Nicholson Otherwise Phyllis

1. Auflage 2015
ISBN: 978-963-525-338-8
Verlag: Booklassic
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 239 Seiten

Phyllis is a healthy, hearty, vivacious young woman of prankish disposition and inquiring mind....

Autoren/Hrsg.

Nicholson, Meredith

Leseproben

Chapter 2 THE MONTGOMERYS OF MONTGOMERY
A stout, spectacled gentleman of fifty or thereabouts appeared at intervals, every business day of the year, on the steps of Montgomery's Bank, at the corner of Main and Franklin Streets. As he stood on this pedestal, wearing, winter and summer, a blue-and-white seersucker office coat tightly buttoned about his pudgy form, and frequently with an ancient straw hat perched on the side of his head, it was fair to assume that he was in some way connected with the institution from whose doors he emerged. This was, indeed, the fact, and any intelligent child could have enlightened a stranger as to the name of the stout gentleman indicated. He was one of the first citizens of the community, if wealth, probity, and long residence may be said to count for anything. And his name, which it were absurd longer to conceal, was Amzi Montgomery, or, to particularize, Amzi Montgomery III. As both his father and his grandfather who had borne the same name slept peacefully in Greenlawn, it is unnecessary to continue in this narrative the numerical designation of this living Amzi who braved the worst of weathers to inspect the moving incidents of Main Street as a relief from the strain and stress of the business of a private banker. When, every hour or so, Mr. Montgomery, exposing a pink bald head to the elements, glanced up and down the street, usually with a cigar planted resolutely in the corner of his mouth, it was commonly believed that he saw everything that was happening, not only in Main Street, but in all the shops and in the rival banking-houses distributed along that thoroughfare. After surveying the immediate scene,—having, for example, noted the customers waiting at the counter of the First National Bank, diagonally opposite,—something almost invariably impelled his glance upward to the sign of a painless dentist, immediately above the First National,—a propinquity which had caused a wag (one of the Montgomery's customers) to express the hope that the dentist was more painless than the bank in his extractions. There was a clothing store directly opposite Amzi's bank, and his wandering eye could not have failed to observe the lettering on the windows of the office above it, which, in badly scratched gilt, published the name of Thomas Kirkwood, Attorney at Law, to the litigiously inclined. Still higher on the third and final story of the building hung a photographer's sign in a dilapidated condition, and though a studio skylight spoke further of photography, almost every one knew that the artist had departed years ago, and that Tom Kirkwood had never found another tenant for those upper rooms. At two o'clock on the afternoon of the day following the return of Phil Kirkwood and her father from their camp on Sugar Creek, as Mr. Montgomery appeared upon the steps of the bank and gazed with his usual unconcern up and down Main Street, his spectacles pointed finally (or so it seemed) to the photographer's studio over the way. Although a slight mist was falling and umbrellas bobbed inanely in the fashion of umbrellas, Amzi in his seersucker coat was apparently oblivious of the weather's inclemency. One of the windows of the abandoned photograph gallery was open, and suddenly, without the slightest warning, the head of Miss Phyllis Kirkwood bent over the cornice and she waved her hand with unmistakable friendliness. It was then that Mr. Montgomery, as though replying to a signal, detached his left hand from its pocket, made a gesture as graceful as a man of his figure is capable of, and then, allaying suspicion by passing the hand across his bald head, he looked quickly toward the court-house tower and immediately withdrew to continue his active supervision of the four clerks who sufficed for his bank's business. As depositors were now bringing to the receiving teller's window their day's offerings, Mr. Montgomery took his stand at the paying teller's window,—a part of his usual routine,—to relieve the pressure incident to the closing hour, one teller at other times being quite equal to the demands of both departments. Mr. Montgomery's manner of paying a check was in itself individual. He laid his cigar on the edge of the counter, passed the time of day with a slightly asthmatic voice, drew the check toward him with the tips of his fingers, read it, cocked an eye at the indorsement, and counted out the money with a bored air. If silver entered into the transaction, he usually rang the last coin absently on the glass surface of the counter. In other times the sign on the window had proclaimed "Montgomery & Holton, Bankers"; and the deletion of the second name from the copartnership was due to an