THE MONTGOMERYS OF MONTGOMERY
A stout, spectacled gentleman of fifty or thereabouts appeared at
intervals, every business day of the year, on the steps of Montgomery's
Bank, at the corner of Main and Franklin Streets. As he stood on this
pedestal, wearing, winter and summer, a blue-and-white seersucker office
coat tightly buttoned about his pudgy form, and frequently with an
ancient straw hat perched on the side of his head, it was fair to assume
that he was in some way connected with the institution from whose doors
he emerged. This was, indeed, the fact, and any intelligent child could
have enlightened a stranger as to the name of the stout gentleman
indicated. He was one of the first citizens of the community, if wealth,
probity, and long residence may be said to count for anything. And his
name, which it were absurd longer to conceal, was Amzi Montgomery, or,
to particularize, Amzi Montgomery III. As both his father and his
grandfather who had borne the same name slept peacefully in Greenlawn,
it is unnecessary to continue in this narrative the numerical
designation of this living Amzi who braved the worst of weathers to
inspect the moving incidents of Main Street as a relief from the strain
and stress of the business of a private banker.
When, every hour or so, Mr. Montgomery, exposing a pink bald head to the
elements, glanced up and down the street, usually with a cigar planted
resolutely in the corner of his mouth, it was commonly believed that he
saw everything that was happening, not only in Main Street, but in all
the shops and in the rival banking-houses distributed along that
thoroughfare. After surveying the immediate scene,--having, for example,
noted the customers waiting at the counter of the First National Bank,
diagonally opposite,--something almost invariably impelled his glance
upward to the sign of a painless dentist, immediately above the First
National,--a propinquity which had caused a wag (one of the Montgomery's
customers) to express the hope that the dentist was more painless than
the bank in his extractions.
There was a clothing store directly opposite Amzi's bank, and his
wandering eye could not have failed to observe the lettering on the
windows of the office above it, which, in badly scratched gilt,
published the name of Thomas Kirkwood, Attorney at Law, to the
litigiously inclined. Still higher on the third and final story of the
building hung a photographer's sign in a dilapidated condition, and
though a studio skylight spoke further of photography, almost every one
knew that the artist had departed years ago, and that Tom Kirkwood had
never found another tenant for those upper rooms.
At two o'clock on the afternoon of the day following the return of Phil
Kirkwood and her father from their camp on Sugar Creek, as Mr.
Montgomery appeared upon the steps of the bank and gazed with his usual
unconcern up and down Main Street, his spectacles pointed finally (or so
it seemed) to the photographer's studio over the way. Although a slight
mist was falling and umbrellas bobbed inanely in the fashion of
umbrellas, Amzi in his seersucker coat was apparently oblivious of the
weather's inclemency. One of the windows of the abandoned photograph
gallery was open, and suddenly, without the slightest warning, the head
of Miss Phyllis Kirkwood bent over the cornice and she waved her hand
with unmistakable friendliness. It was then that Mr. Montgomery, as
though replying to a signal, detached his left hand from its pocket,
made a gesture as graceful as a man of his figure is capable of, and
then, allaying suspicion by passing the hand across his bald head, he
looked quickly toward the court-house tower and immediately withdrew to
continue his active supervision of the four clerks who sufficed for his
bank's business.
As depositors were now bringing to the receiving teller's window their
day's offerings, Mr. Montgomery took his stand at the paying teller's
window,--a part of his usual routine,--to relieve the pressure incident
to the closing hour, one teller at other times being quite equal to the
demands of both departments. Mr. Montgomery's manner of paying a check
was in itself individual. He laid his cigar on the edge of the counter,
passed the time of day with a slightly asthmatic voice, drew the check
toward him with the tips of his fingers, read it, cocked an eye at the
indorsement, and counted out the money with a bored air. If silver
entered into the transaction, he usually rang the last coin absently on
the glass surface of the counter.
