A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill
need, Cousin John, is a mother.”
“I must try to look after them more,” the Doctor said, somewhat
helplessly. “Have you seen them recently?”
“I came by there this morning. They were all well, I suppose; Connie was
at the Ivy's as usual, and Hattie at school. What a savage creature your
new cook, Myrtella, is. I believe she is an anarchist! She opened the
door only a crack, and when I asked her how the young ladies were, she
said she was sure she didn't know, that she hadn't asked them.”
“And Bertie, did you see Bertie?”
“Yes, he was with her. Had a dirty piece of dough in his hands which he
said was going to be a cake. I must say she seems good to Bertie, but I
would not tolerate her impertinence for a moment.”
“Myrtella carries concealed virtues,” said the Doctor. “She is an
excellent cook, and a good manager. Her only faults, apparently, are
faults of the disposition.”
“From which Heaven defend me! What on earth is that noise? It sounds as
if some one were kicking the door.”
“Please open!” called a voice from without, and as Mrs. Sequin complied,
Miss Lady came in, carrying a large luncheon tray gaily decorated with
flowers from the garden.
“'Blest be those feasts with simple plenty crowned,'” quoted the Doctor.
“You see how they spoil me, Katherine?”
“I don't believe he could be spoiled, do you, Mrs. Sequin?” Miss Lady
asked, as she fixed his eggs. “Is there anything else, Doctor?”
“Don't run away,” Mrs. Sequin said, following her movements with
frank admiration. “Come here and sit down, I want to talk to you. I've
discovered the ideal site for my new house, and I want to ask you about
it. You know the western crest of this hill overlooking the river; did
that belong to your father?”
“It all used to be ours, long before it was ever called Billy-goat
Hill.”
“The name _is_ a handicap,” said the Doctor. “You might modify it,
Katherine, by calling your prospective mansion 'Angora Heights.'”
“The very thing,” said Mrs. Sequin, eager to seize upon any suggestion
that emanated from the Queerington intellect. “But who does the ground
belong to?”
“It belongs to Mr. Wicker, now.”
“Wicker?” repeated Mrs. Sequin. “Where have I heard that name? Why,
Cousin John, wasn't that the man Don stayed with, when he was looking
for a farm? How we laughed over that absurd notion of his farming!”
“I did not laugh at it,” said the Doctor. “I encouraged him. It seemed
to me the most excellent idea!”
“But you did not allow for Don's fickleness. Of course he's a darling
fellow but he has had as many hobbies as he has had sweethearts.”
“I allowed for his character, which may yet strike root in the proper
soil,” the Doctor said with dignity; then turning to Miss Lady, who had
risen and was standing by the bed, her hands tightly clasped and her
eyes fixed on his, he explained: “We are speaking of the young brother
of Mrs. Sequin; I was telling you about him this morning. Why, child!”
For Miss Lady had suddenly dropped her face in her hands and made a rush
for the door.
“It's the shock of her father's death,” explained Mrs. Sequin, who
prided herself on divining motives. “I was like that for weeks when my
last dog was run over. The most casual thing would upset me. I lost two
games of cards one afternoon because somebody merely mentioned an ice
wagon.”
The Doctor's long, slender fingers drummed absently on the bedspread.
Presently he broke in quite irrelevantly on Mrs. Sequin's steady flow
of talk: “I said chestnut brown, Katherine, they are more of a hazel, I
should say, a deep hazel with considerable fire.”
CHAPTER X
The long, summer months dragged their length for Miss Lady, months of
heartache and rebellion, of loneliness and tears. Then came a day when,
without apparent reason, the shadows lifted. She was tramping across the
river flats, with Mike at her heels, when once again she heard the world
singing, and before she knew it an answering song sprang to her lips.
Uncle Jimpson, plowing near by, looked up and smiled:
“Dat's right, Honey; sounds lak ole times to hear you singin' ag'in.
I was jus' settin' here steddyin' how good I'd feel ef de Cunnel could
come a stompin' 'long an' gimme one of his 'fore-de-war cussin's fer
bein' lazy.”
“Oh, Uncle Jimpson, if he could! It seems so long since he left us. I
have just been over to Miss Ferney's, but she wasn't there. I want to
get her to come and stay with me until I know what I am going to do.
They expect to take the Doctor home to-morrow.”
“Yas'm, Carline was tellin' me. Looks to me lak he's been well enough to
go fer some time.” Uncle Jimpson scratched his head wisely.
“I don't know what's to become of us,” said Miss Lady ruefully twisting
Mike's ears. “They say unless I sell the rest of Thornwood, we won't
have money enough to live on. But I won't sell another acre. I'll teach
school first.”
Uncle Jimpson was scandalized: “Now, Miss Lady, chile, don't you git dem
notions in your head. Dem's ole maid notions, you ain't no ole maid
yit! Why don't you git married, and git a kerridge, an' I'll dribe an'
Carline'll cook an' tak' care de chillun.”
“I'm _never_ going to marry, Uncle Jimpson,” Miss Lady declared, with
the passionate assurance of youth. “And I am never going to leave
Thornwood. If you see Miss Ferney going down the road, ask her to stop
by a minute. Come on, Mike, we are late now.”
