A stout, spectacled gentleman of fifty or thereabouts appeared at intervals, every business day of the year, on the steps of Montgomery's Bank, at the corner of Main and Franklin Streets. As he stood on this pedestal, wearing, winter and summer, a blue-and-white seersucker office coat tightly buttoned about his pudgy form, and frequently with an ancient straw hat perched on the side of his head, it was fair to assume that he was in some way connected with the institution from whose doors he emerged. This was, indeed, the fact, and any intelligent child could have enlightened a stranger as to the name of the stout gentleman indicated. He was one of the first citizens of the community, if wealth, probity, and long residence may be said to count for anything. And his name, which it were absurd longer to conceal, was Amzi Montgomery, or, to particularize, Amzi Montgomery III. As both his father and his grandfather who had borne the same name slept peacefully in Greenlawn, it is unnecessary to continue in this narrative the numerical designation of this living Amzi who braved the worst of weathers to inspect the moving incidents of Main Street as a relief from the strain and stress of the business of a private banker.
When, every hour or so, Mr. Montgomery, exposing a pink bald head to the elements, glanced up and down the street, usually with a cigar planted resolutely in the corner of his mouth, it was commonly believed that he saw everything that was happening, not only in Main Street, but in all the shops and in the rival banking-houses distributed along that thoroughfare. After surveying the immediate scene,—having, for example, noted the customers waiting at the counter of the First National Bank, diagonally opposite,—something almost invariably impelled his glance upward to the sign of a painless dentist, immediately above the First National,—a propinquity which had caused a wag (one of the Montgomery's customers) to express the hope that the dentist was more painless than the bank in his extractions.
There was a clothing store directly opposite Amzi's bank, and his wandering eye could not have failed to observe the lettering on the windows of the office above it, which, in badly scratched gilt, published the name of Thomas Kirkwood, Attorney at Law, to the litigiously inclined. Still higher on the third and final story of the building hung a photographer's sign in a dilapidated condition, and though a studio skylight spoke further of photography, almost every one knew that the artist had departed years ago, and that Tom Kirkwood had never found another tenant for those upper rooms.
At two o'clock on the afternoon of the day following the return of Phil Kirkwood and her father from their camp on Sugar Creek, as Mr. Montgomery appeared upon the steps of the bank and gazed with his usual unconcern up and down Main Street, his spectacles pointed finally (or so it seemed) to the photographer's studio over the way. Although a slight mist was falling and umbrellas bobbed inanely in the fashion of umbrellas, Amzi in his seersucker coat was apparently oblivious of the weather's inclemency. One of the windows of the abandoned photograph gallery was open, and suddenly, without the slightest warning, the head of Miss Phyllis Kirkwood bent over the cornice and she waved her hand with unmistakable friendliness. It was then that Mr. Montgomery, as though replying to a signal, detached his left hand from its pocket, made a gesture as graceful as a man of his figure is capable of, and then, allaying suspicion by passing the hand across his bald head, he looked quickly toward the court-house tower and immediately withdrew to continue his active supervision of the four clerks who sufficed for his bank's business.
As depositors were now bringing to the receiving teller's window their day's offerings, Mr. Montgomery took his stand at the paying teller's window,—a part of his usual routine,—to relieve the pressure incident to the closing hour, one teller at other times being quite equal to the demands of both departments. Mr. Montgomery's manner of paying a check was in itself individual. He laid his cigar on the edge of the counter, passed the time of day with a slightly asthmatic voice, drew the check toward him with the tips of his fingers, read it, cocked an eye at the indorsement, and counted out the money with a bored air. If silver entered into the transaction, he usually rang the last coin absently on the glass surface of the counter.
In other times the sign on the window had proclaimed "Montgomery & Holton, Bankers"; and the deletion of the second name from the copartnership was due to an incident that must be set down succinctly before we proceed further. Amzi II had left a family of five children, of whom Phil Kirkwood's three aunts have already been mentioned. The only one of the Montgomery girls, as they were locally designated, who had made a marriage at all in keeping with the family dignity, had been Lois.