In other times the sign on the window had proclaimed "Montgomery &
Holton, Bankers"; and the deletion of the second name from the
copartnership was due to an incident that must be set down succinctly
before we proceed further. Amzi II had left a family of five children,
of whom Phil Kirkwood's three aunts have already been mentioned. The
only one of the Montgomery girls, as they were locally designated, who
had made a marriage at all in keeping with the family dignity, had been
Lois.
Lois, every one said, was the handsomest, the most interesting of the
Montgomerys, and she had captured at eighteen the heart of Tom Kirkwood,
who had come out of the East to assume the chair of jurisprudence in
Madison College, which, as every one knows, is an institution
inseparably associated with the fame of Montgomery as a community of
enlightenment. Tom Kirkwood was a graduate of Williams College, with a
Berlin Ph.D., and he had, moreover, a modest patrimony which, after his
marriage to Lois Montgomery, he had invested in the block in Main Street
opposite the Montgomery Bank. The year following the marriage he had, in
keeping with an early resolution, resigned his professorship and begun
the practice of law. He seemed to have escaped the embarrassments and
prejudices that attend any practical undertakings by men who have borne
the title of professor, and whether his connection with the Montgomery
family saved him from such disqualification it was nevertheless true
that he entered upon the law brilliantly. Two or three successes in
important cases had launched him upon this second career auspiciously.
Amzi II was still living at the time of the marriage, and as he valued
his own position in the community and wished his family to maintain its
traditions, he had subdivided a large tract of woodland in which his
father's house stood, and bestowed an acre lot upon each of his
daughters. His son had declined a similar offer, having elected early in
life the bachelor state in which we have found him. As Lois had been the
first to marry, her house was planted nearest to the gray old brick in
which she had been reared.
If the gods favored the Montgomerys, they seemed no less to smile with a
peculiar indulgence upon the Kirkwoods. People who had said that Lois
was a trifle strong-willed and given to frivolity were convinced that
her marriage had done much to sober her. In the second year thereafter
Phyllis was born, a further assurance that Lois was thoroughly
established among the staid matrons of her native town. Then in the
fifth year of her marriage, rumors--almost the first scandalous gossip
that had ever passed current in those quiet streets--began to be heard.
It did not seem possible that in a community whose morals were nurtured
in Center Church, a town where everybody was "good," where no
respectable man ever entered a saloon and divorce was a word not to be
spoken before children,--that here, a daughter of the house of
Montgomery was causing anxiety among those jealous of her good name. A
few of Kirkwood's friends--and he had many--may have known the inner
history of the cloud that darkened his house; but the end came with a
blinding flash that left him dazed and dumb.
The town was so knit together, so like a big family, that Lois
Montgomery's escapade was a tragedy at every hearth-side. It was
immeasurably shocking that a young woman married to a reputable man, and
with a child still toddling after her, should have done this grievous
thing. To say that she had always been flighty, and that it was what
might have been expected of a woman as headstrong as she had been as a
girl, was no mollification of the blow to the local conscience, acutely
sensitive in all that pertained to the honor and sanctity of the
marriage tie. And Jack Holton! That she should have thrown away a man
like Tom Kirkwood, a gentleman and a scholar, for a rogue like Holton,
added to the blackness of her sin. The Holtons had been second only to
the Montgomerys in dignity. The conjunction of the names on the old sign
over the bank at Main and Franklin Streets had expressed not only
unquestioned financial stability, but a social worth likewise
unassailable. Jack Holton, like Amzi Montgomery, had inherited an
interest in the banking-house of Montgomery & Holton. To be sure his
brother William had been the active representative of the second
generation of Holtons, and Jack had never really settled down to
anything after he returned from the Eastern college to which he had been
sent; but these were things that had not been considered until after he
decamped with Lois Kirkwood. Many declared after the event that they had
"always known" that Jack was a bad lot. Those who sought to account for
Lois Kirkwood's infatuation remembered suddenly that he and Lois had
been boy and girl sweethearts and that she had once been engaged to
marry him. It was explained that his temperament and hers were
harmonious, and that Kirkwood, for all his fine abilities, was a
sober-minded fellow, without Holton's zest for the world's gayety. Any
further details--the countless trifles with which for half a dozen years
the gossips of Montgomery regaled themselves--are not for this writing.
