Part 8 (1/2)

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 rea.s.sured?”

”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 fas.h.i.+on.

”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 pa.s.sionate 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 s.h.i.+ny 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 pa.s.sion for music that they can create themselves by merely winding up something. And--to antic.i.p.ate--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.