Otherwise Phyllis by Meredith Nicholson - HTML preview

CHAPTER XVIII

AMZI IS FLABBERGASTED

Struby's drug-store did a large business in hot drinks in the week following Christmas, as citizens and citizenesses met to discuss the return of Lois Montgomery. The annual choir-row in Center Church caused scarcely a ripple; the county poorhouse burned to the ground, and nobody cared particularly; an august professor in the college was laid low with whooping-cough, and even this calamity failed to tickle the community as it would have done in ordinary circumstances.

Wonder and mystery were in the air of Main Street. Persons who had no money in Montgomery's Bank, and whom the liveliest imagination could not dramatize as borrowers from that institution, dropped in casually on fictitious errands, in the hope of seeing or hearing something. Housewives who lived beyond the college, or over in the new bungalow addition across the Monon tracks, who had no business whatever in the neighborhood of the old Montgomery place, made flimsy excuses for visiting that region in the hope of catching a glimpse of a certain lady who, after a long absence, had reappeared in town with bewildering suddenness. What Amzi had said to his sisters Kate, Josie, and Fanny and what they had said to him, and what Mrs. Lois Montgomery Holton had said to them all afforded an ample field for comment where facts were known; and where there were no facts, speculation and invention rioted outrageously. Had Tom Kirkwood seen his former wife? Would Phil break with her father and go to live at Amzi's with her mother? Was it true that Lois had come back to Indiana in the hope of effecting a reconciliation with Jack Holton, of whom unpleasant reports were now reaching Montgomery from the state capital? An intelligent community possessed of a healthy curiosity must be pardoned for polishing its spectacles when a drama so exciting and presenting so many characters is being disclosed upon its stage.

It was said that Mrs. Holton emerged from Amzi's house daily to take the air. She had been observed by credible witnesses at the stamp window of the post-office; again, she had bought violets at the florist's; she had been seen walking across the Madison campus. The attendants in the new Carnegie library had been thrilled by a visit from a strange lady who could have been none other than Mrs. Holton.

At four o'clock on the afternoon of January 2, Mrs. Holton drank a cup of bouillon at Struby's counter, informed the white-jacketed attendant that it was excellent, and crossed Main Street to Montgomery's Bank under the admiring eyes of a dozen young collegians who happened to be loafing in the drug-store. Amzi escorted his sister at once to his private room at the rear, poked the fire, buttoned his coat and sat down.

"Well, Lois, how goes it?"

His question was the one he habitually asked his customers, and he had no idea that anything of importance had happened to his sister since he left her at one o'clock.

"The air in the counting-room is bad, Amzi; you ought to put in ventilators. A little fresh air would increase the efficiency of the clerks one hundred per cent," she remarked, tossing her muff and a package on the table. It was a solid package that fell with a bang.

"Then they'd want more pay. You've got another guess coming."

"No. You'd cut down their wages because they worked less time."

He rubbed his head and chuckled. It was plainly written on his face that he was immensely fond of her, that her presence in the dim, dingy old room gave him pleasure. He clasped his hands behind his head to emphasize his comfort.

"I passed Center Church on my way down just as my perfectly good sisters three were entering the side door. The Presbyterians haven't set up a confessional, have they?"

"Lemme see. I guess this is the afternoon they sew for the heathen. No. This is Tuesday. Pastor's Aid Society. Caught 'em in the act, did you?"

"I suppose I did. They bowed and I bowed. When I got to the corner I turned round to take a look at the steeple and they were inspecting my clothes. They're rather funny human beings, those sisters of ours. How do you suppose they ever happened anyhow? How do you suppose they came to be so good and you and I so naughty? I mention your naughtiness, Amzi, just to keep from being so lonesome."

"Thunder!" he puffed, evidently rejoicing in the wickedness she conferred upon him.

"I came to talk business a little, Amzi. Didn't want to do it at the house. In fact, I'm out of money; broke; busted. I bought a cup of soup at the drug-store over the way and left my last dime on the counter."

