GHOSTS SEE THE LIGHT AGAIN
Kirkwood plunged into work with an ardor that was not lost upon Phil. He
rose early and kept office hours with a new faithfulness, and he
frequently carried books and papers home for study. Something was
impending, Phil surmised, in the affairs of the Sycamore Traction
Company, for he had been to Indianapolis to confer with the New York
lawyer who represented the trustee for the bondholders and they had made
an inspection of the road together. It had always been Kirkwood's way
when aroused to devote himself tirelessly to his client's business, and
Phil had not failed to note how completely labor transformed him. His
languor and indifference now disappeared; he spoke feelingly of the
generosity of his Williams classmate, who had placed the Sycamore case
in his hands. It was a great opportunity and he assured her that he
meant to make the most of it.
He warned her that she was not to tell any one what he was engaged upon,
and that she must not be surprised into confessions by her aunts. He
began to visit the capital, always returning on the evening train,
though she knew that he might more comfortably have spent the night in
the city. He explained to Phil that he hoped to adjust the Sycamore's
affairs without litigation.
"I'm just enough of an old fogy to cut myself out of a big fee by
smoothing the wrinkles without a lawsuit. It's the professor in me,
Phil; it's the academic taint."
And to this the obvious retort was, of course, that it was because of
his highmindedness that he sought peaceable adjustments where more
drastic measures would have been to his profit.
She, too, was putting forth her best energies, and he was relieved to
find that she disposed of her work so lightly; even her frequent
calamities were a matter for jesting. They made a joke of the washing of
the supper dishes: he insisted on helping her, and would don an apron
and do the rougher part of it. He declared that he had never been so
well fed before, and that her cooking showed real genius. It would be a
dark day when his fee in the traction case would make it possible to
install a new maid-of-all work.
Phil was aware that their talk drifted often and with seeming
inevitableness to the Bartletts. Her successes with the housekeeping
were due to the friendly supervision of the sisters in Buckeye Lane. He
liked to hear her recount the ways in which they were her guide and
inspiration. In doubts she flew to them; but one or the other appeared
almost daily at the cottage. "Rose showed me how to make that sponge
cake," Phil would say; or, if the furniture in their little parlor had
been rearranged, it was very likely Nan who had suggested the change. It
was a considerable distance across town from the Kirkwoods' to Number 98
Buckeye Lane, and as these women were exceedingly busy it was not
without sacrifice that they visited Phil so constantly. "Nan read me
some new jokes she's just sending off this morning: I wonder how people
think up such things," Phil would observe, turning, perhaps, with her
hand on the pantry door; and she knew that her father's face lighted at
the mention of Nan and her jokes.
The aunts had not been above planting in Phil's young breast the
suspicion that her father was romantically "interested" in one of the
Bartletts--as to which one they hoped she would enlighten them. They
tried to keep track of the visits paid by the father and daughter to
Buckeye Lane; their veiled inquiries were tinged also with suspicions
that Amzi might be contemplating marriage with one of these maiden
ladies of the Lane--the uncertainties in each case as to the bright star
of particular adoration giving edge to their curiosity. The cautious
approaches, the traps set in unexpected places, amused Phil when she was
not angered by them. As she viewed the matter it would be perfectly
natural for her father to marry either of the Bartlett sisters, her only
fear being that marriage would disturb the existing relations between
the two houses which were now so wholly satisfactory.
Phil managed to visit her father's office every day or two, trips to
"town" being among the Montgomery housewife's privileges, a part of her
routine. Much visiting was done in Main Street, and there was always
something to take one into Struby's drug-store, which served as a club.
Even in winter there was hot chocolate and bouillon to justify the
sociably inclined in lingering at the soda-water tables by the front
windows. Phil, heedful of the warnings of the court-house clock, managed
to keep in touch with current history without jeopardizing the
regularity of meals at home. She was acquiring the ease of the Bartletts
in maintaining a household with a minimum of labor and worry. Her aunts
had convoyed her to Indianapolis to buy a gown for the coming-out party,
which was now fixed for the middle of November; and they were to return
to the city shortly for a fitting. All Main Street was aware that Phil
was to be brought out; the aunts had given wide publicity to the matter;
they had sighingly confessed to their friends the difficulties, the
labor, the embarrassment of planting their niece firmly in society.
