“Phoebe,” she answered, shrinking with shyness.
“Phoebe what?”
“I have no other name.”
Phoebe had been accustomed all her life to the courtesy and gentleness of one man, her father. The few others she had known were rough mountaineers, and here was she, barefooted and ragged, treated like a princess by two men.
While the doctor fried ham and eggs, the staple of every camp, Ben made a pot of tea, and presently drew up a table in front of her and placed on it a tray set as neatly as he knew how. Phoebe watched the proceedings with wide frightened eyes. She tried to hide her bare feet under her ragged dress and to draw down the sleeves over her hands, brown and stained with blackberry juice. Later, when they had made her a bed on one of the divans and left her to sleep until daylight, she was too bewildered to say good-night.
All her life Phoebe had lived in the little mountain cabin. She had never known a mother and she had never had a friend. Her father had taught her many things, however, and one was to read from the books on the shelf. There were several books on astronomy; Pilgrim’s Progress; the Bible; a volume of Shakespeare; a history of England; a translation of the “Iliad”, and some volumes of poetry:—Keats, Tennyson and Browning. Where her father had got these books and the silver and the blue china, she knew no more than he. He had tried and tried to remember, but he had forgotten. He had no identity, no past. His name, his family, everything connected with his early life had gone. His past life had stopped when he had gone for a physician. He had taught his little girl to read, as we have said, and when old enough she had often read aloud in the long winter evenings. He had seemed to listen with absorbed interest, but it is difficult to say how much he grasped of the words he heard, or whether they were mere words to him with no collective significance.
With a certain instinct left to him from that mysterious dead past, he had imparted to his daughter an unmistakable refinement of speech and manner. About some things he was even fastidious,—her way of eating, the appearance of the table and the silver. He himself was excessively neat and orderly and had periods of great industry, weaving baskets of sweet grass and carving wood, not crudely, but with unusual taste, boxes and chalets, napkin rings and figures of animals. Where he had learned these arts his daughter never knew, but she imagined from an old Indian who had lived in the little cabin in the early days and had died when Phoebe was still quite small. As far as a man may be sane whose memory extends back only some eighteen years and who has only one illusion, Phoebe’s father was sane. The baskets and woodcarving he and his daughter peddled through the country with success, because they were exceedingly well done, and the money earned was sufficient for their small needs.
Too excited from the unusual events of the night to sleep, Phoebe lay on the divan in the living room and reviewed the mysteries that filled her life. She had a strange smattering of knowledge for a girl of eighteen. It would seem that she had been gifted with a memory for two since her father had none, and whatever she learned from the row of books on the shelves she remembered. That is, whatever interested her.
She knew the constellations and the planets, and on summer nights had located them in the heavens by means of the book chart. She would point them out to her father, who glanced at them vaguely, smiled and went on playing the zither, his consolation in idle moments.
She had read and re-read the history of England so many times that some of the chapters she could repeat word for word. She understood little of the poetry, but the rhythm of the lines sang in her head, and without knowing the meaning she could repeat in a sing-song voice long poems and sonnets. “Pilgrim’s Progress” and the “Iliad” and the New Testament with the Psalms were her solace on the long winter evenings. One after the other she read them with unending pleasure. She would read slowly so as not to finish too soon, as a child nibbles at her sweet cake to make it last the longer, and having finished one volume she would take up another with all the eagerness of one about to plunge into a new book. Just how much she had gained from the teachings of Christ was hidden deep in her own soul, but we will find later that Phoebe had learned a secret which those who have had the advantage of broad education have often passed by.