Lois, every one said, was the handsomest, the most interesting of the Montgomerys, and she had captured at eighteen the heart of Tom Kirkwood, who had come out of the East to assume the chair of jurisprudence in Madison College, which, as every one knows, is an institution inseparably associated with the fame of Montgomery as a community of enlightenment. Tom Kirkwood was a graduate of Williams College, with a Berlin Ph.D., and he had, moreover, a modest patrimony which, after his marriage to Lois Montgomery, he had invested in the block in Main Street opposite the Montgomery Bank. The year following the marriage he had, in keeping with an early resolution, resigned his professorship and begun the practice of law. He seemed to have escaped the embarrassments and prejudices that attend any practical undertakings by men who have borne the title of professor, and whether his connection with the Montgomery family saved him from such disqualification it was nevertheless true that he entered upon the law brilliantly. Two or three successes in important cases had launched him upon this second career auspiciously.
Amzi II was still living at the time of the marriage, and as he valued his own position in the community and wished his family to maintain its traditions, he had subdivided a large tract of woodland in which his father's house stood, and bestowed an acre lot upon each of his daughters. His son had declined a similar offer, having elected early in life the bachelor state in which we have found him. As Lois had been the first to marry, her house was planted nearest to the gray old brick in which she had been reared.
If the gods favored the Montgomerys, they seemed no less to smile with a peculiar indulgence upon the Kirkwoods. People who had said that Lois was a trifle strong-willed and given to frivolity were convinced that her marriage had done much to sober her. In the second year thereafter Phyllis was born, a further assurance that Lois was thoroughly established among the staid matrons of her native town. Then in the fifth year of her marriage, rumors—almost the first scandalous gossip that had ever passed current in those quiet streets—began to be heard. It did not seem possible that in a community whose morals were nurtured in Center Church, a town where everybody was "good," where no respectable man ever entered a saloon and divorce was a word not to be spoken before children,—that here, a daughter of the house of Montgomery was causing anxiety among those jealous of her good name. A few of Kirkwood's friends—and he had many—may have known the inner history of the cloud that darkened his house; but the end came with a blinding flash that left him dazed and dumb.
The town was so knit together, so like a big family, that Lois Montgomery's escapade was a tragedy at every hearth-side. It was immeasurably shocking that a young woman married to a reputable man, and with a child still toddling after her, should have done this grievous thing. To say that she had always been flighty, and that it was what might have been expected of a woman as headstrong as she had been as a girl, was no mollification of the blow to the local conscience, acutely sensitive in all that pertained to the honor and sanctity of the marriage tie. And Jack Holton! That she should have thrown away a man like Tom Kirkwood, a gentleman and a scholar, for a rogue like Holton, added to the blackness of her sin. The Holtons had been second only to the Montgomerys in dignity. The conjunction of the names on the old sign over the bank at Main and Franklin Streets had expressed not only unquestioned financial stability, but a social worth likewise unassailable. Jack Holton, like Amzi Montgomery, had inherited an interest in the banking-house of Montgomery & Holton. To be sure his brother William had been the active representative of the second generation of Holtons, and Jack had never really settled down to anything after he returned from the Eastern college to which he had been sent; but these were things that had not been considered until after he decamped with Lois Kirkwood. Many declared after the event that they had "always known" that Jack was a bad lot. Those who sought to account for Lois Kirkwood's infatuation remembered suddenly that he and Lois had been boy and girl sweethearts and that she had once been engaged to marry him. It was explained that his temperament and hers were harmonious, and that Kirkwood, for all his fine abilities, was a sober-minded fellow, without Holton's zest for the world's gayety. Any further details—the countless trifles with which for half a dozen years the gossips of Montgomery regaled themselves—are not for this writing.
Many years had passed—or, to be explicit, exactly sixteen. One of the first results of the incident had been the immediate elimination of the Holton half of the firm name by which the bank had long been known. Jack's brother William organized the First National Bank, toward which Mr. Amzi Montgomery's spectacles pointed several times daily, as already noted. Samuel, the oldest son of the first Holton, tried a variety of occupations before he was elected Secretary of State. He never fully severed his ties with Montgomery, retaining a house in town and the farm on Sugar Creek. After retiring from office, he became a venturesome speculator, capitalizing his wide political acquaintance in the sale of shares in all manner of mining and plantation companies, and dying suddenly, had left his estate in a sad clutter.
