Otherwise Phyllis Part 37

"What a terrible young person you are! You seem to forget that I'm not the Holtons' attorney. I'm hired by the poor innocents who bought Sam Holton's bonds, and it's my business to get all the money for them I can. Charles's tricks with his father's estate only figure incidentally, but they have a dark look. It's merely a case of the sins of the parents being visited upon the children--"

He had been speaking half-carelessly, not really heeding what he said, and he arrested himself with an impatient shrug of the shoulders. The visitation of a parent's sins upon children was not a subject for discussion in that household, as Phil realized with a poignancy born of her morning's adventure. Kirkwood was instantly contrite as he saw tears in Phil's eyes. He would not for worlds have wounded her. It was impossible for him to know how in her new sensitiveness this careless speech, which a day earlier would have pa.s.sed unheeded, aroused all her instincts of defense. She was half-aware of the irony by which their talk about the nephews of Jack Holton had carried them with so fateful a directness to her mother.

Kirkwood frowned. His former wife was of all subjects the most ungrateful on this Christmas day. The old wounds had healed absolutely and the scars even had vanished in his new hope and happiness. He did not mean to have his day spoiled. He crossed the room to the window where Phil stood pulling idly at a withered geranium leaf. He drew her round and kissed her.

"Forgive me, dear old Phil! I wouldn't hurt you for ten thousand kingdoms. And I didn't mean that. I don't think it; moreover, I don't believe in that philosophy."

His contrition was unmistakedly sincere; yet she knew that if he had not obliterated the thought of her mother from his mind he would not have let slip that reference to parental sins. His forgetfulness was worse than the offense itself.

She experienced a sensation, new in all their intercourse, of wanting to hurt him. This was, in all kindness and charity, the instant for announcing her mother's return; and yet before making that disclosure Phil meant to force him to tell her in so many words that he was engaged to marry Nan. This was the most astonishing of all Phil's crowding experiences of the day, that she harbored with cruel satisfaction the thought of inflicting pain upon her father--her old comrade, with whom she had so joyfully camped and tramped and lived so many happy days in this little house, where now for the first time shadows danced malevolently.

"I wanted this to be a happy day, Phil. What do we care about the Holtons or Sycamore Traction! Charlie and Fred are all right, and I must say that I've been a good deal pleased by the att.i.tude of both the young fellows. But I have something to tell you; something you've been prepared for for a long time in that wise, old head of yours. It's made me the happiest man in the world; and I hope it will make you almost as happy. And I believe it's for your good; that it's going to be a great big factor in working out all your problems and mine! Come now, forgive me, and tell me whether you want three guesses as to what it is!"

He rested the tips of his fingers on her shoulders, standing off and looking at her with all the old fondness in his eyes. He had spoken buoyantly; his manner was that of a young man about to confide a love affair to a sympathetic sister.

Phil slipped from under his hands and stood rigid, with her back against the geranium box. She swallowed a sob and lifted her head to meet the blow. He would not have it thus, but caught her hands and swung them in a tight clasp.

"It's Nan, Phil, dear: Nan's promised to marry me! She's been saying she never would. It was only last night she agreed to take this poor old wreck and try to make a man of me. We meant to tell you to-day if Fred Holton hadn't come in, and then the girls had to run. But n.o.body is to know for a month yet; we mean to be married at Easter. That last point we fixed up just now in the library. You see what a lot of things can happen right here in dear old Montgomery within twenty-four hours."

He waited for one of her characteristic Philesque outbursts--one of the tumultuous mussings with which she celebrated her happy surprises.

Nothing was needed to complete his joy but Phil's approval, about which he had never had the slightest question. In his last talk with Nan on Christmas Eve they had discussed Phil and the effect of their marriage upon her rather more than upon themselves. And he had now exhausted himself upon the announcement; there was nothing more that he could say.

Phil's hands were cold in his, and with an almost imperceptible pressure she was thrusting him away from her. Two great tears welled in her eyes and stole down her cheeks.

"Why, Phil! I thought you--you of all people in the world--"

"Mamma has come back!" said Phil colorlessly; and repeated, "mamma has come back. She is at Uncle Amy's, and I have seen her."

There was silence for a little s.p.a.ce while he stared at her. Their eyes met in a long gaze. He grew suddenly white and she felt the trembling of his hands.

"O G.o.d, no!" he said hoa.r.s.ely. "You don't mean that, Phil. This is a joke--not here; not in Montgomery! She would never do that. Come, you mustn't trifle with me; it's--it's too horrible."

His voice sank to a whisper with his last word. The word and his tone in uttering it had not expressed the full sense of the horror that was in his face.

"It is true, daddy," she said softly, kindly. "I have seen her; I have talked with her."

"You saw her at Amzi's?" he asked dully.

"Yes; she came last night. I didn't know it until I got to the house this morning. They were all there, and when I went in they tried to send me off; they thought I oughtn't to see her."

"There was a scene, then; they were ugly about it?"

"They tried to be; but it didn't go!"

He noted the faltering triumph of her tone and looked at her more closely.

"They wanted her to go and she held her ground against them?"