Many years had passed--or, to be explicit, exactly sixteen. One of the
first results of the incident had been the immediate elimination of the
Holton half of the firm name by which the bank had long been known.
Jack's brother William organized the First National Bank, toward which
Mr. Amzi Montgomery's spectacles pointed several times daily, as
already noted. Samuel, the oldest son of the first Holton, tried a
variety of occupations before he was elected Secretary of State. He
never fully severed his ties with Montgomery, retaining a house in town
and the farm on Sugar Creek. After retiring from office, he became a
venturesome speculator, capitalizing his wide political acquaintance in
the sale of shares in all manner of mining and plantation companies, and
dying suddenly, had left his estate in a sad clutter.
In due course of time it became known that Lois Kirkwood had divorced
her husband at long range, from a Western state where such matters were
at the time transacted expeditiously, and a formal announcement of her
marriage to Holton subsequently appeared in the Montgomery "Evening
Star."
The day after his wife's departure Kirkwood left his home and did not
enter it again. It was said by romanticists among the local gossips that
he had touched nothing, leaving it exactly as it had been, and that he
always carried the key in his pocket as a reminder of his sorrow. Phil
was passed back and forth among her aunts, _seriatim_, until she went to
live with her father, in a rented house far from the original roof-tree.
Even in practicing the most rigid economy of space some reference must
be made to the attitude of Lois Kirkwood's sisters toward her as a
sinning woman. Their amazement had yielded at once to righteous
indignation. It was enough that she had sinned against Heaven; but that
she should have brought shame upon them all and placed half the
continent between herself and the scene and consequences of her
iniquity, leaving her family to shoulder all its responsibilities, was
too monstrous for expression. They were Montgomerys _of_ Montgomery; it
seemed incredible that the town itself could ever recover from the shock
of her egregious transgression. They vied with each other in
manifestations of sympathy for Kirkwood, whose nobility under suffering
was so admirable; and they lavished upon Phil (it had been _like_ Lois,
they discovered, to label her with the preposterous name of Phyllis!) an
affection which became in time a trial to the child's soul.
Their fury gained ardor from the fact that their brother Amzi had never,
after he had blinked at them all when they visited him in his private
room at the bank the morning after the elopement, mentioned to any
living soul the passing of this youngest sister. It had been an occasion
to rouse an older brother and the head of his house to some dramatic
pronouncement. He should have taken a stand, they said, though just what
stand one should take, when one's sister has run off with another man
and left a wholly admirable husband and a winsome baby daughter behind,
may not, perhaps, have been wholly clear to the minds of the remaining
impeccable sisters. They demanded he should confiscate her share of
their father's estate as punishment; this should now be Phil's; they
wanted this understood and they took care that their friends should know
that they had made this demand of Amzi. But a gentleman of philosophic
habit and temper, who serenely views the world from his bank's doorstep,
need hardly be expected to break his natural reticence to thunder at an
erring sister, or even to gladden the gallery (imaginably the whole town
that bears his name) by transfers of property, of which he was the
lawful trustee, to that lady's abandoned heir.
Lois had caused all eyes to focus upon the Montgomerys with a new
intentness. Before her escapade they had been accepted as a matter of
course; now that she had demonstrated that the Montgomerys were subject
to the temptations that beset all mankind, every one became curious as
to the further definition of the family weaknesses. The community may be
said to have awaited the marriages of the three remaining Montgomery
girls in much the same spirit that a family physician awaits the
appearance of measles in a child that has been exposed to that malady.
And Montgomery was not wholly disappointed.
Kate, who like Lois, was a trifle temperamental, had fallen before the
charms of one Lawrence Hastings. The manner of Hastings's advent in
Montgomery is perhaps worthy of a few words, inasmuch as he came to
stay. Hastings was an actor, who visited Montgomery one winter as a
member of a company that had trustfully ventured into the provinces with
a Shakespearean repertoire. Montgomery was favored in the hope that,
being a college town, it would rally to the call of the serious drama.
