CHAPTER NINETEEN
Down in Philadelphia, that fall, Phebe was having her first experience of bitter homesickness. She had always supposed herself immune from that dire disease, and, for some time, she had no idea what was the matter with her. In vain she tried to trace the cause of her complaint to malaria and to every known form of indigestion. She studied her symptoms carefully and tried to match them up, one by one, to the symptoms recorded in her text-books. At last, she was forced to the ignoble conclusion that she was suffering from homesickness pure and simple, homesickness in one of its acutest forms. Her appetite for her work declined in proportion to her appetite for her food. She was listless, dull, and, it must be confessed, most deplorably cross. The fact of the matter was that the girl was pining for the broad lawns of The Savins, for the shabby red house, for her father and Hubert, even for Cicely and Cicely's dog Melchisedek.
Her work interested her. To her mind, there was a great charm in seeing the neat economy with which her body was constructed. She enjoyed the lectures keenly; but the clinics had proved to be her undoing. At the first one she had attended, she had ignominiously fainted away. There was a certain satisfaction in feeling that she had drawn upon herself at least one-half as much attention as the more legitimate object of the gathering; however, she was sternly resolved never to repeat the experience, and she accordingly became a walking arsenal of restoratives, whenever a clinic was on hand. In a nutshell, Phebe found theory far more attractive than practice. Surgery was a grand and helpful profession; but, under some circumstances, it was not neat, and Phebe must have neatness at any cost.
With her fellow-students she was quite unable to fraternize. For the most part, they were older than herself, a body of enthusiastic, earnest women who were ready to lay down their lives for their profession. Grave-eyed and intent, they went through the day's routine with a cheery patience under drudgery which showed the noble stuff of which they were made. They looked askance at Phebe's grumblings, her fluctuating enthusiasm, her hours of girlish frivolity and of pettish complaint. Among themselves, they analyzed her; but they were unable to classify her. She was foreign to their ways of life and thought; in a word, they set her down as worldly and lacking in conviction.
On her side, Phebe detested them heartily. Golf was a sealed book to them; their skirts were prone to hang in dejected folds; their talk, even in their hours of relaxation, was of the shop shoppy. Down in her heart of hearts, she respected them; but in her naughty little head, she railed at them, not loudly, but long and unceasingly.
There were days when, utterly discouraged and out of conceit with herself and the world, she meditated writing to her father, telling him the whole truth and then taking the next train for home. Then she shut her teeth and went back to her work in a grim silence that warned her neighbors that she wished to be let alone. So far in her life, she had never given up anything she had undertaken, and she hated the idea of doing it now. She would fight it out a little longer. Perhaps in time it would be a little less intolerable. Perhaps people always found it hard at first to adapt themselves fully to their professions. It was even within the limits of human possibility that, if she kept on long enough, she might come to the point of delighting in clinics, like Miss Caldwell who was fat and wore spectacles with tin bows and a cameo breastpin. Then she hunted up a dry spot in her pillow, and dreamed of The Savins, and Mac, and Quantuck, and waked up, and went to sleep again, and dreamed of hearing her father saying in the next room,—
"Poor Babe! I don't think she was ever meant to be a good doctor; but I don't see what on earth she really is good for, anyway."
The next afternoon, there were neither lectures nor clinics, and Phebe determined to go for a long walk. It was early November, and the hush and the haze of Indian summer lay over the park, as she halted on the bridge and stood looking down into the river beneath. Not a soul was in sight. The noises of the city were hushed in the distance, and before her the broad reaches of the park stretched out and out under their mighty forest trees. In a way, the rolling slopes, the broad lawns and the trees reminded her of The Savins. She could imagine just how it looked at home, the green lawn heaped here and there with brown oak leaves, the golden glory of the hickories, the masses of late chrysanthemums, red and white and pink and yellow, filling every sheltered nook and corner, above it all, the soft November haze which is neither rosy nor purple nor gold, but blended from them all, yet quieter far than any one of them.
All of a sudden Phebe's head went down upon her arms folded on the rail of the bridge and, secure in her solitude, she gave herself up to her woe.
"Miss McAlister?"
She started and pulled herself together abruptly.
"Are you in trouble?"
The voice was unknown, yet familiar, and she spun around to find herself face to face with Gifford Barrett.
"Where did you come from?" she asked, too much astonished at his appearing, too glad to look into a friendly pair of eyes to resent the sympathy written on his face.
"I came over here, for a few days, and I took the liberty of calling on you. The people at the house told me you had spoken of coming out here, so I came on the chance of finding you. But was something—?" He hesitated.
Phebe rubbed away her tears.
"Yes, something was," she answered, with an attempt at her usual briskness. "You caught me off my guard, Mr. Barrett. The fact is, I am desperately homesick."
"Then why don't you go home?" he asked prosaically, for he had learned, even in his slight experience at Quantuck, that it was not wise to take a sentimental tone in addressing Phebe.
"I can't. I came down here for a year, and I must stick it out."
"What's the use?"
"Because I never do give in. It would be babyish. Besides, I am going to be a doctor."
"I don't see why. It isn't in your line."
"I begin to think nothing is in my line," Phebe said forlornly.
"What else have you tried?"
"Nothing; but—I don't care about many things. I should like this, if it weren't for the clinics and the students and such things, and if I could be a little nearer home."
"When do you go home?"
