Part 6 (1/2)
Her needle moved slowly and unaccustomedly but she had the air of doing the hemming bravely if fearfully.
”Isn't it darling?” she said as she raised her head for a half-second, then immediately dropped her eyes and went on printing her st.i.tches carefully. ”What else was in that box, I feel I need to know?” she asked.
”Let me see! The dozen little s.h.i.+rts, they were made out of some of my own trousseau things because of a scarcity of linen in those days, and two little embroidered caps and a blue cashmere sack and a set of crocheted socks and--and the major sent brandy, he always does. I have the letter she wrote me about it all. And to think she had to leave--” Mrs. Matilda's eyes misted as she paused to thread her needle.
”She didn't realize--that, and think of what she felt when she opened the box,” said Caroline as she raised her eyes that smiled through a threatened shower. ”Oh, I mustn't let the tears fall on Little Sister's ruffle!” she added quickly as she took up her work.
”That reminds me of an accident to the s.h.i.+rts I made for Phoebe. They were being bleached in the sun when a calf took a fancy to them and chewed two of them entirely up before we discovered him. I was so provoked, for I had no more linen as fine as I wanted.”
”Of course the calf ate up my s.h.i.+rts,” came in Phoebe's laughing voice from the doorway where she had been standing un.o.bserved for several minutes, watching Mrs. Buchanan and Caroline. ”Something is always chewing at my affairs but Mrs. Matilda shoos them away for me sometimes still--even _calves_ when it is positively necessary. How very industrious you do look! At times even I sigh for a needle, though I wouldn't know what to do with it. There seems to be something in a woman's soul that nothing but a needle satisfies; morbid craving, that!”
”Phoebe, I want to make something for you. I feel I must as soon as these petticoats for Little Sister are done. What shall it be?” and Caroline Darrah beamed upon Phoebe with the warmest of inter-woman glances. The affection for Phoebe which had possessed the heart of Caroline Darrah had deepened daily and to its demands, Phoebe, for her, had been most unusually responsive.
”At your present rate of st.i.tching I will have a year or two to decide, beautiful,” she answered as she settled down on the broad window-seat near them. ”David Kildare and I have come to lunch, Mrs. Matilda, and the major has sent him over for Andrew. I hope he brings him, but I doubt it.
I have told Tempie and she says she is glad to have us,” she added as Mrs. Buchanan turned and looked in the direction of the kitchen regions.
They all smiled, for the understanding that existed between Phoebe and Tempie was the subject of continual jest.
”Have you seen the babies to-day?” asked Caroline as she drew a long new thread through the needle. ”Isn't it lovely the way people are making them presents? Mr. Capers says the men at the mills are going to give them each a thousand dollar mill bond.”
”Well, I doubt seriously if they will live to use the bonds if some one does not stop David from trying experiments with them,” answered Phoebe with a laugh. ”After dinner last night he came in with two little sleeping hammock machines which he insisted in putting up on the wall for them. If the pulley catches you have to stand on a chair to extract them; and if it slips, down they come. Milly was so grateful and let him play with them for an hour; she's a sweet soul.”
”Has he sent any more food?” asked Mrs. Matilda as they all laughed.
”Two more cases of a new kind he saw advertised in a magazine. Somebody must tell him that--Milly is equal to the situation. Billy Bob _won't_; and so the cases continue to arrive. The pantry is crowded with them and they have sent a lot to the Day Nursery,” and Phoebe slipped from the window-seat down on to the rug at Caroline's feet in a perfect ecstasy of mirth.
”But he is just the dearest boy, Phoebe,” said Caroline Darrah as she paused in her sewing to caress the sleek, black, braided head tipped back against her knee. There was the shadow of reproach in her voice as she smiled down into the gray eyes upturned to hers.
”Yes,” answered Phoebe, instantly on the defensive, ”he is just exactly that, Caroline Darrah Brown--and he doesn't seem to be able to get over it. I'm afraid it's chronic with him.”
”He's young yet,” Mrs. Buchanan remarked as she clipped a thread with her bright scissors.
”No,” said Phoebe slowly, ”he is six years older than I am and that makes him thirty-two. I have earned my living for ten years and a man five years younger who sits at a desk next to mine at the office is taking care of his mother and educating two younger brothers on a salary that is less than mine--but _David_ is a dear! Did you see the little coats Polly sent the babies?” she asked quickly to close the subject and to cover a note of pain she had discovered in her own voice.
”They were lovely,” answered Mrs. Buchanan. ”Now let me show you how to roll and whip your ruffle, Caroline dear,” she added as she bent over Caroline's completed hem. In a moment they were both immersed in a scientific discussion of under-and-over st.i.tch.
Phoebe clasped her knees in her arms and gazed into the fire. Her own involuntary summing up of David Kildare had struck into her inner consciousness like a blow. And Phoebe could not have explained to even herself what it was in her that demanded the hewer of wood and drawer of water in a man--in David. Decidedly Phoebe's demands were for elementals and she questioned Kildare's right to his leisurely life based on the Jeffersonian ideals of his forefathers.
And while they sewed and chatted the hour away, over in the library the major and David were in interested conclave.
”Now, I leave it to you, Major, if he isn't just the limit,” said David on his return from his mission for the purpose of drawing Andrew from his lair. ”I couldn't budge him. He is writing away like all possessed with a two-apple-and-a-cracker lunch on the table beside him. He seems to enjoy a death-starve.”
”David,” said the major as he laid aside the book he had been buried in and began to polish his gla.s.ses, ”you make no allowances whatever for the artistic temperament. When a man is making connection with his solar plexus he doesn't consider the consumption of food of paramount importance. Now in this treatise of Aristotle--”
”Well, anyway, I've made up my mind to fix up something between him and Caroline Darrah. He's got to get a heart interest of his own and let mine alone. The child is daffy about his poetry and moons at him all the time out of the corners of her eyes, dandy eyes at that; but the old ink-swiller acts as if she wasn't there at all. What'll I do to make him just see her? Just see her--_see her_--that'll be enough!”
”David,” said the major quietly as he looked into the fire with his s.h.a.ggy brows bent over his keen eyes, ”the combination of a man heart and a woman heart makes a dangerous explosive at the best, but here are things that make it fatal. The one you are planning would be deadly.”
”Why, why in the world shouldn't I touch them off? Perfectly nice girl, all right man and--”
”Boy, have you forgotten that I told you of the night Andrew Sevier's father killed himself; yes, that he had sat the night through at the poker table with Peters Brown? Brown offered some restoration compromise to the widow but she refused--you know the struggle that she made and that it killed her. We both know the grit it took for Andrew to chisel himself into what he is. The first afternoon he met the girl in here, right by this table, for an instant I was frightened--only _she_ didn't know, thank G.o.d! The Almighty gardens His women-things well and fends off influences that shrivel; it behooves men to do the same.”
”So that's it,” exclaimed Kildare, serious in his dismay. ”Of course I remember it, but I had forgotten to connect up the circ.u.mstances. It's a mine all right, Major--and the poor little girl! She reads his poetry with Phoebe and to me and she admires him and is deferential and--that girl--the sweetest thing that ever happened! I don't know whether to go over and smash him or to cry on his collar.”