well, none of _my_ dear ones are going to pass away there," said
Phyllis irreverently, "unless Mrs. Clancy wants to. I'm not even taking
any servants but Wallis. The country-house doesn't need any more than a
cook, a chambermaid, and outdoor man. Mrs. Clancy is getting them. I
told her I didn't care what age or color she chose, but they had to be
cheerful. She will stay in the city and keep the others straight, in
something she calls board-wages. I'm starting absolutely fresh."
They were back at Mrs. De Guenther's house by the time Phyllis was done
telling her plans, Phyllis sitting in the identical pluffy chair where
she had made her decision to marry Allan. Mrs. De Guenther sprang from
her own chair, and came over and impulsively kissed her.
"God bless you, dear!" she said. "I believe it was Heaven that inspired
Albert and myself to choose you to carry on poor Angela's work."
Phyllis flushed indignantly.
"I'm undoing a little of it, I hope," she said passionately. "If I can
only make that poor boy forget some of those dreadful years she spent
crying over him, I shan't have lived in vain!"
Mrs. De Guenther looked at Phyllis earnestly--and, most unexpectedly,
burst into a little tinkling laugh.
"My dear," she said mischievously, "what about all the fine things you
were going to do for yourself to make up for being tied to poor Allan?
You should really stop being unselfish, and enjoy yourself a little."
Phyllis felt herself flushing crimson. Elderly people did seem to be so
sentimental!
"I've bought myself lots of things," she defended herself. "Most of this
is really for me. And--I can't help being good to him. It's only common
humanity. I was never so sorry for anybody in my life--you'd be, too, if
it were Mr. De Guenther!"
She thought her explanation was complete. But she must have said
something that she did not realize, for Mrs. De Guenther only laughed
her little tinkling laugh again, and--as is the fashion of elderly
people--kissed her.
"I would, indeed, my dear," said she.
X
Allan Harrington lay in his old attitude on his couch in the darkened
day-room, his tired, clear-cut face a little thrown back, eyes
half-closed. He was not thinking of anything or any one especially;
merely wrapped in a web of the dragging, empty, gray half-thoughts of
weariness in general that had hung about him so many years. Wallis was
not there. Wallis had been with him much less lately, and he had
scarcely seen Phyllis for a fortnight; or, for the matter of that, the
dog, or any one at all. Something was going on, he supposed, but he
scarcely troubled himself to wonder what. The girl was doubtless making
herself boudoirs or something of the sort in a new part of the house. He
closed his eyes entirely, there in the dusky room, and let the web of
dreary, gray, formless thought wrap him again.
Phyllis's gay, sweetly carrying voice rang from outside the door:
"The three-thirty, then, Wallis, and I feel as if I were going to steal
Charlie Ross! Well----"
On the last word she broke off and pushed the sitting-room door softly
open and slid in. She walked in a pussy-cat fashion which would have
suggested to any one watching her a dark burden on her conscience.
She crossed straight to the couch, looked around for the chair that
should have been by it but wasn't, and sat absently down on the floor.
She liked floors.
"Allan!" she said.
No answer.
"Allan _Harrington_!"
Still none. Allan was half-asleep, or what did instead, in one of his
abstracted moods.
"_All-an Harrington!_"
This time she reached up and pulled at his heavy silk sleeve as she
spoke.
"Yes," said Allan courteously, as if from an infinite distance.
"Would you mind," asked Phyllis guilelessly, "if Wallis--we--moved
you--a little? I can tell you all about everything, unless you'd rather
not have the full details of the plan----"
"Anything," said Allan wearily from the depths of his gray cloud; "only
don't _bother_ me about it!"
Phyllis jumped to her feet, a whirl of gay blue skirts and cheerfully
tossing blue feathers. "Good-by, dear Crusader!" she said with a catch
in her voice that might have been either a laugh or a sob. "The next
time you see me you'll probably _hate_ me! Wallis!"
Wallis appeared like the Slave of the Lamp. "It's all right, Wallis,"
she said, and ran. Wallis proceeded thereupon to wheel his master's
couch into the bedroom.
"If you're going to be moved, you'd better be dressed a little heavier,
sir," he said with the same amiable guilelessness, if the victim had but
noticed it, which Phyllis had used from her seat on the floor not long
before.
"Very well," said Allan resignedly from his cloud. And Wallis proceeded
to suit the action to the word.
Allan let him go on in unnoticing silence till it came to that totally
unfamiliar thing these seven years, a stand-up collar. A shiningly new
linen collar of the newest cut, a beautiful golden-brown knit tie, a
gray suit----
"What on earth?" inquired Allan, awakening from his lethargy. "I don't
need a collar and tie to keep me from getting cold on a journey across
the house. And where did you get those clothes? They look new."
Wallis laid his now fully dressed master back to a reclining
position--he had been propped up--and tucked a handkerchief into the
appropriate pocket as he replied, "Grant & Moxley's, sir, where you
always deal." And he wheeled the couch back to the day-room, over to its
very door.
It did not occur to Allan, as he was being carried downstairs by Wallis
and Arthur, another of the servants, that anything more than a change of
rooms was intended; nor, as he was carried out at its door to a long
closed carriage, that it was anything worse than his new keeper's
mistaken idea that drives would be good for him. He was a little
irritable at the length and shutupness of the drive, though, as his cot
had been swung deftly from the ceiling of the carriage, he was not
jarred. But when Wallis and Arthur carried the light pallet on which he
lay swiftly up a plank walk laid to the door of a private car--why then
it began to occur to Allan Harrington that something was happening.
And--which rather surprised himself--he did not lift a supercilious
eyebrow and say in a soft, apathetic voice, "Very we-ell!" Instead, he
turned his head towards the devoted Wallis, who had helped two
conductors swing the cot from the ceiling, and was now waiting for the
storm to break. And what he said to Wallis was this:
"What the deuce does this tomfoolery mean?" As he spoke he felt the
accumulated capacity for temper of the last seven years surging up
toward Wallis, and Arthur, and Phyllis, and the carriage-horses, and
everything else, down to the two conductors. Wallis seemed rather
relieved than otherwise. Waiting for a storm to break is rather wearing.
"Well, sir, Mrs. Harrington, she thought, sir, that--that a little move
would do you good. And you didn't want to be bothered, sir----"
"Bothered!" shouted Allan, not at all like a bored and dying invalid. "I
should think I did, when a change in my whole way of life is made! Who
gave you, or Mrs. Harrington, permission for this outrageous
performance! It's sheer, brutal, insulting idiocy!"
"Nobody, sir--yes, sir," replied Wallis meekly. "Would you care for a
drink, sir--or anything?"
"_No!_" thundered Allan.
"Or a fan?" ventured Wallis, approaching near with that article and
laying it on the coverlid. Allan's hand snatched the fan angrily--and
before he thought he had hurled it at Wallis! Weakly, it is true, for it
lighted ingloriously about five feet away; but he had _thrown_ it, with
a movement that must have put to use the muscles of the long-disused
upper arm. Wallis sat suddenly down and caught his breath.
"Mr. Allan!" he said. "Do you know what you did then? You _threw_, and
you haven't been able to use more than your forearm before! Oh, Mr.
Allan, you're getting better!"
Allan himself lay in astonishment at his feat, and forgot to be angry
for a moment. "I certainly did!" he said.
"And the way you lost your temper!" went on Wallis enthusiastically.
"Oh, Mr. Allan, it was beautiful! You haven't been more than to say
snarly since the accident! It was so like the way you used to throw
hair-brushes----"
But at the mention of his lost temper Allan remembered to lose it still
further. His old capacity for storming, a healthy lad's healthy young
hot-temperedness, had been weakened by long disuse, but he did fairly
well. Secretly it was a pleasure to him to find that he was alive enough
to care what happened, enough for anger. He demanded presently where he
was going.
"Not more than two hours' ride, sir, I heard Mr. De Guenther mention,"
answered Wallis at once. "A little place called Wallraven--quite
country, sir, I believe."
"So the De Guenthers are in it, too!" said Allan. "What the dickens has
this girl done to them, to hypnotize them so?"
"But I've heard say it's a very pretty place, sir," was all Wallis
vouchsafed to this. The De Guenthers were not the only people Phyllis
had hypnotized.
He gave Allan other details as they went on, however. His clothes and
personal belongings were coming on immediately. There were two
suit-cases, perhaps he had noticed, in the car with them. The young
madam was planning to stay all the summer, he believed. Mrs. Clancy had
been left behind to look after the other servants, and he understood
that she had seen to the engagement of a fresh staff of servants for the
country. And Allan, still awakened by his fit of temper, and fresh from
the monotony of his seven years' seclusion, found all the things Wallis
could tell him very interesting.
* * * * *
Phyllis's rose-garden house had, among other virtues, the charm of being
near the little station: a new little mission station which had
apparently been called Wallraven by some poetic young real-estate
agency, for the surrounding countryside looked countrified enough to be
a Gray's Corners, or Smith's Crossing, or some other such placid old
country name. There were more trees to be seen in Allan's quick passage
from the train to the long old carryall (whose seats had been removed to
make room for his cot) than he had remembered existed. There were sleepy
birds to be heard, too, talking about how near sunset and their bedtime
had come, and a little brook splashed somewhere out of sight. Altogether
spring was to be seen and heard and felt, winningly insistent. Allan
forgave Wallis, not to speak of Phyllis and the conductors, to a certain
degree. He ordered the flapping black oilcloth curtain in front rolled
up so he could see out, and secretly enjoyed the drive, unforeseen
though it had been. His spine never said a word. Perhaps it, too,
enjoyed having a change from a couch in a dark city room.