In due course of time it became known that Lois Kirkwood had divorced her husband at long range, from a Western state where such matters were at the time transacted expeditiously, and a formal announcement of her marriage to Holton subsequently appeared in the Montgomery "Evening Star."
The day after his wife's departure Kirkwood left his home and did not enter it again. It was said by romanticists among the local gossips that he had touched nothing, leaving it exactly as it had been, and that he always carried the key in his pocket as a reminder of his sorrow. Phil was passed back and forth among her aunts, seriatim, until she went to live with her father, in a rented house far from the original roof-tree.
Even in practicing the most rigid economy of space some reference must be made to the attitude of Lois Kirkwood's sisters toward her as a sinning woman. Their amazement had yielded at once to righteous indignation. It was enough that she had sinned against Heaven; but that she should have brought shame upon them all and placed half the continent between herself and the scene and consequences of her iniquity, leaving her family to shoulder all its responsibilities, was too monstrous for expression. They were Montgomerys of Montgomery; it seemed incredible that the town itself could ever recover from the shock of her egregious transgression. They vied with each other in manifestations of sympathy for Kirkwood, whose nobility under suffering was so admirable; and they lavished upon Phil (it had been like Lois, they discovered, to label her with the preposterous name of Phyllis!) an affection which became in time a trial to the child's soul.
Their fury gained ardor from the fact that their brother Amzi had never, after he had blinked at them all when they visited him in his private room at the bank the morning after the elopement, mentioned to any living soul the passing of this youngest sister. It had been an occasion to rouse an older brother and the head of his house to some dramatic pronouncement. He should have taken a stand, they said, though just what stand one should take, when one's sister has run off with another man and left a wholly admirable husband and a winsome baby daughter behind, may not, perhaps, have been wholly clear to the minds of the remaining impeccable sisters. They demanded he should confiscate her share of their father's estate as punishment; this should now be Phil's; they wanted this understood and they took care that their friends should know that they had made this demand of Amzi. But a gentleman of philosophic habit and temper, who serenely views the world from his bank's doorstep, need hardly be expected to break his natural reticence to thunder at an erring sister, or even to gladden the gallery (imaginably the whole town that bears his name) by transfers of property, of which he was the lawful trustee, to that lady's abandoned heir.
Lois had caused all eyes to focus upon the Montgomerys with a new intentness. Before her escapade they had been accepted as a matter of course; now that she had demonstrated that the Montgomerys were subject to the temptations that beset all mankind, every one became curious as to the further definition of the family weaknesses. The community may be said to have awaited the marriages of the three remaining Montgomery girls in much the same spirit that a family physician awaits the appearance of measles in a child that has been exposed to that malady. And Montgomery was not wholly disappointed.
Kate, who like Lois, was a trifle temperamental, had fallen before the charms of one Lawrence Hastings. The manner of Hastings's advent in Montgomery is perhaps worthy of a few words, inasmuch as he came to stay. Hastings was an actor, who visited Montgomery one winter as a member of a company that had trustfully ventured into the provinces with a Shakespearean repertoire. Montgomery was favored in the hope that, being a college town, it would rally to the call of the serious drama. Unfortunately the college was otherwise engaged at the moment with a drama of more contemporaneous interest and authorship. An unusually severe January added to the eager and nipping air upon which the curtain rises in "Hamlet," and proved too much for the well-meaning players. Hastings (so ran tradition) had gallantly bestowed such money as he had upon the ladies of the company to facilitate their flight to New York. His father, a successful manufacturer of codfish packing-boxes at Newburyport, telegraphed money for the prodigal's return with the stipulation that he should forswear the inky cloak and abase himself in the box factory.
At this point Kate Montgomery, in charge of an entertainment for the benefit of Center Church, invited Hastings (thus providentially flung upon the Hoosier coasts) to give a reading in the church parlors. Almost coincidently the opera house at Montgomery needed a manager, and Hastings accepted the position. The Avon Dramatic Club rose and flourished that winter under Hastings's magic wand. It is not every town of fifteen thousand that suddenly enrolls a Hamlet among her citizens, and as the creator and chief spirit of the dramatic club, Hastings's social acceptance was immediate and complete. In other times the town would have been wary of an actor; but had not Hastings given his services free of charge for the benefit of Center Church, and was he not a gentleman, the son of a wealthy manufacturer, and had he not declined money offered by telegraph that he might cling stubbornly to his art? Kate Montgomery talked a good deal about his art, which he would not relinquish for the boxing of codfish. After Hastings had given a lecture on "Macbeth" (with readings from the play) in the chapel of Madison College, his respectability was established. There was no reason whatever why Kate Montgomery should not marry him; and she did, at the end of his first year in town. He thereupon assumed the theater lease and what had been the old "Grand Opera House" became under his ownership "Hastings's Theater," or "The Hastings."
