Otherwise Phyllis Part 40

"But why don't you be a good brother and 'fess up? As I remember they're both nice women--quite charming and fine. I should think you'd take your pick first, and then let Tom have what's left. You deserve well of the world, and time flies. Don't you let my coming back here interfere with your plans. I'm not in your way. If you think I'm back on your hands, and that you can't bring home your bonny bride because I'm in your house, you're dead wrong. You ought to be relieved." She ended by indicating the memorandum of her a.s.sets; and then tore it into bits and began pushing them into a little pile on the table.

"It must be Rose--the musical one. Phil has told me about the good times you and she and Tom have had in Buckeye Lane. I looked all over the house for your flute and wondered what had become of it; so you keep it there, do you--you absurd brother! Rose plays the piano, you flute, and Tom saws the 'cello, and Nan and Phil are the audience. By the way, Mrs.

King mentioned a book Nan Bartlett seems to be responsible for--'The Gray Knight of Picardy.' Everybody was reading it on the train when I came out, but I didn't know it was a Montgomery production. Another Hoosier author for the hall of fame! It comes back to me that Nan always was rather different--quiet and literary. I don't doubt that she would be a splendid woman for Tom to marry."

"I don't know anything about it," said Amzi.

"Humph!" She flung the sc.r.a.ps of paper into the air and watched them fall about him in a brief snowstorm. She seemed to enjoy his discomfiture at the mention of the Bartletts. "Let's not be silly, you dear, delightful, elusive brother! If you want to marry, go ahead; the sooner the better. And if Tom wants to try again, I'll wish him the best luck in the world--the Lord knows I ought to! I suppose it's Nan, the literary one, he's interested in. She writes for the funny papers; Phil told me that; and if she's done a book that people read on trains, she'll make money out of it. And Tom's literary; I always had an idea he'd go in for writing sometime."

She mused a moment while Amzi mopped his head. He found it difficult to dance to the different tunes she piped. He would have given his body to be burned before referring to the possibility of Tom's marrying again; and yet Lois broached the subject without embarra.s.sment. Nothing, in fact, embarra.s.sed her. He knew a great banker in Chicago who made a point of never allowing any papers to lie on his desk; who disposed of everything as it came; and Lois reminded him of that man. There was no unfinished business on her table, no litter of memories to gather dust!

He not only loved her as a sister, but her personality fascinated him.

"They've been good to Tom; and they've been perfectly bully to Phil.

They're fine women," he said. "But as to whether Tom means to marry, I don't know; I honestly don't."

"Tut! You needn't be so solemn about it. I intend to see that you get married. If you wait much longer, some widow will come along and marry you for your money--a poor shrimp of a woman with a lot of anaemic children to worry you into your grave. And as for Tom, the quicker the better. I wonder--"

He waited while she wondered. She had an exceedingly pretty way of wondering.

"I wonder," she finished briskly, as though chagrined that she hadn't thought of it before--"I wonder if I oughtn't to tell Tom so!"

The "Thunder!" died in his throat at the appalling suggestion.

"O Lord, _no_!" he cried hoa.r.s.ely.

CHAPTER XIX

PHIL MOVES TO AMZI'S

When he had recovered from the first shock of his wife's return, Kirkwood adjusted himself to the new order of things in a philosophic temper. Nan had withdrawn absolutely her day-old promise to marry him.

That episode in his life was ended. He felt the n.o.bility of her att.i.tude without wholly accepting its conclusions. He had tried to persuade her that the geography of the matter had nothing to do with it; that having promised to marry him when they believed Lois to be safely out of the way, her return did not affect their status in the least. This was the flimsiest casuistry, as he well knew. It made a tremendous difference where Lois was!

"I have to go away to-morrow, Phil, and I'm likely to be in Indianapolis much of the time until spring. I can't take you with me very well; a hotel is no place for you, and I shall be very busy. And I can't leave you here alone, you know."

His tone was kind; he always meant to be kind, this dear father of hers!

He hurried on with an even greater thoughtfulness to antic.i.p.ate a solution of this problem which had occurred to her instantly, but which she lacked the courage to suggest.

"I saw your Uncle Amzi to-day and had a long talk with him about you. I proposed that you go to his house and stay, at least until I get through my work with the Sycamore Company. We won't make any definite date for your return, for the reason that I don't just know when I'll be free to settle down here again. Amzi was perfectly agreeable to the idea--quite splendid about it, in fact. Your mother, it seems, means to stay with him. And now there's this further thing, Phil. You won't mind my going into it a little bit, once and for all. The law gave you to me long ago, but apart from that I suppose I have a certain moral claim to you.

But I want you to feel free to do as you like where your mother's concerned. What I said of her yesterday I'm sorry for; I shouldn't have done that if I'd been myself. And I'm not making it necessary for you to make a choice between us. We're old comrades, you and I, Phil, and there can't be any shadow of a difference between us, now or ever. It's the simplest and easiest thing for you to go to your uncle's house, and we won't even consider the fact that your mother is there; we'll just a.s.sume that her being there is the most natural thing in the world, and that it's a matter of our common convenience for you to be there, too.

