Otherwise Phyllis Part 26

"I want," said Fred, detainingly, speaking across the gate; "I want you to think well of me! I care a good deal about what you think of me!"

"Oh, everybody thinks well of you!" answered Phil, and caught up the drumstick and announced herself.

CHAPTER XIV

TURKEY RUN

A week before Christmas Mrs. William Holton gave a sleigh-ride and skating-party for a niece from Memphis, and Phil was invited. She mentioned the matter to her father, and asked him what she should do about it.

He had come back from Indianapolis in good spirits, and told her that the affairs of the traction company had been adjusted and that he hoped there would be no more trouble. He seemed infinitely relieved by the outcome, and his satisfaction expressed itself to her observing eyes in many ways. The confidence reposed in him by his old friend, the counsel of the Desbrosses Trust & Guaranty Company, had not only pleased him, but the success that had attended his efforts to adjust the traction company's difficulties without resorting to the courts had strengthened his waning self-confidence. He even appeared in a new suit of clothes, and with his beard cut shorter than he usually wore it,--changes that evoked the raillery in which Phil liked to indulge herself. He was promised the care of certain other Western interests of the Trust Company, and he had been offered a partnership in Indianapolis by one of the best lawyers in the state.

"Things are looking up, Phil. If another year had gone by in the old way, I should have been ready for the sc.r.a.p heap. But I miss the cooking our poverty introduced me to; and I shan't have any more time for fooling with excursions into Picardy with the Gray Knight. By the way, I found some strange ma.n.u.script on my desk at the office to-day. If you've take up the literary life you'll have to be careful how you leave your vestigia in lawyers' offices. It was page eighteen of something that I took the liberty of reading, and I thirsted for more."

She had not told him about "The Dogs of Main Street," wishing to wait until she could put the magazine containing it into his hands. Under the stimulus of the acceptance of her sketch she had been scratching vigorously in her spare moments. Having begun with dogs she meditated an attack upon man, and the incriminating page she had left behind in her father's office was a part of a story she was writing based upon an incident that had occurred at a reunion of Captain Wilson's regiment that fall in Montgomery. A man who had been drummed out of the regiment for cowardice suddenly reappeared among his old comrades with an explanation that restored him to honored fellowship. Phil had elaborated the real incident as Captain Wilson described it, and invested it with the element of "suspense," which she had read somewhere was essential to the short story.

Phil was living just now in a state of exaltation. She began a notebook after the manner of Hawthorne's, and was astonished at the ease with which she filled its pages. Now that her interest was aroused she saw "material" everywhere. The high school had given her German and French, and having heard her father say that the French were the great masters of fiction, she addressed herself to Balzac and Hugo. The personalities of favorite contemporaneous writers interested her tremendously, and she sought old files of literary periodicals that she might inform herself as to their methods of work. She kept Lamb and Stevenson on the stand by her bed and read them religiously every night. There had never been any fun like this! Her enjoyment of this secret inner life was so satisfying that she wished no one might ever know of it. She wrote and rewrote sentences and paragraphs, thrust them away into the drawers of the long table in her room to mellow--she had got this phrase from Nan,--and then dug them out in despair that they seemed so lifeless. She planned no end of books and confidently set down t.i.tles for these unborn masterpieces.

Nan and Rose marked the change in her. At times she sat with her chin in her hand staring into vacancy. The two women speculated about this and wondered whether her young soul was not in the throes of a first love affair.

Now that fortune smiled upon her father Phil's happiness marked new att.i.tudes, with no cloud to darken the misty-blue horizons of her dreams. She meant to be very good to her father. And as to his marrying Nan, she was giving much time to plots for furthering their romance.

"Fred Holton was looking for you the other day. I suppose you haven't seen him."

"Yes; he came to Indianapolis and saw me at the hotel. I remember that he was at your party, but I don't recall how you got acquainted with him?"

Phil laughed.

"Oh, that last night we camped at Turkey Run I wandered off by myself and met him in the funniest fashion, over by the Holton barn. They were having a dance--Charlie and Ethel, and Fred was watching the revel from afar, and saw me dancing like an idiot round the corn-shocks. And I talked to him across the fence and watched the dance in the barn until you blew the horn. I didn't tell you about it because it seemed so silly--and then I thought you wouldn't like my striking up acquaintances with those people. But Fred is nice, I think."

"He seems to be a very earnest young person. He came to me on a business matter in a spirit that is to his credit."

Phil had decided, in view of Nan's unlooked-for arraignment, to give her father another chance to express himself as to her further social relations with the Holtons.

"Daddy dear, I want you to tell me honestly whether you have any feeling about those people," she said when they were established at the fireside for the evening. "Of course, you know that one's aunts were responsible for asking them to Amy's party; it wasn't Amy's doings; but if you want me to keep clear of them I'll do it. Please tell me the truth--just how you feel about it."