Fanny Montgomery had contented herself with the hand of a young man named Fosdick who had been summoned to town to organize a commercial club. In two years he added several industries to Montgomery's scant list, and wheedled a new passenger station out of one of the lordly railroads that had long held the town in scorn. Two of the industries failed, the new station was cited as an awful example by the Professor of Fine Arts at the college, and yet Paul Fosdick made himself essential to Montgomery. The commercial club's bimonthly dinners gave the solid citizens an excuse for leaving home six nights a year, and in a community where meetings of whist clubs and church boards constituted the only justification for carrying a latch-key this new freedom established him at once as a friend of mankind. Fosdick was wholly presentable, and while his contributions to the industrial glory of Montgomery lacked elements of permanence, he had, so the "Evening Star" solemnly averred, "done much to rouse our citizens from their lethargy and blaze the starward trail." After he married Fanny, Fosdick opened an office adjoining the Commercial Club rooms and his stationery bore the legend "Investment Securities." Judge Walters, in appointing a receiver for a corporation which Fosdick had organized for the manufacture and sale of paving-brick, inadvertently spoke of the promoter's occupation as that of a "dealer in insecurities"; but this playfulness on the court's part did not shake confidence in Fosdick. He was a popular fellow, and the success of those Commercial Club dinners was not to be discounted by the cynical flings of a judge who was rich enough to be comfortably indifferent to criticism.
Amzi Montgomery being, as hinted, a person of philosophic temperament, had interposed no manner of objection to the several marriages of his sisters until Josephine, the oldest, and the last to marry, tendered him a brother-in-law in the person of Alexander Waterman. Josephine was the least attractive of the sisters, and also, it was said, the meekest, the kindest, and the most amiable. An early unhappy affair with a young minister was a part of the local tradition, and she had been cited as a broken-hearted woman until she married Waterman. Waterman was a lawyer who had been seized early in life with a mania for running for Congress. The district had long been Republican, but with singular obstinacy Waterman insisted on being a Democrat. His party being hopelessly in the minority he was graciously permitted to have such nominations as he liked, with the result that he had been defeated for nearly every office within the gift of a proud people. He was a fair jury lawyer, and an orator of considerable repute among those susceptible to the blandishments of the florid school.
Amzi's resentment of Josephine's choice was said to be due to a grilling the banker had received at Waterman's hands on the witness stand. Once while standing on the steps of his bank for a survey of the visible universe, Amzi was rewarded with an excellent view of the liveliest runaway that had thrilled Main Street in years. Several persons were hurt, and one of the victims had sued the grocer whose wagon had done the mischief.
Waterman was the plaintiff's attorney, and Amzi Montgomery was, of course, an important though reluctant witness. The banker loathed litigation in all its forms and in his own affairs studiously avoided it. It enraged him to find one of his idiosyncrasies advertised by the fact that he had observed the violent collision of a grocer's wagon with a fellow-citizen. His anger was augmented by the patronizing manner in which Waterman compelled him to contribute to the record of the case admissions touching his habits of life, which, though perfectly lawful and decorous, became ridiculous when uttered on oath in a law court. Every one knew that Mr. Montgomery stood on the bank steps at intervals to take the air, but no one had ever dreamed that he would be obliged to discuss or explain the habit.
The "Evening Star" printed all of his testimony that it dared; but as the cross-examination had been conducted before a crowded courtroom the neat give and take between lawyer and witness had not lacked thorough reporting. For several weeks thereafter Amzi did not appear on the bank steps; nor did he revert to his old habit until satisfied that groups of idlers were not lying in wait. After Josephine introduced Waterman to the family circle Amzi seemed generously to overlook the offense. He was as cordial toward him as toward either of the other brothers-in-law, with the exception of Kirkwood, though of course Kirkwood, strictly speaking, no longer continued in that relationship.