And they were late, five minutes, by the open-faced watch that lay in
the Doctor's hand as they entered the garden. He was sitting in his
wheel-chair with his books and manuscripts on a table at his elbow, and
he lifted an expectant face toward the gate as she entered.
It was strange what two months at Thornwood had done for the Doctor. He
had been brought there unconscious, a serious, middle-aged professor,
who had run in the same groove for twenty years. The same surroundings,
the same people, the same monotonous, daily routine had rendered him
as rusty and faded as the text-books he lived with. Nothing short of a
collision could have jolted him out of his rut, and the collision had
arrived.
The sudden change from the grim realism of a lecture platform, with its
bleak blackboard and creaking chalk, to the romance of an old flower
garden where blossoms flirted with each other across the borders, and
birds made love in every bough, was enough to freshen the spirit of
even a John Jay Queerington. His cosmic conscience, which usually worked
overtime, striving to solve problems which Nature had given up,
seemed to be asleep. His fine, serious face relaxed somewhat from its
austerity, and as the days passed he read less and observed more.
His observations, before long, resulted in a discovery; he, who was
so weary of the cultivated hothouse species of femininity, had chanced
quite by accident upon a rare, unclassified wild-flower, that piqued
his curiosity and enlisted his interest. For two months he had depended
almost entirely upon his young hostess for companionship, and the
fact that the large box of books he had ordered from the city remained
unopened, gave evidence that the Doctor had not been bored.
During the hours when he was not engrossed in verifying statistics, and
appending references to those voluminous and still accumulating notes
for the fifth volume of his great work, he devoted himself to sorting
and arranging the odds and ends of facts and fancies that he found
stored away in Miss Lady's brain. Under ordinary circumstances he would
have dismissed a pupil to whom clearness and accuracy were strangers,
and whose attention wandered with every passing butterfly. In the
classroom he not only demanded but practised order and system. He
arrived at his conclusions by as methodical a series of mental actions
as he arrived at his desk every morning at twenty-nine minutes to nine.
But these were not ordinary circumstances.
The impetuous young person who listened to him with such rapt admiration
and respect, when she listened at all, had no method or system whatever.
She simply waited for the hint, the flash that revealed the vision, then
she joyously and fearlessly leaped to her conclusion.
The fact that amazed him was not that she frequently landed before he
did, but that she landed at all!
As for Miss Lady herself, she was finding the Doctor's interest and
companionship a welcome solace in her loneliness. The well of his
knowledge seemed to her fathomless, and she never tired of hanging over
the brink and looking down, often seeing stars in the darkness that she
never saw in the day.
When this last lesson was finished, the Doctor closed the book
reluctantly:
“I have given you the merest outline for future work,” he said. “The
rest remains with you. Have you decided yet what you are going to do?”
“No, I'll do whatever you tell me, Doctor. Only I do hope it won't be to
teach school,--the very thought of teaching makes me shrivel.”
“It is not altogether beyond the range of possibility that you will
marry,” said the Doctor, tracing parallelograms on the arm of the chair.
“Such things do happen, you know.”
Miss Lady, sitting with her elbows on the table and her chin on her
palms, flashed a strange, questioning glance at him.
“Do you believe in love, Doctor?”
“Why, of course, you foolish girl, in all its manifestations, filial,
paternal, marital. Assuredly I do.”
“But I mean that other kind, the kind that makes a little heaven for a
man and woman here on earth, that answers all their longings, so that
nothing else matters, just so they have each other. I read about it in
novels and in poetry, but I don't see it. The married people I know take
each other as much for granted as they do their hands and feet. That's
not what love means to me.”
The Doctor smiled indulgently. “Wait until you have passed the
sentimental age before you give your verdict! Most young ladies imagine
that because love does not arrive, full panoplied on a snow-white steed,
that it is not love. You, probably, like the rest, have read too many
romantic novels. When you come to know life better you will realize that
moral equality and intellectual affinity promise a much safer union than
a violent romantic attachment.”
She regarded him as earnestly as if he had been the fount of all wisdom.
“How long does it usually last?” she asked.
“Last?” he repeated.
“The sentimental age. I suppose a girl ought to get through it by the
time she is twenty. But I never do things on time. I didn't even know
I was sentimental until you told me. I have learned a great many things
since you came.”
“There were some things you did not need to learn,” said the Doctor
quietly. “Kindness and sympathy, and rare understanding. I shall always
look back with pleasure to these quiet weeks spent under your father's
roof. They have given me the only chance I have had in years for
undisturbed writing on the History that will stand for my life work. I
must confess that I dread my return home. The noise and confusion, the
constant invasion of my privacy, the demands upon my time, appal me.
Very few realize the magnitude of my work, and the necessity it lays
upon me for isolating myself. You have been singularly sympathetic and
helpful in that respect.”
“But think what your being here has meant to me! You came into my life
just when everything else seemed to drop out. You explained things to
me, and gave me something to do. You can't begin to know how you have
helped me.”
“I have only tried to direct and suggest,” the Doctor said; “in short to
take the place--”
“Of a father,” finished Miss Lady enthusiastically.
The Doctor tapped his foot impatiently. After all her father was a much
older man than he: the distance, at that moment, between forty and sixty
seemed infinitely greater than that between forty and twenty.