Unfortunately the college was otherwise engaged at the moment with a
drama of more contemporaneous interest and authorship. An unusually
severe January added to the eager and nipping air upon which the curtain
rises in "Hamlet," and proved too much for the well-meaning players.
Hastings (so ran tradition) had gallantly bestowed such money as he had
upon the ladies of the company to facilitate their flight to New York.
His father, a successful manufacturer of codfish packing-boxes at
Newburyport, telegraphed money for the prodigal's return with the
stipulation that he should forswear the inky cloak and abase himself in
the box factory.
At this point Kate Montgomery, in charge of an entertainment for the
benefit of Center Church, invited Hastings (thus providentially flung
upon the Hoosier coasts) to give a reading in the church parlors. Almost
coincidently the opera house at Montgomery needed a manager, and
Hastings accepted the position. The Avon Dramatic Club rose and
flourished that winter under Hastings's magic wand. It is not every town
of fifteen thousand that suddenly enrolls a Hamlet among her citizens,
and as the creator and chief spirit of the dramatic club, Hastings's
social acceptance was immediate and complete. In other times the town
would have been wary of an actor; but had not Hastings given his
services free of charge for the benefit of Center Church, and was he not
a gentleman, the son of a wealthy manufacturer, and had he not declined
money offered by telegraph that he might cling stubbornly to his art?
Kate Montgomery talked a good deal about his art, which he would not
relinquish for the boxing of codfish. After Hastings had given a lecture
on "Macbeth" (with readings from the play) in the chapel of Madison
College, his respectability was established. There was no reason
whatever why Kate Montgomery should not marry him; and she did, at the
end of his first year in town. He thereupon assumed the theater lease
and what had been the old "Grand Opera House" became under his ownership
"Hastings's Theater," or "The Hastings."
Fanny Montgomery had contented herself with the hand of a young man
named Fosdick who had been summoned to town to organize a commercial
club. In two years he added several industries to Montgomery's scant
list, and wheedled a new passenger station out of one of the lordly
railroads that had long held the town in scorn. Two of the industries
failed, the new station was cited as an awful example by the Professor
of Fine Arts at the college, and yet Paul Fosdick made himself essential
to Montgomery. The commercial club's bimonthly dinners gave the solid
citizens an excuse for leaving home six nights a year, and in a
community where meetings of whist clubs and church boards constituted
the only justification for carrying a latch-key this new freedom
established him at once as a friend of mankind. Fosdick was wholly
presentable, and while his contributions to the industrial glory of
Montgomery lacked elements of permanence, he had, so the "Evening Star"
solemnly averred, "done much to rouse our citizens from their lethargy
and blaze the starward trail." After he married Fanny, Fosdick opened an
office adjoining the Commercial Club rooms and his stationery bore the
legend "Investment Securities." Judge Walters, in appointing a receiver
for a corporation which Fosdick had organized for the manufacture and
sale of paving-brick, inadvertently spoke of the promoter's occupation
as that of a "dealer in insecurities"; but this playfulness on the
court's part did not shake confidence in Fosdick. He was a popular
fellow, and the success of those Commercial Club dinners was not to be
discounted by the cynical flings of a judge who was rich enough to be
comfortably indifferent to criticism.
Amzi Montgomery being, as hinted, a person of philosophic temperament,
had interposed no manner of objection to the several marriages of his
sisters until Josephine, the oldest, and the last to marry, tendered him
a brother-in-law in the person of Alexander Waterman. Josephine was the
least attractive of the sisters, and also, it was said, the meekest, the
kindest, and the most amiable. An early unhappy affair with a young
minister was a part of the local tradition, and she had been cited as a
broken-hearted woman until she married Waterman. Waterman was a lawyer
who had been seized early in life with a mania for running for Congress.
The district had long been Republican, but with singular obstinacy
Waterman insisted on being a Democrat. His party being hopelessly in the
minority he was graciously permitted to have such nominations as he
liked, with the result that he had been defeated for nearly every office
within the gift of a proud people. He was a fair jury lawyer, and an
orator of considerable repute among those susceptible to the
blandishments of the florid school.
