The Return of the Prodigal Part 14

"My dear, it's you he likes, not me."

"Don't, Effie."

"But it's true," said Effie.

"How can you tell?" said Phoebe, and she felt perfidious.

"Isn't he always going about with you?"

But Phoebe was ingenious in the destruction of her own joy.

"Oh," said she, "that's his cunning. He likes you dreadfully. He goes about with me, just to hide it."

"You goose."

"Are you sure, Effie, you don't care?"

"Not a rap."

"You never have? Not in the beginning?"

"Certainly not in the beginning. I only thought he might be nice for you."

"You didn't even want to divide him?"

Effie shook her head vehemently.

"Well--he's the only thing I ever wanted all to myself. If----" Then Phoebe looked frightened. "Effie," she said, "he's never said anything."

"All the same, you _know_."

"Can you know?"

"I think so," said Effie.

III

Gibson had been talking a long time to Phoebe. They were sitting together on the beach, under the shadow of the cliff. He was trying to form Phoebe's mind. Phoebe's mind was deliciously young, and it had the hunger and thirst of youth. A little shy and difficult to approach, Phoebe's mind, but he had found out what it liked best, and it pleased him to see how confidingly and delicately it, so to speak, ate out of his hand.

He puzzled her a good deal. And she had a very pretty way of closing her eyes when she was puzzled. In another woman it would have meant that he was boring her; Phoebe did it to shut out the intolerable light of knowledge.

"Ah!--don't," he cried.

"Don't shut my eyes? I always shut my eyes when I'm trying to think," said Phoebe.

He said nothing. That was not what he had meant when he had said "Don't."

"Am I boring you?" he said presently. His tone jarred a little on Phoebe; he had such a nice voice generally.

"No," said she. "Why?"

"Because you keep on doing that."

"Doing what?"

"That."

"Oh!--this?"

She put up her hand and untwisted the little tendril of brown hair that hung deliciously over her left ear.

"I always do that when I'm thinking."

He very nearly said, "Then, for G.o.d's sake, don't think."

But Phoebe was always thinking now. He had given her cause to think.

He began to hate the little brown curl that hung over her left ear, though it was anguish to him to hate anything that was Phoebe's.

He looked out with nervous anxiety for the movement of her little white hand. He said to himself, "If she does it again, I can't come near her any more."

Yet he kept on coming; and was happy with her until Phoebe (poor, predestined little Phoebe) did it again. Gibson shuddered with the horror of the thing. He kept on saying to himself, "She's sweet, she's good, she's adorable. It isn't her fault. But I can't--I can't sit in the room with it."

And the next minute Phoebe would be so adorable that he would repent miserably of his brutality.

Then, one hot, still evening, he was alone with her in the little sitting-room. Outside, on the gra.s.s plot, her father sat in his bath-chair while Effie read aloud to him (out of her turn). Her voice made a cover for Gibson's voice and Phoebe's.

Phoebe was dressed (for the heat) in a white gown with wide, open sleeves. Her low collar showed the pure, soft swell of her neck to the shoulder-line.

She was sitting upright and demure in a straight-backed chair, with her hands folded quietly in her lap.

"That isn't a very comfortable chair you've got," he said.

He knew that she was tired with pus.h.i.+ng the bath-chair about all day.

"It's the one I always sit in," said Phoebe.

"Well, you're not going to sit in it now," he said.

He drew the armchair out of its sacred corner and made her sit in that. He put a cus.h.i.+on at her head and a footstool at her feet.

"You make my heart ache," he said.

"Do I?"

He could not tell whether the little shaking breath she drew were a laugh or a sigh.

She lay back, letting her tired body slacken into rest.