Chapter 25

Philip's kindness to his aunt's family was originally self-moved, but, as Phillida convalesced, his mother contrived to send him with messages to her, and even suggested to him that his company would be cheering to his cousin. Philip sat and chatted with her an hour every day, but the exercise did not raise his spirits in the least. For his mother frequently hinted that if he had courage he would be more prompt to avail himself of his opportunities in life. Philip could have no doubt as to what his mother meant by opportunities in life, and he knew better than any one else that he was prone to waste his haymaking sunshine in timid procrastinations. But how to make love to Phillida? How offer his odd personality to such a woman as she? His mother's severe hints about young men who could not pluck ripe fruit hanging ready to their hand spurred him, but whenever he was in Phillida's presence something of preoccupation in her mental attitude held him back from tender words. He thought himself a little ridiculous, and when he tried to imagine himself making love he thought that he would be ten times more absurd. If he could have got into his favorite position in an arm-chair and could have steadied his nerves by synchronous smoking, as he was accustomed to do whenever he had any embarrassing business matters to settle, he might have succeeded in expressing to Phillida the smoldering passion that made life a bitterness not to be sweetened even by Caxton imprints and Bedford-bound John Smiths of 1624.

He always knew that if he should ever succeed in letting Phillida know of his affection it would be by a sudden charge made before his diffidence could rally to oppose him. He had once or twice in his life done bold things by catching his dilatory temper napping. With this idea he went every day to call on Phillida, hoping that a fit of desperation might carry him at a bound over the barrier. At first he looked for some very favorable opportunity, but after several visits he would have been willing to accept one that offered the least encouragement.

There were but a few days left before Phillida's departure southward, and if he should allow her to escape he would incur the bitter reproaches of his own conscience, and, what seemed even worse, the serious disapproval of Mrs. Gouverneur.

Phillida and her mother were to leave on Friday afternoon by the Congressional Limited for Baltimore, and to take boat down the bay on Saturday. Philip had arranged it all. It was now Tuesday, and the time for "improving his opportunity in life" was short. On this Tuesday afternoon he talked an hour to Phillida, but he could not possibly cause the conversation to swing around so as to be able, even with considerable violence, to make the transition he desired. He first let her lead, and she talked to him about the East and the queer ways of the yellow Mongolians she remembered. These memories of early childhood, in the blessed period when care and responsibility had not yet disturbed the spirit's freedom, brought her a certain relief from gnawing reflections. When she tired it was his turn to lead, and he soon slipped into his old grooves and entertained her with stories of the marvelous prices fetched by Mazarin Bibles, and with accounts of people who had discovered "fourteeners" in out-of-the-way places, and such like lore of the old book-shop. All the time he was tormented by a despairing under-thought that love-making was just as far from book-collecting as it was from Phillida's Oriental memories. At length the under-thought suppressed the upper ones, and he paused and looked out of the window and drew his small form down on the chair, assuming his favorite attitude, while he supported his right elbow with his left hand and absent-mindedly held the fingers of the right hand near his lips as though to support an imaginary cigar.

"Philip," said the invalid, embarrassed by the silence, "I envy you your interest in books."

"You do?" Philip moved his right hand as he might have done in removing a cigar from the mouth and turned to Phillida. "Why?"

"It saves you from being crushed by the immensities as you call them. I suppose it has consoled you in many a trouble, and no doubt it has kept you from the miseries of falling in love."

She laid her thin hand on the arm of her chair as she spoke.

"Kept me from falling in love," gasped Philip, aware that his now-or-never had arrived, "how do you know that?"

"I never heard that you were in love with anybody. Excuse me if I have trodden on forbidden ground."

"I have loved but one woman, and I'm such a coward that I never had the courage to tell her," he said abruptly, at the same time restoring his imaginary cigar to his mouth.

"That's a pity," she said.