They saw no one in their passage through the long, low old house.
Phyllis evidently had learned that Allan didn't like his carryings
about done before people.
Wallis seemed to be acting under a series of detailed orders. He and
Arthur carried their master to a long, well-lighted room at the end of
the house, and deftly transferred him to a couch much more convenient,
being newer, than the old one. On this he was wheeled to his adjoining
bedroom, and when Wallis had made him comfortable there, he left him
mysteriously for a while. It was growing dark by now, and the lights
were on. They were rose-shaded, Allan noticed, as the others had been at
home. Allan watched the details of his room with that vivid interest in
little changes which only invalids can know. There was an old-fashioned
landscape story paper on the walls, with very little repeat. Over it,
but not where they interfered with tracing out the adventures of the
paper people, were a good many pictures, quite incongruous, for they
were of the Remington type men like, but pleasant to see nevertheless.
The furniture was chintz-covered and gay. There was not one thing in
the room to remind a man that he was an invalid. It occurred to Allan
that Phyllis must have put a good deal of deliberate work on the place.
He lay contentedly, watching the grate fire, and trying to trace out the
story of the paper, for at least a half-hour. He found himself, at
length, much to his own surprise, thinking with a certain longing of his
dinner-tray. He was thinking of it more and more interestedly by the
time Wallis--trayless--came back.
"Mr. and Mrs. De Guenther and the young madam are waiting for you in the
living-room," he announced. "They would be glad if you would have supper
with them."
"Very well," said Allan amiably, still much to his own surprise. The
truth was, he was still enough awake and interested to want to go on
having things happen.
The room Wallis wheeled him back into was a long, low one, wainscoted
and bare-floored. It was furnished with the best imitation Chippendale
to be obtained in a hurry, but over and above there were cushioned
chairs and couches enough for solid comfort. There were more cheerful
pictures, the Maxfield Parrishes Phyllis had wanted, over the
green-papered walls. There was a fire here also. The room had no more
period than a girl's sentence, but there was a bright air of welcomeness
and informality that was winning. An old-fashioned half-table against
the wall was covered with a great many picknicky things to eat. Another
table had more things, mostly to eat with, on it. And there were the De
Guenthers and Phyllis. On the whole it felt very like a welcome-home.
Phyllis, in a satiny rose-colored gown he had never seen before, came
over to his couch to meet him. She looked very apprehensive and young
and wistful for the rôle of Bold Bad Hypnotist. She bent towards him
with her hand out, seemed about to speak, then backed, flushed, and
acted as if something had frightened her badly.
"Is she as afraid of me as all that?" thought Allan. Wallis must have
given her a lurid account of how he had behaved. His quick impulse was
to reassure her.
"Well, Phyllis, my dear, you certainly didn't bother me with plans
_this_ time!" he said, smiling. "This is a bully surprise!"
"I--I'm glad you like it," said his wife shyly, still backing away.
"Of course he'd like it," said Mrs. De Guenther's kind staccato voice
behind him. "Kiss your husband, and tell him he's welcome home, Phyllis
child!"
Now, Phyllis was tired with much hurried work, and overstrung. And
Allan, lying there smiling boyishly up at her, Allan seen for the first
time in these usual-looking gray man-clothes, was like neither the
marble Crusader she had feared nor the heartbroken little boy she had
pitied. He was suddenly her contemporary, a very handsome and attractive
young fellow, a little her senior. From all appearances, he might have
been well and normal, and come home to her only a little tired, perhaps,
by the day's work or sport, as he lay smiling at her in that friendly,
intimate way! It was terrifyingly different. Everything felt different.
All her little pieces of feeling for him, pity and awe and friendliness
and love of service, seemed to spring suddenly together and make
something else--something unplaced and disturbing. Her cheeks burned
with a childish embarrassment as she stood there before him in her
ruffled pink gown. What should she do?
It was just then that Mrs. De Guenther's crisply spoken advice came.
Phyllis was one of those people whose first unconscious instinct is to
obey an unspoken order. She bent blindly to Allan's lips, and kissed him
with a child's obedience, then straightened up, aghast. He would think
her very bold!
But he did not, for some reason. It may have seemed only comforting and
natural to him, that swift childish kiss, and Phyllis's honey-colored,
violet-scented hair brushing his face. Men take a great deal without
question as their rightful due.
The others closed around him then, welcoming him, laughing at the
surprise and the way he had taken it, telling him all about it as if
everything were as usual and pleasant as possible, and the present state
of things had always been a pleasant commonplace. And Wallis began to
serve the picnic supper.
XI
There were trays and little tables, and the food itself would have
betrayed a southern darky in the kitchen if nothing else had. It was the
first meal Allan had eaten with any one for years, and he found it so
interesting as to be almost exciting. Wallis took the plates invisibly
away when they were done, and they continued to stay in their
half-circle about the fire and talk it all over. Phyllis, tired to death
still, had slid to her favorite floor-seat, curled on cushions and
leaning against the couch-side. Allan could have touched her hair with
his hand. She thought of this, curled there, but she was too tired to
move. It was exciting to be near him, somehow, tired as she was.
Most of the short evening was spent celebrating the fact that Allan had
thrown something at Wallis, who was recalled to tell the story three
times in detail. Then there was the house to discuss, its good and bad
points, its nearnesses and farnesses.
"Let me tell you, Allan," said Mrs. De Guenther warmly at this point,
from her seat at the foot of the couch, "this wife of yours is a wonder.
Not many girls could have had a house in this condition two weeks after
it was bought."
Allan looked down at the heap of shining hair below him, all he could
see of Phyllis.
"Yes," he said consideringly. "She certainly is."
At a certain slowness in his tone, Phyllis sprang up. "You must be tired
to _death_!" she said. "It must be nearly ten. Do you feel worn out?"
Before he could say anything, Mrs. De Guenther had also risen, and was
sweeping away her husband.
"Of course he is," she said decisively. "What have we all been thinking
of? And we must go to bed, too, Albert, if you insist on taking that
early train in the morning, and I insist on going with you. Good-night,
children."
Wallis had appeared by this time, and was wheeling Allan from the room
before he had a chance to say much of anything but good-night. The De
Guenthers talked a little longer to Phyllis, and were gone also. Phyllis
flung herself full-length on the rugs and pillows before the fire, too
tired to move further.
Well, she had everything that she had wished for on that wet February
day in the library. Money, leisure to be pretty, a husband whom she
"didn't have to associate with much," rest, if she ever gave herself
leave to take it, and the rose-garden. She had her wishes, as uncannily
fulfilled as if she had been ordering her fate from a department store,
and had money to pay for it.... And back there in the city it was
somebody's late night, and that somebody--it would be Anna Black's turn,
wouldn't it?--was struggling with John Zanowskis and Sadie Rabinowitzes
by the lapful, just as she had. And yet--and yet they had really cared
for her, those dirty, dear little foreigners of hers. But she'd had to
work for their liking.... Perhaps--perhaps she could make Allan
Harrington like her as much as the children did. He had been so kind
to-night about the move and all, and so much brighter, her handsome
Allan in his gray, every-day-looking man-clothes! If she could stay
brave enough and kind enough and bright enough ... her eyelids
drooped.... Wallis was standing respectfully over her.
"Mrs. Harrington," he was saying, with a really masterly ignoring of her
attitude on the rug, "Mr. Harrington says you haven't bid him good-night
yet."
An amazing message! Had she been in the habit of it, that he demanded it
like a small boy? But she sprang up and followed Wallis into Allan's
room. He was lying back in his white silk sleeping things among the
white bed-draperies, looking as he always had before. Only, he seemed
too alive and awake still for his old rôle of Crusader-on-a-tomb.
"Phyllis," he began eagerly, as she sat down beside him, "what made you
so frightened when I first came? Wallis hadn't worried you, had he?"
"Oh, no; it wasn't that at all," said Phyllis. "And thank you for being
so generous about it all."
"I wasn't generous," said her husband. "I behaved like everything to old
Wallis about it. Well, what was it, then?"
"I--I--only--you looked so different in--_clothes_," pleaded Phyllis,
"like any man my age or older--as if you might get up and go to
business, or play tennis, or anything, and--and I was _afraid_ of you!
That's all, truly!"
She was sitting on the bed's edge, her eyes down, her hands quivering in
her lap, the picture of a school-girl who isn't quite sure whether she's
been good or not.
"Why, that sounds truthful!" said Allan, and laughed. It was the first
time she had heard him, and she gave a start. Such a clear, cheerful,
_young_ laugh! Maybe he would laugh more, by and by, if she worked hard
to make him.
"Good-night, Allan," she said.
"Aren't you going to kiss me good-night?" demanded this new Allan,
precisely as if she had been doing it ever since she met him. Evidently
that kiss three hours ago had created a precedent. Phyllis colored to
her ears. She seemed to herself to be always coloring now. But she
mustn't cross Allan, tired as he must be!
"Good-night, Allan," she said again sedately, and kissed his cheek as
she had done a month ago--years ago!--when they had been married. Then
she fled.
"Wallis," said his master dreamily when his man appeared again, "I want
some more real clothes. Tired of sleeping-suits. Get me some, please.
Good-night."
As for Phyllis, in her little green-and-white room above him, she was
crying comfortably into her pillow. She had not the faintest idea why,
except that she liked doing it. She felt, through her sleepiness, a
faint, hungry, pleasant want of something, though she hadn't an idea
what it could be. She had everything, except that it wasn't time for the
roses to be out yet. Probably that was the trouble.... Roses.... She,
too, went to sleep.
* * * * *
"How did Mr. Allan pass the night?" Phyllis asked Wallis anxiously,
standing outside his door next morning. She had been up since seven,
speeding the parting guests and interviewing the cook and chambermaid.