Phil, dropping into her father's office in the middle of an afternoon
and finding him absent, dusted it from force of habit and began turning
the pages of a battered copy of "Elia" she kept tucked away in an alcove
that contained the Indiana Reports. A sign pinned on the door stated
that her father would return in half an hour. This card, which had
adorned the door persistently for several years, had lately ceased to
prophesy falsely, Phil knew, and she thought she heard her father on the
stairs when a young man she did not at once recognize opened the door
and glanced about, then removed his hat and asked if Mr. Kirkwood would
return shortly.
"I'm Mr. Charles Holton," said the visitor.
For a man to prefix "mister" to his own name was contrary to local
usage, and the manner, the voice, the city clothes of Charles Holton at
once interested Phil. She was sitting in her father's old swivel chair,
well drawn in under his big flat-top desk, across which she surveyed the
visitor at leisure. She placed him at once in his proper niche among the
Holtons: it was of him that people were speaking as a Montgomery boy who
was making himself known at the capital. He was the brother of Ethel and
Fred, and clearly an alert and dashing person.
"Pardon me; but I remember you perfectly, Miss Kirkwood. I hope we may
dispense with the formality of an introduction--we old Montgomery
people--and that sort of thing!"
Holton carried a stick, which was not done in Montgomery save by elderly
men, or incumbents of office, like Judge Walters or Congressman
Reynolds. His necktie also suggested more opulent avenues than Main
Street.
"By the outward and visible sign upon the portal I assume that Mr.
Kirkwood will return shortly."
He referred to his watch, absently turned the stem-key, and sat down in
one of the chairs which Phil had lately dusted.
"I used to see you around a lot when I was a boy--you and your pony; but
we've all been away so much--my sister Ethel and I. You know Ethel?"
"I've seen her," said Phil.
"We've just been breaking up our old home here. Rather tough, too, when
you think we're quite alone. We've sold the old house; sorry, but the
best offer I got was from a doctor who wants to turn it into a
drink-cure sanatorium. Tough on the neighbors, but there you are! It
didn't seem square to stand in the way of bracing up booze victims."
He expected her approval of this attitude; and Phil murmured phrases
that seemed to fill the gap he left for them.
"Had to go to the highest bidder--you can hardly give away an old house
like that in a place like this. Neighbors are kicking, but it wasn't my
fault."
Phil said she supposed that was so.
She was still noting various small items of Holton's raiment--his tan
oxford shoes, brilliant socks, and brown derby. A brown derby seemed odd
in Montgomery. From the pocket of his sackcoat protruded the cuffs of
tan gloves, and he wore an inconspicuous watch chain passed from pocket
to pocket of his waistcoat. Not even the most prosperous of the college
seniors had ever presented to Phil's eye a variety of adornments so
tastefully chosen, a color scheme so effective. The interview seemed to
be to the young man's liking. He talked with assurance, holding his
light stick with one hand, and balancing his hat on his knee with the
other. Often before men had come into the office as Phil sat there and
she had conversed with them while they waited for her father. She had
usually exhausted the possibilities in forecasting her father's return
at such times; but this gentleman seemed in no wise impatient. He spoke
of the world's affairs lightly and with a flattering confidence in the
understanding and sympathy of his auditor. The theatrical attractions at
the capital, the promise of grand opera in Chicago, the political
changes, these were things of passing interest, but nothing to grow
feverish about.
"The new trolley line will make a lot of difference to towns like
Montgomery--revolutionize things in fact. Part of the great social
change that is apparent all over the Middle West. There won't be any
country folks any more; all hitched on to the cities--the rubes
derubenized and inter-urbanized!"