He rubbed his pink pate and cleared his throat. He was not surprised; he had expected her to be broke. Several times in the week that had passed since her return, he had thought of broaching the subject of money, but had refrained. Lois could have anything he had; that was his feeling about it; and no doubt when she needed money she would ask for it. His other sisters had never hesitated.

"Just say how much, Lois."

His tone was reassuring. The others had bled him for years; he had kept an account of his "advances," as they called them, in a pass-book, and within a few days he had credited Lois with an amount equal to the total of these sums. It was approximately this amount that he had tried to bestow upon Phil the previous fall when that unreasonable young person had scorned it.

Lois had not answered him. Her face wore a look of abstraction and she compressed her lips poutingly. He had found her increasingly interesting and amusing as the days passed. The subjects she discussed in their long evenings together were as various as her costumes. She was always cheery, always a delight to his admiring eyes. Now that she needed money she would be sure to ask for it in her own charming fashion.

"Speak up; don't be afraid. The sooner we fix it the quicker we can forget it," he added kindly.

"I was just wondering how to divide things around a little," she replied.

"Divide how? Among your creditors?"

"Creditors? Bless your silly head, Amzi, I haven't any creditors!"

"I thought you said you were broke."

"Oh, I believe I did," she replied, still only half-attentive to what he said, and apparently not particularly interested in explaining herself. She reached for a pad and made rapid calculations. He lighted a cigar and watched her gloved hand dancing over the paper. The package she had tossed on the table was much bewaxed and sealed. "When I said I was broke, I meant that I hadn't any money in my pocket. I want to open an account here so I can cash a check. I suppose you haven't any prejudices against accepting small deposits?"

"No prejudices exactly, Lois; but it's so long since any member of the family came into this bank without wanting to make a touch that I'm likely to drop dead."

She laughed, drew out her purse, and extracted three closely folded slips of crisp paper, took up a pen and scratched her name across the back of each.

"There," she said, "consider these on deposit and give me a check-book."

He ran the drafts through his fingers, reading the amounts, and from force of habit compared the indorsement with the name on the face. He smoothed them out on the table and laid a weight on them. He looked at the end of his cigar, then at her. Of the three bills of exchange on New York, one was for ten thousand dollars, issued by a Seattle bank; another was for fifteen thousand, issued by a San Francisco house, and the third was a certified check for seven thousand and some odd dollars and cents. Something over thirty-two thousand dollars!

He unconsciously adopted with her something of his way with Phil. He would not express surprise at the magnitude of the sum she had so indifferently fished out of her purse, but rather treat the matter as though he had been prepared for it. The joke of it—that Lois should have come back with money, when her sisters certainly, and the rest of the community probably, assumed that her return to Montgomery meant nothing more or less than the collapse of her fortunes—this was a joke so delicious, so stupendous, that his enjoyment of it dulled the edge of his curiosity as to the history the fact concealed. She hadn't even taken off her gloves to write her name on the drafts! There were depositors who had shown more emotion over confiding one hundred dollars to his care than she had displayed in writing her name on the books as his largest individual depositor. He wanted to giggle; it was the funniest thing that had ever happened. He remarked casually,—

"Got a gold mine, Lois?"

He was so full of the joy of it that he gasped at her reply.

"How did you know?" she asked sharply.

"I didn't."

"I thought not. Nobody knows. And nobody need know. Just between ourselves—all this."

He nodded. She was an amazing creature, this sister! The joke grew. He hoped she would delay and prolong her revelations, that he might miss nothing of their humor.

"Nevada," she remarked sententiously.

"Ground floor?"

"Something like that."

She pushed toward him the pad with her calculations. They read thus:—

His jaw fell and he gulped when he tried to speak. Even Amzi could not joke about half a million dollars.

"Thunder! You must be fooling, Lois."

"I may be fooled about some of that stuff, but those figures are supposed to be conservative by people who ought to know."

"Lord! you're a rich woman, Lois," he remarked with awe. "It's flabbergasting!"