Mrs. Clancy's choice had been cheerful to a degree, and black, all of
it; a fat Virginia cook, a slim young Tuskegee chambermaid of a pale
saddle-color, and a shiny brown outdoor man who came from nowhere in
particular, but was very useful now he was here. Phyllis had seen them
all this morning, and found them everything servants should be. Now she
was looking after Allan, as her duty was.
Wallis beamed from against the door-post, his tray in his hands.
"Mrs. Harrington, it's one of the best sleeps Mr. Allan's had! Four
hours straight, and then sleeping still, if broken, till six! And still
taking interest in things. Oh, ma'am, you should have heard him
yesterday on the train, as furious as furious! It was beautiful!"
"Then his spine wasn't jarred," said Phyllis thoughtfully. "Wallis, I
believe there was more nervous shock and nervous depression than ever
the doctors realized. And I believe all he needs is to be kept happy, to
be much, much better. Wouldn't it be wonderful if he got so he could
move freely from the waist up? I believe that may happen if we can keep
him cheered and interested."
Wallis looked down at his tray. "Yes, ma'am," he said. "Not to speak ill
of the dead, Mrs. Harrington, the late Mrs. Harrington was always saying
'My poor stricken boy,' and things like that--'Do not jar him with
ill-timed light or merriment,' and reminding him how bad he was. And she
certainly didn't jar him with any merriment, ma'am."
"What were the doctors thinking about?" demanded Phyllis indignantly.
"Well, ma'am, they did all sorts of things to poor Mr. Allan for the
first year or so. And then, as nothing helped, and they couldn't find
out what was wrong to have paralyzed him so, he begged to have them
stopped hurting him. So we haven't had one for the past five years."
"I think a masseur and a wheel-chair are the next things to get," said
Phyllis decisively. "And remember, Wallis, there's something the matter
with Mr. Allan's shutters. They won't always close the sunshine out as
they should."
Wallis almost winked, if an elderly, mutton-chopped servitor can be
imagined as winking.
"No, ma'am," he promised. "Something wrong with 'em. I'll remember,
ma'am."
Phyllis went singing on down the sunny old house, swinging her colored
muslin skirts and prancing a little with sheer joy of being twenty-five,
and prettily dressed, with a dear house all her own, and--yes--a dear
Allan a little her own, too! Doing well for a man what another woman has
done badly has a perennial joy for a certain type of woman, and this was
what Phyllis was in the very midst of. She pranced a little more, and
came almost straight up against a long old mirror with gilt cornices,
which had come with the house and was staying with it. Phyllis stopped
and looked critically at herself.
"I haven't taken time yet to be pretty," she reminded the girl in the
glass, and began then and there to take account of stock, by way of
beginning. Why--a good deal had done itself! Her hair had been washed
and sunned and sunned and washed about every ten minutes since she had
been away from the library. It was springy and three shades more golden.
She had not been rushing out in all weathers unveiled, nor washing
hastily with hard water and cheap library soap eight or ten times a day,
because private houses are comparatively clean places. So her complexion
had been getting back, unnoticed, a good deal of its original country
rose-and-cream, with a little gold glow underneath. And the tired
heaviness was gone from her eyelids, because she had scarcely used her
eyes since she had married Allan--there had been too much else to do!
The little frown-lines between the brows had gone, too, with the need of
reading-glasses and work under electricity. She was more rounded, and
her look was less intent. The strained Liberry Teacher look was gone.
The luminous long blue eyes in the glass looked back at her girlishly.
"Would you think we were twenty-five even?" they said. Phyllis smiled
irrepressibly at the mirrored girl.
"Yas'm," said the rich and comfortable voice of Lily-Anna, the cook,
from the dining-room door; "you sholy is pretty. Yas'm--a lady _wants_
to stay pretty when she's married. Yo' don' look much mo'n a bride,
ma'am, an' dat's a fac'. Does you want yo' dinnehs brought into de
sittin'-room regular till de gem'man gits well?"
"Yes--no--yes--for the present, any way," said Phyllis, with a mixture
of confusion and dignity. Fortunately the doorbell chose this time to
ring.
A business-like young messenger with a rocking crate wanted to speak to
the madam. The last item on Phyllis's shopping list had come.
"The wolfhound's doing fine, ma'am," the messenger answered in response
to her questions. "Like a different dog already. All he needed was
exercise and a little society. Yes'm, this pup's broken--in a manner,
that is. Your man picked you out the best-tempered little feller in the
litter. Here, Foxy--careful, lady! Hold on to his leash!"
There was the passage of the check, a few directions about
dog-biscuits, and then the messenger from the kennels drove back to the
station, the crate, which had been emptied of a wriggling six-months
black bull-dog, on the seat beside him.
XII
Allan, lying at the window of the sunny bedroom, and wondering if they
had been having springs like this all the time he had lived in the city,
heard a scuffle outside the door. His wife's voice inquired breathlessly
of Wallis, "Can Mr. Allan--see me?... Oh, gracious--_don't_, Foxy, you
little black gargoyle! Open the door, or--shut it--quick, Wallis!"
But the door, owing to circumstances over which nobody but the black dog
had any control, flew violently open here, and Allan had a flying vision
of his wife, flushed, laughing, and badly mussed, being railroaded
across the room by a prancingly exuberant French bull at the end of a
leash.
"He's--he's a cheerful dog," panted Phyllis, trying to bring Foxy to
anchor near Allan, "and I don't think he knows how to keep still long
enough to pose across your feet--he wouldn't become them anyhow--he's a
real man-dog, Allan, not an interior decoration.... Oh, Wallis, he has
Mr. Allan's slipper! Foxy, you little fraud! Did him want a drink,
angel-puppy?"
"Did you get him for me, Phyllis?" asked Allan when the tumult and the
shouting had died, and the caracoling Foxy had buried his hideous little
black pansy-face in a costly Belleek dish of water.
"Yes," gasped Phyllis from her favorite seat, the floor; "but you
needn't keep him unless you want to. I can keep him where you'll never
see him--can't I, honey-dog-gums? Only I thought he'd be company for
you, and don't you think he seems--cheerful?"
Allan threw his picturesque head back on the cushions, and laughed and
laughed.
"Cheerful!" he said. "Most assuredly! Why--thank you, ever so much,
Phyllis. You're an awfully thoughtful girl. I always did like bulls--had
one in college, a Nelson. Come here, you little rascal!"
He whistled, and the puppy lifted its muzzle from the water, made a
dripping dash to the couch, and scrambled up over Allan as if they had
owned each other since birth. Never was a dog less weighed down by the
glories of ancestry.
Allan pulled the flopping bat-ears with his most useful hand, and asked
with interest, "Why on earth did they call a French bull Foxy?"
"Yes, sir," said Wallis. "I understand, sir, that he was the most active
and playful of the litter, and chewed up all his brothers' ears, sir.
And the kennel people thought it was so clever that they called him
Foxy."
"The best-tempered dog in the litter!" cried Phyllis, bursting into
helpless laughter from the floor.
"That doesn't mean he's bad-tempered," explained master and man eagerly
together. Phyllis began to see that she had bought a family pet as much
for Wallis as for Allan. She left them adoring the dog with that
reverent emotion which only very ugly bull-dogs can wake in a man's
breast, and flitted out, happy over the success of her new toy for
Allan.
"Take him out when he gets too much for Mr. Allan," she managed to say
softly to Wallis as she passed him. But, except for a run or so for his
health, Wallis and Allan between them kept the dog in the bedroom most
of the day. Phyllis, in one of her flying visits, found the little
fellow, tired with play, dog-biscuits, and other attentions, snuggled
down by his master, his little crumpled black muzzle on the pillow close
to Allan's contented, sleeping face. She felt as if she wanted to cry.
The pathetic lack of interests which made the coming of a new little dog
such an event!
Before she hung one more picture, before she set up even a book from the
boxes which had been her father's, before she arranged one more article
of furniture, she telephoned to the village for the regular delivery of
four daily papers, and a half-dozen of the most masculine magazines she
could think of on the library lists. She had never known of Allan's
doing any reading. That he had cared for books before the accident, she
knew. At any rate, she was resolved to leave no point uncovered that
might, just possibly _might_, help her Allan just a little way to
interest in life, which she felt to be the way to recovery. He liked
being told stories to, any way.
"Do you think Mr. Allan will feel like coming into the living-room
to-day?" she asked Wallis, meeting him in the hall about two o'clock.
"Why, he's dressed, ma'am," was Wallis's astonishing reply, "and him and
the pup is having a fine game of play. He's got more use of that hand
an' arm, ma'am, than we thought."
"Do you think he'd care to be wheeled into the living-room about four?"
asked Phyllis.
"For tea, ma'am?" inquired Wallis, beaming. "I should think so, ma'am.
I'll ask, anyhow."
Phyllis had not thought of tea--one does not stop for such leisurely
amenities in a busy public library--but she saw the beauty of the idea,
and saw to it that the tea was there. Lily-Anna was a jewel. She built
the fire up to a bright flame, and brought in some daffodils from the
garden without a word from her mistress. Phyllis herself saw that the
victrola was in readiness, and cleared a space for the couch near the
fire. There was quite a festal feeling.
The talking-machine was also a surprise for Allan. Phyllis thought
afterward that she should have saved it for another day, but the
temptation to grace the occasion with it was too strong. She and Allan
were as excited over it as a couple of children, and the only drawback
to Allan's enjoyment was that he obviously wanted to take the records
out of her unaccustomed fingers and adjust them himself. He knew how, it
appeared, and Phyllis naturally didn't. However, she managed to follow
his directions successfully. She had bought recklessly of rag-time
discs, and provided a fair amount of opera selections. Allan seemed
equally happy over both. After the thing had been playing for
three-quarters of an hour, and most of the records were exhausted,
Phyllis rang for tea. It was getting a little darker now, and the
wood-fire cast fantastic red and black lights and shadows over the room.