"What a figure I'd cut as a lover! Little, lank, nervous, eccentric in manner, peculiar in my opinions, lacking resolution to undertake anything worth while, frittering away my time in gathering rare books--what woman would think of me?"

"Philip, you have many excellent qualities, and I shouldn't wonder if marriage would be good for you," said Phillida, in that motherly tone that only a young woman can assume easily.

"You'd laugh at me as long as you live if I should tell you whom I have dared to love without ever daring to confess." His face was averted as he said this.

"You poor fellow," said Phillida, "you are always doubtful of yourself. Come, I think you had better tell me; may be I can encourage you, and it will give me something to think about and keep away thoughts that I don't wish to think."

Philip drew a long breath and then said slowly and with a firm voice, but with his eyes on the window fastenings:

"The woman I love and have loved for a long time is my Cousin Phillida."

"You are joking, Philip," said Phillida, but her voice died as she spoke.

"Yes," said Philip, in his old desponding tone, "I knew it would seem ridiculous to you. That's why I never spoke of it before."

He looked out of the window in silence, and presently became aware that Phillida was weeping.

"O God! let me die," she murmured in a broken voice. "I am doomed to work only misery in the world. Isn't it enough to have blighted the happiness of Charley, whom I loved and still love in spite of myself? Must I also plunge Philip into misery who has been more than a brother to me? If I could only die and escape from this wretched life before I do any further harm."

"I am sorry that I said anything, Phillida. Forget it. Forget it, please." He said in an alarmed voice, rising as he spoke.

"Cousin," said Phillida, "you are the best friend I have. But you _must not_ love me. There is nothing left for me. Nothing--but to die. Good-by."

That evening Philip did not appear at dinner and his mother sent to inquire the reason.

"Mr. Philip says he has a headache, and will not come down," said the maid on her return.

After dinner the mother sought his room with a cup of coffee and a bit of toast. Philip was lying on the lounge in his book-room with the gas turned low.

"What's the matter, Philip? Is your throat sore? Are there any signs of diphtheria?" demanded his mother anxiously.

"No, I am all right. A little out of sorts. Only just let me be quiet."

"Has anything gone wrong?"

"Nothing more than common."

"Something has worried you. Now, Philip, I can see plainly that you are worrying about Phillida. Why don't you speak your mind if you care for her, and have it over with?"

"It is over with, mother," said Philip.

"And she refused you?" said Mrs. Gouverneur, with rising indignation, for she thought it rather a descent for Philip to offer himself to Phillida or to anybody else.

"No, she didn't refuse me. I didn't formally offer myself. But I let her know how I felt toward her. She'll never accept me."

"May be she will," said the mother. "Girls don't like to accept at the first hint."

"No, she was kind and even affectionate with me, and broke her heart over my confession that I loved her, so that I'm afraid I have done her a great deal of harm."

"How do you know she will never accept you, you faint-hearted boy?"

"She let me see her whole heart. She loves Charley Millard as much as ever, but, I think, for some reason she doesn't expect or wish a renewal of the engagement. She called me the best friend she had in the world, next to Charley Millard. That's an end of it. A good deal more of an end of it than a flat refusal might have been."

"She's a foolish and perverse girl, who has compromised her family and ruined her own prospects," said Mrs. Gouverneur. "Your aunt told me to-day that Dr. Gunstone thinks she is going to die of her disappointment about Charley unless the engagement can be renewed. But Phillida has determined not to allow a renewal of it. She's always doing something foolish. Now, eat a little dinner, or take your coffee at least."

"Leave the things here, mother. May be I'll eat after a while."

Half an hour later Mrs. Gouverneur, uneasy regarding Philip, returned to his library to find the food as she had left it.

On inquiry she learned that Philip had just gone out. Whither and for what purpose he had sallied forth dinnerless she could not divine, and the strangeness of his action did not reassure her. She was on the point of speaking to her husband about it, but he had so little in common with Philip, and was of a temper so fixed and stolid, that his advice would not have availed anything. It never did avail anything certainly in the first hour or two after dinner.