Amzi's resentment of Josephine's choice was said to be due to a grilling
the banker had received at Waterman's hands on the witness stand. Once
while standing on the steps of his bank for a survey of the visible
universe, Amzi was rewarded with an excellent view of the liveliest
runaway that had thrilled Main Street in years. Several persons were
hurt, and one of the victims had sued the grocer whose wagon had done
the mischief.
Waterman was the plaintiff's attorney, and Amzi Montgomery was, of
course, an important though reluctant witness. The banker loathed
litigation in all its forms and in his own affairs studiously avoided
it. It enraged him to find one of his idiosyncrasies advertised by the
fact that he had observed the violent collision of a grocer's wagon with
a fellow-citizen. His anger was augmented by the patronizing manner in
which Waterman compelled him to contribute to the record of the case
admissions touching his habits of life, which, though perfectly lawful
and decorous, became ridiculous when uttered on oath in a law court.
Every one knew that Mr. Montgomery stood on the bank steps at intervals
to take the air, but no one had ever dreamed that he would be obliged to
discuss or explain the habit.
The "Evening Star" printed all of his testimony that it dared; but as
the cross-examination had been conducted before a crowded courtroom the
neat give and take between lawyer and witness had not lacked thorough
reporting. For several weeks thereafter Amzi did not appear on the bank
steps; nor did he revert to his old habit until satisfied that groups of
idlers were not lying in wait. After Josephine introduced Waterman to
the family circle Amzi seemed generously to overlook the offense. He was
as cordial toward him as toward either of the other brothers-in-law,
with the exception of Kirkwood, though of course Kirkwood, strictly
speaking, no longer continued in that relationship.
These details aside, it is possible to return to the bank, and await the
result of that furtive gesture with which Mr. Amzi Montgomery responded
to Phil Kirkwood's signal from the window of the photograph gallery. By
half-past four the clerks had concluded their day's work; the routine
letters to Chicago, Cincinnati, and Indianapolis correspondents had been
sealed and dispatched, and the vault locked by Mr. Montgomery's own
hand. Thereupon he retired to the back room, unlocked the Franklin
Street door and beguiled himself with the "Evening Star." Shortly before
five o'clock he heard light steps outside followed by a tap and Phil
opened and closed the door.
"Lo, Amy!"
She pronounced the _a_ long, after a fashion she had adopted in
childhood and refused to relinquish. Amzi was "A-mee" to Phil. She
glanced into the bank room, seized his newspaper, crunched it into a
football, and kicked it over the tellers' cages into the front window.
Then she pressed her uncle down into his chair, grasped his face in her
hands, and held him while she kissed him on the nose, the left eye, and
the right cheek, choosing the spot in every instance with provoking
deliberation as she held his wriggling head. He lost his cigar and his
spectacles were knocked awry, but he did not appear to be distressed.
Phil set his spectacles straight, struck a match for a fresh cigar, and
seated herself on the table.
"I'm back, Amy. How did you know we'd be home to-day?"
"Dreamed it," said Amzi, apparently relieved that her assaults upon his
peace and dignity were ended.
"I'd been watching for you half an hour before you came out on the
steps. I'd about given you up."
"So? You were pretty late getting home last night. Your father ought to
be ashamed of himself."
Amzi glared at Phil. His curiously large blue eyes could, at will,
express ferocity, and the red and purple in his face deepened as he shut
his jaws tight. She was not, however, in the least disturbed, not even
when he pushed back his chair to escape her swinging legs, and pointed
his finger at her threateningly.
"I wanted to see you," he gasped.
"So I inferred," Phil remarked, bending forward and compressing her lips
as though making a careful calculation, then touching the point of his
nose.
Amzi rubbed the outraged nose with the back of his hand, wheezed
hoarsely (the effect of the rain upon his asthma), and cleared his
throat.
"You'll come down from your high horse in a minute. I've got something
to tell you that will sober you up a bit."