It was very intimate and thrilling to Phyllis suddenly, the fire-lit
room, with just their two selves there. Allan, on his couch before the
fire, looked bright and contented. The adjustable couch-head had been
braced to such a position that he was almost sitting up. The bull-dog,
who had lately come back from a long walk with the gratified outdoor
man, snored regularly on the rug near his master, wakening enough to bat
his tail on the floor if he was referred to. The little tea-table was
between Allan and Phyllis, crowned with a bunch of apple-blossoms, whose
spring-like scent dominated the warm room. Phyllis, in her green gown,
her cheeks pink with excitement, was waiting on her lord and master a
little silently.
Allan watched her amusedly for awhile--she was as intent as a good child
over her tea-ball and her lemon and her little cakes.
"Say something, Phyllis," he suggested with the touch of mischief she
was not yet used to, coming from him.
"This is a serious matter," she replied gravely. "Do you know I haven't
made tea--afternoon tea, that is--for so long it's a wonder I know which
is the cup and which is the saucer?"
"Why not?" he asked idly, yet interestedly too.
"I was otherwise occupied. I was a Daughter of Toil," explained Phyllis
serenely, setting down her own cup to relax in her chair, hands behind
her head; looking, in her green gown, the picture of graceful, strong,
young indolence. "I was a librarian--didn't you know?"
"No. I wish you'd tell me, if you don't mind," said Allan. "About you, I
mean, Phyllis. Do you know, I feel awfully married to you this
afternoon--you've bullied me so much it's no wonder--and I really ought
to know about my wife's dark past."
Phyllis's heart beat a little faster. She, too, had felt "awfully
married" here alone in the fire-lit living-room, dealing so intimately
and gayly with Allan.
"There isn't much to tell," she said soberly.
"Come over here closer," commanded Allan the spoilt. "We've both had all
the tea we want. Come close by the couch. I want to see you when you
talk."
Phyllis did as he ordered.
"I was a New England country minister's daughter," she began. "New
England country ministers always know lots about Greek and Latin and how
to make one dollar do the work of one-seventy-five, but they never have
any dollars left when the doing's over. Father and I lived alone
together always, and he taught me things, and I petted him--fathers need
it, specially when they have country congregations--and we didn't bother
much about other folks. Then he--died. I was eighteen, and I had six
hundred dollars. I couldn't do arithmetic, because Father had always
said it was left out of my head, and I needn't bother with it. So I
couldn't teach. Then they said, 'You like books, and you'd better be a
librarian.' As a matter of fact, a librarian never gets a chance to
read, but you can't explain that to the general public. So I came to the
city and took the course at library school. Then I got a position in the
Greenway Branch--two years in the circulating desk, four in the
cataloguing room, and one in the Children's Department. The short and
simple annals of the poor!"
"Go on," said Allan.
"I believe it's merely that you like the sound of the human voice," said
Phyllis, laughing. "I'm going to go on with the story of the Five Little
Pigs--you'll enjoy it just as much!"
"Exactly," said Allan. "Tell me what it was like in the library,
please."
"It was rather interesting," said Phyllis, yielding at once. "There are
so many different things to be done that you never feel any monotony, as
I suppose a teacher does. But the hours are not much shorter than a
department store's, and it's exacting, on-your-feet work all the time. I
liked the work with the children best. Only--you never have any time to
be anything but neat in a library, and you do get so tired of being just
neat, if you're a girl."
"And a pretty one," said Allan. "I don't suppose the ugly ones mind as
much."
It was the first thing he had said about her looks. Phyllis's ready
color came into her cheeks. So he thought she was pretty!
"Do you--think I'm pretty?" she asked breathlessly. She couldn't help
it.
"Of course I do, you little goose," said Allan, smiling at her.
Phyllis plunged back into the middle of her story:
"You see, you can't sit up nights to sew much, or practise doing your
hair new ways, because you need all your strength to get up when the
alarm-clock barks next morning. And then, there's always the
money-worry, if you have nothing but your salary. Of course, this last
year, when I've been getting fifty dollars a month, things have been all
right. But when it was only thirty a month in the Circulation--well,
that was pretty hard pulling," said Phyllis thoughtfully. "But the
worst--the worst, Allan, was waking up nights and wondering what would
happen if you broke down for a long time. Because you _can't_ very well
save for sickness-insurance on even fifty a month. And the work--well,
of course, most girls' work is just a little more than they have the
strength for, always. But I was awfully lucky to get into children's
work. Some of my imps, little Poles and Slovaks and Hungarians mostly,
are the cleverest, most affectionate babies----"
She began to tell him stories of wonderful ten-year-olds who were
Socialists by conviction, and read economics, and dazed little atypical
sixteen-year-olds who read Mother Goose, and stopped even that because
they got married.
"You poor little girl!" said Allan, unheeding. "What brutes they were to
you! Well, thank Heaven, that's over now!"
"Why, Allan!" she said, laying a soothing hand on his. "Nobody was a
brute. There's never more than one crank-in-authority in any library,
they say. Ours was the Supervisor of the Left Half of the Desk, and
after I got out of Circulation I never saw anything of her."
Allan burst into unexpected laughter. "It sounds like a Chinese title of
honor," he explained. "'Grand Warder of the Emperor's Left
Slipper-Rosette,' or something of the sort."
"The Desk's where you get your books stamped," she explained, "and the
two shifts of girls who attend to that part of the work each have a
supervisor--the Right and Left halves. The one that was horrid had
favorites, and snapped at the ones that weren't. I wasn't under her,
though. My Supervisor was lovely, an Irishwoman with the most florid
hats, and the kindest, most just disposition, and always laughing. We
all adored her, she was so fair-minded."
"You think a good deal about laughing," said Allan thoughtfully. "Does it
rank as a virtue in libraries, or what?"
"You have to laugh," explained Phyllis. "If you don't see the laugh-side
of things, you see the cry-side. And you can't afford to be unhappy if
you have to earn your living. People like brightness best. And it's more
comfortable for yourself, once you get used to it."
"So that was your philosophy of life," said Allan. His hand tightened
compassionately on hers. "You _poor_ little girl!... Tell me about the
cry-side, Phyllis."
His voice was very moved and caressing, and the darkness was deepening
as the fire sank. Only an occasional tongue of flame glinted across
Phyllis's silver slipper-buckle and on the seal-ring Allan wore. It was
easy to tell things there in the perfumed duskiness. It was a great many
years since any one had cared to hear the cry-side. And it was so dark,
and the hand keeping hers in the shadows might have been any kind,
comforting hand. She found herself pouring it all out to Allan, there
close by her; the loneliness, the strain, the hard work, the lack of all
the woman-things in her life, the isolation and dreariness at night, the
over-fatigue, and the hurt of watching youth and womanhood sliding away,
unused, with nothing to show for all the years; only a cold hope that
her flock of little transient aliens might be a little better for the
guidance she could give them--
Years hence in rustic speech a phrase,
As in rude earth a Grecian vase.
And then, that wet, discouraged day in February, and the vision of Eva
Atkinson, radiantly fresh and happy, kept young and pretty by unlimited
money and time.
"Her children were so pretty," said Phyllis wistfully, "and mine, dear
little villains, were such dirty, untaught, rude little things--oh, it
sounds snobbish, but I'd have given everything I had to have a dainty,
clean little _lady_-child throw her arms around me and kiss me, instead
of my pet little handsome, sticky Polish Jewess. Up at home everything
had been so clean and old and still that you always could remember it
had been finished for three hundred years. And Father's clean, still old
library----"
Phyllis did not know how she was revealing to Allan the unconscious
motherhood in her; but Allan, femininely sensitive to unspoken things
from his long sojourn in the dark--Allan did. It was the mother-instinct
that she was spending on him, but mother-instinct of a kind he had never
known before; gayly self-effacing, efficient, shown only in its results.
And she could never have anything else to spend it on, he thought. Well,
he was due to die in a few years.... But he didn't want to. Living was
just beginning to be interesting again, somehow. There seemed no
satisfactory solution for the two of them.... Well, he'd be unselfish
and die, any way. Meanwhile, why not be happy? Here was Phyllis. His
hand clasped hers more closely.
"And when Mr. De Guenther made me that offer," she murmured, coloring in
the darkness, "I was tired and discouraged, and the years seemed so
endless! It didn't seem as though I'd be harming any one--but I wouldn't
have done it if you'd said a word against it--truly I wouldn't, dear."
The last little word slipped out unnoticed. She had been calling her
library children "dear" for a year now, and the word slipped out of
itself. But Allan liked it.
"My poor little girl!" he said. "In your place I'd have married the
devil himself--up against a life like that."
"Then--then you don't--mind?" asked Phyllis anxiously, as she had asked
before.
"No, indeed!" said Allan, with a little unnecessary firmness. "I _told_
you that, didn't I? I like it."
"So you did tell me," she said penitently.
"But supposing De Guenther hadn't picked out some one like you----"
"That's just what I've often thought myself," said Phyllis naively. "She
might have been much worse than I.... Oh, but I was frightened when I
saw you first! I didn't know what you'd be like. And then, when I looked
at you----"
"Well, when you looked at me?" demanded Allan.
But Phyllis refused to go on.
"But that's not all," said Allan. "What about--men?"
"What men?" asked Phyllis innocently.
