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Rose Garden Husband

<h2>VII</h2> They were all waiting for her, in what felt like a hideously quiet semicircle, in Allan's great dark room. Mrs. Harrington, deadly pale, and giving an impression of keeping herself alive only by force of that wonderful fighting vitality of hers, lay almost at length in her wheel-chair. There was a clergyman in vestments. There were the De Guenthers; Mr. De Guenther only a little more precise than his every-day habit was, Mrs. De Guenther crying a little, softly and furtively. As for Allan Harrington, he lay just as she had seen him that other time, white and moveless, seeming scarcely conscious except by an effort. Only she noticed a slight contraction, as of pain, between his brows. "Phyllis has come," panted Mrs. Harrington. "Now it will be—all right. You must marry him quickly—quickly, do you hear, Phyllis? Oh, people never will—do—what I want them to——"[Pg 82] "Yes—yes, indeed, dear," said Phyllis, taking her hands soothingly. "We're going to attend to it right away. See, everything is ready." It occurred to her that Mrs. Harrington was not half as correct in her playing of the part of a dying woman as she would have seen to it that anyone else was; also, that things did not seem legal without the wolfhound. Then she was shocked at herself for such irrelevant thoughts. The thing to do was to keep poor Mrs. Harrington quieted. So she beckoned the clergyman and the De Guenthers nearer, and herself sped the marrying of herself to Allan Harrington. ... When you are being married to a Crusader on a tomb, the easiest way is to kneel down by him. Phyllis registered this fact in her mind quite blankly, as something which might be of use to remember in future.... The marrying took an unnecessarily long time, it seemed to her. It did not seem as if she were being married at all. It all seemed to concern somebody else. When it came to the putting on of the[Pg 83] wedding-ring, she found herself, very naturally, guiding Allan's relaxed fingers to hold it in its successive places, and finally slip it on the wedding-finger. And somehow having to do that checked the chilly awe she had had before of Allan Harrington. It made her feel quite simply sorry for him, as if he were one of her poor little boys in trouble. And when it was all over she bent pitifully before she thought, and kissed one white, cold cheek. He seemed so tragically helpless, yet more alive, in some way, since she had touched his hand to guide it. Then, as her lips brushed his cheek, she recoiled and colored a little. She had felt that slight roughness which a man's cheek, however close-shaven, always has—the man-feel. It made her realize unreasonably that it was a man she had married, after all, not a stone image nor a sick child—a live man! With the thought, or rather instinct, came a swift terror of what she had done, and a swift impulse to rise. She was half-way risen from her knees when a hand on her shoulder, and the clergyman's voice in her ear, checked her.[Pg 84] "Not yet," he murmured almost inaudibly. "Stay as you are till—till Mrs. Harrington is wheeled from the room." Phyllis understood. She remained as she was, her body a shield before Allan Harrington's eyes, her hand just withdrawing from his shoulder, till she heard the closing of the door, and a sigh as of relaxed tension from the three people around her. Then she rose. Allan lay still with closed eyelids. It seemed to her that he had flushed, if ever so faintly, at the touch of her lips on his cheek. She laid his hand on the coverlet with her own roughened, ringed one, and followed the others out, into the room where the dead woman had been taken, leaving him with his attendant. The rest of the evening Phyllis went about in a queer-keyed, almost light-hearted frame of mind. It was only the reaction from the long-expected terror that was over now, but it felt indecorous. It was just as well, however. Some one's head had to be kept. The servants were upset, of course, and there were many arrangements to be made. She and Mr. De Guenther worked steadily[Pg 85] together, telephoning, ordering, guiding, straightening out all the tangles. There never was a wedding, she thought, where the bride did so much of the work! She even remembered to see personally that Allan's dinner was sent up to him. The servants had doubtless been told to come to her for orders—at any rate, they did. Phyllis had not had much experience in running a house, but a good deal in keeping her head. And that, after all, is the main thing. She had a far-off feeling as if she were hearing some other young woman giving swift, poised, executive orders. She rather admired her. After dinner the De Guenthers went. And Phyllis Braithwaite, the little Liberry Teacher who had been living in a hall bedroom on much less money than she needed, found herself alone, sole mistress of the great Harrington house, a corps of servants, a husband passive enough to satisfy the most militant suffragette, a check-book, a wistful wolfhound, and five hundred dollars, cash, for current expenses. The last weighed on her mind more than all the rest put together.