“Don’t,” said Silas imploringly. “He and she are sitting over that old album, comparing notes. I saw them through the window, that’s why I came to look for you in the garden. Do you know, I believe the Governor was gone once on Maria, years ago, but they never got married. He married my mother instead.”
Phyl forgot her resentment.
The faint idea that Colonel Grangerson and Maria Pinckney had perhaps been more than friends in long gone days, had strayed across her mind, to be dismissed as a fancy. It interested her to find Silas confirming it.
“Of course, I can’t say for certain,” he went on, lighting a cigarette. “I only judge by the way they go on when they’re together, and the way he talks of her. Say, do you ever want to grow old?”
“No, I don’t—ever.”
“Neither do I. I hope I’ll be kicked to death by a horse, or drowned or shot before I’m forty. I don’t want to die in any beds with doctors round me. I reckon if I’m ever like that I’ll drink the liniment instead of the medicine—same as I nearly drenched Pap—and go to heaven with a red label for my ticket. Sit down for a while and let’s talk.”
“No, I don’t care to sit down.”
“I won’t touch you. I promise.”
Phyl hesitated a moment and then sat down. She was not afraid of Silas in the least, but his tricks of an overgrown boy did not please her; it seemed to her sometimes as though his irresponsibility was less an inheritance from youth, than from some ancestor ill-balanced to the point of craziness. If any other man of his age had acted and spoken to her as he had done she would have smacked his face, but Silas was Silas, and his good looks and seeming innocence, and something really charming that lay away at the back of his character and gave colour to this personality, managed, somehow, to condone his queerness of conduct.
All the same she sat a foot away from him on the seat, and kept her hands folded on her lap.