"Oh, I haven't done so badly. You'd probably like to know how it came about, and I might as well tell you the whole story. Jack was an awful fizzle—absolutely no good. I saw that early in the game, and I knew where I'd bring up if I didn't look out for myself. He began nibbling like a hungry rat at my share of father's estate as soon as you sent it to me. I backed him in half a dozen things he wanted to go into. He hadn't the business sense of a baby, and I began to see that I was going to bump my head good and hard if I didn't look sharp. He began to cheer himself during his failures by getting drunk, which wasn't exactly pretty. He went his way and I went mine, and as he lied to me about everything I began to lie to him about my money. I made some friends, and one of these happened to be the wife of a banker with brains. Through him I made some small turns in real estate, covering them up so Jack wouldn't know. The fifth year after I left here I made twenty thousand dollars in one turn. Then I grub-staked two young fellows who wanted to try their luck in Nevada—nice college boys, all on the square. I invested about two thousand dollars in those youngsters, and as a result got into Broken Axe. It was so good that it scared me, and I sold out for the two hundred and fifty thousand you see on the slip there, and bought Government bonds with it. My banker covered all these things up for me as long as I had Jack on my hands. When he became intolerable I got rid of him, legally, for fear he'd cause trouble if he found what I'd been doing. I'm a little tired of running my own business now and mean to dump it off on you if you don't mind. I left my papers in a safety vault in Chicago, but here's my Phœnix Lumber and a jumble of miscellaneous junk I want to send West to be sold so I can put it into things around here. I'm not going back there any more."

"Lord!" he ejaculated, rubbing his head. "You made all that money yourself?"

"Sheer luck, mostly. But it isn't so bad, take it all round. By the way, in that junk there are some Sycamore Traction bonds I took off the bank's hands out there. They were carrying them as collateral for a man Sam Holton stung on one of his Western trips. He'd planted all he could in New York and had to try a new field. The bank foreclosed on the bonds and I bought twenty of them at sixty-five. I suppose from what I hear that they're not good for much but kindling."

"You got 'em at sixty-five, Lois?"

"The bank only lent on them at that, and there was no market for them out there. What's going to become of that road?"

Amzi glanced toward the empty counting-room where a single clerk was sealing the mail.

"Tom's trying to save it. And I've been buying those things myself at seventy."

"You think it's a good buy at that? Going to clean up something out of it?"

Amzi flushed, and moved uneasily in his seat.

"No. That's not just the way of it. I don't want to make any money out of it; neither does Tom. We're trying to protect the honest people around here at home who put their money into that scheme. Sam and Bill Holton made a big play for small investors, and a lot of people put their savings into it—the kind o' folks who scrimp to save a dollar a week. Tom's trying to sift out the truth about the building of the line, and if he can force the surrender of the construction company's graft over and above the fair cost of the road, Sycamore will be all right. Your bonds are good, I think. People have been up in the air over the rumors, and anxious to sell at any price. What I'm doing, Lois, as far as I'm able—"

He fidgeted uneasily, seemingly reluctant to disclose just what he was doing.

"Well," she said impatiently.

"I'm picking up all I can from these little fellows—farmers, widows, and so on, and if Tom works out his scheme and the bonds are good, I'm going to let them have them back. That's all," he ended shamefacedly; and added, as though such a piece of quixotism required justification to a woman who had rolled up a fortune and was therefore likely to be critical of business methods, "I suppose I'd be entitled to interest."

"I suppose you would, you gay Napoleon of finance!" She looked at him musingly with good humor and affection in her fine eyes.

"I sort o' like this old town, Lois, and I don't want any harm to come to the folks—particularly these little fellows that don't know how to take care of themselves."

"Is Tom animated by the same philanthropic motives, or is he going to get a fee for his work?"

"Oh, he'll get paid all right. It's different with Tom."

"I suppose so. He ought to have a good fee if he can straighten out that tangle. But, Amzi—" She hesitated a moment, then began again more deliberately. "If you're getting more of those bonds than you want, you might buy some with my money—I mean with a view to taking care of these home investors who are in a panic about Sycamore. I suppose I owe something to the community myself—after—"

She gave him her quick, radiant smile.