Phil admitted that the changes he suggested were of significance. Her
father often used similar phrases in speaking of tendencies and
influences; but it was to be expected of him. The same ideas as
expressed by Charles Holton derived a certain importance from the fact
that he condescended to utter them; they gained weight and authority
from his manner of presenting them. He was not only a man of the world,
but an acute observer of social phenomena; and he was a new sort. She
had not known any one like him. The memory of her two meetings with Fred
came back to her: she recalled them the more clearly by reason of the
contrast between the brothers.
"Your brother has moved back to the farm," she suggested to gain
confirmation of a relationship which seemed hardly plausible with this
radiant young person before her.
"Oh, Fred! Well, I'd have you know that I offered to take Fred in with
me, but he wouldn't see it. I'd like the folks over here to know that;
but I couldn't do anything with him. He camped on one of our Mexican
mines so long that he is afraid of cities,--isn't city-broke,--and
seemed relieved when I suggested that he take the farm. It's no great
shakes of a farm as farms go, but he's one of these plodding chaps who
like a hard job. He came back and took a look around and said it was
back to the soil for him! So there was the farm, just waiting for
somebody to tackle it. I haven't seen him for some time,--I'm terribly
busy,--but I dare say he's out there, an earnest young husbandman
anxious to become one of these prosperous farmers who push the price of
bread out of sight and cry to have the tariff taken off champagne. You
don't happen to know Fred?"
"I've met your brother," said Phil with reserve.
"Well, I suppose we Montgomery folks are all acquainted without being
introduced. Lots of 'em moving to Indianapolis; I'm thinking of
organizing a club over there to keep the Montgomery people together--an
annual dinner, say; and that sort of thing. Do you know, it's rather
nice of you to be talking to me in this friendly, neighborly way; it
really is."
As Phil seemed not to see at once wherein the particular kindness of it
lay, he smiled and continued:--
"Our families haven't been so friendly, you know. Pardon me!"
Phil, seeing now what he meant, colored deeply, and glancing out of the
window was rewarded by a glimpse of Amzi's back. He had just concluded
an observation and was turning into the bank.
"You will pardon me, won't you," pleaded young Holton, lowering his
voice.
"I think father will be here shortly," Phil remarked irrelevantly.
He had opened himself to the suspicion that he had broached the subject
of the antipathy between their houses merely to test its dramatic value.
To be talking to the daughter of a woman with whom his uncle had eloped
made a situation; it is possible that he liked situations that called
into action his wits and an evident gift for using his voice and eyes.
He had been rapidly noting Phil's good points. He wished to impress her,
and he was not convinced that the impression he had made was favorable
or that she forgave him for touching, however lightly, upon the
ungrateful topic of her mother's dereliction. He had never thought of
his Uncle Jack's escapade with Mrs. Kirkwood concretely; it had happened
long ago, before he became attentive to such things; but the young woman
with whom he was now conversing visualized the episode for him. In his
mind there was an element of picturesqueness in that joint page of
Holton-Montgomery history. He wondered whether Phil looked like her
mother. Phil was pretty enough, though in repose she seemed rather
spiritless. She was swinging herself in the swivel chair, carelessly,
and since his reference to the old scandal he saw or imagined that he
saw her manner change from courteous interest to a somewhat frosty
indifference. His pride was pricked by the sense of his blunder. He
flattered himself that in his intercourse with men and women he was
adroit in retrieving errors, and his instinct warned him that the
curtain must not fall upon a scene that left him in discomfiture at the
back of the stage.
"It pleased Ethel and me very much to have an invitation to your party,
Miss Kirkwood. It was nice of you to ask us, and we shall certainly come
over, even if I have to give up a trip to New York I had expected to
make at just that time. Let me see, it's the twentieth, isn't it? Well,
I guess I can make them wait down there. We Western folks don't often
get a chance to make New Yorkers wait."
