CHAPTER XVIIIPHILIP SITS IN JUDGMENT
“Philip will get his book out before mine if my publishers don’t look sharp,” grumbledMr.Burns to his sister.
Philip had ridden over on his hired mare Soda, and had had tea at Hawk’s Nest, and ridden back directly afterwards.
“I wish Philip would not work so hard,” said the mother anxiously. “He has had no holiday this summer.”
“What said Bismarck?” replied Uncle Robert. “‘To youth I have but three words of counsel—Work, work, work!’”
Mrs. Barrimore laughed girlishly. “Ah, Robert!” she said, “Bismarck also said, ‘A good speaker must be somewhat of a poet, and cannot therefore adhere mathematically to the truth.’ It is not good for youth to work without amusement to break it. Philip has no amusements. It can’t be good for him.”
“It is not,” acknowledgedMr.Burns. “I observed to-day that Philip is putting on flesh. He will get stout if he does not take exercise.”
“He rides,” defended Mrs. Barrimore.
“Rides!” echoed her brother. “He ought to walk and play cricket and swim!”
“But his work takes it out of him. He is too tired for these things,” objected the mother. “But heought to go to a play sometimes. We get very good companies down here.”
“Bah!” answered Uncle Robert. “Stuffy theatres are no good. What Philip wants is open-air exercise. Look at me!”
Mrs. Barrimore did so, and laughed again softly.
“Youare stout, you know,” she told him.
“So I am,” he acknowledged, “but I should become an elephant if I didn’t exercise. ‘Upon what meat doth this our Cæsar feed, that he is grown so great?’ Annie, why don’t you prevent me from eating potatoes! And Dan is coming back to-morrow to paint my portrait!”
“What time is Dan coming?” inquired Mrs. Barrimore.
“In time for dinner. I asked Philip to come.”
“Did you know that Colonel Lane was coming?”
“No. But the more the merrier.”
“But—” Mrs. Barrimore hesitated. “But you know Philip is always vexed to find Colonel Lane here.” Her face flushed pinkly.
“If Philip don’t like it he can lump it,” said Uncle Robert curtly. “Philip is too masterful, too overbearing. He would like to regulate even me! I think, Annie, that you have been unkind to the Colonel.”
Mrs. Barrimore’s sweet mouth became tremulous. “I think, dear,” she said, “that we agreed not to speak of that. Colonel Lane and I are very good friends—oh, yes,very. He does not think me unkind.”
“I call it all tommy-rot,” said Uncle Robert, “to spoil your life and that good fellow’s, just because Philip has an objection to your remarriage.”
“Do you know that Phyllis suggested that perhapsPhilip would take a fancy to Miss Le Breton?” she said, to change the subject.
“Oh! did she!” said Uncle Robert with contempt. “Idon’t think there is the slightest chance of such a thing. Philip is very satisfied with his condition. His work is more to him than any woman, even his mother!”
“Youare unkind now,” she said with as much displeasure in her voice as her gentle nature was capable of showing.
“No,” he contradicted. “I am not unkind. I am as fond of the lad as a man can be, but I am not blind to his faults.”
“But you do not realize his suffering,” she protested.
“I realize that he has got over it,” affirmed Uncle Robert. “It has become a sort of poetic regret—an interesting adjunct in his personality.”
But Mrs. Barrimore shook her head, her eyes shining with love for that boy of hers, and with conviction that she understood him, which his Uncle Robert failed to do.
The person who really did understand Philip was Eweretta Alvin, for though she was mistaken in believing that he had consoled himself with Phyllis Lane, she had studied his face to some purpose. She realized that the dead can be forgotten, and that a love sworn to be eternal can end with a few shovelfuls of earth upon a coffin. She realized, too, that love could end so, even though two people were united in marriage. Love could pass away in life as well as in death.
It was this conviction that helped her more than anything else to rise above the blow she had received.