"Phil," said Kirkwood, meeting her eyes steadily, "those aunts of yours are silly women--with vain, foolish, absurd ideals. They didn't consult me about asking the Holtons because I'm a stupid old frump, and it didn't make any difference whether I'd like it or not. But I'm eternally grateful that they did it; and I'm glad that other man came back just as he did. For all those things showed me that the years have blotted out any feeling I had against them. I haven't a bit, Phil. Maybe I ought to have; but however that may be there's no bitterness in my soul. And I'm glad I've discovered that; it's a greater relief to me than I can describe."

His smile, the light touch he gave her hands, carried conviction. The discussion seemed to afford him relief.

"So far as the Holtons concern me, there's peace between our houses.

It's perfectly easy for a man to shoot another who has done him a wrong; but it doesn't help any, for,"--and he smiled the smile that Phil loved in him--"for the man being dead can't know how much his enemy enjoys his taking off! Murder, as a fine art, Phil, falls short right there."

He had not mentioned her mother; and Phil wondered whether she too shared this amnesty. It was inconceivable that he should have forgiven the man if he still harbored hatred of the woman.

With a sudden impulse she rose and caught his face in her hands.

"Why don't you marry Nan, daddy?"

She saw the color deepen in his cheeks and a startled look came into his eyes.

"What madness is this, Phil?" he asked, with an effort at lightness.

"It means that I think it would be nice--nice for you and Nan and nice for me. I can see her here, sitting right there in that chair that she always sits in when she comes. I think it would be fun--lots of fun for her to be here all the time, so we wouldn't always be trailing over there."

He laughed; she felt that he was not sorry that she had spoken of Nan.

"Are we always trailing over there? I suppose they really are our best friends. But there is Rose, you know. Wouldn't she look just as much at home in her particular chair as Nan?"

"Well, Rose is fine, too, but Rose is different."

"Oh, you think there's a difference, do you?"

He picked up a book, turned over the leaves idly, and when he spoke again it was not of Nan.

"If you want to go to Mrs. Holton's party it's all right, Phil. I suppose most of the young people will be there."

"Yes; it's a large party."

"Then go and have a good time. And Phil--"

"Yes, daddy."

"Be careful what foolish notions you get into your head."

Mrs. William Holton undeniably did things with an air. It may have been an expression of her relief at having disposed of Jack Holton so quickly and effectively--he had vanished immediately after his interview with William in the bank--that her sleigh-ride and skating-party as originally planned grew into a function that well-nigh obscured Phil's "coming-out." It began with a buffet luncheon at home, followed by the ride countryward in half a dozen bob-sleds and sleighs of all descriptions. It was limited to the young people, and Phil found that all her friends were included. Ethel and Charles Holton had come over from Indianapolis to a.s.sist their aunt in her entertainment.

"Mighty nice to find you here!" said Charles to Phil as he stood beside her on the sidewalk waiting for their appointed "bob." "And you may be sure I'm glad to get a day off. I tell you this business life is a grind. It's what General Sherman said war is. I suppose your father told you what a time we've been having straightening out the traction tangle.

Scandal--most outrageous lying--but that father of yours is a master negotiator. He ought to be in the diplomatic service."

He looked at her guardedly with a quick narrowing of the eyes.

"Oh, I suppose it wasn't really so serious," said Phil indifferently.

"Father never brings business home with him and I only know that I don't like having him away so much."

"Yes," said Holton, "I don't doubt that you miss him. But Montgomery is getting gay. Over in Indianapolis there's more doing, of course, and bigger parties; but they don't have the good old home flavor. It's these informal gatherings of boys and girls who have known each other all their lives that count."

It was the brightest of winter days, with six inches of snow, and cold enough to set young blood tingling. They set off with a merry jingling of bells and drove through town to advertise their gayety before turning countryward. The destination was Turkey Run, that fantastic anomaly of the Hoosier landscape, where Montgomery did much of its picnicking.

A scout sent ahead the day before had chosen a stretch of ice where the creek broadened serenely after its bewilderingly tumultuous course through the gorge. There the ice was even and solid and the snow had been sc.r.a.ped away. In the defile, sheltered by its high rocky banks, bonfires were roaring. The party quickly divided itself into twos--why is it that parties always effect that subdivision with any sort of opportunity?--and the skaters were off.

Phil loved skating as she loved all sports that gave free play to her strong young limbs. The hero of the Thanksgiving football game had attached himself to her, but Phil, resenting his airs of proprietorship, deserted him after one turn.

As her blood warmed, her spirits rose. The exercise and the keen air sent her pulses bounding. It was among the realizations of her new inner life that physical exercise stimulated her mental processes. To-day lines, verses, couplets--her own or fragments of her reading--tumbled madly over each other in her head. No one ranged the ice more swiftly or daringly. She had put aside her coat and donned her sweater--not the old relic of the basketball team, but a new one from her fall outfit, which included also the prettiest of fur toques. The color was bright in her cheeks and the light shone in her eyes as she moved up and down the course with long, even strides or let herself fly at the boundaries, or turned in graceful curves. Skating was almost as much fun as swimming, and even better fun than paddling a canoe.