These details aside, it is possible to return to the bank, and await the result of that furtive gesture with which Mr. Amzi Montgomery responded to Phil Kirkwood's signal from the window of the photograph gallery. By half-past four the clerks had concluded their day's work; the routine letters to Chicago, Cincinnati, and Indianapolis correspondents had been sealed and dispatched, and the vault locked by Mr. Montgomery's own hand. Thereupon he retired to the back room, unlocked the Franklin Street door and beguiled himself with the "Evening Star." Shortly before five o'clock he heard light steps outside followed by a tap and Phil opened and closed the door.
"Lo, Amy!"
She pronounced the a long, after a fashion she had adopted in childhood and refused to relinquish. Amzi was "A-mee" to Phil. She glanced into the bank room, seized his newspaper, crunched it into a football, and kicked it over the tellers' cages into the front window. Then she pressed her uncle down into his chair, grasped his face in her hands, and held him while she kissed him on the nose, the left eye, and the right cheek, choosing the spot in every instance with provoking deliberation as she held his wriggling head. He lost his cigar and his spectacles were knocked awry, but he did not appear to be distressed. Phil set his spectacles straight, struck a match for a fresh cigar, and seated herself on the table.
"I'm back, Amy. How did you know we'd be home to-day?"
"Dreamed it," said Amzi, apparently relieved that her assaults upon his peace and dignity were ended.
"I'd been watching for you half an hour before you came out on the steps. I'd about given you up."
"So? You were pretty late getting home last night. Your father ought to be ashamed of himself."
Amzi glared at Phil. His curiously large blue eyes could, at will, express ferocity, and the red and purple in his face deepened as he shut his jaws tight. She was not, however, in the least disturbed, not even when he pushed back his chair to escape her swinging legs, and pointed his finger at her threateningly.
"I wanted to see you," he gasped.
"So I inferred," Phil remarked, bending forward and compressing her lips as though making a careful calculation, then touching the point of his nose.
Amzi rubbed the outraged nose with the back of his hand, wheezed hoarsely (the effect of the rain upon his asthma), and cleared his throat.
"You'll come down from your high horse in a minute. I've got something to tell you that will sober you up a bit."
Phil raised her hands and with brown nimble fingers found and readjusted the pin that affixed a shabby felt hat to her hair. Then she folded her arms and looked at the tips of her shoes.
"The suspense is killing me. I who am about to die salute you!"
Amzi frowned at her levity. His frown caused a disturbance throughout his vast tracts of baldness.
"You'll change your tune in a minute, my young commodore. Have you seen your aunts?"
"No; but it's not their fault! Aunt Josie called; the others telephoned for dates. I saw Aunt Josie first, which explains why we didn't meet. I knew something was up."
"Something is up. They got me over to Josie's last night to ask me to help. It's a big programme. And I wanted to warn you in advance. You've got to stop all your capers; no more camps on Sugar Creek, no more tomboy foolishness; no more general nonsense. You've got to be a civilized woman, and conduct yourself according to the rules in such cases made and provided."
"Oh, is that it? And they got you to tell me, did they? How sweet of them!" observed Phil. "I might have guessed it from the look of Aunt Josie's back as she went out the gate."
"Her back? Thunder! How did you see her back?"
"From the roof, Amy, if you must know. If you had three aunts who had turned up every few minutes all your natural life to tell you what not to do, you'd run for the roof, too, every time you heard the gate click. And that last cook they put in the house was just a spy for them. But she didn't spy long! I've bounced her!"
Amzi blinked and coughed, and feigned even greater ferocity.
"That's it! That's the kind of thing you've got to stop doing! You're always bouncing the hired girls your aunts put in the house to take care of you and you've got to quit; you've got to learn how to manage a servant; you've got"—and he drew himself up to charge his words with all possible dignity—"you've got to be a lady."
"You insinuate, Amy, that I'm not one, just natural born?"
"I don't mean any such thing," he blurted. "You know mighty well what I mean—this skylarking, this galloping around town on your pony. You've got to behave yourself; you've got to pay attention to what your aunts tell you. You've got to listen to me!"