[Pg 86] "Why, I don't know how to make Current Expenses out of all that!" she had said to Mr. De Guenther. "It looks to me exactly like about ten months' salary! I'm perfectly certain I shall get up in my sleep and try to pay my board ahead with it, so I shan't have it all spent before the ten months are up! There was a blue bead necklace," she went on meditatively, "in the Five-and-Ten, that I always wanted to buy. Only I never quite felt I could afford it. Oh, just imagine going to the Five-and-Ten and buying at least five dollars' worth of things you didn't need!" "You have great discretionary powers—great discretionary powers, my dear, you will find!" Mr. De Guenther had said, as he patted her shoulder. Phyllis took it as a compliment at the time. "Discretionary powers" sounded as if he thought she was a quite intelligent young person. It did not occur to her till he had gone, and she was alone with her check-book, that it meant she had a good deal of liberty to do as she liked. It seemed to be expected of her to stay. Nobody even suggested a possibility of her[Pg 87] going home again, even to pack her trunk. Mrs. De Guenther casually volunteered to do that, a little after the housekeeper had told her where her rooms were. She had been consulting with the housekeeper for what seemed ages, when she happened to want some pins for something, and asked for her suit-case. "It's in your rooms," said the housekeeper. "Mrs. Harrington—the late Mrs. Harrington, I should say——" Phyllis stopped listening at this point. Who was the present Mrs. Harrington? she wondered before she thought—and then remembered. Why—she was! So there was no Phyllis Braithwaite any more! Of course not.... Yet she had always liked the name so—well, a last name was a small thing to give up.... Into her mind fitted an incongruous, silly story she had heard once at the library, about a girl whose last name was Rose, and whose parents christened her Wild, because the combination appealed to them. And then she married a man named Bull.... Meanwhile the housekeeper had been going on.[Pg 88] ... "She had the bedroom and bath opening from the other side of Mr. Allan's day-room ready for you, madam. It's been ready several weeks." "Has it?" said Phyllis. It was like Mrs. Harrington, that careful planning of even where she should be put. "Is Mr. Harrington in his day-room now?" For some reason she did not attempt to give herself, she did not want to see him again just now. Besides, it was nearly eleven and time a very tired girl was in bed. She wanted a good night's rest, before she had to get up and be Mrs. Harrington, with Allan and the check-book and the Current Expenses all tied to her. Some one had laid everything out for her in the bedroom; the filmy new nightgown over a chair, the blue satin mules underneath, her plain toilet-things on a dressing-table, and over another chair the exquisite ivory crepe negligee with its floating rose ribbons. She took a hasty bath—there was so much hot water that she was quite reconciled for a moment to being a check-booked and wolf hounded Mrs. Harrington—and slid[Pg 89] straight into bed without even stopping to braid her loosened, honey-colored hair. It seemed to her that she was barely asleep when there came an urgent knocking at her door. "Yes?" she said sleepily, looking mechanically for her alarm-clock as she switched on the light. "What is it, please?" "It's I, Wallis, Mr. Allan's man, Madame," said a nervous voice. "Mr. Allan's very bad. I've done all the usual things, but nothing seems to quiet him. He hates doctors so, and they make him so wrought up—please could you come, ma'am? He says as how all of us are all dead—oh, please, Mrs. Harrington!" There was panic in the man's voice. "All right," said Phyllis sleepily, dropping to the floor as she spoke with the rapidity that only the alarm-clock-broken know. She snatched the negligee