Phil was disposed to be magnanimous. He undoubtedly wished to be
agreeable; and it was his uncle, a remote person whom she had never
seen, who had decamped with her mother. It was hardly just to hold him
accountable for his uncle's misdeeds. She wondered whether the uncle had
been like this nephew, or whether he was more like William Holton, whom
she had seen frequently all her life. In her encounters with Fred
Holton, she had only vaguely associated him with that other and
indubitably wicked Holton who had eloped with her mother.
She was conscious that some one was stirring in the room overhead, and
she became attentive to the sounds. Her father had asked delay in
disposing of the apparatus of the old photograph gallery; he had wanted
to look the old stuff over, he had said, and he wished also to utilize
the darkroom in developing the pictures he had taken on their last
outing. One of the objects of her call this afternoon had been to urge
him to haste, as Bernstein wanted to move his remodeling shop into the
rooms at once.
"I make it a rule of my life," Holton went on, "to duck when it comes to
other people's mistakes. I make enough of my own without shouldering
those my friends and relations are responsible for--particularly my
relations. For example, if dear old Fred wants to throw himself away on
a farm, that's his trouble. I did all I could to save him. And when I
had done that, I had done my best, and I'm a busy man with troubles of
my own!"
Her reception of this was not wholly satisfactory. She made in fact no
reply at all.
"Excuse me," she said, hearing steps unmistakably; "I think maybe father
is on the floor above. If you will wait here, I'll run up and see."
He saw her erect for the first time as she passed him. Her apparent
languor as she swung in the old creaky chair had belied what was
evidently her more natural manner. The few steps necessary to carry her
from the desk to the door were taken lightly, with a long, free stride.
Captain Wilson, in apostrophizing her as the Diana of Main Street, had
paid no inappropriate tribute to Phil's graceful carriage. Holton rose
as she crossed the room, noting her brown cheek, the golden glint in her
hair, her finely modeled features, her clear brown eyes and their dark
lashes. His eyes still rested upon the door for a moment after it had
closed upon her. Then he struck the floor with his stick, and whistled
softly. "Lordy!" he ejaculated.
Phil accused herself of dullness in not having thought earlier of the
photograph gallery. Her father must have been conducting himself very
quietly there or she would have heard him before. It had been a bright
day and he had undoubtedly been taking advantage of the sun to do his
printing. She had always encouraged his experiments in photography,
which afforded him one of his few recreations. He owned a fine camera
and he gave to every detail of the photographer's art the care he
bestowed upon anything that deeply interested him. They had bound in
portfolios many of the views obtained in their adventures afield, and he
had won prizes at state and national exhibitions of camera societies.
Phil was relieved to know that he was developing these newest plates,
for now there would be no excuse for retaining the deserted gallery and
it could be turned over to Bernstein without further delay.
It had grown late, and even under the glazed roof she did not at once
make him out.
"Daddy!" she called softly.
She had broken in upon one of his deep reveries, and as she spoke he
started guiltily. The oblong of glass he had been holding, staring at in
the lessening light, fell with a crash, breaking into countless pieces.
"Oh, daddy! Did I scare you like that! Hope it wasn't one of the best
negatives that went to smash--hard luck to wipe one of those Autumn on
Sugar Creek gems out of existence!"
"It's all right, Phil--all right. It was only an old negative. I was
looking over the rubbish here and amused myself by printing some of the
old plates. There are a lot of old ghosts hidden away there in the
closet. This was an old shop, you know, dating back to the Civil War,
and there are negatives here of a lot of our local heroes. I wonder if
it's right to throw them away? It's like exterminating a generation to
destroy them. There must be people who would like to have prints of some
of these."
"We might sell them to that new photographer for money enough to paint
the building," she suggested. "The real owner would owe us a lot of rent
if he ever turned up, which he never will. That would be our only way of
getting even."
"There spoke a practical mind, Phil!"
She knew from the poor result of his effort to appear cheery that
something had occurred to depress him. His own associations with
Montgomery had been too recent for the resurrection of old citizens to
have any deep significance for him.
"We must go, Phil; I didn't mean for you to catch me here. I've wasted
the whole afternoon--but some of the Sugar Creek views have come out
wonderfully. We must clean up and turn the room over to Bernstein right
away."