He nodded gravely.

"All right, Lois. I'll remember that. And I'll tell you something else, now that we're on business matters. The First National Bank over the way there is built up in the air too high; it's got all the weaknesses of the Holton family—showy without any real bottom to it. Some of their stock has always been owned around through the state—quite a bunch of it—and Bill has had to sell part of his own holdings lately; he's got only a scant majority. I've been picking up a little myself, on the quiet. After Tom gets through with the Holtons, I doubt if Bill's going to be able to hold on. I know his line of customers; I guess I could tell you about every piece of paper he's got. It's a poor line, wobbly and uncertain. There was a new examiner here not long ago, and he stayed in town two or three days when he usually cleans up in a day. Banking is a business, Lois, not a pastime, and Bill isn't a banker; he's a promoter. Do you get the idea?"

"I think I see the point, but if his bank's going to smash, why don't you keep away from it? There's a double liability on national bank stock, isn't there? Seems to me that's the reason I never bought any."

"Right, Lois; but I don't intend the First shall bust. It won't do me or my bank or the town any good to have it go to smash. A town of the size of this don't live down a bank failure in one generation. It soaks clear in. I've got enough now to assert my rights as a stockholder, only I'm keeping under cover; there's no use in screaming in the newspapers. I haven't anything against Bill Holton, and if he pulls through, all right; but if he can't—well, I've never wanted to nationalize this bank, but that would be one way of doing it."

"You seem to be full of large thoughts, brother. You may play with my money all you like in your charitable games, with a few reservations. I like to eat and I don't want to spend my old age in the poorhouse. There's cash enough here to run me for some time and you can use half of that in any way you like. I'll take any chance you do, and you'll find I won't cry if the boiler bursts. My Seattle real estate is all right—and I mean to hold fast to it. Now I want to do something for Phil; I want to make sure she never comes to want. That's only right, you know."

She waited for his affirmation.

"You ought to do it, Lois," he said. "I mean to do the right thing by her myself. If I should die to-night, Phil would be taken care of."

"That's like you, Amzi, but it isn't necessary. I want to set aside one hundred thousand for Phil. I'd like to make a trust fund of it, and let her have the income from now on, and turn over the principal when she's thirty, say. How does that strike you?"

"It's splendid, Lois. By George, it's grand!"

He blew his nose violently and wiped his eyes. And then his humor was touched again. Phil, the long-unmothered, the Main Street romp, the despair of sighing aunts, coming in for a hundred thousand dollars! And from the mother whom those intolerant, snobbish sisters had execrated. He was grateful that he had lived to see this day.

"You've been fine to Phil, and I appreciate it, Amzi. She's told me all about it; the money you offered her and all that; and how you've stood by her. Those dear sisters of mine have undoubtedly worked me hard as an awful example. If they hadn't painted me so black, the dear beautiful child wouldn't have warmed to me as she has."

"If the girls knew you had all that money, Lois, it would brace 'em up a good deal. It's a funny thing about this funny old world, how the scarletest sins fade away into pale pink at the jingle of money."

This bit of philosophy seemed not to interest her; she was thinking of something else, humming softly. Her sins were evidently so little in her mind that she paid no heed to his remark or the confusion that covered him when he realized that he had been guilty of a tactless and ungracious speech.

"Mrs. King called on me this afternoon, the dear old soul."

"You don't say!"

"I do, indeed. She put on her best clothes and drove up in the old family chariot. She hasn't changed a bit."

Amzi sat pigeon-toed. Mrs. John Newman King, whose husband had been United States Senator and who still paid an annual visit to Washington, where the newspapers interviewed her as to her recollections of Lincoln, was given to frank, blunt speech as Amzi well knew. It was wholly possible that she had called on Lois to administer a gratuitous chastisement, and if she had done so, all Montgomery would know of it.