"Why, men you were interested in, of course," he answered.
"There weren't any," said Phyllis. "I hadn't any place to meet them, or
anywhere to entertain them if I had met them. Oh, yes, there was one--an
old bookkeeper at the boarding-house. All the boarders there were old.
That was why the people at home had chosen it. They thought it would be
safe. It was all of that!"
"Well, the bookkeeper?" demanded Allan. "You're straying off from your
narrative. The bookkeeper, Phyllis, my dear!"
"I'm telling you about him," protested Phyllis. "He was awfully cross
because I wouldn't marry him, but I didn't see any reason why I should.
I didn't like him especially, and I would probably have gone on with my
work afterwards. There didn't seem to me to be anything to it for any
one but him--for of course I'd have had his mending and all that to do
when I came home from the library, and I scarcely got time for my own.
But he lost his temper fearfully because I didn't want to. Then, of
course, men would try to flirt in the library, but the janitor always
made them go out when you asked him to. He loved doing it.... Why,
Allan, it must be seven o'clock! Shall I turn on more lights?"
"No.... Then you were quite as shut up in your noisy library as I was in
my dark rooms," said Allan musingly.
"I suppose I was," she said, "though I never thought of it before. You
mustn't think it was horrid. It was fun, lots of it. Only, there wasn't
any being a real girl in it."
"There isn't much in this, I should think," said Allan savagely,
"except looking after a big doll."
Phyllis's laugh tinkled out. "Oh, I _love_ playing with dolls," she said
mischievously. "And you ought to see my new slippers! I have pink ones,
and blue ones, and lavender and green, all satin and suede. And when I
get time I'm going to buy dresses to match. And a banjo, maybe, with a
self-teacher. There's a room upstairs where nobody can hear a thing you
do. I've wanted slippers and a banjo ever since I can remember."
"Then you're fairly happy?" demanded Allan suddenly.
"Why, of course!" said Phyllis, though she had not really stopped to ask
herself before whether she was or not. There had been so many exciting
things to do. "Wouldn't you be happy if you could buy everything you
wanted, and every one was lovely to you, and you had pretty clothes and
a lovely house--and a rose-garden?"
"Yes--if I could buy everything I wanted," said Allan. His voice dragged
a little. Phyllis sprang up, instantly penitent.
"You're tired, and I've been talking and talking about my silly little
woes till I've worn you out!" she said. "But--Allan, you're getting
better. Try to move this arm. The hand I'm holding. There! That's a lot
more than you could do when I first came. I think--I think it would be a
good plan for a masseur to come down and see it."
"Now look here, Phyllis," protested Allan, "I like your taste in houses
and music-boxes and bull-dogs, but I'll be hanged if I'll stand for a
masseur. There's no use, they can't do me any good, and the last one
almost killed me. There's no reason why I should be tormented simply
because a professional pounder needs the money."
"No, no!" said Phyllis. "Not that kind! Wallis can have orders to shoot
him or something if he touches your spinal column. All I meant was a man
who would give the muscles of your arms and shoulders a little exercise.
That couldn't hurt, and might help you use them. That wouldn't be any
trouble, would it? _Please!_ The first minute he hurts, you can send him
flying. You know they call massage lazy people's exercise."
"I believe you're really interested in making me better," said Allan,
after a long silence.
"Why, of course," said Phyllis, laughing. "That's what I'm here for!"
But this answer did not seem to suit Allan, for some reason. Phyllis
said no more about the masseur. She only decided to summon him, any way.
And presently Wallis came in and turned all the lights on.
XIII
In due course of time June came. So did the masseur, and more flowered
frocks for Phyllis, and the wheel-chair for Allan. The immediate effect
of June was to bring out buds all over the rose-trees; of the flowered
dresses, to make Phyllis very picturesquely pretty. As for the masseur,
he had more effect than anything else. It was as Phyllis had hoped: the
paralysis of Allan's arms had been less permanent than any one had
thought, and for perhaps the last three years there had been little more
the matter than entire loss of strength and muscle-control, from long
disuse. By the time they had been a month in the country Allan's use of
his arms and shoulders was nearly normal, and Phyllis was having wild
hopes, that she confided to no one but Wallis, of even more sweeping
betterments. Allan slept much better, from the slight increase of
activity, and also perhaps because Phyllis had coaxed him outdoors as
soon as the weather became warm, and was keeping him there. Sometimes
he lay in the garden on his couch, sometimes he sat up in the
wheel-chair, almost always with Phyllis sitting, or lying in her hammock
near him, and the devoted Foxy pretending to hunt something near by.
There were occasional fits of the old depression and silence, when Allan
would lie silently in his own room with his hands crossed and his eyes
shut, answering no one--not even Foxy. Wallis and Phyllis respected
these moods, and left him alone till they were over, but the adoring
Foxy had no such delicacy of feeling. And it is hard to remain silently
sunk in depression when an active small dog is imploring you by every
means he knows to throw balls for him to run after. For the rest, Allan
proved to have naturally a lighter heart and more carefree disposition
than Phyllis. His natural disposition was buoyant. Wallis said that he
had never had a mood in his life till the accident.
His attitude to his wife became more and more a taking-for-granted
affection and dependence. It is to be feared that Phyllis spoiled him
badly. But it was so long since she had been needed by any one person as
Allan needed her! And he had such lovable, illogical, masculine ways of
being wronged if he didn't get the requisite amount of petting, and
grateful for foolish little favors and taking big ones for granted,
that--entirely, as Phyllis insisted to herself, from a sense of combined
duty and grateful interest--she would have had her pretty head removed
and sent him by parcel-post, if he had idly suggested his possible need
of a girl's head some time.
And it was so heavenly--oh, but it was heavenly there in Phyllis's
rose-garden, with the colored flowers coming out, and the little green
caterpillars roaming over the leaves, and pretty dresses to wear, and
Foxy-dog to play with--and Allan! Allan demanded--no, not exactly
demanded, but expected and got--so much of Phyllis's society in these
days that she had learned to carry on all her affairs, even the
housekeeping, out in her hammock by his wheel-chair or couch. She wore
large, floppy white hats with roses on them, by way of keeping the sun
off; but Allan, it appeared, did not think much of hats except as an
ornament for girls, and his uncovered curly hair was burned to a sort of
goldy-russet all through, and his pallor turned to a clear pale brown.
Phyllis looked up from her work one of these heavenly last-of-June days,
and tried to decide whether she really liked the change or not. Allan
was handsomer unquestionably, though that had hardly been necessary. But
the resignedly statuesque look was gone.
Allan felt her look, and looked up at her. He had been reading a
magazine, for Phyllis had succeeded in a large measure in reviving his
taste for magazines and books. "Well, Phyllis, my dear," said he,
smiling, "what's the problem now? I feel sure there is something new
going to be sprung on me--get the worst over!"
"You wrong me," she said, beginning to thread some more pink embroidery
silk. "I was only wondering whether I liked you as well tanned as I did
when you were so nice and white, back in the city."
"Cheerful thought!" said Allan, laying down his magazine entirely.
"Shall I ring for Wallis and some peroxide? As you said the other day,
'I have to be approved of or I'm unhappy!'"
"Oh, it really doesn't matter," said Phyllis mischievously. "You know, I
married you principally for a rose-garden, and that's _lovely_!"
"I suppose I spoil the perspective," said Allan, unexpectedly ruffled.
Phyllis leaned forward in her blossom-dotted draperies and stroked his
hand, that long carven hand she so loved to watch.
"Not a bit, Allan," she said, laughing at him. "You're exceedingly
decorative! I remember the first time I saw you I thought you looked
exactly like a marble knight on a tomb."
Allan--Allan the listless, tranced invalid of four months before--threw
his head back and shouted with laughter.
"I suppose I serve the purpose of garden statuary," he said. "We used to
have some horrors when I was a kid. I remember two awful bronze deer
that always looked as if they were trying not to get their feet wet,
and a floppy bronze dog we called Fido. He was meant for a Gordon
setter, I think, but it didn't go much further than intention. Louise
and I used to ride the deer."
His face shadowed a little as he spoke, for nearly the first time, of
the dead girl.
"Allan," Phyllis said, bending closer to him, all rosy and golden in her
green hammock, "tell me about--Louise Frey--if you don't mind talking
about her? Would it be bad for you, do you think?"
Allan's eyes dwelt on his wife pleasurably. She was very real and near
and lovable, and Louise Frey seemed far away and shadowy in his
thoughts. He had loved her very dearly and passionately, that
boisterous, handsome young Louise, but that gay boy-life she had
belonged to seemed separated now from this pleasant rose-garden, with
its golden-haired, wisely-sweet young chatelaine, by thousands of black
years. The blackness came back when he remembered what lay behind it.
"There's nothing much to tell, Phyllis," he said, frowning a little.
"She was pretty and full of life. She had black hair and eyes and a
good deal of color. We were more or less friends all our lives, for our
country-places adjoined. She was eighteen when--it happened."
"Eighteen," said Phyllis musingly. "She would have been just my age....
We won't talk about it, then, Allan ... Well, Viola?"
The pretty Tuskegee chambermaid was holding out a tray with a card on
it.
"The doctor, ma'am," she said.
"The doctor!" echoed Allan, half-vexed, half-laughing. "I _knew_ you had
something up your sleeve, Phyllis! What on earth did you have him for?"
Phyllis's face was a study of astonishment. "On my honor, I hadn't a
notion he was even in existence," she protested. "He's not _my_ doctor!"
"He must have 'just growed,' or else Lily-Anna's called him in,"
suggested Allan sunnily. "Bring him along, Viola."