"Look me in the eye, you old fraud! I'll bet every one of 'em has called you up to tell you to see me and give me a lecturing. They're a jolly lot of cowards, that's all. And I came over here thinking you wanted to be nice and cheerful like you always used to be. All by your dear old lonesome you'd never think of talking to me like this; I've a good notion to muss you up!"
The thought of being mussed was clearly disturbing. He rose hastily and retreated to the barred window, with the table between them.
"Oh, you're guilty! I always know when they've been putting you up to something. Come along now and sit down like a good old uncle and tell me what new idea has struck those foolish females. Sit down right there in your little chair, Amy; I'll let you off from that mussing if you tell the truth."
"You see, Phil," he began earnestly, "you've grown up. You're not a kid any more to chase cats and dogs through the court-house square, and flip on the interurbans, but a grown woman, and you've got to begin acting like one. And you've got to begin right now. Just look at your shoes; look at that hat! What kind of clothes is that sailor boy's suit you're wearing? You've got to dress like a decent white girl that's had some bringing-up, and you've got to—you've got—" Amzi coughed as though afraid of the intended conclusion of his sentence. Phil's eyes were bent upon him with disconcerting gravity. He hoped that Phil would interrupt with one of her usual impertinences; but with the suspicion of laughter in her eyes she waited, so that he perforce blurted it out. "You've got to go into society; that's what's the matter!"
Phil moved her head slightly to one side, and her lips parted. A faraway look came into her eyes for an instant only. Amzi was watching her keenly. He was taken aback by her abrupt change of manner; her sudden sobriety baffled him. Something very sweet and wistful came into her face; something that he had not seen there before, and he was touched by it.
"I suppose I must change my ways, Uncle Amy. I do act like a wild zebra,—I know that. But I'm sorry. Of course it's silly for a girl who's nearly nineteen to be as skittish as I am. And they tell me I'm a bad example to my cousins and the whole town. It's tough to be a bad example. What's this they're going to do to me?"
"Oh, you've got to be brought out; you've got to have a party; they want me to have it in my house."
"All right," said Phil tamely. She seemed, indeed, to be thinking of something else. Her manner continued to puzzle him; he was even troubled by it. He relighted his cigar and watched the smoke of the extinguished match after he had tossed it into the little grate.
"Uncle Amy," said Phil, quite soberly, "I'm really serious now. I've been wondering a good deal about what's going to become of me."
"How's that, Phil?"
"Well, I'm not as silly as I act; and I've been wondering whether I oughtn't to try to do something?"
"What kind of something? Housekeeping—that sort of thing?"
"Yes; but more than that. I ought to go to work to earn money."
Amzi shrugged his shoulders.
"Thunder! you can't do that," he said with decision. "It wouldn't be proper for you to do that."
"I don't see why not. Other girls do."
"Girls do when they have to. You don't have to."
"I'm not so sure of that. We might as well be sensible if we're going to talk about it."
Amzi agreed to this with a nod and resettled himself in his chair.
"Daddy isn't making enough to take care of us, that's all. This afternoon I was over in his office cleaning up his desk,—you know he never does it himself, and even a harum-scarum like me can help it some,—and I saw a lot of things that scared me. Bills and things like that. And it would be hard to talk to daddy about it; I don't think I ever could. And you know he really could make a lot of money if he wanted to; I can tell that from the letters he gets. He doesn't answer his letters. Every month last year I used to straighten his desk, and some of last spring's bills are still there, and they haven't been paid. I know, of course, that that can't go on forever."
"You oughtn't to have to bother about that, Phil. It's none of your business."
"Yes," she replied, earnestly, "it is my business. And it's been troubling me for a long time. I can't talk to father about it; you can see how that would be; and he's such a dear—so fine and kind. I suppose there isn't anybody on earth as fine as daddy. And he breaks my heart, sometimes; goes about so quiet, as though he had gone into himself and shut the blinds, as they do in a house where somebody's dead. It seems just like that, Uncle Amy."
Amzi was uncomfortable. It was not to hear her speak of drawn blinds in houses of the dead that he had summoned Phil for this interview. His sisters had asked him to reason with her, as they had often appealed to him before in their well-meant but tactless efforts to correct her faults, but she had evinced an accession of reasonableness that made him uneasy. She had changed f