"Don't worry! She was as nice as pie. Josie had kindly gone to see her to tell her the 'family' had warned me away; the 'family' wanted her to know, you know. Didn't want an old and valued friend like the widow of John Newman King to think the good members of the House of Montgomery meant to overlook my wickedness. Not a bit of it! You can hear Josie going on. She evidently laid it on so thick it made the old lady hot. When she came in, she took me by both hands and said, 'You silly little fool, so you've come back.' Then she kissed me. And I cried, being a silly little fool, just as she said. And she didn't say another word about what I'd done or hadn't done, but began talking about her trip abroad in 1872, when she saw it all, she says—the Nile and everything. She swung around to Phil and told me a lot of funny stories about her. She talked about Tom and you before she left; said she'd never made out how you and Tom meant to divide up the Bartlett girls; seems to be bent on marrying you both into the family."

"Thunder!" he exploded. This unaccountable sister had the most amazing way of setting a target to jingling and then calmly walking off. The thought of her husband's marrying again evidently gave her no concern whatever.

"Not nice of you to be keeping your own prospects a dark secret when I'm living under the same roof with you. Out with it."

"Don't be foolish, Lois."

"But why don't you be a good brother and 'fess up? As I remember they're both nice women—quite charming and fine. I should think you'd take your pick first, and then let Tom have what's left. You deserve well of the world, and time flies. Don't you let my coming back here interfere with your plans. I'm not in your way. If you think I'm back on your hands, and that you can't bring home your bonny bride because I'm in your house, you're dead wrong. You ought to be relieved." She ended by indicating the memorandum of her assets; and then tore it into bits and began pushing them into a little pile on the table.

"It must be Rose—the musical one. Phil has told me about the good times you and she and Tom have had in Buckeye Lane. I looked all over the house for your flute and wondered what had become of it; so you keep it there, do you—you absurd brother! Rose plays the piano, you flute, and Tom saws the 'cello, and Nan and Phil are the audience. By the way, Mrs. King mentioned a book Nan Bartlett seems to be responsible for—'The Gray Knight of Picardy.' Everybody was reading it on the train when I came out, but I didn't know it was a Montgomery production. Another Hoosier author for the hall of fame! It comes back to me that Nan always was rather different—quiet and literary. I don't doubt that she would be a splendid woman for Tom to marry."

"I don't know anything about it," said Amzi.

"Humph!" She flung the scraps of paper into the air and watched them fall about him in a brief snowstorm. She seemed to enjoy his discomfiture at the mention of the Bartletts. "Let's not be silly, you dear, delightful, elusive brother! If you want to marry, go ahead; the sooner the better. And if Tom wants to try again, I'll wish him the best luck in the world—the Lord knows I ought to! I suppose it's Nan, the literary one, he's interested in. She writes for the funny papers; Phil told me that; and if she's done a book that people read on trains, she'll make money out of it. And Tom's literary; I always had an idea he'd go in for writing sometime."

She mused a moment while Amzi mopped his head. He found it difficult to dance to the different tunes she piped. He would have given his body to be burned before referring to the possibility of Tom's marrying again; and yet Lois broached the subject without embarrassment. Nothing, in fact, embarrassed her. He knew a great banker in Chicago who made a point of never allowing any papers to lie on his desk; who disposed of everything as it came; and Lois reminded him of that man. There was no unfinished business on her table, no litter of memories to gather dust! He not only loved her as a sister, but her personality fascinated him.

"They've been good to Tom; and they've been perfectly bully to Phil. They're fine women," he said. "But as to whether Tom means to marry, I don't know; I honestly don't."

"Tut! You needn't be so solemn about it. I intend to see that you get married. If you wait much longer, some widow will come along and marry you for your money—a poor shrimp of a woman with a lot of anæmic children to worry you into your grave. And as for Tom, the quicker the better. I wonder—"

He waited while she wondered. She had an exceedingly pretty way of wondering.

"I wonder," she finished briskly, as though chagrined that she hadn't thought of it before—"I wonder if I oughtn't to tell Tom so!"

The "Thunder!" died in his throat at the appalling suggestion.

"O Lord, no!" he cried hoarsely.