“She’ll never be old,” said Jawn. “I can hardly keep my eyes off her hair—it’s so brilliant and fascinating.” He was about to say something equally complimentary when he caught her shadow at the long front windows. Mrs. Wells had seen her, too, peeping behind a curtain, and showed the knowledge in her face. “Fascinating?” he continued, “yes. And charming? Not a doubt. She’ll be that way when she’s eighty—I’ve known many of her kind—having all the young boys dancing about her—unless she takes cold and dies from poking her dainty head in at draughty windows!”
“Jawn de Lancey O’Rourke,” she poked her dainty head further in, “you’ll force me to marry you yet in self-defence.”
This time she was really gone. Down the road she walked briskly, a fine glow on her face. It was such an unusual joy for her to meet a mind as absurd as her own. What good is a sense of the ridiculous, a kinship with the Comic Spirit, if folks about you are for ever taking you seriously? It simply means offence when you had meant none; and scandal where none was dreamed. The Wells were the right sort, because they took nothing seriously from Phœbe, which was a good thing in many ways: it gave Phœbe an outlet for some real heavy matters that weighed on her soul, and she never need fear too much sympathy. And it gave her a chance to say the most literal truths about her neighbours, to let loose her satire on their shortcomings, and never to be suspected of wisdom.
The Wells, notwithstanding, were hardly more than appreciative audience; Jawn, now, was a “pardner”—to use the technical term of comedians. He stirred her mind, provoked it, as none of the others did. And every ripple of his own she felt akin to. It would be glorious fun to fight quip with quip; even though he were a rascal.
Of course he was a rascal. The pair of them were. About Richard she might have had doubts, but about Jawn—never! She knew an Irish villain when she saw one. He was a rascal, but she was not sure that she would be against him in the final reckoning. After all, life was a game of matching wits; and if this Wells Virginia-English strain was stupid should it not pay the penalty? But that explanation of her partnership was discarded before she got half-way down the hill. The Irish rascal was a rascal for high philosophic reasons: it was because he placed so little value upon the world’s goods that he concerned himself even less about the matter of precise ownership.—“I am taking your watch,” he might say kindly, “about which you should not grieve too much; for consider, when you come to your last dozen breaths, how little value this watch will have in your eyes, and how quickly you’d give it for another year of living.”
That’s what made the Irish villain so captivating a character in picturesque romances. He cracked his little joke at the world; if he got off with it, he laughed; if he got caught he laughed. The whole business of having and losing is so trivial when life itself is trivial.
In some such ways she defended Jawn, but resolved to watch him, nevertheless. If for no other reason than to get the joy of the play of his mind, she would watch him. And it was delightful to see how easily the good Wells were taken in. Their idea of a swindler was of a sneaking, Uriah Heepish, Sing-Singish cut-throat. They had not the wit to conceive of an honest blarneying lad who went straight at his task, open and above-board.
And what, in the name of pity, had happened to the mistress of the house? The most imposing creature in Jerusalem township had actually shrunk into a timid, smiling—it was as if the Red Queen (“Off with his head!”) had suddenly become the White Queen (“Pat her on the head and see how pleased she’ll be”). We all know how age creeps on us, but this time, thought Phœbe, it had pounced! Mrs. Wells had lost her rigidly erect bearing, her face had given up the fixed effort of concentration, she was aimlessly drifting. “A little kindness—and putting her hair in papers—would do wonders with her!” Phœbe laughed at this picture of the helpless White Queen, but the laugh soon died away. The reality was not at all comic.
But no one would have guessed that back of Phœbe’s public mirth and jollity was even a serious observation of the change in Mother Wells. A fine sense of consideration had kept even the glance of curiosity out of her eyes. She was not the sort to greet a lady friend with, “Goodness! Aren’t you getting a little stouter?”
She would not let even her own thoughts dwell too long on her friend’s misfortune. The villains were summoned again before her. Of course, Phœbe agreed before she reached “Lombardy,” her cottage, that she would keep an open mind about these mysterious gentlemen with changeable names. They might in the end turn out to be respectable. Very well. Her plan was to stand guard and never be suspected. And the way never to be suspected is to tell all your plans to the enemy. They won’t believe you, which is exactly what you want. “I’ll tell them they’re a set of rascals,” she chuckled, “and that I’m watchin’ every move of them, and they’ll laugh their heads off and never be disturbed by my little joke.”