You see how perfectly easy and natural it all comes about."

She clung to him, the tears welling. She had never been disappointed in him, and this generosity moved her deeply. He was making it easy for her to go to her mother; that was all. Her soul rebelled against the fate that made necessary any choice when her father was so gentle, so wise, so kind, and her mother so transcendently charming and lovable.

"You are so good to me; you have always been so good!" she sobbed. "And I'm sorry I was ugly yesterday, about Nan. You know I love Nan. No one was ever kinder to me than Nan--hardly you, even! And I don't want you to give her up; you need each other; you do understand each other! Oh, everything is so queer and wrong!"

"No, Phil; things are not as queer and wrong as they look. Don't get that idea into your head. Life isn't queer or wrong; life simply isn't as easy as it looks, and that's very different."

He smiled, turning her face so that she could see that he smiled not unhappily.

"But I don't want you to go away; I'd die if I thought I shouldn't see you any more--and all the good times we've had, right here in this old house--and everything--"

"But this isn't the end of things. When I'm back, as I shall be for a day or two frequently, I'll always let you know; or you can run over to the city and do a theater with me whenever you like. So let's be cheerful about everything."

The pa.s.sing of her trunk from her father's house to her uncle's was not neglected by the gossips. Her three aunts noted it, and excoriated Kirkwood and Amzi. They took care that every one should know how they felt about the transfer of poor, dear Phil (on whom they had lavished their love and care for years, to the end that she might grow up respectable, etc., etc.) to a roof that sheltered her Jezebel of a mother.

"That was nice of him," said Lois, when Phil explained her coming.

"How's your father getting on these days?"

"Oh, quite well!" Phil replied.

She was establishing herself in a room adjoining her mother's. Lois, in a flowered silk kimona, commented upon Phil's clothes as they were hauled from the trunk. Her opinions in the main were touched with her light, glancing irony.

"I'll wager Jo bought that walnut-stain effect," she remarked, pointing an accusing finger at a dark waist. "That has Josephine stamped on it.

Poor old soul!"

Her manner of speaking of her sister set Phil to giggling. Mrs. Waterman had bought that particular article over Phil's solemn protest, and she now sat on the bed and watched her mother carry the odious thing gingerly by the collar to the door and fling it in the direction of the back stairs.

Lois brought from her own room a set of silver toilet articles and distributed them over the top of Phil's bureau.

"I forgot all about these, Phil; but they fit in handily right here. A little self-indulgence of my own, but my old ones are good enough. Oh, please don't!" she exclaimed, as Phil began to thank her. "Why shouldn't you have them? Who has a better right to them, I'd like to know!"

Whereupon she began experimenting with the nail-polisher from Phil's set.

"This is a good polisher, Phil. I'm going to show you how to do your own manicuring--every lady her own maid. Sarah dug up a colored hairdresser, manicurist, and light-running domestic chatterbox this morning, and she gave my hair a pulling I shan't forget in a hurry. Never again! If you can't have a trained maid, you'd better be your own beautifier. I had a wonderful girl the last time I was over, and took her with me on a motor trip through the chateau country. She was an outrageous little flirt.

Two chauffeurs got into a row about her during the week we spent at Tours, and one pounded the other into a pulp. The French rural police are duller than the ox, and they locked up Marie as a witness. Imagine my feelings! It was very annoying."

Her smile belied the annoyance. Phil surmised that she had enjoyed the experience; but Lois added no details to her hasty picture. Lois did not trouble herself greatly with details; everything with her was sketchy and impressionistic.

"What about boys, Phil?"

"I've had one proposal; he was a senior with a funny stammer. He went away with his diploma last June, and said he'd never forget. I got his cards to-day. She's a Lafayette girl he had down for the 'Pan' in his senior year. She has golden hair," Phil added musingly.

"The scoundrel; to forget you as quick as that!" And Lois laughed as Phil bent her head and clasped her hands in a mockery of dejection.

"You've come out and I suppose you are asked to all the parties. Let me see, when I was a girl there were candy-pullings, and 'companies' where you sat around and were bored until somebody proposed playing 'The Prince of Paris Lost his Hat' or some game like that. When the old folks went to bed, our hostess would find a pack of cards--authors, most likely--or play a waltz on the soft pedal for two couples to dance.

Wholesome but not exciting."

"Oh, we're livelier and better than that! They have real b.a.l.l.s now at the Masonic Hall; and all the fraternities have dances, and there's the Pan-h.e.l.lenic, and so on. And there are dinners in courses, and bridge no end!"

"Bridge!"

Lois shrugged her shoulders, lifted her pretty brows, and tossed the nail-polisher on to the bureau to emphasize her contempt for bridge in all its forms.

"As to young men, Phil. Tell me all about the Montgomery cavaliers."

"Oh, every girl knows all the boys. They are divided into two cla.s.ses as usual, nice and un-nice. Some of them have flirted with me and I have flirted with them. I suppose there was nothing very naughty in that."