"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 pa.s.s. 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 pa.s.sing 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 a.s.similated 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 bl.u.s.ter; "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 b.u.t.ton 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 a.n.a.lysis, 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 k.n.o.b.
"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 e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed, though it was not clear just wherein the nonsense lay.