Her alert eyes marked the Sugar Creek pictures at one end of a shelf
built against the window, but from his position at the moment she had
surprised him in his brooding she knew that he had not been studying
them. Nor did these new prints from old plates present likenesses of
Montgomery's heroes of the sixties; but there were three--a little
quaint by reason of the costumes--of a child, a girl of fourteen, and a
young woman; and no second glance was necessary to confirm her instant
impression that these represented her mother--the mother of whom she had
no memory whatever. There were photographs and a miniature of her mother
at home, and at times she had dreamed over them; and there was a
portrait done by an itinerant artist which hung in her Uncle Amzi's
house, but this, her Aunt Josephine had once told her, did not in the
least resemble Lois.
Kirkwood tried clumsily to hide the prints.
"No; Phil, please don't!" he exclaimed harshly.
"Of course, I may see them, daddy,--of course!"
He allowed her to take them from him.
"It's mamma," said Phil. "How dear they are!" she murmured softly.
As she turned the prints to catch the dimming light, he watched her,
standing inertly with his elbow on the shelf.
"Isn't it odd that I never saw any of these! even Uncle Amy hasn't
them."
She bent over the print of the child, who stood with a hoop, smiling as
though in delight at her belated rescue from oblivion.
"You were going to give these to me, weren't you, daddy?" She was
running over the others. One that showed the mature woman in a fur cape
long out of fashion and with a fur cap perched on her head, held her
longest.
"If you want them," said her father, "you shall have them, of course. I
will touch them up a bit in the morning."
"Maybe," said Phil looking at him quickly, "it is better not to keep
them. Was it one of these plates that broke?"
"Yes," said Kirkwood; "it was this one"; and he indicated the picture
that revealed his wife in her young womanhood.
It was over this that he had been dreaming alone in the dim gallery when
she had interrupted his reverie. The pity of it all, the bleak
desolation of his life, smote her sharply, now that she had caught a
glimpse of the ghosts scampering off down the long vistas. With an
abrupt gesture she flung aside the melancholy reminder of his tragedy.
"Dear old daddy!" She held him in her strong arms and kissed him.
She felt that all these spectres must be driven back into their world
of shadows, and she seized the prints and tore them until only little
heaps of paper remained and these she scattered upon the floor.
"Are these the plates?"
He indicated them with a nod. One after the other they crashed echoingly
in the bare gallery. She accomplished the destruction swiftly and with
certainty. One that fell on edge undamaged she broke with her heel.
Then she took a match from his pocket and lit the gas in one of the old
burners. The light revealed a slight smile on his face, but it was not
his accustomed smile of good humor. His eyes were very sad and gentle.
"Thank you, dear old Phil! I guess that's the best way, after all. It
must be time to go home now. Are you ready?"
"Wait here a minute--you had better pull down the windows and lock up.
I'll close the office and you can meet me on the landing."
She went out, closing the door, and ran down to the office, where
Charles Holton stood at the window looking out upon Main Street, where
the electric lamps were just sputtering into light.
"Ah," he cried turning toward her with a bow, "I'd begun to think you
had forgotten my unworthy presence on earth!"
"Not at all, Mr. Holton. I'm sorry, but my father is too much engaged to
see you to-day. If you really want to see him you can come in
to-morrow."
This was not what he had expected. Dismissal was in her tone rather more
than in her words. Their eyes met for a moment in the dim dusk and he
would have prolonged the contact; but she walked to the desk and stood
there, looking down at the copy of "Elia" which lay as she had left it
when he had interrupted her reading. She refused to be conscious of his
disappointment or to make amends for having caused him to wait
needlessly. He turned at the door.
"I hope I haven't put you to any inconvenience?" he remarked, but
without resentment.
"Not at all, Mr. Holton. Good-afternoon!"
"Good-day, Miss Kirkwood."
She listened until his step died away down the stair and then went out
and whistled for her father.