Viola produced him so promptly that nobody had time to remember the
professional doctor's visits don't usually have cards, or thought to
look at the card for enlightenment. So the surprise was complete when
the doctor appeared.
"Johnny Hewitt!" ejaculated Allan, throwing out both hands in greeting.
"Of all people! Well, you old fraud, pretending to be a doctor! The last
I heard about you, you were trying to prove that you weren't the man
that tied a mule into old Sumerley's chair at college."
"I never did prove it," responded Johnny Hewitt, shaking hands
vigorously, "but the fellows said afterwards that I ought to
apologize--to the mule. He was a perfectly good mule. But I'm a doctor
all right. I live here in Wallraven. I wondered if it might be you by
any chance, Allan, when I heard some Harringtons had bought here. But
this is the first chance a promising young chickenpox epidemic has given
me to find out."
"It's what's left of me," said Allan, smiling ruefully. "And--Phyllis,
this doctor-person turns out to be an old friend of mine. This is Mrs.
Harrington, Johnny."
"Oh, I'm so glad!" beamed Phyllis, springing up from her hammock, and
looking as if she loved Johnny. Here was exactly what was
needed--somebody for Allan to play with! She made herself delightful to
the newcomer for a few minutes, and then excused herself. They would
have a better time alone, for awhile, any way, and there was dinner to
order. Maybe this Johnny Hewitt-doctor would stay for dinner. He should
if she could make him! She sang a little on her way to the house, and
almost forgot the tiny hurt it had been when Allan seemed so saddened by
speaking of Louise Frey. She had no right to feel hurt, she knew. It was
only to be expected that Allan would always love Louise's memory. She
didn't know much about men, but that was the way it always was in
stories. A man's heart would die, under an automobile or anywhere else,
and all there was left for anybody else was leavings. It wasn't fair!
And then Phyllis threw back her shoulders and laughed, as she had
sometimes in the library days, and reminded herself what a nice world it
was, any way, and that Allan was going to be much helped by Johnny
Hewitt. That was a cheering thought, anyhow. She went on singing, and
ordered a beautiful, festively-varied dinner, a very poem of gratitude.
Then she pounced on the doctor as he was leaving and made him stay for
it.
Allan's eyes were bright and his face lighted with interest. Phyllis, at
the head of the table, kept just enough in the talk to push the men on
when it seemed flagging, which was not often. She learned more about
Allan, and incidentally Johnny Hewitt, in the talk as they lingered
about the table, than she had ever known before. She and Allan had lived
so deliberately in the placid present, with its almost childish
brightnesses and interests, that she knew scarcely more about her
husband's life than the De Guenthers had told her before she married
him. But she could see the whole picture of it as she listened now: the
active, merry, brilliant boy who had worked and played all day and
danced half the night; who had lived, it almost seemed to her, two or
three lives in one. And then the change to the darkened room--helpless,
unable to move, with the added sorrow of his sweetheart's death, and
his mother's deliberate fostering of that sorrow. It was almost a shock
to see him in the wheel-chair at the foot of the table, his face lighted
with interest in what he and his friend were saying. What if he did care
for Louise Frey's memory still! He'd had such a hard time that anything
Phyllis could do for him oughtn't to be too much!
When Dr. Hewitt went at last Phyllis accompanied him to the door. She
kept him there for a few minutes, talking to him about Allan and making
him promise to come often. He agreed with her that, this much progress
made, a good deal more might follow. He promised to come back very soon,
and see as much of them as possible.
Allan, watching them, out of earshot, from the living-room where he had
been wheeled, saw Phyllis smiling warmly up at his friend, lingering in
talk with him, giving him both hands in farewell; and he saw, too,
Hewitt's rapt interest and long leave-taking. At last the door closed,
and Phyllis came back to him, flushed and animated. He realized,
watching her return with that swift lightness of foot her long years of
work had lent her, how young and strong and lovely she was, with the
rose-color in her cheeks and the light from above making her hair
glitter. And suddenly her slim young strength and her bright vitality
seemed to mock him, instead of being a comfort and support as
heretofore. A young, beautiful, kind girl like that--it was natural she
should like Hewitt. And it was going to come natural to Hewitt to like
Phyllis. He could see that plainly enough.
"Tired, Allan Harrington?" she asked brightly, coming over to him and
dropping a light hand on his chair, in a caressing little way she had
dared lately.... Kindness! Yes, she was the incarnation of kindness.
Doubtless she had spoken to and touched those little ragamuffins she had
told him of just so.
He had got into a habit of feeling that Phyllis belonged to him
absolutely. He had forgotten--what was it she had said to him that
afternoon, half in fun--but oh, doubtless half in earnest!--about
marrying him for a rose-garden? She had done just that. She had never
made any secret of it--why, how could she, marrying him before she had
spoken a half-dozen words to him? But how wonderful she had been to him
since--sometimes almost as if she cared for him....
He moved ungraciously. "Don't _touch_ me, Phyllis!" he said irritably.
"Wallis! You can wheel me into my room."
"Oh-h!" said Phyllis, behind him. The little forlorn sound hurt him, but
it pleased him, too. So he could hurt her, if only by rudeness? Well,
that was a satisfaction. "Shut the door," he ordered Wallis swiftly.
Phyllis, her hands at her throat, stood hurt and frightened in the
middle of the room. It never occurred to her that Allan was jealous, or
indeed that he could care enough for her to be jealous.
"It was talking about Louise Frey," she said. "That, and Dr. Hewitt
bringing up old times. Oh, _why_ did I ask about her? He was
contented--I know he was contented! He'd gotten to like having me with
him--he even wanted me. Oh, Allan, Allan!"
She did not want to cry downstairs, so she ran for her own room. There
she threw herself down and cried into a pillow till most of the case was
wet. She was silly--she knew she was silly. She tried to think of all
the things that were still hers, the garden, the watch-bracelet, the
leisure, the pretty gowns--but nothing, _nothing_ seemed of any
consequence beside the fact that--she had not kissed Allan good-night!
It seemed the most intolerable thing that had ever happened to her.
XIV
It was just as well, perhaps, that Phyllis did not do much sleeping that
night, for at about two Wallis knocked at her door. It seemed like
history repeating itself when he said: "Could you come to Mr. Allan,
please? He seems very bad."
She threw on the silk crepe negligee and followed him, just as she had
done before, on that long-ago night after her mother-in-law had died.
"Did Dr. Hewitt's visit overexcite him, do you think?" he asked as they
went.
"I don't know, ma'am," Wallis said. "He's almost as bad as he was after
the old madam died--you remember?"
"Oh, yes," said Phyllis mechanically. "I remember."
* * * * *
Allan lay so exactly as he had on that other night, that the strange
surroundings seemed incongruous. Just the same, except that his
restlessness was more visible, because he had more power of motion.
She bent and held the nervously clenching hands, as she had before.
"What is it, Allan?" she said soothingly.
"Nothing," said her husband savagely. "Nerves, hysteria--any other silly
womanish thing a cripple could have. Let me alone, Phyllis. I wish you
could put me out of the way altogether!"
Phyllis made herself laugh, though her heart hurried with fright. She
had seen Allan suffer badly before--be apathetic, irritable, despondent,
but never in a state where he did not cling to her.
"I can't let you alone," she said brightly. "I've come to stay with you
till you feel quieter.... Would you rather I talked to you, or kept
quiet?"
"Oh, do your wifely duty, whatever it is," he said.... "It was a
mistake, the whole thing. You've done more than your duty, child,
but--oh, you'd better go away."
Phyllis's heart turned over. Was it as bad as this? Was he as sick of
her as this?
"You mean--you think," she faltered, "it was a mistake--our marriage?"
"Yes," he said restlessly. "Yes.... It wasn't fair."
She had no means of knowing that he meant it was unfair to her. She held
on to herself, though she felt her face turning cold with the sudden
pallor of fright.
"I think it can be annulled," she said steadily. "No, I suppose it
wasn't fair."
She stopped to get her breath and catch at the only things that
mattered--steadiness, quietness, ability to soothe Allan!
"It can be annulled," she said again evenly. "But listen to me now,
Allan. It will take quite a while. It can't be done to-night, or before
you are stronger. So for your own sake you must try to rest now.
Everything shall come right. I promise you it shall be annulled. But
forget it now, please. I am going to hold your wrists and talk to you,
recite things for you, till you go back to sleep."
She wondered afterwards how she could have spoken with that hard
serenity, how she could have gone steadily on with story after story,
poem after poem, till Allan's grip on her hands relaxed, and he fell
into a heavy, tired sleep.
[Illustration: "BUT YOU SEE--HE'S--ALL I HAVE ... GOOD-NIGHT, WALLIS"]
She sat on the side of the bed and looked at him, lying still against
his white pillows. She looked and looked, and presently the tears began
to slide silently down her cheeks. She did not lift her hands to wipe
them away. She sat and cried silently, openly, like a desolate, unkindly
treated child.
"Mrs. Allan! Mrs. Allan, ma'am!" came Wallis's concerned whisper from
the doorway. "Don't take it as hard as that. It's just a little relapse.
He was overtired. I shouldn't have called you, but you always quiet him
so."
Phyllis brushed off her tears, and smiled. You seemed to have to do so
much smiling in this house!
"I know," she said. "I worry about his condition too much. But you
see--he's--all I have.... Good-night, Wallis."
Once out of Allan's room, she ran at full speed till she gained her own
bed, where she could cry in peace till morning if she wanted to, with no
one to interrupt. That was all right. The trouble was going to be next
morning.