XXXIX.

PHILIP IMPROVES AN OPPORTUNITY.

The intimacy between Millard and Philip Gouverneur had long languished. Philip was naturally critical of Charley after he became the accepted lover of Phillida, and their relations were not bettered by the breaking off of the engagement. Phillida's cousin felt that he owed it to her not to seem to condemn her in the matter by a too great intimacy with the lover who had jilted or been jilted by her, nobody could tell which, not even the pair themselves. Moreover Philip had for years taken a faint pleasure in considering himself as a possible suitor to Phillida. He found the enjoyment of a solitary cigar enhanced by his ruminations regarding the possibilities of a life glorified--no weaker word could express his thought--by the companionship of Phillida, little as he had ever hoped for such a culmination of his wishes. But this love for Phillida served to complicate his relations with Millard. So that it had now been long since he had visited The Graydon. Nevertheless on this evening of his sudden and dinnerless departure from home, the night clerk remembered him and let him go up to apartment 79 without the ceremony of sending his card.

Millard, who was writing, received Philip with some surprise and a curiosity mixed with solicitude regarding the purpose of his call. But he put up his pen and spoke with something of the old cordial manner that had won the heart of Gouverneur some years before.

"I'm glad to see you again, Philip. I began to think you were not coming any more. Sit down," said Millard. "How is book-collecting? Anything startling lately?" he added by way of launching the talk, as he usually did on the favorite subject of his companion.

"No, no," said Philip, seating himself.

"I've not seen much of you lately, anywhere," said Millard, making a new start. "But that is my fault. I've pretty much cut general society this spring, and I think for good. I've been busy and tired, and to tell the truth, I don't care much for society any more. You still go out a good deal. Is there anything interesting?"

"Oh, no," said Gouverneur.

Seeing that Philip was preoccupied and that all attempts to give him direction and set him in motion were likely to prove futile, Charley concluded to let him start himself in whatever direction his mood might lead him. He did this the more readily that he himself found talking hard work in his present mood. But by way of facilitating the start, Millard held out to Philip a bronze tray containing some cigars.

"No, thank you, Charley. I don't feel like smoking."

To Millard's mind nothing could have been more ominous than for Philip Gouverneur to refuse to smoke.

"I suppose I might as well begin at once," said Philip. "If I wait I never shall get the courage to say what I want to say. I ought to have waited till morning, but if I once put off a good resolution it is never carried out. So I came down here pell-mell, Charley, resolved not to give myself time to think what a piece of impertinent impudence I was going to be guilty of." Then after a pause he said: "If you turn me out of the apartment neck and heels, I sha'n't be surprised."

"Pshaw, Philip, you excite my curiosity," said Millard, trying to smile, but yet a little aghast at seeing his old friend in this unusual mood, and divining that the subject would be disagreeable.

"I come to speak about Phillida," said Philip.

Ever since Millard's hopes had received their quietus from Mrs. Callender's note in which Phillida declined to receive a visit from him, he had recognized the necessity for getting Phillida out of his mind if he were ever again to have any sane contentment in life. If Phillida did not any longer care for him, it would be unmanly for him to continue brooding over the past. But he found that exhorting himself to manliness would not cure a heartache. There was nothing he could have dreaded so much at this time as a conversation about Phillida, and, of all people he most disliked to speak of her with Philip Gouverneur. He made no reply at all to Philip's blunt statement of the subject on which he proposed to converse. But Gouverneur was too much absorbed in holding himself to his plan of action to take note of his companion's lack of responsiveness.

"I want to ask whether you still love her or not, Charley," said Philip, with a directness that seemed brutal, his gaze fixed on the wall.

"I have no claims upon her," said Millard, "if that is what you want to know."

"That isn't what I want to know. I asked if you still loved her?"

"I don't know whether even you have a right to ask that question," said Millard with manifest annoyance.

"I am her cousin," said Philip, looking up at Millard with eyes strangely unsteady and furtive.