"I held it with her," said Phil.

"You didn't think she should go; was that it, Phil?"

"I didn't think she should be treated like a dog!"

Phil drew away, with her head held high, her fists tightly clenched.

Kirkwood walked slowly across the room thrice while she stood immovable.

He recalled her presence in a moment and remarked absently:--

"Amzi should have told me. It wasn't fair for him to do this. If I had known last night that she was here--"

He broke off with a groan. The resigned, indifferent air he had lately flung off possessed him again, and seeing it the pity stole back into her heart. She moved about, avoiding him, fearful of meeting again that hurt, wounded look in his eyes. The short day was drawing to an end, and the shadows deepened. He was mechanically lighting his pipe, and she crouched in her favorite seat by the fire.

"It's a little tough, Phil," he said finally with a revival of courage, pausing in his slow, aimless wandering through the rooms. "It's a little tough after so long, and _now_."

She could not controvert this; she merely waited to see what further he had to say. He paused presently, his arm on the mantel-shelf, his fingers nervously playing with his pipe.

"What is she like, Phil?"

"Oh, she is lovely! She is the most charming woman that ever lived!"

"You liked her, then; she was nice to you?"

"She is dear and sweet and wonderful! Oh, I didn't know she would be like that!"

His eyes opened and shut quickly. There was an implied accusation against him in the fervor of her admiration for the wife who had deserted him. He groped for something in self-justification with which to confute Lois Montgomery's daughter.

"You found her what you would like your mother to be,--you didn't think her hard or cruel?"

"No."

"You wouldn't have thought her a woman who would desert a husband and a helpless baby and run away with another man?"

There was silence in the room. He had mercilessly condensed the case against Lois Montgomery, reducing it to its harshest terms for Phil's contemplation. It was in Phil's mind that she had nothing to do with those things; that the woman against whose cheek she had laid her own was not Thomas Kirkwood's recreant wife, but another and very different person. She did not know how to express this; it seemed preposterous to insist to her father that his former wife was not the same woman that she had held speech with that day.

"I can't talk about her in that way, daddy. I can't tell you just how I feel. But it seemed so wonderful, when I went into the house, and those horrible creatures were circling round her like wolves, that we understood each other, she and I, without a word being said! And I hated them all, except dear old Amy. They all went home and Amy went off and left us alone, and we talked just as though we had been old friends."

She ceased as though to attempt to describe it would be profanation.

"What did she say--about me?" he asked blindly.

"Oh, she didn't talk about you at all! It wasn't that kind of talk--not about what she had done--not even about what she meant to do! She is so young! She is just like a girl! And she speaks so charmingly, with the loveliest voice. It's like the way the water ripples round the big boulders at The Run."

"She hadn't anything to say about her going off? I don't quite believe you mean that, Phil."

"That's exactly the truth, daddy"; and there was grieved surprise in her tone. "Why, she isn't like that; she wouldn't ever say anything to hurt any one. I haven't words to tell you about her, because there was never any one like her. She is all sunniness and sweetness. And she's the most amusing person I ever saw,--ever so droll and funny!"

Phil's refusal or inability to see her mother in robes of sin irritated Kirkwood. For Phil to call her an amusing person was sheer childish navete. Phil was the victim of an infatuation which he could understand now that his wife began to live again in his imagination. He had read in books that the maternal instinct will a.s.sert itself after long separations, where mother and child are without other clue than that of the mysterious filial and maternal tie to guide them; but his practical sense rejected the idea. If he had been warned of Lois's unaccountable return, he might have fortified Phil against her charms, but now it was too late. Lois was Phil's mother. Shocked as he was by this termination of his Christmas-Day happiness, his nature revolted against any attempt to shatter Phil's new idol. The fact that Lois had sinned as much against Phil as against himself was not something that he could urge now that Phil had taken her stand. The thought of Lois brought before him not only the unhappy past, but she seemed, with the cruelest calculation, to have planted herself in the path of his happy future.

He was intent upon a situation that called for immediate handling. He tried to bring the scattered dim stars in this new firmament to focus.

He might go to Nan and endeavor to minimize the effects of Lois's return, urging that if she wished to spend the rest of her life in Montgomery it was her affair, and had nothing whatever to do with her former husband or the woman he meant to marry. This was a sane, reasonable view of the situation; but its sanity and reasonableness were not likely to impress Nan Bartlett. Such an event as the sudden return of Lois would pa.s.s into local history as a great sensation. Jack Holton's re-appearance only a few weeks earlier had caused his fellow-townsmen to attack the old scandal with the avidity of a dog unearthing a neglected bone; and the return of the woman in the case could hardly fail to prove far more provocative of gossip. If Lois persisted in remaining in Montgomery, it was wholly unlikely that Nan would ever marry him; nor could he with any delicacy insist upon her doing so. They might marry and move to Indianapolis, thereby escaping the discomforts of the smaller town's criticism; and this was made possible by his brightening prospects. At any rate, it was only fair to go to Nan at once and lay the matter before her. Even now the news might have reached her; news spreads quickly in the world's compact Montgomerys.