incident that must be set down succinctly before we proceed further. Amzi II had left a family of five children, of whom Phil Kirkwood's three aunts have already been mentioned. The only one of the Montgomery girls, as they were locally designated, who had made a marriage at all in keeping with the family dignity, had been Lois. Lois, every one said, was the handsomest, the most interesting of the Montgomerys, and she had captured at eighteen the heart of Tom Kirkwood, who had come out of the East to assume the chair of jurisprudence in Madison College, which, as every one knows, is an institution inseparably associated with the fame of Montgomery as a community of enlightenment. Tom Kirkwood was a graduate of Williams College, with a Berlin Ph.D., and he had, moreover, a modest patrimony which, after his marriage to Lois Montgomery, he had invested in the block in Main Street opposite the Montgomery Bank. The year following the marriage he had, in keeping with an early resolution, resigned his professorship and begun the practice of law. He seemed to have escaped the embarrassments and prejudices that attend any practical undertakings by men who have borne the title of professor, and whether his connection with the Montgomery family saved him from such disqualification it was nevertheless true that he entered upon the law brilliantly. Two or three successes in important cases had launched him upon this second career auspiciously. Amzi II was still living at the time of the marriage, and as he valued his own position in the community and wished his family to maintain its traditions, he had subdivided a large tract of woodland in which his father's house stood, and bestowed an acre lot upon each of his daughters. His son had declined a similar offer, having elected early in life the bachelor state in which we have found him. As Lois had been the first to marry, her house was planted nearest to the gray old brick in which she had been reared. If the gods favored the Montgomerys, they seemed no less to smile with a peculiar indulgence upon the Kirkwoods. People who had said that Lois was a trifle strong-willed and given to frivolity were convinced that her marriage had done much to sober her. In the second year thereafter Phyllis was born, a further assurance that Lois was thoroughly established among the staid matrons of her native town. Then in the fifth year of her marriage, rumors—almost the first scandalous gossip that had ever passed current in those quiet streets—began to be heard. It did not seem possible that in a community whose morals were nurtured in Center Church, a town where everybody was "good," where no respectable man ever entered a saloon and divorce was a word not to be spoken before children,—that here, a daughter of the house of Montgomery was causing anxiety among those jealous of her good name. A few of Kirkwood's friends—and he had many—may have known the inner history of the cloud that darkened his house; but the end came with a blinding flash that left him dazed and dumb. The town was so knit together, so like a big family, that Lois Montgomery's escapade was a tragedy at every hearth-side. It was immeasurably shocking that a young woman married to a reputable man, and with a child still toddling after her, should have done this grievous thing. To say that she had always been flighty, and that it was what might have been expected of a woman as headstrong as she had been as a girl, was no mollification of the blow to the local conscience, acutely sensitive in all that pertained to the honor and sanctity of the marriage tie. And Jack Holton! That she should have thrown away a man like Tom Kirkwood, a gentleman and a scholar, for a rogue like Holton, added to the blackness of her sin. The Holtons had been second only to the Montgomerys in dignity. The conjunction of the names on the old sign over the bank at Main and Franklin Streets had expressed not only unquestioned financial stability, but a social worth likewise unassailable. Jack Holton, like Amzi Montgomery, had inherited an interest in the banking-house of Montgomery & Holton. To be sure his brother William had been the active representative of the second generation of Holtons, and Jack had never really settled down to anything after he returned from the Eastern college to which he had been sent; but these were things that had not been considered until after he decamped with Lois Kirkwood. Many declared after the event that they had "always known" that Jack was a bad lot. Those who sought to account for Lois Kirkwood's infatuation remembered suddenly that he and Lois had been boy and girl sweethearts and that she had once been engaged to marry him. It was explained that his temperament and hers were harmonious, and that Kirkwood, for all his fine abilities, was a sober-minded fellow, without Holton's zest for the world's gayety. Any further details—the countless trifles with which for half a dozen years the gossips of Montgomery regaled...