A fairy bell was tinkling. The clear tones were part of a dream so
sweet, though afterwards not remembered, that Phœbe smiled in her sleep.
The tinkling grew steadily louder. Phœbe waked, saw where she was, and
raised her head to listen. The bell was outside. Persistent and musical,
its ringing called Phœbe from her bed to a window. She peered down
through a gap in the storm shutters.
A messenger boy on a bicycle was coming up the curving drive that led
from the front gate to the house. The rain was over. The sun glinted on
the metal of his wheel. He disappeared from Phœbe’s view under a square,
flat roof that was one story below her window.
She ran to put on her shoes and stockings. She splashed her face with
the icy water in the flowered bowl, and dressed at top speed. A
messenger boy conveyed only one thing to her: a telegram from her
mother.
She was right. When she came racing down to ask, her father was standing
by the front door in the big hall, the telegram open in his hand.
He did not permit Phœbe to read the wire, but put it away in the leather
case that held his paper money. And he did not reply to it by another
telegram when the messenger boy reminded him that there was an answer.
“I’ll write your mother,” he explained to Phœbe.
After breakfast he sat down to write. That first day at Grandma’s, Phœbe
learned that during each week-day morning the library was sacred to
Uncle John. So Phœbe’s father wrote at Grandma’s desk in the
sitting-room, with Phœbe writing at the sewing-table close by.
Her father’s letter was short. His face was stern as he wrote it. Then
he paced the floor. Phœbe had often seen him like that in New York. She
understood that he was frequently worried over business. And she
understood business worries, because she had seen several worried
business men in the “movies.” Usually they stood over curious machines
out of which ran a long narrow strip of paper. And as a rule they ended
by committing suicide with a pistol. Phœbe stole anxious glances toward
her father as she wrote.
“_Darling, darling Mother_,” ran her letter, “_I did as you said. But I
hope you’re going to tell me to come home right away. It’s nice here,
only I want you, and I hope I’ll be back before Saturday. Your loving
daughter, Phœbe._”
It was a short letter, since it occurred to Phœbe that perhaps a little
of her father’s pacing might be due to impatience. She was not a rapid
penman.
Her letter finished and folded, she took it to him. “Put this in with
yours, Daddy?” she asked.
He stared down at her, not answering for a moment. Then, “Yes,” he said,
“of course.” He added her letter to his, but he did not seal the
envelope.
When he was gone, Phœbe sat down to wait. There were things to be seen
outside—a barn to explore, and a chicken-coop. Also, Grandma had
promised to show Phœbe over the house. But Phœbe was not especially
interested. What she wanted most was the return of her father, that she
might hear the hour of her return to New York.
Sophie came in to set the living-room to rights. On better acquaintance,
there was something exceedingly attractive about Sophie. Her hair was so
bright, her eyes were roguish. She had dimples. In the matter of dress,
however, she entirely lacked that black-and-white smartness which Sally,
Mother’s colored maid, possessed. Remembering Sally gave Phœbe a happy
thought: Here was the one, of all those in the big house, who would be a
pleasant companion to the local “movies.”
“Is there a moving-picture theatre in this town?” she asked.
“Is there!” cried Sophie. “I should say! Many as nine, I guess.”
“Oh, I’m so glad!”
“Mm.” Sophie looked doubtful, somehow. But she kept her own counsel. “I
seen a grand picture last night,” she confided.
“Did you! Oh, tell me about it!”
First, for some reason, Sophie went to the door and looked out into the
hall. Then, launching into her story, she dropped her voice. “It was all
about awful rich folks,” she began. “There was a girl, and you seen her
at the start in her papa’s viller. He’s so rich that his hired men wear
knee pants.”
The story grew. With it mounted Phœbe’s interest and Sophie’s
enthusiasm. And when Sophie was done, Phœbe in turn remembered a picture
full of high adventure and love that put danger to scorn.
“The horse jumped off a fast train,” she related. “And the brave young
cow-boy fell to the water below. But horses can swim. This horse made
for shore, and the cow-boy swam along beside him. The waves were high—it
must have been the ocean. Now you saw him, now you didn’t. But he got
closer and closer to land. Pretty soon the horse touched bottom. You saw
the cow-boy was safe. When there, on the beach, stood the villain—with a
gun in his hands!”
“Phœbe.” Her father had entered. He was frowning at Sophie.
“Daddy!” Phœbe ran to him. “Oh, there are nine movie theatres in this
town, Sophie says. Oh Daddy, I’d like to go to one this afternoon.”
“But, Uncle John, Phœbe,” said her father.
She did not understand. “Couldn’t Sophie take me?”
“Phœbe, your Uncle John is a clergyman,” explained her father, his voice
grave. “If his niece goes to the movies, that looks as if he approves of
them. And he doesn’t.”
Phœbe stared, aghast. “But Mother took me hundreds of times,” she
reminded.
“Not in this town, dear.”
“But can’t I even see travel pictures?”
“I’m sorry.”
Phœbe sat down, dumbfounded. Sophie went out quietly, without lifting
those roguish eyes.
Phœbe’s father came over to his daughter, and rested a gentle hand on
her shoulder. “In this house,” he said, speaking very low, “the less my
little girl says about the movies the better.”
“Yes, sir,” answered Phœbe, dutifully.
But rebellion came into her heart that first morning. And thereafter her
Uncle John, rector of the town’s most exclusive church, and undeniably a
most devout man, was to play the rôle of villain in the drama which
Phœbe felt that she was living.
The subject of moving-pictures was forgotten temporarily when more fairy
tinklings announced the arrival, about noon, of a second messenger boy.
He had still another telegram from Phœbe’s mother. And this time he
waited while Phœbe’s father wrote out an answer. Then he went tinkling
away.
“Is Mother anxious about us, Daddy?” Phœbe wanted to know.
“Yes, darling. But we’re all right here, aren’t we?—for a little while.”
“I guess so,” said Phœbe, without enthusiasm.
A third telegram came later on in the day, and a fourth that evening.
The day following brought others. More arrived the day after that.
Phœbe’s father answered some of them in kind, others by letter. After
the arrival of the first one he had taken on something of a resigned,
almost cheerful, air, and had explained each message to Phœbe, declaring
laughingly that her mother would burn up the telegraph wires; while
Phœbe, with her numerous letters, would put a terrible strain on the
local post-office.
Yet for all his gaiety, Phœbe sensed that there was something about it
all which she did not understand. For one thing, why did her mother not
write to her?
“Has Mother written you?” she asked her father.
“Yes.” But though he searched his pockets and the desk, he failed to
locate the letter. Also he was not able to remember much that the letter
contained.
“Of course,” conceded Phœbe, “Mother isn’t a very good letter-writer.
Whenever you were away, she’d say, ‘You write to Daddy.’ And I would.
Darling Mother! She never liked to sit down and go at it. She just seems
to hate ink.”
“That’s why she wires,” declared Phœbe’s father. “It’s easy to get off a
telegram.—Oh, well.”
But Phœbe kept on puzzling over it all. When the telegrams stopped, her
father admitted that letters kept on arriving. But he never showed any
of them to Phœbe, or read to her from them. He explained that they were
about very private matters. “What?” Phœbe asked herself.
Yes, there was something about all this telegraphing and letter-writing
which she did not understand.