"Christmas, if I live till then," Phebe laughed; but her mirth sounded rather lugubrious. Then she added half-involuntarily, "I wonder what you must think of me, Mr. Barrett. I'm not generally given to this kind of a scene."
"No matter," he said soothingly, much as he might have spoken to a child;
"I am an old acquaintance, you know; and I never tell tales."
Suddenly Phebe laughed out blithely.
"What about the last night you were at Quantuck, Mr. Barrett?"
"Oh—well, that was different. How could I know that my muddy, murderous
Amazon was Miss Phebe McAlister in disguise?"
This time, they both laughed, and Phebe felt better.
"Let's walk on," she suggested. "This bridge is getting monotonous. Is your arm quite strong again?"
"Perfectly. I think, if you'll let me, I can match your record in golf, before I go back to New York."
"I didn't even know there were any links here," she said.
"There are, fine ones. One of my errands, to-day, was to make some kind of an engagement with you. I've my reputation for laziness to redeem, you know."
"I wish you wouldn't remind me of all the horrid things I said to you," she said contritely.
He looked at her in surprise. It was not like the Phebe McAlister he had known, to speak like this. At Quantuck she had been cocksure, aggressive; now she was gentler, more womanly. He missed something of the piquancy; yet after all he rather liked the change.
"Really, aren't you enjoying it down here?" he asked.
"No; I am not. I'm all out of my element. I don't mind the work so much as I do the people. They despise me as a worldling, and I don't like being despised." For the moment, it was the old Phebe who was speaking. "Don't tell," she begged. "I'd rather die than have them know it at home. How long are you going to stay here?"
"About a week, I only came over last night."
"I don't see why I am glad to see you," Phebe said, with characteristic frankness. "I didn't know you much at Quantuck; it probably is because I associate you with the home people. You used to be around with Hope a good deal."
"What's the use of analyzing it?" he answered. "I'm here, and you are homesick and glad to see me. That's enough for any practical purposes. When are you going to play golf with me?"
"Can you really play?"
"I shouldn't dare ask you, if I couldn't. One thing that has brought me over here is a thirsting to beat you."
"I haven't touched a club since I came."
"Did it ever occur to you, Miss McAlister, that you were very lazy?"
"Did it ever occur to you, Mr. Barrett, that you were outspoken?"
Like a pair of children, they laughed together, and Phebe suddenly discovered that his eyes were singularly clear and frank. She also discovered that the day was much finer than she had supposed, the sunlight clearer, the air more bracing.
"We may as well cry quits," she said. "I fought you rather violently; you retaliated by telling my family the one sealed chapter of my life."
"But if they don't know it—"
"They do know it; but not my share in it."
For a little distance they strolled along in silence. Then Phebe asked abruptly,—
"You said, that night at Quantuck, that you were in the middle of some work, when I ran into you. Did I break it up entirely; or have you ever finished it?"
"Then you haven't seen the papers?" he asked, with boyish egotism.
"Yes, I always read them. What then?"
"My symphonic poem is to come out soon."
"Oh, I don't ever read the music notes. I don't know much about music, anyway."
"And care less?" he asked a little shortly.
"Oh, I don't mind it much. I don't often go to concerts; but I like it behind palms at receptions."
For a moment, he looked at her, in doubt whether or not she was jesting.
Then as her face suggested no humorous intent, his color came.
"What about it?" she inquired. "How is it coming out?"
"I didn't know as you would be interested."
"Of course. I am interested in you, even if I don't care a fig for your music," Phebe answered, with a bluntness that should have been death to sentiment.
"It is going to be given in New York, on the twelfth of December," he said, and Phebe wondered at the slight catch in his breath. "I'm to conduct the orchestra, you know. I have sent for Mrs. Farrington to come down and bring Miss Cicely, and—I wondered—do you suppose—at least, could you make time to run over and join them in my box?"
Phebe clasped her hands rapturously.
"Oh, Mr. Barrett! Could I? I should like nothing better. How good you are to ask me! I shall be so glad of the chance to see Teddy again."
When the night of the twelfth came, Theodora and Phebe and Cicely were in the box set apart for Mr. Barrett's use. Eager and happy as a child, dressed in rose-pink and with a great bunch of pink roses in her hand, Phebe was looking her very best. Unconscious of the envious eyes which watched her, she talked to the young composer with the same girlish frankness she had shown, that day in the park. Theodora looked at her in surprise. This was a new Phebe to her, gentler, infinitely more lovable; yet she smiled now and then as she saw the utter unconcern with which her young sister was receiving the attentions of the hero of the evening.
The symphony over and the aria, Gifford Barrett left them and, a moment later, came forward to the conductor's desk. Applause, a hush, then the orchestra gave out the low, ominous chords of the introduction before the violins took up the opening theme which repeated itself, met another theme, paused to play with it for a space, then in slow, majestic growth passed on and up to a climax which left the audience breathless, so much moved that it needed time to rally before bursting into the well-won applause. The Alan Breck Overture was surpassed, and Gifford Barrett's name was in every mouth; but Phebe, while she watched him, tried in vain to realize that the man now bowing before the footlights was the man she had capsized upon Bannock Hill, that the right arm which had swayed the orchestra, now banging their approval on their racks, was the arm she had broken, once upon a time, and then tugged back into place.
Gifford Barrett came back into the box, trailing after him a huge wreath. He laid it down at Phebe's side.
"What in the world is that for?" she demanded. "I didn't write your music for you."
"No" he answered, with a queer little smile; "but perhaps you helped it on."