"If there were any charge that I had wronged her, you, as her cousin, might have a right to inquire," said Millard, who fancied that Gouverneur had a personal end in making the inquiry, and who at any rate did not care to be known as a discarded and broken-hearted lover. "I'll tell you plainly that it is a subject on which I don't wish to speak with anybody. Besides it's hardly fair to come to me as Phillida's cousin, when there is reason to believe your feelings toward her are more than cousinly. I have no claims on Phillida, no expectation of a renewal of our engagement, and I certainly have no complaint to make of her. Nobody has any right to inquire further."

Charley Millard got up and walked the floor in excitement as he said this.

"You're plaguey cross, Charley. I never saw you so impolite before. Didn't know you could be. I suppose you're right, by Jupiter! I went too straight at the mark, and you had a right to resent it. But I had to go at it like a man having a tooth pulled, for fear I'd back out at the last moment."

There was a ten seconds' pause, during which Millard sat down. Then Philip spoke again.

"I know, Charley; you have misunderstood. You think I wish to get a disclaimer that will clear the way for me. Charley--" Philip spoke now in a voice low and just a little husky,--"if I loved Phillida and believed she could love me, do you think I'd wait to ask your permission? If I wished to marry her and she loved me, I wouldn't ask any man's permission! And I came here not in my own interest, nor in your interest either. I am here only for Phillida's sake and as her cousin, and I want to know whether you love her."

"If you want me to do anything for her, I am ready. That is all I ought to be required to say," said Millard, softened by Philip's evident emotion, but bent on not betraying his own feelings.

"I suppose that means that you don't care for her," said Gouverneur. Then he went on, looking into the fireplace: "Well, that's an end of it. What an idiot she has been! She has thrown you over and alienated your affections, and made herself the talk of the streets. You wouldn't think such a fine-looking woman could make herself so utterly ridiculous. She is a mortification to her relations, and--"

"Now, Philip, stop," said Millard, with heat. "You are in my house. No man shall say a word against that woman in my hearing while I live. I tell you that even her mistakes are noble. If her relatives are ashamed of such as she is, I am sorry for her relatives." Millard made an effort to say more, but his utterance was choked.

Philip laughed a sardonic little laugh.

"Charley, before God, I was not sincere in a word I said against Phillida. I lied with deliberate purpose. Now I know that you love her. That's what I wanted to find out. I only denounced her to get at your feelings. You wouldn't tell me, I had to resort to a ruse."

"Do you think it--do you think it's the thing to pry into my feelings?" said Millard, still speaking hotly.

"Yes, I do, under the circumstances. In return I'll tell you something worth your listening to, if you'll only cool off enough to hear it."

Millard's curiosity was excited by this, but he made no reply; he only sat still with Philip's eyes fixed upon him.

"Phillida loves you," said Philip.

Millard looked steadily at the smallish figure of his old friend, not shrunken into the chair as usual now, but sitting upright and looking straight at him with a strange look he had never seen before.

"Philip," he said softly, "how do you know this? Tell me, for God's sake!"

"I must not betray confidence," said Philip. "You know me, your friend and Phillida's. I am here to-night--I might say heart-broken, I can hardly say disappointed. I don't blame Phillida for not caring for me except as a cousin, or for preferring you. On the whole, if I were in her place I'd do the same, by George!"

Philip laughed again, that little laugh which pained his friend.

"Why did you come to tell me this, Philip?" Millard was sitting now with his elbows on the table, and the fingers of his right hand supporting his cheek, as he regarded Philip steadily.

"Well, if one can not contrive to do what one wants, he should, I suppose, do the second best thing. The only thing for me to do--the thing that'll be a comfort for me to look back on--is to render Phillida some service. In short, to save her life and make her happy."

"How do you propose to do that?" asked Millard.