But somehow, when morning came, the old routine was dragged through
with. Directions had to be given the servants as usual, Allan's comfort
and amusement seen to, just as if nothing had happened. It was a perfect
day, golden and perfumed, with just that little tang of fresh windiness
that June days have in the northern states. And Allan must not lose
it--he must be wheeled out into the garden.
She came out to him, in the place where they usually sat, and sank for a
moment in the hammock, that afternoon. She had avoided him all the
morning.
"I just came to see if everything was all right," she said, leaning
toward him in that childlike, earnest way he knew so well. "I don't need
to stay here if I worry you."
"I'd rather you'd stay, if you don't mind," he answered. Phyllis looked
at him intently. He was white and dispirited, and his voice was
listless. Oh, Phyllis thought, if Louise Frey had only been kind enough
to die in babyhood, instead of under Allan's automobile! What could
there have been about her to hold Allan so long? She glanced at his
weary face again. This would never do! What had come to be her dominant
instinct, keeping Allan's spirits up, emboldened her to bend forward,
and even laugh a little.
"Come, Allan!" she said. "Even if we're not going to stay together
always, we might as well be cheerful till we do part. We used to be good
friends enough. Can't we be so a little longer?" It sounded heartless to
her after she had said it, but it seemed the only way to speak. She
smiled at him bravely.
Allan looked at her mutely for a moment, as if she had hurt him.
"You're right," he said suddenly. "There's no time but the present,
after all. Come over here, closer to me, Phyllis. You've been awfully
good to me, child--isn't there anything--_anything_ I could do for
you--something you could remember afterwards, and say, 'Well, he did
that for me, any way?'"
Phyllis's eyes filled with tears. "You have given me everything
already," she said, catching her breath. She didn't feel as if she could
stand much more of this.
"Everything!" he said bitterly. "No, I haven't. I can't give you what
every girl wants--a well, strong man to be her husband--the health and
strength that any man in the street has."
"Oh, don't speak that way, Allan!"
She bent over him sympathetically, moved by his words. In another moment
the misunderstanding might have been straightened out, if it had not
been for his reply.
"I wish I never had to see you at all!" he said involuntarily. In her
sensitive state of mind the hurt was all she felt--not the deeper
meaning that lay behind the words.
"I'll relieve you of my presence for awhile," she flashed back. Before
she gave herself time to think, she had left the garden, with something
which might be called a flounce. "When people say things like that to
you," she said as she walked away from him, "it's carrying being an
invalid a little _too_ far!"
Allan heard the side-door slam. He had never suspected before that
Phyllis had a temper. And yet, what could he have said? But she gave him
no opportunity to find out. In just about the time it might take to
find gloves and a parasol, another door clanged in the distance. The
street door. Phyllis had evidently gone out.
* * * * *
Phyllis, on her swift way down the street, grew angrier and angrier. She
tried to persuade herself to make allowances for Allan, but they refused
to be made. She felt more bitterly toward him than she ever had toward
any one in her life. If she only hadn't leaned over him and been sorry
for him, just before she got a slap in the face like that!
She walked rapidly down the main street of the little village. She
hardly knew where she was going. She had been called on by most of the
local people, but she did not feel like being agreeable, or making
formal calls, just now. And what was the use of making friends, any way,
when she was going back to her rags, poor little Cinderella that she
was! Below and around and above everything else came the stinging
thought that she had given Allan so much--that she had taken so much for
granted.
Her quick steps finally took her to the outskirts of the village, to a
little green stretch of woods. There she walked up and down for awhile,
trying to think more quietly. She found the tide of her anger ebbing
suddenly, and her mind forming all sorts of excuses for Allan. But that
was not the way to get quiet--thinking of Allan! She tried to put him
resolutely from her mind, and think about her own future plans. The
first thing to do, she decided, was to rub up her library work a little.
It was with an unexpected feeling of having returned to her own place
that she crossed the marble floor of the village library. She felt as if
she ought to hurry down to the cloak-room, instead of waiting leisurely
at the desk for her card. It all seemed uncannily like home--there was
even a girl inside the desk who looked like Anna Black of her own
Greenway Branch. Phyllis could hear, with a faint amusement, that the
girl was scolding energetically in Anna Black's own way. The words
struck on her quick ears, though they were not intended to carry.
"That's what comes of trusting to volunteer help. Telephones at the last
moment 'she has a headache,' and not a single soul to look after the
story-hour! And the children are almost all here already."
"We'll just have to send them home," said the other girl, looking up
from her trayful of cards. "It's too late to get anybody else, and
goodness knows _we_ can't get it in!"
"They ought to have another librarian," fretted the girl who looked like
Anna. "They could afford it well enough, with their Soldiers' Monuments
and all."
Phyllis smiled to herself from where she was investigating the
card-catalogue. It all sounded so exceedingly natural. Then that swift
instinct of hers to help caught her over to the desk, and she heard
herself saying:
"I've had some experience in story telling; maybe I could help you with
the story-hour. I couldn't help hearing that your story-teller has
disappointed you."
The girl like Anna fell on her with rapture.
"Heaven must have sent you," she said. The other one, evidently slower
and more cautious by nature, rose too, and came toward her. "You have a
card here, haven't you?" she said. "I think I've seen you."
"Yes," Phyllis said, with a pang at speaking the name she had grown to
love bearing; "I'm Mrs. Harrington--Phyllis Harrington. We live at the
other end of the village."
"Oh, in the house with the garden all shut off from the lane!" said the
girl like Anna, delightedly. "That lovely old house that used to belong
to the Jamesons. Oh, yes, I know. You're here for the summer, aren't
you, and your husband has been very ill?"
"Exactly," said Phyllis, smiling, though she wished people wouldn't talk
about Allan! They seemed possessed to mention him!
"We'll be obliged forever if you'll do it," said the other girl,
evidently the head librarian. "Can you do it now? The children are
waiting."
"Certainly," said Phyllis, and followed the younger girl straightway to
the basement, where, it seemed, the story-hour was held. She wondered,
as they went, if the girl envied her her expensively perishable summer
organdie, with its flying sashes and costly accessories; if the girl
thought about her swinging jewelries and endless leisure with a wish to
have them for herself. She had wanted such things, she knew, when she
was being happy on fifty dollars a month. And perhaps some of the women
she had watched then had had heartaches under their furs....
The children, already sitting in a decorous ring on their low chairs,
seemed after the first surprise to approve of Phyllis. The librarian
lingered for a little by way of keeping order if it should be necessary,
watched the competent sweep with which Phyllis gathered the children
around her, heard the opening of the story, and left with an air of
astonished approval. Phyllis, late best story-teller of the Greenway
Branch, watched her go with a bit of professional triumph in her heart.
She told the children stories till the time was up, and then "just one
story more." She had not forgotten how, she found. But she never told
them the story of "How the Elephant Got His Trunk," that foolish,
fascinating story-hour classic that she had told Allan the night his
mother had died; the story that had sent him to sleep quietly for the
first time in years.... Oh, dear, was everything in the world connected
with Allan in some way or other?
It was nearly six when she went up, engulfed in children, to the
circulating room. There the night-librarian caught her. She had
evidently been told to try to get Phyllis for more story-hours, for she
did her best to make her promise. They talked shop together for perhaps
an hour and a half. Then the growing twilight reminded Phyllis that it
was time to go back. She had been shirking going home, she realized now,
all the afternoon. She said good-by to the night-librarian, and went on
down the village street, lagging unconsciously. It must have been about
eight by this time.
It was a mile back to the house. She could have taken the trolley part
of the way, but she felt restless and like walking. She had forgotten
that walking at night through well-known, well-lighted city streets, and
going in half-dusk through country byways, were two different things.
She was destined to be reminded of the difference.
"Can you help a poor man, lady?" said a whining voice behind her, when
she had a quarter of the way yet to go. She turned to see a big tramp, a
terrifying brute with a half-propitiating, half-fierce look on his
heavy, unshaven face. She was desperately frightened. She had been
spoken to once or twice in the city, but there there was always a
policeman, or a house you could run into if you had to. But here, in the
unguarded dusk of a country lane, it was a different matter. The long
gold chain that swung below her waist, the big diamond on her finger,
the gold mesh-purse--all the jewelry she took such a childlike delight
in wearing--she remembered them in terror. She was no brown-clad little
working-girl now, to slip along disregarded. And the tramp did not look
like a deserving object.
"If you will come to the house to-morrow," she said, hurrying on as she
spoke, "I'll have some work for you. The first house on this street that
you come to." She did not dare give him anything, or send him away.
"Won't you gimme somethin' now, lady?" whined the tramp, continuing to
follow. "I'm a starvin' man."
She dared not open her purse and appease him by giving him money--she
had too much with her. That morning she had received the check for her
monthly income from Mr. De Guenther, sent Wallis down to cash it, and
then stuffed it in her bag and forgotten it in the distress of the day.
The man might take the money and strike her senseless, even kill her.
"To-morrow," she said, going rapidly on. She had now what would amount
to about three city blocks to traverse still. There was a short way from
outside the garden-hedge through to the garden, which cut off about a
half-block. If she could gain this she would be safe.
"Naw, yeh don't," snarled the tramp, as she fled on. "Ye'll set that
bull-pup o' yours on me. I been there, an' come away again. You just
gimme some o' them rings an' things an' we'll call it square, me fine
lady!"
Phyllis's heart stood still at this open menace, but she ran on still. A
sudden thought came to her. She snatched her gilt sash-buckle--a pretty
thing but of small value--from her waist, and hurled it far behind the
tramp. In the half-light it might have been her gold mesh-bag.
