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.