Phil raised her hands and with brown nimble fingers found and readjusted
the pin that affixed a shabby felt hat to her hair. Then she folded her
arms and looked at the tips of her shoes.
"The suspense is killing me. I who am about to die salute you!"
Amzi frowned at her levity. His frown caused a disturbance throughout
his vast tracts of baldness.
"You'll change your tune in a minute, my young commodore. Have you seen
your aunts?"
"No; but it's not their fault! Aunt Josie called; the others telephoned
for dates. I saw Aunt Josie first, which explains why we didn't meet. I
knew something was up."
"Something is up. They got me over to Josie's last night to ask me to
help. It's a big programme. And I wanted to warn you in advance. You've
got to stop all your capers; no more camps on Sugar Creek, no more
tomboy foolishness; no more general nonsense. You've got to be a
civilized woman, and conduct yourself according to the rules in such
cases made and provided."
"Oh, is that it? And they got you to tell me, did they? How sweet of
them!" observed Phil. "I might have guessed it from the look of Aunt
Josie's back as she went out the gate."
"Her back? Thunder! How did you see her back?"
"From the roof, Amy, if you must know. If you had three aunts who had
turned up every few minutes all your natural life to tell you what not
to do, you'd run for the roof, too, every time you heard the gate click.
And that last cook they put in the house was just a spy for them. But
she didn't spy long! I've bounced her!"
Amzi blinked and coughed, and feigned even greater ferocity.
"That's it! That's the kind of thing you've got to stop doing! You're
always bouncing the hired girls your aunts put in the house to take care
of you and you've got to quit; you've got to learn how to manage a
servant; you've got"--and he drew himself up to charge his words with
all possible dignity--"you've got to be a lady."
"You insinuate, Amy, that I'm not one, just natural born?"
"I don't mean any such thing," he blurted. "You know mighty well what I
mean--this skylarking, this galloping around town on your pony. You've
got to behave yourself; you've got to pay attention to what your aunts
tell you. You've got to listen to me!"
"Look me in the eye, you old fraud! I'll bet every one of 'em has called
you up to tell you to see me and give me a lecturing. They're a jolly
lot of cowards, that's all. And I came over here thinking you wanted to
be nice and cheerful like you always used to be. All by your dear old
lonesome you'd never think of talking to me like this; I've a good
notion to muss you up!"
The thought of being mussed was clearly disturbing. He rose hastily and
retreated to the barred window, with the table between them.
"Oh, you're guilty! I always know when they've been putting you up to
something. Come along now and sit down like a good old uncle and tell me
what new idea has struck those foolish females. Sit down right there in
your little chair, Amy; I'll let you off from that mussing if you tell
the truth."
"You see, Phil," he began earnestly, "you've grown up. You're not a kid
any more to chase cats and dogs through the court-house square, and flip
on the interurbans, but a grown woman, and you've got to begin acting
like one. And you've got to begin right now. Just look at your shoes;
look at that hat! What kind of clothes is that sailor boy's suit you're
wearing? You've got to dress like a decent white girl that's had some
bringing-up, and you've got to--you've got--" Amzi coughed as though
afraid of the intended conclusion of his sentence. Phil's eyes were bent
upon him with disconcerting gravity. He hoped that Phil would interrupt
with one of her usual impertinences; but with the suspicion of laughter
in her eyes she waited, so that he perforce blurted it out. "You've got
to go into society; that's what's the matter!"
Phil moved her head slightly to one side, and her lips parted. A faraway
look came into her eyes for an instant only. Amzi was watching her
keenly. He was taken aback by her abrupt change of manner; her sudden
sobriety baffled him. Something very sweet and wistful came into her
face; something that he had not seen there before, and he was touched by
it.
"I suppose I must change my ways, Uncle Amy. I do act like a wild
zebra,--I know that. But I'm sorry. Of course it's silly for a girl
who's nearly nineteen to be as skittish as I am. And they tell me I'm a
bad example to my cousins and the whole town. It's tough to be a bad
example. What's this they're going to do to me?"
"Oh, you've got to be brought out; you've got to have a party; they want
me to have it in my house."