"There's my money--go get it!" she gasped--and ran for her life. The
tramp, as she had hoped he would, dashed back after it and gave her the
start she needed. Breathless, terrified to death, she raced on, tearing
her frock, dropping the library cards and parasol she still had held in
her hand. Once she caught her sash on a tree-wire. Once her slipper-heel
caught and nearly threw her. The chase seemed unending. She could hear
the dreadful footsteps of the tramp behind her, and his snarling,
swearing voice panting out threats. He was drunk, she realized with
another thrill of horror. It was a nightmare happening.
On and on--she stumbled, fell, caught herself--but the tramp had gained.
Then at last the almost invisible gap in the hedge, and she fled
through.
"_Allan! Allan! Allan!_" she screamed, fleeing instinctively to his
chair.
The rose-garden was like a place of enchanted peace after the terror of
outside. Her quick vision as she rushed in was of Allan still there,
moveless in his chair, with the little black bull-dog lying asleep
across his arms and shoulder like a child. It often lay so. As she
entered, the scene broke up before her eyes like a dissolving view. She
saw the little dog wake and make what seemed one flying spring to the
tramp's throat, and sink his teeth in it--and Allan, at her scream,
_spring from his chair_!
Phyllis forgot everything at the sight of Allan, standing. Wallis and
the outdoor man, who had run to the spot at Phyllis's screams, were
dealing with the tramp, who was writhing on the grass, choking and
striking out wildly. But neither Phyllis nor Allan saw that. Which
caught the other in an embrace they never knew. They stood locked
together, forgetting everything else, he in the idea of her peril, she
in the wonder of his standing.
"Oh, darling, darling!" Allan was saying over and over again. "You are
safe--thank heaven you are safe! Oh, Phyllis, I could never forgive
myself if you had been hurt! Phyllis! Speak to me!"
But Phyllis's own safety did not concern her now. She could only think
of one thing. "_You can stand! You can stand!_" she reiterated. Then a
wonderful thought came to her, striking across the others, as she stood
locked in this miraculously raised Allan's arms. She spoke without
knowing that she had said it aloud. "_Do you care, too?_" she said very
low. Then the dominant thought returned. "You must sit down again," she
said hurriedly, to cover her confusion, and what she had said. "Please,
Allan, sit down. Please, dear--you'll tire yourself."
Allan sank into his chair again, still holding her. She dropped on her
knees beside him, with her arms around him. She had a little leisure
now to observe that Wallis, the ever-resourceful, had tied the tramp
neatly with the outdoor man's suspenders, which were nearer the surface
than his own, and succeeded in prying off the still unappeased Foxy, who
evidently was wronged at not having the tramp to finish. They carried
him off, into the back kitchen garden. Allan, now that he was certain of
Phyllis's safety, paid them not the least attention.
"Did you mean it?" he said passionately. "Tell me, did you mean what you
said?"
Phyllis dropped her dishevelled head on Allan's shoulder.
"I'm afraid--I'm going to cry, and--and I know you don't like it!" she
panted. Allan half drew, half guided her up into his arms.
"Was it true?" he insisted, giving her an impulsive little shake. She sat
up on his knees, wide-eyed and wet-cheeked like a child.
"But you knew that all along!" she said. "That was why I felt so
humiliated. It was _you_ that _I_ thought didn't care----"
Allan laughed joyously. "Care!" he said. "I should think I did, first,
last, and all the time! Why, Phyllis, child, didn't I behave like a
brute because I was jealous enough of John Hewitt to throw him in the
river? He was the first man you had seen since you married
me--attractive, and well, and clever, and all that--it would have been
natural enough if you'd liked him."
"Liked him!" said Phyllis in disdain. "When there was you? And I
thought--I thought it was the memory of Louise Frey that made you act
that way. You didn't want to talk about her, and you said it was all a
mistake----"
"I was a brute," said Allan again. "It was the memory that I was about
as useful as a rag doll, and that the world was full of live men with
real legs and arms, ready to fall in love with you.
"There's nobody but _you_ in the world," whispered Phyllis.... "But
you're well now, or you will be soon," she added joyously. She slipped
away from him. "Allan, don't you want to try to stand again? If you did
it then, you can do it now."
"Yes, by Jove, I do!" he said. But this time the effort to rise was
noticeable. Still, he could do it, with Phyllis's eager help.
"It must have been what Dr. Hewitt called neurasthenic inhibition," said
Phyllis, watching the miracle of a standing Allan. "That was what we
were talking about by the door that night, you foolish boy!... Oh, how
tall you are! I never realized you were tall, lying down, somehow!"
"I don't have to bend very far to kiss you, though," suggested Allan,
suiting the action to the word.
But Phyllis, when this was satisfactorily concluded, went back to the
great business of seeing how much Allan could walk. He sat down again
after a half-dozen steps, a little tired in spite of his excitement.
"I can't do much at a time yet, I suppose," he said a little ruefully.
"Do you mean to tell me, sweetheart--come over here closer, where I can
touch you--you're awfully far away--do you mean to tell me that all that
ailed me was I thought I couldn't move?"
"Oh, no!" explained Phyllis, moving her chair close, and then, as that
did not seem satisfactory, perching on the arm of Allan's. "You'd been
unable to move for so long that when you were able to at last your
subconscious mind clamped down on your muscles and was convinced you
couldn't. So no matter how much you consciously tried, you couldn't make
the muscles go till you were so strongly excited it broke the
inhibition--just as people can lift things in delirium or excitement
that they couldn't possibly move at other times. Do you see?"
"I do," said Allan, kissing the back of her neck irrelevantly. "If
somebody'd tried to shoot me up five years ago I might be a well man
now. That's a beautiful word of yours, Phyllis, inhibition. What a lot
of big words you know!"
"Oh, if you won't be serious!" said she.
"We'll have to be," said Allan, laughing, "for here's Wallis, and, as I
live, from the direction of the house. I thought they carried our friend
the tramp out through the hedge--he must have gone all the way around."
Phyllis was secretly certain that Wallis had been crying a little, but
all he said was, "We've taken the tramp to the lock-up, sir."
But his master and his mistress were not so dignified. They showed him
exhaustively that Allan could really stand and walk, and Allan
demonstrated it, and Wallis nearly cried again. Then they went in, for
Phyllis was sure Allan needed a thorough rest after all this. She was
shaking from head to foot herself with joyful excitement, but she did
not even know it. And it was long past dinner-time, though every one but
Lily-Anna, to whom the happy news had somehow filtered, had forgotten
it.
"I've always wanted to hold you in my arms, this way," said Allan late
that evening, as they stood in the rose-garden again; "but I thought I
never would.... Phyllis, did you ever want me to?"
It was too beautiful a moonlight night to waste in the house, or even on
the porch. The couch had been wheeled to its accustomed place in the
rose-garden, and Allan was supposed to be lying on it as he often did in
the evenings. But it was hard to make him stay there.
"Oh, you _must_ lie down," said Phyllis hurriedly, trying to move out of
the circle of his arms. "You mustn't stand till we find how much is
enough.... I'm going to send for the wolfhound next week. You won't mind
him now, will you?"
"Did you ever want to be here in my arms, Phyllis?"
"Of course not!" said Phyllis, as a modest young person should.
"But--but----"
"Well, my wife?"
"I've often wondered just where I'd reach to," said Phyllis in a
rush.... "Allan, _please_ don't stand any longer!"
"I'll lie down if you'll sit on the couch by me."
"Very well," said Phyllis; and sat obediently in the curve of his arm
when he had settled himself in the old position, the one that looked so
much more natural for him.
"Mine, every bit of you!" he said exultantly. "Heaven bless that
tramp!... And to think we were talking about annulments!... Do you
remember that first night, dear, after mother died? I was half-mad with
grief and physical pain. And Wallis went after you. I didn't want him
to. But he trusted you from the first--good old Wallis! And you came in
with that swift, sweeping step of yours, as I've seen you come fifty
times since--half-flying, it seemed to me then--with all your pretty
hair loose, and an angelic sort of a white thing on. I expect I was a
brute to you--I don't remember how I acted--but I know you sat on the
bed by me and took both my wrists in those strong little hands of yours,
and talked to me and quieted me till I fell fast asleep. You gave me the
first consecutive sleep I'd had in four months. It felt as if life and
calmness and strength were pouring from you to me. You stayed till I
fell asleep."
"I remember," said Phyllis softly. She laid her cheek by his, as it had
been on that strange marriage evening that seemed so far away now. "I
was afraid of you at first. But I felt that, too, as if I were giving
you my strength. I was so glad I could! And then I fell asleep, too,
over on your shoulder."
"You never told me that," said Allan reproachfully. Phyllis laughed a
little.
"There never seemed to be any point in our conversations where it fitted
in neatly," she said demurely. Allan laughed, too.
"You should have made one. But what I was going to tell you was--I think
I began to be in love with you then. I didn't know it, but I did. And it
got worse and worse but I didn't know what ailed me till Johnny drifted
in, bless his heart! Then I did. Oh, Phyllis, it was awful! To have you
with me all the time, acting like an angel, waiting on me hand and foot,
and not knowing whether you had any use for me or not!... And you never
kissed me good-night last night."
Phyllis did not answer. She only bent a little, and kissed her husband
on the lips, very sweetly and simply, of her own accord. But she said
nothing then of the long, restless, half-happy, half-wretched time when
she had loved him and never even hoped he would care for her. There was
time for all that. There were going to be long, joyous years together,
years of being a "real woman," as she had so passionately wished to be
that day in the library. She would never again need to envy any woman
happiness or love or laughter. It was all before her now, youth and joy
and love, and Allan, her Allan, soon to be well, and loving her--loving
nobody else but her!
"Oh, I love you, Allan!" was all she said.
End of Project Gutenberg's The Rose Garden Husband, by Margaret Widdemer
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