around her, and thrust her feet hastily into the blue satin slippers—why, she was actually using her wedding finery! And what an easily upset person that man was! But everybody in the house seemed to have[Pg 90] nerves on edge. It was no wonder about Allan—he wanted his mother, of course, poor boy! She felt, as she ran fleetly across the long room that separated her sleeping quarters from her husband's, the same mixture of pity and timidity that she had felt with him before. Poor boy! Poor, silent, beautiful statue, with his one friend gone! She opened the door and entered swiftly into his room. She was not thinking about herself at all, only of how she could help Allan, but there must have been something about her of the picture-book angel to the pain-racked man, lying tensely at length in the room's darkest corner. Her long, dully gold hair, loosening from its twist, flew out about her, and her face was still flushed with sleep. There was a something about her that was vividly alight and alive, perhaps the light in her blue eyes. From what the man had said Phyllis had thought Allan was delirious, but she saw at once that he was only in severe pain, and talking more disconnectedly, perhaps, than the slow-minded Englishman could follow.[Pg 91] He did not look like a statue now. His cheeks were burning with evident pain, and his yellow-brown eyes, wide-open, and dilated to darkness, stared straight out. His hands were clenching and unclenching, and his head moved restlessly from side to side. Every nerve and muscle, she could see, was taut. "They're all dead," he muttered. "Father and Mother and Louise—and I—only I'm not dead enough to bury. Oh, God, I wish I was!" That wasn't delirium; it was something more like heart-break. Phyllis moved closer to him, and dropped one of her sleep-warm hands on his cold, clenched one. "Oh, poor boy!" she said. "I'm so sorry—so sorry!" She closed her hands tight over both his. Some of her strong young vitality must have passed between them and helped him, for almost immediately his tenseness relaxed a little, and he looked at her. "You—you're not a nurse," he said. "They go around—like—like a—vault——" She had caught his attention! That was[Pg 92] a good deal, she felt. She forgot everything about him, except that he was some one to be comforted, and her charge. She sat down on the bed by him, still holding tight to his hands. "No, indeed," she said, bending nearer him, her long loose hair falling forward about her resolutely-smiling young face. "Don't you remember seeing me? I never was a nurse." "What—are you?" he asked feebly. "I'm—why, the children call me the Liberry Teacher," she answered. It occurred to her that it would be better to talk on brightly at random than to risk speaking of his mother to him, as she must if she reminded him of their marriage. "I spend my days in a basement, making bad little boys get so interested in the Higher Culture that they'll forget to shoot crap and smash windows." One of the things which had aided Phyllis to rise from desk-assistant to one of the Children's Room librarians was a very sweet and carrying voice—a voice which arrested even a child's attention, and held[Pg 93] his interest. It held Allan now; merely the sound of it, seemingly. "Go on—talking," he murmured. Phyllis smiled and obeyed. "Sometimes the Higher Culture doesn't work," she said. "Yesterday one of my imps got hold of a volume of Shaw, and in half an hour his aunt marched in on me and threatened I don't know what to a library that 'taught chilren to disrespect their lawful guardeens.'" "I remember now," said Allan. "You are the girl in the blue dress. The girl mother had me marry. I remember." "Yes," said Phyllis soothingly, and a little apologetically. "I know. But that—oh, please, it needn't make a bit of difference. It was only so I could see that you were looked after properly, you know. I'll never be in the way, unless you want me to do something for you." "I don't mind," he said listlessly, as he had before.... "Oh, this dreadful darkness, and mother dead in it somewhere!" "Wallis," called Phyllis swiftly, "turn up the lights!"