"All right," said Phil tamely. She seemed, indeed, to be thinking of
something else. Her manner continued to puzzle him; he was even troubled
by it. He relighted his cigar and watched the smoke of the extinguished
match after he had tossed it into the little grate.
"Uncle Amy," said Phil, quite soberly, "I'm really serious now. I've
been wondering a good deal about what's going to become of me."
"How's that, Phil?"
"Well, I'm not as silly as I act; and I've been wondering whether I
oughtn't to try to do something?"
"What kind of something? Housekeeping--that sort of thing?"
"Yes; but more than that. I ought to go to work to earn money."
Amzi shrugged his shoulders.
"Thunder! you can't do that," he said with decision. "It wouldn't be
proper for you to do that."
"I don't see why not. Other girls do."
"Girls do when they have to. You don't have to."
"I'm not so sure of that. We might as well be sensible if we're going to
talk about it."
Amzi agreed to this with a nod and resettled himself in his chair.
"Daddy isn't making enough to take care of us, that's all. This
afternoon I was over in his office cleaning up his desk,--you know he
never does it himself, and even a harum-scarum like me can help it
some,--and I saw a lot of things that scared me. Bills and things like
that. And it would be hard to talk to daddy about it; I don't think I
ever could. And you know he really could make a lot of money if he
wanted to; I can tell that from the letters he gets. He doesn't answer
his letters. Every month last year I used to straighten his desk, and
some of last spring's bills are still there, and they haven't been paid.
I know, of course, that that can't go on forever."
"You oughtn't to have to bother about that, Phil. It's none of your
business."
"Yes," she replied, earnestly, "it is my business. And it's been
troubling me for a long time. I can't talk to father about it; you can
see how that would be; and he's such a dear--so fine and kind. I suppose
there isn't anybody on earth as fine as daddy. And he breaks my heart,
sometimes; goes about so quiet, as though he had gone into himself and
shut the blinds, as they do in a house where somebody's dead. It seems
just like that, Uncle Amy."
Amzi was uncomfortable. It was not to hear her speak of drawn blinds in
houses of the dead that he had summoned Phil for this interview. His
sisters had asked him to reason with her, as they had often appealed to
him before in their well-meant but tactless efforts to correct her
faults, but she had evinced an accession of reasonableness that made him
uneasy. She had changed from the impulsive, exasperating young creature
he knew into an anxious, depressed woman in a mackintosh, whom he did
not know at all! He breathed hard for a few minutes, angry at his
sisters for bringing this situation to pass. It was absurd to tame a
girl of Phil's spirit. He had enjoyed, more than anything in his life,
his confidential relations with Phil. It was more for the fun of the
thing than because there was any cause for it that a certain amount of
mystery was thrown about such interviews as this. There was no reason on
earth why Phil shouldn't have entered by the front door in
banking-hours, or visited him in her grandfather's house where he lived.
But he liked the joke of it. He liked all their jokes, and entered
zestfully into all manner of conspiracies with her, to the discomfiture
of the aunts, to thwart their curbing of her liberties. He prided
himself upon his complete self-control, and it was distinctly annoying
to find that Phil's future, seen against a background plastered with her
father's unpaid bills, caused a sudden hot anger to surge in his heart.
Within the range of his ambitions and desires he did as he liked; and he
had a hardened bachelor's fondness for having his way. He walked to the
window and stared out at the street. It grew late and the rain was
gathering volume as though preparing for a night of it.
A truck heavily loaded with boxes and crates of furniture moved slowly
through Franklin Street toward the railway. Amzi was at once alert. He
read much current history in the labels on passing freight, and often
formed the basis for credits therefrom. Was it possible that one of the
bank's customers was feloniously smuggling merchandise out of town to
avoid writs of attachment? Such evils had been known. Phil jumped from
the table and joined him at the window. She knew her Uncle Amzi's mental
processes much better than he imagined; suspicion was writ large on his
countenance.
"Humph!" she said. "That's only the stuff from the Samuel Holton house.
