To which the child made answer: “Why, Phoebe, of course.”
The small but sharp observer had eyed his questioner closely, and had taken his moral measure. He lowered his guard, and rather assumed a tone with him: as having discovered him to be an unaccustomed person in the art of polite conversation.
“Phoebe,” said the child, “can’t be anybobby else but Phoebe. Can she?”
“No, I suppose not.”
“Well,” returned the child, “then why did you ask me?”
Deeming it prudent to shift his ground, Barbox Brothers took up a new position.
“What do you do there? Up there in that room where the open window is. What do you do there?”
“Cool,” said the child.
“Eh?”
“Co-o-ol,” the child repeated in a louder voice, lengthening out the word with a fixed look and great emphasis, as much as to say: “What’s the use of your having grown up, if you’re such a donkey as not to understand me?”
“Ah! School, school,” said Barbox Brothers. “Yes, yes, yes. And Phoebe teaches you?”
The child nodded.
“Good boy.”
“Tound it out, have you?” said the child.
“Yes, I have found it out. What would you do with twopence, if I gave it you?”
“Pend it.”
The knock-down promptitude of this reply leaving him not a leg to stand upon, Barbox Brothers produced the twopence with great lameness, and withdrew in a state of humiliation.
But, seeing the face on the window-sill as he passed the cottage, he acknowledged its presence there with a gesture, which was not a nod, not a bow, not a removal of his hat from his head, but was a diffident compromise between or struggle with all three. The eyes in the face seemed amused, or cheered, or both, and the lips modestly said: “Good-day to you, sir.”
“I find I must stick for a time to Mugby Junction,” said Barbox Brothers with much gravity, after once more stopping on his return road to look at the Lines where they went their several ways so quietly. “I can’t make up my mind yet which iron road to take. In fact, I must get a little accustomed to the Junction before I can decide.”
So, he announced at the Inn that he was “going to stay on for the present,” and improved his acquaintance with the Junction that night, and again next morning, and again next night and morning: going down to the station, mingling with the people there, looking about him down all the avenues of railway, and beginning to take an interest in the incomings and outgoings of the trains. At first, he often put his head into Lamps’s little room, but he never found Lamps there. A pair or two of velveteen shoulders he usually found there, stooping over the fire, sometimes in connection with a clasped knife and a piece of bread and meat; but the answer to his inquiry, “Where’s Lamps?” was, either that he was “t’other side the line,” or, that it was his off-time, or (in the latter case) his own personal introduction to another Lamps who was not his Lamps. However, he was not so desperately set upon seeing Lamps now, but he bore the disappointment. Nor did he so wholly devote himself to his severe application to the study of Mugby Junction as to neglect exercise. On the contrary, he took a walk every day, and always the same walk. But the weather turned cold and wet again, and the window was never open.
III
At length, after a lapse of some days, there came another streak of fine bright hardy autumn weather. It was a Saturday. The window was open, and the children were gone. Not surprising, this, for he had patiently watched and waited at the corner until they WERE gone.
“Good-day,” he said to the face; absolutely getting his hat clear off his head this time.
“Good-day to you, sir.”
“I am glad you have a fine sky again to look at.”
“Thank you, sir. It is kind if you.”
“You are an invalid, I fear?”
“No, sir. I have very good health.”
“But are you not always lying down?”
“Oh yes, I am always lying down, because I cannot sit up! But I am not an invalid.”
The laughing eyes seemed highly to enjoy his great mistake.
“Would you mind taking the trouble to come in, sir? There is a beautiful view from this window. And you would see that I am not at all ill—being so good as to care.”
It was said to help him, as he stood irresolute, but evidently desiring to enter, with his diffident hand on the latch of the garden-gate. It did help him, and he went in.
The room upstairs was a very clean white room with a low roof. Its only inmate lay on a couch that brought her face to a level with the window. The couch was white too; and her simple dress or wrapper being light blue, like the band around her hair, she had an ethereal look, and a fanciful appearance of lying among clouds. He felt that she instinctively perceived him to be by habit a downcast taciturn man; it was another help to him to have established that understanding so easily, and got it over.
There was an awkward constraint upon him, nevertheless, as he touched her hand, and took a chair at the side of her couch.