"I've already done it, old fellow," said Philip, with a mixture of triumph and regret in his voice. "Dr. Gunstone said to Aunt Callender, after talking with Phillida, that unless her engagement with you were renewed she would probably not recover. I wouldn't have told you this for the world if I had found you didn't love her. She'd better die now than marry you and discover that you married her from pity."

Millard went to his desk and took out the note from Mrs. Callender in which Phillida had refused to see him. He handed it to Philip.

"I got that last week, and it seemed final," he said huskily. "I have found life almost more than I could carry since, Philip."

Philip read the note and then returned it to Millard.

"That's some of her confounded scruples," he said. "She told me that she had ruined your life. She thinks you wish to marry her from pity, and she'd rather die like a brave girl than consent to that. But she loves you and nobody else."

"I wish I were sure of it," said Millard.

Philip sat a good while silent.

"Charley," he said, "the end I have in view justifies the breach of confidence, I hope. I have the assurance of her feelings toward you from her own lips, and that not many hours ago. She would have died rather than tell me had she thought it possible I would tell you. And I would have died rather than betray her if I hadn't believed your feelings toward her unchanged."

Saying this he helped himself to a cigar from the tray on the table and lighted it, and then rose to leave.

"What can I do, Philip? I seem absolutely shut out from making any further advances by this note," demanded Millard.

"You mustn't expect any further aid or advice from me. I've done all you can expect," said Gouverneur. "Good-by."

And without shaking hands he went out of the door into the main hall. Millard followed him and, as they reached the elevator, said with emotion:

"Philip, you have done one of the bravest acts."

"Pshaw! Charley," said Philip, half-peevishly and looking over his shoulder at his companion as he pressed the button, "don't put any heroics on it. There isn't enough of me to play such a part. Such talk makes me feel myself more ridiculous than ever."

XL.

THE RESTORATION.

How many scores of devices for securing a conversation with Phillida, Millard hit upon during the night that followed Gouverneur's visit, he could not have told. He planned letters to her in a dozen different veins, and rejected them all. He thought of appealing to Mrs. Callender once more, but could not conceive of Mrs. Callender's overruling Phillida. His mind perpetually reverted to Agatha. If only he might gain her co-operation! And yet this notion of securing the assistance of a younger sister had an air of intrigue that he did not like.

About nine o'clock the next morning there was handed to Mrs. Callender a note from Millard inclosing an unsealed note which Mr. Millard desired Mrs. Callender if she saw fit to hand to Miss Agatha. Mrs. Callender gave it to Agatha without opening it.

AGATHA: I wrote to your mother the other day begging permission to call on your sister, and received a reply expressing Miss Callender's desire to avoid an interview. That ought to have put an end to my hope of securing your sister's forgiveness, and for a while it did. But on reflection I am led to believe that her decision was based, not on a lack of affection for me, but on a wrong notion of my feeling toward her. She probably believes that I am actuated by gratitude for her attention to my relatives, or by pity for her sufferings as an invalid. She holds certain other erroneous notions on the subject, I think. I give you the assurance with all the solemnity possible that my devotion to her is greater to-day than ever. Her affection is absolutely indispensable to my happiness. I will undertake to convince her of this if I am once permitted to speak to her. Now if you think that she would be the better for a renewal of our old relations will you not contrive in some way that I may see her this afternoon at three o'clock, at which hour I shall present myself at your door?

I hope your mother will pardon my writing to you; persuasion exerted by a sister has less the air of authority than that of a parent. I leave you to show this letter or not at your own discretion, and I put into your hands my whole future welfare, and what is of a thousand times greater importance in your eyes and in mine, Phillida's happiness. Whatever may be your feelings toward me I know that Phillida can count on your entire devotion to her interests. CHARLEY.

The only thing that seemed to Millard a little insincere about this rather stiff note was the reason assigned for writing to Agatha. Her persuasions, as Millard well knew, did not have less of authority about them than her mother's. But this polite insincerity on a minor point he had not seen how to avoid in a letter that ought to be shown to Mrs. Callender.