“Philip would have ceased to care in anycase,” she told herself. “It is well that he thinks me dead.”
She had been warned both by Mrs. Le Breton and by her uncle that she would probably encounter Philip, now that she was free to come and go.
She had smiled mystically.
“He will never have the least suspicion I am not Aimée,” she had said. In her heart she said: “There is no love to penetrate the disguise.”
She saw Philip nearly every day as he took his favorite stroll across the fields, passing the hedge of the White House garden.
Philip looked well and contented. He was, indeed, at this time, mightily pleased with his work, and that put him in excellent spirits.
The letter he had received from Thomas Alvin pleased him too, and being in such excellent humor, he generously made allowances for the rudeness ofMr.Alvin on the occasion of his visit, and answered the note in his own charming manner.
He had, however, no present intention of repeating the call he had made at the White House. The rough Colonial did not appeal to him, and Miss Le Breton, being restored to a normal condition, was not in need of kindnesses, which, moreover, might be mistaken. Philip considered himself very clever to have thought of this.
It was, of course, possible now that Miss Le Breton and the young man should meet, but Philip meant to avoid it if he could. He did not want to have the old sorrow awakened by her looks and her voice. Her voice, when he chanced to hear it from the garden, affected him more than her extraordinary likeness to Eweretta. Both girls had low-pitched, contralto voices, singularly sweet.
Philip had no desire to be haunted by ghosts.
Since coming to the bungalow he had communed much with himself, and one result of his communings had been the abandonment of his resolve to die a bachelor.
He had no notion of again falling in love. He had, he told himself, experienced one grand passion. He could never experience another. But he would marry, if he got on, a woman who had society tact and experience, a woman who could make his position by hersavoir faire. He had come to realize that however big an author a man might be, a society wife was an essential to a big success. She could make him thefashion. His work was everything to him now, and he honestly believed that no living author wrote quite such perfect romances as he did.
In justice to Philip, the critics—those critics that count—prophesied a big future for him. He was still a very young man.
He was considerably relieved that his uncle’s book would be by “Robert Burns,” and not by “Barrimore.” Had it been his father’s brother instead of his mother’s Philip would have regarded the publication of this volume of verse as nothing short of a catastrophe.
Philip did not want so inferior a production to be put down to him.
But Philip was fond of his uncle, and he had made big efforts to appear pleased that the book was coming out. Nevertheless, his real views did leak out in spite of him. In a fit of penitence for “hurting the poor old chap’s feelings” Philip consented to leave work and dine at Hawk’s Nest as requested.
Philip often had fits of penitence regarding histreatment of both his uncle and his mother; nevertheless he had but the vaguest idea how much he sometimes hurt them both.
Of one thing Philip had an idea that had no vagueness at all about it, and that was Colonel Lane’s opinion about it all.
Colonel Lane often regarded Philip with a cold, disapproving eye. Once he had said, after Philip had been putting his mother and his uncle right on several points in succession, “A bit of army discipline would do you good, young man.”
Davis, the ex-soldier, who acted as servant to Philip, had also his ideas about his domineering, dictatorial (albeit kind) master, and had on one occasion confided to the saucepan he was scouring that it would improveMr.Barrimore to be “kicked round the square” a bit.
Philip was not altogether to blame. His mother had always treated him as a demi-god from his infancy. Also she had made the great mistake of keeping him at home under a tutor when he ought to have been at a public school—an omission with which Philip in these days, did not fail to reproach his mother!
“The boy hasn’t been thrashed, that’s what’s the matter with him,” Uncle Robert would often observe. “‘Spare the rod and spoil the child!’ Why I don’t think Philip ever so much as had a fight with another boy!”
These ideas of Uncle Robert’s were little pleasing to the gentle but unwise mother.
Philip, in his wisdom, disapproved of them all!—his mother, his uncle, and Colonel Lane. But he was tolerant to them, he told himself, for “they had good intentions!”