Charlie and Ethel are moving to Indianapolis. That's some of the
furniture they had in their town house here. I saw the crates in the
yard this morning."
"I believe you're right, Phil; I believe you're right."
His eyes opened and shut several times quickly, as he assimilated this
information. Then he recurred to Phil's affairs.
"Speaking of money, Phil, we'll have to do something about those unpaid
bills. In a town like this everybody knows everybody's business--except
yours and mine. We can't have your father's bills piling up; they've got
to be paid. And this brings me to something I've meant to speak to you
about for some time. In fact, I've just been waiting for a chance, but
you're so confoundedly hard to catch. There's--a--some money--er--that
is to say, Phil, as executor of your grandfather's estate, I hold some
money, that--er--"
He coughed furiously, blew his nose, and made a fresh start.
"I'm going to open an account for you--your own money, understand!--and
you can pay those bills yourself. We'll start with, say, five hundred
dollars and you can depend on a hundred a month. It will be
strictly--er--your money. Understand? You needn't say anything to your
father about it. That's all of that."
He feigned sudden interest in the wet street, but Phil, whose eyes had
not left him, tapped him lightly on the shoulder.
"Oh, no, you don't! You haven't a cent that belongs to me, and you know
it, you splendid old fraud. And don't you try that game on me again or
I'll stop speaking to you."
"Do you mean--" he began to bluster; "do you mean to say that I don't
know my own business? Do you think I'm going to steal money from your
grandfather's estate to give you? Why--"
"You weren't born to adorn the front row of successful liars, Amy. And
even if you had a million or two lying round loose, you couldn't give me
a cent of it; I wouldn't take it. It wouldn't be square to daddy;
daddy's a gentleman, you know, and I couldn't do anything meaner than to
take your money to pay his debts with. So there, you old dear, I've a
good notion to muss you up, after all."
He again put the table between them, and stood puffing from the unwonted
haste with which he had eluded her grasp. He had managed the matter
badly, and as his hand, thrust into his coat pocket, touched a check he
had written and placed there as a preliminary to this interview, a
sheepish expression crossed his face.
"Well," he blurted, "I'd like to know what in thunder you're going to
do! I tell you it's yours by right. I ought to have given it to you long
ago."
"I'm skipping," said Phil, reaching down to button her raincoat. "We're
going to Rose's for tea."
"Tea?"
Amzi's emphasis implied that in tea lay the sole importance of Phil's
announcement; and yet, subjected to even the most superficial analysis,
Mr. Montgomery's sensations were not in the least attributable to the
thought of tea. Tea in the sense intended by Phil was wholly
commonplace,--a combination of cold meat, or perhaps of broiled chicken,
with hot biscuits, and honey or jam, or maybe canned peaches with cream.
Considered either as a beverage or as a meal, tea contained no thrill;
and yet perhaps the thought of tea at Miss Rose Bartlett's aroused in
Amzi Montgomery's breast certain emotions which were concealed by his
explosive emphasis. Phil, turning up the collar of her mackintosh,
reaffirmed the fact of tea.
"You never come to my house for just tea, but you go to Rose's. You're
always going to Rose's for tea," boomed Amzi.
"Daddy likes to go," added Phil, moving toward the door.
"I suppose he does," remarked Amzi, a little absently.
"By-by, Amy. Thanks, just the same, anyhow."
"Good-night, Phil!"
Phil lingered, her hand on the knob.
"Come over yourself, after tea. There may be music. Daddy keeps his
'cello over there, you know."
"His 'cello?"
It seemed that 'cello, like tea, was a word of deep significance. Amzi
glared at Phil, who raised her head and laughed.
"Nonsense!" he ejaculated, though it was not clear just wherein the
nonsense lay.
"Oh, your old flute is over there, too," said Phil, not without scorn.
Having launched this she laughed again and the door closed upon her with
a bang. She hammered the glass with her knuckles to attract his
attention, flung back her head as she laughed again, and vanished.
Amzi stared at the door's rain-splashed pane. The world was empty now
that Phil had gone. He drew down the shabby green blind with a jerk and
prepared to go home.