[Pg 94] The man slipped the close green silk shades from the electric bulbs. Allan shrank as if he had been hurt. "I can't stand the glare," he cried. "Yes, you can for a moment," she said firmly. "It's better than the ghastly green glow." It was probably the first time Allan Harrington had been contradicted since his accident. He said nothing more for a minute, and Phyllis directed Wallis to bring a sheet of pink tissue paper from her suit-case, where she remembered it lay in the folds of some new muslin thing. Under her direction still, he wrapped the globes in it and secured it with string. "There!" she told Allan triumphantly when Wallis was done. "See, there is no glare now; only a pretty rose-colored glow. Better than the green, isn't it?" Allan looked at her again. "You are—kind," he said. "Mother said—you would be kind. Oh, mother—mother!" He tried uselessly to lift one arm to cover his convulsed face, and could only turn his head a little aside.[Pg 95] "You can go, Wallis," said Phyllis softly, with her lips only. "Be in the next room." The man stole out and shut the door softly. Phyllis herself rose and went toward the window, and busied herself in braiding up her hair. There was almost silence in the room for a few minutes. "Thank—you," said Allan brokenly. "Will you—come back, please?" She returned swiftly, and sat by him as she had before. "Would you mind—holding my wrists again?" he asked. "I feel quieter, somehow, when you do—not so—lost." There was a pathetic boyishness in his tone that the sad, clear lines of his face would never prepare you for. Phyllis took his wrists in her warm, strong hands obediently. "Are you in pain, Allan?" she asked. "Do you mind if I call you Allan? It's the easiest way." He smiled at her a little, faintly. It occurred to her that perhaps the novelty of her was taking his mind a little from his own feelings.[Pg 96] "No—no pain. I haven't had any for a very long time now. Only this dreadful blackness dragging at my mind, a blackness the light hurts." "Why!" said Phyllis to herself, being on known ground here—"why, it's nervous depression! I believe cheering-up would help. I know," she said aloud; "I've had it." "You?" he said. "But you seem so—happy!" "I suppose I am," said Phyllis shyly. She felt a little afraid of "poor Allan" still, now that there was nothing to do for him, and they were talking together. And he had not answered her question, either; doubtless he wanted her to say "Mr. Allan" or even "Mr. Harrington!" He replied to her thought in the uncanny way invalids sometimes do. "You said something about what we were to call each other," he murmured. "It would be foolish, of course, not to use first names. Yours is Alice, isn't it?" Phyllis laughed. "Oh, worse than that!" she said. "I was named out of a poetry[Pg 97]book, I believe—Phyllis Narcissa. But I always conceal the Narcissa." "Phyllis. Thank you," he said wearily. ... "Phyllis, don't let go! Talk to me!" His eyes were those of a man in torment. "What shall I talk about?" she asked soothingly, keeping the two cold, clutching hands in her warm grasp. "Shall I tell you a story? I know a great many stories by heart, and I will say them for you if you like. It was part of my work." "Yes," he said. "Anything." Phyllis arranged herself more comfortably on the bed, for it looked as if she had some time to stay, and began the story she knew best, because her children liked it best, Kipling's "How the Elephant Got His Trunk." "A long, long time ago, O Best Beloved...." Allan listened, and, she thought, at times paid attention to the words. He almost smiled once or twice, she was nearly sure. She went straight on to another story when the first was done. Never had she worked so hard to keep the interest of any restless circle of children as she worked now,[Pg 98] sitting up in the pink light in her crepe wrappings, with her school-girl braids hanging down over her bosom, and Allan Harrington's agonized golden-brown eyes fixed on her pitying ones. "You must be tired," he said more connectedly and quietly when she had ended the second story. "Can't you sit up here by me, propped on the pillows? And you need a quilt or something, too." This from an invalid who had been given nothing but himself to think of this seven years back! Phyllis's opinion of Allan went up very much. She had supposed he would be very selfish. But she made herself a bank of pillows, and arranged herself by Allan's side so that she could keep fast to his hands without any strain, something as skaters hold. She wrapped a down quilt from the foot of the bed around her mummy-fashion and went on to her third story. Allan's eyes, as she talked on, grew less intent—drooped. She felt the relaxation of his hands. She went monotonously on, closing her own eyes—just for a minute, as she finished her story.[Pg 99] <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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